lacrimae rerum

There was an obviously computer-printed "hand-written" letter in our letter box from someone claiming to want to buy houses in "your suburb" which emphasised multiple times that the house can be in any condition and that they're not a real estate agent.

So they're obviously targeting easily-fooled people who want to sell their run-down houses but find the process scary and are vulnerable to the promise of some random stranger just giving them a big pile of cash as quickly and easily as possible.

Now that itself could be the scam: offer unfairly low prices and know your target is unlikely to complain. But idk it feels like part of a scam scam not just a sincere if shady attempt to actually buy people's houses. I tried looking up real estate scams but it's all about scams aimed at people buying houses, which makes sense, since that's the more natural situation where you can take people's money and run.

I guess it could be one of those nigerian prince type scams: Offer a high price for the house, well above market value, make the seller think they're the one taking advantage of a dumbass woman, but oh no she needs a little deposit first to handle some unexpected fees, if you could just help out with a tiny proportion now she'll be able to pay the full amount any day now...

Either way, I reported it to consumer protection, since they might be able to do something with the phone number.

I'm going through the free university mini-course Media and Power from the University of Iowa, and am going to try and take notes as I go. (Yes I do intend to get back to the Ursula K LeGuin book. One day. Shh)

This handbook guides students through concepts, content, and exercises that help them develop media literacy by understanding media and power. The authors want students to not only gain the ability to critically analyze the languages and discourses – textual, visual, audio, and code – that people use to create and interpret media content, but also to understand the overarching context: media possess immense power in contemporary societies around the world.

So far there has been A Lot of focus on US political reporting, which is very reasonable but is not actually my preferred area of focus.
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