Comment HEY! (Score 1) 317
That's the kid that stole my 30 inch disco ball! He flattened out and DESTROYED IT!!! DAMN!
What bothers me is that sensitive equipment which can be inperceptively damaged by such handling is difficult to detect. Specifically, hard drives. They are the basis of our society, and damage from improper handling can often take days, weeks, or months to determine after the fact. It is not fun to receive a box of disks which has been thrown, jostled, and dropped needlessly; you find out at 3am when several members of an array fail at the same time.
I'm not going to make excuses for poor service, but items that can be damaged through normal (or abnormal) handling should be packaged to survive such a trip. Not only the exterior corrugated parcel but in the example you cite, drives need to be engineered to handle such potential shocks. Don't drives park the heads in a safe zone now? Or are you referring to the platters being damaged?
UPS offers packaging assistance for any shipper, but having been in logistics for a number of years, I can tell you few take advantage of it. UPS, Fedex, the USPS and all freight companies invariably look at the way items are packaged before paying any claims. In my experience, many shippers are clueless when it comes to proper protective packaging, or if they feel the cost is higher than absorbing damages, won't spend the extra money to package their merchandise properly.
Your mention of California losing population and business should come as no surprise but clearly the people that haven't figured it out yet are all in Sacramento.
However, if they really wanted to do something about this looming problem, maybe the reduction or even elimination of taxes on manufacturing firms building electric infrastructure components and other businesses, and the resulting employment of tens of thousands, could help turn the state around and start the flow of cash back into the state's coffers. Of course, with Moonbeam Brown as Governor, this won't happen. The state will collapse and we'll all be bailing it out.
I'd say the last one out please turn off the lights but the way things are going, there won't be any lights to turn out.
Common sense is the only real defence against these scams, and it's pretty clear that schools have no way of teaching that.
Unfortunately, common sense is in very short supply it seems.
I can't know what's in the mind of those who get scammed, but the simplest defense is to just walk away from anyone wanting to take your stash. While it's certainly possible to be scammed by someone the victim has hired to perform a service (re:Bernie Madoff), at some point reason has to come into play. A PC repairman finds evidence of victim's life being in danger and he swallows it hook, line and sinker? What about second opinions?
Madoff was paying huge returns to his early victims and had they been more engaged in what was happening, a second opinion might have saved them from being wiped out. The old saw is "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is". In the case of the composer, had he revealed the problem to someone with a dispassionate eye, this would have been a non-story.
-people buying something that they think will make them well, only to have it not help them, or worse, poison them...
In reality, the spammers aren't going to ship anything. They just want credit card info, yes?
In the US, spam is illegal. If a black hat used their skilz to defeat the botnet, would anybody care? I mean, it's not like the spammers are going to file an FBI report and demand justice.
Welcome to the new industrial revolution where you're not entitled to minimum wage because you're working online as an "independent contractor" for a foreign company.
But....no one has to take the job. I can see how an argument can be made that these grossly underpaid jobs break the laws protecting workers. The number of jobs being offered is minuscule compared to the number of real world jobs.
Besides, low and unpaid positions are always being offered on craigslist in several categories, notably, media production and web design. How many people actually answer these ads? Probably very few and those that do probably never actually show up for them.
There's always trying to get something for nothing, but the market decides what the prevailing wage will be, not some cheap piker on mechanical turk or craigslist.
They're ugly, look crippled, and found in only one place in the world -- an oil spill.
It's true. There are a lot of BP Execs involved ~rimshot
A decline is when the issuing bank will not pay the charge attempting to be authorized by a merchant. The merchant will not receive funds for a decline. Chargebacks occur when a card number is found to be stolen (or some other reason) after a successful authorization and transaction, or if a customer files a protest for a charge on their credit card.
Chargebacks are a fact of life for merchants, but can be minimized by utilizing various security measures.
If all else fails, lower your standards.
