Never do business with a company you can’t call on the phone.
I learned this lesson – one I give many people – for myself a couple of days ago.
I had been using Skype to do some meetings on line. Skype is a Microsoft company.
In one case it saved me a business trip and got me a contract worth close to $100,000.
But my honest face and harsh phone voice scared off some other more genteel possible customers recently. The lines of work I am in – investigation and heavy industry training and publishing – do not feature guys who look like male models. Most of the people who have been doing Skype interviews with me are young enough to be my children. They wound up doing business with prettier but less effective people.
So it was time to unplug Skype.
I found out it was easy to kill the Skype program, but not easy to pry their fingers off of my credit card.
On my credit card bill, the number listed for Skype.com/go/bill/ was (650) 899-1504. So I called it a couple of times, and each time a recording said, “This number is not in use.”
Their “customer service” contact was a joke. The e-mail “service” kept refusing to let me register a “DISCONTINUE” order. And they weren’t offering me a phone number to call, anywhere on line.
So after I called several Microsoft stores and abused the unfriendly employees who said they couldn’t help me, I did some searching and came up with a Microsoft phone number that reached someone who answered the phone.
For the record, the number I used is (877) 696-7786.
The person who answered the phone said, in a sing-songy voice I associated with countries in Asia where dog is a food group, that his name was Mike and he was in Memphis.
“Nice try, guy,” I thought. “Maybe Macau. Or Mindanao. But not Memphis.”
The guy talked me through killing everything to do with Microsoft accounts on my laptop. He forgot to tell me to uninstall the Skype program. I did this myself later.
He also said he didn’t recognize the (650) 899-1504 number.
He also said Skype had no record of me ever ordering their services or records on my account.
It didn’t stop them from charging me, I told Dogbreath.
He was unhelpful, so I told him “I can’t wait till President Trump breaks up you Microsoft (vulgar synonym for submissive homosexual behavior)s like a glass bottle.”
I then hung up.
I called my credit card company, and asked them for a phone number or Skype besides the one they printed on my statement. I told them that number was invalid. They said they couldn’t track down any number for Microsoft/Skype. I said, “Then why do you allow those a-holes to bill your card holders? They are contacting you to get paid, aren’t they?”
The third person I talked to (because I kept hanging up on the knucklehead hires when they got stuck and wouldn’t refer me to a manager) admitted her credit card company relies on the info that vendors give them without verifying it or requiring updates. This hampers customers in contacting questionable vendors and is an abuse of consumer credit laws. I had the girl cancel my credit card and issue me another one. So 99 is joking that she has me on a budget now until the new card comes in.
Why did I nuke my card? It stops Skype from grabbing any more money.
The company that issued my credit card is better than most in customer service, so I reckon most credit card companies’ people don’t check on vendor contact phone numbers either.
I checked the (650) 899-1504 phone number on line later. It turns out Microsoft/Skype has been using that line to convince people to buy more services from Skype and possibly scam them as to why they were apparently overbilling their customers.
Skype’s shitheads also cost me time and effort in contacting companies whose people I have authorized to bill my credit card for monthly bills.
So I will contact the Federal Trade Commission and my congressman about this. Perhaps the bureaucrats will actually do something about Skype, and perhaps my congressman will listen to President Trump ague for breaking up techie monopolies more than he listens to the economic traitors of the Chamber of Commerce.
LESSON? DO NOT DEAL WITH ANY COMPANY YOU CANNOT READILY CALL.
Accurate history is a public record.
Who went to war against the robber barons?
Men like General William T. Sherman’s brother John and Theodore Roosevelt. Sherman, a senator from Ohio, got the Sherman Anti-Trust Act signed into law in 1890. Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to really use this law. Teddy, who became president when an anarchist murdered William McKinley, had his federal attorneys use it several hundred times in actions against the monopolists.
Theodore Roosevelt. Our Man in NYC, DC, wherever needed. RIP, Mr. President!
Muckraking journalists in the 1890s and early 1900s publicized official and corporate misconduct. Teddy Roosevelt gave them the nickname “muckrakers.” Roosevelt, who had been the police commissioner of New York City, knew a number of the muckrakers. He didn’t always approve of them, but he acted on legitimate exposes they provided.
Real journalist Ida Tarbell, relying on public records and a series of interviews with Standard Oil Company executives and allies and opponents, wrote a series of magazine articles for McClure’s Magazine about the monopoly and the rebates and kickbacks it got from the railroads. Ida also would benefit from a young employee of Standard Oil who sent her copies of receipts of illegal payments he was supposed to destroy. She had documentary proof of some of Rockefeller’s corporate corruption. Her editors put the articles together and published them in book form. The result? “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” It was one of the best muckraker books of all time.
Ida Tarbell. Along with Nellie Bly, she set the standard for wome in media.
Ida Tarbell grew up in Pennsylvania’s oil country in north of Pittsburgh. Her father worked for John Rockefeller and knew all too well his crooked practices. On the other hand, the oil industry was on the whole a great benefit to America. Ida, who had a degree in a real science (biology) and also knew geology better than most, wrote accurately about Standard Oil, and included positive as well as negative info on the monopoly. This even-handed approach made her work more devastating than a fierce anti-oil book would have done.
In large part due to the outcry Ms. Tarbell’s work generated, Theodore Roosevelt’s people investigated and prosecuted Standard Oil.
Teddy Roosevelt, a stud himself, appointed a number of studs to the federal bench. Among these was Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a fiery Ohioan whose father fought in General Sherman’s Army and suffered a wound in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Judge, Baseball Commissioner, Irate Man of Integrity.
Judge Landis in 1907 heard one of several cases Theodore Roosevelt’s prosecutors were bringing against oil refinery monopolist John Rockefeller. Judge Landis ordered Standard Oil smashed into several pieces and fined Rockefeller’s corporation $29.2 million for multiple violations of the Elkins Act. This law forbade railway rebates; Standard Oil executives forced railroads to give them rebates due to volume, which gave them an advantage on their competitors. Landis fined the oil trust $20,000 per illegally rebated tank car load of oil; this was where the fine total came from.
A judge who evidently had ties to Rockefeller overturned Landis’ decision. Theodore Roosevelt was furious with this judge over the judge’s sabotaging of his war on illegal trusts. The appellate judge, whose name was Grosscup, soon quit the bench. (Rockefeller’s son-in-law invited the judge to his estate after he overturned Landis’ ruling. Could he have been bribed into overturning and retirement?)
Eventually, other prosecutors won a conviction against Standard Oil on grounds the refinery giant violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by being a “combination in restraint of interstate commerce.” The conviction withstood crooked appellate judges and even withstood the Supreme Court. The high court judges allowed the breakup punishment Landis had pioneered to stand.
Even though Teddy Roosevelt’s successor William Howard Taft was nowhere near as energetic, his federal prosecutors were even more energetic in using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act than Theodore’s had been. But TR and his people at least pioneered the punishment and pushed cases that would stand up in court. In our court system, precedent is everything.
Guess what? All of these government anti-trust people I named were Republicans.
(Info of Judge Landis and Standard Oil comes from New York Times articles dated 8/10/1907, 7/23/1908, 7/26/1908, 9/11/1908, and 10/22/1908, from a 6/11/1923 Time article, from a March 1970 article titled “The Gentlewoman and the Robber Baron” by Virginia Van Der Veer Hamilton in American Heritage magazine, and the 1911 Supreme Court ruling on the 1910 case Standard Oil Company of New Jersey et. al v. U.S. (221 U.S. 1, Case No. No. 398). )
Donald Trump is a Republican born in New York City like Theodore Roosevelt. Trump, like Teddy, is not in the club. Trump and Teddy have encountered the opposition of the GOP establishment and the open enmity of the Democrats. The GOP establishment stole a presidential nomination from Teddy, and they tried to steal one from Trump.
Today’s tech field monopolists like Bill Gates at Microsoft, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and others of their ilk are hard leftists. Many of them, like Google’s geeks and Facebook’s ferrets, are thought fascists who suppress pro-American thought on their search engines and on social media. Many of them are also economic traitors. They urge a vast expansion in H-1B visas for countries like India and China who send us techs who are not as good as our own people, but will work cheap and will engage in industrial espionage.
They don’t pay much in the way of corporate taxes here because they offshore their books and pay lesser taxes in other countries and write off their expenses here.
If any companies should be broken up like Standard Oil, Microsoft and Amazon and Google and Facebook are my first four choices. President Trump, please smash them with my compliments.
As for H1-B visas, I believe we should curtail them or drastically limit them.
These are not the visas someone like Albert Einstein or Enrico Fermi would use to come to America and build up science and industry. These visas are called O-1 visas. The O-1 visa is for “foreign nationals of extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics.” The O-2 visa is for the O-1 visa holder’s assistants, and the O-3 visa is for his family members. (Many baseball players from Latin America could qualify for this type of visa.)
There are also the EB-1 visas. They are for “priority workers.” This immigrant visa is for “foreign nationals of extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics,” for “foreign nationals that are outstanding professors or researchers,” and for “foreign nationals that are managers and executives subject to international transfer to the United States.”
Only a few score thousand people and their family members qualify for these visas.
Now back to credit cards and businesses.
Credit card companies are urging parents to give their kids credit cards “to teach them about credit and finances.” This is another sinister corporate trick that plays on the “keep up with the Joneses” insecurity that many Americans are suckers for having.
Is it any wonder some kids are abusing these credit cards, buying things without their parents’ consent?
For many reasons, I urge you not to give your kids credit cards. Some will lose them. Others will misuse them, or let their friends con them into misusing them. The irresponsibility of most teens can also lead to data breaches that will affect your family.
Fortunately, most of the parents who give their kids credit cards are wealthier than the norm. This means when the credit card companies come for their money, they can pay it.
This is a problem mostly found in the Northeast and the Pacific Coast, where there are many affluent and soft parents. Other parts of the West are less likely to see credit card-toting teens. Southern parents are not as prone to let Junior or Missy screw up their credit. Then too, every state in the South except for Virginia (which has lots of parasite federal employees and consultants) voted for Trump. The section least likely to fall for this foolishness? The Midwest. The voters of 10 of the 12 Midwestern states voted for Trump over Hillary. In Minnesota, Trump and Evan McMuffin voters outnumbered Hillary voters. And in Illinois, the only solid Hillary state, youths in Chicago obtain credit cards by stealing them from adults they rob.
(Source: 3/24/2019 creditcards.com article by Barri Segal)
My Mom wouldn’t have nagged my Dad to give me a credit card. And Dad would have beaten hell out of me if I misused one. Nowadays too many mothers are helicoptering whiners and too many fathers are not real men. Then, too, the same public schools whose teachers molest tens of thousands of children a year are the first to call the law if a kid says his old man wore him out for his misbehavior.
Now to a related corrupt industry which grows fat off of extending credit to youths – colleges.
A few celebs got caught getting college exam people to cheat for their kids on placement tests and getting college coaches to claim falsely the little darlings were in extracurricular activities.
You would expect the University of Southern California to be neck-deep in this. They are as crooked as a corkscrew. They name their sports teams after a brand of condom.
Trojan women in comparative economics class? Or Ivy women social climbing in women’s studies?
It fits. USC’s campus OB-GYN, a guy named George Tyndall, stands accused of molesting hundreds of Trojan women, some of whom were human guinea pigs in RU-486 abortion pill trials the USC medical school (which produces all too many abortionists) was involved in.
But the hoity-toity schools like some of the Ivies and other such schools were involved also.
The larger problem is the high cost of a college education. Before I joined the Army, I went to Loyola University for a year. Tuition for nonresidents cost $2000. I got a $500 scholarship and a $500 loan. I paid the other $1000 by working as a mechanic’s helper in a paper mill in the afternoons and early evenings at $2.50 an hour. Mom and Dad gave me room and board, but I had to do chores, and I had to help Dad with construction projects and parish work on weekends.
If I hadn’t been accepted for the Army training I chose, I would have become a union carpenter’s apprentice or electrician’s apprentice and would have had the money to go to school and pay off my loan.
As it was, I paid off the $500 loan while I was in the Army. The Army sent me to college for four years, so I paid off the college I got from the Army by serving as a combat branch officer for a few years.
One of the guys at my parish went to medical school. The state he went to school in needed rural doctors, so they were willing to help him with tuition if he was willing to spend several years being a country doctor.
Several of the guys at my parish got athletic scholarships in football. They were able to get educations in careers ranging from engineering to agriculture to business to forestry.
By and large many of these paths to graduation don’t exist today.
Immigrants, often illegal ones, take factory jobs. Or the owners of industries ship their manufacturing to China or India or elsewhere.
Or kids don’t get after-school or summer jobs because of the demand by colleges for extracurricular activities. Working on a farm or in a factory or on a construction site is a whole lot better education for a youth than theater, glee club, or sports.
If a kid needs to build self-confidence, he or she should take martial arts training in boxing, judo, karate, or some similar self-defense discipline. Boxing and Army self-defense, coupled with industrial and construction work, turned me from a 125-pound weakling into a fit and aggressive young man ready to smash Communism and jihadism and able to tear up guys quite a bit heavier than me.
As for costs, legislators need to streamline the public colleges. There is no need for lesbian studies, gay studies, snowflake safe zones, student activity funds that aid anti-American thought, or diversity monitors, for starters.
Colleges know what other colleges charge. There is quasi-collusion in pricing among colleges akin to what the industrial trusts used to do.
More money should go into educating for the sciences. However, colleges should prepare young people for careers. Math, biology, chemistry, engineering, physics, accounting, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, medicine, and computer programming should have good courses. Likewise for disciplines like business and teaching and fire science and law enforcement and paramedics. There are too many courses taught on subjects kids don’t need.
There needs to be a stop to importing low-skilled low-paid techies from overseas. This would encourage more of our kids to study STEM subjects, knowing scumbag corporate types couldn’t force them out for low quality imports.
There is a place for classical education. We need the social studies to pass on our heritage in history, law, religion, and culture, like they do at colleges like Steubenville, Christendom, Hillsdale, and Grove City.
But we need to level with kids about getting degrees in subjects that will only saddle then with debt instead of marketable skills.
This should happen at the high school level and again at colleges before admission to college.
And there should be some recruitment for high school kids who learn by doing. There should be legitimate technical colleges reasonable in price to teach students the trades of carpentry, plumbing, electrician, machinist, welder, miner, smith, and similar disciplines for those who are more apt to be happy, productive, and decently paid in the trades. Allow these kids to learn business management so they can form their own companies someday and be successful.
Too many college profs are worthless. They need competition, not tenure.
And the colleges and the school loan racketeers need some scrutiny and new laws. And sterner law enforcement.
Too many school loan outfits operate in secrecy, practice usury, and use threats other credit companies cannot employ. Many of them are unresponsive to students’ requests for records concerning their loans and charges. College administrators don’t stop these racketeers, because they benefit from all the high loans to students.
Perhaps there should be some enforcement on these loan sharks and their buddies in college. After all, if Duke University can admit they stole more than $100 million from the feds, how hard would it be to find where they and most other colleges have stolen from students and parents?
(Per Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak, 3/26/2019, “Duke will pay the federal government $112.5 million in a settlement that “resolves allegations that between 2006 and 2018, Duke knowingly submitted and caused to be submitted claims to the [National Institutes of Health] and to the [Environmental Protection Agency] that contained falsified or fabricated data or statements in thirty (30) grants, causing the NIH and EPA to pay out grants funds they otherwise would not have,” the Department of Justice said Monday. Suck on that, Coach K and the Duke Diversity Police.)
This is something President Trump will likely have to handle, as most college profs and administrators are Democrats, and the Democrats in government cover for them. By the way, former Democrat senator and college president David Boren is under scrutiny for allegedly sexually harassing a male student. The New York Times’ reporter who covered this in a 3/29/2019 article “forgot” to say the former president of the University of Oklahoma and accused fagele Boren is a Democrat. Boomer Sooner, Boren, you alleged pervert.
But you have to help out too, as a parent.
Figure out what your kids enjoy and are good at. Then steer them toward trades they can earn livings at that they might enjoy. See that they take the courses they need to qualify for college or trade school. Level with them on what the working world is like. Have them talk to people in your circle who work in professions that interest your children. And don’t do everything for them. They have to learn on their own.
Encourage kids to follow their dreams. But tell them to have a backup plan that will help them earn honest livings just in case.
99 and I farmed for many years. We provided work for a number of teenagers. There are adults out there like us that you might know. See if they will hire your kids if your kids are willing to work instead of just stand around with hands in pockets. Learning how to show up on time and give a good day’s effort are worthwhile life skills for any teen boy and teen girl to learn.
When it comes to raising your children and helping them become worthwhile adults, you are their first responder. Moms and Dads, we’re praying for all of you!
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
