I've always guessed that they are able to tell when you called/what you called about, but they simply don't give that level of information to their frontline folks.
It might be because its in their interests to do so.
It is our problem that needs fixing, so we can just wait untill either they redirect us to the right person with the right knowledge who might be one of the higher ups in the call centers.
Or we just quit the call. Either way, it doesn't matter to the company.
Plus points that they don't have to teach the frontline customer service more details too and it could be easier for them to onboard new people / fire old employees.
Also they would have to pay less if they require very low specifications.
man I remember the is 0.001 cent = 0.001 $ video /meme of verizon
If you magnify Alice in Chains' beginnings and pretend like Andrew Wood hadn't died and Pearl Jam never existed and Mother Love Bone became popular, the hair metal influence becomes much more obvious.
I'm not sure about Census but Fivetran's free plan has met my needs to sync data from different ad platforms to BigQuery pretty well.
One of their pitfalls is charging by the row. If you're cost-conscious, you really need to watch what data you're syncing and you need to pare it down quite a bit during the 2-week period they give you when setting up a new connector. If you do all that though, you can get a lot of mileage out of the free plan for some use cases.
> “the Google executive Jerry Dischler said this was not a “hallucination” – where AI systems invent untrue information – but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes.”
This is a huge fail for Gemini. Google, of all companies, should know the incentives to distort information aggregators for monetary gain (just look at how bad search results are these days). It's 100% expected that people will try to game LLMs the same way. It's entirely dependent on the LLMs to counteract this.
The "Playing different pitches" section plays "The Final Countdown", arguably the greatest synth riff of all time. If you know it, just click the rhythm on that section.
I understand the thinking behind some of this but I don't think it's right. My first language was GW-Basic so I grew up and enjoyed this era. However, if I want to start working on Javascript today, all I need to do is open a browser and start playing around in the console or set up a directory to point my browser to.
You don't need NPM, Github, Vite, React, etc. to do any of that. I'd also say the vast amount of documentation, sites like Codecademy, seemingly infinite amount of Youtube videos, etc. accelerates learning light years beyond what we had with GW-Basic, assuming you even had this reference guide!
JavaScript is a painful first language, full of gotchas. Even worse code bootcamps introduce it with react. I always recommend anyone starting programming to just make command line programs at the beginning in something like python. I might be wrong but at least it introduces a fundamental universal programming tool.
You are deliberately missing the point and confusing X with ‘something that looks like X’.
For eg., using QBasic, you can pick some random spot on the monitor and have a white dot show up at that spot. What you end up doing is directly writing to the vga buffer address of that spot. That’s the X. You can directly talk to LPT1 and directly get the dot matrix printer to print an ascii character. That’s the X.
All these things were possible because the synergy between the hardware and the software was extreme. QBasic was just a shim. You were directly talking to the hardware in as few steps as you possibly could. The assembler code for your BAS file could be inspected and you could even muck with that.
All of that has gone out the door. What you have with javascript is something that looks like X. So I can use a html canvas element and get its drawing context and do an arc with the right parameters and fill and hide the scrollbar with some css and pretend that what you now see is like the X. But its not! To actually get rid of the browser window and only have the white dot, you would need a full blown electron install or worse. And it still wouldn’t get you to the X. We already had X. Now we have something that barely approaches X after a great deal of effort.This is supposed to be progress ?!!
My workaround to this has been to email the company telling them I want to cancel. Once I either don't get a reply, or get a reply saying "just call us and we'll cancel!", I dispute the next charge with American Express and have the email record of trying to cancel. I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature that cuts off future charges.
> I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature
If they have this it's another reason to use them for automatic billing. I have tried to do this with a VISA card and they said they cannot do it; the only way to prevent future charges would be to close that account entirely and even then I might still get billed for some period of time.
American Express is a very special card that typically comes with annual fee that is very much worth it. I would never book any hotels, buy plane tickets or signup in any form of membership with any other card because I got burnt way too many times with Visa and MC is even worse. Also that's why businesses typically do not like AE because how easy it is to dispute the charge.
But to add - I discourage you from using chargeback as a feature to stop future charges. Most banks will report it to your credit bureau - you won't see it in form of points being withheld BUT it might be adverse for you when you try to get a loan, etc. My mother disputed way too many things (memory troubles at her age) and they did not renew her CC after expiration date and MasterCard told her she is not eligible for card with her excessive CB ratio.
> Most banks will report it to your credit bureau - you won't see it in form of points being withheld BUT it might be adverse for you when you try to get a loan, etc
I never knew this! I have heard about companies banning you if you request a CB, which would be really bad for things like Google, Uber, etc.
I usually end up having to dispute a charge only once a year or so. It has surprised me over the past few years how lacking AMEX seems to be in its "investigation". It at least used to take a few days and they'd sometimes ask for documentation. The last one I did got turned around in maybe an hour.
I use one of those banks that allows me to generate sub-accounts easily, each of which has an account number for e-checks and Debit card number. So I can use that for subscriptions, either fund it once, or fund it regularly via automated transfers from my main balance, or you can set it up to just automatically pull from your main account. Then when you're done with it, you can close that sub-account. It's worked very well for these sorts of subscriptions.
Specifically, I'm using Qube, but at this point I'm looking to move away from them and do not at all recommend them.
Check out Privacy.com for card generation. You can set monthly/yearly/all-limits, pause and cancel cards, create single-use cards, etc. And their virtual cards accept any billing information. As a result I don’t bother unsubscribing directly anymore and instead just pause the card. Less hassle. More control.
I’m also using Qube and looking to get away but I really like having the sub-accounts. What have you found? Envelope seems to have really nice features but lacks the sub-accounts.
Privacy.com has been increasing neutering their free tier and you cant fund with a credit card, their cards have reputation problems at merchants. They're one if the problems imho if we're talking about what's being sold if different than what's being bought.
Although in practice I don't think it will be an issue, in theory issuing a chargeback on your credit card does not release you from any financial obligations you agreed to with a contract. And if that contract specifies that you must "call to cancel" I don't think "I emailed" will hold up in court (but IANAL). Of course with this FCC ruling that could very well not be the case, but in any case always be wary of issuing a chargeback and thinking the matter settled if you did actually have legitimate commerce with the business in question.
This is good to know. I had Dropbox billing through PayPal and could never cancel charges in anyway through the Dropbox site. Realized I had to disassociate PayPal and the recurring charge said “payment failed”. Finally effectively canceled.
AmEx is great for this. I've used it twice, no issues that I can tell. I had my personal card attached to a BrowserStack account that used a work email address. Forgot to cancel it when I left the job and BrowserStack support was completely useless. One chat session with AmEx later and I receive no more charges from BrowserStack.
Of course I have to remember that they are blocked on that card, should I ever need an account again in the future.
The best workaround (imho) is just using virtual cards. My Venture X allows me to create a virtual card on the spot restricted to that merchant where I can also enter an optional lock date. If I want to try something, I just create a new card and set the lock date to the next day. Even if I forget to cancel, good luck charging my card :)
I notice this one a lot. My sense of time is attached to how much I’ve changed, and my rate of change—-at least for music consumption—-attenuates as I age, dilating time. A couple years can seem like an eon when you’re 14 and each new album transforms you. Now a decade of music feels static and irrelevant and I barely notice it go by.
Related: it sure seemed like the mid-90s were special for rock music; I was 13 when Dookie came out and I felt (still feel) like I was in a sort of alternative renaissance, just crammed with amazing new music. But I’m sure every generation feels that way about whatever happened to be popular when they were teenagers.
Oddly enough, several professional sports gamblers were aware of a NBA referee manipulating game from their data analysis, well before the NBA became aware of it.
That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.
I don’t know how much cheating by referees has got to with it. But many years ago I found the NBA to be a foul shooting contest and gave up on it. It is unwatchable.
Travel from DC through New England is about the only convenient use of Amtrak. Travel times in the midwest are an absolute joke. 12 hours from Pittsburgh to New York City vs. a 1-hour flight to Newark and <30 minute ride to Penn Station.
The Cascadia corridor is pretty decent, too. The train between Seattle to Portland is time-competitive with driving, and much more comfortable. (Amtrak also goes north to Vancouver, but it's been over 20 years since I've taken that route, so I can't attest to its current convenience.)
Be happy if you're even on the network. I'm in Nashville and we're not connected at all. Amtrak has proposed a plan of eventually putting it on the end of a route which would be convenient for going to Chattanooga or Atlanta and likely nowhere else.
Most of the state-supported routes (e.g., the trips between DC and other points in Virginia) are also pretty decent. But any long-distance route is pretty much a crapshoot.
I used to ride Empire service all the time. Very comfortable ride, especially after about half of the train got out at Albany and I could get some quiet time in the dining car, along with one of those disgusting hotdogs or meatball subs or cup noodles. The long delays between Albany and Buffalo were annoying, but apparently that's no longer a problem. I loved the train compared to the bus or flying or driving, great way to travel. Although nothing beats the flexibility of driving, especially if you don't have a pickup (or a reliable taxi) waiting for you at the destination. And that's a big problem in the USA -- no connecting transit in most places, once you get off the train you're basically stranded.
