They restored access after about 4 hours, but during that window:
- Google Voice disappeared from Takeout, so I could not access my historical data
- I had no option to port my number to another provider
- Incoming text forwarding was disabled, which locked me out of financial, municipal, health, and payroll apps.
When I called some of those providers to update my phone number, they wanted to authenticate me with a one-time code sent to the suspended Google Voice number! They would not accept an email link and the only options were to either visit them in person or by certified letter.
I have been using this number since GrandCentral, before it migrated to Google Voice, and had never had an issue until yesterday.
The suspension was eventually reversed once the error was discovered, but it exposed a serious planning and design failure in Voice. Even if Google believes it needs to block outgoing activity during an abuse investigation, incoming texts should remain available. Removing Takeout access and preventing port-out during a mistaken suspension seems hard to justify.
This doesn't seem to be a one off - I stumbled across https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/ and found that this has been an ongoing issue - I hope atleast one person here can affect some positive changes.
I'm also lucky I wasn't in middle of an emergency myself requiring phone calls during that time - that could have had far more disastrous consequences.
I wouldn't make that claim - it's about the mindset. I've seen plenty of privately owned companies where the owners heavily churn through employees extracting as much as they can from each person and spitting them out.
Their attitude is "I can't pay at or above market, so this employee will eventually leave, so why should I invest in this employee? Let me extract as much as I can while they are here"
> Getting laid off doesn’t just rattle your career; it shakes the very foundation of your life. I've seen friends lose their jobs and go into an existential tailspin. It's not uncommon for them to blame themselves and to feel immense guilt and shame. The experience is especially hard on parents whose families depend on them for income.
What shook me up is when top performing coworkers were "laid off" because, due to recent downmarket conditions, there were slightly less competent candidates available at a heavy discount. These top performing coworkers worked extremely hard, were great at their jobs and often sacrificed personally when the company needed them but they were good negotiators as well and had negotiated good, above market salaries.
Once the project took off, the owners fired them and replaced them with cheaper workers who weren't as good but good enough to maintain and update the product.
It feels to me like the owners gave these people an impression that they would be long term employees, where their short term sacrifices would pay off long term, but effectively used them as flat rate contractors while paying them employee rates (instead of contractor rates).
> Calm companies are not exciting. They’re not inspiring. You won’t do your best work there.
Explain more. Also, ensure you're not conflating "calm companies" with "cheap companies" where the owners are focused on spending as little money as possible, including paying people as little money as possible and claim they spend so little in order to "spend responsibly" - those places are depressing and I am curious if there's a way to detect "calm companies" from "cheap companies"
As a candidate, how do you separate this kind of company from one where the owners are cheap and want to pay you as less as possible?
There are a lot of companies that advertise terrific WLB, pictures of their employees and their families laughing only to find out none of those employees work there any longer and the pictures were taken on their once-every-10-years retreat at a cheap hotel in MO or WY.
> If you were smart, you would have seen the financial crash of year 2XXX
Makes sense
> If you were smart you'd have seen that a foreign market for X would have opened up draining out all funding in the US and leaving that portion of the job market hollow
Makes sense
> If you were smart you'd have seen that bill that allowed X thousand more people in the country in this job dropping pay rates by half
Makes sense
> And I'm sure you are smart for having been born in a family that was somewhere near middle class and didn't have crippingling addictions or otherwise have issues that would put education somewhere not number 1 on the priority list. I'll clap my hands at how brilliant you are...
Doesn't make sense and then there's unhelpful sarcasm at the end
> But, what we're talking about here is those not born with all these gifts can lift themselves out of a pit of debt or worse a life that would lead to crime, so that all of us live in a better place. You have any suggestions on that. Or are you just going to lock yourself up in a gated community and not worry about that kind of thing?
Providing direct value to society and getting rewarded for doing so has been an evergreen suggestion that has always worked well.
This works well for the Chinese immigrant with literally no money and no grasp of English who starts off selling takeout and grows the business, as it does to the person who starts driving taxi cabs, again, with no money to start off at all and then saves some to lease their first taxi and hire their first employee and then the second taxi and then the second employee.
A morally just society should reward, not punish these people. We need to have more, not less of them and that happens my incentivizing the right behaviors and disincentivizing the wrong behaviors.
It's all about the mindset and taking responsibility for your own future. You can complain and blame your fate or you can give it the middle finger and grow.
But, what are some suggestions you have to lift people out of a pit of debt or crime?
Not really - banks would have made money on something else instead.
The real problem is that universities are making money off selling trash to children not old enough to drink yet.
Before loans were guaranteed, there were some checks and balances for how much trash universities could sell and at what price, but now that politicians have figured out there's nothing stopping them from taking money that's not theirs and paying it off to universities, the only losers are those who consume the trash and destroy their lives and their descendants.
> wouldn't they say that we are actually much wealthier per capita and more much productive than we were back then?
Wealthier (higher QoL, longer life expectancy etc) and more much productive, yes. However, affordability is lower precisely because everyone is more wealthy, so they demand more compensation (incentive to work), so every person has to now earn even more to afford to pay someone else more.
Globalization has put an upward pressure on wealth globally and has a deflating impact on affordability, which is in contrast to the unique position the U.S. was in allowing its citizens to enjoy extreme wealth growth right off WWII.
So yes, people are wealthier and more much productive, but they can afford less because everyone else are wealthier and more much productive as well and can compete for the same resources better than they were able to before (it's not that exciting to be a millionaire if everyone is also a millionaire).
> person gets crashed into and injured, then a poorly timed market crash eliminates 70% of their savings driving them into bankruptcy
I think you need to collide your imagination with reality by asking whether majority of the recipients of this subsidy ended up there due to these terrible situations outside their control similar to what you suggest.
The crash, injury, market crash are all events that have happened to everyone and sure, it does affect a few people worse than others, but, for the problem at hand, are those the root cause, or something else entirely?
and should society as a whole ensure people have the training and skills to be more resilient to impacts from crashes, injuries, market crashes?
Extrapolating exceptional situations and weaving them into a story that feels good and fits an evil narrative that will have a terrible impact on future generations to come isn't a step in the right direction.
This is a political trick that exploits people in bad situations and does nothing to ensure that future generations don't end up in similar bad situations.
> My biggest issue with these cancellations is that they don't seem to be fixing the underlying issue at all — that you can't default on your student loans
Lenders being selective about student loans is part of a larger feedback loop. That you can't default on your student loans removes a strong signal for a student to realize what they are planning to do isn't deemed productive by society, but that doesn't mean a well educated student won't figure this out on their own even in the lack of this strong signal.
A well educated person shouldn't need a lot of external feedback to figure out if you spend more than you earn, bad things will happen.
The root cause is schools are completely failing at their job of laying good foundations for generations of tomorrow and are not getting the feedback they need to be useful and political tricks like this further distorts the feedback loop.
This means students are not well educated - they might be able to recite Shakespeare or vomit out coding algorithms from a book but most of them lack logical thinking, clarity of mind, decision making that includes knowledge of finances and projections so you can answer the question "out of all the things I can do, what should I be doing right now?"
So they go and land themselves in a mess and then politicians exploit them by digging a deeper hole for them and their children.
> I mean aren't you really asking "What should I be doing X years from now"?
For a person to answer what they should be doing X years from now, well, they first, need to be able to answer what they should be doing right now, very well.
> Is part of your great plan in making things better just unaliving these people?
That is quite a stretch.
Let us simplify things down a bit: on an individual basis, these subsidies are a few hundred dollars a month - which means that while that's nothing to scoff at, the recepients already have something else going on and making a living already. It might not be a great living but this subsidy isnt going to, for example, take someone destitute and homeless and put them in a position to become financially independent.
What would have stopped destitution and homeless would have been a better education. Now yes, there are well educated people who due to bad luck have become destitute and homeless but those are the exception, not the norm for well educated people to end up in.
Schools are not getting the feedback they need to be useful and political tricks like this further distorts the feedback loop.
We should really take a few minutes to consider what this means for not just our future but our future generations.
I think arguments that go along the lines of "I worked extremely hard to minimize my loans and now I felt betrayed" is missing the bigger evil lurking in the shadows: schools in the U.S. don't teach what really needs to be taught and political tricks like this further distort the feedback loop.
Schools should teach logical thinking, clarity of mind, decision making that includes knowledge of finances and projections so you can answer the question "out of all the things I can do, what should I be doing right now?"
"Follow your passion" worked when the U.S. was enjoying extreme wealth growth right off WWII - at that time you could shine shoes and own a single bedroom house away from the city. Weaving baskets and selling them could be the only thing you did and rent half a home for the rest of your life.
This is a cheap political trick that makes things worse. This is a perfect example of why a government shouldn't be trusted to allocate resources efficiently.
I am also concerned that this now opens an expectation that this current party will periodically forgive loans in the future - so, as long as you keep voting them into power, it doesn't matter what decisions you make, you won't have to suffer too terribly for them.
The right call would have been to invest these dollars in reworking education and schooling so that our future generations don't repeat the same mistakes we did and end up looking for handouts because we failed to learn how to make the right decisions.
While the intentions for this might not be evil, the effect is terribly so and disempowering for future generations.
To those who got some relief from this subsidy - I hope this helps you feel a bit better but hold those who put you in this situation accountable. Don't let politicians take advantage of you like this. Take a few minutes to write a letter to your school and college and tell them how they failed you and what you wish they had done instead.
The future of our country depends on your feedback
Then I assume you have a custom Kubernetes LB that can handle non-HTTP TCP and UDP traffic because you choosing Kubernetes and the design restrictions that comes with it does not affect how the dev solves problems?
The underlying orchestrator definitely affects how the software needs to behave and is definitely not irrelevant.
> If you guys don't see the value of being able to click on a button on a website to deploy, perfectly, everytime over some guy sshing into the box and running git pull I dunno what to tell you.
Maybe clicking a button that sshes into the box and runs git pull?
> honestly, who needs the ability to manage complex applications with any semblance of ease?
The argument being made here is majority of applications are rarely complex and hence dont require managing that complexity.
A simple webservice fronted by a simple reverse proxy like Caddy running on a single "modern PC" can do wonders without any Kubernetes needing to get involved.
> All those things you (a developer) could mostly clone, slightly customize and ship both to a development k8s cluster and to a prod k8s cluster (with all the safety nets already in place).
How did/does the devs create, test new code and debug issues? Can they do that locally on their local laptop? If so, how?
Kubernetes is/was a way to fight off walled gardens from cloud providers. The other path would have been to learn the bespoke implementation of each cloud provider depending on what that employer ended up using.
Kubernetes was at the right place, at the right time just as AWS was trying to force feed people their own proprietary solution, as Azure was trying to wall off people into their own walled garden, as GCP was being Google just not giving a damn about any other usecase than what works great at a massive search company.
With Kubernetes, developers can learn one API to deploy their applications and hopefully it works on AWS, Azure, GCP, DO, OVH or a laptop at home.
So that way, developers can learn one thing and transfer their knowledge at an employer that hosts on AWS, and then another that hosts on Azure and so on.
This is in contrast to the experience of a Python developer who's mastered FastAPI/Flask/SQLAlchemy and feels absolutely lost in a Django project or an Angular developer who stares a Next.js project wondering what the heck is happening and how it all works. Neither a Next.js or an Angular developer would start off with an AWS Amplify solution if they could help it.
They restored access after about 4 hours, but during that window:
- Google Voice disappeared from Takeout, so I could not access my historical data
- I had no option to port my number to another provider
- Incoming text forwarding was disabled, which locked me out of financial, municipal, health, and payroll apps.
When I called some of those providers to update my phone number, they wanted to authenticate me with a one-time code sent to the suspended Google Voice number! They would not accept an email link and the only options were to either visit them in person or by certified letter.
I have been using this number since GrandCentral, before it migrated to Google Voice, and had never had an issue until yesterday.
The suspension was eventually reversed once the error was discovered, but it exposed a serious planning and design failure in Voice. Even if Google believes it needs to block outgoing activity during an abuse investigation, incoming texts should remain available. Removing Takeout access and preventing port-out during a mistaken suspension seems hard to justify.
This doesn't seem to be a one off - I stumbled across https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/ and found that this has been an ongoing issue - I hope atleast one person here can affect some positive changes.
I'm also lucky I wasn't in middle of an emergency myself requiring phone calls during that time - that could have had far more disastrous consequences.