The problem, however, is that "more productive" is republican code for working longer hours for less pay.
One could also state that the problem, however, is that "more productive" is employee code for working more hours. But does that really make any sense? If you are working more hours but not providing any more value, why should you have more compensation?
More often people who are very well off are there not because they work hard but because they got really lucky.
Do you think Scott Adams got to where he is today through luck? Read about his life sometime, and you will see that his achievements were realized through persistence. Persistence trumps luck any day.
Not everyone has the ability coupled with luck to translate hard work into higher tax brackets.
If/when you get into a higher tax bracket, you'll see how silly that sounds.
As an ostensibly civilized human being you need to decide how you treat these people who through no fault of their own, will not have huge sums of cash.
I think any civilized human would agree that there ought to be a minimum standard of living. But reasonable people could disagree on what that standard ought to be.
The republican mindset is to fuck them hard, in the ass, with no lube.
Disclaimer: I am not a tax adviser. Don't listen to me.
In a nutshell, if you are not a business, don't bother paying use tax. You are never, ever going to get audited for use tax as an individual.
That being said, pro photographers get shaken down for use tax all the time because they tend buy high-ticket items and dodge sales/use tax. Save those receipts and/or pay your use tax, as applicable.
I'm not an Oracle cheer-leader. But I do work with their products daily and I cringe when I see people say that MySQL or even PostgreSQL (which I absolutely love) are on par with Oracle. They aren't.
I agree with this statement, but that doesn't change the fact that most companies who use Oracle don't need Oracle.
They could get by just fine with MySQL or PostgreSQL. But no one got fired for buying Oracle, I guess.
That's not partitioning. That's a weird, ugly, error-prone hack with table inheritance and constraints.
And you're further telling me I further have to enable constraint exclusions on my entire database server, which is a performance hog on non-partitioned tables?
And what if I want to change my partition keys? No can do. Parameterized queries? Nope.
So mod me -1 troll all day long--I don't care. Being right is more important to me.
What does MySQL have that Oracle needs or would improve it? I can't think of anything - seriously. I'm not trying to troll, fill me in on where MySQL is better than Oracle.
Ease of use and cost.
Sure, you think Oracle is easy, but you are an Oracle DBA. MySQL is trivially easy for a developer to set up and get running. I mean, 'apt-get install mysql-server' easy. I just typed 'apt-get install oracle' and, surprise, I have no Oracle. So Oracle is harder.
Oracle is also obscenely expensive. Don't get me wrong--if you need it, it's worth every penny. But 3 of my last 4 clients could not stop bitching about the cost of Oracle licenses and Oracle DBAs, yet MySQL or PostgreSQL would have easily met their needs. (The 4th client, a massive financial institution, did not complain about the cost of Oracle licenses, and they definitely needed to be using Oracle.)
My current client's largest database has only about 4 million records in it, but it has a simple, well-designed schema and queries are very cheap. Yet they have 4 Oracle DBAs, and god knows how many Oracle licenses. They have old Oracle instances where they pay per-CPU license fees on an ancient CPUs. There is no reason in the world they couldn't just retire those boxes, move the simple DBs to Postgres, and send those licenses back to Oracle. They'll never do that, but they could easily save a quarter million dollars per year if they would.
Right because being burned by incompetence doesn't happen in any other field right?
Had the Ask Slashdot submitter ever actually done an interview in another field, he'd know that "test" are not limited to IT-related jobs.
Go apply for any banking job and you will receive what is called a "case interview". You'll wish you were just taking just a simple IT test.
Many other employers will give personality tests.
That being said, I did walk out on a job interview once over one of those tests. I was applying for a job at a large national bank, and HR had decreed that all applicants for professional positions would take a particular math test. The highest level mathematical skills required to complete the exam were an elementary grasp of fractions, and the ability to read a graph with X and Y axes.
I asked the interviewer if it was really necessary to waste a few hours of my time on this math exam after acing my case interview (it was a few hundred questions long!). She informed me that, regrettably, I would be required to take it, and that she was very sorry about it, and to please just take it, and that in 5 years I wouldn't even remember it and would be happily along in my career. Well, that was over 10 years ago, I still remember it, and when I walked out, about 3 other applicants walked out with me.
I guess they must know something I don't, because that bank is doing very well right now in the current financial crisis. But my career path wound up taking a very different turn for the better, anyhow.
Is someone forcing you to use a bank with statements that complex? Seems to me there's a lot of choice in banks out there. If you bank has statements that are too complicated, get a different bank.
Nobody is forcing me to use that private bank, and I have no particular affinity for complicated statements (although I'm pretty sure all private banks have similarly complicated statements). The only reason I use my current bank is because that's where my portfolio manager works. If he moved, I'd move too. I spent months looking for one that I trusted, and now I have experience with him to validate that trust.
When things get complicated, you hire a professional.
You're preaching to the choir here. I have a banker, financial planner, portfolio manager, bookkeeper, CPA, tax strategist, and estate planner. And that's just off the top of my head.
Go for simple investments. Nobody says you have to invest in complex things. Have a certain amount of operational overhead in a checking account, some more reserve overhead in a high interest savings and/or CD, and the rest in an index fund. No, you aren't going to make the massive returns that some of the creative schemes out there can. However the tradeoff is that it will be extremely easy to manage yourself.
This strategy fails in several ways.
No financial plan. When you're 22 years old with no family and no responsibilities, you can indeed manage your financial affairs willy-nilly. But once you get older and have responsibilities, you start having to face important questions. How much house can I afford? Am I saving enough for the kids' college? Can I buy a new car right now? Am I saving enough for retirement? Am I using the right tax-advantaged vehicles? If you have no financial plan, you have no idea what tomorrow will bring. Did you save too much and not enjoy life as much as you cold have? Did you save too little, and now you are in a financial pickle? What happens if you become disabled or die?
No risk/reward management. A portfolio manager's job is to achieve maximum return for the minimum risk. In the late '90s, I knew a few millionaires who are now hundred-thousandaires because they had high risk-high return portfolios. A bull market can make anyone look like an investing genius. But how did you perform during the bear markets? That's what counts. My portfolio manager has me invested in several specialized vehicles in order to control risk. This is important to me, because I have worked hard to be where I am today.
No tax planning. The IRS would love it if everyone followed your plan.:)
No estate planning. Your plan above would have Uncle Sam be your biggest heir when you die.
There is no honor in managing your portfolio yourself if you are going to do a terrible job at it. There are people out there who are as good at managing portfolios as you are at whatever your job is. They are worth what they cost.
To me it sounds like he just kinda got lazy. Not a lot of sympathy in that case, especially since he should have known better.
My guess is his bookkeeper dropped the ball here. I mean, what bookkeeper sees $300,000 in ACH debits from Dell and doesn't even ask the boss if any of that should be reported to his CPA as a deductible expense? I get 100 such calls each year from my bookkeeper--she manages books with an iron fist.
For my purposes, I'd rather not have to deal with complex investments and complex statements, but that's what it takes to ensure that my family's financial picture remains strong.
Seriously with a bit of work it shouldn't be hard to keep track of your financials these days, especially with instant access via the Internet.
You've obviously never seen a private banking statement. For fun, I pulled out my July statement. There were 3 actual transactions on it (not dividend/reinvestment), and the statement was 40 pages long.
These statements really scream "DO NOT READ ME". I'm just sayin'. (Yes, I read and understand my statement, but I can fully sympathize with those who cannot. I needed my banker to go through the first one with me page by page just to understand the thing, and I do not consider myself to be an idiotic or financially illiterate person.)
Personally I don't even know what the difference is between retail banking and "private" banking, much less what a private banking statement actually looks like.
I just don't understand how it can be so complex. I mean, any statement should have a list of transactions, and that transaction should have a date, an amount, and a description. If the transaction is a check then it will list the check number. If it's an ACH transfer, then the description will be something about the nature of the other end. I simply don't see how you can make a list of transactions so complex that it becomes infeasible to check them. If you could provide some enlightenment on this then it would be much appreciated.
No problem. I just pulled out my unopened July statement. The entire statement is structured so that you never get past the first page, if you look at it at all.
To give you an idea of how needlessly complex these statements are, consider this: My portfolio manager manages, for my wife and myself, nothing more than our taxable investments, and one nondeductible IRA for each of us. That's it. So what do you think our statement looks like?
For one thing, it is 40 pages long, and the front page gives your portfolio's total value and change since the previous month (what you really care about, anyway). Oh, did I mention that it's printed in such a way that you need to put it into a binder to even read it. The whole thing just screams, "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ ME".
There is a ton of information in there, and it's all in abbreviations and shorthand. It's organized funny, and the actual transactions are difficult to pick out in between all of the dividends and reinvestments. The bottom line is once you are taught how to read the thing, you can understand it if you want to, but... let's face it... if I really wanted to be on top of these things, I wouldn't be paying someone to do it for me.
I actually do, at one point or another, read all of our statements and make sure there isn't anything grossly wrong with them. But I can't imagine just how long our statement would be if we used the private bank for our transactional accounts. They want us to, of course, but it will never happen.
The real moron in the story is the guy in TFA's bookkeeper (he must have one, because I don't believe that the guy personally writes 1000 checks per month (33 checks per day!)). The bookkeeper should have recognized those unauthorized transactions and handled it. Surely the bookkeeper didn't believe that his employer ordered $300,000.00 worth of Dell laptops via ACH debits out of his personal checking account.
And I don't understand how a statement can be "complicated". For each transaction, there is a line. There is an amount, and a name of some kind that tells you what it was for.
That is because you are a retail banking customer.
Private banking statements are incredibly complex. I should post one of mine just so you can see. I can see how if you did a lot of transactions (I don't), it would be impossible to have clue #1 what the hell was going on. Truly. And I am an economist.
Personally, I have a manged portfolio at a private bank, but my day-to-day transactions are in a retail bank account for precisely this reason. My banker once asked me why I didn't take advantage of their transactional accounts and I told him because it would make my life too complicated.
The guy in the article, frankly, should have had a bookkeeper, and that bookkeeper should have known what was up.
The FDIC insurance of $100K has nothing to do with fraud. That's insurance against your bank going insolvent. When you deposit $100k in your bank account, and that bank loans the money to Billy Bob down the street in a subprime mortgage, and Billy Bob defaults, the FDIC insurance says your $100k is safe. The bank may not have your $100k anymore, but you'll still get it.
The 50k that JPM is reimbursing the guy in the article is actually date-based, not dollar-based. The round number confused you. When there is an unauthorized transaction on your account, you have 60 days from the time you receive the statement to alert the bank. If you wait 61 days, it's your problem.
That's what happened to the guy in TFA. He got credited for the last 60-90 days (depending on when in his statement cycle he caught it) worth of fraudulent transactions.
He did. He called to complain several times and was told that there was nothing wrong.
But the account holder has some responsibility, wouldn't you agree? If someone is siphoning money out of my account for 15 months, I'd definitely notice and report it in the first month.
Actually, you probably wouldn't have clue #1. Especially not the first month.
If you RTFA, you'll see why. Private banking statements are really hard to read if you're not used to them. Hell, they're hard to read even when you are used to them.
After my wife and I got our first statement, we had to go into our private banker and ask for a lesson on how to read the thing, and my wife and I are not financially illiterate. I am an economist, and my wife works for a bank developing new products. So if the two of use couldn't make heads or tails of the thing, then it's to be considered hard to read.
At this point, I can understand them, but they are a pain to read, so I don't read them as closely as I should. I'm not worried about the above happening to me because I don't pay any bills out of my managed portfolio, and I don't have a personal account at the private bank. If ACH debits started coming in, my banker would be all over it.
What I do not understand about JPMorgan's behavior is the following:
This guy is loaded, and JPMorgan should be bending over backwards for him. My banker pretty much does whatever I ask of him, and he better, because he makes a fuckload of money off of us.
They should never have given him the run-around at JPM. He should have had at least one dedicated banker to his account, and that banker should have taken the time to research his situation and resolve it satisfactorily.
They should just cover his losses. They make way the hell more than $300k off this guy each year, and they should just eat it. I'm shocked that they won't, even though they think they are in the right. Truly shocked that they would tell such a high-value client to go pound sand.
It's not clear to me that JPM is in the right here. The guy in TFA had his account forever, and doesn't believe he was given the proper disclosures. If JPM can't prove that he got 'em, my wife says JPM is on the hook for the whole $300k, not just the last 60 days worth of transactions. JPM is just covering their ears and shouting, "la la la la! I can't hear you! 60 days! La la la la!" but they may very well be liable.
I cannot relay to you just how shocked I am that JPM would treat this guy so poorly. I don't use JPM, so I can't comment on their private banking division, but my banker has done everything in his power and then some to keep us happy. To allow a high net worth client to be victimized by fraud at all is just nuts, and to turn around and tell him he's just screwed... unheard of.
It's little wonder the largest language barrier I've ever experienced was while traveling to the UK. At what point in history did y'all forget how to speak English?
If you've got something not-so-kosher on your laptop's hard drive, then make the password the confession to its ownership. Agree to indemnity, and poof! no more lawsuit.
Not quite. You'd only be granted immunity to the extent that the password itself won't be used against you. You'll never be granted immunity from what the password unlocked.
By way of example: Let's say you have child porn on your laptop, and you encrypt it using the passphrase: "I have child porn on my laptop. Please just lock me up now, thank you." A judge orders you to divulge your password, but your attorney says, "My client can't reveal the passphrase because the passphrase itself would infringe on his 5th amendment right against self-incrimination." That's when the prosecutor says, "We grant the defendant immunity from the passphrase. We will not enter it as evidence."
Now, the passphrase cannot be used against you so it doesn't matter that it contains a confession. The passphrase cannot incriminate you because of the immunity, so now there is no 5th amendment issue with your revealing it. Of course, once the prosecution decrypts your files and sees that there is, indeed, child porn on your laptop, then you are busted.
This is my entire problem with debt collections, there is basically no regulation and when you demand proof of a debt, if they drop the matter they are not required as far as I know to send you proof! What will often happened, is that company will transfer the "debt" over to another company (usually owned by the same people and usually to the guy in the cubicle next to the one that called you). So legally, now we have a different company with this "debt" to collect, they will hold it and then try to collect again from you, hoping you have forgotten about the first call months or even years later.
Well, just because you don't know something doesn't mean you're right.
On of the brilliant strategies (I am n-o-t a lawyer, so take this at face value) I've heard is to make your password the confession of a crime.
Urban myth.
All the prosecutor would have to do is agree not to use the password itself ("I killed Mrs. Plum in the rumpus room with the crowbar") as evidence against you. Then, revealing the password could not possibly incriminate you.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem, however, is that "more productive" is republican code for working longer hours for less pay.
One could also state that the problem, however, is that "more productive" is employee code for working more hours. But does that really make any sense? If you are working more hours but not providing any more value, why should you have more compensation?
More often people who are very well off are there not because they work hard but because they got really lucky.
Do you think Scott Adams got to where he is today through luck? Read about his life sometime, and you will see that his achievements were realized through persistence. Persistence trumps luck any day.
Not everyone has the ability coupled with luck to translate hard work into higher tax brackets.
If/when you get into a higher tax bracket, you'll see how silly that sounds.
As an ostensibly civilized human being you need to decide how you treat these people who through no fault of their own, will not have huge sums of cash.
I think any civilized human would agree that there ought to be a minimum standard of living. But reasonable people could disagree on what that standard ought to be.
The republican mindset is to fuck them hard, in the ass, with no lube.
Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?
Then maybe you are in the wrong tax bracket. Try being in mine for a while.
If you were more productive, maybe you would be in a higher tax bracket.
How many books have you written? Ever start a food company?
No. You just sit around and wish you made more money.
A "fucking cartoonist"?
How many books have you written? Have you started your own food company yet?
Wealthy people don't get that way by being lazy, son.
Use tax. Riiiiiiight.
Disclaimer: I am not a tax adviser. Don't listen to me.
In a nutshell, if you are not a business, don't bother paying use tax. You are never, ever going to get audited for use tax as an individual.
That being said, pro photographers get shaken down for use tax all the time because they tend buy high-ticket items and dodge sales/use tax. Save those receipts and/or pay your use tax, as applicable.
I'm not an Oracle cheer-leader. But I do work with their products daily and I cringe when I see people say that MySQL or even PostgreSQL (which I absolutely love) are on par with Oracle. They aren't.
I agree with this statement, but that doesn't change the fact that most companies who use Oracle don't need Oracle.
They could get by just fine with MySQL or PostgreSQL. But no one got fired for buying Oracle, I guess.
That's not partitioning. That's a weird, ugly, error-prone hack with table inheritance and constraints.
And you're further telling me I further have to enable constraint exclusions on my entire database server, which is a performance hog on non-partitioned tables?
And what if I want to change my partition keys? No can do. Parameterized queries? Nope.
So mod me -1 troll all day long--I don't care. Being right is more important to me.
What does MySQL have that Oracle needs or would improve it? I can't think of anything - seriously. I'm not trying to troll, fill me in on where MySQL is better than Oracle.
Ease of use and cost.
Sure, you think Oracle is easy, but you are an Oracle DBA. MySQL is trivially easy for a developer to set up and get running. I mean, 'apt-get install mysql-server' easy. I just typed 'apt-get install oracle' and, surprise, I have no Oracle. So Oracle is harder.
Oracle is also obscenely expensive. Don't get me wrong--if you need it, it's worth every penny. But 3 of my last 4 clients could not stop bitching about the cost of Oracle licenses and Oracle DBAs, yet MySQL or PostgreSQL would have easily met their needs. (The 4th client, a massive financial institution, did not complain about the cost of Oracle licenses, and they definitely needed to be using Oracle.)
My current client's largest database has only about 4 million records in it, but it has a simple, well-designed schema and queries are very cheap. Yet they have 4 Oracle DBAs, and god knows how many Oracle licenses. They have old Oracle instances where they pay per-CPU license fees on an ancient CPUs. There is no reason in the world they couldn't just retire those boxes, move the simple DBs to Postgres, and send those licenses back to Oracle. They'll never do that, but they could easily save a quarter million dollars per year if they would.
Oh, does Postgres have partitioning now like both Oracle and MySQL do? No?
Oh well, maybe someday Postgres will be more than a cute little toy database.
Maybe some people want to see the effects of their gifts while they are still alive?
Sorry, we're a lincoln logs shop.
Or the people looking for 10+ years of experience in JAVA in 2003
In that case, I'd say just include your experience with SmallTalk. I mean, hell, fair is fair, no?
Right because being burned by incompetence doesn't happen in any other field right?
Had the Ask Slashdot submitter ever actually done an interview in another field, he'd know that "test" are not limited to IT-related jobs.
Go apply for any banking job and you will receive what is called a "case interview". You'll wish you were just taking just a simple IT test.
Many other employers will give personality tests.
That being said, I did walk out on a job interview once over one of those tests. I was applying for a job at a large national bank, and HR had decreed that all applicants for professional positions would take a particular math test. The highest level mathematical skills required to complete the exam were an elementary grasp of fractions, and the ability to read a graph with X and Y axes.
I asked the interviewer if it was really necessary to waste a few hours of my time on this math exam after acing my case interview (it was a few hundred questions long!). She informed me that, regrettably, I would be required to take it, and that she was very sorry about it, and to please just take it, and that in 5 years I wouldn't even remember it and would be happily along in my career. Well, that was over 10 years ago, I still remember it, and when I walked out, about 3 other applicants walked out with me.
I guess they must know something I don't, because that bank is doing very well right now in the current financial crisis. But my career path wound up taking a very different turn for the better, anyhow.
So what is the best OCR package that runs on Linux?
Is someone forcing you to use a bank with statements that complex? Seems to me there's a lot of choice in banks out there. If you bank has statements that are too complicated, get a different bank.
Nobody is forcing me to use that private bank, and I have no particular affinity for complicated statements (although I'm pretty sure all private banks have similarly complicated statements). The only reason I use my current bank is because that's where my portfolio manager works. If he moved, I'd move too. I spent months looking for one that I trusted, and now I have experience with him to validate that trust.
When things get complicated, you hire a professional.
You're preaching to the choir here. I have a banker, financial planner, portfolio manager, bookkeeper, CPA, tax strategist, and estate planner. And that's just off the top of my head.
Go for simple investments. Nobody says you have to invest in complex things. Have a certain amount of operational overhead in a checking account, some more reserve overhead in a high interest savings and/or CD, and the rest in an index fund. No, you aren't going to make the massive returns that some of the creative schemes out there can. However the tradeoff is that it will be extremely easy to manage yourself.
This strategy fails in several ways.
There is no honor in managing your portfolio yourself if you are going to do a terrible job at it. There are people out there who are as good at managing portfolios as you are at whatever your job is. They are worth what they cost.
To me it sounds like he just kinda got lazy. Not a lot of sympathy in that case, especially since he should have known better.
My guess is his bookkeeper dropped the ball here. I mean, what bookkeeper sees $300,000 in ACH debits from Dell and doesn't even ask the boss if any of that should be reported to his CPA as a deductible expense? I get 100 such calls each year from my bookkeeper--she manages books with an iron fist.
For my purposes, I'd rather not have to deal with complex investments and complex statements, but that's what it takes to ensure that my family's financial picture remains strong.
Seriously with a bit of work it shouldn't be hard to keep track of your financials these days, especially with instant access via the Internet.
You've obviously never seen a private banking statement. For fun, I pulled out my July statement. There were 3 actual transactions on it (not dividend/reinvestment), and the statement was 40 pages long.
These statements really scream "DO NOT READ ME". I'm just sayin'. (Yes, I read and understand my statement, but I can fully sympathize with those who cannot. I needed my banker to go through the first one with me page by page just to understand the thing, and I do not consider myself to be an idiotic or financially illiterate person.)
Personally I don't even know what the difference is between retail banking and "private" banking, much less what a private banking statement actually looks like.
Wikipedia.
I just don't understand how it can be so complex. I mean, any statement should have a list of transactions, and that transaction should have a date, an amount, and a description. If the transaction is a check then it will list the check number. If it's an ACH transfer, then the description will be something about the nature of the other end. I simply don't see how you can make a list of transactions so complex that it becomes infeasible to check them. If you could provide some enlightenment on this then it would be much appreciated.
No problem. I just pulled out my unopened July statement. The entire statement is structured so that you never get past the first page, if you look at it at all.
To give you an idea of how needlessly complex these statements are, consider this: My portfolio manager manages, for my wife and myself, nothing more than our taxable investments, and one nondeductible IRA for each of us. That's it. So what do you think our statement looks like?
For one thing, it is 40 pages long, and the front page gives your portfolio's total value and change since the previous month (what you really care about, anyway). Oh, did I mention that it's printed in such a way that you need to put it into a binder to even read it. The whole thing just screams, "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ ME".
There is a ton of information in there, and it's all in abbreviations and shorthand. It's organized funny, and the actual transactions are difficult to pick out in between all of the dividends and reinvestments. The bottom line is once you are taught how to read the thing, you can understand it if you want to, but ... let's face it... if I really wanted to be on top of these things, I wouldn't be paying someone to do it for me.
I actually do, at one point or another, read all of our statements and make sure there isn't anything grossly wrong with them. But I can't imagine just how long our statement would be if we used the private bank for our transactional accounts. They want us to, of course, but it will never happen.
The real moron in the story is the guy in TFA's bookkeeper (he must have one, because I don't believe that the guy personally writes 1000 checks per month (33 checks per day!)). The bookkeeper should have recognized those unauthorized transactions and handled it. Surely the bookkeeper didn't believe that his employer ordered $300,000.00 worth of Dell laptops via ACH debits out of his personal checking account.
And I don't understand how a statement can be "complicated". For each transaction, there is a line. There is an amount, and a name of some kind that tells you what it was for.
That is because you are a retail banking customer.
Private banking statements are incredibly complex. I should post one of mine just so you can see. I can see how if you did a lot of transactions (I don't), it would be impossible to have clue #1 what the hell was going on. Truly. And I am an economist.
Personally, I have a manged portfolio at a private bank, but my day-to-day transactions are in a retail bank account for precisely this reason. My banker once asked me why I didn't take advantage of their transactional accounts and I told him because it would make my life too complicated.
The guy in the article, frankly, should have had a bookkeeper, and that bookkeeper should have known what was up.
The FDIC insurance of $100K has nothing to do with fraud. That's insurance against your bank going insolvent. When you deposit $100k in your bank account, and that bank loans the money to Billy Bob down the street in a subprime mortgage, and Billy Bob defaults, the FDIC insurance says your $100k is safe. The bank may not have your $100k anymore, but you'll still get it.
The 50k that JPM is reimbursing the guy in the article is actually date-based, not dollar-based. The round number confused you. When there is an unauthorized transaction on your account, you have 60 days from the time you receive the statement to alert the bank. If you wait 61 days, it's your problem.
That's what happened to the guy in TFA. He got credited for the last 60-90 days (depending on when in his statement cycle he caught it) worth of fraudulent transactions.
Or you could just compare expected balances.
He did. He called to complain several times and was told that there was nothing wrong.
But the account holder has some responsibility, wouldn't you agree? If someone is siphoning money out of my account for 15 months, I'd definitely notice and report it in the first month.
Actually, you probably wouldn't have clue #1. Especially not the first month.
If you RTFA, you'll see why. Private banking statements are really hard to read if you're not used to them. Hell, they're hard to read even when you are used to them.
After my wife and I got our first statement, we had to go into our private banker and ask for a lesson on how to read the thing, and my wife and I are not financially illiterate. I am an economist, and my wife works for a bank developing new products. So if the two of use couldn't make heads or tails of the thing, then it's to be considered hard to read.
At this point, I can understand them, but they are a pain to read, so I don't read them as closely as I should. I'm not worried about the above happening to me because I don't pay any bills out of my managed portfolio, and I don't have a personal account at the private bank. If ACH debits started coming in, my banker would be all over it.
What I do not understand about JPMorgan's behavior is the following:
I cannot relay to you just how shocked I am that JPM would treat this guy so poorly. I don't use JPM, so I can't comment on their private banking division, but my banker has done everything in his power and then some to keep us happy. To allow a high net worth client to be victimized by fraud at all is just nuts, and to turn around and tell him he's just screwed... unheard of.
It's little wonder the largest language barrier I've ever experienced was while traveling to the UK. At what point in history did y'all forget how to speak English?
You explained everything but the most important part. Why are pants offensive? I do not find pants to be offensive at all.
How much did you pay the electric company over the last few years in order to make that post?
If you've got something not-so-kosher on your laptop's hard drive, then make the password the confession to its ownership. Agree to indemnity, and poof! no more lawsuit.
Not quite. You'd only be granted immunity to the extent that the password itself won't be used against you. You'll never be granted immunity from what the password unlocked.
By way of example: Let's say you have child porn on your laptop, and you encrypt it using the passphrase: "I have child porn on my laptop. Please just lock me up now, thank you." A judge orders you to divulge your password, but your attorney says, "My client can't reveal the passphrase because the passphrase itself would infringe on his 5th amendment right against self-incrimination." That's when the prosecutor says, "We grant the defendant immunity from the passphrase. We will not enter it as evidence."
Now, the passphrase cannot be used against you so it doesn't matter that it contains a confession. The passphrase cannot incriminate you because of the immunity, so now there is no 5th amendment issue with your revealing it. Of course, once the prosecution decrypts your files and sees that there is, indeed, child porn on your laptop, then you are busted.
This is my entire problem with debt collections, there is basically no regulation and when you demand proof of a debt, if they drop the matter they are not required as far as I know to send you proof! What will often happened, is that company will transfer the "debt" over to another company (usually owned by the same people and usually to the guy in the cubicle next to the one that called you). So legally, now we have a different company with this "debt" to collect, they will hold it and then try to collect again from you, hoping you have forgotten about the first call months or even years later.
Well, just because you don't know something doesn't mean you're right.
Read the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
There, now you know.
On of the brilliant strategies (I am n-o-t a lawyer, so take this at face value) I've heard is to make your password the confession of a crime.
Urban myth.
All the prosecutor would have to do is agree not to use the password itself ("I killed Mrs. Plum in the rumpus room with the crowbar") as evidence against you. Then, revealing the password could not possibly incriminate you.