I shop on eBay about once a month and normally pay with PayPal in the last 6 years making and receiving thousands of transactions, using PayPal I have had a few small issues but nothing that could not be cleared up by a phone call. But my last experience with PayPal will change the way I look at that company, and may influence the ways I purchase online in the future.

On Dec 22 2009 I had purchased a 1.75″ shackles & spacer lift for my jeep cherokee, during checkout I wanted to use a new credit card. So like most people would do I clicked on alternate payment sources, and entered my cards information, and then hit save and submit. Little did I know that once I hit the submit button all hell would break lose…

To my knowledge the transaction worked as planned the next day my credit card showed a pending charge from PayPal, but it was for only $1. At this point I still thought it was working as I see a $1 charge all the time as merchants use that to authorize the card.

About four days later I get an email from my bank that I have been overdrawn and has over $100 in NSF fees, this is when I discovered PayPal made a big mistake.

I logged  into my PayPal account and reviewed the transaction and sure enough it says instant bank transfer, but then why would they be charging $1 to my credit card? I thought it was time to call PayPal and get to the bottom of this mess.

Calling PayPal was a challenge, it asks for a code that I did not have, but after screaming operator and pressing “0″ multiple times I got a person that was able to help me. After about 5 minutes on hold I was told that I had not selected the credit card as the payment source, I responded by asking if I had not selected it why is was $1 charged? Again I was put on hold and this time got a more real answer  from the representative  ”after adding a new credit card you must wait 1 to 5 minutes before using that payment method and you clicked submit order only 15 seconds after adding the card, so our system used the payment on file”, “our system must validate the card is not stolen and that it is valid”. As a web developer I have worked on and managed many online shopping and payment systems, one of the tasks is to make sure it verifies payment and “then” charges the payment, if it cant charge it the transaction will fail.

I then asked if they can see what payment method I selected and the response was “Our system does not keep that information”, a payment processing system the size of PayPal does not store the payment method the user selects!?

I find this a huge flaw in the PayPal system, one large enough that I will not be using PayPal in the near future.

But what to do about the NSF fees and the fact that they took the money out of the wrong account, I ask PayPal what they will do about it and they said “you will have to contact your banking institution” basically saying that they are not the ones that messed up and that I am out of luck.

Well little did they know I dealt with issues like this before and know that the bank will always side with the customer, I decided the way PayPal handled this required action. I called my bank and said this transaction was not authorized and that I would like to put a stop hold on all PayPal transactions.

This is where it gets tricky, if I had wanted to use my bank account for the purchase I legally would not be able to do what I did as it would be perjury. But because  I had wanted and tried to use the credit card this bank charge was technically unauthorized.

I tell the bank the story and after only 5 minutes on the phone I get a Stop Payment order, and they are doing an investigation for the ACH withdraw she says it will take ten days to complete and I will get the NSF fees back like nothing happened.

Ten days later I logged into my bank and the money was returned to me along with the fees, so now that I got my money back the seller is probably wondering where his money is. This seller is a company and takes credit cards so i give him a call and explain the story and then make the payment over the phone, and we both hang up on a good note.

But this leaves me wondering how safe PayPal really is, I easily got my money back from a bank transfer and put a permanent block on PayPal transactions. What is stopping people from buying using PayPal and then taking the money back and disappearing? I actually found the whole process faster and easier then doing a credit card dispute.

In my mind this is a major flaw in PayPal system and makes me wonder how safe my money is when I sell on eBay. What do you think about this PayPal issue?

If A = B

and A = C,

Then B = C

Instead of ranting and raving illogically at various town hall meetings, let’s try using a little good old-fashioned logic (that we were all bored-to-death with in high school, but, let’s face it, can come in handy now and then).

Now consider the following statistics:

When asked in a new Harris Poll how strongly those polled support 14 different government services, five services receive strong, or a fair amount of support, from about three-fourths of all adults or more. The five most popular services are The National Parks Service (85% support), Crime-fighting and prevention services (77%) Medicare (76%), Social Security (76%), and Unemployment benefits (74%).

Medicare came in with a strong 76%, over 3 out of 4 people polled by Harris.  (REMINDER: Medicare is a “single payer” system, with the government as the payee).  I think it is safe to say that overall, Medicare is a success, and, if we can say that success is “good”,  it logically follows that:

Medicare (A) = Single-payer System (B)

Medicare (A) = “good” (C)

then, Single-Payer System (B) = “good” (C)

Now, that wasn’t so painful was it?

Today's crowded emergency room

At least 80% of Americans don’t really have any health care insurance.  This implies that,  given some unfortunate event, you will still have health care coverage.  What they do have,  those that are now fortunate enough to have a job, and less and less frequently, a job that also provides health insurance, is a “heath related benefit”.

According to Wikipedia, an “employee benefit” is defined as:

various non-wage compensations provided to employees in addition to their normal wages or salaries.   Where an employee exchanges (cash) wages for some other form of benefit, this is generally referred to as a ‘salary sacrifice’ arrangement.

The problem is, coverage is tied into whether or not you have such a job, and a job where your salary was negotiated to contain such a “benefit” (this is entirely up the the employer.  They are not mandated to provide you with a health care related benefit).

Many things can disrupt this tidy arrangement, such as:

Your company could drop its health plan. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of the population covered by employer-based health insurance has fallen every year since 2000, from 64.2% to 59.3%.

You could lose your job. I don’t think I need to tell anyone what the unemployment rate is these days.**

You could voluntarily leave your job, for example because you have to move to take care of an elderly relative.

You could get divorced from the spouse you depend on for health coverage.

So, you don’t really have health coverage, you have a health related benefit that depends, very heavily, on your employment.

Let’s look at another Wikipedia definition, this time for “insurance”

Insurance, in law and economics, is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss.

So you don’t even really have “insurance” because the risk of loosing your job provided health care  isn’t mitigated by the “insurance”.  I.e., loose your job, loose your health benefits.

Of course, we have been “privileged” to have the option to receive coverage through the COBRA plan, for up to one year.  COBRA health insurance is available to anyone loosing their job.  The thing I guess we’re all supposed to get excited about is that this coverage is available in spite of any pre-existing conditions.  Of course, you have to pay through the nose for it, usually somewhere between $500 -$1000/month depending on how many family members you wish to include.   If you are average, you will probably get something like $1200 a month in unemployment benefits.  So, that leaves you a whopping $500 or so per month for rent, food, transportation, clothing, etc.  Such a deal!

According to a New York Times poll, “69 percent of respondents in the poll said they were concerned that the quality of their own care would decline if the government created a program that covers everyone.   My attitude is, let any one of those 69 percent experience joblessness for a little while.  Their concern about “decline” becomes a joke.  How about having ANY health care at all .  Please!

Google Apps poster

This week Google has launched a new advertising campaign using billboards in four cities, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Chicago, each day the billboards will display a different message promoting Google Apps. I have been using many of Google’s products for the past few years, I also have helped many others setup and use Gmail as an alternative for traditional email hosting with great success.

Here is my five reasons to use Google Apps.

1. Google Apps, Free For 100 Users

If you are a small business and looking for ways to cut costs, Google Apps allows for up to 100 users on their free ad supported version. The biggest difference is the 25GB vs 7GB of email storage, as well as being able to force SSL on the premium account but not the standard account. You also get access to Google Docs, but with a shared account of 10GB, on the premium account you get 10GB plus 500MB of shared space per user.

2. Hosted E-Mail, Powered by Gmail.

Here at techimoto our email is powered by Gmail using Google Apps, we easily transfered our email DNS records and within a few hours we where reaping all the benefits of Gmail. One of the key features that drew us to use Gmail was the great spam filtering and the fact that you don’t need to delete anything, being able to go back and search for a receipt or other important message from many years back. Another requirement we had when evaluating our email setup was the ease of access, Gmail allows us to use IMAP and have our iPhones, Laptops, and Gmail.com in sync saving us time sorting and re-marking messages as read.

• Spam Filtering, after much research and testing it was concluded that the spam filtering built into Gmail was far better then other options available to us without a large budget.
• IMAP + Web-Mail, having all our systems and mobile devices using IMAP we are able to keep both our laptops and mobile phones in sync, in addition to that the Gmail web interface is also updated from IMAP changes.

3. Google Calendars

To keep track of my busy life I decided to use Google Calendar, I have my iPhone connected to their service using the exchange protocol allowing the phone to get updates when I modify my calendar. The best part of the exchange link is the fact that the phone will set off an alarm when I have an upcoming event. When I am at my laptop I will just simply login to my Google Apps domain and access my calendar via the web. I wanted I could configure iCal to download updates from the web.

4. Easy, Fast User Management

With Google Apps it could not get any easier to add and manage existing users, from the main Apps page you can add a new user with just 2 clicks and just 3 form fields. This is much faster then having to go login to my web hosting web admin panel and go at least 6 layers down, and then when you do get to the page you have at least 20 diferent options to chose from and if one is not just right the page wont work.

You can also make groups and group together Sales, Support, Web Dev and make it easy for emails to get to the right people and keep the clutter out of others.

5. Google Talk

Google Talk is a very simple and yet powerful chat system, alike MSN, Yahoo, it has a downloadable client (Windows Only, Mac users see iChat) and works the same as most other chats, but one very nice thing about it is the simplicity and ease of use. If you are on a public computer you can log into your Gmail and access the chat system from your email page, his allows you to be able to use it wether or not you have the client installed on your computer.

As for the Microsoft Office vs Google Docs debate, I still prefer a local editor and in my case that is iWork 08. But I do on occasion use the Google Docs when I reading an email that has an attachment and would like to save the time from downloading the file.

Now that I have been using Google Apps for the past few years I do feel that it has allowed me to worry more about the website and it’s content and spend more time writing my own scripts. In fact i rarely ever think “Is our email server working, did we get black listed, did someone relay spam or hijack a domain” all things that i used to think about on a daily basis. I do think that Google is heading the right direction with their service and do hope to see more great products come from them in the future.

Do you think that your business would use Google Apps? If not why?

How "healthy" is our health care in America today?

It’s difficult to understand why the word “socialized medicine” strikes such fear in Americans.  It’s almost a visceral response, negating what most of us know and have heard about other successful plans in other countries that most folks here would brand “socialist”.

Let’s take Canada for instance.  If we look at the numbers, we see that  spending in Canada is projected to reach $160 billion, or 10.6% of GDP, in 2007. This is slightly above the average for OECD countries, and substantially below the 15.2% of GDP taken by up healthcare in the United States.  This should go aways towards quieting some of the accountants amonst us, and should be looked at by congresspersons that are freaking out about “cost”.

Canada’s system is known as a single payer system, where basic services are provided by private doctors (since 2002 they have been allowed to incorporate), with the entire fee paid for by the government at the same rate. Most family doctors receive a fee per visit. These rates are negotiated between the provincial governments and the province’s medical associations, usually on an annual basis. A physician cannot charge a fee for a service that is higher than the negotiated rate — even to patients who are not covered by the publicly funded system — unless the physican opts out of billing the publicly funded system altogether. Pharmaceutical costs are set at a global median by government price controls. Other areas of health care, such as dentistry and optometry, are wholly private.

Considerable attention has been focused on two issues in Canada: wait times and health human resources.

There is also a debate about the appropriate ‘public-private mix’ for both financing and delivering services. Studies by the Commonwealth Fund found that 57% of Canadians reported waiting 4 weeks or more to see a specialist; 24% of Canadians waited 4 hours or more in the emergency room.  I’ve heard many horror stories from friends and family here in Los Angeles, where they spent more than 12 hours waiting in an emergency room at local hospitals.  A 4 hour wait seems trivial.  I also know from first hand experience that getting into see a specialist is often just as difficult.  One of my family members needed to go to a specialized clinic rescently, only to find out that “new patients were no longer admitted” due to the current waiting list of existing patients.  Hmmmmm. Of course, this doesn’t even address the issue that close to 50 million Americans can’t get access to health care at all!

In regards to health-care professional shortages, their is some issue here,  With 2.1 doctors per thousand population in 2006, Canada is well below the OECD average of 3.1. Canada’s 8.8 nurses per thousand was also below the OECD average of 9.7.  However, here’s an interesting statistic: According to a 2007 article from CTV News, the Canadian medical profession is suffering from a brain drain. The article states, “One in nine trained-in-Canada doctors is practising medicine in the United States.

Now if the U.S. implements a plan similar to Canadas, and health care costs become more contained, it only seems logical that Canada’s “brain drain” will slow considerably.  Doctor’s in Canada average an income of $202,000/year.  I think that kind of income should go a long way in keeping the financial incentive alive for new, young doctors.

And Canada’s system, although better than ours, is still ranked below other “socialized” countries, such as England and France.  So what part of a “socialized medicine” approach here in the U.S. is so worrysome?   That statistics stated above are a vast improvement of what we have going right now.

Right now it sounds like a warzone, with helicopters buzzing overhead like a swarm of bees. Honking from Wilshire Avenue, and Santa Monica Blvd., both main roads leading into and out off UCLA.

Only 50. A musicians life can be hard, even for those who achieved fame.

Life in America

Interesting idea, but why hasn’t it worked?  The answer is simple; Greed.    The majority of a corporations profits go to the top executives for allocation.  That part works fine.  But then, IT STAYS THERE!  NO WAY DOES IT “TRICKLE DOWN”!

It’s no secret about  the enormous salaries, bonus, and benefit packages received by the top guys and gals in major U.S. corporations.  Ex-Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina comes to mind.  She got a severance package worth about $21.4 million, but stood to get another $21 million after she was forced out by the company.  Nice pay for messing things up royally (consider the logic of such packages: the board hires a CEO, gives them an incredible golden parachute.  If they fail and are thrown out, they get rich.  If they succeed, they get rich.  What a Motivator!).

I was a first hand witness during that time, working for HP as a consultant, and it was a blood bath.  I’ll never forget the pain she caused thousands of employees as she ruthlessly changed HP’s gentle and relatively caring culture to a culture of “the bottom-line”.  What did she bring to HP as a result of all that pain (besides a lighter corporate pocketbook as she exited stage left): nothing.

Of course our more current stories come from Wall Street and the banking industry, and of course good ol’ AIG.   The Feds pump millions into these companies to cover for basic failure in their management, and, of course, the ravages of Greed.

I also witnessed Greed at work first hand, when working for a small tech firm in Colorado.  When I first joined up, the company was small, with only 5 of us working hard to build up the business.  The owner at that time, was very humble, and appreciative of our efforts.  What profits we did have, he shared generously.  However, over the years, he (the CEO/President), changed.  As his own personal fortune grew, he grew more and more reluctant to share the wealth with the rest of us (“exit strategy”?, what exit strategy?  Stock?  No way!).  Getting a raise was like pulling teeth, and he became unilateral in his decision making, not wanting to make things messy by input from “the rabble rousers”.

To add insult to injury, he was from India, and got most of the companies work through a federal program that gives minorities a competitive edge during the bidding process for federal contracts.  His “payback” to America?  Keep the majority of profits for himself and his family, send massive amounts back to family members in India, and what was left, might, if it was a good year, result in a 1 or 2% raise for us working-stiff American citizens.  “Much thanks America!  Adios!”

Greed is the sand in our industrial wheels.  Unfortunately, it is now up to government to come to our rescue and regulate against one of the worst of the “7 deadly sins”, greed, and with these insane bailouts,  to regrease the wheels in hopes we can live for another day.

PS for MBA Students: Case Study: “The Carly Strategy”:  Come into the organization like a whirlwind.  Be authorative.  Create massive amounts of smoke, dust-in-the-air, and fire people so that no one (esp. the members of the board) can tell that you have no clue what you are doing.  Rape, pillage, and create massive amounts of personal wealth for yourself.  Exit.  Write a book telling the world how tough it is to be you.

Introducing Republican Minority Leader John Boehner.  Now here’s an example of what NOT to look like in 21st century America.  You republican dudes would be way better off with some badly dressed geeky looking person as your spokesperson.

Sorry John, I’m not available right now to help you update your image.

By the way, when he speaks, he sounds as dumb as he looks.

For cruising boaters, having enough potable water is always an issue.  Modern cruisers carry 80, 100, or more gallons in their water tanks.   Yet if in a remote area, local water may either be suspect, hard to find, or difficult to transport back to the boat for future use.

Most boats have some space under their galley sinks, usually used for various cleaning supplies, etc.  If you can spare a few cubic feet, I will present one technique that will help the boater supplement the water from their tanks.  It also lends itself well to seperating your available water supply by QUALITY; i.e., keep your tank water for things like dishes, showers, etc., and use your new jerry jug setup described here, for your high quality drinking water.

The picture at the right shows you where we want to end up.  This series of articles will give you a step-by-step description of how to put the galley-pumpable jerry jug together using simple off-the-shelf parts from any half way decent hardware store.  The objective is to make your jerry jug storage easy-to-use and flexible.

Later on in this series, we will also show you how to hook up these jugs as part  of a simple rain catching system.

Stay tuned!