• Art35ian@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.

    I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.

    No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.

    • SupraMario@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Sounds like they didn’t spend any money on Cyber security’s team to properly implement it then…data exfil %100 would have been picked up by any real DLP solution and even barebones heuristics based EDR would have thrown a red flag as well.

      • Art35ian@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Haha, please. You’re talking about machine learning when the best any business is using is antivirus. You forget, Boomers are still running big business and IT departments are running security.

        It’s perfect world vs. real world my dude, and real world puts out tender for the cheapest solution.

        • SupraMario@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          It sounds like you’ve been working for Mom and pop shops then, and they’re not having audits done. Companies with millions of customers will usually either have in house secops or an mssp handle everything. Point being is, without audits then insurance usually will not be approved for PII loss or they flat out will not work with the company at all. It even more so with HIPAA laws.

          • ApostleO@startrek.website
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            8 months ago

            I’m with the above commenter. I’ve worked at many companies of various sizes, from small local shops up to international corporations, including at least one contractor for the US military.

            Every one of them had rules and policies and training on security, to varying degrees. But at every one of them, I’d find some vulnerability, or instance where someone was neglecting security. Each time, I’d bring it to the attention of someone in management. Each time (with one company as exception), those warnings would be “heard” and “passed up the chain”, and then nothing would happen. Only one company in 20 years of work actually fixed a security issue I found. And no company I’ve ever worked for was leak proof.

            In my experience, until it threatens to cost a company much more money in losses than it would cost to fix the problem, but said problem will not get fixed. That’s profit motive. And often it seems they’d rather roll the dice until a loss occurs, and then (maybe) fix the issue.

      • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I’ve worked at plenty of companies with exfil protection and people still did this. One has 100 devs and 500 total employees

    • Dasnap@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The past decade of the tech industry has felt very snakeoil-y.

      INB4 “It always has been.”

      • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        What’s sad is there are plenty of actual problems out there that could be solved with software. Most of the time they’re not that ‘sexy’ and management is so blinded by greed that they throw away all the good opportunities.

      • ourob@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        If you’re good at building hype and have some connections, you can attract all sorts of investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.

        Dan Olsen’s NFT video from a year ago summed it up well, I think (link). People with money to invest today want to repeat the insane growth in wealth brought about by computers, the internet, social media, etc. So they will basically gamble on any new ideas that have an air of plausibility to kick off the next boom.

    • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      It is kind of hilarious that airplanes are seen as being safe and reliable, when if they were given the same factor of safety as most other consumer goods, they’d never get off the ground from being too heavy.

      I do NOT recommend you do this, but if a ladder says it is designed for 300 lbs, then it should carry 1200 lbs. 4X is a fairly common factor of safety for things like ladders where people’s lives are in jeopardy. Most other items are usually 2X. (I want to point out that there are qualifications to this… static loading and dynamic loading are totally different things. Also a simple point load is not the same as a cantilevered loading condition. A new piece of equipment is not the same as one abused on the job for the last 10 years. All these things will dramatically affect safety ratings for things)

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’d say the difference is that every single part of an airline is carefully rated though. Everything that’s supplied for use on an airline is expensive because of all the regulations.

        A ladder may be rated for 1200 pounds, but nobody inspects every single use-case for that ladder and ensures that the entire system always has 4x safety. Once you buy the ladder it’s up to you what you lean it up against, etc.

        • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          Regulations and quality checks on aerospace parts is no joke. More so on stuff that goes out into space and on military hardware, but every single nut and bolt and everything in between can be traced back to a supplier and that supplier will be able to tell you when it was made, by who and even where the raw material came from and show you the certs. Regular airplanes not nearly as strict or as much paperwork, but it isn’t that far behind, quite honestly.

          Also, you might be surprised by the testing that ladders go through. Not so much the cheapo Chinesium stuff, but safety in all fields is no joke. It is too costly to skimp on testing.

          • ApostleO@startrek.website
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            8 months ago

            I used to believe this, but recent incidents have exposed systemic issues in engineering and QA at at least one major US aerospace manufacturer.

  • solstice@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.

    Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.

      • solstice@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah but most people aren’t Alexander the Great or Mozart. And even if you are, you’re probably not working in congress, hah

        • fubo@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Alexander had Aristotle to tutor him. If you find yourself young and in power, you better hope your elder advisors are that good.

  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.

    The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.

    • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      You didn’t talk about how coffins are sold for many thousands of dollars when they are just cheap plywood boxes that shouldn’t cost more than a hundred bucks and that serve no purpose other than to decay as quickly as possible.

      • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they’re actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they’re bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can’t have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.

        The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person’s identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They’re often sold for $300 to $500.

    • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      Not so fun story:

      One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.

      As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.

      After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.

      After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.

      On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.

      I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.

      I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.

      I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.

      I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.

      • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.

        The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.

        • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.

          You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.

          You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.

          The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.

  • GoosLife@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    When your favorite band cancels their gig because the lead singer has “come down with the flu”, that’s industry code for “got too wasted, and is currently too busy getting alcohol and possibly drugs out of their system to perform”.

    I even worked one show that had to end after 20 minutes because one guy in the band was visibly under the influence, refused to play, talked to his hallucinations, then spent a few minutes talking to the audience about how his foot was evil and wanted to kill him, before the tour manager could drag him off stage. Then he tried to assault several backstage staff for not allowing him to cut off his foot. This was on a tour that promoted alcohol free rockshows btw, so we didn’t provide alcohol to the artists backstage. God knows what he might’ve purchased from our local street dealers lol.

    The next day in the papers, the headline says “[the band] cancels first week of reunion tour after flu outbreak” 🙃 Yes, of course

    • StereoTrespasser@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      I always wondered why Paul Westerberg caught the flu so much. When I finally got to see him live a few years ago he definitely was coming down with the flu on stage.

  • Muffi@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.

    • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.

      (Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)

        • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.

          Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.

          • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:

            The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.

            A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.

            That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.

            Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.

              I can’t wait to retire when I’m 208 years old.

              • SCB@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Butlarian crusade

                Butlerian Jihad, my dude. Hate to correct you, but the spice must flow.

                • Hydroel@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  If you’re going to correct people about Dune quotes, at least use one from the book! “The spice must flow” doesn’t appear in any of them, it’s a Lynch addition.

      • insomniac@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.

    • LurkNoMore@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Package management is impossible. When a big enough package pushes an update the house of cards eill fall. This causes project packages with greatly outdated versions to exist in production because there is no budget to diagnose and replace packages that are no longer available when a dependency requires a change.

      Examples: adminJs or admin bro… one of them. Switched the package used to render rich text fields.

      React-scripts or is it create react app, I don’t recall. Back end packages no long work as is on the front end. Or something like that? On huge projects, who’s got the budget to address this to get the project up to date?

      This has to be a world wide thing. There is way to many moving targets for every company to have all packages up to date.

      It’s only a matter of time before an exploit of some sort is found and who knows what happens from there.

  • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    How online ads actually work.

    Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it “put ads here, here and here”.

    The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.

    One of them goes “I know this guy, they’re an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I’ll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face”. Someone else yells “I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn’t bought one yet.”

    The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.

    That’s extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.

    • drekly@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      And how you’re tracked online. I’ve worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don’t see you,the user, and your data.

      I just click “female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone” and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they’re super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.

      And that’s advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won’t even get into the audience side of things and they’ll stick to keywords: they’ll show you an ad because you searched for “autumn home decor” and that’s all.

      Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don’t have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don’t understand it, and it’s true, they don’t have time… so then Google takes your “autumn wreath” keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for “Christmas trees”, because they’re both seasons and they’re both plant related, right?

      And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn’t interested and left right away.

      My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn’t fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren’t there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.

  • ToppestOfDogs@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.

    Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.

    The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.

    Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.

    • Tilgare@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.

      One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.

      Sounds like it’d be pretty simple to just replace it and not tell them. If they tell you they know it should’ve broken down by now, just ask, “Why, did you intentionally sell me something defective?”

      • Dadd Volante@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.

        Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already

        Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.

  • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Supermarket employee here. We have a “fresh” fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.

    Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they’re lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some … people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.

    Long story short, “fresh” fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.

    • malloc@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Hold up, you mean that market in the middle of nowhere (like Kansas) with “fresh caught” fish was not caught by my local fisherman.

      Shocked, I tell you 😂

      • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Oh you’d be surprised … by the way, the same goes for literally everything at the bakery counter. Heard a customer complain once that she won’t ever buy pretzels in the store again because they weren’t actually freshly made, the employees just tossed prepackaged frozen pretzels ino the oven yadda yadda … uhhhm lady, do you really think they’re kneading dough behind the scenes?! Never wondered why your croissants, bread rolls and the like always have the same shape, size and weight? It’s almost as if they were made in a factory or something …

        …yet these, too, are treated like first choice over the frozen bread rolls you can bake at home, because “a real baker made them” …

        • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          The bakery part hits me especially hard, I’m living in germany, where many people are proud of the bread culture, and you basically need to look for artisan bakeries to get stuff they actually made themselves instead of having frozen stuff delivered and just baked in the store. The saddest part is most people don’t realize, while still writing comments online about how “american bread is just sugar”

          • If you’re ever in San Francico there’s this hole in the wall Bob’s Donuts on Polk Street, go there after 8pm and order whatever was just made. Eat a five-minute-old donut.

            Bob’s supplies most of the cafés and donut shops in San Francisco, and tapping the source is a fast way to becoming a donut snob and addict.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    [in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.

    I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Fuck everything about the current US healthcare system. The US can be so much more, can be so much better, if we could somehow just make a single percent stop fucking over the other 99%

  • ccunix@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Sysadmins have no idea what they are doing, we’re just one step ahead of the rest of you at googling stuff.

  • ✨Abigail Watson✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Accounting is a goddamn mess. There’s lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we’re supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world’s audit, tax, and consulting needs. They’re supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You’re worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.

    And the only reason it continues to work is society’s social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don’t have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we’re all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It’s bonkers.

    I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I’m in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.

    • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Accounting, just like economics, likes to pretend it is a hard science when in reality is it close to reading tea leaves.

    • at_an_angle@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      So basically, everyone is full of bullshit and lying to keep the system working.

      Why am I not surprised?

      • Sludgeyy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Social security would be a ponzi scheme if it wasn’t done by the government. System only works because new younger people are “convinced” to put in money to pay the old in hopes that new younger people will pay them in the future.

        The social security liability is currently 23 trillion. If no new people started paying in and everyone wanted to cash out, they couldn’t get a dime.

        We are 33 trillion dollars in debt. 33 trillion.

        If we as a country ever tried to cut spending and save money to pay that down, our economy would collapse so fast.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Social security was designed to be that way, it’s not a secret or anything. It’s how the system was set up and it’s how it is supposed to work. Today’s workers fund today’s retirees.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Except it was built with the assumption that everyone would continue to have 2.5 kids, and skilled immigrants would keep making the US home, and the economy would keep growing and growing forever, and retirees would die off a couple of years after they retired.

            All the base assumptions on which the system were built were shaky. People are having fewer kids, so there’s less money coming in. Retirees are living longer so they need more benefits. People who paid hundreds of thousands into the system during their lifetimes are requiring millions in benefits at the end of their lives. But, people are having fewer kids and so the bottom of the pyramid is shrinking.

  • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    For those in the US: no medical office dealing with insurance has a clue what they’re doing. Why can’t you ever “shop around” and get a price for your procedure? Because nobody really knows the price until they submit the claim. It’s basically impossible for a human to keep track of the policies that change daily across dozens of insurance providers along with the hugely complicated calculations needed to get a price. And that’s before they have software try to rearrange your claim to get the most money possible from insurance companies. And good luck figuring any of this out yourself; even if you manage to track down the policy data, it’s written completely in medical insurance jargon and might even leave some room for interpretation.

    Basically, even with the insane amount of work medical coders (people who process and interpret medical claims and policies) do to try and stay on top of it all, at the end of the day, you have to just submit the claim to a black hole and hope that it gets accepted. The patient’s cost is whatever it spits out.

    Also, dozens of doctors across the US get fired, banned from practice in their state, or have their licenses revoked every month. Some of them are unfortunate, like doctors being forced into retirement due to old age or physical inability to do their job, but many others get in trouble for practicing without a license, sexual harassment/assault, and, of course, prescription drug abuse. This data is all publicly accessible, but being on atrociously designed and maintained government websites, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who’s in trouble without paying for third party software to do it for you. If you don’t happen to catch it, it’s pretty easy for a medical provider to move a few states over and set up shop like nothing happened.

    Edit: Oh yeah, our company was very serious about HIPAA training and treated patient data with extreme caution. Some offices… really didn’t. It got to the point where we’d straight up have to reject ticket requests for having identifying information. Our ticketing system was secure on our end, no telling what was going on outside of it.

    As a side note, for the trans people out there, don’t accept that you have to be misgendered on your medical records without a bit of a fuss. There’s special modifiers that specifically override restrictions on sex-based medical procedures when your reported gender doesn’t match their requirements. Unfortunately, whether your provider knows about or uses them is a bit of a toss-up.

    On a brighter note, as stupid as it is that every single diagnosis has to be codified specifically for the insurance industry, there are some funny codes in there.

    Some favorites:

    Now there’s a new standard coming into effect, ICD11. The biggest complaint with ICD10 was the overly specific codes they had to keep track of. They did change things so that you didn’t have a completely different code for every single type of, say, dolphin injury, but they did add many more animals.

  • rmuk@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Outsourced IT provider here:

    90% of businesses have basically zero IT security. Leaked passwords in regular use and no process or verification for password resets. As soon as someone complains that 2FA or password rotation is difficult it gets dropped. Virtually all company data is stored on USB keys, plaintext hard drives and on staff’s personal home devices.

    The reason they’re not constantly having their data stolen is because no-one cares about the companies either.

  • andros_rex@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Teacher - school districts are so afraid of getting sued that unless a kid is physically assaulting another student we have absolutely nothing we can do about it (even then, no guarantees). If your kid goes to a public school, all of your kids classes have one or two students that are allowed to do essentially whatever they want with no consequences.

    Cell phone addiction is also huge. A lot of the “learning loss” being blamed on Covid is in part just the fact that students spend class watching TikTok’s or bullying each other in group chats. Don’t fucking text your kid during class. Vaping is as predominant as smoking was in the 80s.