At one point in the wide-ranging, nearly two-hour conversation, Lutnick also said that if Social Security “didn’t send out their checks this month,” his “mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain.”

“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” the billionaire businessman said.

“Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing,” he said. “Because my mother-in-law’s not calling, come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27111902

Robert Ehrlich was “falsely asserting his authority as mayor, demanding access to office space, and declaring that the entire Village staff was fired," said officials in Sea Cliff, New York.

The founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks lost his chaotic bid for mayor of a tiny New York community after he claimed he was the village leader and had the authority to replace the entire local government, officials said Thursday.

Elena Villafane, the incumbent mayor of Sea Cliff, defeated Pirate’s Booty Snacks founder Robert Ehrlich, 1,064-62, on Tuesday in the village, which is about 26 miles northwest of midtown Manhattan.

Villafane had been running unopposed for her third two-year term when Ehrlich jumped into the fray a week ago Monday.

That's when Ehrlich went to Village Hall and "presented a statement falsely asserting his authority as mayor, demanding access to office space, and declaring that the entire Village staff was fired effective immediately but could reapply for their jobs," the village said in a statement.

"While Village staff remained calm and professional throughout the incident, Ehrlich and his associates raised their voices, used profane language, made outlandish claims, and engaged in direct harassment of Village personnel," the statement said. "Despite multiple requests to leave, they refused, creating a hostile and disruptive environment that required police intervention."

The brazen assertions stunned village officials who said they'd never seen or heard from Ehrlich before in any civic context.

In the piece — titled "Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?" — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.

The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.

Egg interceptions up 116% so far this year, while seizures of fentanyl down 32%

A controversial proposal from U.S Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to let bird flu naturally spread through poultry farms is raising alarms among scientists -- who say the move could be inhumane and dangerous.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27020868

Summary

Minnesota Republican state Sen. Justin Eichorn, who introduced a bill classifying "Trump Derangement Syndrome" as a mental illness, was arrested for allegedly soliciting sex from a minor.

Police say Eichorn believed he was meeting a 16-year-old girl but was actually texting undercover officers. His arrest came just a day after he and four other Republican senators introduced the controversial bill.

Eichorn, who is married with four children, was booked into jail and will be transferred to the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center.

I honestly don’t understand this compunction to break things that are already working fine. Axon makes body cameras (and Tasers!), but it simply wasn’t enough to equip cops with cameras…

Xun started vaping last year, she said, as a way to begin the process of quitting cigarettes. She also has a "bunch of friends who vape," many of whom "are very attached to their vapes." But she's not naive about vaping's well-documented risks, and began to wonder if "gamifying" her nicotine use might help her disincentivize it. In the first iteration of the project, hitting the vape would actually murder the digital pet, and thus would ideally work to guilt-trip the user into not inhaling.

"There's a big trend of parental locking yourself," Camacho added. "I'm locked out of certain apps behind a password that Rebecca knows, so I don't scroll Instagram too much. It would be cool if you could have that for nicotine."

But then, explained Xun, Camacho "found this Stupid Hackathon. And we were like, it'd be kind of funnier to be evil."

Link to the proposed bill: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=SF2589&version=0&session=ls94&session_year=2025&session_number=0