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Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

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Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#331

Post by quickthrower2 »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #190
wkat4242 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals. I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this. I did a similar job…

>Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals Europe? Literally lots of people have guns, where I live, from 01 Sept there's plenty of gunshots ringing out scaring one of my dogs. I know two people in the uk that have shotguns (police checked, locked away in the attic). There are many ww2 firearms in circulation (Serbia, I believe just had an amnesty), so 'literally' is incorrect. The diff…

The government has the best ammo available: organization

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#332

Post by donalhunt »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #302
CalRobert wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, they had brand new broadband! My area was in a "rural fibre zone" and while I was there the local houses (including mine) went from satellite-only or tethering (which could be OK, sometimes, barely) or 1 Mbit DSL to 1Gbps fibre. It was pretty awesome.

Man, I do wonder how they decide which rural areas get fiber, do they throw darts at a map?

Based on my experience... yes!

In the end, the Irish government decided to bankroll the rollout of fiber to "commercially unviable" areas (under the guide of a National Broadband Scheme). That prompted one of the unsuccessful telcos to suddenly find ~ 300k of those homes commercially viable!

Trying to understand why some properties have been hooked up and others not is a fruitless exercise. During the COVID lockdown, I discovered that most churches (which had a strong interest in broadcasting masses to their congregations) has either been deemed commercially unviable or not indexed at all. Many hoops were jumped through.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#333

Post by jollyllama »

bombcar wrote: post #321
cutemonster wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work as a cable technician, 6 customers a day, that's around 2000 in a year. If 1 in 100 is mentally ill, in a bad mood (TV broken!) and with a gun ... Maybe there's some selection bias: You'll tend to meet angry people, who are more dumb (couldn't fix the problem themselves?)? Maybe in any weapon loving place, a job where you visit lots of people at their homes and help fixing something that's broken, is mild…

Especially if you’re disconnecting service - I dare say the repo tow truck drivers encounter MANY more gun incidents than the average AAA tow truck driver. However I suspect the repo company allows its employees (or they’re self-employed) to carry in retaliation - I strongly suspect that the cable companies don’t allow their repairmen to pack heat. It’s like the thin bread line - pizza delivery is more dangerous than…

>However I suspect the repo company allows its employees (or they’re self-employed) to carry in retaliation

I doubt it. That'd be a huge liability.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#334

Post by wl »

kmeisthax wrote: post #104
wkat4242 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals. I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this. I did a similar job…

You're right that the US is very proud of their trigger and muzzle discipline. Or at least half of it. The other half points loaded guns with the safeties off directly at their own crotches to own the libs[0]. Going a layer deeper, Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers. To put it extremely charitably, we're used to being fucked by corpos so we pre-emptively fuck them back in…

That Vice article and the pluralistic blog spam post don't understand what a Fudd is. A Fudd is a curmudgeonly, old fashioned gun owner who is judgmental about people owning modern firearms. They favor hunting and shotgun games over handguns and semiautomatic rifles. If they own handguns at all, think revolvers and 1911s instead of Glocks. Generally, Fudds tend to be very adamant about safe gun handling, often advocating for range rules that are overly restrictive like prohibiting aimed rapid fire. They're not the kind of people who point loaded handguns at their crotches to get a reaction out of people online.

The people who are pointing loaded guns at their crotches are mocking people who take the four rules of gun handling very seriously, including both Fudds and most "normal" gun owners. They're trolls that exist almost exclusively online. They don't make up anywhere near half of gun owners and they're unwelcome at pretty much any gun club or public range.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#335

Post by sznio »

yetihehe wrote: post #179
Gud wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not done by “low income, uneducated people". This is done by 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from the middle east and africa. Please be specific, otherwise these problems will never be resolved. I come from a low income neighborhood but native parents, this was unheard of up until the 2000s.

To be specific - Poland. We don't have enough immigrants from middle east and africa for this to be noticeable problem. It's mostly uneducated drunk idiots who target ER teams. Firefighters - I didn't heard about them being targeted yet. Edit: I don't say that MENA immigrants targeting public services is not an issue. I say that this issue exists globally too, it's a result of having a lot of uneducated demoralised p…

>It's mostly uneducated drunk idiots who target ER teams.

It's the aftershocks of all the coronavirus/antivaxx conspiracy theories. The people who got brainwashed hard attack doctors/ER teams because they see them as murderers.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#336

Post by pmarreck »

midasuni wrote: post #257
noduerme wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, everyone I know in the US who owns firearms - which is basically everyone I know here - takes safety and knowledge of the laws around storing/carrying/brandishing/firing them very seriously. But the sheer scale of the US population and the absolute number of guns is just difficult to conceive of from a European perspective. We have something like 60 privately owned guns in this country for every person i…

Oh another “The US is big” post. The EU has 30% more people There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana. There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders. There is a cultural problem in the US with firearms.

> There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana.

> There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.

gonna need a fact-check on these claims, please, because initial googling reveals these are, at the very least, false or misleading

I live in the Northeast US and very few people have guns here.

Incidentally, even if it is difficult to purchase a gun, it's trivial to order a crossbow or airbow, which has just as much 1-shot stopping power (although, of course, after that 1 shot, reload can be a problem, less so with the airbow)

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#337

Post by lo_zamoyski »

sublinear wrote: post #154
kmeisthax wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that the US is very proud of their trigger and muzzle discipline. Or at least half of it. The other half points loaded guns with the safeties off directly at their own crotches to own the libs[0]. Going a layer deeper, Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers. To put it extremely charitably, we're used to being fucked by corpos so we pre-emptively fuck them back in…

> Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers. That wasn't my experience when I worked in customer service for a few years. Maybe 10% of people were like that and it was always because they were tired of not getting solutions to their problems, and that was always because their account fell into a bad spot in the customer service flow policy (suspicious activity, low LTV, fraud, et…

> It was really hard to take any of that personally.

Indeed. When companies abuse their customers, customer service is not only the only way by which a problem can even hope to be resolved, but it is the job of customer service to do so. They are representatives of their companies, the interface between the customer and the service their company offers.

Now, I don't sanction abuse, of course, and pulling guns on people is insane, but that's not what you have in mind here, and knowing how tortured and stretched the definition of "abuse" some people have is, I will say you do sometimes need to be somewhat aggressive and push to escalate your problem to get the customer service rep. to transition on their script's finite state machine to a helpful state and outcome. In those cases, don't blame the customer. Blame the corporation.

Corporations often like to drag their feet to maximize profit with all sorts of ridiculous and unsavory tactics. It's like being automatically enrolled in something by default and burdening the customer with unsubscribing; on average you can steal at least a little money from those who don't unsubscribe, or do so only after a couple months have passed. The time and burden of doing so (a form of theft), and the lack of genuine consent (Pacta sunt servanda, buddy!), doesn't seem to be accounted for.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#338

Post by esperent »

wkat4242 wrote: post #89
thatoneguy wrote: post #31

I was a "broadband technician" around then and AT&T Broadband did not give AF if you were stealing cable or not. I only handled cable modem installs and quit after a year to go major in philosophy and because: - Getting quietly threatened once (with AR-15 up against the customer's front door) on a troubleshooting call that I wasn't able to leave until "the internet started working". - Having to increasingly go do cab…

The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals. I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this. I did a similar job…

> I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals.

Come on, this is totally untrue. I grew up in rural Ireland and it's very common for farmers to own guns. Hunters too.

Check here [•] - Finland, for example, is only a couple of percentage points behind the US in number of households that own a gun (42% vs 37%).

The difference is in the culture, not gun ownership. In Finland, Ireland, and every single developed country in the world (and most developing countries too) except for the US, privately owned guns are for hunting or for killing pests, not for threatening humans. That's the difference.

•https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_g...

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#339

Post by tgaj »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #298

What strikes me most is the level of anxiousness people in the US develop when faced with frivolous/absurd charges. This guy is working so hard - hours and hours - trying to convince Comcast to get their shit right and install a video trap! Here where I live, you would just lough out loud, lean back and continue watching TV. Because you know it would take a judge exactly 1 minute to consider two facts - 1) you had a…

I don't know where you live but even in my European country you should be anxious when interacting with judicial bureaucracy. Kafka's "The trial" is still relevant today.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#340

Post by wl »

refracture wrote: post #252
wkat4242 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals. I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this. I did a similar job…

Americans take pride in having them, but being properly trained in safely handling or effectively using them is optional. Try and force it and you’ll get the tyranny talk. Sadly I’ve heard many stories of cable/dish techs dealing with this nonsense.

The opposition to mandatory training is because the actual goal is usually to harass and discourage or raise revenue rather than improve safety. There's plenty that's been tried and none of it seems to have improved safety outcomes. The people who are irresponsible with guns pretty much always know better and decided to be stupid, anyway.
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