pdxfed

Screw your workers for 30+ years, move your production, make them embarrassed with your company name by eliminating engineering excellence and outsourcing quality to lowest bidder, withhold raises for a decade, remove a real retirement plan and see what happens.

Good for them.

I received several texts today on my personal phone number addressed to a minor child in my household for whom I provide health insurance from Kaiser.

1. I opted out of Kaiser text message communications. They don't respect it because Marketing?
2. The messages are addressing a minor child, yet sent to me, the adult. Kaiser would know their age. If they're young, directly texting them is a violation of parental consent. If they're a dependent there could be all kinds of privacy concerns for say a teen who maybe doesn't want their parents to be involved in such conversations.
3. I went to Kaiser's website to make a complaint. They don't provide an e-mail contact so you have to use a web submission form. Attachments (e.g. screenshots) aren't allowed. I copied in the text of the text messages after noting my concerns above and tried to submit. The web form said "unsupported characters", which I then spent 30 minutes trying to guess which of the characters from the texts they sent me might be unsupported by their website.
4. I decided to call their web support to find out which characters were unsupported, I'm sure I wasn't the first person to have the issue. They asked for personal identifying information that isn't necessary to provide website support, spent 5 minutes locating my account, and then told me they'd have to transfer me to a different region as they don't support my region.
5. They transferred me and I received an audio notice that the region was experiencing technical difficulties and the call disconnected.
6. I went back to the web form to open a complaint about their web form and submitted it suggesting they identify which characters are not permitted. The form also is about 3 lines of text high but accepts 1,000 characters which makes it very difficult to read as the web user (I'm sure a dark pattern to reduce form submission)
7. I called support again to try to reengage them to find out if they could identify the characters so I could submit the ticket myself. I got a different agent and had to tell them my original complaint and then what had just happened. They said they didn't know which characters were permissible, that my regions support shouldn't be down as they had no alerts, and wouldn't be able to find out which characters the form could use, despite being web support. They said they could take my complaint over the phone.
8. I asked what else they needed to make the complaint. The woman said just a minute and pulled up a form after talking to a colleague and asked me to start from the beginning to make my compliant. I hung up.
9. I went back on the website, typed out the entirety of the text messages I had received, my concern and the form allowed me to submit. The text messages must have had a hidden character or space that wasn't visible to me when copying/pasting.

Now I wait to hear back on my two complaints. All so that, after furiously and competently struggling against the machine, I get back to a place where maybe if I'm lucky they will respect my communication preferences, not contact my child without my permission, potentially fix their shit website, which would leave me maybe about as good off as I was before I was aware of these issues.

I feel like Calvin at the bottom of the big snowball hill he and Hobbes used, only in the modern US it's a shit snowball and it's full of companies who are technologically incompetent and aren't incentivized to follow even the laws they likely helped shaped through lobbying. The above issue is hardly even bad compared to other situations I or others have been through, it's the routiniety of it that is so dystopian.

Edit: 10. IT support responded to my ticket tonight. They didn't read the complaint and provided boilerplate AI template responses on how to submit a ticket when logged in as a customer.They also provided instructions on how to take a screenshot and asked me to respond to their e-mail and attach it so they could review. I responded telling them I didn't need instructions on how to take a screenshot or how to submit a message, that was included in my ticket which they didn't read--I needed a functional communication system, and reviewing the above points and then attached screenshots. I received an automated response almost instantly from their system that I had responded to a ticket that had already been closed and that Kaiser hoped they had resolved the issue to my satisfaction. No ability to re-open the ticket, no contact e-mail or phone number to continue to try to resolve the issue.

If anyone else uses this emulator and (unfortunately) Windows, are you seeing turbo run throughs when loading ROMS? This updates were installed yesterday and they're the only thing I can think of unless the rom speed can be controlled elsewhere in the system I'm not seeing:

2024-10 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 23H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5044285)

2024-10 Cumulative Update for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8.1 for Windows 11, version 23H2 for x64 (KB5044033)

Cheers.

edit - fixed with tip below (- key slows down emulation)

I posted about this 3 months ago and it was $750--glad to see the measure is going for it. The $1,600 is per person, not household. Minors count.

Large corps ($25m in revenue minimum) pay.

I posted about this 3 months ago and it was $750--glad to see the measure is going for it. The $1,600 is per person, not household. Minors count.

Large corps ($25m in revenue minimum) pay.

I posted about this 3 months ago and it was $750--glad to see the measure is going for it. The $1,600 is per person, not household. Minors count.

Large corps ($25m in revenue minimum) pay.

There is probably a link somewhere but it would be nice to have the essentials in the boost comment/post forms somewhere so that if I'm trying to remember how to link a user/forum/instance or how to strikethrough text it would be right there.

19% YOY usage drop last month, 3.6% bill increase. It's been like this for months. Even if you're trying to limit your usage and save money, you get fucked. Such bullshit. Meanwhile the PUC came out and said they don't want to not approve these large increases PGE has requested every year because "it would set a bad precedent". Talk about in another world.

Their "why are my electricity charges higher" are also incorrect on weather, actually the exact opposite--the same page notes the period was 1 degree cooler than last year.

Replacing a dishwasher. Most of the mid-range options now come with fucking Wi-Fi. Found a model I liked, no info in manual and support from Samsung was of course, useless since it wasn't already in the manual and wanted to keep talking about their exciting "smart things" app. gag.

I saw a youtube video of a guy disconnecting wifi cable on a fridge. I'm fine doing that if I have to open up the board but it'll probably be smaller than the fridge and who knows if it'll be helpfully labled like the one in the video was. Internet searching showed me there may be oven keypress combinations to turn wi-fi radio on/off. Anyone have anything similar/advice for Samsung appliances, specifically dishwashers?

Whatever way you take this:

• 1. A way to be able to remove anything that is deemed "offensive", "unpopular", or "unpalatable" and a good option
• 2. A way to ensure conversations critical of entrenched interests and dominant practices are censored and don't take place

It seems hopelessly broad attempt to shape discourse and thought. Even giving administrators the benefit of the doubt and saying this policy was created so if someone puts a swastika on their door they can take it down, it also means that anything someone claims is political could be removed. As we've seen in the last 10 years, is there anything that can't be politicized with enough money thrown at it? With this policy, if a history or biology teacher put "vaccines save lives" poster on their door, someone could say it's political and offensive. Giving extremists the opening to say something is "political" means that they could say, "Oh your LGBTQ poster is offensive and political to me", and it would be hard to make a case that would stand up under this crap policy that sexuality hasn't been politicized and that is should stay up to support diverse students. Hasn't diversity itself been politicized? The administrator's comment that "LGBTQ flags are ok because they support groups that have been marginalized" is 100% correct, but I don't think they're really working through how "political" and "personal" are so broad anything could be attacked and claimed "offensive", "political", or "personal". What if there was an educational poster about climate change? Economics? History? How, in any universe, could you have those discussions without broaching potentially "political" items?

TLDR; policy thought up by 5-year-olds who apparently haven't been watching the attacks on school boards, policies, postings and education elsewhere to understand where it will lead. Support your teacher's unions, the administrators leading them are scared of conflict and open dialogue and we can't educate without them.

Kroger wants to buy Albertsons, a major competitor, who also owns Safeway, which Albertsons somehow was approved to buy 3-4 years ago. The attached is a good representation of what “choice” would look like if the merger were approved by the FTC for SE metro area of Portland; 6/10 larger grocers would be run by Kroger (WinCo, Costco, Grocery Outlet and New Seasons the only exception).

This is a big deal because:

• Kroger has already been price gouging like crazy since the pandemic as we all knew but has been recently confirmed by Kroger themselves (https://www.newsweek.com/kroger-executive-admits-company-gouged-prices-above-inflation-1945742)
• This would make bullet #1 above worse with that scale of market dominance
• Kroger was among the most appalling for worker and customer safety during the pandemic. They had sneeze guards up in their 172nd location in May of 2021, a full 1.5 years after the pandemic started, never enforced masking and refused to take any returns during the pandemic for any reason, but mainly to pad their bottom line.
• Kroger’s local workers are currently on strike for the crap wages and conditions they have endured. A larger corporate entity would only grow the awful employment and labor practices Kroger has.
• Pharmacy services are already under-served and with Rite-aid and Walgreens closing hundreds of locations nationwide, it would force more medically dependent customers to Kroger, who demonstrated its absolute indifference to worker and customer safety before, during and after the pandemic.

If you want to slow grocery price gouging, support better conditions for customers and employees, be able to choose other companies when one isn’t meeting your needs, I highly recommend sharing your thoughts with the FTC and boycotting Kroger/Safeway/Albertsons as much as you can.

Kroger wants to buy Albertsons, a major competitor, who also owns Safeway, which Albertsons somehow was approved to buy 3-4 years ago. The attached is a good representation of what “choice” would look like if the merger were approved by the FTC for SE metro area of Portland; 6/10 larger grocers would be run by Kroger (WinCo, Costco, Grocery Outlet and New Seasons the only exception).

This is a big deal because:

• Kroger has already been price gouging like crazy since the pandemic as we all knew but has been recently confirmed by Kroger themselves (https://www.newsweek.com/kroger-executive-admits-company-gouged-prices-above-inflation-1945742)
• This would make bullet #1 above worse with that scale of market dominance
• Kroger was among the most appalling for worker and customer safety during the pandemic. They had sneeze guards up in their 172nd location in May of 2021, a full 1.5 years after the pandemic started, never enforced masking and refused to take any returns during the pandemic for any reason, but mainly to pad their bottom line.
• Kroger’s local workers are currently on strike for the crap wages and conditions they have endured. A larger corporate entity would only grow the awful employment and labor practices Kroger has.
• Pharmacy services are already under-served and with Rite-aid and Walgreens closing hundreds of locations nationwide, it would force more medically dependent customers to Kroger, who demonstrated its absolute indifference to worker and customer safety before, during and after the pandemic.

If you want to slow grocery price gouging, support better conditions for customers and employees, be able to choose other companies when one isn’t meeting your needs, I highly recommend sharing your thoughts with the FTC and boycotting Kroger/Safeway/Albertsons as much as you can.