Speculative Tech Nonsense in California Paid for My Cat’s Surgery. Thoughts About Joe Biden and Vietnam, and What Kind of Country Americans Have.

Speculative Tech Nonsense in California Paid for My Cat’s Surgery.

My cat had her surgery yesterday, and they removed two masses and did a dental cleaning and extracted one bad tooth while she was under a general anesthetic anyway.

Recently, I had a bunch of class action settlements come in from various ways tech companies in California violated the law, usually the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, victimizing me and stealing my facial imagery data.

These settlements keep going out for years after you’ve actually used a thing, because you weren’t considering at the time how the thing used you.

Lemonade insurance had an app that required me to use a video statement during a renter’s insurance loss claim.

Veriff (which just had a huge layoff), verified my driver’s license data so I could use an account to trade some securities.

There were others.

It occurred to me that this is a life changing amount of money for me. I could get a car repair or save my cat’s life, but to them, they just go right on breaking laws and paying for it later. Why not? It’s all “venture capital” nonsense.

The point of running companies on VC and juicing the stock with press releases of things that may lead to a profit “someday”, but not now, is so that the people running it can pay themselves handsomely and then fire everyone and announce that the company is bankrupt.

With higher Fed rates seemingly here to stay for a while, and the focus is on making people unemployed and popping large bubbles, damn the human cost (yet again), we’re “closing the business cycle” and with almost no new products.

Essentially most of what tech workers do is throw their labor “into the sea” on things that never benefit anyone except the scammers at the very top who made a lot of money issuing press statements about imaginary future profits.

Then they get laid off and their visas lapse and they have to go home. Some people end their lives. It’s tragic.

This is the kind of economy that America has because it refuses to have a real economy that is sustainable and producing real goods and services.

Instead of using what happened in China as a lesson on why it was a bad idea to make your population unemployable and strung out on drugs, while the suicide rate doubled, Bonehead Biden was off in Vietnam, an enemy country that 68,000 Americans died trying to keep at least part of “Free” from horrific Communist oppression, and lost.

Although we did manage to evacuate some people that I know and give them a better life in this country, the Communists overran South Vietnam and raped, murdered, starved, and disappeared many thousands of people. Which is very typical in Communist revolutions.

Communists are brutes. You see that when people risk running across mine fields to get to South Korea and have bullets in their back and tapeworms in their guts, and haven’t eaten anything in weeks if they make it.

You see people agitating for Communism in the United States. Usually these are spoiled brats in their mommy and daddy’s house, in their 20s, never had a job, don’t know how Communism will treat them. Hint, it ain’t gonna be iPhones and Xboxes and laying around all day taking pictures of your food for Instagram.

Also, 50 or 70 years after the revolution, you still get “rich Communists”, however that happens. Theoretically impossible, but you do. These are usually people high up in the good graces of the government officials, who get to go to hot spring resorts and have Macs and Steam accounts while there are food shortages and dirt floors in the country for everyone else.

Essentially everything Americans complain about and worse happens in a Communist state. The social stratification.

North Korea has an economy the size of Indiana’s, but there are several times as many people. It also has to support a huge military, a nuclear weapons program, and some party officials and “rich Communists”, who have brought nothing but dire poverty to millions while they enjoy most of what there is, for themselves.

“Communism makes everyone equal!”. Let’s test that. Just have the other 26 million North Koreans show up to that hot spring resort and see how equally they all get shot for trying to use something that no more than a few hundred are supposed to have.

Now, according to Old Bonehead, who can’t even make it through a paragraph if it’s late enough in the day that he starts sundowning with the cameras on him, we’re “exporting AI”, whatever that is, to a regime that functionally isn’t a lot different than China or even North Korea.

Biden’s term in office has been yet another slap in the face to Americans. Instead of building a more prosperous future for America, in America, we get more of these deals with corrupt enemy nations to make sure that we get Happy Meal Toys.

It’s actually very sick and depressing to watch how the media spins this whole situation.

I was talking with my dad over email again, and some of what he thinks about Joe Biden and the Democrats is actually quite right and I would like to quote him.

In your article you said “What does amaze me is how a country that takes away everything from people and leaves them homeless or dying from lack of food or medical care, has been so good about suppressing revolt.”

What they do is watch all the time, and then do really evil and painful things to anyone that steps out of line.

Total control. Total suppression.

They monitor and restrict communication. They prevent group activity that can allow political activism. They get them watching and reporting on each other. Now, facial recognition, AI, and “social conformity scores” can bump that up a notch.

The US leftist Democrat stranglehold on the government is taking the steps you would have to succeed at to turn this government into that kind of state. Subversion of the DOJ and FBI. Control of the courts and DAs. Domination and control of the voting system, including at-will manipulation and unaccountability. Vicious attacks on any opposition. Reinterpretation and substitution of social values. Manipulation of culture. Redefinition of ethical behavior. Control of news and reporting. Control and subversion of the education system for youth – mind control. They are building all this in plain view.

-My Dad

U.S. Banks, Including Chase and Synchrony, File Suspicious Activity Reports and Shut Down Accounts for ‘Logging in From Another Country’ and Transferring Retirement Funds; May Also Affect VPN Users

U.S. Banks, Including Chase and Synchrony, File Suspicious Activity Reports and Shut Down Accounts for ‘Logging in From Another Country’ and Transferring Retirement Funds; May Also Affect VPN Users

American banks are closing customer accounts without warning and many are refusing to say why.

The ones named, according to the article, are Chase and Synchrony Bank.

(Two of the worst banks in the country to bank with, I might add. Chase was ripping my ex blind with $11 monthly “checking account fees” until I switched him to an online bank with no fees and put an end to that.)

Synchrony is an underlying bank for “PayPal Savings” and “PayPal Checking.

Synchrony also runs some store cards. They have a possibly illegal practice (under Illinois BIPA) of collecting biometric data to open an Amazon Card.

If you use a VPN, you may want to use “split tunneling” for a Web browser session to do your online banking.

In at least one instance, according to the article, Chase Bank violated the Bank Secrecy Act, first by telling a man who had his accounts frozen in the middle of dinner and was left unable to pay the bill as a result, that it had filed a SAR (which is illegal….you cannot tell a customer you did that), and then violated the BSA again by telling him why (he had logged on to their online banking system from a foreign country while he was on vacation).

There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the US banking industry right now, including an explosion of SARs. Ironically, the article says the explosion of SARs came “after the pandemic”, which was a pandemic of a SARS virus. 🙂

In all seriousness, the banks are reporting anything that looks even kind of dodgy, apparently, because there’s no penalty to the bank to close accounts and file them, even though only 4% are possibly criminal activity, according to the New York Times article.

MinceR on #TechRights IRC channel raised a very good point.

Isn’t losing clients a penalty?

Chase Bank has $4 trillion in assets. With that much and with the “Systemically Important Bank” regulators breathing down their necks, it’s not so serious if they start cutting some “risky” clients loose even if they’re not actually all that risky.

Smaller banks that need the deposits more (like $100-200 billion in assets) and don’t have the intense SIB regulations are probably more likely to look the other way on some of this, but I don’t know that.

Besides, there are risks at banking with one where less eyes are on them, like all those California Tesla “loaners” who came to bang on the window of the failed SVB thinking you can go to a failed bank and walk out with a briefcase and a million dollars cash. They found this out.

Big banks treat you like shit, because they’re huge and they don’t need your weekly paycheck from cleaning the hospital that much, and small banks, well…. Who even knows what’s going on in there?

You takes your chances… As the saying goes.

The man who banked at Synchrony (super sketchy bank) had another problem.

He dumped out his 401(k) into Synchrony and then tried to open another IRA at TD, which is not suspicious or illegal….people close retirement accounts and transfer the money into a new one all the time….the IRS even says you HAVE TO within the same tax year to avoid penalties!

When he went to open the new IRA at TD and fund it, again, perfectly legal, people do it every day, Synchrony froze his account, took his money, wouldn’t tell him why, and said “We’ll get back to you within 60 days.”

Uh huh….