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[Jopax]

The one photo I saw was a truck hauling off several mailboxes with the claim being 'removal due to low usage' or something to that extent, which may or may not be a valid claim, without official numbers it'd be kinda hard to tell either way.

Still, the timing is kinda weird what with the whole voting by mail and the upcoming elections thing looming over the horizon.

[Maximum Spin]

Still, the timing is kinda weird what with the whole voting by mail and the upcoming elections thing looming over the horizon.

I can categorically confirm that mail trucks, at least, get hauled around more or less every week and the timing is only in when people are NOTICING it.

Also, if people's mailboxes were getting stolen, you'd know. Someone would have said "THE MAILBOX ON MY STREET GOT TOWED AWAY AND NOW I CAN'T PAY RENT" or something, it'd be a huge fiasco.

[Dostoevsky]

The backdrop is indeed pretty bad. Today USPS announced "temporary" price increases effective October 18th, they're charging states more for sending ballots (by getting rid of mass mail discounts that others can get), and there's an ongoing (as of early July, I think) set of changes to how mail is handled in general that is slowing down delivery speeds.

Today the USPS also 'warned' Michigan and Pennsylvania that their absentee voting rules may result in "a significant risk that, at least in certain circumstances, ballots may be requested in a manner that is consistent with your election rules and returned promptly, and yet not be returned in time to be counted." As in, the postal service won't deliver them rapidly enough to be counted. Some postal workers predicted that the above-mentioned changes to the USPS would lead to this result.

One of the underlying problems with the US Postal Service is that - since Reagan, I believe - the postal service is run like a government agency, with a agency-like objective, but is funded like a corporation. That is, they exist to provide a benefit but have to fund itself through mail. They are also generally pretty limited in what changes they can make, e.g. closing individual postal offices, as the legislative branch can intervene.

Another wrinkle here is that the Treasury department recently offered to give the cash-strapped agency a significant loan - with certain terms.

The Postal Service, subject to confidentiality restrictions, will provide Treasury copies of its 10 largest “negotiated service agreements,” or contracts with high-volume third-party shippers such as Amazon, FedEx and UPS, and receive a crucial injection of cash that postal officials say will keep the debt-laden agency solvent for at least another year, according to a copy of the loan’s term sheet obtained by The Washington Post.

I've seen some reporting that some of the leadership changes to bring in Trump loyalists were also unofficial conditions of Treasury's loan.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had previously sought to leverage the loan, attached to an early round of coronavirus relief spending, in exchange for sweeping operational control of the Postal Service, including provisions that would allow the Trump administration to approve senior postal personnel decisions, service contracts with third-party shippers, collective bargaining negotiation strategies and high package prices.

All that said, I don't know about mail trucks getting moved around.

Edit: I should add further backdrop that a newly-appointed Trump loyalist (and donor friend) is responsible for these changes. They've also forced out much of the existing leadership of the organization last month.

[Starver]

Fascinating that a warranty lasts for 90 days only tho, you'd think US cars would be better made than that :V

I've watchee all the documentaries. They tend to get blown up (often by rocket launchers), flip upside down (due to a near miss by rocket launchers), get girders poking through their windshields (due to someone firing at something else with a rocket launcher) or flooded engines (because someone took out the bridge with a rocket launcher).

This happens with all the shiniest cars, vans, etc, obviously fresh from the showroom (initially).

If you drive a very old car, it largely escapes all that, so you don't even need a warranty.

Anything yellow with checkerboard bands is a toss-up (no matter how old or new) but anything with red/blue strobes is doomed,.especially if it's a county-sherrif's personal vehicle and he's just left it at the side of a road to mediate a.minor shunt, at which point it becomes subject to a major shunt by being heavily clipped by a big-rig (probably dragging a trailer of rocket-launchers) that causes it to mysteriously blow up, flip, land upside down precariously on the edge of a bridge, long enough for the sherrif to reach in and grab the radio handset, before it topples in, leaving the sherrif holding just the handset and dangling chord.  Every. Time.

[nenjin]

There's a various levels of warranties, and when you're buying a pre-owned vehicle, the warranty is there to protect you against some shit the dealership didn't check out before they sold the car to you.

[MrRoboto75]

Anyways, what's this talk of USPS fuckery being commited by the administration. Seeing a lot of noise on social media from US folk, not sure how much of it is knee-jerk panic from folks traumatized by 4 years of shitler in charge and how much is valid concerns.

Trump has outright stated he's defunding USPS to block mail voting.  He knows if voters can mail, he will lose.  He knows he needs to look for any justification to call the election fraudulent.  USPS has been denied overtime hours/pay, on top of how they already are mandated to hold 75 years of pension pay.  There have been reports of sorting machines being dismantled or even destroyed, with the justification that somehow doing it by hand is cheaper.

Couple this with the fact that polling volunteers have been at shortage, and multiple polling places have closed in the state primary votes this year.  There's a lot to be afraid of, even if Trump officially loses the election.

[Lord Shonus]

Well the calls started almost 3 months to the day after I bought my car. So if I didn't sign up for a warranty (which they then probably sold to someone else) at the very least they sold my phone # to someone.

It's not unreasonable that it could be coincidence. I mean, the whole point of the scam is that they call enough people to hope that, statistically, SOME of them will have bought a car around the right time to believe it. You may just be that some.

Motor vehicle registrations are accessible for insurance purposes. I've always got a ton of warranty spam after registering (or renewing) a vehicle , and assumed that was the cause.

[Maximum Spin]

Motor vehicle registrations are accessible for insurance purposes. I've always got a ton of warranty spam after registering (or renewing) a vehicle , and assumed that was the cause.

That is also possible, but I (and others have reported the same) occasionally get a ton of warranty spam after not owning a vehicle. So I figure it's a tossup.

[Eschar]

Wait a minute, if it's after not owning a vehicle, you must be owning a vehicle then

Technically correct, the best kind of correct

[Starver]

Regularly (once a day, often) someone I know over here gets a recorded phonecall about her Amazon Prime account being deactivated. (She, like I have no such account.) Then there's "£600 from your bank account" (always that value), that the (usually wrong) ISP/phone company is cancelling the respective service, etc etc.

Via email, she gets any number of things (most just Spam, sometimes Amazon/random Bank/etc), every now and then a deliberately[1] mis-crafted ISP services email (correct company, them being clued in by the name@isp.net address on their records).  It's possible - so she asserts - that this all stems from one time she registered her contact details for a supermarket promotion, one time. Hard to tell, as the phone number could have been randomly dialled and found working and her email has appeared on a scrapable online resource (not vastly exposed, but still).

I tended to use the trick of using a different @ on the same domain of mine for all kinds of necessary registrations (easy filter/sort on arrival, and thus tell if a place I registered had leaked/been leaky beyond the anticipated remit.  Also got a lot of <randomstuff>@ mail, which indicates fishing (though not necessarily phishing) for 'other users on my network'.

I really haven't had much via my.mobile (long ago I dropped my landline, which had the occasional "We are Microsoft, your computer has a virus, please give us remote access to your comouter for us to help you", that I know still happens, but slightly) better scripted to cover a wider range of devices[2]), I keep getting text offers from my service provider about an offer that just does not save me money[3] that are likely genuine, though I also occasionally get a call-centre saying the same thing, supposedly the same company but ask me how much I spend. Obviously as uninformed as the text-sending system (I respond "I don't really know, but you should").

Back to the someone-I-know, and cars... Just recently she changed cars and within minutes of retaxing the new vehicle under her name, at the post office, got a text purporting to be from HMRC (≈IRS) asking her to download[4] a document. Given it was on a server like "government.me" rather than something like "hmrc.gov.uk" it was fairly obvious non-legit, though forwarded it to HMRC's own anti-Phishing dept. and they confirmed it/hopefully aggressively dealt with the trap-site. And in retaxing she hadn't set down her mobile number anyway (maybe it leaked from the Insurer or other service, dealt with a day or three before when the purchase was finalised, but could just have been total and utter fluke).


It's that kind of world, though, for neutral or worse.



[1] If you fall for a badly-crafted automated hoax, you're worth their precious time once you get to the human-led attack stage.

[2] I used to boot up my antique Cambridge Workstation, occasionally, though at the time I could have probably gotten away with a Linux machine before I had to start faking an inability to follow their instructions, and delaying their ability to move on to yet another target person.

[3] PAYG, currently, and I don't spend the amount per month that the move to a contract would cost to give me the unbelievably huge number of free minutes that I mostly would not use anyway.

[4] Like me, her phone doesn't do downloads, so again we thwart the scammers far too high expectations.

[nenjin]

Admittedly to me, the most disturbing spam calls are literally in Chinese.

[Reelya]

On the robocall note, Kamala Harris is so bad even the dead tweet about her:

https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/herman-cain-tweets-about-kamala-harris-two-weeks-after-he-died-from-covid19/news-story/0129e25c54e753b75628a7e0bf34b229

[Starver]

If a blue-tick account is now verifiably unverified as the previously verified person... Does it still deserve its tick?

(Genuine question. I know the system exists, but not its exact criteria.)

On the SANS issue: I was once enrolled to the Institute of Validation Technology, as a useful adjunct to a prior job. The membership materials I got through the post included a 'membership card' for a person that was not me...  (IIRC, I just left it to rot at the bottom of a desk drawer.)

[Doomblade187]

Here's a Vice/Motherboard article about the sorting machines. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wk9z/the-post-office-is-deactivating-mail-sorting-machines-ahead-of-the-election

Basically, the USPS is removing surge capacity from several centers. This is bad practices when it comes to manufacturing/processing, and will make the system more vulnerable to mail in ballot delays. In order to counteract this, send your ballot in wayyy early.

[Iduno]

Here's a Vice/Motherboard article about the sorting machines. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wk9z/the-post-office-is-deactivating-mail-sorting-machines-ahead-of-the-election

Basically, the USPS is removing surge capacity from several centers. This is bad practices when it comes to manufacturing/processing, and will make the system more vulnerable to mail in ballot delays. In order to counteract this, send your ballot in wayyy early.

It's been pretty much continuous in the 2000's. There's been a lot of effort of the part of the major political parties in the US to get rid of social services, including the post office. Yes, under-represented people are feeling the pinch more in an election year, but also in the rest of the years. Corporatism affecting poor people more is just a symptom of non-rich people being fed into the system more and more.