The Curmudgeon Speaks

This is a complaint. I think I know who I blame, but my concern seems legitimate and explaining my concern may inform others.

My wife goes through our credit card charges and asked me about a charge for a little more than $100. I did not remember making a purchase in this amount recently and asked her to identify the company. The charge came from Paymentus and the cryptic description of the purchase roughly translated as “technology related”.

There was a phone number. The payment included a long transaction number. I thought I would call and ask about the charge. This turned out not to be helpful. Paymentus said they handle credit card payments for many different companies including many companies selling technology goods and services. Even with the transaction number, the call service employee said it would be difficult to identify the specific company seeking payment and suggested I call my credit card company. I responded that this advice made no sense to me because the credit card company was paying Paymentus and not the company selling the product. I said Paymentus must know the identity of the company they were collecting for or they would be unable to forward the money received to them. The employee seemed unable to understand these arguments and offered no solution.

We called our credit card company. As I expected, they did not know what I had supposedly purchased. They then canceled our credit card assuming this was a fraudulent charge and issued us new cards. This was not what I wanted. I assume the bill was probably legit. I just wanted to know what the charge was for. Since I could not convince Paymentus to determine who had forwarded the request for payment, I thought that the credit card company would likely have more luck getting this information. All I wanted was to know was the identity of company asking for the money.

This seems a very strange way of doing business and a strange solution. I now must register my new credit card with many companies that I pay via a subscription model and I must wait for some angry company to contact me or worse shut off some service I use.

Remember the “no spin zone”?

Read this Fox News story. It makes Google sound like it is attempting to limit Republican candidates reaching voters by email because much more email from Republican candidates ends up in spam folders. The spam folder seldom receives any attention making the email less likely to be read.

Now – read the actual research study (link appears in the Fox article). The description of Gmail is accurate. What is not reported are the other results. The study covered Gmail, yahoo, and outlook. The data show the opposite results with yahoo and outlook with more email from Democratic candidates treated as spam. Fox story is factually accurate, but misrepresents what anyone who read the actual study would know. It would have been easy to report the summary of the study (see below).

[Summary. Our observations in §4.1 to answer Q1 revealed that all SFAs exhibited political biases in the months leading upto the 2020 US elections. Gmail leaned towards the left (Democrats) whereas Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right (Republicans). Gmail marked 59.3% more emails from the right candidates as spam compared to the left candidates, whereas Outlook and Yahoo marked 20.4% and 14.2% more emails from left candidates as spam compared to the right candidates, respectively.]

I thought I would check my own Gmail spam folder. I did not do a precise count, but there are plenty of emails from both parties Gmail hid as spam. Check your own spam folder if you have one. To be fair, we are not in the time leading up to a Presidential election. I also explore a lot of political stories and this may influence how the trackers have me labeled.

If you are concerned, take some time with the content of your spam folder. This could be quite informative. It is easy to inform Google that you want to see items similar to any item you think should have not been sent to the spam folder. Open an item in the folder and you should find the following message.

Barbara Walter studies how civil wars start. This interest covers a wide swath of history with a particular focus on what we would consider recent examples. She and colleagues identify factors in specific international cases and they weight as most predictive those factors that appear in most situations. She argues that the U.S. democracy has shown a decline since 2010 and focuses on the variables that appear in her research on the predictors of civil wars.

A couple of indicators:

1. Ethnic decline – situations in which a once dominant faction finds itself in decline
2. Anocracy – government that mixes democracy and autocracy

Yes, these indicators may sound similar

I am working on the book, but after becoming interested by listening to a couple of interviews. These interviews offer a framework that is expanded in the book.

1. Minnesota Public Radio
2. Your Undivided Attention

We returned from our winter break in Kauai about a week ago. You can follow the day-to-day experiences of this trip on my travel blog. While I was there I decided to listen to Mitchner’s Hawaii which is historical fiction and I thought it would provide a little background to the present culture in which I have spent several months a year since retirement. I am a bit slow in commenting on the book as it relates to our trip because the audiobook version of the book requires more than 50 hours to complete and I had not quite finished it when we left. I purchase the book through Amazon, but I am guessing anyone could easily borrow the book/audiobook from a local library.

Hawaii was written in 1959 and like several of the Mitchner books I have read (Centennial, Chesapeake, Alaska) Hawaii traces history over multiple generations tied together in some way. The book begins with the geological formation of Hawaii, then in order the arrival of the Polynesians, the haole (white) missionaries, the Chinese, and then the Japanese. The thread throughout is the generations of the missionaries and their efforts to control/manipulate the native people and the others who followed them. The story is complex with “good guys and bad guys” within each group, but there is an underlying theme of exploitation based on perceptions of knowing what is best for others. The book ends with more equal footing for all groups but the native Hawaiians as Hawaii approaches statehood.

Present day Hawaii (at least Kauaii) no longer relies on sugar and pineapple as an economic engine. In fact, these groups are pretty much gone for the island where we stay. I am just guessing but tourism/real estate is the big economic driver. Coffee is the big crop.

I felt a certain tension related to native rights that reminded me of the time I have spent on Native American reservations. The fate of the whites, Chinese, Japanese, and others who came to work in Hawaii eventually all seemed to be more positive. The expression of native Hawaiian frustration centers on having your lands stolen by intruders generations ago and exclusion from opportunities since. This is kind of true, but stolen and being taken advantage of mean somewhat different things and depending on specific historical circumstances both can apply. In either case, present circumstances reflect differences in opportunities and economic reality. How to best address these circumstances is the issue. Compensation to people of the present for poor treatment of their ancestors in ways that involve taking from people of the present who had nothing to do with the past or any relationship beyond being from a given race with the historical oppressors has obvious limitations. Equal opportunities for education and employment in the present seem a reasonable position to take fo everyone whatever their race or culture. Achieving equal opportunities for people who as a group have fewer resources and poorer preparation for the benefits of education is very challenging to achieve.

This Ars Technica article provides an interesting history of Russian disinformation specifically addressing the online efforts of the Russian government. The article also explains why the Russians have had difficulty controlling the pushback when it comes to their invasion of Ukraine. Multiple examples of the ways in which the internet has allowed truth to reach the Russian people are included in the analysis.

I know from the log files that I get an occasional visit from Russian readers. I have written in recent posts about our connection with people from Russia and these folks may be those who have connected.

The present war in Ukraine is not being accurately represented to the Russian people and measures are being taken to limit what Russian citizens can presently learn from sources outside of Russia. VPNs allow protected Internet access for those who realize their news is biased and want a safe way to access blocked sites. Most individuals in countries wanting to get outside information know about this technique, but just for others I would have interested readers take a look at a source titled – Best VPNs for Russia in 2022. The article also explains VPNs for those who don’t explore such tech tools and gives specific information about sites that are presently blocked from Russia.

I have spent several weeks in Russia and have an ongoing friendship with several Russian citizens. One thing that was obvious in spending time in Russia was just how memories of the Second World War are so alive among the Russian people. The following image from Volgograd is of a building preserved to honor the defenders of the city and country and a specific soldier who ran from window to window firing and throwing grenades to deceive the Nazi attackers as to the strength of the defenders.

Putin has described his invasion of the Ukraine as a fight against Nazis. What a cruel, but probably effective strategy to promote this deception of the Russian people. Control of the media prevents the Russian people from viewing the many similar images that now show the reality of Russian actions in Ukraine. The time will come when the Ukrainians will preserve a similar building to help future generations remember the atrocities of the Russians.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has placed tech companies in a challenging position. I was just listening to a podcast on which the participants were debating the competing positions. One one hand Apple phones are very popular and expensive. Those unable to make purchases are likely the more wealthy Russians and possible more persuasive in putting pressure on the regime. On the other side phones and the internet are a primary means of information and the Russian people are being told a slanted version of the war and the atrocities being imposed on the outgunned Ukrainian people.

My perception of the value of truthful information has been shaped in part by the Russian people I know. We have good friends from Russia who just left after staying with us for a couple of weeks. They are not pro-Putin, but seem to largely get their news from Russian sources. Initially, their perspective was that of less alarm, but our television habits and their constant phone conversations with their own family members in Russia and Ukraine resulted in a change in their thinking. They have significant issues with the situation on both sides of the border suffering financial consequences themselves because of the funds they still have in a Russian bank and having to worry about those they know in Ukraine.

Disinformation is such a tool and we should understand this from the situation in this country.

Maybe it is just the crazy way my brain works, but present circumstances in the world keep bringing the song Sting sang in the mid ’80s running through my consciousness.

The song was called “Russians” and the song concerned the foolishness of the nuclear threat the Russians and the U.S. had created to each other. In a war that could not be won from the perspective of an American, there is a line that comes as close as anything to offering a hopeful perspective:

But what might save us, me and you

Is if the Russians love their children too

I can’t say I am against all wars because there are certain values that must be defended and certain wrongs that must be confronted. From the Russian perspective, I just can’t see in this case what justification the Russian people would see in the invasion of Ukraine.

I recognize that I have been neglecting this blog lately. We are in Kauai to avoid the worst of the Minnesota winter and I have been describing this experience on my travel blog. 

Here is something rather unique from our experiences. We stay close to a golf course and there is an area that has been adopted by nesting  Layson Albatrosses. These birds are unique in several ways. They live as long as humans and fly incredible distances without stopping. They do this strange dance I was able to record.  There is a lot of wind noise, but you should also be able to hear bird sounds – clicks and moos