TerkErJerbs

I’m not speaking in absolutes here obviously. But it’s pretty well established that a very small fraction of people who take drugs (prescription or otherwise) become what we term addicts. There are lots of affluent addicts and alcoholics (I know plenty personally) but just because they have access to medical and mental health care doesn’t mean every one of them will go there.

You don’t see a lot of upper middle class people end up on the streets with heavy addictions because they can usually get into rehab, get help processing whatever it is keeping them down, and move on with their lives. Lots of poorer people can do so as well (the poverty and “success” porn content out there is easy to find) but for every one of those success stories there are thousands who never make it. I don’t think it’s hard to parse that poorer people have less culturally acceptable means of getting help (if they don’t outright end up in prison for simple possession to begin with, which I’m guessing those peers you’re referring to seldom have to worry about).

The thing a lot of people get backwards (fuck the war on drugs actually) is that hardcore addiction is virtually always predated by some type of undiagnosed and untreated mental health issue. To say that another way, mental health issues are not caused by taking drugs. When someone is very unwell and often poor (i.e. low or no access to medical and mental health professionals) they often find a way to self-treat the affliction(s) with street drugs. Those same underlying causes for a more affluent person will be dealt with alongside medical supervision (and often with the same class of drugs) without falling into the trap of addiction (because supervised, and supported).

Nothing cool about being a drug user by choice, nor an addict trying to cope. It’s just reality.

4. If every psycho and their dog knew there was a parachute onboard for them it would happen often that some drunk asshole decided today was they day they’re gonna jump from a commercial flight

I quit a well known ecomm tech company a few months ago ahead of (another) one of their layoff rounds because upper mgmt was turning into ultra-wall street corpo bullshit. With 30% of staff gone, and yet our userbase almost doubling over the same period, they wanted everyone to continue increasing output and quality. We were barely keeping up with our existing workload at that point, burnout was (and still is) rampant.

Over the two weeks after I gave my notice I discovered that in the third-party app ecosystem many thousands of apps that had (approved) access to the Billing API weren’t even operating anymore. Some had quit operating years ago, but they were still billing end-users on a monthly basis. Many end-users install dozens of apps (just like people do with mobile phones) and then forget they ever did so. The monthly rates for these apps are anywhere from 3 to 20 dollars per month, many people never checked their bank statements or invoices (when they eventually did, they’d contact support to complain about paying for an app that doesn’t even load and may not have for months or years at this point).

I gathered evidence on at least three dozen of these zombie apps. Many of them had hundreds of active installs, and were billing users for in some cases the past three years. I extrapolated that there were probably in the high-hundreds or low-thousands of these zombie apps billing users on the platform, amounting to high-thousands to low-tens-of thousands of installs… amounting to likely millions per year in faulty and sketchy invoicing happening over our Billing API.

Mgmt actually did put together a triage team to address my findings, but I can absolutely assure you the only reason they acted so quickly is because I was on the way out of the company. I’d spotted things like this in the wild previously and nothing had ever been done about it. The pat answer has always been well people are responsible for their own accounts and invoicing. I believe they acted on this one because I was being very vocal about how it would be ‘a shame’ if this situation ever became public, and all those end-users came after the company for those false invoices at one time. It would be a PR and Support nightmare.

You have definitely interacted with this ecommerce platform if you shop online.