Testing
I’m testing a new anti-spam program. I was satisfied with Akismet, but after updating today, they told me that I had to re-register with WordPress.com. I humored them up to the point where I saw a Google “Lazy G” appear. To hell with that.
I’m trying out a new plug-in, so there may be problems as it gets ‘acquainted’ with y’all.
If anyone is in a European country, I envy you and I’m not tracking you or anyone else. I have enough trouble tracking down my phone and my socks to worry about other people. I don’t knowingly use cookies for anything other than snacks, but I assume WordPress uses a session tag of some sort to keep track of things.
If you are commenting, your chosen user name and a web site, if you chose to include one, are the only things displayed. The e-mail addresses which have to be reasonable but not necessarily real, are used to make spoofing of commenters more difficult.
The GDPR took effect today It appears to be a melding of the worst ideas of the former GDR {German Democratic Republic] and the DPRK [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea] in that it is officious, intrusive, and ‘for your own good’ whether you want it or not. Despite the fact Cinco Bayou is still in Florida, I have been getting e-mail from everyone I have ever done business with telling me about their new privacy policy.
I guess I’ll go batten down hatches for Alberto’s arrival tomorrow morning.
8 comments
Testing to see if the spam filter likes me.
Test 2 as something weird showed up the first time
Testing from my phone to see if this works
Let’s see if the automatic approval is working
looks like chez hipparchia will see the “good” side of alberto 🙂
Yes. Earlier it looked like it was headed for your area, but now it is further East.
Weirdest question I’ve received — “Is your service GDPR compliant?”
Answer: No. We do not do business in Europe. Not because we don’t like European money, and not because of lack of interest in our product, but, rather, because European companies are so bureaucratic, insular, and xenophobic that getting a purchase order out of a European company if you’re not local to the company is a nightmare that even the people who want to buy our product internal to that company are unable to navigate the maze. If there was ever any reason to sell into Europe we would do so — we don’t gather any information not needed for the operation of our service, so we would pass GDPR compliance if such existed — but there just isn’t any reason, and now there’s even less reason, since we’d have to pay for an audit to sell into Europe. Screw that. It just isn’t worth our time and money to try to jump through those hoops.
Meanwhile, we sell lots to Arab companies and South and Southeast Asian companies. Go figure.
It is fairly easy to figure out that I’m not in Europe but all of the companies I have ever done business with watn to update me on their GDPR compliance, which is spam by another name.
Europe tends to be like the US government – if you have the time and money and believe that either is a major market for you, you jump through the hoops and spend the money to make them happy. For most people it isn’t worth the effort.
Given what Trump did today, any US business with Euro customers may find their costs rising sharply, if they are still allowed to do business there. The New York gambling den didn’t like his decision at all. Doing things that can create problems in the economy during an election year is not exactly a winning strategy.