Rhaedas

Not all parts of the brain deteriorate at the same rate.

Ew.

Mustard?

Shields up for the replies.

I'll bet the cause of that is simple. The one person who knew how to change the message no longer works there, and while that has been mentioned to the higher ups, it's not a priority so it got shoved into the "to-do" pile.

It's not a matter of getting back what you put in, but to be able to not worry about supporting your basic needs in the last part of life. That many have paid into the system their entire working life and it isn't enough without some extra supplement suggests it's not working well enough.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's instructions to modify the system prompt to maximize effectiveness, and everyone leaves it at the generic default. Just like so many people leave other things at the default and just plug it in and go. Thank goodness the Cisco hold music is decent. I grew to love it while holding on the VA phone lines a lot for my dad.

Could be, but there's also population growth. It's not really a surplus if it's an ongoing balance between incoming and outgoing with an above zero balance that fluctuates. You don't want it to dip below zero.

The last part is exactly what they want you to think. It WAS meant to be sufficient, but that would have cost someone else, so they invented the idea of people taking care of themselves with the 401K invention. Now when your SS doesn't mean your needs, they can point and say, well, you should have saved up better.

There used to be company pensions too, but they've slowly eroded away as younger people entered their jobs. My job gave me the option years ago of keeping the pension going or converting it to a secondary 401k that would earn lots of money, promise. I said hell no, give me my pension.

Funny you mention a phone tree, something that's been hit by AI. It's actually been around longer as voice recognition that finds a close match to a keyword, but in theory AI should be able to take a request and break down what is actually needed.

I haven't run across an AI version that works well. I don't know if that's because the voice recognition part is still bad, or if they're using Co-pilot (since I know how it mangles simple requests in text).

You forgot the mandatory lead message. "Please listen closely as our menu options have changed." No, they haven't. Ever.

I didn't know that. So they can't even rebrand well.

The movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" shows how being the better product isn't a requirement to dominate.

Windows wasn't the first on the scene with a GUI, they just got a better foothold into the market and spread into the business world to become the default. If we're talking about waves, MS has been riding that wave of being used the most everywhere for a long time while giving mediocre products.

Better than putting one of the brake pads on backwards. Yes, somehow. Fortunately I always test things out gently first, and was very aware of the metal to metal sound and realized what I had done, so immediately parked it again and jacked it back up. No obvious rotor damage. Whew.