> What makes this default even more egregious is that the stone-age-era IT system of the state’s Employment and Development Department (EDD) opened the floodgates to bad actors, permitting more than $30 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims during the pandemic. Those receiving fraudulent payments include incarcerated felons, a person impersonating a one-year-old, and a person impersonating Senator Dianne Feinstein. A single residential address received checks for around 60 separate individuals filing from that address.
I don't know how true this all is, but I find it doubly infuriating given that I lived in CA at the time and tried filing for benefits on the basis that my employer was cutting everyone's hours and pay temporarily in response to the pandemic (and in addition to layoffs). Technically, I was eligible for these benefits that I paid in to, but the application system would continually have errors in addition to being fairly difficult to parse if you've never tried using it before.
I also find it insane that the state government would constantly brag about their budget surplus and offer various benefits like the recent gas rebate. They do this while defaulting on billions of dollars in debt. I'm sure there was some justifications for how they can do this, but it all seems quite scummy to me, model behavior of completely shitty governance. Imagine every other city in densely populated areas utterly failing to fix the most basic issues while focusing on doing things like removing gendered language from their laws or, better yet, passing illegal laws like bans on gas stoves that inevitably get overturned by a higher court.
The morals and their exceptions are all people's opinions, and we now live in times where it's practically an act of courage to bother making a fucking decision on whether or not XYZ is morally okay.
The bug-brained stance is to just agree with moral relativism. "Oh gosh stealing/assault/murder is okay if you're poor," etc. Fuck that shit.
The only reason Zuckerberg wanted to pivot to the Metaverse was because he wanted to be president of the US but couldn't. The idea was spread briefly, and he found out that the general public hated him and he had no chance to win political office. He decided to make his own universe where he could be the virtual president / tyrannical dictator.
The fact that I could find, prior to Musk, fairly famous people who were refused blue checks whereas I'd see 'literal who' journalists made it clear the verification system was politically biased. People mad at Twitter 'Blue' are primarily mad that this bias went away.
Not that this goes too far against what the article is stating, but the headline at least: many of us thought that the blue check was de facto already devalued when you'd find blue checks you'd never heard of who write for Kotaku or some other bullshit outlet.
That was because Twitter gave them out en mass as a marketing ploy (growth hacking.) They literally gave them out to every newsroom for every writer, using the media outlets themselves as marketing engines to get their writers to post content. And the journalists and politicos all being on there made Twitter relevant. So it was a nice network effect.
Now we understand that the whole thing is social media hell. Just looking in the feed occasionally makes you so depressed about humanity. (But it is all performative as it really affects my life zero.)
D-list celebs who promote shit on Instagram without pointing out they're being paid. Somehow, I'm supposed to view this as markedly worse than Tom Brady, Larry David, etc. doing the same thing in a commercial.
Commercials don't require disclosure because everyone knows they're a commercial. The same is not true for influencers' Instagram posts. Sometimes the scripting is ham-handed enough to be obvious, but hardly always.
The outcome is the same, people buying something they may not have otherwise. Also, the fact that viewers know something is an ad doesn't change the fact that they view it as a celebrity endorsement.
I do find the "unlimited" plan claims annoying. Most operators make this false claim. I know for sure that Tello does something similar, and their fallback is a "2G" (not actually 2G, just throttled) throttled speed to about 64kb/s. This is effectively unusable, and while they might claim it is just "slower", in application, many requests will just timeout and cause errors at those speeds.
I think Mint and Boost throttle down to around 512kb/s, although not sure as I've never experienced, tested, or read about it myself.
I've also been on Mint for about 4 years. Didn't realize this until a couple of days ago when I looked at my billing info.
It's been mostly good, but MVNOs do get throttled traffic in some situations. When I lived in the SF Bay Area, it was somewhat annoying to frequently get throttled on a crowded BART train or just while walking around downtown in the middle of the day. But for the most part, it worked fine, and I adjusted to make things work better for me (download offline music and podcasts for commutes, that sort of thing). It's a great option for people who are cheap and patient about internet data speeds.
I don't know how true this all is, but I find it doubly infuriating given that I lived in CA at the time and tried filing for benefits on the basis that my employer was cutting everyone's hours and pay temporarily in response to the pandemic (and in addition to layoffs). Technically, I was eligible for these benefits that I paid in to, but the application system would continually have errors in addition to being fairly difficult to parse if you've never tried using it before.
I also find it insane that the state government would constantly brag about their budget surplus and offer various benefits like the recent gas rebate. They do this while defaulting on billions of dollars in debt. I'm sure there was some justifications for how they can do this, but it all seems quite scummy to me, model behavior of completely shitty governance. Imagine every other city in densely populated areas utterly failing to fix the most basic issues while focusing on doing things like removing gendered language from their laws or, better yet, passing illegal laws like bans on gas stoves that inevitably get overturned by a higher court.