You want advice. Live under a bridge. Eat nothing but potatoes, don't ever pay someone for something you can do yourself regardless of how long it takes you. Then you will truly be saving money.
It's a fucked life, but hey, every dollar right?
Extraneous recurring expenses are what will kill you financially. I make my own coffee, bring my lunch to work, mow my own yard, don't pay for cable, etc., because those costs add up massively over time. On the other hand, I have a very nice set of speakers for my home theater, because I can pay once, and enjoy them for a lifetime.
I wonder how much people just don't think about how much things cost. $2.50 is a sufficiently small amount that it's not worth keeping track of. $2.50 a couple of times a day feels psychologically like it's still in the noise. Over $1,200 per year feels a lot more, but it's not until you do the calculation that you realise how much you're spending. If at that price it still does seem worth it, great, but it might not be the best way of translating $1,200 into an improvement in your quality of living.
If you have someone that doesn't track their spending, and want to give them a heart attack, get them to track everything in Quicken or similar for a few months, then run some reports. I do that as a matter of course (the tracking bit, not the giving heart attacks...), and still end up with a few WTF moments every now and then.
My big coffee expense is in the office. I treat it as a cost of employment. Sure, it's costing me $2k/year but it's enabling me to earn substantially more than that.
Yeah... it's always hilarious to me when companies decide that providing cheap, legal performance-enhancing drugs to their employees all day is somehow a bad idea...:P
Why would you stand in line? I get my coffee at a drive-through window, along with my breakfast. Saves me 20 minutes easy. Sure I could save $4 by making my own breakfast and coffee before I leave the house, but those extra 20 minutes of sleep are worth a lot more to me.
What are you doing? Standing there watching the machine brew? I start my coffee first thing after I get up (takes less than a minute, including grinding beans), then toss it in a travel mug right before I walk out the door. It's better coffee, cheaper, and unless you're using a manual press, faster, too.
And who do you suggest Apple uses? All the other CMs are exactly the same - or worse.
(speaking from a US perspective) I suggest that when we discover some company operating anywhere in such a way that would violate US labor or environmental laws if they were operating domestically, that the US totally ban imports of any products of that company, as well as other products incorporating those products, for a period matching the length of the violation plus 12 months. That means they need to be paid at least the US min. wage, etc. ("That company" to include anything in the corporate ownership "tree" such that you can't just transfer stuff to another subsidiary)
That should make it sufficiently risky that anyone wanting to sell their crap here should shape up a a bit. Yes, prices would go up, but I'm fine with that.
Nuclear bombs which are highly cobalt salted to increase fallout have been thought of but the evidence is that no nuclear power has built them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb. Similarly currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.
The weapons you mention are indiscriminate, and can easily cause just as many problems for those that deploy them as they do for the targets. There are very good reasons not to use or bother building them. The whole point of the drones is that they're cheap, surgical, and can be deployed with little to no consequence for the attackers.
Energy consumption is stated at "under 2kWh/mile", which is reasonable. So a 500 mile range would be a 1MWh battery pack. The larger the battery pack, the more you approach individual cell energy densities, so they're probably getting around 200Wh/kg. Hence the battery pack (the heaviest portion of the tractor) probably weighs around 5 tonnes. Given that a typical semi tractor weighs about 8 tonnes, the two should be comparable.
Also, I seriously doubt that most trailers are at full weight all the time, so hanging another 5T battery pack under the trailer to double the range seems like it would be trivial, if you really need it. And easy to quickly swap out with standard equipment like a forklift.
Also I believe things will get worse for gaming and not better in the short term. Just wait till major AAA games are only subscription based only which EA has indicated on their sports franchises.
No... Things are just fine for gaming. My rule of thumb is "never pay more than ~$20," which has lead to me finding SO MANY good indie games, that it takes me longer to get through them than it does for new interesting ones to come out. And even if it ends up not being great, well... it was only $20.
A price tag higher than about $20 is a really good indication that the developer (or their corporate overlords) has spent on "shiny" instead of "fun".
there needs to be criminal liability for senior management too.
If we are going to start putting people in prison for incompetence, then we will need a lot more prisons.
America already imprisons four times as many people as any other 1st world country. Perhaps we should stop looking at incarceration as the solution to every problem.
In this case, it's not incompetence. I work in infosec at the engineer/architect level, and we NEVER have the resources to do things properly. It's expensive and time consuming, and profits are more important to senior management than security, plain and simple. Add to that the fact that everyone above our heads (including the CEO) complains loudly at even the slightest inconvenience in the name of security ("two-factor is too much trouble, turn it off!"), and it's hopeless without some kind of "incentives" that the higher-ups can understand.
...is that Russia has compromised one of the OTHER A/V products, and are trying to get people to switch of of Kaspersky so it's more likely they'll use the compromised one.:P
Seriously, just how much koolaide have you drank? He promised x, he failed to deliver x. That's a simple fact, not a distortion of the truth.
"produced just 17.3% of the cars they'd planned," while technically true, was probably chosen to sound much worse than it really is. "1500 people had to wait an extra month for their new car" is probably more accurate from a "what's actually going on" standpoint, but also probably doesn't make nearly as good of a headline.
Welcome to the world of research! The gap between physical possibilities and economical viability is large, but without sufficient breakthroughs on physical possibilities we will never find one that is economically viable.So, regardless of the chances being slim that we will reap the benefits of all these breakthroughs anytime soon, I am still happy to see such breakthroughs happen.
Also, I got the impression from this one that it's not "aha, we've developed this new, fragile thing that can't yet work outside of a lab," but more "aha, we've found a way to solve some of those annoying economic viability problems! And it charges really fast!"
Usually what happens in just about every court proceeding is that the plaintiff's attorney files a motion usually leading to a hearing unless the parties settle the matter beforehand. During the court proceedings the plaintiff presents to the judge an order that they believe will resolve the issue. If the defendant doesn't show up (which is the case here) to contest the order that has been presented by the plaintiff, unless the judge really understands the order (which I suspect they may not understand the internet in this case), they may be inclined to use the plaintiff's proposed order and enter it as a default judgment. Otherwise, I'm not sure how a judge could have thought that this is an appropriate remedy to the issue. The judge is asking entities who are not parties to the case to perform actions that constitute the remedy.
Does the order specify who is to PAY for the ISPs, etc. doing all this? Obviously it's useless for the judge to order the defendant to pay, since they can't and won't in this case, and it's ridiculous to expect someone not party to the case to spend a bunch of money on it.
Don't be dumb. How many of your possessions earn you income directly? If you are really claiming that one should only own such things you're an alien and should avoid trying to communicate with the humans.
Does your toothbrush make you money? Does your dog make you money? Does your lawnmower make you money?
My toothbrush helps me avoid a lot of expensive dentist bills. Pets' effect on lowering stress probably also save on medical expenses - maybe at least a wash? My lawnmower paid for itself in less than one summer of not paying for lawn service - 13 years ago, so every year since has been money in my pocket.
So maybe not earn income, technically, but avoid expenses, certainly.
Now, my home theater? Gaming computer? Not so much.:)
The problem for the gun advocates is they campaigning for a minimum level of gun violence, yet they never tell us what that minimum level is, or how to keep normal people from buying guns, losing their minds, and then killing off a bunch of the rest of us. And if you have ever spent time with the mentally ill, you'd realize a good many of them can come off normal for everyday life. There's a percentage that will go all the way down the rat hole. Some will even take their medication on the way down.
If someone has lost their mind, and is intent on killing a bunch of people, whether or not they have access to firearms makes no difference. At that point, there's almost certainly going to be some minimum level of violence that happens before they can be stopped. Don't have guns? Build a bomb. Can't do that? Just call in a fake bomb threat to the local elementary, and drive your car through the crowd when they come out.
The sad truth is that you can't stop that sort of behavior, no matter what you do, so please don't trample everyone else's rights with futile attempts. Universal access to cheap mental healthcare would probably be the most help, but still won't fix everyone (and remember, if someone thinks that accessing said mental healthcare will force them to give up their own rights, they might not get help).
No, that's the old way. In a modern world, automated guns are placed at the corner of every street. It will open fire at everything that sounds like a gunshot. The only way to stop shootings like this. And it will make the excuse "guns don't kill people, people do" invalid. Developing, installing and maintaining such automated guns will also create a lot of jobs. It's gonna be great.
Lots and lots of jobs... Since firing at "everything that sounds like a gunshot" would, of course, mean they'd decimate each other the first time one of them opened fire, necessitating the replacement of all of them...
The shareholders of the manufacturer would probably go around trolling the systems with firecrackers.
What do you mean by a containment failure? The tube is going to have a near vacuum in it so it has to be built to withstand a pressure difference of only one atmosphere. That's like a submarine diving to 10 metres. I think we can manage that.
I think it's much more likely that the tube will develop a leak. When a train traveling at 700 mph hits the air, it's going to slow down, probably quite rapidly. I couldn't begin to tell you how that will pan out. It may be that it is not a big deal because there probably won't be a wall of air so much as a pressure gradient.
If you think like an engineer for a minute, then you realize that the air from a breach could be used as an automatic brake. If the pods/tubes are designed so that even hitting a "wall of air" would result in a survivable slow to manageable speeds, then even making a 10 meter section of tube simply vanish might not be a big deal, unless the pods are right on top of it when it happens. (just have to deal with the front pods getting pushed into ones further back in lower pressure)
No, this mistake was made by someone much lower in the org than her and they probably had certs/degrees.
Probably not...
I'm in InfoSec as well, and it almost always goes like this: 1. InfoSec - we need to do X, Y and Z to address these weak points. It will cost $A. (or potentially involve B amount of dealing with user gripes) 2. Upper management - no, that's too expensive (or to much trouble, or whatever) 3. InfoSec - well, ok, we have enough resources to partially address the worst offenders X and Y... 4. Attackers - Z is weak! All your bytes are belong to us! 5. Upper management - !?! Here's a stack of money, and you users shut up 6. InfoSec - Ok, barn door is shut, but the horse is long gone...
Security issues, in my experience, are almost always due to lack of funding/manpower rather than engineering incompetence.
...FTP just needs to die. The two port requirement and worse still, people who don't get it still insisiting on 'active' FTP, is a pain in the backside for firewall admins (we had one vendor insist that passive mode was 'insecure' and active mode was somehow 'secure' but after some browbeating and the threat of the wire brush of enlightenment accepted they should use this new fangled "sftp" which didn't have any of the drawbacks of ftp, passive or active).
FTP's day was done over ten years ago.
what? As someone else who administers firewalls, I have to ask, what the hell kind of ancient packet filter are you using?
Any modern stateful firewall for almost the last two decades has been able to inspect unencrypted FTP control channels, and dynamically open the appropriate data channel ports. Both active and passive usually work just fine. As a security person, I hate FTP for its lack of encryption and clear text password transmission, but technically, it's one of the easiest.
SFTP will often end up with users complaining of slowness, because SSH has it's own (smaller) window size sitting on top of the normal TCP windowing, so FTP will often be faster without doing some tweaking on the server side for SFTP.
The most irritating file transfer protocol from a firewall perspective is FTPS - it works the same was as FTP (control + data connections), but the control channel is encrypted and unreadable to the firewall, so you actually do have to manually open high port ranges, and pay attention to active vs. passive.
I wonder whether it's really a lack of ideas, and or worse engineering staff. I think engineers are, on average, less passionate than they used to be. For many people in the industry it's just a career now, and not a passion. Especially in large companies like Intel.
Perhaps not *worse* engineering staff, just human? It would seem that the more knowledge we create, the more someone has to learn about the state of their art before they can start making useful contributions. At some point, we'll run into the problem that humans only live so long.
Sure it can. Just have legislation that makes any entity providing credit liable for eating any fraudulent credit. Then maybe they'll stop using what's basically public information at this point to give credit.
I just opened a new credit card a few weeks ago, and it was a joke to get it.
One way to protect yourself (to a certain degree) is to put a lock on your personal information with each of the three credit-reporting companies (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.) That way, nobody can access your information unless you lift the lock, either selectively, or for a finite period of time. Some of the agencies charge money (typically $10) for such a lock, or to lift it temporarily, but it's worth it IMHO.
It was... If someone now has every piece of information that Equifax has for you, they can probably lift the lock, as well.
I've been smoking marijuana on and off for almost 20 years now. I'm not addicted, and I've never been tempted to smoke during the work day or even the night before work. My clients have always been happy with my work and past clients even reach out to me asking me to come back (I'm a software contractor). I'm known for being reliable, quick thinking, creative, and productive.
And yet, companies still hire tobacco smokers that waste gobs of time each day taking smoke breaks and drive up healthcare costs.
Slashdot Mirror
This is advice. Financial advice
You want advice. Live under a bridge. Eat nothing but potatoes, don't ever pay someone for something you can do yourself regardless of how long it takes you. Then you will truly be saving money.
It's a fucked life, but hey, every dollar right?
Extraneous recurring expenses are what will kill you financially. I make my own coffee, bring my lunch to work, mow my own yard, don't pay for cable, etc., because those costs add up massively over time. On the other hand, I have a very nice set of speakers for my home theater, because I can pay once, and enjoy them for a lifetime.
I wonder how much people just don't think about how much things cost. $2.50 is a sufficiently small amount that it's not worth keeping track of. $2.50 a couple of times a day feels psychologically like it's still in the noise. Over $1,200 per year feels a lot more, but it's not until you do the calculation that you realise how much you're spending. If at that price it still does seem worth it, great, but it might not be the best way of translating $1,200 into an improvement in your quality of living.
If you have someone that doesn't track their spending, and want to give them a heart attack, get them to track everything in Quicken or similar for a few months, then run some reports. I do that as a matter of course (the tracking bit, not the giving heart attacks...), and still end up with a few WTF moments every now and then.
My big coffee expense is in the office. I treat it as a cost of employment. Sure, it's costing me $2k/year but it's enabling me to earn substantially more than that.
Yeah... it's always hilarious to me when companies decide that providing cheap, legal performance-enhancing drugs to their employees all day is somehow a bad idea... :P
Why would you stand in line? I get my coffee at a drive-through window, along with my breakfast. Saves me 20 minutes easy. Sure I could save $4 by making my own breakfast and coffee before I leave the house, but those extra 20 minutes of sleep are worth a lot more to me.
What are you doing? Standing there watching the machine brew? I start my coffee first thing after I get up (takes less than a minute, including grinding beans), then toss it in a travel mug right before I walk out the door. It's better coffee, cheaper, and unless you're using a manual press, faster, too.
And who do you suggest Apple uses? All the other CMs are exactly the same - or worse.
(speaking from a US perspective) I suggest that when we discover some company operating anywhere in such a way that would violate US labor or environmental laws if they were operating domestically, that the US totally ban imports of any products of that company, as well as other products incorporating those products, for a period matching the length of the violation plus 12 months. That means they need to be paid at least the US min. wage, etc. ("That company" to include anything in the corporate ownership "tree" such that you can't just transfer stuff to another subsidiary)
That should make it sufficiently risky that anyone wanting to sell their crap here should shape up a a bit. Yes, prices would go up, but I'm fine with that.
Nuclear bombs which are highly cobalt salted to increase fallout have been thought of but the evidence is that no nuclear power has built them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb. Similarly currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.
The weapons you mention are indiscriminate, and can easily cause just as many problems for those that deploy them as they do for the targets. There are very good reasons not to use or bother building them. The whole point of the drones is that they're cheap, surgical, and can be deployed with little to no consequence for the attackers.
Energy consumption is stated at "under 2kWh/mile", which is reasonable. So a 500 mile range would be a 1MWh battery pack. The larger the battery pack, the more you approach individual cell energy densities, so they're probably getting around 200Wh/kg. Hence the battery pack (the heaviest portion of the tractor) probably weighs around 5 tonnes. Given that a typical semi tractor weighs about 8 tonnes, the two should be comparable.
Also, I seriously doubt that most trailers are at full weight all the time, so hanging another 5T battery pack under the trailer to double the range seems like it would be trivial, if you really need it. And easy to quickly swap out with standard equipment like a forklift.
Also I believe things will get worse for gaming and not better in the short term. Just wait till major AAA games are only subscription based only which EA has indicated on their sports franchises.
No... Things are just fine for gaming. My rule of thumb is "never pay more than ~$20," which has lead to me finding SO MANY good indie games, that it takes me longer to get through them than it does for new interesting ones to come out. And even if it ends up not being great, well... it was only $20.
A price tag higher than about $20 is a really good indication that the developer (or their corporate overlords) has spent on "shiny" instead of "fun".
there needs to be criminal liability for senior management too.
If we are going to start putting people in prison for incompetence, then we will need a lot more prisons.
America already imprisons four times as many people as any other 1st world country. Perhaps we should stop looking at incarceration as the solution to every problem.
In this case, it's not incompetence. I work in infosec at the engineer/architect level, and we NEVER have the resources to do things properly. It's expensive and time consuming, and profits are more important to senior management than security, plain and simple. Add to that the fact that everyone above our heads (including the CEO) complains loudly at even the slightest inconvenience in the name of security ("two-factor is too much trouble, turn it off!"), and it's hopeless without some kind of "incentives" that the higher-ups can understand.
...is that Russia has compromised one of the OTHER A/V products, and are trying to get people to switch of of Kaspersky so it's more likely they'll use the compromised one. :P
Yeah, they rounded a bit. 200/1500=.1333
Seriously, just how much koolaide have you drank? He promised x, he failed to deliver x. That's a simple fact, not a distortion of the truth.
"produced just 17.3% of the cars they'd planned," while technically true, was probably chosen to sound much worse than it really is. "1500 people had to wait an extra month for their new car" is probably more accurate from a "what's actually going on" standpoint, but also probably doesn't make nearly as good of a headline.
Welcome to the world of research! The gap between physical possibilities and economical viability is large, but without sufficient breakthroughs on physical possibilities we will never find one that is economically viable.So, regardless of the chances being slim that we will reap the benefits of all these breakthroughs anytime soon, I am still happy to see such breakthroughs happen.
Also, I got the impression from this one that it's not "aha, we've developed this new, fragile thing that can't yet work outside of a lab," but more "aha, we've found a way to solve some of those annoying economic viability problems! And it charges really fast!"
Usually what happens in just about every court proceeding is that the plaintiff's attorney files a motion usually leading to a hearing unless the parties settle the matter beforehand. During the court proceedings the plaintiff presents to the judge an order that they believe will resolve the issue. If the defendant doesn't show up (which is the case here) to contest the order that has been presented by the plaintiff, unless the judge really understands the order (which I suspect they may not understand the internet in this case), they may be inclined to use the plaintiff's proposed order and enter it as a default judgment. Otherwise, I'm not sure how a judge could have thought that this is an appropriate remedy to the issue. The judge is asking entities who are not parties to the case to perform actions that constitute the remedy.
Does the order specify who is to PAY for the ISPs, etc. doing all this? Obviously it's useless for the judge to order the defendant to pay, since they can't and won't in this case, and it's ridiculous to expect someone not party to the case to spend a bunch of money on it.
Does your $1000 phone make you money?
Don't be dumb. How many of your possessions earn you income directly? If you are really claiming that one should only own such things you're an alien and should avoid trying to communicate with the humans.
Does your toothbrush make you money?
Does your dog make you money?
Does your lawnmower make you money?
My toothbrush helps me avoid a lot of expensive dentist bills.
Pets' effect on lowering stress probably also save on medical expenses - maybe at least a wash?
My lawnmower paid for itself in less than one summer of not paying for lawn service - 13 years ago, so every year since has been money in my pocket.
So maybe not earn income, technically, but avoid expenses, certainly.
Now, my home theater? Gaming computer? Not so much. :)
The problem for the gun advocates is they campaigning for a minimum level of gun violence, yet they never tell us what that minimum level is, or how to keep normal people from buying guns, losing their minds, and then killing off a bunch of the rest of us. And if you have ever spent time with the mentally ill, you'd realize a good many of them can come off normal for everyday life. There's a percentage that will go all the way down the rat hole. Some will even take their medication on the way down.
If someone has lost their mind, and is intent on killing a bunch of people, whether or not they have access to firearms makes no difference. At that point, there's almost certainly going to be some minimum level of violence that happens before they can be stopped. Don't have guns? Build a bomb. Can't do that? Just call in a fake bomb threat to the local elementary, and drive your car through the crowd when they come out.
The sad truth is that you can't stop that sort of behavior, no matter what you do, so please don't trample everyone else's rights with futile attempts. Universal access to cheap mental healthcare would probably be the most help, but still won't fix everyone (and remember, if someone thinks that accessing said mental healthcare will force them to give up their own rights, they might not get help).
No, that's the old way. In a modern world, automated guns are placed at the corner of every street. It will open fire at everything that sounds like a gunshot. The only way to stop shootings like this. And it will make the excuse "guns don't kill people, people do" invalid. Developing, installing and maintaining such automated guns will also create a lot of jobs. It's gonna be great.
Lots and lots of jobs... Since firing at "everything that sounds like a gunshot" would, of course, mean they'd decimate each other the first time one of them opened fire, necessitating the replacement of all of them...
The shareholders of the manufacturer would probably go around trolling the systems with firecrackers.
What do you mean by a containment failure? The tube is going to have a near vacuum in it so it has to be built to withstand a pressure difference of only one atmosphere. That's like a submarine diving to 10 metres. I think we can manage that.
I think it's much more likely that the tube will develop a leak. When a train traveling at 700 mph hits the air, it's going to slow down, probably quite rapidly. I couldn't begin to tell you how that will pan out. It may be that it is not a big deal because there probably won't be a wall of air so much as a pressure gradient.
If you think like an engineer for a minute, then you realize that the air from a breach could be used as an automatic brake. If the pods/tubes are designed so that even hitting a "wall of air" would result in a survivable slow to manageable speeds, then even making a 10 meter section of tube simply vanish might not be a big deal, unless the pods are right on top of it when it happens. (just have to deal with the front pods getting pushed into ones further back in lower pressure)
No, this mistake was made by someone much lower in the org than her and they probably had certs/degrees.
Probably not...
I'm in InfoSec as well, and it almost always goes like this:
1. InfoSec - we need to do X, Y and Z to address these weak points. It will cost $A. (or potentially involve B amount of dealing with user gripes)
2. Upper management - no, that's too expensive (or to much trouble, or whatever)
3. InfoSec - well, ok, we have enough resources to partially address the worst offenders X and Y...
4. Attackers - Z is weak! All your bytes are belong to us!
5. Upper management - !?! Here's a stack of money, and you users shut up
6. InfoSec - Ok, barn door is shut, but the horse is long gone...
Security issues, in my experience, are almost always due to lack of funding/manpower rather than engineering incompetence.
...FTP just needs to die. The two port requirement and worse still, people who don't get it still insisiting on 'active' FTP, is a pain in the backside for firewall admins (we had one vendor insist that passive mode was 'insecure' and active mode was somehow 'secure' but after some browbeating and the threat of the wire brush of enlightenment accepted they should use this new fangled "sftp" which didn't have any of the drawbacks of ftp, passive or active).
FTP's day was done over ten years ago.
what? As someone else who administers firewalls, I have to ask, what the hell kind of ancient packet filter are you using?
Any modern stateful firewall for almost the last two decades has been able to inspect unencrypted FTP control channels, and dynamically open the appropriate data channel ports. Both active and passive usually work just fine. As a security person, I hate FTP for its lack of encryption and clear text password transmission, but technically, it's one of the easiest.
SFTP will often end up with users complaining of slowness, because SSH has it's own (smaller) window size sitting on top of the normal TCP windowing, so FTP will often be faster without doing some tweaking on the server side for SFTP.
The most irritating file transfer protocol from a firewall perspective is FTPS - it works the same was as FTP (control + data connections), but the control channel is encrypted and unreadable to the firewall, so you actually do have to manually open high port ranges, and pay attention to active vs. passive.
But a phone that unlocks when it sees your face is one that the police can confiscate and unlock by simply aiming it at your face.
Why wouldn't you want that convenience?
That does open up the interesting possibility of a "duress" expression that wipes the phone when it sees it... :P
As a bonus, it will have been the cop doing the erasing, not you, so you'd not be on the hook for destroying evidence.
I wonder whether it's really a lack of ideas, and or worse engineering staff. I think engineers are, on average, less passionate than they used to be. For many people in the industry it's just a career now, and not a passion. Especially in large companies like Intel.
Perhaps not *worse* engineering staff, just human? It would seem that the more knowledge we create, the more someone has to learn about the state of their art before they can start making useful contributions. At some point, we'll run into the problem that humans only live so long.
No regulation would stop this.
Sure it can. Just have legislation that makes any entity providing credit liable for eating any fraudulent credit. Then maybe they'll stop using what's basically public information at this point to give credit.
I just opened a new credit card a few weeks ago, and it was a joke to get it.
One way to protect yourself (to a certain degree) is to put a lock on your personal information with each of the three credit-reporting companies (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.) That way, nobody can access your information unless you lift the lock, either selectively, or for a finite period of time. Some of the agencies charge money (typically $10) for such a lock, or to lift it temporarily, but it's worth it IMHO.
It was... If someone now has every piece of information that Equifax has for you, they can probably lift the lock, as well.
That this type of info is basically public domain at this point, and any company using it to verify identity is being negligent?
I've been smoking marijuana on and off for almost 20 years now. I'm not addicted, and I've never been tempted to smoke during the work day or even the night before work. My clients have always been happy with my work and past clients even reach out to me asking me to come back (I'm a software contractor). I'm known for being reliable, quick thinking, creative, and productive.
And yet, companies still hire tobacco smokers that waste gobs of time each day taking smoke breaks and drive up healthcare costs.