The broken web

 This post is a summary of broken systems and how it's darn near impossible to get them fixed.  It's important to keep these in mind as we try to automate more and more of our lives.  Because of issues like this, I dread the day of widespread AI adoption.

• 3/19/25 - It's 2025, and Gmail still puts a ton of legitimate email from technical mailing lists and from the customer service responses of various vendors in my spam box, while allowing spam and phishing messages in my inbox.  Unfortunately there is no way to disable the spam filter.  This has been going on for many years.
• 3/19/25 - I received an email from customer support of a prominent organization (AAA) where the "from" address was my email address.  In other words the from and to addresses were the same and there was no way to respond to them to tell them the address was wrong.  My mail app even showed as if the message were from me!  When I used the form to get in touch with them, the rep at the other end had no idea what I was talking about.
• 3/19/25 - I received an email from a merchant (a small olive oil vendor) with "do not reply" (and thus no way to respond to the message) notifying me that a certain product which I had ordered a couple of weeks ago had just shipped.  The product was already delivered several days ago, but there was no easy way to contact the merchant.  They do not even list an email address on their website.  I used the contact form, and interestingly when I got a response, it ended up in my spam folder on Gmail!
• 3/19/25 - I received a text notification from Doordash that my order was dropped off approximately 5 hours after it had been dropped off.
• 3/19/25 - My brokerage has been sending me 2 expiration notices for trades that didn't go through during the trading day.  This has been going on for many months and happened today as well.  The first one arrives at the close of trading at around 1 pm pacific time.  The second one arrives at the end of the business day at 5 pm pacific time.  When I contacted the brokerage about this, they suggested that I change the email address that I use for these notifications!

Numerology for names

Here are the numbers for each letter from Cheiro's Book of Numbers.  If the name adds to a single digit, those are covered in separate chapters starting at page 38.  If the name adds to double digits, those are covered starting on page 80.  Many folks that utilize numerology will change the spelling of their name to one that adds up to a more fortunate number.  You can use this page to run the computation for your name.

1 - A, I, J, Q, Y

2 - B, K, R

3 - C, G, L, S

4 - D, M, T

5 - E, H, N, X

6 - U, V, W

7 - O, Z

8 - F, P