Because it’s just that kind of day: Can someone please tell me why I apparently have put more thought into keeping my daily two-hour current events chat operating and online than Interac has given to keeping the Canadian economy online?
Because it’s just that kind of day: Can someone please tell me why I apparently have put more thought into keeping my daily two-hour current events chat operating and online than Interac has given to keeping the Canadian economy online?
“The failure of two Fridays ago was that when one of our telecom companies went down, a pretty horrifying cross-section of Canadian society had no back-up plan.”
Why would you need a back-up plan when you operate on blind trust, and the term ‘due diligence’ no longer has any meaning?
If our telecommunications system had suffered a “gender crisis”, then I’m sure it would have gotten the full and dedicated attention of all involved.
No backup plan, like a CREDIT CARD?
Seriously. I can understand people not carrying more than $50 in their pocket, for any number of reasons, but, no credit card? We were on the road all that day, and encountered the sheep holding signs “cash/credit only”, “No Debit”, etc.
I bought the ferry trip, gas, meals, goodies and hotel room, NO PROBLEMO!
CCs are an easy way to manage one’s finances, without yo-yoing one’s account balance, and, not being charged Debit transaction fees.
Yes, the average Canadian is that lazy, stupid and unprepared. Just look at how they reacted to Covid, mostly cattle and sheep, easily fooled and herded. This day reinforced how lazy and unprepared the average citizen is. Be prepared, a financial crisis is coming that almost no one alive has seen, think 1929-1935.
“This wasn’t a problem for me. I almost never use cash, but I do keep some handy exactly for emergencies like this. (A holdover from my 2003 blackout experience.) Most people don’t these days. Two Fridays ago, that showed.”
Most people are idiots who don’t have a Plan B for food, FFS, but they get to lecture Rogers because they can’t buy an Ejaculatte?
Gurney can, I guess, but I’ve got no sympathy for the average cunned stunt, and especially the young people at work that I’ve repeatedly warned. Some of them don’t even have or carry wallets.
Morons.
And if their phone dies, a part of them dies too.
Computer says “no”.
LOL – my friends in Toronto last year introduced me to short videos from “Little Britain” about awful customer service. A Tranny sits typing at the computer and then tells the customer “The Computer Says No!” That has now become my favorite line.
Well, cash on hand is ALWAYS a good thing no..?
On another note:
I’ve never been one to buy into “weather modification”
However: Witness the Calgary Stampede:
For the 2.5 months prior we had pretty much EVERY DAY- RAIN….Then Boom, Come The Friday of the start of the Stampede..?? .a perfect stretch of absolutely perfect awesome sunny days avg temps 30C. 7 days straight.
Day after..??? Rain and clouds.
WTF is up with dat..???
I may become a full on “believer”
Hopefully, Calgary had good weather on the day they held the drag show that’s now part of the Stampede festivities.
Because Canada hasn’t been serious about anything with respect to its infrastructure or economy for well over a decade now. Maybe much longer than that. The easy money is in goosing real estate, so that’s where way too much investment money goes. Everything else may as well just be magic. It’s there, it works, no thought whatsoever about why it works or how it works or what might cause it to stop working or what the hell to do when it finally does stop working.
When the crash finally comes here, as it assuredly will, this country is NOT going to cope well with it.
Every politician likes the ribbon cutting ceremony of a new project. None of them are interested in operation and maintenance. If you understand that political class runs on vanity projects instead of reliability of services and infrastructure then things like abysmal passport or immigration services, the airport mess, etc. (It took 2 months to get my PAL renewed).
It’s not just federal. Provincial and municipal politicians have the same flaw. There’s no glory in maintainence and repair.
The political class needs to ensure that public services and essential private services are reliable and affordable.
It takes a certain type of politician to make the trains run on time.
Yes but it takes only a reasonably competent person to ensure the trains do not routinely derail.
(applause)
It also doesn’t help that we train few people to deal with these impending disasters.
Looks like Interac has a meritocracy problem. Looks like society is not a safe space for merit. A herd of ‘cunned stunt’, brought to extinction by cell phone failure.
This is what it is like inside a Darwin event. Not what you expected when you read about them, I know. It is tempting to run with the herd, towards the cliff.
The plan: Open the bay doors HAL.
The back-up plan: Open the bay doors HAL. Please!
In New Jersey a few years back a hurricane killed the power grid for days. This left all the gas stations off-line because they need electricity to run. My propane stove needs electricity to run (not the burners, the stove). My freezer (back-up plan A) needs electricity to run, so good for 2 days. When my Rogers phone went down so did the ATMs and the gas pumps. We carry a jerry can so we got home ok. We were 900 km from home at the time.
My new back-up plan is getting adopted by a Mennonite family.
My Interac Boohoo plan is $200.00 in my wallet, half USD in the hope they liberate.
My furnace back-up plan is a wood stove and two electric oil heaters.
My electricity back-up plan is a generator and 80 liters of fuel.
My car back-up plan is a bicycle/snowshoes and even a kick sled my dog can pull if I can get her to chase something in the right direction.
https://goslide.ca/collections/frontpage
My cell phone back-up plan is a landline.
My freezer backup plan is a lot of freeze dried food.
My Plan A for the Cannibal Apocalypse are all my neighbors: “Honey, we’ll just wait for the government to DO something. Oh look there’s someone at the door…”
Plan B is a couple thousand rounds of .22 and 9mm.
And no, I’m not living in a bunker and I don’t have a Plan B for beer…
I see one serious flaw…
Lol. Me too!
Buddy, your local liquor store will have plenty of beer to tide you over after the Apocalypse.
While your neighbours are fighting over lettuce and beyond meat at Co-op ,
Plan B for Beer involves your .22 and 9mm rounds.
And a friend with with a F250 long box pickup.
After a couple of months you can save your ammo for hunting.
For this specific sector of the economy, I can assure you that’s it’s not just Rogers, it’s not just Interac, it’s not just Canada: the entire digital economy is run on infrastructure hacked together and operated by people who literally have no idea what they’re doing.
I have intimate knowledge of two companies who between them account for 40% of the North American market for remote, real-time monitoring of pressurized gas tanks. Everything from the oxygen tanks at the local hospital to liquid nitrogen tanks at large chemical plants to the propane tanks at the gas station.
Their entire infrastructure was being kept afloat by one guy who was constantly manually restarting things as they failed. No auto-remediation, no fixing the problems – they weren’t even logging the problems.
You can imagine what happened when he got fed up and quit.
Oxygen tanks at the local hospital … operated by people who literally have no idea what they are doing …
I begin to understand that meritocracy is an aspect of natural law. Meritocracy is not only the best way of doing society; it is also a necessity. Canada is not a safe space for merit; immovable forces act in reaction.
I don’t have a cell phone and don’t plan on getting one. I also have a diesel generator behind the barn if the electricity goes down.
How do you run the ArriveCan app then? Isn’t it a basic necessity of life in Canada?
There are few effective backup plans because of the inbred incompetence of service providers. They attended too many consciousness raising workshops in college and not enough hands on “how do you prevent f-ups” courses
Bingo.
Keep in kind the CRTC is more concerns with naughty tweets and so forth than they are this gong show.
There’s a happy balance somewhere between full-on prepper and digital Eloi.
Being a radio amateur (i. e., ham), I can still put out a signal provided that I still have power for my batteries.
From the article:
“But still. The lesson of two Fridays ago shouldn’t be that Rogers is bad. It also shouldn’t be that the CRTC is bad or that our politicians are spineless and that our regulators are thoroughly captured. All of those things are true, but they’re not the lesson. That wasn’t the failure of two Fridays ago. The failure of two Fridays ago was that when one of our telecom companies went down, a pretty horrifying cross-section of Canadian society had no back-up plan.”
No, Mr. Gurney, the problem is a system set up that way.
There is also no back-up plan for political malfeasance or failure of the government-run healthcare system, but I digress.
We have deliberately spread out our providers despite the ‘savings’ offered for ‘bundling’. So, while our cell phones were non-operational, we still had cable, internet, and landlines. Offspring who had wondered why had that redundant landline is now a convert as that phone was IT.
As far as businesses were concerned, it very much depended upon one’s internet provider. Interact was down so debit cards didn’t work, but those who weren’t with Rogers for internet could still accept credit cards.