Tag: Technology

Forced Participation

Retailing

Of late, there’s been a lot of what I’ve come to call “forced participation” in that after almost every retail transaction, it seems, one has to respond to a follow-up questionnaire on said transaction.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind, but the problem is that this is becoming increasingly tiresome.  FFS, the transaction took at most a minute, which is what one would expect from a routine transaction, and now I have to take three minutes to say the thing was worth 5 stars?  Frankly, given that the transaction was unexceptional — I paid my money, got the item, all pretty normal — in the normal scheme of things I’d just give it three stars and away we go.

Except that’s not how it works these days, is it? because now Management uses these “service metrics” as a performance indicator for the staff member in question, and (I’m told) anything less than 5 stars has (bad) consequences for the employee come salary review time, or bonus time for that matter.

So now one is more or less compelled to give 5 stars regardless (unless the service was crap, in which case the reduced star count is or should be unexpected).

And here’s the problem.  If five stars is de rigeur, then how do we describe or reward outstanding service?  Like so much grading nowadays, if everyone gets an A, then what is the worth of an A?

I remember once awarding a single star (because I couldn’t give 0 or a negative) for a truly horrendous experience.  The problem was, as I explained to the drone who actually called me to see what had happened (!), that the problem was not with the customer service rep — who had been truly excellent, by the way — but with the corporation’s stupid policy, something over which the poor girl had no control.  But what was I supposed to do?  Give five stars for a monumental clusterfuck?  How does that help?

The situation didn’t improve when I asked the supervisor if I was going to get a survey on his service call, because he hadn’t helped the situation either.  At the end of it, I simply told the supervisor that the outcome was that I was never going to do business with his company ever again, given their shitty policy and terrible backup.  (And I never have.)

As with so many of he little technologies that have injected themselves into our lives of late, this one is being misused (even abused) by people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing and don’t know how to set up or manage information streams.

A plague on all their houses.

Oh, and there will be a followup post on a related matter, all about how I stopped doing business with a longtime service provider precisely because they’ve started abusing the data that I’ve been exchanging with them.  I have to allow a little time to pass before I do because if I rant about what I really think at the moment, there could be lawyers (theirs, of course).

Watch this space.

Update:  Got another one just this morning.

“You recently made contact with Tina at our Customer Service Center. As one of Tina’s customers, we believe you are the most relevant and credible expert to offer advice to help Tina continue to improve. Tina would love your help and it should only take two minutes. Click on the button below to take the survey.”

Yeah, “Tina would love your help” — like she’ll ever see my input other than if I call her service (which was outstanding, by the way) terrible.

Assholes.

Future, By Subscription Only

Corporate Fuckery, Technology

Reader Stephen S. chimes in with this little piece of technological bastardy:

The rapidly approaching future of the Windows PC is no longer just about what’s on your desk, but what you’re permitted—by subscription—to access from the cloud. Microsoft promotes this as inevitable and, to some, the advantages are real. Yet for those uncomfortable with their digital world being defined and priced by a faraway corporation, alternatives remain.
What is worse is that Microsoft will have your data on their cloud (OneDrive) and you will need to continually pay to have access to it.   On the flip side, because it is on “their” computer systems (1970’s Supreme Court Decision), they will be able to scan it and use it for training their AI.  They will also be able to sell your data to 3rd parties, again because it is on “their” computers.  [Microsoft has already changed their EULA to reflect this]
How does the medical profession make sure the patients’s data is secure.  Although on a personal level, I’m sure Microsoft’s AI would love finding out about illness discussions, personal behavior, etc to be sold to 3rd parties.  That kind of info is what insurance companies would love to know, and the users would be paying Microsoft to provide it to them.
But a larger point occurs to me.  Microsoft would be getting the financial data for people and businesses smaller than the DOW 50, and that is a gold mine for them (Wall St spends millions to collect it).  Again, the users are paying Microsoft to provide their financials to Microsoft, and then Microsoft can then use it.

How nice.

It has taken me a Herculean effort to stop this OneDrive bullshit from imposing itself on my paltry online existence, and I’m not even sure that I’ve been that successful.  I get the occasional “warning” email that my OneCloud subscription has expired or my storage allocation is full, and that they can no longer store any more of my data — to which, of course, my unspoken response is:  I never wanted you to store my data anyway, so fuck off.

I have no idea how this is going to end, or if it ever will.

Old-Fashioned Security

Technology

One comment (on this article) got me thinking:

I’m speaking to my business’s IT people about getting a “cold storage” option, even just a hard drive sitting in a desk drawer we update once a week. I don’t know how much I trust our cloud based database now.

Back when I was running Grand Union’s customer management function, I was fearful to the extent of paranoia about protecting our customers’ data privacy.  So fearful was I that I made several changes (against massive resistance from IT) in our data storage process.

As with all such nascent programs of the time, when customers applied for a loyalty card, we collected their personal data (name and address) and applied a unique ID number embedded in the card’s magnetic strip (no chips back then).  Like everyone else, we delegated this task to our card provider, who included that service, plus a direct mail service in their product offering.  I wasn’t too comfortable about having our customers’ data in the hands of a third party, but you have to trust somebody sometimes, and I figured that they had more to lose in the mismanagement thereof, which would keep them honest.

Then I found out that our company’s IT department had ordered the provider to send them those customer files over to us, as a “backup” and “security” measure (of course).  I didn’t like having two sets of data out there, but being the new boy, I kept my trap shut.

Then I found out that Store Operations was in the process of setting up a little routine which would track our staff’s spending — all staff had cards issued to them (for the wrong reasons, by the way, but I’ll talk about that some other time).  So I blew up at the Ops VP — the first time I had exploded at a senior member of upper management, but by no means the last — and uttered the words that became quite legendary at Grand Union.

“Let me make one thing quite clear.  Just because we are housing the data, does not mean you can play with it.  You know who owns the data?  I DO.  And only I will dictate how the data is to be used from now on.”  (There were more words, calling them idiots for abusing our own staff when in fact we were getting free research from their behavior, but that too is a story for another time.)

The result of all this was that I took all the personal customer data off the mainframe, leaving only the unique IDs behind, and stored that data not on our department’s terminal — which of course was linked to IT — but on a stand-alone PC in my techie Kenny’s office, on which resided only the customer data (and IDs of course), and the necessary tools to manage it (I used Paradox as the database manager and query tool, and Quattro Pro as the spreadsheet program).  Incidentally, the only way I got funding for the PC was by threatening to just buy one with my own money if I got turned down.  The only way to get data off that PC was by diskette (remember them) and Jaz cassettes (once again, the best mass offline storage media at the time);  and I had the only other Jaz drive in the company (and also the only other Quattro Pro software, but that was by choice because MS Excel was and still is an inferior product).

And absolutely everything was password-protected — only Kenny and I had admin privileges.  It was unwieldy, and often frustrating, and time-consuming;  but our data was secure, which was all that mattered to me.  So when we were doing a direct-mail promotion to our customer-cardholders, Kenny and I would do the analysis, then send the promotional offer and list of customer IDs to our card provider to create the mail shot.  (The “sending” of the promo details involved handing a Jaz cassette to our account executive to take back to their IT department:  also unwieldy and time-consuming, but irrelevant to me.  And the head of their IT department was a great friend of mine, so I trusted him to safeguard the data.)

And all that was in the mid-1990s, when data snooping was rudimentary, crude and easily blocked.  Now?  Fuggedabahtit.

I do know that had anyone in my department even suggested to me that I back up our data on some Internet-based “cloud” (for the usual “convenience” reasons), I would probably have fired them, for forgetting that when it comes to data — most especially private data — security matters more than ease or convenience.  I eve refused to back up our customer data on the company’s own mainframe, so protective did I feel about the issue.

And I think that people need to feel more like that today, because in today’s world data security is more, not less fragile and indeed vulnerable.

Shared Concerns

Technology, Watermelons

For once, there’s an article worth reading at National Review, and for once, I find myself somewhat in agreement with the rabid Leftoids (albeit for different reasons).

[T]here’s a consistent and surprisingly effective effort to convince you that the biggest threat to your community is the plans for a new AI data center on the other side of town. Read on.
Democrats’ Data Center Obsession

Back in 2024, I observed that when some of America’s biggest tech companies realized that they needed significantly more electrical power to run their data centers in the decades to come, they decided that restarting decommissioned nuclear plants was the best, most cost-effective, and most reliable option. And with the seeming snap of their fingers, a slew of those closed nuclear plants were scheduled to start operating again in the coming years.

And it wasn’t just Republican governors like Glenn Youngkin of Virginia eager to re-embrace nuclear power; Democrats like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine all jumped on board. It was a case of the right policy finally being enacted after decades of foot-dragging and fearmongering, but more than a little frustrating that years of conservatives winning the policy argument and being right on the facts didn’t move the needle on the issue; it was Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other big companies simply saying, “We want this.”

We should have known that eventually the progressive wing of the Democratic Party would wake up and galvanize opposition; now an increasingly loud swath of Americans, mostly on the left, seem to hate data centers the way they used to hate your SUV, your Big Mac, and, well, you.

Of course, the reason the Watermelons are being stirred to violence is because electricity is eeeevil, as is nuuuuclear powerrrr etc. etc.

I don’t care about any of that.

What concerns me about A.I. is more of a philosophical nature because while I can see many benefits of having computing power save humans a lot of grunt work and so on, I am profoundly disturbed by the implications of letting A.I. run things — and more especially, run the activities and affairs of humans.  As long as it’s a tool, therefore, I think I can get behind it;  but as a management system, I remain deeply skeptical.

And my skepticism stems from two sources.

Firstly, I think it’s all too easy (through laziness or indifference) to hand over the reins to outside control — we just have to see how cars are being thus transformed as an example — and as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out (way far out) on whether this is a good, bad or evil thing.

My second concern stems from the basic premise of A.I., as I’ve said before, in that the collective [sic] wisdom can form a secure foundation for intelligence.  As someone who has often used and manipulated data myself, I am intimately familiar with how this process can be affected by, let’s call it malevolent forces.  And whereas in the past one could rely on some kind of human element to be a firewall on this issue, we are now faced with the prospect of A.I.-driven bots to not only speed up the process massively, but also to conceal what’s actually going on.

I’m not going to do anything stupid like bomb some data center, of course, nor would I ever support the assholes that do this kind of thing.  If they do something vile like this, or even plan to do something like this and get caught, then by all means hang them, bury them under a prison or stick them in some deep dark jail cell forever.

I do think that we aren’t being careful enough with the drive to A.I., because the guys who are building it are obsessed with performance / generation.  As with all science, though, we need to continuously ask ourselves the question:  “Just because we can, are we sure that we should?”

And I see very few people asking that question of A.I. — which means that the field of resistance is being left open for the loony Leftoids.

Catching Up

Food & Drink, Good Stuff

Stop the presses!  Here’s the latest kitchen fad:

Serious home cooks looking to create a restaurant-style kitchen in their own homes are lusting after yet another piece of culinary kit.

Surfaces may already be groaning under the weight of appliances such as air fryers, espresso machines and top-of-the-range mixers – and let’s not forget the pizza oven in the shed, but middle-class foodies are now adding deli-style meat slicers to their polished countertops.

The ‘industry’ style equipment, which ranges in price from around £50 for a budget version on Amazon to the early thousands for an all-singing, all-dancing one, can precision slice through everything from smoked salmon to hams and cheeses – and even sourdough – with ease.

And while they may seem like an indulgent addition to an everyday kitchen, top chefs say they’re worth the investment – because not only will your charcuterie taste superior, but you can also buy it in bulk, which almost always saves money.

There’s less waste too, because you slice what you need, ensuring wafer-thin sheets of Parma ham don’t go unloved in the fridge.

The slicers – both hand-operated and electric – work by cutting food to uniform sheets, as thick or as thin as you’d like, which can affect flavors significantly, say those in the know.

Well, yes.  The above article appeared in the Daily Mail  yesterday (February 12, 2026).

Then there’s this:

…which appeared in this post, dated Nov 25, 2023.

Good grief;  for once, I’m actually ahead of a trend.

No need to thank me;  it’s all part of the service.  (Oh, and don’t let the product description fool you.  I used the above machine to slice meats like salami, ham and beef for years.)

RFI: OS

Advice, Technology

As someone who is actively looking to do this, can someone please explain the last panel to me?

…because I don’t understand the iconography.  What are the products?

#StupidOldFart #OutOfTouch