I have had to fight hard for disputes, even with “premium” credit cards like Amex Platinum. I’m not talking about “not as described” bs, but being asked over and over for the same info to wear me down.
I recently ordered some snacks from another country and after 3 months the vendor stopped responding while never having sent anything. When I asked for a chargeback, my claim was denied because I didn’t have proof they didn’t send anything! I literally had an email from them that said they are backed up and unable to send stuff.
Out of all the banks I’ve done chargebacks through Chase has been the least painful. I think only one time I had a back and forth with them. And that time I had one phone call, sent my evidence, and that was that. The company then tried to charge me again, which I also disputed, never heard from them again.
This was a moving company that insisted I should use their flat rate package and 3 movers rather than the 6 hourly I asked for. It took forever and they tried to charge me extra fees.
Not unlike the experience many Americans have of fighting their own insurance company that they already pay a monthly premium to.
The lengths insurance companies will go just to avoid adding to a deductible are, given the circumstances, rather disgusting.
They don't seem to produce any savings. Are credit card companies much different? Why are their CEOs making millions of dollars? Is it all supposed to be because of innovation in preventing fraud?
As with health insurance companies I too have found in reality their way of dealing with these things leaves much to be desired. The way they treat it seems transparently like health insurance - add minimal value upfront, then wear you down so you never actually get the service or "value" they were supposed to provide in the first place.
That shitty service is the margin padding that multi million dollar salary. Where's the innovation?
So much of the economy seems to be about wrongly extracting money from people, and then only giving it back to the people who have enough free time and persistence to endlessly argue and haggle for it.
Yeah, I've been extremely disappointed with disputes on Amex Platinum.
I literally had a bike rental company in Amsterdam attempt to get me to conspire to report a bike stolen (which had briefly been stolen but was back in my possession), and then when I refused, charged me as if the bike had been stolen!
I reported all this to Amex, and I was never refunded, and to my knowledge, the attempt fraud was never investigated.
I don't know techrights, and reading about them it does seem as if they have a very strong pro-FOSS, adversarial (to put it nicely) bent. So thank you for educating me there!
Reading the post closer, and looking at their other posts, I don't think this is a blog I'd personally put a lot of trust in as a valuable resource. Maybe fun to read, but yeah. Not super trustable.
> "Today the "badge" says IBM,"
Sure, people are getting moved around.
> But the role changed, there's lots of slop ("hey hi") dross or filler
I'm not sure what "hey hi" means, or filler.
> and everybody at IBM knows what PIPs and RA come next
I've been through multiple "silent" and "loud" IBM layoffs. This is 100% true.
> It's not hard to see that the vast majority of redhat.com blog posts sell slop, not Linux. It helps inflate the share price without accomplishing anything of substance.
I don't really think this is true. I feel like as long as I've read Red Hat's blog posts (less frequently now) they've been high quality.
> It's "fake work", just like slop. It cheats the shareholders, but for how much longer?
Based on the last statement, this too seems like it's at best an exaggeration.
> Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step (one step at a time), and some people altogether quit today (or yesterday), not only in Red Hat but also Nordcloud. Some receive money to leave 'voluntarily'.
This is 100% true. When I joined, people told me I was joining a different Red Hat, and the company was vastly different when I left over a decade later.
> The quantum (vaporware) teams are going "the way of the Kyndryl" via Anderon.
I'm not following quantum stuff closely, so I can't judge this, but based on the crappy performance of the Kyndryl stock I got from the spinoff, I sure hope that .. quantum is getting spun off? I don't know, this seems a little wackadoo.
> IBM is imploding 'creatively'.
Gibberish.
After reading it line by line closely and looking at my reaction .. yeah this is a rag of a blog. :D thanks again for knocking some sense into me!
I had to re-read the (very short) linked blog post several times thinking I skipped over an actual nugget of information that would connect it to the title. I didn't find it but noticed the weird uncanny valley writing style that became less clear the closer I tried to read.
It doesn't even link out to the Linkedin post from the screenshot as far as I can tell.
I used to think techrights was biased but told the truth about the biased slice of things it did cover. Then the Freenode hostile take-over happened and I was right in the middle of it and techrights lied repeatedly about it.
Techrights is not a news source. It's propaganda and full of lies.
Hm, care to elaborate? It looks like they've retained most of the engineering team and day-to-day priorities for Confluent / Kafka probably haven't changed much.
RH pandered to shareholders for the entire decade I worked there. It will not disappear as a brand, that is far too valuable for IBM to buy credibility over their bullshit shovelware.
I left shortly after the IBM acquisition was announced, and I'm so happy I did.
The brain drain happened shortly after the announcement. To me it seems like all the driven, ultra-sharp people started leaving in 2019 and in force in 2020 and early 2021. The people I've interacted with Red Hat since 2020 were not anywhere near as sharp as the folks I worked with prior.
EDIT: I was probably too strong on my statement that "all the driven, ultra sharp people". I know that I have a lot of ultra sharp, smart, engaged friends still there. What I meant to say was that I started to see the drain late 2019.
Red Hat had most employees running a custom corporate RHEL build or Fedora on Thinkpads prior to 2018 or so, and even then most employees moved to Mac as soon as they were allowed to do so.
I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.
This is so weird. Small businesses like delis and pizza parlors and Chinese food joints have been using stock photography and pre-made advertisements for decades. That ageless “GYRO” poster, FFS. People have lost their absolute minds over this.
It’s disgusting and unhinged behavior to threaten and bully people about this. Who cares how a local cafe made their menu? I truly don’t understand what’s going through people’s minds who attack people like this.
Absolutely not. My local kebab shop 100% uses AI for their menus and signage. It’s delicious. He does not have time or the desire to worry about the provenance of the menus.
It’s a pretty good indicator the owner bought a ChatGPT or Canva subscription, that’s about it.
My coffee shop barely has a menu. None of the current roasts are listed anywhere, you have to ask and they change daily. No signage. It’s consistently the best coffee I’ve had. Not fussy but very very good.
They do slack off on cleaning the chairs and the decor, that’s for sure. The coffee though is phenomenal.
My local coffee shop not only doesn’t have social media, but they don’t even bother decorating the store. Truly unique and amazing coffee, absolutely no design inside. It’s amazing and it really turns people off!
I recently ordered some snacks from another country and after 3 months the vendor stopped responding while never having sent anything. When I asked for a chargeback, my claim was denied because I didn’t have proof they didn’t send anything! I literally had an email from them that said they are backed up and unable to send stuff.
reply