In a confidence game, the grift is usually separated into “short” and “long” cons. In Revolutionary Suicide*, Huey P. Newton talked about how he used to run a short con on merchants. He described (pp. 86-87) how he would distract them when they were making change and thus could walk away with ten bucks after starting with a fiver, or twenty if starting with a ten. It was petty stuff, but it was still a con. It relied on the charisma of the con artist and the trusting nature of the mark.

The long con is best exemplified by Bernie Madoff. He bilked people for nearly twenty years and despite many red flags flew under the enforcement radar due to his many relationships with powerful and influential people. The people he screwed over had been so taken in by his apparent financial brilliance (not to mention his well-polished reputation) that they, even up to the end, refused to believe they’d been ripped off by an amoral creep.

The BBC just broke a story about a long con run by a guy calling himself Ali Ayad. I googled his name and found this:

It helps to be handsome and fashionably dressed. Apparently this asshole created a fake company (a design and advertising agency) in London called Madbird and recruited people from all over the globe to come work for him. He was passionate, eager, articulate and quite convincing. Dozens of well-meaning people took the bait and logged hours of uncompensated work supposedly building a client base. It was all a sham. There was no company. And no money, either. All of these people had been promised salaries and bonuses at a future date. Those never materialized, of course.

The sad part, besides the folks who got hosed, is that there is a real company called Madbird in Olympia, Washington who do actual work and aren’t screwing anyone over. Imagine having to cover your ass because of some prick in another country.

One of the reasons the Ali Ayad bubble burst is that the BBC reporters used a simple internet search on the company’s address. Here’s what they found:

We all know how to use Google’s street view these days. If you do that on the address listed (182 High Street) here is what you see:

Funny how it turns out to be a law office. And so convenient to have a Subway right next door!

How is it possible for someone to bilk and bedevil all these people? For starters, the pandemic has put many into financially precarious positions. Folks are desperately looking for work and eager to seize any opportunity. Con artists understand vulnerability and exploit it. Secondly, it is easy to fake things in the digital age. Apparently much of the Redbird website consisted of stolen images and fictional bios. Finally, any of us are capable of being fooled. Con artists know that even the smartest and most skeptical of people can be victimized if the pitch is sufficiently tailored to them. In fact, intelligent people often fall victim to scams because they are convinced that they cannot be scammed!

I’ve been fascinated by con artists since the 1973 movie The Sting (a classic long con). In that movie, charming small-time rogues (Robert Redford and Paul Newman) manage to rip off a big-shot gangster (Robert Shaw). It’s all very feel-good because Shaw’s character is a baddie, and they have to overcome his naturally suspicious and conniving nature. But most cons target regular people who don’t have those traits. Everyday folks are mostly trusting of others because societies run on trust. Con artists know this and exploit it.

One of the few scholarly treatments of con artists is David W. Maurer’s 1940 book The Big Con: the classic story of the confidence man and the confidence trick. Many of the practitioners of the grift revealed elements of their craft and a truism emerged: “you can’t cheat an honest man.” The con artists relied on the greed of the mark to string him along. An honest man would recognize that the opportunity he was presented with was “too good to be true” and thus could not be taken advantage of.

But that’s not entirely true. Lots of honest, well-intentioned people get conned, mostly because criminals are not only slick but also don’t give a shit about who they hurt. Most ordinary citizens aren’t like that and thus don’t “think like a crook.”

The internet age has given the con artist a new platform and new tools. It’s bad enough we have to worry about identity theft, we shouldn’t have to deal with jerks like Ali Ayad, too. I suppose the old maxim of caveat emptor (buyer beware) is more important than ever these days. In America’s Wild West it was “keep an eye on your gold and a hand on your gun.” For those of us at home and behind our computers, it’s more like “keep your wallet in your pocket and your finger off the ENTER key!”

Be sure to check out BBC reporter Catrin Nye attempting to confront Ayad about his bullshit. His passive-aggressive and dissimulating responses are the obvious products of a morally corrupt person. His 90,000 Instagram followers ought to take a second look.

*Newton’s book is really quite remarkable and worthy of a read.

Humans have had civilization for a lot longer than they have had electricity. By “civilization” I mean all those organizing structures and practices that keep social groups together. A common language or religion, for example. A transportation network with roads, canals, bridges, and ports. A water supply and a scheme for dealing with waste. A communication network with news, information, and mail. Arable land and agricultural surpluses. Markets. Import and export of commodities. Contracts. The rule of law. Educational institutions. Libraries. Town squares. Musical, artistic, and cultural events. Civilized places have these things. They had these things when oxen pulled plows, not diesel tractors, and when fire lit the night, not electricity.

Today, however, our civilization depends on electricity. Just look at the map. The lit-up regions are where most people live (click on the photo to embiggen).

If you want to destabilize human society just pull the plug. Imagine your life without electricity. Hint: you can’t. Electricity is as essential to you as the air you breathe and the water you drink. Think of electrical energy as the blood that flows through the world we’ve built.

We get electricity by burning coal and other fossil fuels. The heat makes steam, the steam turns turbines. If we are lucky, in some places, we can use falling water to turn those turbines. Or perhaps the wind or tides. We can collect sunlight and dump it to the grid or store it in batteries. With the threat of climate change even much-maligned nuclear fission is looking better and better. Atomic heat is a lot more efficient at making steam than burning hydrocarbons.

The cost of making electricity plummeted in the latter half of the 20th century. It has become so cheap and so abundant that we use it more and more and more. And there are more of us. And we are hotter in the summer than before so we need more electricity to stay cool. Air conditioning demand has been rising steadily for decades—expect that to continue.

Regardless of your political or cultural affiliation in these perverse, anti-social times, we are all better off with civilization and its institutions than without it. Chaos and anarchy make for great sci-fi plots but lousy living.

That means we should all care about our electricity supply. We need a robust and resilient electrical grid with redundancy in case of disasters. This collection of wires and poles and generators and whatnot is as important to our democracy as the founding documents. Thomas Jefferson would probably be aghast at mega-cities and a massive energy infrastructure, but those things are our world, not his. The pieces of the electrical puzzle mean nothing of course without the extraordinary human knowledge base that invented, built, and continues to run the system. Civilizations preserve and transmit important knowledge—that may the single most important thing any civilization can do, to make sure the next generation gets the benefits created by the previous one.

Technology gets so complex and mysterious at a certain point in its evolution that the people who understand it become increasingly like a priestly class. Their knowledge becomes inaccessible to the vast majority of the users of the technology and they become like shamans or sorcerers.

This is a bad thing. You don’t have to know how a polyphase synchronous motor works in order to expect that your electrical grid will deliver the goods. Not everyone is an electrical engineer. But the knowledge that these people have is not sorcery. It is not magic. And the technology has no value by itself but only as part of social structures that serve the needs of people. And we can all work on those.

I need to stay plugged in. You need to stay plugged in. Let’s all stay plugged in.

My favorite website is Astronomy Picture of the Day. APOD to those in the know. APOD goes all the way back to 1995 and there’s a complete archive of all the images. Here’s today’s. You’ve seen it before. It never gets old. We are all just passengers on this third rock from the sun and it’s good to be reminded of that.

But I don’t want to talk about the blue marble. I want to talk about Africa, which is mostly what we see as far as the land area goes. Africa has by some estimates 30% of the world’s mineral resources. That’s reasonable considering its 30 million square kilometers of land, just a few million less than Asia, the largest of the continents. Africa produces over half of the world’s diamonds, about a fourth of the world’s gold, and is rich in cobalt, platinum, manganese, bauxite, uranium, and copper. It’s major producer of phosphate rocks used in fertilizers. It even has lots of fossil fuels!

Why should we care about Africa? Because we use all of those natural resources. If it isn’t farmed, it’s mined. (I should note that Africa has 65% of the world’s arable land.) The Congo (DRC) has most of the world’s cobalt and most of Africa’s copper. Chinese companies not only dominate Congo’s mining industry they built the toll roads to haul the materials from the mines to the export sites. And paid off the president and his family, too. China has the fastest-growing EV market in the world and they want to secure their supplies of critical minerals.

We here in North America need those same things. We want cleaner power sources like solar panels and wind turbines, and we want EVs, and we will likely have to invest in nuclear power again. All of that takes mining. Lots of mining. Mining is messy and the industry has a lousy track record. People and communities are suspicious of mining companies. In too many places in the world the miners have come, gotten rich, devastated the land, and left. The pollution and economic fallout weren’t part of the business plan.

Here at home we aren’t very enthusiastic about new mining projects. We tend to look elsewhere for our supplies. We are willing to trust much of our future to imports from other places. That’s certainly a viable strategy: develop solid trade relationships with stable jurisdictions. But it’s only one piece. A supply chain has to be more robust—if we’ve learned anything in this pandemic we’ve learned that our supply chains are vulnerable.

For starters, there aren’t enough stable jurisdictions in the world. Mining companies would rather work in countries with law and order. Political instability is not good for things like contracts. Secondly, mineral deposits are not scattered equally over the globe. They tend to be clustered in certain places.

So you have to have a domestic mining industry if you have those precious mineral deposits. The United States of America is a good place to mine because mining companies trust the legal system. Their assets will not be seized by outlaws. Their workers will not be attacked by paramilitaries. That’s an issue in some countries.

Wealthy countries have the luxury of exporting their environmental problems. We can let poorer nations assemble our electronics and make our clothes and not worry about the chemicals polluting their air and water. If those industries were here we’d have stricter regulations and things would cost more.

The challenge is to have domestic industries but to do them better. There’s no reason why we can’t pull stuff out of the ground intelligently. There’s no reason we can’t figure in the cost of protecting ourselves from pollution. We can reduce waste. In fact, we can eliminate the whole notion of waste and build a circular economy.

We have to view the minerals in the ground as precious resources to husband and develop for the good of humanity. In a capitalist economy, that’s hard. It’s more about dollars than citizenship. And it takes a lot of dollars to make a mine and keep it going so miners like to get some return on their investment. That makes for a difficult dynamic.

But it’s one we have to solve since, like I said earlier, we are all just passengers on this third rock from the sun.