Corporate Fraudsters Abandon STTI and Go STAR?

Not much to say here. A valued reader pointed me to STAR’s 2023 sponsors. Veritext and US Legal are featured. Both corporations had players on the Speech-to-Text Institute board, the organization that misled students, consumers, court administrators, other court reporting businesses, and the public about the state of the court reporting industry by pumping the market with misinformation that the stenographer shortage was impossible to solve. Sometime after I started publishing about STTI’s fraud, they got sued and shut down their website. To this day, you can find my work by Googling things like “Veritext fraud” or “Speech-to-Text Institute.” Veritext in particular is kind of hilarious because it has a reputation for making problems for reporters because of what they post on Facebook, but the company lets me publish whatever I want because going after me might wake reporters up to how much is habitually and systematically “stolen” from them. After all, when you read that employers save something like $50 billion to $148 billion on taxes by misclassifying employees, well over 10x the size of our entire industry, it makes you wonder if perhaps the “employers” in our business might have a financial interest in making sure that everyone labels themselves an independent contractor.

Anyway, that’s it for the serious part of this discussion. You can tune out now if that’s all you wanted. If you want a humorous anecdote on caution when trusting tech vendors, keep going.

In doing some halfhearted research for this specific post, I went to look up the 2022 event sponsors, and I happened across a very strange page.

I’m intellectually challenged. I couldn’t figure out what the text means, so I decided to Google it. Google wasn’t incredibly helpful, but I did notice that the text appeared on other sites, like the Taco Coalition, in almost the same exact format.

National Council of Independent Living…

Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology…

Minnesota Field Trip & Activity Library…

Kentucky Association of Master Contractors….

National Onion Association…

I’ll stop there.

Just for anyone that wants to go down the rabbit hole, the text is below so you can copy and paste it. It seems plausible to me that there is some product or service for associations and organizations of that nature that was used to promote all these events, and once it was over with, it no longer mattered enough to upkeep. My best guess based on some of the Google results I saw is that it has something to do with the coding for a navbar — I believe it’s placeholder text. That leads me to the conclusion I’m hoping the audience draws. Be very careful with tech solutions. They can promise whatever they promise, but it’s pretty clear to me that a whole bunch of organizations, including the ostensibly techy STAR, used something that decided to break, a service, a widget, whatever, and when it broke, it made their pages look ridiculous. There’s no warning. There’s no automatic, magic correction. It just breaks and your site page looks like ass until you learn the skills you need to fix it or pay someone to fix it.

I could say something similar to the court systems of America. Where’s that salesman going to be when the AI starts pumping out gibberish? They’re going to have their commission and be long gone. People like to talk about the exponential nature of technology. But look at the truth. There are documented times when “technology” can’t handle “words on a website.” Just one thing breaking broke at least 7 pages for at least 7 organizations. Do we really want to trust it unassisted when it comes to people’s lives and livelihoods and the 20,000 to 40,000+ words that can be said in a single courtroom throughout the day?

Let’s just say I’m glad I had a court reporter. I leave the rest to your imagination.

TEXT:

Occaecat commodo aliqua delectus. Fap craft beer deserunt skateboard ea. Lomo bicycle rights adipisicing banh mi, velit ea sunt next level locavore single-origin coffee in magna veniam.

Occaecat commodo aliqua delectus. Fap craft beer deserunt skateboard ea. Lomo bicycle rights adipisicing banh mi, velit ea sunt next level locavore single-origin coffee in magna veniam.

Occaecat commodo aliqua delectus. Fap craft beer deserunt skateboard ea. Lomo bicycle rights adipisicing banh mi, velit ea sunt next level locavore single-origin coffee in magna veniam.

Oh snap! Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et.

P.S.

Going back to my writing break. Decided to extend it into October. Thank you to all of you writing in and sharing stuff. Please feel free to double message me if I don’t get back to you in a reasonable amount of time. Juggling accounts, I miss stuff, it’s not intentional. I know I can come across in a negative way here, but it’s out of a love for the world and a belief that the world and all of us can be better through honesty/truth/learning/understanding. It’s better to give it to you straight than to not give it out of a fear that you won’t like me.

I’m working on some new ideas. Hopefully these don’t flop and I get to share soon.