Hurrgfhhhbblbblllvlvllllbbbllbllluuhhh
Yeah uh the machine smelled like death and was drooling and the guy insisted there was no problem. Miami Quality
Gurrrbbllg jk jgnnv hi k SD ggb mk s GH k fee try urr DC jjgg
Store management was unable to figure out it even happened in the first place, but it was determined that my short exile from Walmart was the result of computer error and resolved itself.
I’m still just way too amused it ever happened.
Picture related. Somewhat. FX. actually it should be FS now for F Schneider.
I’m banned from Walmart??
I tried to make a purchase there using my credit card. The machine would get to where it asked me to sign then said “unable to process transaction” and a message printed to the cashier. She called over a manager who informed me that the a note that came up in the point of sale system reflects that I’m banned from their stores nationwide.
He added that there was no information filled out in the system indicating why, and that he felt that was in error and, though he couldn’t override it preventing me from using any payment card in my name, he politely let me check out for part of my items in cash before I left.
That’s…… Special. I’ve never even heard of anything this bizarre.
No, this is in no way related to my having quietly taken a photo of that hazardous exit door.
I’m quite confused but not entirely even mad.
No you won’t have any issues with people running out this door with your merchandise! The steel armored cables to the delayed panic exit lock control system will neatly land on and lasso the would be thief.
No guarantees made of safety or fitness for any purpose whatsoever. Fnord. Fnord fnord fnord fnord sloth fnord fnord made in china fnord fnord not a typewriter fnord fnord potato fnord fnord
Please forgive this unusual departure from the usual content on this site. Actually, it’s… Going to sound like the typical conversation of a ham radio operator, and that’s unusual for me.
The US is burning… And you may not know until you’re caught by the flames.
The 2016 Presidential election is a sham.
I’m calling it election theatre. There is not a trace of democracy about it, and the endless chain of scandals tearing apart the Democratic party and the extremely unfavorable candidate selected by the Republican party, also supposedly the source of massive dissent, are both being used to make the public feel angry and powerless.
Civil unrest is being actively promoted. Why, I’m not sure. I’ve seen others working under the theory that it’s the lead up to a staged civil war, but I don’t believe it’s coordinated to that end. It does seem like it would be a hilariously quick way out of a number of mistakes made by the US government, but I doubt that’s the end goal. To be it seems more likely that it’s an attempt to further cement the class divide that’s constantly getting deeper. This brings me to…
The class divide is not an accident.
Those who hold the money and power in our economy want two classes.
The rich, who can play the markets, lend money, and bring in foreign and domestic investments to businesses that exist mainly to boost the value of stock that they hold, and….
The poor, who are permanently restricted from moving up, while being held to paying the majority of taxes…. As well as essentially paying de facto taxes to the rich via crushing fees attached to the services of the banks they are limited to using. Guess where all that money goes…
Staged economic collapse
The big housing market fueled crash of 2008 was a disaster to most.
To most.
It was extremely profitable to some.
It will happen again, most likely as another round of sudden bank failures.
Import crash
US corporations have been spending the last few years getting out of the US as fast as they can. Corporate offices have been inverted to other countries, research, development, and manufacturing have been moved offshore, and we just don’t have many vital products and services available anymore without farming them out to another country. We’ve also denied an entire generation the ability to learn any skilled trades. This leaves us extremely vulnerable… and all it will take is the stroke of a pen to leave us scrambling to keep our standard of life while paying many times more for vital things like food, clothing, medicine, and the tools needed to survive, travel, communicate, and so on…
Nobody really knows what the TPP will do but there’s a chance that it being signed into law will be the disruption of imports that it takes to kick this into effect.
Healthcare failure
We’ve all seen this one. It’s a quick race to the bottom under way now as the industry focuses more on squeezing people for profit at their time of need, and the standards of care are going to slip. It’s less about getting people well and more about getting them in as much debt as possible. This too will eventually crash just long enough to cause nearly impossible access to medical care and record high prices to become the norm. Remember the closures of hospital ERs in the 90s that led to costs going up by an order of magnitude, wait times going from minutes to hours, and the replacement of ER services with urgent care centers not held to the same standards of care for the same costs as were once charged by the hospitals? Yeah…. The shareholders do too.
Assorted corporate bullshit
The bills that are presented for voting in Congress are written in part or full by lobbyists, not elected officials, and the elected officials are not able to review more than some supposed key facts of them before voting. This combined with a fake president will lead to some serious issues.
How do we fix this? I don’t know if we can. At this point it would require a government that actually offers transparency and takes public input…. both of which are now very much out of fashion.
CLUE, the pure essence of common sense and human intelligence, is often lacking in people who try to use technology, and the result of their CLUE lacking deeds causes massive inconvenience to others.
Visible here is part of a laundromat in which dozens of Continental-Girbau washing machines are programmed to flush the detergent into the drum, not on the first wash cycle, not on the second wash cycle, but on the first RINSE!!!
Seriously, how do you louse up the programming THAT badly??!!
This is the weirdest mini tower PC I’ve ever seen.
It’s pure essence of cheap.
It’s almost like a Chinese fake of what you expect.
First warning sign something is amiss : laptop power adapter.
Let’s look at that full back panel.
There are ridges where slots should be. But why aren’t they cut out and usable?
Oh.
SATA drive power comes off tiny JST headers.
This is just bizarre. It’s like a mini itx board but with 99% less flexibility.
This is definitely a Carly Fiorina special.
I never liked how Pandora sounds. Their audio compression is pretty lossy; some quality was sacrificed to ensure smooth streaming on lousy mobile data connections.
The ad insertions aren’t coordinated with the programming either, but this isn’t such a big deal as most of them are just dry reads; it’s not like booming tones and overprocessed voice comes yelling out of there. It’s just a little odd to have everything come to a sudden pause of just some lady reading a spot over silence in between power metal ballads. Granted this also means your classical stream won’t launch you through the roof when a spot plays…
But yeah, terrestrial radio is dead and burned thanks to the new Neilsen PPM encoding systems that cause audio defects to the point of stripping guitar chords out of some songs, eight minute stop sets of ads that come across with great… Mountains of acoustic fnords… before you are returned to a six song music library that you can’t hear properly anyway.
Not that I’m bitter. Just a little bit. Okay, I am.
I mean, Reduction of Life Cycle. Am I right or am I right?
Finally it seems that Western Digital started using better lead free solder on their hard drive logic boards.
Now, Seagate… more like Peegate, yet again it looks like someone pissed on the board.
This one has yet to exhibit the failure mode in which that piss-oxide creeps under the pogo pins leading to the spindle motor, actuator, or head stack, and causes a (sometimes repairable) failure.
This is the aforementioned post in which I will be very brutally honest about my experience with Comcast.
Very, very brutally honest.
Also, full of unrelated pictures.
It all started a couple years ago upon moving into my current apartment. I was told by the management that Comcast and AT&T were options for home Internet service there. At that time, AT&T was very much guilty of, uh, creative, billing practices on their U-Verse service, so I was a little strangely glad at the time that they were unwilling to provide any new service in the complex – they were at that time winding it down and only providing service to those few customers who still had it. At the time I remember wardriving and also seeing “WiFiRSU_****” SSIDs which were characteristic of ClearWire home gateways. ClearWire was on the way out though, its spectrum being reclaimed by Sprint after… whatever the hell happened there. I forget the details other than that Clearwire never actually paid the rent on the Sprint towers. Good riddance to that crap – I had their service once upon a time and it ROYALLY BLEW, although as of late, they were better at their worst than Comcast on a daily basis…
I was given a business card to contact a local sales agent for Comcast who gave us a special rate. This was not advertised as a promotional rate or anything and included a credit to cover modem rental. This also included some weird digital basic cable service package.
However, I had to provide a LOT of personal information to prove that I wasn’t the previous resident who apparently left with an unpaid balance. This took an entire week to clear up and I was treated like a lying cheat the whole way.
The equipment was delivered by our sales rep to the leasing office. I cracked up laughing when I saw it. The Technicolor home gateway was ginormous and looked like some Shenzhen flea market reject. The cable box… oh brother. I had the same cable box at my parents’ house in 1998 for TCI digital cable. I spent an entire day trying to get that activated, and when it was… the picture looked about like RealPlayer, and the box got HOT. When I’d had this same box at my parents’ house I recall having to aim a fan at it to prevent the picture from breaking up. I looked down at the Kill-A-Watt I’d plugged it into and it reported power usage alternating between about 25 and 190 watts(!!). I disconnected it and threw it under the dresser, never to be used again.
Six months in, the bill increased by about $35 when our plan was phased out. I tried to contact the original sales agent only to find that he had gotten so pissed off over this happening to all his clients that he quit! Comcast’s national sales channel was totally unapologetic and I recall a representative at the time actually making some comment about the fact that they knew they were the only option for home internet access where I live. Finally they agreed to give us some stupid extra channel package… on the unwatcha-box? Yeah like that helps.
After a while, our connection began to degrade. Repeated calls to Comcast yielded no willingness to conduct actual diagnostics beyond seeing “yeah, okay, my system says you’re connected”.
Since they’d also been charging me $10 a month modem rental now, I bought my own modem and spent an entire day on the phone trying to get it activated.
Shortly after this I got their message about a “trial” in our area…. of data caps. The 300 gigabyte data cap was instituted and we never even came close to reaching it, in part because the fastest speed offered in our area is 25/5 megabits, but also in part because we were now offline for hours a day. The service had improved a bit with the Motorola Surfboard SB6141 I installed but then started to degrade, even with the 6141 reporting perfectly acceptable signal between it and the node. I guess the modem wasn’t the issue, but hey, at least now I’m not paying an extra $10 a month for it, right?
Well, only, now I am. Comcast also began creatively billing. I’ll pay my bill on time each month via credit card and the charge remains pending in my account until a day or two after it’d be overdue… then gets refunded, and I have to pay it again. With a late charge. This happens about every other month, except for this past month, when I received a mysterious 90 dollar “courtesy” credit on my account that prevented me from paying the bill because it had already been “paid”. The “courtesy” credit was reversed just after the bill went overdue.
Usually you don’t call curbstomping your customer’s face a “courtesy” but I digress.
And now, as of the last few months, the data usage went over 300 gigabytes despite it being quite impossible for this to occur. At first it’d run over right at the very end of the month, but last month it hit 300 gigs within the first six days!!
Each time it occurred, a browser notification would pop up upon trying to go to any website. This usually went away after being clicked away a few times (not on the first try, ever), but then I’d also receive robocalls.
EVIL ROBOCALLS. The robot would call every 15-20 minutes with NO WAY TO STOP IT! I installed the TrueCaller app and that automatically silenced the robocalls.
I tried calling Comcast and asking for assistance with this issue. The most I could get is a sales script saying I need to secure my wifi, pay them to secure it for me, or pay an extra $30 a month to add unlimited data to my account, but that there was no actual PROBLEM because I wasn’t being charged for it yet – I was still in courtesy overages.
At this point I filed a complaint with the Friendly Cookie Company. That got me a response, albeit… a very stupid one.
Comcast now had a representative calling me repeatedly during business hours. At first these calls were just hitting TrueCaller and silenced because I still had the filter active to stop the neverending robot spam! I added an exception upon realizing they had a human trying to contact me from a different number. Unfortunately, well… where I work, most of the office is in a room screened with solid copper sheeting. Cellular phones just don’t work. When I was able to get out of the office during the day to return a call to Comcast’s rep, I pointed out it would be impossible for me to receive calls from them like that, but I was able to talk to them about the issues with the data cap and slow/nonexistent transfer.
I’ve run speed tests repeatedly and received anything from 0.1 to 8 megabits down and 0.4 to 2 megabits up. This is not the 25/5 I’m paying for (although am not guaranteed). Often it takes three tries to load any fairly complex webpage. How am I using over 300 gigabytes again?!
The answer I got? Yes, our metering is accurate. No, it’s not our fault. However, if you buy now, you can get unlimited for $30 a month, which will go up to $50 as soon as we raise the data caps to one terabyte.
They offered to have someone from my local market contact me back about the reliability problems, but this has either never happened or they are incapable of using email or voicemail.
Fuckety bye, wankstain.
The incessant attempts to contact me within the copper shielded room continued for a couple weeks until Comcast finally sent a letter to me and the FCC stating that I was unresponsive to their attempts to resolve the issues in my complaint and they were closing the matter.
This month, about halfway through the month, the meter is just above 300 gigs, so the new data cap of 1TB won’t be exceeded. So… I still have barely any useful service to speak of, but at least I’m not getting charged for the overages I can’t possibly be causing.
At this point I’m just holding out hope their monopoly will be broken. This is why we cannot have nice things.