Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

A simpler way to describe systemic failures is to tell you to picture a row of dominoes toppling each other over as they fall… you, or someone, only tipped the first one over…

https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-piece-by-piece-d7f5547f3929

So this is a guy who has a business bank account with HSBC, and they froze it, presumably because someone thought he was funneling drug money for Daesh, and what happened next is everything started collapsing.

He still doesn’t get it, because he says the answer is HSBC are shit and he should have had a separate bank account so that the loss of use of one didn’t impact him.

He’d still have had to alter all his subscription payment details for everything, and there is the fucking real problem, software that stops working as soon as the debit / credit / bank account associated with it stops working.

To be sure, I pay my monthly rent for my home via a standing order from one bank account, so if that bank account went tits up, I’d have to set up another standing order from another bank or draw cash and pay said landlord.

This is a world away from what he describes, which is alerts going out electronically that otherwise valid debit cards are suspended, and so all kinds of software stops working (hello crapple) and all kinds of other software starts ticking.

I’d say this guy should sue the ass off HSBC, except they have more lawyers than he has, so good luck with that.

But HSBC isn’t responsible for him and his business being wide open to systemic failure, he is, and a secondary bank account will not prevent that.

For example a secondary bank account is no use if all your software is associated with a primary email address and that is no longer available as that account was associated with the primary bank account.

What we are essentially discussing here is “the cloud”, vs my business where all the software that I use runs locally, it does not need a net connection to install or work, and I have copies of all of the installers so I can reinstall them all onto bare metal should I so choose.

It’s one of the reasons I still have for example Paint Shop Pro 8, to be fair I have other photo editing software, ACDsee ultimate 9, etc etc, and it is the exact reason I do not have fucking Photoshop or Office 365 or Google docs or OneDrive or any other of that crap, it’s just asking for systemic failure.

Space the dominoes so far apart that any one of them can topple, and it can’t touch any others, and you have eliminated systemic failure, don’t get me wrong, it’s still a pain in the fucking ass that could take a week to sort out, but sort it out you could.

Yeah, the guy is right, it’s fucking atrocious that it was only bad PR that got his case sorted, still leaves everyone else affected out in the dark, but like I said, he still doesn’t get it, because two separate bank accounts can be frozen as easily as one… I know someone who had four separate bank accounts frozen when their government mandated a bail in a couple of years ago, you just revealed an extra hidden domino a little further up the food chain than your first domino.

****MICROSOFT**** can disappear off the face of the planet tomorrow and all my microsoft software and operating systems will continue to work, PSP8 will continue to work, Rhino will continue to work, etc etc etc… and yes, I do keep a current image of the latest suse and a few other linux clones lying around, just in case like, as well as copies of every microsoft OS from 9x on up.

It’s called avoiding systemic risk.

HSBC and many others have been gutting their in house IT for decades now, and they aren’t the only one, so there is no excuse for anyone even remotely involved in IT to think that *any*  bank has a robust internal IT structure.

The fact that this guy gives shout outs to paypalsucks and massacard speaks volumes to me about the parlous state of affairs.

As does the “ok I’ll do what it says on the screen and phone this number…” I’d have been in the local branch every day with my accountant and a police officer and a live streaming web cam demanding the account is closed and my money was given to me in the form of a bankers draft… it wouldn’t head off any money laundering / drug dealing investigation or liability, the paper trail is still there.

Suspending an account doesn’t make sense, the paper trail *is* the evidence, it does not need to be frozen in carbonite, and even if they money itself goes “missing” polly peck style, the evidence is still all there.

This is of course all assuming that HSBC is solvent and this isn’t some scam to cover up an internal cash flow problem.

This guy’s entire fucking business model is fucked, and he can’t see it, he can only see the one domino that fell, and this is someone who codes for a living, and still can’t see progression.

The guy is complaining about his mortgage and not being able to pay employees, all he has to do is tell them all he is investigating suspicious activity and until further notice his mortgage payments and staff wages are frozen.

Why not, if the arguments given to him were valid, they would be valid to pass on to his mortgage company and staff, if they are not valid to pass on, then they are not valid.

It brings us back to the old adage, if it can be taken from you, it is not yours.

But that needs a little refinement, because as we see here, not everything requires squads of jackbooted stasi to kick your door in and load up a truck with your shit.

So, if it can be *trivially* taken from you, with a single mouse click, it is not yours.

But even this does not address systemic risk, such as this guy and many others face.

Sure, in this case HSBC were a bunch of worthless lying fucks, but that does not change the entirely separate issue that HSBC are not responsible for this guy choosing to run a business rabidly exposed to systemic risk and failure.

That’s what HSBC lawyers would argue, and I would agree with them.

Anyone want to take any bets with me that his IT business doesn’t have verified bare metal PC world new hardware back up and running in 4 hours backups, or a decent redundant pipe to the backbone so that a single JCB or backbone routing failure can’t take him out?

There are 10 types of people in this world, those that see systemic failure, and those that do not (old binary joke) and those that do can’t ignore it.