Ask Google for a certified mail address so you can send them the timeline of events that occurred. This is the shibboleth that lets them know you mean business and that by not responding, they may be facing legal action. DO NOT THREATEN or mention legal action. The managerial class doesn't act that way. Just signal you are building a case against them. Start with getting that certified mailing address... you may be surprised how they respond after just that request.
If they don't respond, keep following up. Send them a timeline of events, proof of ownership even if they do not ask you what you need to prove ownership. Make it clear what this is costing you.
But here's the thing, EVERY TIME I HAVE ASKED FOR A CERTIFIED MAIL ADDRESS, the globocorp gave me what i wanted, and I never had to follow up. Every time. They don't want to deal with actual legal action from "people who know what they are doing."
It's a shibboleth. Like "Baa-ram-ewe." Use it wisely and honestly.
Wow, that's a great read. Bookmarking and sending to others.
He points out how expressing all the natural human reactions - anger, fear, supplication, bargaining - tell the institution that you are a vulnerable, manipulable moron. The implacable robot that knows the process but doesn't care is what gets results.
You sue them. Depending on the circumstances, you may be able to do so in small claims court, which is pretty inexpensive to do. Google cannot bring their usual insane level of legal resources to bear in this environment, and you will most likely win.
I'm a little confused here - you sue them, in small claims court, for not providing a service address?
How do you serve them without an address, for a claim of not providing an address?
I mean, I know what happens when I appear in court as the applicant/plaintiff, and tell the judge that the respondent/defendant was never served.
Okay, lets say the judge doesn't laugh my case out at that - how is my claim going to proceed? "I claim $X monies for not supplying me with their service address"?
(My understanding is that, by not providing a service address, all you can do is report them to specific bureaus, arbitration councils, etc. You cannot sue businesses, as far as I know, for not having or not providing a service address).
AFAIK them not providing an address is not the main point, it's them not collaborating on your case for a copyright infringement. The not providing an address is just more evidence of them not following on their responsibilities regarding the copyright infringement.
If you are in the US you can look up their official service address through the secretary of state for the state that you will be filing the lawsuit in. There is never a need for them to specifically provide you an official address.
And if you're filing a state case, and you know which county they are in, call the Sheriff. Every Sheriff's office deals with legal service on a routine basis. I've paid the Sheriff many times for serving complaints.
Snowballing. Sometimes it's ok to pick something easy, especially for a team, to get a small win first. If you're in debt, pay off the smallest amount first. Get the easy win. Build to the next.
And remember, you win by showing up each day, not by tilting at windmills.
If someone in the coming years ran on taking down regulatory capture and returning that as social safety net funding, public goods, and lower taxes, and had the chops to actually deliver, they'd do well.
Though best to start local government first, obviously.
We're reaching breaking points in so many places...
“They’d do well.” That is not the lesson I’ve taken from the past 15 years of politics in the US and abroad.
Political candidates actually interested in taking on the very difficult and nuanced task of governing are routinely drubbed by edge lord culture warriors or candidates that simply promise the world without any regard to annoying facts like existing laws, budget deficits, or basic tenets of economics.
I definitely agree there is probably less disfunction and greater chance for reform at the local level.
As someone who formerly worked in this space, the issue is administration is orthogonal to legislature.
Administration and implementation is inherently technocratic in nature, but legislation is is often driven by short-term electoral needs.
This isn't to say autocracy is the answer (it isn't), but the dysfunction arises when people assume that every single administrative decision needs to be made by "elected officials" and constantly second guess administrators.
When administration from local to federal becomes politicized (as is increasingly the norm across the democratic world), implementation slows down severely because the "ideal" solution might not be political tenable.
A good example of this is welfare expansion in the US - the assumption is lower income voters who voted for Trump voted irrationally, but in action, the majority of Trump voters tended to be in the 25th-75th percentile income bracket, which in most cases put them outside of the bracket for a number of social services. Those services which were available such as the ACA/Obamacare have been protected by legislators for that very reason because they know they would lose their seats as a result.
You're in Japan so you've probably seen similar decisions being made with regards to Japanese rice protectionism [0] - unpopular with urban voters, but urban voters don't swing elections at scale.
Japan is 93% urban. 25% of the population lives in Tokyo! It's not that they can't outvote the farmers, it's a more complicated mix of agrarian nationalism that supports farm subsidies in a lot of countries, plus outright bribery with literal sacks of rice.
> administration from local to federal becomes politicized
Administration is politics. It's a mistake to go full technocrat and proceed without the consent of the administered. The problem comes when techocrats get rings run round them by misleading populists.
Japan is a parliamentary system, and the amount of Single Member Seats in the House of Representatives needed to flip an election are primarily small towns or rural.
This is what happened in the 2009 election when the LDP lost the farmer vote.
There's actually plenty of examples out in the real world with competent administration to learn from. Especially if you generalise enough to look at how pockets of competence work even in an otherwise abysmal system, instead of demanding overall competence.
What you end up seeing is those cases of "competence" only worked in cases where administration and legislation was aligned. But even in those societies you'd still see problems which are distinct, but problems nonetheless.
GP might be saying that analyzing _differences_ in how perf targets are met in say, VN&CL (or SG&CH IE&HK TW&SI KR&DK) might be most productive. As you mention, in particular, how are their sad paths ("problems") different? Or the same?
Now there are subdepartments of study devoted to this very question (empirical study of the legislative-administrative divide) , but in the US I'm hard-pressed to list the corresponding think-tanks :) I suppose some MBA level depts in the US will have to suffice
I wish in the US more areas of policy would be decided at the state level, and I wish more state government would flip coins to decide on their policy. (Even better, if we can push it down to county level.)
The first part is about subsidiarity, which is a good idea anyway. But together this is just a tongue-in-cheek plea for doing more randomised, controlled experiments. (Alas, we can't blind them.)
> I wish in the US more areas of policy would be decided at the state level, and I wish more state government would flip coins to decide on their policy. (Even better, if we can push it down to county level.)
The overwhelming majority of policy is decided at the state and local level in the US so long as it's not foreign policy or monetary policy related.
Whatever is decided on the Hill has no bearing once administration and implementation comes to play - which is overwhelmingly done by state and local government.
This is why the US has become increasingly dysfunctional over the past few years - state and local elections which were previously staid affairs became polarized partisan affairs because turnout is low and the overwhelming majority of decision making roles are elected.
Flipping GP's tangent on its head (after all states in the US are akin to countries in the EU/EA:)
If you can't blind them find them
I suggest that, absolutely, state governance has _already_ generated lots of excellent data >> federal level :) probably much more accessible than corporate governance data )
Of course YC's Seibel might have something to say here, it's probably not a new perspective
I wish you were right. NYC can't even charge people for their using their roads (whether that's driving or parking) without the state and federal governments getting involved.
The problem isn’t that such candidates would never accomplish anything let alone get elected due to the insurmountable amount of resistance from so many incumbents with a vested interest in that not happening, ever.
One of the biggest problem of a two-party system is that the two parties are thoroughly captured by lobbyists.
In a PR system, fresh parties do arise over election cycles, and it takes some time for them to be thoroughly infested. These can then push for some reforms that threaten entrenched interests, and sometimes succeed.
Most people don’t even know what regulatory capture really means. There’s no “brand” to rally around and I don’t know how you’d go about building one.
And without the concept spread through the population, where would you find the grass roots support you’d need for resisting the avalanche of interest-group pushback?
“Draining the swamp” or “revolving door” were sorta in the neighborhood, but still ineffective and counterproductive.
DOGE was a Potemkin organization. They destroyed USAID, smashed up a bunch of other institutions, then went home. Very little of which complied with Federal funding law, either.
"Evidence-based" stats tracking is the only somewhat scientific method i know of that can give you a good range of estimates. But it takes effort. Thus why many don't do it.
But accurate estimate ranges are a super-power for businesses if they can trust them. Never understood why that's not demanded more... oh yeah, it's work :p
It’s still “new tech” to our monkey brains and it takes a long time, and probably a lot of destruction, before our we develop better cultural norms for dealing with it. Our cultural immune system has only just started to kick in.
It's definitely one of those pieces of media that is extremely frustrating because of how close it came to being an all-time great adaptation. Moffat needed somebody in the writers room with him to tell him 'no' sometimes.
First, worth reading this on how he deals with credit agencies and debt collectors: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r... . There's gold in here for dealing with big globo-corp and how to get their attention.
Ask Google for a certified mail address so you can send them the timeline of events that occurred. This is the shibboleth that lets them know you mean business and that by not responding, they may be facing legal action. DO NOT THREATEN or mention legal action. The managerial class doesn't act that way. Just signal you are building a case against them. Start with getting that certified mailing address... you may be surprised how they respond after just that request.
If they don't respond, keep following up. Send them a timeline of events, proof of ownership even if they do not ask you what you need to prove ownership. Make it clear what this is costing you.
But here's the thing, EVERY TIME I HAVE ASKED FOR A CERTIFIED MAIL ADDRESS, the globocorp gave me what i wanted, and I never had to follow up. Every time. They don't want to deal with actual legal action from "people who know what they are doing."
It's a shibboleth. Like "Baa-ram-ewe." Use it wisely and honestly.
reply