Unneighborly

According to the Wall Street Journal, State Farm sales agents are up in arms over a scheme to reduce their compensation and benefits, now that State Farm has lost the title of premier auto insurer to Progressive.

I don't blame them.

I used to be a State Farm customer. I was with them for many years.

One day, my car was in the parking lot of a local drugstore, when some yahoo hit it and drove away. I called State Farm and was told to use their online claims tool. Which I did. A week went by, with no response. In the meantime, I learned that I really needed to have my car fixed, because despite the fact that it ran perfectly well, the fact that it was now down a headlight and turn signal meant that it wasn't street legal.

So I called State Farm. And was told to use their online tool. I told customer service that I had. The agent looked, and, with clear surprise, told me that the company had simply dropped the ball; for reasons they couldn't explain, my report was still sitting there, waiting to be picked up.

Things went downhill from there. If someone had told me in advance how poorly things would have gone, I wouldn't have believed them. It was an unmitigated disaster. And completely unexpected, given that State Farm wasn't just some random online-only insurance startup.

And so I switched insurers. My State Farm agent, who I really liked, sent me a letter, asking me to come back, and promising me a discount on premiums. I felt badly for him; none of what happened was remotely his fault, yet he was the one expected to grovel. And I told him: what I was looking for was from someone for State Farm corporate to get on the phone and say that they hadn't met expectations. One mistake can be chalked up to human error. When literally nothing works as promised, there's a process problem that needs to be fixed.

I understand State Farm forcing cuts on agents, due to falling revenues. But when I stopped buying insurance through them, it wasn't due to premium rates; it was the impression that I couldn't be sure that I would get the services I was paying for. I shopped around when I switched companies, and the rates were pretty much all the same; the only real way to reduce what I was paying was to drop certain coverage. Given this, I suspect that I'm not the only person who didn't find State Farm to be good value for money. Making the agents take it on the chin won't fix that.

Hot Coffee

Taken in a Seattle-area Starbucks. (Where else?)

One thing that I've never taken the time to learn is image-manipulation software. I'm pretty sure that Photoshop could accentuate the steam rising from the white tumbler pretty easily. Come to think of it, I suspect that if I knew my camera well, I could have made the steam stand out simply by engaging the proper settings. But it's reasonably visible as it is, and that's good enough for my needs.
 

Looking Up

I avoid doomscrolling. I think. I'm not sure that I'm clear enough on the definition of the term to be able to confidently say that I don't do it. I don't spend much time on news sites these days, because most of them require subscriptions, and I don't find most of them valuable enough to trade date, let alone money, for. And other than Linkedin, I don't have much of a social media presence. I enjoyed Google+, but that's long dead at this point. I could never get a straight answer as to the proposed business models of the would-be alternatives, and so never moved over to any of them. I haunt Reddit once in a while, but don't spend much time reading the news there.

So I don't think that I indulge in a lot of doomscrolling. But even without it, it's hard to find positive news about what's going on in the would, since positive items neither sell subscriptions nor drive attention to advertisers. So my media diet tends to have a fairly negative bent to it... which I dislike, and so I'm less likely to spend a lot of time reading the news.

But why do that, when the positive news is out there... it's just a matter of going out and finding it. Part of it, I suspect, is an aversion to the treacly "rainbows and puppies" sort of good news. It's easy to sort, and easy to report, but it comes across as being pretty trivial. There are only so many rousingly successful grade school bake sales I can be bothered to read about. Perhaps it's due to the stories being mainly human interest. And of course there are always people out there doing good things... the population of the United States is in the hundreds of millions, we can't all be jackasses all the time.

I think that what I'm actually looking for is accessible technology news; something I can read to learn how people are getting out there and solving problem, with enough technical detail that it's not all about the personal stories involved, but in language that I can actually make heads or tails of, given that I don't have a technical education.

That's likely to be a rare beast, and unlikely to be free. But, given the length and breadth of the World Wide Web, it's out there somewhere, I just have to find it. I expect that it will be a worthwhile project. 

Enlightening

Why not?

I stopped in a local bookstore and found this display. I'd never heard of celebrity prayer candles before, but it turns out that there's a decent-sized cottage industry for this sort of thing. I already have a few too many things that I don't have an immediate use for, otherwise, I might have purchased one, just for the novelty factor.

I'm a bit surprised that this hasn't made anyone angry enough that it's become newsworthy, but I suppose I shouldn't complain when people take things in stride for a change.
 

Hidden

A low-effort fake profile from LinkedIn.

So I received a connection request on LinkedIn from a person I'd never heard of, and wasn't even a second-level contact. Curious, I looked at their profile. And was greeted by a raft of red flags.

This sort of thing is common with fraudulent LinkedIn profiles: the lack of connections, prior roles without details and only a handful of connection despite a seemingly long career. And all that before I did a reverse image search on the profile picture.

And that commonality can be part of the problem. Because while not all bogus profiles are so obviously bogus, it can be easy to come to the conclusion that they are. And thus, anyone with an ounce of sense should be able to spot them. But someone with a decent amount of time and some resources can avoid many of the obvious pitfalls; existing profiles can be "rented" or compromised, work histories can align with stated timeframes and locations, and a fabricated résumé can be constructed. That may be more effort than a stereotypical third-world fraudster can bring to the project, but not everyone conforms to the stereotype.