Screw your workers for 30+ years, move your production, make them embarrassed with your company name by eliminating engineering excellence and outsourcing quality to lowest bidder, withhold raises for a decade, remove a real retirement plan and see what happens.

Good for them.

I received several texts today on my personal phone number addressed to a minor child in my household for whom I provide health insurance from Kaiser.

1. I opted out of Kaiser text message communications. They don't respect it because Marketing?
2. The messages are addressing a minor child, yet sent to me, the adult. Kaiser would know their age. If they're young, directly texting them is a violation of parental consent. If they're a dependent there could be all kinds of privacy concerns for say a teen who maybe doesn't want their parents to be involved in such conversations.
3. I went to Kaiser's website to make a complaint. They don't provide an e-mail contact so you have to use a web submission form. Attachments (e.g. screenshots) aren't allowed. I copied in the text of the text messages after noting my concerns above and tried to submit. The web form said "unsupported characters", which I then spent 30 minutes trying to guess which of the characters from the texts they sent me might be unsupported by their website.
4. I decided to call their web support to find out which characters were unsupported, I'm sure I wasn't the first person to have the issue. They asked for personal identifying information that isn't necessary to provide website support, spent 5 minutes locating my account, and then told me they'd have to transfer me to a different region as they don't support my region.
5. They transferred me and I received an audio notice that the region was experiencing technical difficulties and the call disconnected.
6. I went back to the web form to open a complaint about their web form and submitted it suggesting they identify which characters are not permitted. The form also is about 3 lines of text high but accepts 1,000 characters which makes it very difficult to read as the web user (I'm sure a dark pattern to reduce form submission)
7. I called support again to try to reengage them to find out if they could identify the characters so I could submit the ticket myself. I got a different agent and had to tell them my original complaint and then what had just happened. They said they didn't know which characters were permissible, that my regions support shouldn't be down as they had no alerts, and wouldn't be able to find out which characters the form could use, despite being web support. They said they could take my complaint over the phone.
8. I asked what else they needed to make the complaint. The woman said just a minute and pulled up a form after talking to a colleague and asked me to start from the beginning to make my compliant. I hung up.
9. I went back on the website, typed out the entirety of the text messages I had received, my concern and the form allowed me to submit. The text messages must have had a hidden character or space that wasn't visible to me when copying/pasting.

Now I wait to hear back on my two complaints. All so that, after furiously and competently struggling against the machine, I get back to a place where maybe if I'm lucky they will respect my communication preferences, not contact my child without my permission, potentially fix their shit website, which would leave me maybe about as good off as I was before I was aware of these issues.

I feel like Calvin at the bottom of the big snowball hill he and Hobbes used, only in the modern US it's a shit snowball and it's full of companies who are technologically incompetent and aren't incentivized to follow even the laws they likely helped shaped through lobbying. The above issue is hardly even bad compared to other situations I or others have been through, it's the routiniety of it that is so dystopian.

Edit: 10. IT support responded to my ticket tonight. They didn't read the complaint and provided boilerplate AI template responses on how to submit a ticket when logged in as a customer.They also provided instructions on how to take a screenshot and asked me to respond to their e-mail and attach it so they could review. I responded telling them I didn't need instructions on how to take a screenshot or how to submit a message, that was included in my ticket which they didn't read--I needed a functional communication system, and reviewing the above points and then attached screenshots. I received an automated response almost instantly from their system that I had responded to a ticket that had already been closed and that Kaiser hoped they had resolved the issue to my satisfaction. No ability to re-open the ticket, no contact e-mail or phone number to continue to try to resolve the issue.

...and it contained a meth/fent dealer starter kit; cash, gun, drugs and scales.

If anyone else uses this emulator and (unfortunately) Windows, are you seeing turbo run throughs when loading ROMS? This updates were installed yesterday and they're the only thing I can think of unless the rom speed can be controlled elsewhere in the system I'm not seeing:

2024-10 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 23H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5044285)

2024-10 Cumulative Update for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8.1 for Windows 11, version 23H2 for x64 (KB5044033)

Cheers.

edit - fixed with tip below (- key slows down emulation)

There is probably a link somewhere but it would be nice to have the essentials in the boost comment/post forms somewhere so that if I'm trying to remember how to link a user/forum/instance or how to strikethrough text it would be right there.

Replacing a dishwasher. Most of the mid-range options now come with fucking Wi-Fi. Found a model I liked, no info in manual and support from Samsung was of course, useless since it wasn't already in the manual and wanted to keep talking about their exciting "smart things" app. gag.

I saw a youtube video of a guy disconnecting wifi cable on a fridge. I'm fine doing that if I have to open up the board but it'll probably be smaller than the fridge and who knows if it'll be helpfully labled like the one in the video was. Internet searching showed me there may be oven keypress combinations to turn wi-fi radio on/off. Anyone have anything similar/advice for Samsung appliances, specifically dishwashers?

Going into quick settings or full settings from search result menu, I disable AI in Search Results. It goes away.

Opening Firefox again and searching it turns back on.

How can this be disabled in Brave permanently? Not only do I want to not wait for AI, it's trash to begin with.

TIA

When the music, the creativity, the stars and a story are unforgettable.

Instead of posting, then having to tediously copy/paste to different instances with similar communities, it would be nice (although potentially crazy spammy) to allow x-posting from one post. This may be less of a Boost idea and more of a Lemmy discussion, but if it can be enabled in Boost I thought that would be a nice addition.

Other than "dont' use Godaddy", what do I need to know? I've never owned a domain or had a website of my own before.

1. Domain registration/host recommendations?
2. Web hosting recommendations? Should I mix #1 and #2?
3. Website template creation suggestions? Have fairly simple needs like service offerings and contact forms but want something without rotating construction cones.
4. What else should I consider? Security? e-mail?
5. Am open to all-in-one for the above, just would like to understand tradeoffs, what to look for/avoid.

TIA

It’s a common misconception, but if you registered "Independent Party" you aren’t “independent” you are a member of your state’s Independent party, who has a platform and agenda you may or may not agree with. What you actually want is called an "unaffiliated" voter status. The good news is, all you have to do is...nothing!

LA Times had a good summary a few years back: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-american-independent-party-california-registration-card-20180405-story.html

You don’t need to register with any party to show you don’t like R or D, do nothing or choose "unaffiliated if you want to be “little i independent”.

Examples:

• New York - http://ipny.org/platform.html

• Oregon - https://www.indparty.com/

• Illinois - https://www.iviipo.org/our-policies/economic-issues

• American Independent Party - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Independent_Party

#USA #politics----

Twice in the last week videos I have viewed have been saved in a boost photos folder. I didn't request to save or download them at any point. Is this based on the site, internal vs. external browser choice, caching or something else?

Obviously is prefer videos not be downloaded if I don't try to save/download them.