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I fought the PayPal and I won

jessesingal.substack.com

201–210 of 349 posts

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost access to a PayPal account I had used for years, because one day they decided they needed to know the CVV of a long-expired credit card, and refused to let me log in without it. Surprisingly, customer support was very helpful and let me transfer out the (minimal) balance in the account to another, completely unconnected PayPal business account I happened to have. Which is even more disconcerting, because it me…

Transferring money out is far lower risk than unauthorised account access. If they transfer money out and it turns out it was fraud they can easily compensate the original account holder by putting the money back in their account and there's little harm done, especially if the sums are small. If they give unauthorised account access then there's far greater harm including risk they'll get penalised by regulators over…

In a large corporation, different precesses can be handled and developed by separate teams often working in silos.

After many years, there may not be a force to assure these processes are consistent, have rules that make sense in relation to one a other. I think the answer may just be it’s “dumb” because no one cares or has the power or will to look at things holistically.

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#202
post #64

Quoted post unavailable.

Well, good to know. I was about to forward this.

It sounds like you have the same intentions as PayPal then: PayPal doesn't want to do business with them because of their personal views, and you don't want to forward their story that you implied you found worth sharing, because of their personal views.

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what makes sex-realism hateful?

It erases everyone who does not consider themselves inside of a binary, which is a lot of people. It excludes and erases them, tells them they don't fit in and that they should just conform (or they'll be made to).

"erases"?

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#204
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBAN and wait for a day. The delay can be skipped in many cases via the IBAN instant payment option. Requires both banks to be participating in the program and trust each other (the delay will happen if additional checks are needed, for example if the transction gets flagged for manual inspection, eg if you write "funny" purpose text, etc)

AFAIK banks here charge extra for that.

Use Wise (https://wise.com). In Germany especially N26 is also popular but IMO they went downhill quite a bit as soon as they realized that being a neobank is a losing venture.

Source: I work in finance.

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#205
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought trans was about changing gender, not changing sex. Mostly true, but it's confusing. Historically, sex and gender have been used interchangeably. That is slowly changing. There are a lot of places that refer to "sex" where "biological sex", as you put it, is not what is meant. See e.g. how trans people can still get their "sex" updated on documents that refer to sex and not gender, and how many places desc…

> Historically, sex and gender have been used interchangeably. This really isn't true. "Sex" was the only word anyone used for most of history; the idea that there's a distinction between "sex" and "gender" was invented by the sexologist John Money in 1955. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender#History_of_the_concept "Gender" was originally a term from linguistics that had nothing to do with biological sex.

The Wikipedia article you link to also claims that the 1882 Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language said that one meaning of gender was sex. Other dictionaries from well before 1955 also support this. In fact, the 1828 Webster's dictionary, available online, specifically says the meaning of sex came first, the meaning in grammar followed from that. The separation of sex and gender is recent, you're right about that and that's what I was saying too, but you're wrong that sex was the only term used before that.

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#206

PayPal is such a weird company. I was a loyal customer for 20 years until I wanted to convert my account from business to personal (I closed the business) and the site refused to do so. after months of calls with support, it became clear that no one was able to do this (something locked the flow and no one was able to see what; I guess my account was so ancient, it has some db flags no longer used but still checked b…

Brazil (1985 film) was not supposed to be an instruction manual!

The scale of these absurdities is just wild. Years ago I signed up for a domain for my blogger.com blog. At some point google decided to transfer the management of that domain to google workspaces ... I don't know how or why but they did. So when it expired I was told to login to google workspaces, but I don't have a google workspaces account at the email they kept emailing me at ... and their emails never told me what email to login with.

To get help on the website I was told to contact my google workspaces administrator ... but not who that is.

I figured out who the domain registrar was and told them my story and they helped me get a hold of the domain. Kudos to them to having a very fast and effective support team.

Now even more years later I get more emails from google workspaces that my account is expiring and sorta implying some consequences (but not actually saying) ... not that I can do anything about it.

At this point I have it in the back of my mind that any given day google could find this weird situation, assume malice, and ban me... a situation that 1. I didn't make happen. 2. I can't even fix. 3. I don't even know how it happened / what the problem is / google won't really tell me.

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#207
post #17

The author of this article is a public defender in the pacific northwest. He sometimes writes for Jesse Singal, but he also has his own substack.[1] Many of his posts provide a unique window into the criminal justice system. If that sounds interesting to you, I strongly recommend reading more of his writing. In my opinion, his greatest hits are Eleven Magic Words [2] and Death of a Client [3]. 1. https://ymeskhout.su…

Quoted post unavailable.

From your link:

>Singal was supported by sex columnist Dan Savage, who derided what he described as a "long & dishonest campaign" against Singal,[14] and urged readers to listen to Singal's interview of a youth-gender clinician before judging him as transphobic.[6]

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#208
post #17

The author of this article is a public defender in the pacific northwest. He sometimes writes for Jesse Singal, but he also has his own substack.[1] Many of his posts provide a unique window into the criminal justice system. If that sounds interesting to you, I strongly recommend reading more of his writing. In my opinion, his greatest hits are Eleven Magic Words [2] and Death of a Client [3]. 1. https://ymeskhout.su…

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm afraid that everyone using a computer today is relying on the John von Neumann architeture. To add, von Neumann is problematic and called for premptive nuclear war and the genocidal murder of tens of millions of human beings. I suggest throwing that vile machine in the trash immediately - you don't want to be using something designed by a wannabe mass-murderer, do you?

Re: I fought the PayPal and I won

#210
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that requiring cvv for a login is stupid, not that the risk levels are different. Does it become acceptable to require the blood of my first-born because the risk levels are different? Of course not. They're not even allowed to store that in the US (PCI-DSS), so the other poster must not be in the US.

Your GP had "it meant they were sufficiently convinced about my identity to let me transfer money out, but not enough to let me login in. Insane", and your parent is explaining why that's a non-insane thing.

GP here. I found every part of the process insane. To enumerate:

1) getting locked out for not having the CVV of some random card that expired a decade earlier

2) being allowed to transfer money out, but not to login into the account

3) being allowed to keep my second account, even though they don't trust me enough to give me access to the first

None of these make sense individually, and they make even less sense as a whole.

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