9,936 karma · joined January 2, 2010
Not for too much longer for most people. ID cards issued on or after September, 2018 have a random code format instead of the generated one from before: https://custhelp.courts.wa.gov/ci/fattach/get/63481/0/filena...
All ID cards are being changed as they are renewed.
Look at how many of us got hired as an employee or who got investment to try doing a startup and that relationship ended poorly. Are we, because we are not famous, obligated to always speak kindly of the person who paid us? Even if we perceive that the relationship turned out to not be good?
Just because someone is rich and famous doesn't mean they don't have the same human emotional responses as the rest of us; it just means theirs are more visible and open to attack.
I will never claim to know what Taylor Swift truly thinks of the Big Machine purchase of her masters. But, having made art of my own before, I do very much understand the emotional attachment to that art and the incredible difficulty in separating the art from the business transaction of making money from that art. That's something that the "money men" in the artistic endeavors don't usually seem to get.
I was wondering if someone would mention Microsoft in a reply.
Yes, there are apartments near there, but Redmond has the same failing as most other suburbs in the area: housing stock woefully inadequate for the number of people working there, and ordinances that artificially restrict building any more. Microsoft's campus is also adjacent to the Bellevue city limits, where residents on the other side of Bel-Red have fought vociferously against new housing for decades.
Meanwhile, SR 520 is a mess all the way back to the 405 interchange (and beyond, some mornings). After the much-vaunted light rail arrives, that station will serve fewer residences than the one in Angle Lake.
My point is that lots of people just throw out "well, live near where you work" as a panacea to life's commuting and office ills. Under our current idea of what counts as zoning and land use, it's not possible for any more than a small sliver of people to do that. So we have a choice: change how we do land use, change how we work with offices, or both.
And in large parts of the rest of the country, it's illegal to put homes close to work.
Where I work is on the edge of an office campus on the edge of a suburb of Seattle. By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work. If you live in the same municipality as this office and work at it, your only choice to get there is a twenty-minute drive (with pre-pandemic traffic levels). There is no local bus service that goes from the rest of the town to the office park. Bus service from Seattle to this office park exists, however, so I live in Seattle.
"Just live close to work" is a physical impossibility for so many people, and not solely because they want the stereotypical standalone house with a picket fence. My family has zero interest in that, yet there's no housing anywhere near where I work. What little exists is largely short-term corporate rentals and AirBnBs.
When we've lived in other places, the dynamic is the same. Office parks in the suburbs or all clumped together in a large downtown, with housing as far as you can get from them.
This is, in my opinion, one of the few things Amazon did right: plopping its office campus in the middle of a very mixed-use area with rental apartments and condominium units for ownership, shops, restaurants, parks, and so on. (Of course, after having run out of land there, now they're building traditional office towers in the suburban downtown with virtually no housing to speak of. And yes, it is sky-high expensive to live near Amazon because that's basically the only mixed-use office park in the whole county.)
We impose a lot of duties on people who are employed in the service of the general public. Humans are messy, unpredictable, inconsistent beings with unique needs so, yes, it is possible that two humans will be a mismatch for each other in the public sphere.
The law, and society in making that law, has generally decided that the right of a person with particular needs--such as a service animal or a carseat--outweigh the rights of someone to ply a trade in a customer-facing role. And, given the level of discrimination that people with those needs experience on a daily basis, I happen to think this is a fair trade-off. The person with the needs may not have a choice, or may have fewer choices, than the service provider.
What services like this do is enable someone who owns a number that is not ordinarily enabled for SMS (POTS, VoIP, toll free/WATS) to enter their number into the SMS routing system and tell other carriers to deliver SMS to a service provider (one that can handle the inbound SMS traffic and display it on a web portal, for instance) of their choosing.
The flaw is when a SMS-enabled number can have its instructions overwritten by a service like this so that messages are routed where they shouldn’t go. As all mobile numbers are considered SMS-enabled by default and only the owning carrier should be the destination, this is a flaw. (Yes, I can think of some scenarios where you might want your mobile number SMS messages going elsewhere, but that’s dead for now.)
More specifically, the flaw is to do it on the back of an easily-faked, CYA letter of authority.
Where I live in Seattle, an area that isn't even in the downtown or Capitol Hill core, I am a maximum of 15-minute walk from two parks, a library, three shopping areas, two grocery stores, health care offices, and a major transit center. At the transit center, two bus routes that go to different parts of the city (an important thing, since two bus routes going to roughly the same place are basically the same bus) arrive every 12-15 minutes virtually the entire calendar day.
Does that not sound like something that many parts of London already have?
Just to be clear, I was all but certain we were in agreement, and I didn't think you were (deliberately) leaving anyone out. What I wrote was more of a "this is gonna suck...for most of us...pretty damn soon...and we all know it...and that sucks."
Not to sound too defeatist about it, since let's be honest we are still sitting pretty high on the list of people doing pretty well for ourselves, but I'm not sure there is any real escape.
In addition to more people moving here, one of the other reasons the Puget Sound housing market has shot up so dramatically is because lots of us didn't lose our jobs during this pandemic, but we for damn sure lost what we usually spend money on. With so much money sloshing around, people make the decision of "well, surely now I should buy a house, right?" And then they do. And since more money is available to them, housing prices are driven upward.
What sucks is if we have this worry, those of us of the high-five-figure/low-six-figure brigade, how must it be to be of even lesser means? If we're feeling the creep--the only reason I didn't get hit with yet another $100/month rent increase is because the Governor said they couldn't--then what is everyone else doing? I am anxious not only for my family, but for society at large.
I don't know how much longer that can last. Maybe it can last forever, since the monetary policy in this country seems to be that housing prices Must Never, Ever, Ever Fall, because housing is both a required good and the primary "investment" vehicle of everyone with lower net worth than an Apple executive.
My employer has taken up the work from wherever mantle and has said that where our company has offices, even internationally, are places where living is acceptable. As I'm an EU citizen, I wouldn't need work permission to go live there, maybe I give there a go for the second half of my life.
DFW is going to be in a world of hurt when the water runs out and that day is coming somewhat soon. There are already places in central Texas where the aquifers are dry and the lakes don't refill during the formerly-rainy season. North Texas is reliant on a set of manmade lakes that are already slower and slower to refill, with more and more taps being added every year.
This is exactly what we're seeing in the Seattle area. A lot of people in the various circles I'm in thought, as we entered the early stages of this pandemic really settling in for the long-haul, "well, phew, at least it'll put a breather on housing costs."
Nope.
Because of the "work wherever you want" and Seattle and Puget Sound still being a wonderfully attractive place to live, the pace has accelerated. Housing prices here have shot up by double-digit numbers, even inside the city limits from which people are supposedly "fleeing." Both the north and south ends of Seattle, even West Seattle where the main road link has been severed for a year (as of today), have seen massive upticks.
The Department of Licensing has released statistics that show that the number of California driving licenses and vehicle titles exchanged for Washington ones is the second-highest it's been in ten years, with only 2018 being higher, and that's with most DOL offices being closed or heavily restricted due to in-person limits from the virus. (The influx of cars isn't going to do our "pristine environment" any favors, either, and I look forward to the even-louder rants about how terrible traffic is driving by oneself from Marysville to Queen Anne for a hockey game).
Meanwhile, people around here continue to insist that building is bad and, I shit you not, that if we simply don't build then the people will stop coming. I don't know why anyone still thinks this; it hasn't been true for twenty years, why should now be any different? And the new arrivals aren't keen on building more or making sure newer arrivals have space because, well, they moved here, to this spot because they liked it that way and, gosh-darn-it, this space is going to stay like this forever.
It's getting quite frustrating. After many, many years of waiting and hoping and moving around, I finally live near where a light rail station will be opening in the coming year-ish and I fear, even on my moderately good tech salary, I'm not going to be able to afford to live here before the train arrives, or shortly thereafter.
I'd be very curious to know what kind of exceptions you mean.
I've owned where I live a few times, each time it ended poorly. Now, I rent. The problem is, I can't buy what I want to live in even if I wanted to buy. Here's what I want to buy:
- Inside the city limits of Seattle; location is not fungible, I can't substitute a property in Spokane or Atlanta for one in Seattle.
- Within a 10-minute walk to a train station or rapid bus route.
- An outdoor space of my own, not a shared garden but a balcony or private garden of some sort.
That's it. That's the Tweet.
You'd think that would be trivially easy, but the exactly two places I've seen where property can be owned (one is a townhouse development in Rainier Valley with an astoundingly expensive HOA, yet still sold out and the other is a condominium development near the stadiums but the handful of units with a balcony sold out immediately) are unavailable.
There's nowhere else. No condos, no townhouses, no rowhouses, not even any detached houses. It's all rented apartments. No one is building ownable properties, because of a combination of striving for rental returns, zoning, and Washington's condo liability law.
Any number can be provisioned at an SMSC, even toll-free numbers these days. But mobile providers—and the associated short code entities—are loathe to peer with many VoIP carriers. Partially for competitive reasons, partially because many short codes are premium billing numbers.
You’re right about non-mobile numbers being second class, but that’s largely because companies filter them out because “fraud,” which is also suspicious reasoning. I can get a hundred “mobile” numbers within a few minutes, rather inexpensively.
You absolutely can port a Google Voice number. End-user subscriber numbers must be portable per FCC rules. Google, operating services provided by Bandwidth.com (mentioned in the article), does enable port-protection by default but this is easy to bypass by an operator who, like in the article, checks the box that says something like "I have a valid written LOA, complete the port as an exception." This has legitimate uses (some losing providers are very ruthless about not following the rules and letting customers move numbers) but unscrupulous or lazy operators will check the box and move on.
Heck, even with "port lock" enabled on a Google Voice number, that is the barest of security against an attacker who has any kind of access better than "retail store employee." Working for a telco with access to our back-end port system, access several other people had, I could forcibly acquire a number by simply checking a box that said I had verified a written LOA even if the losing carrier responded with code 6P ("port-out protection enabled").
So, yes, you're likely sitting in a security-by-obscurity, or at least security-by-slightly-more-difficult-than-someone-else, situation.
I opted-out when I signed up a decade ago but I have no proof of having done that other than a website I barely remember visiting. They do not display my opt-out status anywhere and customer service claims they have no access to know whether or not I did.
Increasingly, the "if you're not paying then you're the product" saying is bunk. I am paying, almost $400 per month, for quite a few SIMs to be active on T-Mobile's network yet that's not enough. They have to harvest data about me for even more.
(Don't come at me with the "a company is legally required to take in all of the money it possibly can for its shareholders" bit. Nothing says a company can't make a reasonable business decision to leave money on the table.)
At minimum, show the non-religious benefits of doing (or not doing) a thing and why it is relevant for the individual. Don’t punish the victim for doing the thing; if someone must be punished, make it the person imposing the action.
Maybe that's good enough. Maybe people are getting used to software coming out with multiple updates per quarter to fix some "random glitch."
I look at it as the computing industry getting away from the roles and pace that made computers reliable instead of just functional. We used to have Operations staff to keep a service reliable; we used to have Testing staff to make sure a code base was reliable. They had their own failings, but to cut them out entirely did wonders for stock prices and not much for the end user experience.
But maybe being able to launch a pre-VC startup with one person and a stack of cloud services is a better trade-off.
Problem is, I don’t drive and don’t carry a state-issued ID. Just a passport card since they became available about a decade ago. No scan, no order.
I walked away and haven’t been back since. This whole situation sucks but that’s a bit much.
Or would those people still be thrown out onto the street with no housing?
Because if there's anything we need to be doing in the United States, particularly on the West Coast, it's bringing more people to homelessness.
Exactly, though to give a lot of customers of these plans credit, they don't have the extra cash. Griddy's own marketing says that "96% of the time," the wholesale rate is well under the average retail per-kWh rate.
This is yet another one of those hidden costs of how being lower-income is very expensive, both in actual money, and in time. Vanishingly few people have the time to be as on the ball as they'd need to for plans like this to work. And you can automate it, but that costs money many of these customers don't have.
I have no problems with plans like this existing; my issue is we set people up to fail by danging the large-print number being a very small value, while not warning people of how catastrophically it can go--and has gone--very wrong.
In my experience, there are exactly two types of customers on the kinds of plans like Griddy offers: a) people who are heavily into cost-optimization and have spent the cash to automate their living quarters to take advantage of wholesale price swings; and b) people who are trying to stretch a dollar because a single dollar is all they have left.
For people in that second category, the dollar broke and smacked them in the face.
I am by no means calling people stupid for doing this; they believed the sales pitch and either did not understand (because the wholesale pricing model is actually complex) or were not told the massive potential downsides. And when the cost of keeping where you live at a livable temperature runs into the mid-three-digits per month during the summer, you're going to jump at the idea of slashing that by two-thirds.
This is consent in the same way that clicking "agree" on a 15,000-word EULA is consent. It isn't.
Some plans are so-called variable rate where the per-kWh rate you pay changes per month based on the price of natural gas.
But an increasing majority are these time-of-use, rates-can-move plans, of which Griddy's is the logical extreme.
2. Yep, my parents were, and they will never use a time-of-use plan ever again.
3. No. I made a spreadsheet and, based on my math their being bit by this in mid-2019 would have not paid off prior to this event.
Circling back to 2 for a moment, the problem is not so much with the plans, it is with all of the unmet caveats that the author lists in the article.
For my parents, they were pitched this plan on a visit to the State Fair of Texas where the salesperson told them they could "save thousands of dollars" every year by not "lining the pockets of big energy." Sure, they know how Griddy operates now, but what about some new clever scheme another provider comes up with that winds up biting them? That's why they're on fixed-rate plans forever.
Not a single person told them the downsides of this plan, the virtually-unlimited (sorry, but a $9/kWh cap when wholesale electricity is usually $0.02-$0.04/kWh and retail is around $0.115/kWh, is not a cap) cost exposure, and the near-impossibility of taking effective action (it is unreasonable to tell customers to go outside and hit the main breaker in a winter storm).
Texas came up with a system where retail electric customers are willingly offered plans in which they need to be near-experts in the price of natural gas derivatives and spot-generation electrical wholesale rates...and are not told in advance about this requirement.
And everyone tells me that only accepting "real" mobile phone numbers means they're just piggybacking on the identity checks that mobile carriers do. Which, if true, I'd like to introduce you to Constable George Crabtree and his nineteen perfectly valid mobile numbers, all of them with his name in the CNAM field.
All this does is prevent someone who's not tech savvy and who might be trying to save a bit of cash by using a Republic Wireless or TextNow or some other "free calls and texts!" service from fully participating in this new app-based reality we've constructed. Someone who actually wants to commit fraud will step right over these dumb speed humps and do whatever they like.
I'm not saying don't do fraud detection, I'm saying don't do fraud detection that is so screamingly trivial to bypass.
(This is why I laugh and laugh at people who insist that VoIP numbers are more "fraudulent" because of whatever. Right now, breaking no rules whatsoever, I can get a hundred mobile numbers that any service will accept, and they'll go for a year without needing any more money. Stop using phone numbers as identity verifiers, people. All you're doing is making it harder for the people who aren't technically savvy and accomplishing nothing to prevent actual fraud.)
I have a few USB sticks plugged into a powered USB hub and Gammu watches all of them for inbound messages.