HAL 9000 HAS A MODERN COUNTERPART – PART 2

Posted on November 13, 2022 by David

Do Not Use Square For Payment Processing If You Are A Small Business

Their payment processing includes Invoicing and Virtual Terminal services which are completely automated with no error feedback or access to a human being. If Square’s Robot Payment Processing System decides you are a high risk business, they can hold your money for 90 days and you will not get access to a human being to sort things out.

If a data entry occurs, like an incorrect CVV number, their robot payment processing system assigns you a high risk designation and begins a review – by a robot customer support system , with no provision for access to a human operator.

Here is the explanation from the Square website.

How long can Square hold your money? That’s right, Square can hold your money for up to 90 days. Three months without access to your payment processing system can be devastating for even the most established businesses.

Why is Square holding my money for 90 days?

While the review is occurring, we hold the funds to ensure that we understand what they are for and how your business is run so we can guarantee a safe trading environment.

This is why robot payment processing systems are so dangerous. They are designed to save money on human salaries so they limit customer access to human employees. Thus when systems fail to handle human data entry errors, these robot systems institute fraud protection measures, instead of providing error feedback for the human user.

The Square system is set up to prevent chargeback fraud, but holding your money for 90 days with no resolution can invite chargebacks by friendly customers who want to see that you get paid.

Avoid robot data entry or payment processing systems which have no provision to reach a human for help. Square has frozen $1400.00 of my customer payments for 90 days because of a CVV data entry error. Can your business afford this risk?

Posted in Basic Business Concepts | Leave a comment

There Are Times When You Need Help Talking To Your Spirits

Posted on November 12, 2022 by David

I was in session today with a client who has been working with his spirits and has been discovering things he never encountered before. He has had some major wins, but he has also had some unexpected setbacks he was not prepared for. In a very real sense, he has been poking a spiritual hornet’s nest and has stirred up some beings he has not encountered before. He is surrounded by spirits he was not fully aware of before. He is like the bus driver in this illustration.

I have a great deal of admiration for him as he has more courage than almost any other client I have known. It has dawned on him that he has to communicate with and deal with his spiritual companions if he is to continue to survive and he is doing his best even though he is fairly new at the game of talking to his spirits. His telepathic abilities are just beginning to blossom so he is aware of a gathering storm of spirits but does not yet have the skills to manage what he is encountering.

There is a saying that a counselor and his client are greater than the insanity that surrounds them and it is quite true. The client can run solo sessions many times successfully, but there is occasionally a time when his spiritual companions are so disturbed that they keep him off balance and he succumbs to their panic and fears. When this happens, the person can no longer separate his emotions from the emotions of the disturbed spirits surrounding him and he loses control of his emotions and can no longer run a solo session. This is where a trusted partner or counselor can pull the person back from the edge of madness and help him put his thoughts in order again.

When a solo session goes wrong, the panicking spirits cause the solo practitioner to lose control by flooding his consciousness with thoughts of earlier disasters they had experienced. It may even seem to the overwhelmed solo practitioner that all of the successful work he had accomplished was being reversed.

Do not flog yourself if this happens to you, just call an experienced SRT user or me for help.

We are spiritual pioneers on a new frontier here and we are going to run into phenomena that no one expects. If we stay connected and share our resources and our observations, we will develop Spiritual Rescue Technology into a capable system for handling spirits of any type. We will actually recover the powers we used to have and the wisdom to use them more wisely than in the past. We have definitely proved that awesome power has been no match for intelligent and cunning intentions.

Time and time again we beings with godlike powers were brought down by our own inability to believe that we could be outsmarted. We need to recover our ability to read intentions, no matter how cleverly obscured by images demanding our sympathy and playing on our emotions. The bright light of spiritual discovery will change the future if we learn to use it again.

Posted in Achieving Peace of Mind, Achieving Your Full Potential | Leave a comment

Suppose There Is No Such Thing As Bad Luck

Posted on November 11, 2022 by David

A common definition is that bad luck is an unfortunate, unpredictable outcome. This is a made-up definition that attempts to make the person receiving bad luck into a blameless victim. It is an excuse for the inability to perceive intentions that are obvious to almost every onlooker.

If you ask almost any observer of a person who has bad luck, you will find that they were predicting his failures long before they happened, because the person who has “bad luck” has ignored the intentions of others and their own lack of information on what to do in order to succeed.

The major reason for failure in life is the inability to perceive intentions and the unwillingness to assess their importance. Everything in the material universe has been created by intentions and every action has an intention driving it. Intention is a spiritual quality and cannot be directly measured by science. The best measure of an intention, if you cannot perceive it directly, is by the results.

When something you desire and work for diligently is not happening, this is not bad luck. There is counter-intention at work or you have failed to understand what is required to succeed. Your project may be the greatest advance ever to happen to modern civilization, but if the majority of prospective customers feel it is evil or unnecessary, your project will not succeed, no matter how much you advertise it.

On the other hand, you may have sold prospective customers on the desirability of your idea, but the project consumes more energy and money than it can ever generate and it harms the environment. In this case, your project will get built and people will cheer, but the damage will show up later and your reputation will be permanently harmed. In this case, the true cost of the project was never seen or was ignored in the push to get the project completed as planned.

In both of these cases, there are people able to see the counter-intentions and the lack of actual justification for the project, but they either did not speak up or were ignored by those in charge. The sinking of the Titanic was not bad luck and neither is the current economic crises in our current civilizations. The prevalence of misinformation in our school systems and in most of our media will almost guarantee that “bad luck” will continue to occur until some changes are made.

Posted in Challenges to overcome, Gaining The Ability To Help Yourself | Leave a comment

HAL 9000 Has A Modern Counterpart

Posted on November 8, 2022 by David

If you thought HAL 9000 was scary, wait until you meet the robot customer service AI at SQUARE. Their mutual lack of humanity makes both of them stunning examples of badly programmed systems.

HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series. First appearing in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is a sentient artificial general intelligence computer that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship’s astronaut crew.

Both of them are examples of simplistic money-saving solutions with no access to human override. This kind of robot “intelligence” fails spectacularly when presented with data that does not meet the guidelines set by programmers with limited real-life experience.

The robot customer service system at Square was installed to save money on human customer service staff and it does everything possible to keep you from contacting a live human being. It has a low tolerance for input data errors and a simple error in entering a CVV code can lock up your funds and mark you as a high-risk customer. 

Once the Square Customer Service System has marked you as a high-risk customer, it effectively screens you from contacting a live customer service agent by presenting you with a canned set of recordings when you call for help. Text messages sent to the help center get canned replies that refer you to emails sent previously and are no longer available.

I went to Square in mid-October looking for an invoicing and virtual terminal service to replace the one I have been using for the past ten years. I ran test transactions through their system to see how reliable the system was, but I did not test it thoroughly enough. I invoiced a customer and that transaction was completed with no problem. I used the virtual terminal system for another customer and the transaction was denied twice with no reason for the error message. (The customer had given the CVV code in the wrong order.) When I entered the correct CVV code the transaction went through, but Square froze my funds and indicated I was a high-risk customer. Square has indicated that my money will be sent to my bank account, but I am unable to get a date for this transfer.

If you enjoy interacting with a robot system that can freeze your account and deny access to a human counterpart, Square will give you that experience in spades. You can relive the experience of astronaut Dave being locked out of the spaceship airlock with nobody to hear you plead for help.

I have the feeling that I am not the only customer who has been locked out of the Square airlock because the system they have erected to keep customers from contacting real humans is carefully designed to keep us from registering complaints with responsible people working there.

The one human contact I made in the early stages of this catastrophe was a soft-spoken person of foreign extract who apologized because he could not help me straighten this matter out by simply checking with my customer and verifying the transaction. He said I would have to prove to the system that I was a real corporation.

Unfortunately, the system has already given me its answer, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”

If you wish to trust your business to the Square version of HAL, have a backup plan ready. You will need it.

If you would like to see what an AI expert says about these systems, see this presentation:

The Real Reason to be Afraid of Artificial Intelligence | Peter Haas | TEDxDirigo

Posted in Things that concern me | Leave a comment