UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on Free Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D Model 54 minutes ago:
The winners will be the middle men selling fixes for the fixes.
- Comment on The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions. 1 hour ago:
Please don’t confuse actual technological progress with markets.
Consumer goods are delivered through market distributions for nearly every post-industrial society on earth.
The government could distribute widgets, but it doesn’t.
Modern infrastructure is not built by markets.
Construction crews, materials purveyors, architects, electricians/plumbers… All come through the market system. That’s why Americans have to turn to Spain or Japan every time they float the idea of expanding HSR. That’s why only two companies in the world build civilian airliners. That’s why our telecom network is an oligopoly.
Whut?
Teqball’s a lot of fun.
- Comment on The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions. 3 hours ago:
Well… maybe not.
I do think we’re running into a problem of net in exceeding net out with modern tech and finance companies. They’ve surpassed the point at which they can generate meaningful amounts of profit because they’ve cartelized all the major profit centers.
But the idea that there’s nothing left to improve, nothing left to repair, and no one left to consumerize… no, obviously not. The market system isn’t failing. It is being failed by business leaders that no longer want to do the hard work of management, innovation, and improvement.
Look outside the US and you can find everything from massive overhauls in modern infrastructure to breakthroughs in manufacturing and miniaturization to exciting modernization in entertainment and sports. Within the US, though, its just slop.
- Submitted 3 hours ago to technology@lemmy.world | 24 comments
- Comment on DoorDashers are getting paid to close Waymo's self-driving car doors 4 hours ago:
Or they’re in a hurry and didn’t realize the door was ajar when they left the vehicle.
Pretty normal for this to happen at the airport, especially when you’re carrying a bunch of bags, juggling kids, etc. Normally, its not a big deal, because the cabbie will pop out and close the door if they get the alert. But here, there’s no remote way to close the door and no way to signal the rider that it didn’t close completely.
- Comment on DoorDashers are getting paid to close Waymo's self-driving car doors 4 hours ago:
human is dumb for specifically choosing to be a piece of shit for NOT closing the car door.
Depending on what I’m doing, I periodically have to double back and re-close a door if I didn’t close it hard enough. Modern cars have built in alarms specifically to alert drivers when a door latch isn’t secured. You don’t have to be a piece of shit to fail to notice that a door is ajar.
- Comment on DoorDashers are getting paid to close Waymo's self-driving car doors 5 hours ago:
Need a car to get to the airport, because my city doesn’t have mass transit.
If the only cars in my area are Waymos, do I just skip my flight?
- Comment on DoorDashers are getting paid to close Waymo's self-driving car doors 6 hours ago:
Humans know how to close a car door.
- Comment on DoorDashers are getting paid to close Waymo's self-driving car doors 6 hours ago:
The future is clocking in for another 12 hour shift at the “making minor adjustments to the super intelligent AI widget making machine” so you can afford to eat the bugs and live in the pod
- Comment on Which is it?. 21 hours ago:
Pubes
- Comment on A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions— Backlash against ICE is fueling a broader movement against AI companies’ ties to President Trump. 22 hours ago:
Subscriptions? You idiots are paying for this shit?
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 1 day ago:
- Comment on Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? 1 day ago:
collections hands it off to a lawyer who files in court
Lawyer sends the collections agency a bill for 10x the collections amount.
- Submitted 1 day ago to technology@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? 2 days ago:
All that to say, hospitals aren’t always acting intelligently or legally.
Right. Which is why I’d like to see the actual story and not some vague anecdote by a novelty account.
- Comment on Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? 2 days ago:
The IRS withholds taxes from your paystub based on your W2. You can technically zero out your withholdings from the IRS, but this can incur penalties and it exposes your employer to annoying audit requests, so its discouraged at the HR level.
Paycheck withholds that come through a court order are something different entirely. And you’d really need to sit down with an actual Employment Law expert to get the fine details, as they can vary by state and county as well as by how you get paid (salary versus contractor, etc). Which agent actually gets to deduct money from your paystub, how it is escrowed, when the collector can access the money, how that deducts from your total debts, etc isn’t federalized.
But I can say with some degree of confidence that unless you owe money to the IRS, the IRS isn’t involved.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 2 days ago:
Federation is easy. BlueSky is federated, ffs. You think Jack Dorsey would be shy about selling his Twitter knock-off a second time?
- Comment on Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? 2 days ago:
They ended up only getting a few hundred Bucks, how could that possibly have been worth it for them?
If the debt collector bought the debt for pennies on the dollar, there are edge cases. Even then, it’s an expensive process to try and only works as long as you’re rooted in a particular job. As soon as you leave, the collectors have to go back and refile all their claims against you against the new employer.
So it generally isn’t worth the time, which is why the post is sus.
- Comment on Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? 2 days ago:
Wage garnishment happens at the end of a long series of legal filings and claims against the debtor.
And, again, you can avoid it by changing jobs. Which is easy enough for someone in a low wage service sector that very few debt collectors bother trying.
You tend to push for wage garnishment when the person is in a job they can’t easily leave - partner at a law firm, manager at a Fortune 500 company, tenured professor - not someone who can walk across the street and land a new job doing the same work at the same pay over the weekend.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 days ago:
As opposed to a private for-profit company run by friends of the people in government?
- Comment on Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? 2 days ago:
Collection agencies will buy hospital debt at pennies on the dollar. And then collection agencies can try to annoy you into paying. But they have an even weaker claim on your debt than the original hospital. Getting a court to agree to garnish wages is a drawn out process. And it can be easily circumvented if you quit your job and take up employment somewhere else. In the service sector, that happens so routinely as to make wage garnishment a fool’s errand.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 days ago:
Musk was upset that his control over the company would be ceded to a broader pool of public investors. He’s got no problem with privatization and securitization when it fattens his wallet.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 days ago:
He’s appointing the next Fed chair as we speak. We’re a bit past feeling squeamish about what Trump controls.
- Comment on Alphabet selling very rare 100-year bonds to help fund AI investment 2 days ago:
The longest portion of the offering, a 40-year bond, is expected to yield 0.95 percentage points over US Treasuries, down from 1.2 percentage points during initial talks, the people said.
Gotta be really bearish on treasuries to consider this a good idea.
- Comment on Alphabet selling very rare 100-year bonds to help fund AI investment 2 days ago:
Traditionally, you need to find someone to loan you money with the bond as collateral. Then you promise that person the bond as repayment of the debt + interest, with the expectation that you can re-buy the bond at a future date for much less than you could today.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 days ago:
Interac is non-profit.
OpenAI started out as non-profit. Quite a few health insurance companies (Blue Cross Blue Shield, for instance) are organized as non-profits.
shrug
Still, talking to vendors, it sounds like the fees are quite low, and I try to pay debit when it’s a small business.
Sure. All good when it works for you. But this isn’t some kind of wholesale replacement for Visa that doesn’t run the obvious risk of becoming Visa 2.0 (or whatever X.0 iteration of credit card companies we’re currently on).
- Comment on Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? 2 days ago:
the hospital went to court to garnish 35% of her wages. She works at McDonalds.
Not that I question the unsourced anecdotes of the God account, but I’d be genuinely curious to see a business that thought an astronomical legal bill would be worth garnishing the wages of a service sector worker.
As someone with family in the legal profession and the medical billing profession, it’s crazy to think of the cost-benefit of pursuing this kind of claim given the return expected. Hospitals write off millions a year in “bad debt”, because collection is consistently more expensive than the real value of these claims.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 days ago:
It’s transactions at the scale of a continent rather than a household or a business. Hardly unfathomable. Just bigger.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 days ago:
Great if you don’t mind a wallet overflowing with loose change.
Crazy that we don’t have a public sector payment processor, though. You’d think we could have a Generic Card tied to a public bank that handles electronic payments efficiently. But it’s been over 40 years since we began consumer grade electronic transactions and its still entirely within the scope of the private sector.
- Comment on Pumping the bubble now, pay later 2 days ago:
Probably still astronomical, because the RAM being produced is specifically designed for use in large data-centers, not PCs.
This is a classic guns/butter problem. “We’re using all our industrial resources to produce guns” doesn’t mean the price of butter drops when the gun market falls through.
