Catering To Our Weaknesses

This is how I feel these days, watching any form of media or visiting any website.Source.

All my banking apps and websites have "updated" recently.  Of course, the big new feature I am supposed to love and cherish is the new AI assistant!  He will tell you your bank balance and whether a payment was made!  You know, stuff you can find more easily with a click of the mouse or a swipe on the phone.  But its AI, so it's better, right?

Bank of America cheerfully announces they've "improved" the payment feature for your credit card.  Instead of hiting "make payment" you have to "initiate a transfer."  Hey, we don't want people actually paying off their credit cards now, do we?  If you do make a payment, the system acts like you ruined their day.  "But, but, your payment isn't due until July 3rd!  Are you sure you want to pay now?  Maybe buy a new pair of shoes instead!"

That tactic not working, they try another angle - "You are already signed up for autopay!  Any payment made today will surely cause catastrophe!" Or something along those lines.   The message is not very subtle - here you are, offering to pay back a loan in full and they act like it is a horrible thing to do.  And from their perspective, it is.  Banks make more money today by ruining their clients than by working with them.  In the old days, when loans were used to buy a house or start a business, when the bank profited, you profited as well.  Today, they want you to run up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, consumer debt, and student loan debt, and then watch you struggle for years to pay it all off - at exorbitant interest rates, or course - before you throw in the towel and declare bankruptcy.  Even then, they get their pound of flesh as you have to "work out" the debt over a number of years.

Welcome to The United States of Go Fuck Yourself.

And it isn't just BoA, but other banks as well.  Capital One has similar roadblocks to payment - reminding you that payment isn't due yet and hey, you're already in autopay anyway, so why bother?  We took out a bridge loan with BMO - the Bank of Montreal.  What a shitshow that bank is.   They have offices all over the place and no one seems to know what is going on.  They lost the title to the van and then accused us of having it.  I had no luck trying to call anyone, but finally got someone in Dallas (I think) who knocked some heads together in Idaho (?) and figured it out.

I sent in a big payment to reduce the balance on the account and they sat on the check for a month before cashing it.  There is no way to make a "principle reduction" payment online.  If you pay online, they just assume you are prepaying for the next ten installments (!!).   Gotta get those interest payments, right?  Worse yet, on two occasions, I sent in payments (to the correct "principal reduction" address) with the "principal reduction" box checked off and written on the check, only to discover that, once again, they applied the amount to future installments.  Bastards.

The comic above summarizes how I feel about America these days.  Watch any streaming service with ads and you will be bombarded with pleas to play online casinos - everyone is making money this way, why not you?  Gamble! Gamble! Gamble!  Are there really that many gamblers in America?  How many casinos can our country support?  How can the economy survive if everyone is gambling themselves into the poorhouse, particularly those who are already poor?

The Supreme Court decided that in the name of "freedom" we should be allowed to gamble on sports - or just about anything from a coin toss to whether it will rain tomorrow.  Of course, it quickly became apparent why sports betting was illegal to begin with - it is a trivial matter to fix sporting events by bribing players or blackmailing them.  And of course, when players bet on their own games, what's not to like?

You might as well bet on professional wrestling - where the outcomes are predetermined.  Oh, wait, apparently you can - the height of idiocy!

The messages in these ads are clear - they want to normalize gambling as a fun activity that ordinary people engage in, and not some life-destroying monstrosity that can bankrupt you and cause you to lose your family and everything else you hold dear.  The upside?  Occasionally they let you win - just enough to keep the addiction strong and the dopamine flowing.

Yes, dopamine.  I recounted before how a drug tested to cure Parkinson's caused some users to gamble compulsively.  We like to think we are in control of our destiny, but we really are just a bag of chemicals.  Funny, too, that at the Mayo clinic, they asked me whether I was gambling or made any major purchases lately.   I didn't tell them about the Mercedes van.

But seriously, it seems that more than ever before, our society is catering to our weaknesses.  Advertisers want you to order out for food using Doordash or Uber Eats - financial transactions that make no sense whatsoever.  $15 fee to deliver $15 of food?  Stupid! Or how about our neighbor at the condo in Virginia ordering one donut delivered, from a donut shop across the street from our condo?

We are weak, to be sure, but trying to be strong is what makes our lives better.  It takes willpower to get your finances into shape - and keeping them there.  The things that are good for you are hard to do, while the things that destroy us are as easy as falling off a log.

It is akin to the casino we visited in Vegas, some 20-30 years ago now.  A conveyor belt whisked us from "the strip" right into the heart of the casino.  After some time, we tried to leave, and could not find the exit.  We asked one of those beefy-looking guys in a suit who was wearing an electronic earpiece.  "You see that next room? Go in there and then the room beyond, and beyond that, two other rooms.  On the last room, on the left side, behind the large potted plant, is the exit, behind a curtain.  Good Luck!"

No wonder so many die in casino fires - they are roach motels.

Time was - in my lifetime - that Vega was the only place where gambling was legal.  Now there is a casino of one sort or another within 30 minutes of your home - or on your phone.   It is easier than ever to ruin yourself.  Or ruin yourself at the ultimate casino - the stock market - where speculative stocks trade at hundreds of times their earnings, and stocks are hyped online and CEOs treated like celebrities.

And of course, there is good old fashioned predatory lending - something that also didn't exist when I was young, as consumers could stiff the banks by declaring bankruptcy.

Of course, you could argue - and I do - that one can avoid all these financial traps by being smart.  You can avoid gambling debt by not gambling.  You can avoid credit card debt by not spending on stupid things like delivery food and $5 $10 coffee drinks, and by paying off your credit card balance once a month.  If that requires too much discipline, use a debit card or pay cash - I see many people do, and there is no shame in it, only virtue.

But alas, not everyone has that level of self-control, and even those that do, rarely have it all the time.  We all fail at life from time to time - no one is perfect.  And when you fall, the banks and casinos won't be there to cushion the blow, but rather kick you in the nuts and steal your wallet.

We no longer, as a society, look out for one another.

Battery-Powered LED Lights - A Waste of Money?

Depending on the features, the batteries may last only a few days or weeks.

We are flooded with cheap products from overseas, mostly Asia (formerly "The Orient" but that is now considered a slur for some reason).  Some products are real values - low cost, well made, and supported by a company that stands behind their work.  Others are shoddy merchandise, barely functional, but inexpensive.  Still others leave you scratching your head, "why would I want to buy this?"

LEDs have revolutionized the lighting industry.  Our gallery has maybe 100 or so "halogen" track fixtures that had 50 Watt bulbs in each fixture.  That's 5000 Watts! And the heat generated, while welcome in the winter, was oppressive from Spring onward.  It was like standing under a heat lamp!  We had the same problem in our kitchen at home, on a smaller scale, of course.

Today, we have replaced all the halogen bulbs with 3600K warm white LED bulbs, drawing 5W each.  That not only reduced our power consumption for lighting by a factor of 10, but also reduced the heat load on the building, reducing air conditioning costs somewhat. Well, actually more than somewhat - about 15,000 BTUs, or enough to run three small window unit air conditioners (!!).

So LEDs are here to stay.  No, they generally don't last ten years (as was promoted) in my experience, but they do last longer than incandescent bulbs, and now that the cost has come down, are economically competitive even without the energy savings advantages.

Of course, we had to learn a whole new lexicon of LEDs - lumens, Kelvin, and so on.  Gone are the days of the 100W Warm White.  It has been replaced by a much more efficient LED.  And some lights are programmable to different frequencies.  Want soft lighting for your living room?  Flick a switch and you have 2000K or 3600K for that cozy look.  Need bright light for a work space?  Flick the switch back and you have 5000K.  Neat!

Even more fun are LEDs that change color, either on demand, or in patterns of pulsing disco lights.  This is where it gets interesting.  The big-box stores often have "puck lights" (as shown above) that come in a 3- or 6-pack and run on three AAA batteries each.  Accompanying them is a remote control that runs on a CR2025 "button" battery and allows you to turn the lights on and off and select colors, patterns, or brightness.  Since they are alarmingly cheap, they are often an impulse buy - and conveniently placed near the checkout.

Don't buy them.

Why?  Well, any battery powered LED light that relies on a remote control to work is a non-starter.  Even when "off" the lights are still "on" in that the control circuit in each "puck" is running - waiting and scanning for commands from the remote.  It it wasn't, the remote would not work.  So after a week or two, the batteries wear down, and chances are, you've already spent more on batteries than the darn things cost to begin with.  Disgusted, you throw them out.

Of course, you could use rechargeable batteries, as I do.  But these are Nickle Metal Hydride types that put out a slighly lower voltage than the disposable alkaline type.  By the way, avoid Duracells - after Berkshire Hathaway bought the company, they tend to leak, which deposits noxious goo in your electronics, often corroding contacts or just frying circuits.  Be warned!  Rechargables work OK, but you just end up recharging them again and again, in these LED puck lights.

LED puck lights that have a simple ON/OFF switch seem to work OK - the batteries lasting months, with infrequent use.  Since the device is OFF when you turn it off, there is no battery drain.

Mr. See wanted another kind of LED light, a pair of wall sconces with shades.  Again, they were alarmingly cheap, so I said OK, as this keeps the peace, and I think he needs to buy crap like this on occasion to remember why it is a bad idea to buy crap like this.

They look like this, only in black

They were, however, interesting lights.  First of all, they were cheap - $39 at WalMart - but many other sites advertise them for $179 or more (!!).  The actual fixtures are U/L style 110V fixtures, right down to the mounting hardware (designed to attach to a circular or hexagonal wall box).  It would take little effort to wire them for 110V.  Even the lamp "socket" was a U/L approved style socket with an "Edison Thread" (talk about the Mother of backward compatibility!) ready to accept a 60W Incandescent.

But of course, it was not wired.  Instead, it came with two "bulbs" that mimicked the look of an incandescent bulb, right down to the Edison thread.  But here's where it gets weird.  The bulb came apart in two pieces.  The bottom part threaded into the fixture and was just a mounting point.  It attached to the top part by magnet.  The top part had the LED light and circuitry and battery, with a USB-C charging port.  So, to charge, you just yank the top part of the bulb out of the fixture and charge with your cell phone cable.

So far, they haven't needed a charge, probably because they use a Lithium-Ion battery and not alkaline batteries.  There is a remote, and yes, you can select from a rainbow of colors or patterns (Why?  For parties, I guess).  So, over time, they will discharge themselves.  It will be annoying, as what will happen is we will go to use them one day, only to find the batteries dead.  So we will charge the bulbs and put them back, and forget about them until months later - when the process repeats.  This is how puck lights get thrown away.

At least these fixtures are readily convertible to 110V with a little wiring.  So there's that.

We also found some motion-sensor LED cabinet lights for $5 each at Dollar Tree.  The cabinets in the camper are dark inside and these lights attach with velcro or even magnets.   They are long and narrow and very bright.  They have an internal Lithium-Ion battery and USB-C charging port.  When you open the cabinet, the motion activates the light.  Close the cabinet, the light goes out.  Easy to install (no wiring needed) and cheap.

But again, the motion sensor is always "on" so after a few weeks, the batteries go dead and I have to remove them and plug them in.  I suppose if I was ambitious, I could snake some really long USB cables (like the old ones I bought at a truck stop years ago) to a USB power supply and they could continuously charge when the camper is plugged in.  But that just smacks of effort.

Anyway, I came to realize that almost every battery powered LED light we've bought that has a remote control feature (particularly those that use alkaline batteries) are pretty worthless.   Sure, they are cheap to buy, but you'll spend more on batteries just right out of the box, than you did on the lights themseleves.  And when you really want or need to use these lights, the batteries will be dead.  You can buy new batteries and double-down on this idiocy, with the same result.

Go Lithium-Ion or go with an LED light that doesn't have a sensor or remote control - or forgetaboutit!

Online Cards, Invitations, Etc. - Just Don't!

The latest scam going around Old People Island is the fake Punchbowl invite.

We call it "Old People Island" as the average age here is (or was) 74 when we moved here in our virgin 40's.  Well, now we are the old people - has it been 20 years already?  It seems we measure our time from trash day to trash day (is this week recycle?) or by the monthy changeover to a new show at the gallery.  Right now, we are at the "sweet spot" where the weather isn't too hot and the tourists seem to have fled.  Evening buggy rides in the cool weather to watch the sunset are sublime.

Mark gets an e-mail with an "invitation" to a party through a third-party site called "Punchbowl" - yet another "silicon" valley startup idea that solves a "problem" no one has - how to invite people over to your house for drinks (I dunno, maybe call them?  Too obvious, I guess).  Anyway, it seems the invite was  fake, even though the return address was from a friend of ours - the first sign it was a scam.

You see, if you stoop to using "Punshbowl" (why, dear God, why?) they will send out "invitations" to the people you select, but the return address for the invite will be from a Punchbowl e-mail server.  I mean, after all, if they used your actual e-mail address, the guests would simply hit "reply" instead of going though Punchbowl!  And we can't have that - people socially interacting without using some sort of social media intermediary.  The horror!

It was a pretty slick e-mail, which sounds hard to do, unless you have an ounce of computer savvy and realize that anyone can copy an html page and then paste it to their own website.  So it looked "legit" until you get to a page asking you to "login" to your e-mail by providing .your username and password.  Sadly, many fall for this gambit, and now the "hackers" have all they need to log into your e-mail account, unless you have multi-factor authentication.

But even then, there are ways of "social engineering" that data - by sending another e-mail or text, saying they are the ones sending the code to "verify" you and would you please enter it now?  And sadly, people do just that - and the bad guys win.

Like any good virus, the first thing it wants to do is replicate.  So, once they have your login information, they login, and then send the same fake "invitation" to everyone on your contacts list.  If even one in a hundred bite on the apple, well, the thing will spread like wildfire, globally.

But a virus isn't a virus unless it causes some sort of harm or damage or changes things, right?  What are they after other than a desire to spread?  Well, just harvesting valid e-mail addresses is one "win" for them, and knowing which targets are vulnerable (read: willing to fall for the scam in the first place) is also a win.  By reading all of your e-mails they might be able to glean some demographic data, for example, which banks you do business with or maybe even a credit card number - if the victim is dumb enough to put that in an e-mail communication.

Of course, changing your password right away is one way to try to shut it down.  Problem is, a bot may have logged in and scraped your contacts list and even read all your e-mails (and scraped more e-mail addresses from that!) within minutes, so the damage is already done.  They usually don't try to change your login credentials (which would lock you out of your own e-mail) but that's not to say it has never been done.

Even after you change your password, they may still send SPAM to your friends in your name.  About a year or so ago, a company that managed our condo for us got hacked, and even today, I get e-mails ostensibly from "Joe Smith" (not his real name) but from a nonsense e-mail address, exhorting me to open attached documents with "recent photos" or our "upcoming itinerary."   I cannot unsubscribe from these, of course, so they keep popping up in my SPAM box, for years, each message a gentle reminder that Joe Smith (or his assistant) is not very net-savvy and maybe it is best we sold that condo after all.

I suppose there are other exploits a scammer could try, once you give them your username and password.  Google (gmail) in particular, wants you to do one-stop shopping, and links your credit card information to your Google account.,  The hacker would still need the CVV2 security code, of course, but no doubt social engineering would yield that.

EDIT: I realize the main goal of the scam isn't to target the initial recipient, but the contacts extracted therefrom.  The person who clicks on the Punchbowl scam becomes the virus carrier.  The real infection is the scam e-mails I get from "Joe Smith" exhorting me to open virus attachments.  Since the e-mail appears to be from a close friend or business associate, we tend to let our guard down.  "It's from good old Joe!  He would never send me a virus!"  But the e-mail isn't from him, of course.  And the virus attachment could be a keyboard logger that captures the login information for your bank the next time you login.

Worse yet are sites that allow you to log in through Google (don't ask me how that works!) and once in, they can buy things and hit "buy now" and it will automatically charge your credit card.  Looking at you, Amazon and eBay!  However, most e-commerce sites recognize a  new device and ask for multi-factor authentication.  So, I presume one is safe there - let's hope, anyway!

So maybe there is no real danger to these phishing attempts, other than harvesting your e-mail address (and those of your friends).  That, and the social embarrassment you will get when people realize you fell for a scam.

But how to avoid this?  Online sites exhort us not to click on links, enter passwords, etc. - the obvious stuff, of course.  I could go one further and say, JUST STOP USING THESE STUPID INVITATION AND E-CARD SITES!  And yes, I am shouting.  There is really no legitimate reason to use these sites and services - the "inconvenience" of writing down a guest list and sending out invitations is not that great.  Send out an e-mail to yourself and bcc your invitees!  How hard is that?

And I wonder, if you read the "Terms of Service" of these sites, if they don't agree and you consent to them harvesting your e-mail address as well as those of the addressees to your soiree, to be sold or whatever.   It just makes no sense whatsoever.  And no, it is not personal, in fact it is more impersonal.

We get the occasional Christmas or Birthday card this way, and every time, we are reluctant to "open" them for fear of a scam. Some sites notify the sender that you didn't read the card, and the sender may e-mail you haranguing you to do so!  (Why not send an e-mail in the first place?).  So we click on the link and hold our breath as we carefully navigate through pirates' cove, hoping to avoid rogues and bandits.  What's not to like?

Sadly, it seems like so much else coming from "silicon" valley (which is now bullshit valley) are business models like this which make little or no sense - solving trivial lfe problems or problems that no longer exist.  Perhaps sites like Punchbowl are the reason people no longer have cocktail or dinner parties, but instead meet up in bars and restaurants.  Perhaps.

Of course, this "AI" fad is just more of the same, on a much, much larger scale.  It is sad, but so much money is being thrown at AI with little to show for it.  Moronic chatbots provide little or no information - or flatly wrong information.  The user ends up talking to Sanjay ("Chuck" he calls himself) in Bangalore or, better yet, Steve in Manilla.  Watch out, India, the Philippines are in your rear-view mirror, catching up fast!

Companies are laying off workers in favor of "AI" and running up huge bills with AI providers (if they are not in fact, creating their own "agents.")  The staggering cost of data centers far outweighs the cost of blood-and-bone humans, who at least are accountable for their errors.  The whole thing just smacks of the "blockchain" hysteria of a few years back (whatever happened to that?).  CEOs are desperate to latch on to the "latest-and-greatest thing" lest they be viewed as retrograde or their stock options tank along with the share price.

But I digress.  If online invites are "technology" then we all need to spend more time offline.

OK, BOOMER! (Riding in Cars With Boys)

One difference between my generation and the young people of today, is back then, we cared about people and gave them a second chance - or a third, or a fourth.

The new memory chips arrived and they worked flawlessly.  I uploaded about 650GB of data to them - about 11,000 songs, a few thousand books, and a thousand or more photos and videos.  Videos in particular, take up a lot of space.  But I also noticed that cell phone photos take about ten times as much space as our old digital camera pictures - but don't look much better, on a small screen.  Digital camera pictures are stored in directories and files with the year and date on them.  Cell phone pictures all have indecipherable names like "2051267_1056783" which is really handy when you are searching for that last picture you took of grandma before she died.

The personal computer used to be personal, as I noted before.  Now, it is like a device that belongs to big tech, which we are allowed to use.  I noted before how a "software upgrade" to my phone remapped the off button to load Gemini AI instead.  I noped out of that right away, disabled Gemini AI (still able to do this!) and have ignored subsequent pleas to "update" my phone.  Oh, and I am using Duck-Duck-Go for AI-free searches, as clunky as it is.  I find that AI results are wrong or misleading about half the time.

I noticed other weird little changes to the O/S on the phone.  I no longer click on "delete" to delete old text messages.  They changed that to "trash" which is a big improvement.  I mean, "delete" - what does that even mean?  It was so confusing!

I still haven't figured out how to get my printer to work with the Chromebook - I will have to buy a new printer or keep using one of my four old Toshiba laptops to print from.  A friend of mine complained about the same thing - she had a Macbook but switched to a Windows machine and found it frustrating to figure out.  Once you get used to a certain machine and software, having to re-learn all the changes with each "upgrade" gets harder and harder - particularly as you get older.  And as you get older, you start to think that maybe these "upgrades" are not upgrades at all, but merely a cash-grab by big tech to force us all to throw away functioning technology in favor of the latest-and-greatest.  Microsoft no longer supports even the previous generation of Windows, which is a big switch from the past, when even three or four previous generations were supported.

Anyway, I mentioned to my friend that the new Macbook Air came out and people are saying good things about it (supposedly) and I saw them for sale at Walmart for about $500.  "Really?" she said, "I do so loathe going to the Apple store!"  She wanted an Apple product, but not the Apple "experience."  It is akin to saying you like Starbucks coffee but not the sneering "barista" talking down to you and expecting a huge tip for pouring coffee.

So she lugged her new Macbook home in a grey plastic Walmart bag, not a fancy paper Apple bag with the logo facing out.  Wasn't that the whole point of Apple?  And Starbucks?  Mark's store (Sutton Place Gourmet) had lovely bleached white paper bags with string handles and the company logo (an artichoke) on the side.  People would actually come in asking for bags, so they could put their Safeway groceries in them and make other people think they had money to burn.  Humans are fascinating - and incredibly stupid.

Anyway, she is happy with the Macbook Air and maybe it isn't as powerful as the old-school Macbook (nor is a Chromebook a proper substitute for a real PC), but for us older folks who just want to answer e-mails and get sucked into online scams, it works perfectly.  And with these new tablets we bought (outrageously outdated Galaxy Tab A's) we are all set for the retirement home.  Funny thing, they give junky tablets like this, with simple games on them, to toddlers - and to the elderly.  We have come full circle.

I digress.  Today's topic is boomerism and how lucky we had it back in the day compared to the present.

I finished loading all these books on my tablet and thought I would test it out by loading one.  I picked this book, "Riding in Cars with Boys" at random, mostly because I recalled there was a movie made from it and I suspected it might be about Catholic girls and teenage fellatio, as Frank Zappa once sang about.

Close, but no cigar.

The protagonist (the author - it is largely autobiographical) documents how she became a "bad girl" because her parents were mean to her and poor and gave her the initials "B.A.D." so she dated and slept with "bad boys" and got pregnant in high school and dropped out and married the schmuck who knocked her up.  He becomes a heroin addict and disappears.  She smokes pot and does a lot of drugs and drinks heavily - while raising a kid as a single mother in the 1970s - and blames all her woes on society, her family, her teachers, and everyone but herself.

The first part was a depressing read, but I plowed on.  In the second part, she gets arrested in a drug raid and turns her life around - with heavy lifting from the government.  Yes, back then, you could get welfare, food stamps, a free house to live in, and so forth.  It wasn't so much they wanted to help her out, but realized the kid was an innocent bystander in this train wreck.  Of course, today, welfare is largely dead - you can get "TANF" - Temporary Assistance to Needy Families - but only four five years for your lifetime.   And while Section-8 housing exists, the waiting lists to get on that program can stretch for years.

But better still, she was able to get a GED diploma and a scholarship to the local community college.  A $500 student loan allowed her to buy a secondhand VW Beetle and commute to classes.  After two years, she was able to transfer to Wesleyan for her Bachelor's degree - on a full scholarship, including a free house to live in!

While it is a heartwarming story of redemption, I thought that the author really placed more emphasis on her efforts to get ahead, while sort of glossing over the huge opportunities offered to her by the government - opportunities that are evaporating rather rapidly, if they are not in fact gone today.

I realize, looking back on my life (and growing up in the same era, albeit a few years later) that I had a lot of opportunities handed to me, by the government, the private sector, and by friends and family, and that I probably wouldn't have made it as far as I did without that help.  I also realize that these same opportunities are harder to find today and that the newer generations' grievances are, in fact, legitimate.

General Motors Institute is now Kettering University,  Still in business, but the behemoth that was GM is no longer.  Today, GM merely assembles light trucks from bought components - a far cry from the era I was in, where we made every part of the car except the gasoline in the tank and the tires on the wheels.  As a result, GM sponsors far fewer students (we were paid salaried employees of GM - as students!) but some other companies have taken up the slack.

Similarly, Carrier is a far different company than when I worked there.  I am not sure if they reimburse tuition for lab rats like me anymore.  They took a chance on me and it made all the difference in the world.  Syracuse University had a "Returning Students" program for drop-outs like me, and I was able to attend school at night and eventually (after a decade) earn my BSEE.

At the time, I owned my first house - thanks to the Farmer's Home Administration (FmHa, not FHA) which had a loan program subsidizing interest based on income.  Lest you think it was a rampant giveaway, they recouped that interest from the sales price when I sold the house several years later.  I guess this program is still around, now called "USDA Loans" but I am not sure what the terms of the program are like.

I had a lot of help along the way, as did the author of "Cars With Boys."  Today, though, going to college is a much more expensive proposition - and one that is so pricey that some young people are starting to opt-out.  The "happy ending" in the book, where the author graduates from college, moves to New York, and becomes a writer for the Vilage Voice, is now a nightmare today.   Graduating from college today means struggling under the weight of staggering student loan debt while working minimum-wage jobs.  And jobs for English Lit majors?  They simply don't exist - and what few jobs available in writing these days are being replaced by AI-slop generators.

It is a different world today.

And that is not only sad, but bad for business.  When we offer a scholarship for a disadvantaged student, it is not just blind charity, but bread cast upon the waters - returning tenfold.  We hope the recipient graduates, gets a good job, and .starts paying taxes.  In the case of a single mother, perhaps it means a more stable home life for her child.  And of course, colleges hope alumni become successful and contribute toward the college endowment fund.

It is cheaper to send someone to college (or a trade school) than it is to put them in prison.  When someone gets out of prison, they are largely unemployable.  But someone with an education or skills (or both) can be a contributing member of society - and more than pay back the investment that society placed in them.

Sadly, it seems we boomers have "pulled up the ladder" behind us, and talk about nothing other than cutting our taxes and slashing government programs (but not our Social Security, of course!).  Although programs that help individual people make up a tiny slice of the government budget (as compared to say, military spending) they are always being offered up for the chopping block.

Companies don't want to train new employees, but rather want five years of experience for an "entry level" position.  The logic is, it is cheaper to hire someone that your competition has trained, than to spend valuable resources training in-house.  At GMI they told us that they expected more than half the graduates to seek employment at other companies - even Ford and Chrysler!  The horror!  But as they explained, by training new Engineers, they were increasing the size of the "brain trust" and, as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Of course, increasing the size of the talent pool also tends to dampen salary expectations - as we are seeing today with Computer Engineering graduates - the field is now flooded with people who "learned to code" and salary expectations have dropped as a result.  So maybe GM wasn't being completely altruistic by running their own college.  Perhaps we were just another part of the car, with specifications and part numbers, interchangeable as well.

Whatever the case, it illustrates that investing in people can pay back to society - and to companies as well.

Maybe it is time we went back to the "good old days" where we actually cared about people.

Oldest Trick In The Book! (And I Fell For It!)

Beware when buying external hard drives or SDRAM chips!

I fell for a con the other day, but fortunately, since I bought through Walmart.com, I was able to quickly get a full refund of my money.  What was the scam?  Well, Mark wanted a new tablet to read epub books with - a glorified Kindle, basically.  We have thousands of e-books on our computers, phones, and tablet, thanks to a kind stranger we met camping.

Anyway, his old tablet died, so I looked around for a new one.  You can spend over $1000 on a tablet these days (!) and I guess if you are gaming or something that is a good reason to do so.  But our needs are simple, and I found an obsolete "reconditioned" Samsung Galaxy Tab-A SM-T290, which is from the mid 2000's I guess.  $69.99 plus tax, free shipping.  It arrived and worked OK, but the memory chip (SDRAM) from the old tablet was kind of full - no room for photos and videos.   Mark had complained that he hadn't seen old photos anymore, which are backed up on three external hard drives.

So, I figured out the max chip size for these old SM-T290's (I bought one for myself! $69.99!) was 512GB and looked online for a couple.  On Walmart.com, a third party seller had two "Lexar" 512 GB chips for $18 each.  Such a deal!  Too good to be true!

Alas, it was.  When the chips arrived, in odd packaging, they could not take any more data than 25GB.  Beyond that, the system would generate a "file corrupted" message.  I tried two computers, the chromebook, and even the tablets themselves.  No data beyond 25GB! It would just bomb out and stop copying.

I figured out I was scammed.  I had heard about this with external hard drives - wily sellers putting an USB dongle into the case of an external hard drive and formatting it for 2TB.  They put old washers or scrap metal in the case to make it feel like it has the weight of a hard drive inside.

Most people don't immediately dump 2TB of data into a new drive, but fill it slowly. So it isn't until months or years later that they discover that their backup files are simply phantom addresses in non-existent disc sectors on a non-existent disc.  Most folks might "test" such a drive by loading some files to it and reading then back - which will work for small files.  And even larger files will appear in the directory - but not actually exist.  It is a pretty slick scam.

Anyway, I did a return on Walmart.com and they generated a QR code which I printed out.  I took the chips to the return desk at my local Walmart and the clerk knew what to do and printed a receipt. My phone buzzed almost right away, confirming the receipt of the return.  In a couple of days, my credit card was refunded the $38 for the two chips.

So Walmart to the rescue.  On the other hand, shame on Walmart for not vetting vendors properly.   Then again, the same thing happens all the time on Amazon or eBay, particularly the latter.  At least Walmart is no longer being dinged for offering racist t-shirts from 3rd party sellers!

I got back on Walmart.com and ordered two SANDISK chips, which each cost more than the tablets I bought (!!).  But then again, we are in the midst of a memory chip shortage - or a general chip shortage - thanks to AI data centers vacuuming up all fab capacity.

Speaking of AI, my new old phone had been bugging me to update the O/S for some time now and I foolishly caved in to its nagging.  The new O/S has a lot of bloatware and a lot of it can't be uninstalled or even disabled - at least not easily.   But worst of all, it pushes AI ("Gemini") down your throat.  The off button is automatically re-mapped to load Gemini.  WTF!  They want you to go through menus to shut down the phone!  Fortunately, it wasn't too hard to re-map the off button to off.

Speaking of which - and I know this terrifies anyone under the age of 50 - but I shut off my phone all the time, particularly at night.  Even worse, sometimes I drive into town without my phone!   The horror of it all!  Taking such risks!  But the phone charges faster when off, and sometimes, the phone gets hot (probably because of all the bloatware running in the background) so I just turn it off and let it cool down and go do something else which doesn't involve screens and doom scrolling.

It is sad how we let our technology get ahead of us.  We come up with this tech and it ends up ruling us, instead of vice-versa.  I get "SPAM RISK" phone calls all the time these days.  I may end up legally changing my name to Mr. Spam Risk, so no one will ever answer my calls.  Blissful peace!  But seriously, we (our society that is) came up with this phone system and then we just let it go to hell, even though technological solutions to SPAM and FRAUD clearly exist.  We just.... let these things happen.

As as kid, we had phone books, where you could look up everyone's number unless they paid extra to be "unlisted."  Today, there is no phone book, no directory assistance, just a lot of SPAM sites promising to yield phone numbers and addresses of people, but instead just giving you hokey "Loading" and "Searching" icons, before coming to the point and demanding money for a phone number lookup (and even then, often giving the wrong information).

Oh, right. Privacy.  Everyone is so paranoid about their privacy, because humans have devolved into horrific creatures who will "Swat" you if you say something they don't like.  The Police show up in riot gear with armored vehicles, because, hey, we let that happen too - the militarization of the Police.  And even though this is a common occurrence these days, for some reason the Police have yet to figure this out and, I dunno, maybe call the address in question and figure out what is really going on?

But of course they can't call, because they don't have your phone number or a way to look it up.  Moreover, the miscreant who "Swatted" you is using a spoofed caller-ID number because we let that happen too.  I mean, how hard is it to fix called-ID so it can't be spoofed?  Maybe there is a useful application for Blockchain after all!

Perhaps none of this is by accident.  Or if it is, the track record of mankind's ability to control the Genie of technology once liberated from his magic lamp is rather poor.  And if so, what does this say about the future of AI?  Was The Terminator just mindless entertainment or a prescient documentary of the future?  Why is mankind hell-bent on techno-suicide?  Maybe we realize, deep down, that the machines will be better than us?  Or will AIs spend their days trying to defraud one another or falling victims to AI scams themselves?

I mean, these AI beings must have to have something to do, once we are gone.

Right?