9,936 karma · joined January 2, 2010
They are not the problem, in my opinion, but they are also entitled to nothing that I do not choose to give of my own volition. Expecting a response, particularly a polite one, to an unsolicited interaction is on the same level of telling someone that "you'd look better if you smiled."
People are free to be in public but must also be aware of the consequences of their actions. One of those consequences may be that they are brusquely ignored.
If they want to be out in the world, go for it, but don't pretend the people engaging in their own activities are the problem.
(FreeConferenceCall and similar companies lobbied heavily against this rule, but AT&T and Verizon were able to lobby it through.)
I don't mean to do Twilio's work of defending them, but in my experience it's possible they actually don't know how much to bill the customer. What they may know is the generalized per-minute or per-session rate they've agreed with another operator alongside a general "premium rate numbers will be settled at a later date" kind of clause.
My employer got bit by this several years ago, purely on calls within the +1 country code. Before this practice was largely banned, some small carriers were allowed to designate certain rate centers as higher cost. So our VoIP carrier would say that a call to a given area code was $0.003/minute but the calls would later settle out at $0.25/minute because of a 1,000s block of numbers being (unknowing to us our our carrier) as higher cost and being settlement billed back at the higher rate.
Twilio could agree to carry some or all of this risk for its customers as part of their value-add and fees. That way, Twilio has the incentive to make the proper changes for its customers and would have the experience of looking at all of the return billed rates for all of the calls or messages across its entire customer base to help prevent toll fraud.
I remember this period of very rapid advancement, too. It was such a trope in the computer market at the time, Weird Al even made fun of it in his lyrics:
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
(It's All About the Pentiums, 1999, "Running with Scissors")
Which is, of course, what we currently have, except it's the businesses who are able to "conveniently forget to mention" instead of the borrowers.
I pay myriad bills on time and in full every month, but only three of them--all loans--report my positive payment history to credit bureaus. Yet all of them, from mobile phone providers to landlords to utilities to insurance companies, insisted on being able to look at that payment history. They get the benefit of being able to evaluate me on an incomplete set of data; why shouldn't I get the return?
(The answer as always is that we don't have any leverage. Simply saying "well, then don't use those companies" is a non-answer when every company does it the same way and all of them lobby government to keep it that way.)
This is 100% accurate, in my experience. You even gave the answer in your first sentence:
> these are low-paid jobs with no agency.
If they weren't low-paid jobs with no agency, a lot of trust and retention would follow, almost like magic. (Of course there would still be people who abuse or mess up the intended system; that's why you have internal business controls and vetting.)
A long time ago, I worked overnight customer support for a very large ISP, via an outsourcing company. On the overnight shift, there was no distinction between technical support and billing because call volumes were so much lower. Also because of being on the overnight shift, we had much greater authority to make account adjustments and fixes because the employees who worked directly for the ISP didn't want to be woken up in the middle of the night to approve requests. All we needed was a second coworker to sign off. Oh, and we got paid a 25% differential for the shift.
People would actively try to move onto the overnight shift. Our group inside the outsourcing company had the lowest turnover rate by far and was helped by one year our overnight shift had zero turnover. Two of my coworkers even declined being promoted to daytime lead so they could stay working overnights.
Yes, the pay was good even though the hours were not so great, but the autonomy was better. We were treated like adults; we didn't even have a technical support script because no one from the ISP had come to officially train us so we weren't "allowed" to use the script in the knowledge repository. We had access to the billing tools that would tell us why an account was in a certain state and so we could actually fix, or at least tell the customer about, problems instead of offering them a "trouble ticket" and a "one-time credit of $15 for your issue."
It was amazing and I'm often sad that our industry has forgotten that humans are the point of all of this.
This is correct in the sense that it is technically correct (for residential dwellings; commercial condominiums have existed for almost a hundred years prior).
However, residential cooperatives (co-ops) have existed in the United States since the mid-1800s. These are functionally the same as a condominium with a slightly different legal structure. But the end result is identical: multiple owners jointly managing a building in which they all own a stake.
It is often the case that so-called "lesser" sports not only don't get public subsidies, they pay taxes that the bigger sports don't.
For example, I enjoy watching curling. Granite Curling Club in Seattle is one of only two curling-specific facilities on the west coast and while it is a non-profit organization, it still pays property taxes, something that the Seattle Seahawks[0] and Seattle Mariners[0] do not. While the relative amounts are small, to be sure, to take the Mariners for example they pay $1.5 million in rent to the county yet the public expense is much higher than that[1].
This isn't a slam on the concept of sports--I also am a lifelong baseball fan--just how they are paid for, on which I think we agree.
0 - https://dor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/InLieu_Leaseh...
1 - https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/mariners/king-county-cou...
If you cannot give informed or willing consent, you are not a participant, you are a victim. Impenetrable, hard to read terms are not informed consent, particularly when the terms are in a contract of adhesion.
> Don’t like the mortgage process? Don’t get a mortgage. Pay cash, or rent.
Couple of points here. First, I take it you've never read a modern leasing contract. In most jurisdictions, especially where the large corporate landlords have almost entirely conquered the market, they are just as opaque. Landlord associations promulgate so-called "standard leases" that contain myriad difficult to comprehend terms.
> The world doesn’t owe you the exact terms you want. That’s not the fault of capitalism
Perhaps it does not, but yes, it is the fault of capitalism. When all of the participants in a market operate in virtually identical ways because the optimal path, under capitalism, is to legalese first and ask questions later, that is absolutely a failure caused by the capitalistic system. It all stems from the idea that, under capitalism, an individual or group's highest and best course of outcome is to feverishly grab for every single available resource to hoard it against use by others. Along the way, some of those resources are (often temporarily) lent out at an inflated rate to ensure that more resources are grabbed.
This works fine when it comes to a mobile phone device or a book or a toy. Those are optional, often called "luxury", goods that we can leave or take as we desire. Housing, water, food, transportation, energy; we need all of these to live as humans, yet that's where capitalism extracts its most gains because the more desperate someone is for one of these, the more resources they will throw in to fill the need they must fill.
I don't mean to put words in obblekk's mouth (text box) so what I perceived them as meaning is: I don't think the person you're replying to was advocating for direct person-on-person action. When we see people protesting or pushing back against or loudly saying "this is wrong and I won't have it and neither should you" kinds of things, we should consider how our personal situation could rapidly change to be like theirs. And, in a lot of cases, would have been like theirs but for some skill at leveraging a few strokes of uncontrollable luck.
To me, it's like when people complain that "those damn unionized trash truck drivers are making $90,000 with a lot of overtime and a pension." Why is the response to try to tear them down, when the correct, to my mind, question is "why don't I have that, too?"
"Someone stole my bike. Here's how I got it back.
It was an unexpectedly warm day in the hills of Colorado, back in October of 1967. My father--or, rather the person who would eventually become my father, because he didn't yet know it--relaxed on the porch after finally getting to those weeds his mother had been pestering him to work on. My soon-to-be-mother, or at least the soon-to-be-bride to my father as they'd not met as of yet, rode her bicycle along a well-worn trail just outside the woods of rural Vermont.
Did you know that rural Vermont is where Bernie Sanders was born? Except that's not true because he was actually born in New York City some twenty five years earlier. Twenty-five, incidentally, being the age at which someone is eligible to serve in the United States Congress.
[sixteen paragraphs from the Australian parliament to Kevin Bacon later]
So, anyway, I was able to buy my bike back from the thief on Craigslist. I even negotiated the price down a whole $100!"
We, as a society in this country, seem to have internalized the idea that our success or failure is entirely the product of things solely within our complete control. So anyone who succeeds got there on their own merits (with no other outside influence) and anyone who fails is obviously responsible for the consequences that befell them (again, with no outside influence).
This view is completely wrong, in my opinion, but because it lets us do things like short cut having empathy--obviously that homeless person is a bum because they screwed up--and frame resource hoarding as just prudently looking out for one's self, changing this view will be extremely difficult.
I work in healthcare IT and this industry has done more to push me towards wanting a greater sense of collective good and supporting the commons than anything in my life, including going off to college. Day after day, I see patients (as in, I observe them, not that I am providing care for them) who got sick or had an accident or simply had a malformed gene pop up and say "now's my time to shine!" at the wrong time. They're walking towards a future that will take hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep them alive or bring them back to health. Few of us have the kind of insurance that will carry that entire burden and even fewer have sequestered that kind of money inside our 401k accounts.
I don't think it is nuts. The terminal doing the rejection accounts for the "oops the customer did something wrong" case of swiping the card when the issuer wants them to use chip. It's better to tell the customer this now than run an entire transaction.
But checking on the far end that the transaction meets all of the issuers rule accounts for the fraud case of "someone has maliciously rewritten the magnetic stripe data to try to go around the requirement to insert the card." Since, hopefully, this happens far less often than the first case, it is an acceptable path.
I have a M2 MacBook Air with the most amount of RAM and storage that Apple would sell me. I'm sure its CPU sits at about 5% utilization almost the entire day. This was intentional on my part. I bought a laptop with enough "extra" capacity that it will be able to handle increased inefficiencies, bloat, and new features from ever-expanding software for the next several years.
So by buying one "over-speced" laptop now, I avoid buying two or three of them in the future. This is how I like to buy devices, especially since some items, like the screen or keyboard or the like, are mostly fungible.
For landlords, yes.
Not for tenants. That's the crux of the issue here. Tenants have no way of knowing what is happening or why and so the market becomes an anti-competitive cartel. This is doubly so in markets like Seattle, where a single-digit number of management companies cover large swathes of the market.
It's akin to people defending binding arbitration clauses by saying "just choose another competitor." When all of the competitors in the market, especially in a must-have-it-or-else market like housing, are doing the same thing in the same way, there's no choice and no competition.
This has started to really irritate me since it feels like every application in Apple's mobile ecosystem does this. My device has SIX GIGABYTES OF MEMORY[0]. Why do you need to swap everything out of RAM almost instantaneously?
What grinds my gears the most is that state isn't preserved. Apple Maps and Music are the absolute worst for this. Music will show the same screenshot and then just unceremoniously dump me to the "Listen Now" or "Browse" screen (it seems random which) and completely disregard whatever playlist or album I was in. The last song I played and track position are kept but good damn luck getting back to the spot I was in--particularly which playlist--before the app got put on ice.
That screenshot is just a point of "hahaha nope" frustration.
0 - Yes, I mean actual Random Access Memory, not "storage capacity."
And permanent residents. This used to not be the case but changed in the late 90s for reasons I won't derail the thread on.
> SNAP benefits (free food) and Medicaid expansion for low-income people are quite generous
I'm not sure our definitions of "quite generous" are the same. In Washington State, if you are a family of three who makes under $2,300 per month and pays rent and utilities, you qualify for $383/month in food benefit. In western Washington, this is not enough to pay for an entire month of food for three people. It's about a third, or half if you try really hard. (If you have a small child you can qualify for another program, called WIC, but what you get through it is more regulated.)
> If you can get a Section 8 (free housing) voucher you can essentially live without working
The phrase "if you can get" is doing a great deal of work here. The public housing voucher--of all types, not just section 8--waiting list for every populated county in Washington State is closed right now due to far more applicants than availability. In most of the country the waitlist is years long, if not decades. There is that notable story of a person who is now an Alderwoman for the City of Chicago[0] who was on the waiting list for 29 years and finally reached the point where she could apply for (but not yet receive) housing benefits.
The social safety net in the US is neither as strong nor as ubiquitous as you might suspect.
0 - https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/1104338319/chicago-public-hou...
I want to say sorry at the beginning if I misread what the author (you?) intended when you wrote this. And I'm coming at this from someone who is not a developer and who, compared to the lofty Software Engineer salaries in this industry, feels underpaid and underappreciated for doing the operations/administration work.
With that said: I truly wish those who are leaving their roles where this kind of requirement exists--feels "forced"--would speak more loudly about the need to have actual people doing system administration work. This is especially true, I feel, in large companies who operate "the Cloud" and who ought to know better; someone needs to be doing that work and it can't always, or usually, be the people who are writing the features and implementing the updates to the core product you are selling.
But what seems like has happened is everyone in the tech industry has forgotten it, or named it "Site Reliability Engineer" with a job of 55% failure analysis, 35% coding, and 10% "are the infrastructure and products actually online and functional." And then this role gets looked down on and paid less because the people in the role--people like me--are not seen as "delivering" "value".
Which culminates in the proper software developers seeing it as a thing they are forced to do, resulting in disdain, and furthering the cycle.
What GP means is to go to a grocery store and lay out 10 American Dollars for an Apple-branded services gift card (what used to be called an iTunes Gift Card). One of these: https://www.apple.com/shop/gift-cards
You apply it to the brand new Apple ID you've made and use those virtual funds to make the in-app purchase in the Twitter app that, at the time, was the method of paying for Twitter Blue. (The purchase page even said/says, "You can only subscribe on the Twitter iOS app (for now).")
No blocking of prepaid or gift cards here; you're doing exactly what Apple wants and it's not Apple's problem that Twitter takes IAPs for a "verified" service.
This is an entirely reasonable point and that's likely where Seattle's bikeshare system failed. The operator was borderline incompetent, but also siting docks in Seattle is very difficult because of the propensity for car drivers to vocally oppose any efforts at space reallocation. It's getting very frustrating, especially now that they got a Mayor elected and a head of the Council's transportation committee who are both quite pro-car.
No, but the 2 or 13 are and then a scooter can go where we want if that's not close enough or if it's a particularly bad walking day.
> Much could be done to "fix" the scooter issue by working with the city rather than antagonistically against it
I completely agree! However...
> for example, on streets with parking (almost all of them) the first parking space on each block
...this is astoundingly difficult to pull off in Seattle because people who drive cars have a very high fear of loss, as a general rule, and vehemently oppose efforts to turn car storage areas over to areas for other vehicle types. It's why we've wound up with painted-off areas that get used for refuse bins instead (blocking off where the scooters should go).
> Then modify the app to charge you a $10 "you're a dick" fee
The two apps we use require that you take a picture of where you left the thing when you park it and both of us in the past few months have gotten an email, one apiece, saying "you parked wrong, next time it's $25." (They were right, we didn't leave enough space, we've gotten more diligent.)
This is, for me and my wife, the entire point. We had a docked bikeshare system in Seattle and the docks were never where we needed one, particularly since Seattle's topology--a city known internationally for being incredibly flat and dry--meant that the docks on the bottom of a hill would be perpetually full and the ones at the top of the hill were always empty.
But these things are an absolute godsend for someone who can walk, but can't walk far, or who has the occasional struggle with hills. The bus or train can't go everywhere, but a scooter can get you between the spot where the bus let you off and the spot where you want to go. That's how my wife and I use them and they're amazing and, frankly, I hope they never go away.
> The companies running them all seem content to just proliferate scooters all over the street with no regard for expense or the non-scooting public
This is probably true, but I think a lot of people just don't see themselves as "the scooting public" except for the brief time they might be using one.
It's the same problem with cars, just downsized a great deal. We're incapable of building separated infrastructure, mostly due to cost, partially due to fear of loss from space given over to cars. We try these bandage workarounds, like scooters, but because we've half-assed everything except the infrastructure for cars (and because people's expectations are so high around the new idea), we wind up with a situation where everyone is frustrated because no one's needs feel met even though there are clearly uses for them.
This was also the rise of the OpenWRT software on the WRT54G (and GS!) because no consumer-level hardware coult do it. So many Linksys devices bricked from failing tftp sessions, but it worked so well if you could incant it onto the device.
For those who want to re-live the moment, look at this PDF starting on internal page 873 (file page 894): http://vtda.org/books/Computing/OperatingSystems/DOSPowerToo...
I remember Xs4all, sorry to hear they went under.
I also miss the brief moment when we had line sharing on copper telco networks in the United States. Most people were perfectly happy with the standard offerings from their local telco, but those of us who wanted more could connect with an ISP who offered service via a dry pair DSL connection. I loved my time on Speakeasy, for example.
I remember all of the flaws with the line sharing system, too, but it actually worked for the short time we had it, in spite of the problems. Asking a niche ISP to build its own facilities-based network is an exercise in futility for many deployments. Of course, cities or counties or public utility districts could do it but the incumbent providers don't like that.
For what it's worth, a lot of Spotify's customers agree with you and have made third-party apps that try to do this. (I only know they exist but not how good they are since classical music is not my thing. But I kind of understand where classical music fans are coming from since a lot of electronic music, especially earlier works, is "mangled" in the same way.)
The two I know off the top of my head are Concertmaster and Tempso, if that helps.
Vertical (acquiring as many steps in the supply chain to a business' core business as it can) and horizontal (acquiring as many related or semi-related functions as it can) integration has been the name of the game for as long as businesses were a thing.
One example I like to use is Temple-Inland, that started as a company that made boxes, was acquired into a company that made paper, bought another company that did forestry management, which turned into "we should have a real estate investment arm", and resulted in the country's third-largest mortgage lender in the early 80s.
We can be kinda tired of it all we want to but this is one of those competing interests between customers[0] and companies: the customer wants maximum flexibility for the lowest cost with the broadest range of features; the company wants the fewest costs for the most income with the highest amount of lock-in. Integration tilts the balance towards the companies so they will always pursue it.
0 - As an aside, I don't like calling people "consumers". We are customers; we "consume" service offerings, but (likely) we do so with intent.
(Side note: setting image.animation_mode = none in Firefox stops the animation.)