Category Archives: Consumer activism

Holding money at wise.com may be the next best thing to opening an offshore bank account

Wise.com use by U.S. citizens has some of the benefits of an offshore bank account but not all of them.

Buyer beware: Printronix printers

The printer I got from Printronix was terrible, the company was unable to resolve any of the issues with it, I ended up returning it for a full refund (part of which I was only able to obtain via a credit card dispute), and I discourage anyone who stumbles across this blog posting from doing business with this company. I didn’t think a printer company could annoy me more than HP does nowadays, but Printronix succeeded.

“Human Interest” is terrible

Several years ago I worked for a company which outsourced management of their 401k to Human Interest. It was… not a positive experience. I don’t remember all the details—I’ve worked pretty hard to forget them since they were so unpleasant—but suffice it to say that it was my impression that they weren’t terribly good at… Read More »

I see that Verizon’s customer website and onboarding experience still sucks as bad as it always has

Verizon’s website and their FIOS customer onboarding processes are full of problems and have been for at least a decade. I ran into nearly 30 of them just trying to complete the simple task of signing up for FIOS service. How do they get away with this?

Comcast attempts to intimidate me into taking down a blog post

Comcast sent me two intimidating letters and a bogus DMCA takedown notice in a misguided effort to get me to take down content they didn’t like because it has Comcast executive email addresses in it.

Online privacy protection for people in the resistance: DeleteMe, Block Party

If you can make it go from taking 30 seconds to 30 minutes for a bad actor to find something private about you online, you’ll dramatically decrease the number of people willing to go through the effort. Think of it like putting an alarm-system sign on your lawn to encourage burglars to skip your house.