Wisdom & Faith

Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance.

This is a quote from Proverbs that I read last night and it got my wheels spinning. One of the core teachings of the bible is to value those around you that have gained wisdom in their years. In one short generation we have replaced honoring those wiser than ourselves with Google. And as a result we now have unlimited platforms to display our small mindedness. One need look no further than this website to see various displays of that.... As a culture have we entirely disposed of the concept of wisdom? Are we all now too self consumed to be able to humble ourselves to anyone that may be wiser than ourselves?

 

I'd say a lot of it these days it has a lot to do with how you raise your children.

If you let kids immerse themselves on the internet all day then you're surely not teaching them much yourself are you.
I don't have kids so I don't have this problem. If I did they wouldn't be sitting in front of a screen all day.

I'm afraid you are correct for too many though. Hell, manners are out the window and have been for years. I managed quite a few retail type establishments and if a kid said please, thank you, may I etc. I complimented the parents for it as well as the kid.

My father in law just came to visit my wife and I. We never see him and it was great. He's 83 and still works construction 3 days a week.
Great guy and as my wife said he's forgotten more about construction than most people remember.

I enjoy listening to the old folks. Not all but definitely most.

 

Isn't it amazing how we can reflect on our views of decades ago and our views today, and sometimes find those views to be so different? That speaks volumes about how our experience forms what we know to be true, versus what we believe before we have a directly relevant experience.

It's one thing to believe something . . . it's entirely another to know it.

 

there's no fool like an old fool.

 

And there's nothing so embarrassing as learning you've been wrong all of your younger years. Seems to be taking you longer than most, but don't feel too bad FD . . . JN's got you beat by a mile.

 

Correlates of Susceptibility to Scams in Older Adults Without Dementia

This study examined correlates of susceptibility to scams in 639 community-dwelling older adults without dementia from a cohort study of aging. Regression models adjusted for age, sex, education, and income were used to examine associations between susceptibility to scams, measured by 5-item self-report measure, and a number of potential correlates. Susceptibility was positively associated with age and negatively associated with income, cognition, psychological well being, social support, and literacy. Fully adjusted models indicated that older age and lower levels of cognitive function, decreased psychological well-being, and lower literacy in particular may be markers of susceptibility to financial victimization in old age.

Keywords: Fraud, scam, financial exploitation, elder abuse, risk factors
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Introduction
Each year, millions of older Americans are targets of telemarketing fraud, internet fraud, and other scams (AARP, 1999), resulting in a loss by elder victims of an estimated $2.9 billion annually from financial fraud alone (MetLife Inc., 2011). This figure may be even larger; the U.S. Government reported that $40 billion are scammed from people over the phone yearly (U.S. House of Representatives, 1993), and elderly people constitute the vast majority of fraud victims (AARP, 2003). Further, older victims are less likely to report or even acknowledge their victimization compared to younger persons (Pak & Shadel, 2011) and have been called the “forgotten victims of financial crime” (Deem, 2000; Nerenberg, 2000). Scams can be devastating for seniors, who hold the majority of the nation's wealth (Souare & Lloyd, 2008). Older persons who are victimized lose assets accumulated over a lifetime and have limited opportunities to recover from financial losses due to limited employment options, retirement, or physical or cognitive disabilities (Dessin, 2000; Jackson & Hafemeister, 2011). Financial victimization can result in a loss of independence and security (Choi, Kulick, & Mayer, 1999) and a great deal of psychological distress (Deem, 2000). The problem of older scam victims is certain to loom larger as the number of Americans over age 65 swells as baby boomers approach this milestone (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005).

Telemarketing and other forms of fraud—and the specific targeting of older citizens—captured the attention of the media, law enforcement officials, and the government in the mid-1990s (Aziz, Bolick, Kleinman, & Shadel, 2000). With increased awareness of the implications of elder fraud, the U.S. Government launched the Protecting Seniors from Fraud Act in 2000 in order to increase the dissemination of information to educate seniors about scams and to develop strategies to prevent financial crimes against seniors (Sen. Evan Bayh [D-IN 1999-2010], 2000) and initiatives such as the National Telemarketing Victim Call center were launched (Aziz et al., 2000). However, relative to other forms of elder abuse, little is known about the factors that make older adults more vulnerable to financial exploitation and related scams (Dessin, 2000; Payne & Strasser, 2012). In addition to the fact that older persons hold a considerable amount of wealth, there are a number of other potential reasons why older adults are targeted for financial exploitation have been posited, though many of these are based on anecdotal information (Friedman, 1992). For example, seniors are commonly perceived as cognitively vulnerable, sedentary due to physical disabilities (and thus generally at home to receive telemarketing phone calls), naively trusting, socially isolated, and unsophisticated about financial matters (Friedman, 1992; Jackson & Hafemeister, 2011). However, according to a 1996 telephone poll conducted by the AARP, many of the perceptions of the typical older adult scam victim do not correlate well with the actual portrait of victimized older persons. In fact, the poll painted a surprising portrait of telemarketing fraud victims as relatively well-educated, informed and active, and affluent (AARP, 1996). Thus, more research is needed to reconcile the disconnect between common, impressionistic portrait of the elderly scams victim with the profile that is emerging from empirical evidence. An accurate description of the characteristics common to elderly victims of scams has public policy implications as it is necessary to the identification of persons who are at high risk of victimization and may aid in directing interventions to these seniors, ideally before they are targeted for scams.

 

To date, there remains little research on the characteristics that make older persons susceptible to scams. A number of studies have reported on characteristics of fraud victims from data sources such as police records (Friedman, 1992) or callers to fraud hotlines (National Consumers League, 2011), but findings from such studies could reflect reporting errors or biases, or simply reflect the make-up of the sampled population. Furthermore, a large number of scams go unreported, especially in the elderly. A recent AARP study compared a sample of fraud victims with a sample of the general population and found that fraud victims were more likely to be male, married, and interestingly, to have higher education and income (Pak & Shadel, 2011). This information is compelling, but the samples of fraud victims and general population may not be selected from the same underlying population (i.e., selection bias). Therefore, determining correlates of susceptibility to scams among a cohort of community-based older persons may be the most valid way to identify older adults who are most likely to fall victim to financial exploitation and inform efforts to prevent high risk seniors from falling victim to scams.

Because victimization by scams is highly underreported and older persons specifically are less likely to report victimization (Pak & Shadel, 2011), an alternate strategy to examining correlates of reported victimization is to examine correlates of susceptibility to scams. A number of beliefs and behaviors have been identified by sources such as the AARP (AARP, 1996), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), and researchers (Reiboldt & Vogel, 2003) that predispose people to being susceptible to a scam. These include being unable to hang up on a telemarketer and a belief that what a salesperson tells them over the phone is true (Reiboldt & Vogel, 2003). However, there are numerous additional factors that may be at play Determining the characteristics of community-dwelling older adults that are correlated with susceptibility to scams can be useful in targeting high risk seniors for intervention to alert them that they may be targeted by fraudulent telemarketers before the scams take place, a strategy that has shown promise (Aziz et al., 2000).

To that end, in this study we examined data from a cohort of over 600 community-dwelling older adults without dementia to observe how cognitive ability, functional status, psychosocial factors such as social isolation, and literacy were associated with susceptibility to scams. These factors were selected based on the literature and based on the availability of a wide array of variables collected prospectively in the Rush Memory and Aging Project. We used a series of linear regression models to examine these potential correlates alone and in concert to determine the characteristics that were independently associated with susceptibility to scams, as measured with an instrument derived from information on the personal characteristics of known fraud victims from the AARP and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (AARP, 1996; Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, 2013).

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Methods
Participants
Data came from the Rush Memory and Aging Project, an ongoing longitudinal cohort study of chronic conditions of aging (Bennett et al., 2005). Participants were recruited from approximately 40 retirement and subsidized housing facilities around the Chicago metropolitan area. All participants signed an informed consent agreeing to annual clinical evaluation as well as organ donation at the time of death. The study was approved by the institutional review board of Rush University Medical Center. The annual clinical evaluation, conducted by examiners blinded to previous data, included medical history, neurological and neuropsychological examinations as described in detail previously (Bennett et al., 2005). At each evaluation, clinical diagnoses of dementia were conducted using a three-stage process including computer scoring of cognitive tests, clinical judgment by an experienced neuropsychologist, and diagnostic classification by an experienced clinician, as previously described (Bennett et al., 2005). Diagnosis of dementia and probable AD followed the criteria of the joint working group of the National Institute of Neurologic and Communicative Disorders and Stroke and the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association (McKhann et al., 1984). Because the ability of persons with dementia to validly self-report is uncertain, we removed persons diagnosed with dementia from the analysis. Though the majority of the persons in this study live in housing facilities, they are all active, non-demented, independent seniors who interact with the world outside of their facility on a daily basis (Boyle, Buchman, Barnes, James, & Bennett, 2010; James, Boyle, Buchman, Barnes, & Bennett, 2011) and are thus quite susceptible to targeting for scams such as telemarketing and mail fraud.

The Memory and Aging Project began in 1997, and enrollment is ongoing. A decision-making assessment battery that includes questions on susceptibility to scams was added in 2010. At the time of these analyses, 1504 participants had completed the baseline evaluation for the parent study. Of those, 507 died. another 84 refused further participation in the parent project without completing the decision-making assessment battery, and 109 were deemed ineligible for a first decision-making assessment due to cognitive, vision, hearing, or language impairment. Of the remaining 804 potentially eligible persons, 674 completed the decision-making assessment, 71 had not yet completed their decision-making baseline evaluation, and 59 refused the decision-making assessment. Of the 674 participants who had completed the decision-making assessment, six had missing data on susceptibility to scams and 29 had dementia, leaving 639 eligible persons without dementia for these analyses.

Demographics
Age was based on baseline self-reported date of birth and date of assessment of susceptibility to scam. Sex, race (reported here as white, non-Hispanic vs. other), and education (years of schooling) were also self-reported at baseline. Income was measured at the time of the susceptibility to scam assessment using the show card methodology (Bennett et al., 2005). Self-reported annual income at baseline was ranked according to ten possible categories ranging from $0 to over $75,000.




Correlates of Susceptibility to Scams in Older Adults Without Dementia (nih.gov)

 

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While you’re at it, why don’t you show us your strategic research on the susceptibility of schoolchildren to Marxist indoctrination in public school systems?​

 

Yeah, that's pretty much I what I expected . . .

 

you sound like some old deluded John Bircher...so you're mockable

 

This has nothing to do with me . . . you mock any little thing that doesn't resonate with your distorted sensibilities.

 

the good news is that anti vaxxers and right wingers are now the ones getting 97 percent of Covid cases

 

Good news to you is the loss of a job by anyone who believes in working hard and enjoying the fruits of their own labor.

 

but that just gives them incentive to learn more skills, you said so yourself.

 

That's not what I said, and you know it.

Avoiding self-commoditization is the incentive to learn more skills. People with no skills are still employable, and should be employed, but at the lowest wages the marketplace allows for.

 

looks like the marketplace needs to raise wages.

 

Looks like the liberal goobermint needs to stop throwing money at people . . .

 

you mean their money, since they fund the govt through taxes. The only people getting unemployment are the ones who paid unemployment taxes and who have a work history. Or are you confused?

 

Workers do not pay unemployment taxes. Who’s the confused one here?

Besides, I’m not talking about what states pay their unemployed. I’m referring to the liberal federal government.