Paul Krugman demonstrates the importance of understanding WRAITHS and Alt-QAnon

In "Wonking Out: Russian Gas, Acid Raid and Industrial Scaremongers,"Paul Krugman -- who is very smart and a pretty good economist -- seems almost surprised to impart the following "big lesson" to us:

The big lesson here is that you can’t trust industries to provide a reliable, or even honest, assessment of the economic impact of policies that might hurt their bottom line.

Of course, that's a major common sense premise of Alt-QAnon, although Alt-QAnon takes us much farther and deeper. 

He goes on:

This runs counter to the instincts of many people, including politicians. As I said, Germany’s leaders seem to have decided to believe industrialists who say they can’t live without Russian gas and have lashed out at economists who disagree. And in a way I can understand this attitude: Surely executives who actually run companies, who deal every day with business problems, know more about economic reality than nerdy guys in think tanks. Right?

So if you've read my various explanations of Alt-QAnon and WRAITHS in this blog, and have said to yourself something like "everyone knows that," here is Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman telling you that not everybody does, and lots of people think the opposite.  It even almost seems like Krugman himself is only just figuring this out, and just starting to analyze it:

But this presumption has been wrong time and again. I think for two reasons. First, industrialists who weigh in on policy issues that affect them have a huge incentive to talk their own book — to throw out numbers that are meant to scare the public into leaving them alone, rather than to provide realistic assessments.

Very Alt-QAnon-esque, although he is still thinking of the "industrialists" as individuals, acting in their own interests -- which is certainly true -- while the broader point is that the "industrialists" here have little volition whatsoever.  They are part of an artificially intelligent organism, and they are simply playing the role that has been assigned to them.  They would not have achieved that position if they had not been determined to be good for that role, so they will not deviate from it.

Krugman still is not sure that he's been persuasive:  

Oh, and for anyone saying that fine upstanding business leaders wouldn’t do something like that, remember Dieselgate — the massive fraud perpetrated by German automakers to make their cars seem far less polluting than they were.

Dieselgate is certainly a fine example, but it weakens his argument to point to one single foreign example to support his point, when this has been the basic way that industries have worked since the time of the East India Company and before.  Instead of just listing dieselgate, he could have easily listed hundreds if not of thousands of similarly egregious examples.  I've discussed other examples in various places in this blog, for example here,. and yet another one that comes to mind is the "ethyl" industry's push to put lead into gasoline despite lead's known toxicity, and the many.millions of deaths that caused.

But Krugman feels a need to bolster the argument with yet another point:

Second, executives within an industry do indeed know a lot about how things work in their business right now. There’s much less reason to believe that they have a good sense of how things might be done differently — of the adaptations and innovations they might be able to make in the face of a drastically changed situation. It’s like what happens in financial crises: Wall Street types are infinitely better than academics at guessing what will happen day to day, but when things fall apart, economists familiar with economic history tend to do better than those immersed in normal trading.

This may be a decent point, but it diminishes the basic point by seeming to suggest that perhaps the "industries know best" in times when there are no issues of change.  Going back to his first point (and Alt-QAnon's premise), businesses that are doing well will ALWAYS be resistant to change, unless they can see a way that the change benefits them.  Given that "change" is always a possibility, this is also a statement about industry's bias in favor of the status quo.  So the "second" point adds nothing to the first, and actually is a little bit dangerous -- it implies that when things are going well and there are no external sources of change, we can trust businesses.  But that's just not right -- there is always the possibility of beneficial change, and they will always resist it.

And now he has to tell us that the lessons go beyond the immediate point of his column:

The lessons here go well beyond the immediate scandal of Germany’s timid response to Russian atrocities. The same considerations apply to policies that are even more important: actions to limit climate change, which looks more than ever like an existential threat. Business leaders and the politicians who listen to them always claim that the economic costs of adequate action would be unsupportable. Don’t believe them.

So maybe he is slowly inventing something like Alt-QAnon for himself, even though it's been sitting there in front of all of us all of this time.

Not to belabor the point, but this all reduces to what Henry Hazlitt said in Economics in One Lesson -- that industries will hire the "best buyable minds" to make the best arguments that can be made for a given position.  An argument by an industry will necessarily support that industry's profit-making interests and if there is a better argument out there that does not support the industry, the industry will necessarily oppose it.

Note the subcaption of the article:

Kind of sad that a modern Nobel Prize winner is still working out what Hazlitt was telling us was basic economics back in 1946. 

Chess Grandmaster Sergei Karjakin's Mindless Patriotism

In explaining his recent open letter to Vladimir Putin (reproduced below), Sergei Karjakin tweeted: 

"My answer is simple. I am on the side of Russia and my President . . . . No matter what happens, I will support my country in any situation without thinking for a second!"

This is a guy who can spend up to an hour thinking about the right move in a championship level chess game.  He became a grandmaster at age 12 (a record at the time), and played Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship in 2018.  (He self- destructed, as everyone who plays Magnus seems to do; I felt sorry for him at the time, but I no longer do).

This should stand as one more reminder of how dangerous "patriotism" can be.  "Patriotism" is essentially an unthinking devotion to one's country, with the implicit premise that one's country is better than any other country.  In extreme cases, it becomes "my country can do no wrong," or else "my country -- right or wrong."  Sometimes, as in the case of the January 6 attacks, it can be invoked by those who are attacking the government itself -- e.g. "I'm a patriot because I happen to think that Donald Trump is good for America and that the election was stolen."

The MAGA movement demonstrates that you get to call yourself a patriot even if you don't like what the country is currently doing, but still love the country and hope to restore what you consider to have been its past glory.

Less blatantly stupid but more perniciously, nobody can be elected to any U.S. office unless they call themselves a "patriot" and talk about the greatness of our country.

But patriotism in all its forms is dangerous nonsense.  

The "my country right or wrong" catch-phrase, which was Tom Cruise's mantra in Born on the Fourth of July, apparently stems from a drunken toast given by Stephen Decatur at a Democratic-Republican party dinner back in 1816 after our "victory" in the war of 1812 and his own victory over the Barbary pirates in 1815.  Here's what Decatur said:

"Our country -- In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong."

The Hampton Roads Naval Museum blog contends that 

In this context, Decatur's toast is not a call for undying, blind patriotic devotion to one's country as the expression is often used in modern political discourse. It is rather a prayer for guidance, wisdom, and temperance in foreign relations.

I can't say that I read it that way -- to me it ends by wishing for his country's success, whether his country is right or wrong -- regardless of the cost in human lives and suffering -- which is pretty much what Karjakin is doing.  Be that as it may, here are a bunch of quotes about patriotism that are worth pondering:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. (Eric Hoffer)

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!  (Einstein)

One would expect the harmfulness and irrationality of patriotism to be evident to everybody. (Tolstoy)  

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind (Voltaire). 

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.  (Bertrand Russell)

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. (George Bernard Shaw)

One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.  (Aldous Huxley)

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. (Guy de Maupassant)

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.  (Denis Diderot)

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends. (Ambrose Bierce) 

Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. (Ambrose Bierce)

The final five make the point I've been making -- that we need to come together as a world sometime real soon, and mindless "patriotism" is a barrier to that: 

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world. (Eugene V. Debs)

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism. (George Orwell) 

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism. (Earl Warren) 

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. (Arthur C. Clarke)

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. (George Bernard Shaw)

If you search for quotes about patriotism, these are in the minority.  Many in the majority are well-intentioned -- they try to draw lines between patriotism and nationalism, and they claim that dissent in one's own country can be a form of patriotism, since it demonstrates how much one loves one's country.  But all of that seems pretty empty and pointless to me.  Patriotism qua patriotism is just as pernicious and useless as the quotes above make it out to be.  Anything that might seem "justified" as a matter of "patriotism" can readily be justified on better grounds.  Yes, the Ukrainians fighting for Ukraine are loyal to Ukraine and the Ukrainian way of life, and thus can be said to be "patriots."  But there must be a better term for the willingness to fight against an invading authoritarian army.  What's the sense in having a term that only really makes sense in wartime, as Diderot points out?

Back to Karjakin, which appears to be an example of blind patriotism at its very worst: 

Translated as:

On the other hand, it could equally be (1) evidence of how effective the Russian propaganda machine is, or (2) political propaganda itself.  It might be worth pointing out that this was first reported on February 27, only a few days after the war had begun, and before it was clear just how much suffering Putin was willing to inflict on the Ukrainian people. 

But let's not let Sergei off the hook so easily.  He possesses an extremely rare skill of being able to analyze situations from both sides and come to the most rational conclusion.  He could have waited for more data to come in, and he could have questioned his sources of information.  But he seems to have thrown that away for the sake of patriotism, which again makes my point of how harmful patriotism can be.

 

 

 

The Preventable War in Ukraine

 It took a while but I think I've figured out my angle on this war.

Obviously, Volodymyr Zelensky is a rockstar and I sure hope he survives.  If you haven't seen him in "Servant of the People," definitely check it out. It doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere, but it looks like you can catch some episodes on youtube, e.g. here.

I heard him say the other day that he is Jewish, which makes him all the cooler.  If I were a little younger and/or less burdened by family obligations, I'd seriously take him up on his offer to come to Ukraine and pick up a gun.

I've listened to lectures by Vladimir Pozner and John Mearsheimer who are pretty persuasive in the role we played in creating Vladimir Putin, which is what has led to the current crisis.  Don't get me wrong, Putin is way out of line here.  But we only got "here" because of our own ill-conceived foreign policy over the years since the end of the Cold War.

It started at the beginning. We had a golden opportunity when the Wall came down to "spend" our peace dividend -- and use our status as the only superpower in the world -- to help set Russia on a path to peaceful and prosperous democracy and capitalism.   I've previously explained some of the problems with our own implementation of democracy and capitalism both, but at least we're trying.  With various ill-advised exceptions -- Iraq and Afghanistan, to name two -- prosperous democratic countries don't start wars nowadays.  

So some kind of a post-cold-war Marshall Plan should have been a priority.  And over the years following, we should at least have modeled how a decent, prosperous democratic country should behave.  But we didn't do that either (Iraq, Afghanstan, etc).

And then there's the NATO question.  When the Wall came down, our Secretary of State James Baker told Russia that NATO would not move one inch eastward.  That vow was soon broken in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Poland and other former Soviet Bloc states joined up.  I've heard various commentators -- including the New York Times, in its analysis of Putin's recent speech -- question what right one country (Russia) has to prevent another country (e.g. Ukraine) from joining up with whatever "club" it wants to join up with.  That logic might apply to joining the EU.  But NATO is a military alliance AGAINST Russia.  That was James Baker's point way back then -- he realized that Russia saw NATO as a threat, and that no matter what form of government the various "buffer" countries might choose, they would not join NATO.  Remember how we reacted when Cuba wanted to host Russian missiles, and how we would react if Mexico decided it wanted to do the same?  We should have kept to the deal to leave NATO where it was, and concentrated on spreading democracy and capitalism rather than missiles.

But in 2008 in Bucharest we apparently pushed hard even to get Ukraine -- a large, well-armed country right on Russia's border that had been a key part of the former Soviet Union -- into NATO.   Germany and France rightly objected and it didn't happen.  

As Pozner and Mearsheimer explain, the continued expansion of NATO looks like an existential threat to Russia and to Putin, and also has provided a pretext for Russian aggression, including taking Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, not to mention the current war. 

Not only did we squander our opportunity to use our status as the world's only superpower to make Russia prosperous and democratic, but we've squandered numerous opportunities to display -- or gain -- the kind of moral authority that should have come with our superpower status.  Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were mainly driven by self interest, and ended up killing or ruining the lives of millions of people in those countries.  Our treatment of prisoners and the like didn't help.  All of that give rise to new waves of fully preventable terrorism, and it makes it rather hard for us to say that Russia had no right to invade Ukraine.  Seems like it had just as much "right" to invade Ukraine as we did to invade Iraq, and the "threat" that Ukraine poses to Russia is actually more credible than any threat that Iraq posed to us.  Obviously, I'm not defending the invasion of Ukraine; I'm just pointing out that we set the example for it.

And as I've said before, our handling of the pandemic was another opportunity to display and gain moral authority.  With a bit of foresight, we could have made sure that vaccines created at the U.S. Government's expense (like those of Modena and Johnson & Johnson) were rapidly delivered around the world.  The way to do that would have been to do whatever it took -- in addition to the original funding to ensure that all the technology we paid for and used to create the vaccines was in the public domain, such that generics would have been able to produce it.  For example, Moderna got over a billion dollars and NIH scientists either coinvented or simultaneously invented the vaccine; even if Moderna was entitled to a patent and trade secret protection, we should have simply bought out those rights and let the free market take over.  Yes, there would still have been supply chain issues, but those could have been resolved with more money.  The point was that vaccines needed to be in arms, and leaving control of the technology in the hands of private parties ensured that the rich countries would get vaccinated first and that many in developing world would still be waiting, which is exactly what causes new variants to arise.

And we could have done the same with the AIDS crisis in Southern Africa in the late 1990s and early 2000s -- made medications available for generic production, at whatever cost -- but instead let millions die.

I honestly think that if we had taken steps to make a working vaccine rapidly available to everybody, including the Russians, and thereby nipped the Covid thing in the bud, it would been a lot harder for Putin to point to portray us as irredeemably decadent, which is a major part of his pretext for invading Ukraine. 

Back to Ukraine.  Vladimir Pozner, in a slightly different context, reminded me of this quote from Herman Goering, days before he committed suicide:

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

That's essentially what the George W Bush administration did to drag our country into Iraq (remember the "mushroom cloud"), and it's also what Putin is saying to the Russian people.  He is saying that Ukraine is a threat to the Russian way of life.  He might not be completely wrong in that, which is why we should have done more to show the Russians all along a path to a better way of life for all.

yammering about the end of democracy

With the anniversary of the January 6 fiasco, there's been a near continuous yammer-fest in the liberal press about how the end of "democracy" may be approaching. Examples are Jimmy Carter and the The NYT Editorial Board.

The liberals are right to be concerned -- it's quite clear that nearly half of the voting public would prefer a narcissistic lunatic to a "liberal."  And it's also clear that a large percentage of that near-half think that Donald Trump -- the narcissistic lunatic in question -- is actually somehow good for America.

This should not really surprise us.  Deep down, most people believe, and have believed since the time of Plato, that the best kind of government would be a benevolent dictatorship.  The problem is just that liberals would like a benevolent dictator with liberal views and conservatives would like a conservative one. Trump supporters are people who have figured out that normal politics have let them down, and would like a leader like Trump. 

As I think I've made clear before, Alt-QAnon teaches us that both political parties are WRAITHS and both are under control of more wraiths -- mainly corporations but also organized religion (even Obama had to pretend to be religious to get elected) and entities like QAnon.  Just because a wraith has its own form of intelligence doesn't mean it can't be essentially controlled by another wraith or even a human being.  The CEO of a company might control the company, just as the leader of a religion might steer the religion in one direction or another.  But in most cases, the wraith outlives the human leader, just as in all likelihood the Republican Party and QAnon will outlive Donald Trump.  

In other words, it's been a while since we've actually had a "democracy" here, in the sense of rule by the people.  So the people who are suddenly concerned that democracy might be under threat are missing the point.

Right now, we're seeing the Democratic Party wraith do what wraiths do best -- attempt to take advantage of a situation to increase their power. 

Here, the situation was the narcissistic former President's refusal to acknowledge that he had lost the election, and his ability to somehow, despite a lack of rudimentary speaking ability -- stir up a resentful, rag-tag mob that then shambled toward the Capitol, probably with no particular aim in mind.  

At some point, the wraith underlying the mob -- the separate intelligence that everyone agrees mobs have (see, e.g., James Madison: "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”) -- took over, perhaps when the mob realized that it would actually be possible to get to break through the thin line of Capitol Police and get into the Capitol itself.  At that point, the members of the mob were simply pawns of the mob itself, swept into the Capitol by the mob's separate volition.  Sure, some of them were both willing and thrilled to breach the Capitol; it just seems unlikely that even the majority of them had that intent after hearing Trump's speech.  But when the mob as a whole -- the wraith -- figured out that it could get in, the foot soldiers simply followed, some giddily and others blindly.

None of this excuses Trump for spreading lies about the election and giving the mob its start.  

But no matter how the January 6th attack had played out -- even if it had lasted longer, caused more damage, and taken more lives -- it was never a threat to our "democracy-by-wraith."  Biden would still be President today.  That's because our founders thought about this sort of thing, and set up systems to ensure that a takeover would not occur.  Many believed that George Washington should be made King, because everyone knew he would always act in the country's best interest.  But cooler heads prevailed, and realized that if too much power is concentrated in one office, eventually that office will fall into the hands of the wrong sort of person -- someone who either does not have the nation's best interest at heart, or has a warped and anti-democratic view of the nation's best interest.  So we have checks and balances that ensure that too much power doesn't fall into the wrong hands.  Trump could not have undone the election.   

My point is that the Democrats are using this event for political gain, and the individuals writing about it are not really trying to learn from it.  

There are two lessons they should be learning:

First, it is possible, even in this day and age, for a demagogue to stir up a mob and incite the mob to violence.  That means that any time you have a demagogue addressing a group of supporters that might turn violent, you need to take precautions, especially if the violence might be carried out against an institution of government.  In this regard, perhaps our democracy should take a page from our own sorry past, or else look to see how other countries put down protests that get out of hand.  Firehoses and tear gas.  Problem solved, for next time.

Second, we should be taking steps to reclaim the democracy that we've already given away.  The simplest way to do this is to become politically active, and embrace and spread the principles of Alt-QAnon, and either run for political office or vote only for candidates who recognize the problem and are committed to doing something about it.  The same people who were so easily "converted" by the lies of  QAnon should be all the more convertible by Alt-QAnon, which is the truth.

Go for it.

The decline of customer service in four recent examples: part 3

Perhaps people are familiar with this one.  I had just arrived back in the country at a place other than the one I'd left from.  I needed to get a modem quickly, but not so quickly as to make me want to take the time to drive to Best Buy, and risk Covid etc.  I went on Amazon late in the afternoon on Friday and the modem I needed popped right up for less than $80, with delivery (with Prime) set for Sunday.  I figured that meant I would have it up and running Monday morning, so I could work that week from home.  But as soon as I ordered it, it changed the expected delivery date to sometime before 10 pm on Monday. 

Ok, not great, but at least I'd be up and running by Tuesday.

On Monday around 5 pm I got a notice that the modem had been delivered, and that it had been left with the "mail room."  I was a little concerned, since my building doesn't have a mailroom, so I went down to the front desk.  It had not arrived.

I called Amazon customer service -- which, to its credit, was relatively quick at the 206 number.  But the person I got told me this happens often -- the item is indicated as delivered even though it really isn't.  They told me to wait to see if it came later in the day and to call them if it didn't.  It didn't, so I called them.  

They were able to confirm that it had been delivered to the wrong place, and the guy even sounded like he had a sense of where it went -- to a nearby building -- but he refused to give me any hints as to where it might be.  In the end, he agreed to send out a replacement order, which would arrive sometime before the end of the day Wednesday.  I begged him to try to get it to me sometime Tuesday, so I wouldn't lose two full days of work, but he said the system wouldn't let him.

So that's what happened, and instead of being up and running on Monday or Tuesday, I was finally up and running on Thursday.

Perhaps not the worst experience ever (see above), but still not great, and I'm including it because it's another example (see Apple example) of a WRAITH making it impossible for a customer service representative to set things right.  In the old days, I'm pretty sure even Amazon could have figured out a way to get me the modem by the end of the next day.  They have fulfillment centers everywhere and the modem was a very common item and a best seller.  But the system simply didn't give a damn about my work needs, and did not give the customer service representative the ability to make things better for me.

So Amazon is on the way downhill too, although it's still the only game in town for quick delivery, and one might just say the odds caught up to me this time.

The Decline of Customer Service Part 2 of 4: Apple password reset

Ok, this one is somewhat interesting too.  Like the Amazon experience described next, Apple's customer service employees are essentially constrained by algorithms that ultimately don't enable them to provide any kind of useful customer service.

Here's what happened.  Like an idiot, I put an iPad in my luggage on a recent flight from Germany to the US.  And predictably, it disappeared, along with who knows what else.  Years ago I lost some cameras that way on a flight to Egypt, and after a good deal of work, was actually compensated for them.  But times have apparently changed.  

But that's not even the point.  Before reporting the theft to Lufthansa, I wanted to locate the iPad to confirm that it really was still in Germany, and also against any chance that it was still in my possession.  So my idea was to do the "find my phone" feature on icloud and see if I could locate her iPad. But the problem is that it was my mother's iPad, and none of us could quite remember her apple ID.

We tried guessing her password two or three times, but recognizing that too many attempts might cause the account to be locked, I looked into the forgot password options.  Most of the options required access to your iPhone, which we didn't have, because we had left it in another state.  So I opted for a procedure where Apple's instructions indicated that you could in some cases reset your Apple ID password from a trusted friend's phone.  Since my mother trusts me, we used my phone.

But at the end of that process, Apple informed me that it was sending a confirmation message to my mother's phone, which, as I've said above, was in another state.

I tried a couple of times and that's what happened each time.  As noted above, the website indicates this works "in some cases."  But it didn't tell me why it didn't work in my case.  Nor did it tell me why, after taking me through the process of attempting to reset the password using MY phone, it sent to confirmation to HER phone, when the whole reason for going through the process of using my "trusted" phone was that we did not have access to her phone.

I then called Apple Customer service.  I got through relatively quickly to an African American woman.  Yes, I could tell by her voice.  She was very nice and seemed competent, and easier to understand than the non-native speakers that many other companies employ, but I'm guessing she was not particularly expert in this process, because I spent an hour with her on the phone, going through the exact same process (trying to reset it using my phone) and failing in exactly the same way.  She then told me that there was a way to reset it by providing further identifying information, such as a credit card, and that normally takes a day.  She told me Apple would get back to me within a day on that.

And sure enough, Apple sent an email to my mother the next day.  I had expected it to come to my email (to which the representative had sent two emails, which included the case number), so when I first called them two days later I thought that they had let me down on that.  But the new customer service rep (also an African American woman) said they had in fact sent the email, and it occurred to me to check my mother's email and there it was.  Here's what it said:

An account recovery request was made for your Apple ID.

Dear xxxx,

An account recovery request for your Apple ID (evamdkrause@gmail.com) was made from the web near Rockville, MD on September 19, 2021 at 12:39:05 PM EDT. The contact phone number provided was +1 xxxxxxxx.

You will receive a text or a phone call at this number when your account is ready to recover on October 10, 2021 at 12:39:05 PM EDT. For updated status information or to provide additional information to help recover your account, visit https://iforgot.apple.com

If you didn’t make this request or do not recognize the information presented above, you should cancel account recovery immediately to keep your account secure.

Apple Support

So it was going to take a little more than the day that the first customer rep had hypothesized.  October 10 was (and still is) 21 days from when I made the request, on Sept. 19.

I expressed astonishment to the new customer service rep that it would take Apple that long to deal with this situation.  My mother was in the room with me and I offered to put her on the phone and do whatever it took to prove her identity.  But the rep said there was nothing she could do.  I tried to get her to explain WHY, in this computer age, Apple needed 21 days to confirm that I was who I said I was and that I was authorized to change my mother's password.  But she had clearly had no idea. 

I asked to speak to a supervisor, and was passed on to a perfectly nice man named Billy, who said he had been doing this for Apple for a few years, and this is just how the algorithm works sometimes.  Nobody knows what it's doing.  He guessed that given the length of time it had provided for the reset, that meant that I had probably gotten locked out after guessing the password incorrectly too many times.  As above, that's clearly not what happened (I only tried 2 or t3 times, and it didn't lock the account when I did).  But he didn't have any other ideas.

I asked him whether Apple itself could figure out where the iPad was -- it seemed to me that somebody at Apple must be able to fairly easily figure out the location of the iPad.  He didn't know for sure, but he indicated that it didn't matter -- Apple values the privacy of its customers so much that it would not give that information out until the account had been verified, which would take those 21 days.

So once again, the WRAITH (Wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hive; see my other posts on Alt-QAnon for details) has created an environment wherein even if its customer service representatives wanted to be helpful, they couldn't be.

 

The decline of customer service in four recent examples: Part 1 -- Burger King

1. "Customers like you"

On a recent road trip with my 88-year old mother, we stopped at a Burger king, with the hope of ordering a few of their cheesy tots, which are basically tater tots filled with cheese.  Something one could get sick of (and sick from) pretty quickly, but they were still new to us -- and counted as vegetarian food -- so that was our decision.  

The drive-thru sign didn't specifically advertise them, but it did advertise the jalapeno cheddar bites, which looked good too.  We specifically asked if they had the cheesy tots, and the girl said yes.  We ordered one order of those, plus one order of jalapeno cheddar bites.  It came to a little over $4.00, and we drove through and paid happily.  The girl told us to drive the car a bit up and they would bring them to our car, since they had only just started being cooked.

That sounded good too -- they would be fresh.

But after about five minutes the girl came out with a bag, which contained two orders of mozzarella sticks.  In contradiction to her earlier representation that the tots and bites just needed to be cooked, she now told us that they simply didn't have either of the tots or the bites.  She wondered whether we would accept mozzarella sticks instead.  Now, mozzarella sticks have been around for a while, and while it's possible that I once liked them, I have been thoroughly grossed out by them for some time.  So I said no thank you, please just give me a refund.  The girl went in to process the refund but then came back out after a while with her manager, who said we would need the credit card to do it.  I gave the manager the credit card.  Then began another long wait.  At least five minutes with no updates.  At this point all we wanted was our credit card back so we could drive away and find food somewhere else.  

Eventually the girl walked by our car to deliver something to another customer who was parked in the parking lot.   Since our car was off, and I couldn't open the window, I opened the door to and tried to get her attention by speaking to her, but she simply ignored me.  I slammed the door which made her jump a little but she walked right on.  I tried to get her attention on the way back, but she was strictly avoiding eye contact, so I yelled - instinctively -- LOOK AT ME.  She didn't, and went through the door which closed behind her.  I got out of the car to go through the door but it was a one-way door which had locked behind her.  

After another multi-minute wait, the manager came back with the credit card, plus 4 dollars and change.  she explained that they couldn't process the refund to the credit card after all; all they could do was give us cash.  Which of course would have been fine in the first place.  

I have not been that furious for years.  I didn't yell at her but I could barely contain myself in trying to extract an apology from her.  I told her that my mother was 88 years old and we had been driving for 8 hours and that it unacceptable for us to be have to wait there for 20 minutes after first being told we'd get our food etc.  She responded quite coolly that she had been working there since 730 am that day (which was about 13 hours previous) protecting her staff from "customers like you."  

Sort of interesting.  I'm guessing very few people drive up to Burger King with the intent of being a frustrated and angry customer.  But this particular Burger King (in Northern Virginia) clearly had its own way of creating such customers.  Rather than thinking of ways to avoid creating frustrated and angry customers in the first place, this manager seemed to view her job as protecting her employees from the customers that their horrible customer service culture had created.

To be clear, the problems here were:

• Telling us they had both cheesy tots and jalapeno bites when they didn't
• Telling us that we had to wait while the non-existent cheesy tots and jalapeno bites were cooking.
• After making us wait 5 minutes for nothing, trying to give us mozzarella sticks instead.  
• A better approach would have been to come out and offer us something else off the menu rather than the take-it-or-leave-it mozzarella stick approach.
• Telling us they needed our credit card for a refund, when it turned out they couldn't process the refund on the credit card.
• Holding on to the credit card for at least 5 minutes.
• Walking right past my car without giving me an update on where my credit card was and when I'd get it back.
• Not making eye contact and ignoring my pleas for information.
• Telling me that I was a bad "customer" (in saying she had to protect her people from "customers like you").

If race matters, my mother and I are white, the order-taking girl was white, and the manager was brown.

I called the Burger King complaint line and was on hold for at least 15 minutes of our continuing drive, which might give you a sense of how many complaints they are getting or how little they care about the complaints they get.

I finally reached someone and was able to describe the place and what had happened.  She made some of the right sounds, although she didn't really seem all that engaged -- more like she was reading from a script.  She told me I'd get a gift certificate for having taken the time to call.  Not restitution or an apology or anything like that; just a thank you from them to me for taking the time to give them feedback.  In response to my questions, she said they would contact the store and find out what went on.  She even said I could call back and that someone might be able to give me an update.  But I never called back; just couldn't stand the idea of waiting another 15 minutes just to talk to someone, and I didn't have an incident number or anything like that.  I did get a 5 dollar gift certificate.

Although this was literally the worst customer service experience I've ever had, it actually didn't completely surprise me coming from Burger King.  For this trip, Burger King had become our go-to place because they have Impossible Whoppers and we are vegetarians.  They even had a deal where you could buy one and get the other for $1, or else buy two meals impossible whopper meals for $10.  But we did that because of the impossible whoppers, not the customer service.  Another bonus was that the drive-throughs and the stores were usually mostly empty -- perhaps that should have been a sign.

I think this was our about our fourth Burger King stop on a two day road trip -- on a previous one there had been no Impossible Burgers (and no apology) and on another no coffee, and also no apology.  In talking to others, this is about par for the course for Burger King.  Interestingly, I don't recall ever having anything like this kind of experience at a McDonalds,., which I still occasionally go to for a salad, or fries, or a shake.  I guess that's the difference that Hamburger University makes.