{"id":692,"date":"2009-08-17T13:09:25","date_gmt":"2009-08-17T21:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=692"},"modified":"2009-08-17T13:09:25","modified_gmt":"2009-08-17T21:09:25","slug":"you-just-cant-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=692","title":{"rendered":"You Just Can&#8217;t Win"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My bank \u2014 which I chose because of its small size, online nature, and slightly-less-unethical-than-most investment policies \u2014 is &#8220;shifting its business strategy&#8221;.  Which is to say, being swallowed alive by another bank.<\/p>\n<p>Which institution?  Funny you should ask.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=521\">These guys<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been here before.  A few years back I embarked upon a quest to find a phone provider, <em>any<\/em> phone provider, that wasn&#8217;t Rogers or Bell  \u2014 only to find that every time I switched to a new carrier, Rogers or Bell would gobble them up six months later<sup>1<\/sup>.  And while it&#8217;s heartening to see that my traditional faith in the raw power of  Darwinian processes is not misplaced, I <em>am<\/em> now in the position of having to find another bank in which to stash my money.  Any suggestions from fellow Canadians?  Preferably something small, online, nimble? Even a credit union would do.  But don&#8217;t bother recommending Bank of Montreal:  I left those fuckers back in the nineties  (after obtaining a written apology from them for stealing money from my account) and am unlikely to forgive them any time soon.<\/p>\n<p>I hope something turns up.  Otherwise, I&#8217;m going to have to take one of my crusty old socks out of masturbation rotation and stuff my savings in <em>there<\/em>.  (Which might not be so bad, actually; no less an authority than <em>The Economist<\/em> has conceded that an old sock would have been far from the worst place to put one&#8217;s money,  in light of recent events&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #888888;font-size:8pt;\"><sup>1<\/sup>Ultimately, I&#8217;m pleased to report that  that quest ended successfully, when I became  a satisfied customer of a company called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.teksavvy.com\/en\/index.asp\">Teksavvy<\/a>.  Right up to the point at which Bell started throttling Teksavvy&#8217;s Internet traffic without telling anyone&#8230; <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My bank \u2014 which I chose because of its small size, online nature, and slightly-less-unethical-than-most investment policies \u2014 is &#8220;shifting its business strategy&#8221;. Which is to say, being swallowed alive by another bank. Which institution? Funny you should ask. These guys. I&#8217;ve been here before. A few years back I embarked upon a quest to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":705,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions\/705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}