There is nothing about monitoring our email that is necessary for security. The war on terror is a giant hoax, more people are killed every year choking on peanut butter. Members of the government are always reaching for more and more control over our lives and power to watch us.

This speaks to a few things and our opportunity to participate in them:

No one is self made. Everyone owes it to breaks from those around them. Get over yourself. Your life isn't the only hard or misunderstood one.

Give more breaks than you get. No one is a stranger or enemy. Treat everyone as your friend and they'll become one. Treat someone like an adversary and they'll become one too.

If you don't take the time to learn someone's story you have no right to an opinion other than wishing them well.

Keeping kindness, goodness, and sharing opportunity is the bedrock of a world I want to live in.

Keeping kindness, goodness, and sharing a growing thing is a world I want to work on. We're dealing with our own stuff, together. Not everyone will get, or do this. I have my choice.

Remember how connected we are. How I treat others is how I truly do end up treating myself or being treated. Things aren't black and white, but the greys can lighten or darken based on me. The drop is in the ocean, and the ocean is in the drop.

Our universal responsibility for and towards each other. When we can see that we are owed nothing and owe our respect and contribution to the world in exchange for becoming better every day, we begin to realize what life is really about.

It's your job to understand yourself first, enough to keep moving, inward, onward and upward. Through your understanding of yourself, you'll be able to connect to others deeply and in a meaningful way. As much as this may terrify some, it will involve learning to use your heart and gut as much as your mind.

Our responsibility for our society, and our society towards us. We get the responsibility we deserve and demand/contribute to in our actions.

Totally an aside, but if you're in the US and there's a collections agency after you for a bogus debt, it's easy to make them go away: Send them a formal dispute letter under the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act and advise them not to contact you further. If they do anyway, you can sue them for punitive damages.

I'm going to repost my collection of Hacker News threads that contain book recommendations:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185504

—

Hacker News stories which contains plenty of book recommendations (sorted by points, labeled by topic):

Science Fiction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2978027

Computer Science: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3595599

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1752139

Design: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3276986

Computer Science: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636275

Developing mental models and increasing cognition: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277457

Quant finance: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3177815

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663662

General (non software): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226736

Math: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665029

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875686

Entrepreneur: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2928211

Statistics: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902074

Philosophy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503137

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865350

Math for beginners: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755043

Military strategy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456275

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797070

Investing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248469

"I want to start a web company": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567456

Here's my reason for avoiding Expedia.

A few years ago I booked a trip to the UK to visit some friends. The morning I was supposed to leave, I get an email from one of my friends saying that I should check if my flight is still on, because there is "something going on with a volcano in Iceland". Turns out it's the start of that major eruption and all air traffic in Northern Europe is grounded with no foreseeable reopening.

I first called the airline, Virgin Atlantic. They were very friendly, apologetic, and as helpful as possible. They said they could reschedule me, but given all the unknowns they weren't making any new bookings for at least 2 weeks. Now this was a two week vacation I was taking, with lots of other things scheduled, so I couldn't really just up and shift the whole thing two weeks on a whim. They would have gladly given a refund, but since I booked through Expedia, I had to talk to them. That's when things started going downhill.

First of all, even on what I'm sure was a crazy customer service day, the people at Virgin answered the phone in minutes and were quite friendly. The Expedia call took almost an hour to be answered. Every agent I spoke too was borderline rude and confrontational, and had the worst broken English of any oversees call center I've dealt with. From the start they only wanted to argue, that because it was the day of the flight, I could neither cancel or reschedule. Finally, after about 90 minutes of arguing and being transferred, I got to a high enough manager who actually seemed to listen to what I said and not just be reading a script, and got my refund authorized. And I thought it was over.

Months go by and the credit never appears back to my card. I call Expedia a couple times, each time they say it is being processed by the CC company, but it can take up to 90 days. I check with the CC, they have no record of the credit. Finally after 90 days, I get a hold of Expedia and they say it is fine if I just have the CC company cancel the transaction on their end (as a dispute), as there must have been a "glitch" somewhere. And that flipped the trouble switch.

Apparently there is an automated system in Expedia, if you dispute their charge with you CC company, they automatically flip it to a collections agency. A few months after I did, I got a very threatening letter and phone call saying I owed the charge plus penalties and interest. If I did not pay, they would flag my credit rating and possibly take further legal action. I contacted Expedia again to ask WTF is going on, and their response was that they are not allowed to communicate with the collections agency once the matter has been given to them. They were confident that if i just explained why I didn't owe the money, the collections guys would drop it. But they couldn't provide me with any documentation to give them.

After another month of letters and phone calls with the collections agents, and quite a bit of stress on my end, I stopped hearing from them so I guess it was resolved.

Keep in mind, all told this is about 8 months down the road from when I was originally supposed to travel. In fact I rebooked the entire trip for about a month after the original, and had already gone and come back. But definitely not with Expedia.