Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Month: June 2017 Page 1 of 3

Warehouse in New Jersey


#99 Black Hole, New Jersey – Gimlet Media

This week’s Reply All episode is about a warehouse in New Jersey where scammers online use to ship internationally. The packages end up at this address at 600 Markley St in Port Reading, NJ. The company at this address is Meest America Inc.. The company accepts packages and sends them along internationally.

What’s interesting about this podcast is I remember receiving a winning bid from something I sold on eBay. I thought it was suspicious and I remembering looking up the address and seeing it was a warehouse in New Jersey. I declined to ship the item nor accept the payment from the buyer because I knew I was either never going to see the money or the buyer was going to reverse the payment through Paypal and I’d be out of luck. It was the same warehouse. I remember the company name, Meest.

The Meest company is aware of this fraud and have tried working with the FBI and the only result was the FBI looked into the company. It’s a good lesson to be skeptical of selling anything online and with the plethora of mapping sites like Google Maps, you can see where you’re sending your item.

In this case, here’s 600 Markley St. This doesn’t look like anyone’s home.

What Bullets Do to Bodies – NYT

Early in my medical training, I learned that it is not the bullet that kills you, but the damage from the bullet. A handgun bullet enters the body in a straight line. Like a knife, it damages the organs and tissues directly in its path, and then it either exits the body or is stopped by bone, tissue or skin.
This is in contrast to bullets from an assault rifle. They are three times the speed of handgun bullets. Once they enter the body, they fragment and explode, pulverizing bones, tearing blood vessels and liquefying organs.
This is what was happening to my patient, whose heart quickly stopped beating. We performed an emergency thoracotomy — splitting open his chest in an attempt to clamp off bleeding and restart his heart. Blood poured out of his chest cavity. The bullet had disintegrated his spleen and torn his aorta. Four ribs had essentially turned to dust. The damage was far too extensive. He died in our E.R. He was 15.

Source: What Bullets Do to Bodies – The New York Times

How ‘Snowflake’ Became America’s Inescapable Tough-Guy Taunt

Political Discourse, 2017 finds its roots in Fight Club.

Today’s tough-guy posturing seems rooted, paradoxically, in threat and fear: fear of defeat, fear of lost status and fear that society is growing increasingly ill suited to tough-guy posturing in the first place. The narrator of “Fight Club,” source of that “snowflake” mantra, was a delusional man coping with modernity by inventing a hypermasculine alter-ego, imagining himself as the man-cult leader Tyler Durden. But making an entire alternate masculine identity is a lot of work. It’s always much easier to just call other people wimps and snowflakes — and hope they’ll be intimidated enough to melt away.

Via – How ‘Snowflake’ Became America’s Inescapable Tough-Guy Taunt – The New York Times

T.J. Miller’s Tiny Movies

From 33 minutes, 54 seconds in:

Even in the advertising space, you know what, I will absolutely collaborate with Mucinex and Slim Jim and anybody because in a capitalistic society, you’re seeing those advertisements either way. So why not make them funny?
A great insurance commercial should make you cry a little bit. Life is so sad that when Allstate does it right, you should tear up a little bit.
It’s a tiny movie about how sad and hard life is. It’s a 30 second expose on how we’re going to die and we should leave the most we can to those who survive on.

Pocket Casts Timestamped Link: The Nerdist – T.J. Miller #3, 33m, 54s

Add custom episodes in Pocket Casts

Thanks to Marcus Mangelsdorf for pointing out this feature no longer works. Pocket Casts has now added the ability to upload files and cloud stoarage to their Plus offering.

The downside is it’s no longer free, the upside is that it’s much easier to manage the files and the process isn’t as convoluted.
Pocket Casts detailed information on what kind of media is supported from which platform.
Updated: Oct 31st, 2019


This is now out-of-date. See update above.

I recently had a strange issue with a certain podcast not loading on my phone. For some reason, the phone can’t load the domain even though it works from my computer on the same network. And the phone fails to load the page on cellular and wifi. So I set out to see if I could manually load the episodes into Pocket Casts.

I’ve used this for a couple of shows and single audio files and it works great. The instructions are for Android.

  1. Locate the custom_episodes folder. By default it’s located here: /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/ au.com.shiftyjelly.pocketcasts/files/PocketCasts
  2. Move your episode files into the folder
  3. Open Pocket Casts and refresh by tapping on the Pocket Casts icon in the side menu.
  4. You now find a Custom Episodes podcast in your Podcasts tile screen, tap it to view the list of custom episodes.

Note: Only the following file types are supported: mp3, m4a, aac, mov, m4v, mp4, 3g2 and 3gp.
Note: Pocket Casts will only pick up files in the custom_episodes folder, not any sub-folders.

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