Apparently not if it’s territory you illegally occupy or a neighboring country that one time sent terrorists to your country. Then the whole country is terrorists and everything is a military target. Helps if some of your citizens steal the “abandoned” land and build on it after you destroy everything.
Stark self sufficiency and individualism is their philosophy. Too bad they forgot what their parents gave them so they could reach that point. Including the political atmosphere of unions and good paying jobs.
Interviews by an FTE manager and reasonable complaint management and resolution like every other customer facing job would be a start.
It’s in Mull on Android which is the browser I use the most. It’s basically Firefox but with privacy turned up and no Mozilla telemetry.
I mean, yeah, otherwise they’d want regulations that prevent it from being manipulated by individual rich people, but they have always been against anti-monopoly regulation and other protective regulations.
“Free market” doesn’t mean free from regulation, it means free from interference in the supply and demand of the product. But there’s still a need to prevent other forces from interfering with supply, including from those participating in the market. If a single company prevents any competition from entering the market, that is what’s not “free market”.
Cloudflare DDNS updated by ddclient on my OpnSense router. Cloudflare happens to be my current domain registrar. Honestly, my IPv4 doesn’t change that often. And when I used to be on Comcast, they assigned a block of IPv6 addresses and the router dealt with that. Unfortunately, I now have Quantum Fiber who only assign a single IPv6 address, so I gave up on IPv6 for now.
A lot of times of it’s a very small, light item, there are contracts that allow for expedited shipping through government channels which might reduce cost which is why the faster option is less. Probably if it were a bigger item, the faster option would be either unavailable or way more expensive and the slower would be about the same price. Similar to how in the US the first class mail is very cheap.
Also, it’s probably so expensive because expediting the customs process is mostly there just for rich people to skip the line kind of thing like in many other areas of society. There’s almost always a backlog in customs combined with “antiterrorism” things like radiation detection, xray, pathogen detection, poison detection, etc., that is often done at random in large batches, but with expedited they often have to test every piece rather than rooms full of stuff. And routing is similar. They also can’t wait to add your package to a larger batch of things when moving between various points along the way, so a lot of things are moved in smaller batches or direct courier. All of that makes it very expensive to move something very fast, no matter how small.
The monkey’s typing and generating Shakespeare is supposed to show the ridiculousness of the concept of infinity. It does not mean it would happen in years, or millions of years, or billions, or trillions, or… So unless the “AI” can move outside the flow of time and take an infinite amount of time and also then has a human or other actual intelligence to review every single result to verify when it comes up with the right one…yeah, not real…this is what happens when we give power to people with no understanding of the problem much less how to solve it. They come up with random ideas from random slivers of information. Maybe in an infinite amount of time a million CEOs could make a longterm profitable company.
That was the whole point of the DMCA, though. Prevent bad publicity by claiming copyright infringement and companiea have to take down the content before they investigate any response. Any time a company doesn’t do that they are risking their own necks. So usually they only ignore it if they know for sure it’s bogus which requires that they spend the resources on a person reviewing every notice before the required time expires.
That might be the case if you got to talk to someone with the ability to do anything about it. Customer service is just able to tell you what happened, not really make any change. You can file an appeal, but you can’t really ask for much during that process. It’s mostly automated and the people who process those have very specific criteria for overriding an initial decision and have a very short period of time they’re allowed to spend on each appeal.
So the only way you’d get to someone who might be able to access any of this information is through a lawsuit. Trying to intimidate a worker with no power, no access to information, and a very high quotas is unlikely to have much effect. And these companies all have more lawyers on staff and/or retainer than any of us could afford in a hundred lifetimes. And those people aren’t going to give that information anyway. Nor would they give it to any lawyer you might hire in most cases. Proprietary information has way more legal protections than consumer rights, even in healthcare. You’d need to get a judge to order that release of confidential information about an employee or proprietary algorithm in most states, unless you convince someone to sacrifice their job, their freedom, and possibly their life to become a whistleblower.
So unless your claim is in the hundreds of thousands at least, it’s unlikely you’ll spend less on lawyers just to get your case in front of someone who can answer these questions much less compelled them to give it. Otherwise, they’d have an incentive to pay claims in good faith in the first place. So there’s no intimidation felt on their end by things like this. It just makes them get I to a defensive posture if anything, and likely reduces your likelihood of getting an appeal approved in a timely manner.
Your best bet if your claim is denied and appeal fails and you actually have a case is to hope you live in a somewhat progressive state that funds their insurance commission and has more consumer-friendly laws, and go to them for help. Federal laws aren’t going to help much unless you have evidence of fraud or you understand all the details of the case and can point to specific contract language or laws they violated already. But in that case the appeal should be all that’s needed.
Good luck getting them to give you an answer at all to any of those questions. You’re going to need to get a lawyer and spend a lot of money and time getting any response at all from anyone who actually works for the company, since the customer service doesn’t have access to any of that information and they wouldn’t be allowed to reveal it even of they did. It’s an insurance system, not a social service system where you have some kind of rights.
Insurance companies are designed to find any reason possible not to pay a claim, whether it’s homeowner’s insurance, liability insurance, or any other type of insurance. And they have plenty of lawyers on staff so they’re happy to make the lawsuit take long enough to cost you more than the claim is worth to you and it barely costs them anything.
One problem is the push by conservatives towards individualism. The “I don’t have enough to give handouts.” while ignoring the fact that those “handouts” would help them as much as everyone else. Combined with the “American Dream” lie that says “you could be one of those rich people abusing everyone else as revenge.” which goes back to the social concept of “paying your dues” or the Christian ideal that “suffering is holy”. And so they think if they just suffer long enough, that they will eventually be the ones on top making others suffer to serve them. Plus the political setup that keeps it a two party system of lesser evil choice rather than actually having the ability to choose something good. And the prevalence of modern “conservative media” which is just fascist and oligarchical propaganda designed to empower the hateful, murderous minorities among the poor to keep many just trying to not be murdered for being female and daring to get raped, non-christian and daring to be in the country, black and daring to not be a slave, transgender and daring to use the “correct” public bathrooms that shouldn’t exist as gendered in the first place but because the stalls are so revealing end up seeming like they need to be kept in private rooms, though the stalls could just be actual private rooms like in many other places, eliminating the whole need, or whatever demonized group of the month they want people hating to keep them distracted from economic issues and focused purely on survival. It’s not unique to America or setting new, it’s been getting better over time if looked at in terms of centuries or so, but the current version is especially rough, even compared to times like the great depression. But at least technology has made it slightly more survivable than then.
It’s complex. If there was a method for collective bargaining, maybe, but illegal union busting is extremely common and the government agency that enforces that stuff is purposely kept underfunded, so enforcement rarely happens, and because the fines are less than the money they save by union busting, it’s still worth it. Not to mention, there just have never existed unions in “professional” industries like tech. A few have started to pop up but they have had very little luck taking hold due to the union-busting efforts and propaganda. There really is very little middle class in the US anymore, so most people live paycheck to paycheck and missing one or two checks can leave you homeless. And there are very limited safety net programs in most of the US.
So, companies constantly create cycles of layoff and over-hiring that are coordinated across industries either with direct collusion or just because companies know that when the stock market in their industry goes down, that all the other businesses will be doing the same thing. So, people who have just been laid off are desperate to survive and when you just lost your ability to pay for rent and food, plus lost your medical coverage, and are no longer able to contribute to retirement which social security and Medicare programs no longer are guaranteed to be around in a decade, and there’s only a few months of unemployment benefits which give only a percentage of your pay which was already not enough to afford rent, assuming that the companies don’t illegally pretend that your layoff was actually “for cause”, which has happened to me, and thus making unemployment benefits unavailable, then people are willing to accept less pay each time they change jobs. And most employers no longer offer annual raises that keep up with inflation, so even if you stay with a company for a long time, you end up making less and less over time. And if you quit to go find another job, you have no safety net at all in most states.
Add to that the extreme un- and under-employment in the country which is not tracked because people who are unemployed for more than a certain period of time are assumed to not want work and drop off the statistics and underemployment is not really tracked. But gig-work is so common now that underemployment is extremely common. So, the competion for jobs that are full time is extremely high.
Then look at the extreme homelessness issues that people see constantly and fear becoming. And then consider that publicly traded companies are pressured by the system to increase short term profits at the expense of long-term growth, so there’s no incentive to keep a loyal, experienced workforce and every incentive to treat employees as “replaceable cogs”. And the fact that many companies have policies against or at least generally consider it to be a fire-able offense (even if not on paper) to tell coworkers how much money you are paid, so without collective bargaining, there’s often no way to know what you’re being paid less than fairly.
All of this, and several other factors lead to a job market that generally has every incentive under capitalism to not pay fairly across the board. Sure there are a lot jobs that pay well in tech, finance, etc., but they are the exception that everyone is competing for. So the companies have the power without collective bargaining in place as individuals have very little control over how much jobs pay.
Anyway, it’s complicated, but workers in the US generally have very few options for employment and have relatively unstable jobs that they rely on to survive. Plus little to no enforcement of the few regulations there are around employment mean that the vast majority of workers take what they can get just to have food and shelter.
That’s just how tech is in the US among several other industries like finance and healthcare, etc. This guy just happens to be being honest about the abuse much like Elan Musk has been for years.
But many companies expect you to work unlimited hours when you’re a salaried employee. Problem is that the minimum pay for a salaried, “professional” employee until this year was only $684/week, though it finally got raised to $1,128 per week starting next year assuming that doesn’t get reversed by the incoming administration as conservatives are very against minimum wage regulation and have been promising to eliminate it. But with median rent being over $3,000/month in San Francisco, that’s not a lot of money.
It’s just that office work culture has been devolving back to this idea that employers should own their employees time entirely if they’re paid on a salary basis. It’s not as bad as places like Japan, but its getting there. But if you want to get out of poverty, it’s one of the few ways to move up by “paying your dues” so you can then abuse other young people when you move up (another social concept I despise).
Yeah. They don’t pay less, though. They pay one person what other companies pay people to work 40 hours as a salary and make them work 80 or more. They may only get 60 hours worth of productivity in those 80 hours “worked”, so yeah they’d get more productivity out of two people working 40 hours each or probably even two workers working 30 hours each. But they are only paying one worker’s salary and getting more than 40 hours labor.
Good thing they don’t pay hourly wages then.
I tried a few but just got that it’s a particular shade of taupe with no discernable people or objects. And it went on describing how oddly particular the shade of taupe was…for some reason. 🤣 And the other said it was sage green.
I’m guessing something was wrong with it when I tried it and it was just getting a very small portion of the image because the different colors it mentioned were present in the images it referenced, so it’s not like it was just random or blocked entirely.
Why TF does it matter so much if you cheat in a single player game that they have to take such drastic measures to prevent it? In multiplayer, competitive games, I sort of get it, depending on context, but single player games, no way. I mod single player games all the time. It’s one of the main reasons I like PC gaming over console. I’d never buy a game that went this far to prevent something that has no effect on them or anyone else.
It’s good to use SSL even if you don’t plan to use it externally. At some point you may change your mind, or you may need to access it via VPN and there may be one hop between your browser and the VPN that will then be in plain text. Plus, not all devices are trustworthy anymore. An Android or iPhone device might have “malware” (including from reputable companies like Google trying to track you for ad purposes but recording unsecured http traffic to do it.) Or a frienday bring a bad device over and connect to your wifi and inadvertently capture that traffic. Lots of ways for internal traffic to be spied on.
Google: “how to create self signed certificate authority on <your workstation OS>”
And if that article doesn’t have it, google: “how to create a domain certificate from a self signed certificate authority”.
It doesn’t have to be a valid external domain, just use “.internal” as the top level domain which is reserved for this kind of thing, like “vaultwarden.internal”. You can also just use IP addresses in the certificate, but I find that less desirable.
Then google: "how to add a trusted certificate authority on <all your OS’s of all internal devices>”. Depending on what web browser you use, you may need to add it there as well. Once the certificate authority is trusted by your devices and browsers, then the domain certificate created by that CA will be as well.
You can set your expiration dates to be far in the future if you want, to avoid having to create new ones often, but be sure to document how just so in 5 or 10 years or so, if it’s still that way, you’ll know how to update them.