191–200 of 316 posts
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I thought that was already solved by the No Surprises Act that went into effect this January.
>I thought that was already solved by the No Surprises Act that went into effect this January. Are you serious? Is this a real act? We need an act of congress to not be surprised by health care?
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This sounds exactly like my kids school district. They send an email telling you you have a "secure message" and you need to log in to see it. So you try to sign up to see the message, but can't because you don't have the password. So you try calling them and they say they will reply via email. What they mean is that they will send you a secure message about your inability to receive secure messages. So you call agai…
It's hard to recover from the memories of wasted time, effort, and frustration when the schools when distance-learning only in 2020. "We will start using Google Classroom for all communication, class materials, lesson videos, live meetings, and grades" Sure. Good. Come grade time: "Your child is missing a lot of work. It's all due in a week." Kid, you have to do x,y,z missing assignments listed on Google Classroom. "…
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In practice, a lot of companies lie and may not actually have functionality to delete accounts. A UK fintech claimed they closed my account, while in reality they changed the email to VOID@ and presumably suspended future logins, but guess what, all the data is internally still there including the foreign key relationships which by themselves are unique enough and can be used to reidentify me and/or correlate my acti…
... does it happen to be your own domain with a wildcard email inbox?
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You probably pay way more in taxes. If I was given a choice between (1) an additional 20% income tax and free healthcare, or (2) crazy $10k/year out of pocket maximum, I'll choose 2 without a blink.
At the risk of turning this into a political debate -- yes, you pay more taxes if you earn more, and less taxes if you earn less. That's how a society is supposed to work: you don't leave people to suffer because they aren't rich.
Why do we do it for health care or health care insurance? If the justification is "everyone needs it and you will die without it" then shouldn't farms and supermarkets also be public utilities? The line seems entirely arbitrary to me. Water yes, but food no? Why education and healthcare? Why not heating and electric power?
The added benefit of letting people arrange it individually is that those with a higher risk appetite are not forced into it (at significant personal expense) against their will/consent, too.
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Branches are equally powerless. See: Bank of America's policy on two-party "and" checks. I walk in, having had a checking account with them for decades: "Hi, I need to deposit a two-party check into my account here. This is the other party with me, and we're happy to show ID." Door greeter / agent: "Sure, I can do that for you." {Proceeds to verify my information and set up deposit on her tablet} "Hmm." {Walks over t…
Needless to say, I closed my BoA accounts. I've read a number of BoA horror stories on HN, and didn't think anything of them. I just assumed there were a lot because BoA is big in California. Then, recently, I tried to deal with BoA customer service. - I'm saving up a few thousand dollars for a Christmas present, but don't want my wife to see the money in our joint account at another bank. - Since I have BoA credit c…
Don't set up a payment option on the credit card's website. Use the bill pay ability at the web site of the bank where your checking account lives. Now all your payment information is in one place and, more importantly, under your control via pushing payments from your checking to whomever instead of allowing a bunch of companies to pull money from your account.
"So now everyone can recreate your statements."... "remember us? We're a verb now." Hahahaha! I wish this weren't true.
Best part: "but did you write it in rust?" Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?" A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there, we just rent that space to piss you all off, as a visible…
> A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there...
This is what I don't get about BECU being the most popular credit union in Puget Sound. Every time there's a thread on Reddit asking about the credit unions people use or if there's a newcomer who's at a social gathering or just on Twitter, BECU is always the recommended place. I don't understand, since their branches are solely there to sell you a mortgage.
Yet everyone is mad that Chase is opening branches all over town where you can do actual banking with an actual human.
(I'm neither a Chase nor BECU customer, for what it's worth.)
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While I appreciate this argument, I feel it's disingenuous. The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it applies to every goddamn service I try to make contact with these days. The systems are setup to waste a users time so only by showing a large commitment of time and emotional frustration can you get to talk to a human. The net result is massive waste of everyone's time. It's a race to the botto…
One problem I've observed first hand is that the head of customer service is measured on (among other things) the amount of money being spent on customer service (and other closely-related metrics like average contacts per order, agent time spent per customer, etc.). These executives have no direct control over the product, so they can't actually solve the problems that are causing people to contact customer service.…
So that when they try to externalize the costs they end up paying for it instead, enough to influence the business to change, to fix the root cause of the problem.
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Another explanation I’m predisposed to, due to personal involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app access to read your emails, we’d scan for tracking #s but also parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything from…
Slightly unrelated, we noticed this happening _before_ we renamed the app in the App Store from Arrive to Shop, but after the rename happened in, I think, March of 2020, negative reviews about the missing Amazon data started flooding in. People associated the name/design change with the degraded experience, when really the experience had already been degraded for a couple months by that point. The initial rebrand onl…
I thought they were blocking an action that is kind of "opt out" and you're saying they might be blocking an "opt in" action. Neat to hear this before I got too confident in my position.
Best part: "but did you write it in rust?" Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?" A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there, we just rent that space to piss you all off, as a visible…
Dutch banks: Q: Well, at least I can still withdraw and deposit money there, right? A: Actually, if you want to deposit coinage, we've outsourced that to home improvement stores instead.
(At least, that’s what Coinstar in the US has become.)