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Dec. 9th, 2022 08:37 pmGot yet another prepaid card in the mail from California, for a "Middle Class Tax Refund". This time, they're using Bancorp. The other bank they used is hella skeezy too. But I'm having a problem a huge number of other people are having, that that card number is not recognized by the phone activation system so cannot be activated. The Franchise Tax Board site, California's tax authority, says that they don't get money back from cards unless you mail the unused card back to them. So California just handed over billions of dollars to a private corporate who went, nah, I think I'll keep it. So, mailing my $400 card to the FTB. Guessing most people who can't activate won't bother. Customer support from Bancorp is all complete fake.
These things are fascinating to me as unaccountable corrupt power is a big piece of authoritarian regimes. Mail getting lost (my mother said her postperson has three routes and comes by twice a week including on Sundays to deliver mail for her route but is really nice) is related to that. It's a lot easier to profit off of destroying things than fixing them. There's an old IT adage I repeat a lot, "if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem". People who claim to have the solution to the problem that they are causing, and are believed, can cause endless harm.
Of course an obvious fix for the first problem would be to fund the post office and do postal banking, which has long been requested, and send people cheques. But then there's no corporate profiteering. Especially when things are done for the low income set, there are a whole bunch of other hands grabbing at the pie, and very often, they are banks.
But the thing I sent to myself in NY came back successfully. It's worked in the past and it my failure for not doing this, but putting "Do Not Forward" in the destination address pretty avoids problems with this. Cancelling temporary forwards from PO Boxes has resulted in the PO boxes being closed, but I was able to reverse that talking to staff. That happened both in Tempe and here in Isleton. USPS just is not set up to do forwards, especially temporary ones, especially ones when you cancel it online before the original end date, which is always an arbitrary future date when I do those. So, I spent $66 to send my underwear and some books on a tour of the country.
I don't mean to erase the intentional destruction of public education, and other people, especially veterans who get medicine by mail, are far more affected by postal implosion. If we allow this to happen at all, soon, there's nothing left.
On a different bad note, there's a personality type that often occurs in the tech camp I got stuck in (probably stuck in it because validity of these negative stereotypes cast a shade on me. And maybe even correctly. Who knows.). It's one of being extremely arrogant and a horrible listener... bowling people over aggressively, being grabby, having to try to be in charge, but being so convinced they already know everything, and are so convinced that you know absolutely nothing (even if they have to ignore a huge pile of recent evidence), you cannot try to have any conversation with them without just being stunned and angry. A lot of people in this camp are otherwise perfectly smart and hard working to succeed in IT, but do this thing, and don't realize how much it turns people off. Even people who don't have it really really bad, I keep seeing have it to different degrees. Tech is generally toxic but some of these dark corners, people turned off the lights and went home twenty years ago and never came back, for a reason. I've often been frustrated at how siloed I am and how hard it is get anyone to talk about what they did and why they did it, or create any sort of useful documentation, or answer questions without just grabbing and seagulling ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_management ), but being trapped in meetings may be way worse. The selective hearing is astounding. A lot of tech is just making things as complicated as possible in a way that you know so that no one can keep up with you, so you can stay in charge, so you can make it harder for other people, so you can stay in charge. Sometimes people are at least nice and maybe even a bit benevolent about that, but not in this dark corner of IT. This particular gross dark corner also a reputation for "cowboy culture" which may be a side-effect of everyone having to be so in charge that they're incapable of working with other people. But, money.
My nerves are raw and I'm talking about the bad stuff, but Zoom and cell data has worked nearly flawlessly for about a billion hours non-stop there, so there's that. And my stuff at least made it back to me.
Edit: You can't block people in Slack... because abuse and harassment doesn't happen inside companies, and if so, HR will take care of it! (the one thing I don't know how to do in ASCII-emoji is the upside down smiley) https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-block-someone-on-slack
These things are fascinating to me as unaccountable corrupt power is a big piece of authoritarian regimes. Mail getting lost (my mother said her postperson has three routes and comes by twice a week including on Sundays to deliver mail for her route but is really nice) is related to that. It's a lot easier to profit off of destroying things than fixing them. There's an old IT adage I repeat a lot, "if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem". People who claim to have the solution to the problem that they are causing, and are believed, can cause endless harm.
Of course an obvious fix for the first problem would be to fund the post office and do postal banking, which has long been requested, and send people cheques. But then there's no corporate profiteering. Especially when things are done for the low income set, there are a whole bunch of other hands grabbing at the pie, and very often, they are banks.
But the thing I sent to myself in NY came back successfully. It's worked in the past and it my failure for not doing this, but putting "Do Not Forward" in the destination address pretty avoids problems with this. Cancelling temporary forwards from PO Boxes has resulted in the PO boxes being closed, but I was able to reverse that talking to staff. That happened both in Tempe and here in Isleton. USPS just is not set up to do forwards, especially temporary ones, especially ones when you cancel it online before the original end date, which is always an arbitrary future date when I do those. So, I spent $66 to send my underwear and some books on a tour of the country.
I don't mean to erase the intentional destruction of public education, and other people, especially veterans who get medicine by mail, are far more affected by postal implosion. If we allow this to happen at all, soon, there's nothing left.
On a different bad note, there's a personality type that often occurs in the tech camp I got stuck in (probably stuck in it because validity of these negative stereotypes cast a shade on me. And maybe even correctly. Who knows.). It's one of being extremely arrogant and a horrible listener... bowling people over aggressively, being grabby, having to try to be in charge, but being so convinced they already know everything, and are so convinced that you know absolutely nothing (even if they have to ignore a huge pile of recent evidence), you cannot try to have any conversation with them without just being stunned and angry. A lot of people in this camp are otherwise perfectly smart and hard working to succeed in IT, but do this thing, and don't realize how much it turns people off. Even people who don't have it really really bad, I keep seeing have it to different degrees. Tech is generally toxic but some of these dark corners, people turned off the lights and went home twenty years ago and never came back, for a reason. I've often been frustrated at how siloed I am and how hard it is get anyone to talk about what they did and why they did it, or create any sort of useful documentation, or answer questions without just grabbing and seagulling ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_management ), but being trapped in meetings may be way worse. The selective hearing is astounding. A lot of tech is just making things as complicated as possible in a way that you know so that no one can keep up with you, so you can stay in charge, so you can make it harder for other people, so you can stay in charge. Sometimes people are at least nice and maybe even a bit benevolent about that, but not in this dark corner of IT. This particular gross dark corner also a reputation for "cowboy culture" which may be a side-effect of everyone having to be so in charge that they're incapable of working with other people. But, money.
My nerves are raw and I'm talking about the bad stuff, but Zoom and cell data has worked nearly flawlessly for about a billion hours non-stop there, so there's that. And my stuff at least made it back to me.
Edit: You can't block people in Slack... because abuse and harassment doesn't happen inside companies, and if so, HR will take care of it! (the one thing I don't know how to do in ASCII-emoji is the upside down smiley) https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-block-someone-on-slack
