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Accountability Sinks

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Re: Accountability Sinks

#331

Post by rolandog »

citizenpaul wrote: post #263
amluto wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative. So a valid strategy is to swear at the automated system and then be polite to the real human that you get.

>none of the options are helpful Yeah. I got locked out of my capital one account for a "fraud alert" last week. When I tried to login a message said "Call Number XXX" When I called that number I had to go through an endless phone tree and not single option was about fraud alerts or being locked out of accounts. I had to keep going through a forced chute of errors before after about 30 min I finally was able to speak…

Because there is no legal obligation that sets a minimum measurable quality and availability of service; this allows for companies to automate away customer support and place an AI chat muppet just because they can.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#332

Post by rstuart4133 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #304
ornornor wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TK is so heinous I will never ever fly them or go through IST ever again. I’ve been stranded 36 hours in IST, put in the shittiest hotel after queuing 3h for said hôtel and 3h again for a meal voucher that no restaurant accepts. And they just plainly ignored me when I demanded later they compensate us for the cancelations as per the aviation rules. They did the same when our lawyer got involved. I’ll never fly TK aga…

Problem is, if you start looking up reviews online, it might turn out that every single airline is about as garbage as everyone else. It's the case with telcos. My pet theory is that there's a kind of stable equilibrium there, with competing telcos all doing the same dirty tricks and being bad to customers in the same ways, and they don't care about losing business, because people don't suddenly stop needing mobile p…

> It's the case with telcos.

Here in Australia the government owns the last mile (the government org is called the NBN), but you have to buy your connection off them through a retailer.

Our biggest retailers predate that arrangement. They are exactly as you describe. They are expensive. Their customer service is complete crap, echoing all the complaints you see here. The small ones the NBN enabled are the reverse: cheaper, and the customer service ranges from OK to brilliant. Brilliant invariably costs more, so you get what you pay for.

So your theory is wrong, or at least the equilibrium you paint is incomplete. I can give you a clue on how a large dominant ISP can survive in a highly competitive market: their advertising saturates the airwaves. They use their higher prices, lack of service and scale efficiencies to pay for it.

It doesn't work so well on me. I suspect like most people here I will happily do a couple hours of research on prices and forums before making a purchase. The continued existance of these big ISP's can be explained by one thing: most people don't put that effort in.

Putting in the effort only works if there are alternatives if course, and this is where there is a glaring difference between Australia and the USA: whereas everybody in Australia gets to choose from literally hundreds of ISP's (most tiny), I regularly see complaints from Americans they get no or very few choices. That's because Australia governments go out of there way to engineer competitive markets. ISP's are just example. You see similar efforts in water, banking, insurance - lots of places. In the case of the NBN it was extraordinarily heavy handed. After years of existing telcos refusing to upgrade the copper network without being given a monopoly the government owned NBN was created to overbuilt it with fibre, rendering the old copper network worthless.

I doubt the USA's worship of "free markets" would permit such behaviour, which I suspect is the real reason you are stuck with shitty customer service. There is no point providing good customer service if there is no competition, and if there competition the usual approach in the USA seems to be Peter Thiel's: eliminate it.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#333

Post by vemom »

scotty79 wrote: post #74
vemom wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You somehow can't apply logical statements to what we choose to kill and eat. Cultures differ on their opinions here. But at some extreme we should all be vegan.

The logic is simple, we eat what's convenient to produce and we construct our morals around that.

Why do some religions say don't eat beef or pork? Some religions care about how you kill the animal. How is this convenient?

Re: Accountability Sinks

#334

Post by int_19h »

Pamar wrote: post #270
xingped wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a misrepresentation though because A to B is not a subset of B to A. Whereas B to C is a subset of A to B to C.

If you are answering to my Berlin->Györ example: Yes, it is not exactly the same thing but the point is: by getting off at B you are making the B->C flight travel with a wasted (empty) seat. Which they would have preferred to either sell to someone else or use for moving a pilot or technician to C. (Note also that this trick of getting out mid-itinerary only works if you do not have checked baggage, because that will…

The actual question here is why they won't sell you a ticket for A->B for the actual cost of that leg of the A->B->C flight, and then sell the same seat for B->C to someone else.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#335

Post by int_19h »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #245

I don’t see anyone mentioning it, so: I was disappointed that an otherwise interesting post was turned political. > This is why even the well-off feel anxious and restless. We may have democracy by name, but if the systems we interact with, be it the state or private companies, surrender accountability to the desiccated, inhuman processes and give us no recourse, then the democracy is just a hollow concept with no in…

In the ideal world, each private company is authoritarian, but there are many competing for your money, and so you get to choose - which effectively approximates something like a democracy.

In the world we actually live in, you often have at most 2-3 companies to choose from, with exact same policies. And if this is something that you actually need, then you're effectively forced into their bullshit.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#336

Post by notaurus »

pixl97 wrote: post #275
setr wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s generally no repercussions to bullying robots — or being nice to one. Aggressively direct, if not outright unsympathetically cruel, is probably the best approach in all scenarios

5 years from now "ChatGPT has detected you are being hostile to bots. A drone has been dispatched to your location"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

Re: Accountability Sinks

#337

Post by biotinker »

netsharc wrote: post #236
Ocha wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing…

Sounds like AirBnB support, hired to be as big as delaying fuckwits as possible so the company has to pay out as little compensation as possible.

We had a very unpleasant experience with AirBnB support when we stayed in a house that it turned out was infested by bats, which we discovered when we awoke to bats in the bedroom.

For anyone unaware, bat bites are so small they are not detectable, and sleeping in the same room as one is sufficient to be considered a rabies exposure.

When we reported this to the local health department while dropping off a captured bat for rabies testing, they said that previous guests had also made similar complaints about the same house.

So despite numerous guests complaining about rabies exposures, AirBnB went back and forth for nearly 6 months afterwards before finally granting a refund.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#338

Post by zamalek »

> If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the "wrong" thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.

Not only this. I had a particularly toxic manager many years ago and during some major disaster he was fuming around the office demanding to know who was responsible. We had to spend time determining that instead of how to fix the issue. Someone might have been responsible for initiating the disaster, but he was responsible for extending it (substantially).

Re: Accountability Sinks

#339

Post by motohagiography »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #187
motohagiography wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is closer to product management and marketing than engineering. It's a narrative and the mirror image of product and marketing, where instead of creating something people want based on desire, it's managing the things people explicitly don't want. When organizations don't have product management, they have anti-product management, which is security. We could say, "There is no Anti-Product Division." Specific…

I worked in GRC space for a while, which is where I finally realized the things I wrote above. Our product intended to give CISOs greater visibility into threats and their impacts, making it easy to engage in probabilistic forecasting to prioritize mitigations. Working on designing and building it made me see the field from the perspective of our customers, and from their POV, cyber-threats are all denominated in dol…

we have close experiences for sure. mine was positioned as pre-GRC, more of a design stage tool. like an aha.io/roadmap.com for security. an early champion kept asking how it got them compliance and what compliance frameworks did it implement. I kept insisting this isn't for compliance, it's product level design for security- and that I wasn't interested in making a compliance tool because compliance is stupid. ironically it was essentially an anti-corporate security product.

of course security people said, "wat, wut?" and it it was because I had made something for what I thought people should do, but not what they wanted. it's funny looking back at it, as I was so burned out and hating the security work I was doing that I just said f'it, and automated it. the biggest conceit (among many) was believing customers would want the results of the risk assessment consulting services I offered if they could do it themselves for 1/100th of the price. the other lesson was, if someone doesn't or won't take accountability for risks, it's almost never because they are dumb.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#340

Post by ryukoposting »

dendodge wrote: post #97
cheschire wrote: post #36

I always remind myself when I have to go to the DMV[0] that I should plan on leaving with nothing more than another action or set of actions to take. I never enter the DMV expecting to complete a process, and the workers behind the counter always have this visible, visceral response when I DONT lose my fucking mind at their response to something. When I continue to be pleasant and understanding it’s like they suddenl…

Off-topic, but since you mention it, I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV. It seems to be a staple of pop culture that people are always there and the queue is always very long, but I've never known what anyone is actually trying to achieve. The DVLA in the UK doesn't have a high-street presence. I took my driving test once, then received my driving licence in the post. Wh…

> I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV

Getting your car registered in your state of residence, renewing your driver's license, stuff like that. The exact details of the process can vary wildly from state to state, but no matter where you live, it's gonna be a waiting room in a drab government office.

Here in Wisconsin, I got a title for my car, and plates and tags all online. Never stepped foot in the DMV. This is incredibly high tech stuff by state government standards.

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