I very rarely refund anything, but when I do, I send a single email that I want a refund and if it isn't done promptly I will chargeback. It's usually the best customer service I get. No security questions, no Indian call centres, no "are you sure" questions. I don't blame people for just hitting the dispute button though. Years of piss poor customer service has conditioned it.
We always issue a refund if a customer asks, or at least try to find a compromise if the payment was made a very long time ago. In that case, it’s usually more about a pro-rated refund.
But recently I asked for a refund from a very popular project management system, and it was a nightmare, an absolutely terrible experience. After that, I gained a new level of respect for our own support team ))
I live in Thailand, many expat accounts have been closed down, making it very hard to pay bills etc. in the country. That will form part of the 3 million. Huge overreaction that will dent the economy and will no doubt be flip-flopped on in a few months time.
It’s important to note that many of the expat accounts have been closed down due to the laxity of individual bank branches in enforcing their own policies, which were taken advantage of by nefarious actors. Many expats attempt to open bank accounts on tourist visas (which include the recently popular Destination Thailand Visa for digital nomads) without proper identification, and though allowed in the past, is now being restricted. One can argue about the classification of visas and the dissonance between economic goals and immigration policy, but for Thais, this is a long overdue enforcement action especially as it regards to scams targeting an older generation. Yes, it significantly impacts honest expats looking to stay beyond the short-term, but there is a way to doing things in Thailand that requires guests to adapt to their hosts, of which accepting the reality of Thailand’s political situations is an important part.
Foreigners on DTVs are allowed to stay for five years. To prohibit someone living in Thailand for such a long period from opening a bank account - often necessary for paying rent and other necessities - is insane. And sanctimony about "guests adapting to their hosts" doesn't make it any less so.
Thailand doesn't want foreigners holding accounts. They've cranked up the requirements over time. It used to be possible to open an account as a tourist and now you're lucky to be able to get one on any visa that isn't attached to a work permit or PR.
1. The kind that is looking at visiting Thailand as a cheap way to booze, party, smoke weed, and do other stuff. They do not spend enough money to move the needle economically in a country where the majority of the economy is connected to automotive and electronics manufacturing
2. The kind that try to reside in Thailand long term but don't want to file for immigration, so using various loopholes like the "Visa dash" or paying for Thai language classes with no attendance or requirements to attend the class. Lots of drop shippers are doing this and are dodging incorporation taxes in Thailand
3. The kind that come to only train Muay Thai or BJJ, but don't contribute to the rest of the economy (I'm guilty of this). Living and training exclusive at a Fairtex or a Sityodong isn't percolating capital in the rest of Thailand.
All 3 of these types of expats and tourists are barely spending $500/mo in Thailand after rent or hotel spend, and simply don't contribute to the Thai economy to the same degree the other sectors of the economy are. The only reason those 3 types of tourists are tolerated is because the businesses they patronize are overwhelmingly owned by local politicians and give them pocket change, but aren't actually useful from an economic perspective, because it has depressed wages, and exacerbated organized crime.
Heritage and upscale tourism is a separate story, because the premiums that can be demanded and the wages and skills needed incentivize upskilling as well as building a white money local ecosystem.
This is tangential but relevant - Thailand's current fertility rate has fallen to 1, substantially less than Japan even. And this fertility collapse happened long enough that they've already entered into the population decline phase - with accelerating declines over the past 4 years.
It's still the early stages, but Thailand is going to unavoidably be entering into demographic collapse over the coming decades. So tourism, especially when it results in attracting lawful/educated/etc long-term residents, provides more than however much money people can spend.
Of course Thais themselves just need to start having a lot more babies, but it's not looking like that's going to happen. The whole world is going to look so different in 50 years, even if literally nothing whatsoever changed from a technological POV. Fertility issues are going to radically reshape the entire world and the balance of powers, perspectives, even religions, and much more.
>They do not spend enough money to move the needle economically in a country where the majority of the economy is connected to automotive and electronics manufacturing
Don't sex tourists contribute the most? Fall for the girl, "save her", build a house in Isan, fund her new business, then she ditches him and keeps it all because farang by law limited to 49% equity.
That isn't always a scam actually. A lot of old fa^W men retire and marry a citizen to secure rights to the land under their house. I have seen a lot of that (entire gated communities) and it all seemed long-term and high-commitment and in a good faith. Ones on the younger side of their 60ies mostly have a business of some sort and kids together too.
I don't know how much love is there in these marriages and don't draw any judgement either.
1. So what? Are you the kind of guy who wants "quality tourists" and then cries when tourism indicators are down several months in a row?
2. Whose fault is that? Give me a path to residency and I'll happily file taxes there. No one wants to play this game and be treated as a second class citizen.
Also if your visa allows back-to-back entries that's exactly what I'll do. Nowhere does it say that there's a limit, therefore it's not "abuse".
FWIW I really wish I could open shop in Thailand, pay taxes there from my online business and gain visa/residency through it, do it you think it's possible/easy? Nope. Roadblocks at every step.
3. WTF do you want exactly? I'm injecting $500/mo in Thailand, do you prefer 0? This line of thinking is insane.
Anyway $500/mo in Thailand nowadays is basically impossible unless you live in a shack or in the sticks.
> Also if your visa allows back-to-back entries that's exactly what I'll do. Nowhere does it say that there's a limit, therefore it's not "abuse".
Also if the law says you should pay taxes, that's exactly what you should do. Nowhere does it say that there's an exemption for people paying their food and rent ("injecting" $500), therefore you should pay (taxes).
You didn't read my message because that's what I want to do if it was easier (and banks were reliable). Given this news I'll probably continue to not invest in Thailand.
I'm fairly young and I remember this debt ceiling brinkmanship happening several times in the past , turning out to be a nothingburger. Is this time any different? (Genuine question I'm not American)
I usually see similar sin in both parties. But it's notable that not one Democrat Senator is standing up and demanding e.g. the Green New Deal or disbanding ICE in exchange for their vote on the debt ceiling.
Brinkmanship only works if there's a real risk of going over the edge. Is this the roll of the dice that's going to come up snake-eyes? Probably not, but no-one really knows.
They know exactly what it means, and they are betting on the electorate having zero long term memory, which, unfortunately, rings quite true in election years.
There is no brinkmanship, people need to realize that. A crashed economy with high gas prices, rampant inflation, etc... in an election year is exactly what the GOP wants when a Democrat is in the White House. Why do you think right-wing media has been screeching about "Biden's crappy economy" for months now while the GOP's only play is to push Biden to enact a 315 page budget that features 271 pages of handouts to the Oil&Gas lobby? They put in what they want, and have the upper hand, because they get to blame it on Biden when it inevitably goes to shit, and look like they tried something and all Biden said was "no" and a crash happens. That play has worked time and time again and it wins elections.
The GOP playbook for as long as I've been alive is "break things when we're in power, but make sure they aren't visibly broken until a Democrat is in power, and then raise hell about how Democrats always break things, so people will vote us back in".
NINJA EDIT: I wish people were educated enough to understand why Washington and his greatest political rival, John Adams, both were in unison when it came to suggesting that a two party system would destroy our country.
Washington: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
Adams: “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
That's only true if you think they value money more than power. If power is what they care about more, then they could absolutely believe that creating chaos could be more to their advantage. Given the global rise in authoritarianism, and given that in times of trouble people shift toward favoring authoritarians, it's entirely plausible to me that there are political actors who will create the problems that they then claim they will solve.
Not necessarily. Take the "heighten the contradictions" types, who believe in either not remediating or even increasing the pain of current societal dysfunctions. They believe that after a blowup and revolution, things will be better.
You see a fair bit of that sort of logic on the right lately. Saletan's "The Corruption of Lindsey Graham" [1] documents the shift nicely, with Graham going from a senator who believed in democracy and inter-party comity to one who says Democrats "hate us" and "want to destroy us", claiming "there’s nothing they won’t do". Or look at Trump calling for the "termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution".
In that context, political actors can claim and might even believe that saving America from the boogeymen might require making things worse before they step in to put things right.
Bonds are basically like high-denomination dollar bills with a small "coupon" interest payment stapled to them. The interest can be ignored and then we just treat them like money. As all big financial institutions do. They're the "risk free" place to store money. Which is why Circle (via Blackrock) are holding so many in the first place.
Now, what happens if the US defaults, even technically-defaults (missing just one payment) and all this "money" held by financial institutions is suddenly "not money"? Or "maybe not money"?
I would expect a majority of US banks to be in FDIC resolution the next day. As bank stocks fall off a cliff, they start taking the rest of the economy with them. Things would rapidly outstrip the existing ability of the system to absorb small crises. It would look like Cyprus in 2008.
Do you ever wonder why it is that politicians that are, at least nominally, ultimately responsible for signing $6.3 trillion in checks every year only manage to enrich themselves to the tune of a few dozen millions at best? The fry cook at McDonalds gets a larger share of the overall take.
I have two possible explanations. 1) Our politicians are remarkably morally virtuous, and there is virtually no graft and corruption whatsoever. 2) Our politicians are front-men for the actual powers that be and are compensated on a model similar to WWE superstars. In the latter case it's the financial interests of the PTB that will control, not those of the politicians.
We ARE headed toward a pretty tight election. And the MAGA crowd seem to want conflict for it's own sake (and apparently run the whole republican party).
On the last point, I must be missing something obvious, but why don't those workers who have their passports taken report them lost/stolen and get a new one from their embassy?
Because their job is tied to company owned by the citizen of the host country who employs them (their visa sponsor), and they're probably sending money back home to India, Pakistan or Bangladesh to support a family of eight people. You report that and cause a legal fuss with your employers, you not only don't get paid your previous month of work, you get deported and banned from the UAE or Qatar or Saudi Arabia for life.
The police in UAE are not there to help Indian people get their passports returned... and I suspect it would be incredibly dangerous to start complaining to them; your only reason to be there is to work, cheaply and shut up. You are a second class citizen and it’s unbelievably naive to start sticking your head above your station. You’ll be telling them they should start a union next!
Western expats might be second class citizens in the UAE, with some luck. As a worker from India in the UAE, you are far treated far below a second class citizen, sadly.
So we have an individual that has travelled overseas to earn more money than he would be able to make at home, to better support his family. That is not a slave and calling it slavery cheapens actual slavery IMO.
Now, having said that, the conditions are appalling and the employers do many unscrupulous and illegal things. But it is a voluntary arrangement unlike slavery.
The workers have often had to pay huge fees to brokers to score the job in the first place, often including taking out large loans that must be paid back with the job's income.
On arrival, the worker realizes that everything they have been told is a lie. Their passport is confiscated and they are told that, if they try to run away to their embassy etc, goons will go to their family to extort the money owed for the loans by any means necessary, including torture and death.
Would you still call this a "voluntary arrangement"?
> Would you still call this a "voluntary arrangement"?
Perhaps not for the first guy to ever fall for this. But existing workers are still communicating with the folks back home, so prospective new workers now what to expect and what to believe and not to believe.
I agree that they aren't treated well; but we can't ignore that the situation back home is often even worse.
There are a lot of poor villages in Pakistan or Nepal, a lot of brokers, a lot of different lies to tell and a lot of suckers born every minute. And, of course, there's the odd village boy who beats the odds, strikes it rich (often by getting into a position where he can exploit others, eg as a labor broker), builds a big-ass house and becomes inspiration for others to follow in his footsteps.
No, especially the element of having goons back home to coerce the family sounds like actually slavery. I double check these days. Westerners try to make charity cases out of people from the developing world that are just trying to make a buck like we all do.
Just today I needed to run some software only available in .deb and only on Ubuntu 22.04. So whipped out an old laptop that had Ubuntu installed and ran sudo do-release-upgrade to upgrade to 22.04. boom! GUI gone and the terminal was flooded with weird filesystem errors. I had to spend the whole afternoon reinstalling from scratch.
I would love a Linux daily driver but I've had similar experiences to the above every time I've tried it for the last 15 years.
This would be a valid way of thinking about it, but programmers aren't generally judged on their meeting attendance but rather their code output. More meetings == less code == worse perceived performance == fewer opportunities for pay increases and promotions
> More meetings == less code == worse perceived performance == fewer opportunities for pay increases and promotions
That's a rather junior mentality. When one is junior, yeah, usually the most one can do is moving Jira tickets to Done (which means merging code usually). But when one is senior, the pay increases and promotions come from other activities: mentoring, handling technical topics between teams (usually via meetings), etc.
> This would be a valid way of thinking about it, but programmers aren't generally judged on their meeting attendance but rather their code output.
Not universally. Programmers are judged by overall success or failure of the project they are working on. And those ones who can take credit for a success or who can effectively deflect blame for failure are the ones who got promoted. Being in the meetings with the decision makers provides the forum for self-promotion and controlling the message. This does not always mean that they did most of the work. More code or less code is unfortunately secondary.
It's a weird focus comparing it with how the internet developed in a very wild west way. Imagine if internet tech got delayed until they could figure out how to not have it used for porn.
Saftey from what exactly? The AI being mean to you? Just close the tab. Saftey to build a business on top? It's a self described research preview, perhaps too early to be thinking about that. Yet new releases are delayed for months for 'saftey'
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