Money

Trust google at your peril

It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.

Source: Stadia died because no one trusts Google | TechCrunch

The wake-up call was when google killed google reader, but it was ignored by a lot of people cos it was a free service.

Then there was G Suite (Legacy Free). They got a lot of people to rely on google services and then proceeded to straight up betray them. People still didn’t care cos it was also “free service”.

But now with Stadia people will care cos the cost of this cancellation won’t be paid by google— they already wrote off the money. The cost will be borne by developers who trusted google with their games.

I’m somewhat safe as I do pay for some google services but I am looking for alternatives now. Microsoft is not a particularly viable option.

Trust google at your peril Read More »

Seriously Google, what the fuck

They are altering the agreement, pray they don’t alter it further.

Source: Google to free G Suite users: Pay up or lose your account | Ars Technica

Darth Vader: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further

A few years ago I needed to add another domain to my Gsuite account, which led me to start paying for services there. Over time we started using it for more things but we remained leery of purchasing things from Google through Gsuite accounts or free Gmail accounts.

At some point we migrated our Google Voice number from our gmail account to the Gsuite account, and it remained there. When this migration was done Google moved everything through: contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails. Everything happened without issues or difficulties; all you had to do was unlink your carrier number from one account, migrate the GV number from Gmail to Gsuite, and re-link your carrier number.

But starting a couple of years ago Google disabled the ability to migrate from Gsuite to Gmail. Not without losing everything. We’ve been looking to migrate off Google’s infrastructure for email/calendar and everything else and it’s a non-started as long as they hold my main phone number hostage. And now Google is forcing people and companies who made the mistake of choosing Google for their services to pay up or lose everything:

oh fuck

I’ve been using this for my family since Google first introduced it as a way for Families to use vanity domains together. I have over a decade (almost 2?) of purchases tied to this account and the cost to migrate to their enterprise offering for my family is bonkers.

I don’t know what I’m going to do here as I can’t migrate my purchases out of this account and into a normal gmail account. uuuuuuuugh.

While self-hosting files and email and photos is doable, self-hosting your own mobile phone number is still complicated, and on top of that the available services still cannot compete with the simplicity of GV even as Google leaves the service to wither for years at a time. We’ve been looking at using services like https://jmp.chat/ but again, they are non-trivial:

  1. You must port your number from GV to their service.
  2. You lose everything: Contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails.
  3. You have to figure out what XMPP client to use on your devices depending on operating system, as most XMPP clients don’t support them all.
  4. You have to learn the quirks of texting people who aren’t in your contacts already.
  5. Jmp.chat itself is still marketed as Beta, and some features are still in alpha, like group messaging.

Google should offer the option to convert a Gworkspace (nee Gsuite) account to a free Gmail account, or to migrate the data from a Gworkspace account to a Gmail account. They can do it, they just choose not to because nobody can force them to do the right thing.

The current state of things is absolute bullshit.

Seriously Google, what the fuck Read More »

War is about Money. Simple as that.

The little-publicized helicopter scandal was one of many investigated by John Sopko, who, as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, has served as the Cassandra of the Afghan war. Since Congress created his office in 2012 he has been diligently relating details of the colossal waste associated with the war in handsome full-color annual reports, but with little effect. ‘It was a disaster ready to happen, and it happened,’ he told me a few years into the job. ‘We wasted a lot of money. It wasn’t that people were stupid, and it wasn’t that people didn’t care; it’s just the system almost guarantees failure.’

Source: How the US military got rich from Afghanistan – The Spectator World

Next up, the price of heroin will go up internationally until the Taliban gets all its ducks in a row. Then the world will be flooded with opium and its price will crash. The entire time other drugs will take its place, including fentanyl.

That’s just on the drug front. There’s also arms sales to training camps that are yet to be established.

War is about Money. Simple as that. Read More »

Venture Capital is a plague

Allowing masses of underpaid workers to be exploited in order to provide widespread convenience was always a depraved bargain, built on a rickety ethical and economic foundation.

Source: Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic

This industry is ripe for some entity to come out with a co-op model where drivers are not only the employees making the delivery, but also owner shareholders in the company. No one will get rich quickly but they’d earn substantially more than poverty wages.

The “uber but for x” economic model is reliant on destroying everything around it so VC can get rich. Hopefully we won’t need 50 years to gig economy doesn’t work, just like trickle-down economics.

Venture Capital is a plague Read More »

Sitting in the dark watching the screen, somewhere

Will young people — trained during the pandemic to expect instant access to new movies like “Hamilton” and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” — get into the habit of going to the movies like their parents and grandparents did? Generation Z forms a crucial audience: About 33 percent of moviegoers in the United States and Canada last year were under the age of 24, according to the Motion Picture Association.

Source: Hollywood’s Obituary, the Sequel. Now Streaming. – The New York Times

Millenials and Zoomers have a little problem though… we haven’t got any money to spend. Even if there is an economic boom we will not benefit from it unless there is systemic change at all levels of government, business and society.

The cost of a single movie at the theatre will get us an entire month of streaming. The math isn’t hard.

Sitting in the dark watching the screen, somewhere Read More »

Cognitive Dissonance 30 minutes out of downtown

The suburbs run on federal subsidies. Without them, America’s suburbs would have to become more financially productive. They would need to get greater returns per foot on public infrastructure investment. That would mean repealing repressive zoning regulations, allowing the market to respond to supply and demand signals for housing. It would also mean allowing the “little downtowns” Kurtz fears to form where demand for them exists. Isn’t that what is supposed to happen with self-government and local control?

Source: It’s Time to Abolish Single-Family Zoning | The American Conservative

To have a conservative person say this is quite strange. Few suburbs in all of the US actively try to compete with the cities they’re attached to, mostly because they only want to attract wealthier millennials who can afford the down payment on a house by way of the parents paying for it.

Cognitive Dissonance 30 minutes out of downtown Read More »

I’d like to not stress about money kthx

I started working at SysadminJerb about… six months ago or so. I’m looking to pickup a second job hosting at a finer restaurant since I’d like to be able to talk to more people on a regular basis; Working by yourself in a datacenter is not conducive to long conversations in person.

So why is it that I’m having a hell of a time budgeting my money? I’m realizing I’m spending more than I really want to and right now I’m not sure… why. This isn’t a problem I had to face when I was working in a restaurant full time, so now I’m just spinning my wheels trying to figure out why this is happening, and more importantly, how.

I think I’ve got the why figured out: Since I have loads more free time than I ever did before, I now have that much more time available to spend the money I’m making even when I don’t mean to be spending that money.

The how it’s a bit harder but I think that, over the past few months, the average amount of money I spend in small transactions has gone up along with the amount of transactions that I do during a pay period, which follows the fact I have more time to be out and about than I did before.

So now I’m on the search for a budgeting tool that will help me with this. I’ve tried using Mint before but… at this point in time they haven’t added any new features in a while and I’ve had a devil of a time connecting it to my auto-pay accounts, so it let’s me track only some things instead of everything. I’ll try it again since it’s free but if it doesn’t work out I’ll just let it go and never look back.

I’m also looking at other tools like You Need a Budget and Financial Gym. Right now I’m thinking those are nice but… they’re paid and I would prefer to not add more pressure to my wallet.

So as a first step I’ll try Mint, then if that doesn’t work look around for a spreadsheet I can use on google sheets, then if that doesn’t work I’ll try YNAB and the rest. I don’t have a need to track everything but it would be nice to have a better overview than the stuff my bank has for me.

Right, this all reminds me: I can actually use these tools because my income is more or less stable now compared to what it was before: I can count on a solid 40 hour work-week month after month, and before I had to actively fight for working hours. So that’s a big change.

I probably just need to cut a few services here and there that I have not been using to their full potential, or ramp them up so I do use their full potential.

Going to be habit changing, to say the least…

I’d like to not stress about money kthx Read More »

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

The Life of a Completely Blind Iranian Programmer

Source: How I got through Docker’s censorship – Parham Doustdar’s Blog

The most interesting part is being blocked by both the country government and the companies based in other countries. You not only have to develop ways to make packet traffic flow from outside the country into your own, but also to make funds available to you locally.

Not an easy feat.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way Read More »

Being Poor Is Too Expensive

Some think that being poor is simple. You don’t have enough money to buy a lot of stuff, so you’re forced to buy less stuff. But that’s not really how it works. When you’re broke, you can’t do all the little things that will improve your budget over the long run. It actually costs more to be poor.

Source: Being Poor Is Too Expensive

It’s been a long, long time for me to dig out of the hole I was in. While it was never that deep, you’re always uncomfortably aware how much you can fall in a really short amount of time.

Raising the minimum wage won’t solve this, no matter how much politicians assure everyone it is the magic silver bullet needed.

Being Poor Is Too Expensive Read More »

Wallowing in it, in a bad way

My work has taken me on visits to a lot of classes. The thing that I have noticed is that a poor person will have zero idea what to do with a 401K should they get one. A rich person will have no idea how to cash a check if they don’t have a bank account. It’s a completely different skillset with disparate goals and values and norms. It is definitely a different culture.

For example: You need to score some illicit drugs. How do you do that? Rich answer: Ask your assistant. Middle-class answer: Ask your teenager. Poor answer: Walk outside.

Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts.

I’ve been there. I can consider myself fortunate that I’ve been able to let go of most vices, most wants, and am able to go for long stretches of time without actual employment.

But a big part of that is thanks to the middle-class trappings of my lower-class life. I live in a house with a full kitchen, laundry room, all utilities; all for a ridiculously low price. Were I renting an apartment by myself, I’d be working two jobs just to be able to pay rent, nevermind having the time to cook at home and go to the movies every so often.

I am fortunate to know how people of all social walks have lived, having been exposed to all of them at least briefly throughout my life. I know how to deal with rich people without having them try to own me. I know how to interact with middle class people in a fair manner. I know how to hustle with the poor like one of them — I know I’m poor but I try to afford myself the luxury of not feeling poor. Feeling poor saps your body of energy, robs your mind of steel and your spirit of joy.

But I can attest to the knowledge that it is hard to look at the stars while your back is bent toward the ground.

Wallowing in it, in a bad way Read More »

Hospitals giveth, Hospitals taketh.

According to Alan A., the nurse generally handles three or four patients at a time. That would mean Sloan-Kettering is billing more than $1,200 an hour for that nurse. When I asked Paul Nelson, Sloan-Kettering’s director of financial planning, about the $414-per-hour charge, he explained that 15% of these charges is meant to cover overhead and indirect expenses, 20% is meant to be profit that will cover discounts for Medicare or Medicaid patients, and 65% covers direct expenses. That would still leave the nurse’s time being valued at about $800 an hour (65% of $1,200), again assuming that just three patients were billed for the same hour at $414 each. Pressed on that, Nelson conceded that the profit is higher and is meant to cover other hospital costs like research and capital equipment.

I don’t know any nurses who get paid US$800 an hour. Hell, I don’t know any nurses who get paid even US$50 an hour. An acquaintance works 12 hour shifts at a nursing home and at the end of the day gets paid about US$10 an hour by her own reckoning. She gets yelled at, bit on, pissed on. Her employer constantly threatens her with unemployment to obtain free labor. She doesn’t have any satisfaction about her job or herself at the end of the day.

I’ve gotten paid the same amount per hour washing dishes and I’ve gotten the satisfaction of hearing people say “these are the cleanest dishes I’ve ever seen at a restaurant.”

In Mexico we’ve got some price controls implemented so the most egregious overcharging doesn’t happen… but then again, most people would prefer spending more money than they can than to go to a state hospital managed by the IMSS, where mothers give birth on the bathroom floor and you can spend 12 hours sitting in the waiting room before a general practice doctor will even bother to tell you to go home.

I’m now wondering how long until the IMSS is dismembered and the pieces sold. Millions will instantly be unable to afford any kind of emergency healthcare and most types of outpatient care; the same thing that’s happened in the US will happen in Mexico. It will happen by design too.

You can go to the hospital, but you can never leave it behind. The sticker shock at the bills will prevent any kind of health recovery, not matter how many drugs they pump into you.

Then again, it’s by design. A hospital without consumers makes no profit.

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.com.

Hospitals giveth, Hospitals taketh. Read More »

En el fin de semana

El viernes pasado tuvimos al Naza Space Circus aquí en Tijuana. Harta diversión, durante la cual conocí a una muchacha especial que logro que me pusiera de un humor creativo. Lo cual es extremadamente raro, ya que no tengo ni un gramo de creatividad en mis huesos. Pero lo logro, para nuestro disfrute compartido.

Llegue al Hipódromo a las 20:00 exactas y de ahí no llegue a casa hasta las 08:00 del Sábado. Eso seria la primera vez que no he llegado a casa antes de las 3am; chingao, seria la primera vez que no llego a casa pa’ empezar. Ahora veo la parte de mi que ha clamado ser liberada: el Animal Fiestero. No la pienso soltar, resulta muy caro ser uno, especialmente con la economía a punto de ir vertical sobre nuestros traseros.

Una buena noche…

El Sábado lo pase con el niño. Le envidio su cabello, es todo una estrella. Lastima que no tiene todo lo que se merece, incluyendo una buena educación. Aunque duele decirle que no cuando lo veo tan pocas horas a la semana, se tiene que hacer. Quiero que sea un ser humano decente.

Después el Domingo ZeroSoul hizo funcionar un poco de magia con x2x, con seis monitores en tres computadoras siendo controlados con un solo mouse y teclado. Es de lo mas chido que he visto en un rato. Se compara al Synergy, pero hecho a través de SSH.

Así que mas que nada escribo esto para recordarlo en el futuro dado que es probable que lo olvide en el futuro cercano.

En el fin de semana Read More »