Governor DeWine announced today that school will be out starting Monday — I guess I understand the need for some logistical wrangling, but it seems a bit odd to say “there’s a public health emergency that requires us to close down all of the schools …. next week”. I wonder how many people will be absent for the rest of the week. It seems like — if there’s enough spread to require schools to be closed, we shouldn’t be going in tomorrow.
It bother anyone that the map on the CDC’s web site
Is missing a lot of data points that the map on NBC’s web site has?
We finally got around to calling Progressive about the difference in my quoted price v/s their renewal price … ugh! The first person we spoke to started out with ‘just cancel the old policy & open the new one’. Which, great — except it’s a pain. And we lose the ‘perks’ that come with being a long time customer. Including some 250$ off the deductible. Start a new policy, have the bad luck to get in an accident, and saving 150$ just cost me 250$. Not a great deal, that. Plus our home insurance is tied in with the car insurance. And the only reason I didn’t just buy insurance from GEICO (who had the lowest quoted price) is that I didn’t want to screw with the home insurance right now.
Luckily, she transferred us to an insurance agent for help. He checked and there was no way they could price the policy we had at the price quoted under my name. He was able to move the reduced deductible over to the new policy (although it’s still a pain that they have no provision for just swapping the names … and it’s even more of a pain that the person listed first makes such a difference in pricing!). Final price was 164$ for more coverage than the policy they wanted 321$ !?!?! Only took an hour and a half to get there! And I’ve got a really bad feeling the same thing can be done with the homeowners insurance. 🙁
The six-month price for our car insurance renewal went up. Again … which strikes me as odd since the car is older and its value has diminished. With the risks being similar – same drivers, same credit, same very small amount of driving – that coverage should go down year-to-year as the insurance company will be paying out a little less if the car gets destroyed. But, no, the price sneaks up every six months. And now they want 354$ (really 321$ because we don’t do installment billing).
I usually just renew the policy, but this year I decided to get quotes from a few other companies. I was wondering if “churn” (losing customers — basically the idea that there’s a fixed cost to acquire a customer, so the longer they stay with you … the more profitable the relationship becomes) just isn’t a concern in the insurance industry. So I got a few quotes — all of which were about half of what we’re paying. The best price was GEICO at 155$. For increased coverage, since one of our coverage selections was available only with a higher payout limit. That was puzzling since I cannot imagine the actuarial algorithms are that different between companies. And both Progressive and GEICO are paying for a LOT of advertising.
For convenience, I used my SSN to get the quotes and added Scott as the other driver. I wondered how this change would impact the price from Progressive. Now, logically — the risk calculation for Scott and I driving 2500 miles a year in this area with a car with a specific set of safety features and parked in our garage is the same as the risk calculation for I and Scott driving 2500 miles a year in this area with a car with a specific set of safety features and parked in our garage. Yes, I expect a slight difference based on our differing credit scores. But our scores are not that different (and when we bought the house, Scott has the slightly higher score). Got the quote back, and Progressive was willing to sell us a policy for just over half our current cost: 170$. Based simply on switching the account holder and ‘other driver’ people.
They will absolutely deny that it’s because men are charged more for insurance. There’s a lawsuit in there otherwise! But, realistically, there’s nothing that changes by swapping the two names which would impact the price so significantly. And this has been happening for the past six or seven years since we got married and bought joint insurance! That’s like two grand we’ve forked over to Progressive because they put Scott’s name down first!?!
They’re here!
Someone calls you, call them back. It’s easy enough to spoof an outgoing number (make my caller ID look like someone else’s), but intercepting calls to the 800 # on the back of my credit card or the local number on the Waterloo, MI PD’s website is near impossible.
When someone calls from “from my bank”, “about my credit card”, or “about my nephew who is in lockup for a DUI and needs money for bail and the impound lot”, I get the name of the company and call them at their Internet-published number. Real Bank of America can look up my account and figure out why they were calling me (they weren’t). Fake Bank of America? They push me not to waste time calling back in. It’s my time, and I’m happy to waste it. I assume the fake police and fake nephew are the same. And, yeah, fake nephew only gets this one phone call. *I* have unlimited calls, so we’re good.
At the last Trustee meeting, Chief Centner talked about fraudulent calls & said Township residents can ring up Hinckley PD for assistance if you get a call saying a relative is in jail. That is a great service to residents (and I’m having my parents check if their local PD would help too). I’ve never been sure if privacy restrictions would prevent the police from disclosing info about a family member’s arrest and bail. Luckily my nephew was like 2 when I got such a call. And I was pretty sure DUI wouldn’t have been the charge if my nephew had *actually* been arrested two time zones away from home.
I used to want to work in the military intelligence field — data analysis, creating response playbooks. As a result, I learned the importance of taking the context of a report into consideration. Some counties have independent media — something bad happens in the USA, someone is bound to write about it. Now there are avenues for suppressing information — some content that will compromise national security is going to have more trouble getting out there than speculation on corporate fraud committed by a president. But other countries don’t. When I was studying history and poli sci, it was Russia that was a concern. And Russian media publications are going to provide state approved news. For something really bad to hit the Russian news, it’s going to be impossible to hide. Think Chernobyl — they’re measuring fallout in Finland. Everyone knows something happened.
And that’s why I get a bad feeling when China reporting “a cluster of pneumonia cases” — a stock the pantry, batten your hatches bad feeling.
With contestants who think lying about harassment is a good game strategy, and a guy finally removed for unwanted touching … I wonder if this is the end of Survivor. Will next season feature an alliance that outright lies to eliminate competition at key moments in the game? Gain a majority by eliminating a player on the other side.
I’ll admit that I was only halfway paying attention to Survivor tonight, but it sounds like some women lied about someone’s physical contact making them uncomfortable (exaggerated their discomfort?) and then lied about their lying. They discuss the harassment, bond over the shared (miserable) experience. And then I hear “You tell her how uncomfortable you are … like, you have a very open mom/daughter moment about how uncomfortable you are. Right now, that’s our only play.” Our only play?!?
After someone else got voted off the island, Janet explains to Dan why she “turned” on him. Reasonable move, and if (as the show claims) they had a group meeting about respecting personal boundaries and an individual meeting with Dan that included a warning about his behavior … I’m not sure how it’s news to the dude why people were voting for him. Dan talks to Missy and Elizabeth and is told that Janet is lying to him. I mean, I know that the narrative gets built in editing and all … but it’s not like they’re selectively including the three times someone mentioned it to make it seem like something that’s a constant topic of conversation and the person says “I mentioned it once or twice, but I wasn’t making a huge deal about it”. If you never said that … there wouldn’t be footage to include. I was glad that Janet got all four of them together instead of allowing the other women to tell different stories to different people, but the ultimate resolution of their discussion seemed to be “well, Janet, you misunderstood and it got blown out of proportion”. Not “yes, I lied about this”.
Now, I’d understand if they decided that, yeah, dude makes them uncomfortable. But they were going to suck it up to retain their position in the game. I don’t want my alliance to think I’m untrustworthy, so I cannot vote out “one of us”. That would have been a rare bit of actual reality in “reality tv”. I’ve endured uncomfortable situations because I wanted to keep getting a paycheque. But the discomfort was truth. And I didn’t band together with a group of women, agreeing to discuss the problem with HR, only to tell HR that I never saw anything inappropriate. Tthe entire situation was disgusting – gee, why are people hesitant to believe someone who claims to be harassed – and I have a bad feeling that the “drama” is meant to be a hook for the show.
The ethos (or lack there-of) in Survivor has been part of the game since the second episode. Once contestants realized how the game worked, they figured out how to work the game. While lying with integrity is difficult to conceptualize, there are different types of lies told during the game … there’s a significant difference between maintaining multiple alliances or telling someone they’re not mentioned for the vote tonight and claiming that someone is harassing you and then telling that person you never said it. Working the game seems to rely on other players not becoming privy to the information we, as viewers, have. And I wonder what impact it would have on the ethics of the game if the endgame was tweaked. Once the final contestants were selected, and the members of the jury are known … take a few days break before the vote. Allow the production team to do some rough editing for broadcast footage. And then allow the jury to watch the show. Sure, content editing creates a story for each person and it’s a skewed view of the individual. But the final vote would more-or-less be cast with the same information viewers have. The jury thinks it is a shrewd move to use sexual harassment as a ‘play’ in the game and still votes for one of those women? That’s a lot different than jurors thinking Janet blew it out of proportion and only one contestant had complained about the guy.
TL;DR: Lots of content, but UI/UX fail.
The user interface for Amazon Music is terrible and lacks basic functionality (and there’s a disparity of what functionality exists across platforms). The general usability is poor — it is difficult to navigate content, tool tips were not consistently displayed on mouseOver, and there’s no easy way to select a genre and see various artists/albums/releases.
There is no simple way to find and queue music. There is no way to sort albums by release date to identify the latest albums from an artist. There is minimal information about the album displayed when you ‘View album’. You cannot play music to other devices — the search/queue function on the web platform is far better than the functionality in the FireTV app, but I am then stuck streaming to my laptop.
Removing an item from ‘My Music” required too many clicks – the quick actions on the album say ‘Add to My Music’. To remove it required clicking the hamburger button, selecting ‘view album’, clicking another hamburger button, then selecting ‘Remove from My Music’.
We experienced many bugs on the web app when adding an album to ‘my music’ (the album did not appear at all. Or the album did not appear *but* the item count was incremented — so it said there were 6 albums but only five albums displayed. Or the album did not appear, the item count incremented, and one of the already-added albums was listed twice).
When searching for an artist, selecting them in the “artist” section does not list albums from the artist. You have to scroll *past* the ‘artists’ listing and select the artist under “Albums” to view their albums.
I have not been able to find a way to “train” the suggestion algorithm. While I expect the algorithm is trained as we listen to music and possibly skip songs, I would like to be able to select genres or bands that I do not like. There’s no reason to show me four different country music channels if I do not listen to country music.
On the FireTV app, a video history of Biggie Smalls was promoted. We could not find a “Video” section to see what other video content is available.