If CC companies didn't have such a strong foothold on cashless transactions it wouldn't be so bad.
For example in Tokyo I can buy a new transit pass from any of the dozens of railroads, load money onto it, and use it to buy goods at many stores and vending machines. The convenience of cashless with pseudo-anonymity and no bank account required.
Smaller banks and/or credit unions might ignore the lack of a credit score and issue you a low limit credit card simply if you have a history of direct depositing a large amount, or have a large savings account. A friend was able to get a credit card from her bank with a sub-500 score when her direct deposit amount every 2 weeks suddenly increased to the level where there was a 2 in front of the comma.
It's by team rather than department, so even more granular. Java developers and web developers could have different team-wide "in" days for example. If there's a project that requires one of each team for whatever reason, then the people on each team with a similar schedule can be matched up together.
There's also a curveball of people who choose to do 4d x 10h instead of 5d x 8h workweeks. This cannot be combined with work from home, but if you'd rather truly be off on the day you're not in, that works out better. Same benefits on parking and other pooled company resources.
Mix is ok when all the employees get to mix. For example, having 1-2 work from home days a week. The management picks which day of the week everyone needs to be in. It's great because if there's one co-worker you can't stand, you can schedule your home days when he's in, and vice versa. So there's one day with 100% on-site staffing, the other four with 75% staffing (not everyone opts in). Parking, lines at the cafeterias and bathrooms, all more reasonable thanks to this policy. By requiring everyone be in on the same day once a week, they can't get away with shared desk space nonsense. The benefit over a pure remote work scenario is team meetings / collaboration can still happen on the common day, as well as among co-workers who coordinate their "in" days.
Reason 2 is why I've stuck with Android all these years.
Way back in the era of Android 2.3, I picked a phone that still had a slide out keyboard. Good times were had for 3 years. Then I joined the Samsung bandwagon because physical keyboards fell out of style. Gave up on Samsung when they started copying Apple's bad ideas. Now I have a flagship phone that still has a memory card slot and headphone jack. iDevice can suck it.
It used to be better, but someone somewhere decided to remove features. First they separated out messenger from Facebook proper, then proceeded to nag me with a notification counter that never go away because I chose not to install yet another space/resource hogging messenger app. Then the most common thing I would do with it, post media directly from the gallery to a group via "share" -> "Facebook app", is no longer possible. Instead you have to open the stupid app, browse to the group, then click the photo icon and browse to it from there. One nice thing they added is the ability to open links by default in an external browser, for which I use adblock browser. Except this seems to only work half the time.
Fortunately I don't spend enough time on Facebook in general to find any other usability nightmares in the app, but I'm sure they're there...
Thank you! Yes the only "bug" I see here is Adobe's software not prompting "this directory is not empty, you must provide an empty directory for your cache folder" when selecting a location. Which for all I know, it does, and he clicked some sort of "do it anyway" button.
How dumb can you be to specify an existing directory as a cache folder??
They couldn't have picked a better place within NYC. 6+ subway lines, the Long Island Expressway, the Long Island Railroad all within easy reach. One of the few areas east of Manhattan that can support tall buildings. Brand new apartment towers that until now had so oversaturated the market, they had to give out free months of rent just to get takers (I guess it was preferred to do that over simply offering lower rents). Brand new hotels as well. Easy drive to their pick of two airports.
Heck if they want a fully planned campus they could deck over the Sunnyside railyards and build on that 180 acres of contiguous space.
As someone who grew up in NYC as a kid, you're still undervaluing the independence its public transit grants. On weekends I would go from my apartment in the middle of nowhere, NYC with a couple of friends to as far as Philadelphia on day trips. Day at the beach? Go to the Rockaways, the Jersey Shore or Long Beach, all accessible by train. Want to go to a shopping mall with cheaper sales tax? The PATH a quick hop across the river to Newport Mall will do it (back then $1 fare, almost always saved more on sales tax to make that an essentially free trip). Virtually any eating establishment desired could be reached: diners, pizza joints, all fast food places, iHop, White Castle. The subway and buses were free for most high school students until ~7PM on weekdays, which made this perfect.
When college hunting my friends and I just did the campus tours ourselves, no parents.
The end result was while most suburbanites had their first taste of true freedom in college, those of us from NYC had been free since the first day of middle school.
Neighboring Newark offered $7 Billion, and Maryland offered $8 Billion. The fact Amazon turned $13 billion in additional incentive down only to locate less than 20 miles from those places shows how much the incentives actually matter. Gov Cuomo seemed surprised NY won, though.
Connecticut is like this, 10 or 10:30 pm is the cutoff for alcohol sales. To avoid theft and confusion independent convenience stores have padlocks on the beer fridges.
She had the entire US media on her side. And the DNC rigged in her favor via superdelegates and more shady means (no one wins 5 out of 5 coin tosses). If a handful of Russians trolling on social media between pints of vodka are enough to swing the election away from her, the point that she was a terrible candidate still stands.
If you get a flagship phone (e.g. latest Galaxy, LG G series, Pixel, etc) there's plenty of updates for well over 2 years anyway. This is addressing the cheaper, less flashy phones that might still get a lot of sales yet never see an update.
Eventually the economics and convenience of aluminum cans (and, later, plastic bottles) took over. The savings in purchasing and shipping costs just completely wiped out that industry.
I'd be fine going back to the old model but I suspect most people wouldn't.
I agree, sadly. I find it interesting that everyone is gung ho about saving the environment until it means a direct impact to convenience or the bottom line. There's quite a few of so-called environmentalists who can't be arsed to rinse out and return a bottle for the 5c deposit (or into a dedicated recycling bag to be put out on recycling day), or heaven forbid they drink tap water instead of buying a case of Poland Spring at Costco every week...
Then there's me, who doesn't particularly care what happens to this planet beyond my lifespan, yet I spend the effort to insure every metal or plastic in my home is getting rinsed and recycled (or at least making it to the recycling truck... what they do with it after is on them).
Ah, at least you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten a lot of work done (wisdom teeth removal, caps, fillings) now that it's included with my current job (no additional cost or co-pays). The 5 years of deferred maintenance before then took a toll on the 'ol chompers, though (I couldn't even afford the low out of pocket).
A good way to support or refute this theory would be to look at obesity numbers among public transit users versus drivers. Overwhelmingly, public transit use requires more walking (and in the case of Subways/Els/Metros, also involves stairs). Anecdotally, I see less overweight people in Northeast US cities where traffic / parking constraints make driving impractical.
Initial cost, yes. But if we did it like Canada where bottles are returned to the bottler to be refilled instead of crushed and reprocessed, it eventually pays for itself after 10 or so refills. Of course this would have to be coupled with an appropriate bottle deposit to encourage returning (or at least high enough to allow the manufacturer to recoup costs if someone discards the bottle after it's only been refilled once or twice).
They're also a good "try before you buy" option, where they directly hire the best of the contractors after seeing how well things go for a few years. The huge companies (and governments) basically point at contract companies' non-compete section where the contractor can't work directly for the client for x years, laugh, and say "yeah strike that or not a penny of our multi-million dollar contracts will go through you".
Presumably the rate is in the... well, contract. A well run business will have a plan to counter such tactics at contract renewal time.
Of course not many are that prepared, and it's entirely possible they were either foolish enough to allow the rate to be variable, or (more likely) are royally screwed if they don't renew your contract, and yes at that point you have them by the balls.
If the client likes you they can have the contracting company over the barrel. It can be as simple as "well, we really like person X. The previous people you sent were borderline useless. If we can't have him, maybe we don't need this position at all". Halving their cut to increase person X's pay makes more business sense than calling client's bluff...
$600/month for dental is insane. Because it's usually negotiated separately here in the states, the uninsured cost comes out to $600... in a year. And that's if some non-surgical work needs doing (fillings, etc). So unless you have a family of 12 you might be overpaying a smidge there...
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If CC companies didn't have such a strong foothold on cashless transactions it wouldn't be so bad.
For example in Tokyo I can buy a new transit pass from any of the dozens of railroads, load money onto it, and use it to buy goods at many stores and vending machines. The convenience of cashless with pseudo-anonymity and no bank account required.
Smaller banks and/or credit unions might ignore the lack of a credit score and issue you a low limit credit card simply if you have a history of direct depositing a large amount, or have a large savings account. A friend was able to get a credit card from her bank with a sub-500 score when her direct deposit amount every 2 weeks suddenly increased to the level where there was a 2 in front of the comma.
New York City has an income tax as well, in addition to New York State. Lots of new tax money to go around.
It's by team rather than department, so even more granular. Java developers and web developers could have different team-wide "in" days for example. If there's a project that requires one of each team for whatever reason, then the people on each team with a similar schedule can be matched up together.
There's also a curveball of people who choose to do 4d x 10h instead of 5d x 8h workweeks. This cannot be combined with work from home, but if you'd rather truly be off on the day you're not in, that works out better. Same benefits on parking and other pooled company resources.
Mix is ok when all the employees get to mix. For example, having 1-2 work from home days a week. The management picks which day of the week everyone needs to be in. It's great because if there's one co-worker you can't stand, you can schedule your home days when he's in, and vice versa. So there's one day with 100% on-site staffing, the other four with 75% staffing (not everyone opts in). Parking, lines at the cafeterias and bathrooms, all more reasonable thanks to this policy. By requiring everyone be in on the same day once a week, they can't get away with shared desk space nonsense. The benefit over a pure remote work scenario is team meetings / collaboration can still happen on the common day, as well as among co-workers who coordinate their "in" days.
Reason 2 is why I've stuck with Android all these years.
Way back in the era of Android 2.3, I picked a phone that still had a slide out keyboard. Good times were had for 3 years.
Then I joined the Samsung bandwagon because physical keyboards fell out of style.
Gave up on Samsung when they started copying Apple's bad ideas. Now I have a flagship phone that still has a memory card slot and headphone jack.
iDevice can suck it.
It used to be better, but someone somewhere decided to remove features. First they separated out messenger from Facebook proper, then proceeded to nag me with a notification counter that never go away because I chose not to install yet another space/resource hogging messenger app.
Then the most common thing I would do with it, post media directly from the gallery to a group via "share" -> "Facebook app", is no longer possible. Instead you have to open the stupid app, browse to the group, then click the photo icon and browse to it from there.
One nice thing they added is the ability to open links by default in an external browser, for which I use adblock browser. Except this seems to only work half the time.
Fortunately I don't spend enough time on Facebook in general to find any other usability nightmares in the app, but I'm sure they're there...
Thank you! Yes the only "bug" I see here is Adobe's software not prompting "this directory is not empty, you must provide an empty directory for your cache folder" when selecting a location. Which for all I know, it does, and he clicked some sort of "do it anyway" button.
How dumb can you be to specify an existing directory as a cache folder??
They couldn't have picked a better place within NYC. 6+ subway lines, the Long Island Expressway, the Long Island Railroad all within easy reach. One of the few areas east of Manhattan that can support tall buildings. Brand new apartment towers that until now had so oversaturated the market, they had to give out free months of rent just to get takers (I guess it was preferred to do that over simply offering lower rents). Brand new hotels as well. Easy drive to their pick of two airports.
Heck if they want a fully planned campus they could deck over the Sunnyside railyards and build on that 180 acres of contiguous space.
As someone who grew up in NYC as a kid, you're still undervaluing the independence its public transit grants. On weekends I would go from my apartment in the middle of nowhere, NYC with a couple of friends to as far as Philadelphia on day trips. Day at the beach? Go to the Rockaways, the Jersey Shore or Long Beach, all accessible by train. Want to go to a shopping mall with cheaper sales tax? The PATH a quick hop across the river to Newport Mall will do it (back then $1 fare, almost always saved more on sales tax to make that an essentially free trip). Virtually any eating establishment desired could be reached: diners, pizza joints, all fast food places, iHop, White Castle. The subway and buses were free for most high school students until ~7PM on weekdays, which made this perfect.
When college hunting my friends and I just did the campus tours ourselves, no parents.
The end result was while most suburbanites had their first taste of true freedom in college, those of us from NYC had been free since the first day of middle school.
Neighboring Newark offered $7 Billion, and Maryland offered $8 Billion. The fact Amazon turned $13 billion in additional incentive down only to locate less than 20 miles from those places shows how much the incentives actually matter. Gov Cuomo seemed surprised NY won, though.
If you're driving in either of these places you're doing it wrong. Find the nearest park and ride, take train, profit.
Connecticut is like this, 10 or 10:30 pm is the cutoff for alcohol sales. To avoid theft and confusion independent convenience stores have padlocks on the beer fridges.
Unfortunately this model means no profitability in products that are really easy to use
I've always suspected this as the reasoning behind oracle middleware being a steaming pile to support in-house.
She had the entire US media on her side. And the DNC rigged in her favor via superdelegates and more shady means (no one wins 5 out of 5 coin tosses). If a handful of Russians trolling on social media between pints of vodka are enough to swing the election away from her, the point that she was a terrible candidate still stands.
If you get a flagship phone (e.g. latest Galaxy, LG G series, Pixel, etc) there's plenty of updates for well over 2 years anyway. This is addressing the cheaper, less flashy phones that might still get a lot of sales yet never see an update.
The summary specifically states that popular = 100,000 activations. So regardless of what the OEM says, that 100,001th phone triggers this clause.
Eventually the economics and convenience of aluminum cans (and, later, plastic bottles) took over. The savings in purchasing and shipping costs just completely wiped out that industry.
I'd be fine going back to the old model but I suspect most people wouldn't.
I agree, sadly. I find it interesting that everyone is gung ho about saving the environment until it means a direct impact to convenience or the bottom line. There's quite a few of so-called environmentalists who can't be arsed to rinse out and return a bottle for the 5c deposit (or into a dedicated recycling bag to be put out on recycling day), or heaven forbid they drink tap water instead of buying a case of Poland Spring at Costco every week...
Then there's me, who doesn't particularly care what happens to this planet beyond my lifespan, yet I spend the effort to insure every metal or plastic in my home is getting rinsed and recycled (or at least making it to the recycling truck... what they do with it after is on them).
Ah, at least you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten a lot of work done (wisdom teeth removal, caps, fillings) now that it's included with my current job (no additional cost or co-pays). The 5 years of deferred maintenance before then took a toll on the 'ol chompers, though (I couldn't even afford the low out of pocket).
A good way to support or refute this theory would be to look at obesity numbers among public transit users versus drivers. Overwhelmingly, public transit use requires more walking (and in the case of Subways/Els/Metros, also involves stairs). Anecdotally, I see less overweight people in Northeast US cities where traffic / parking constraints make driving impractical.
Initial cost, yes. But if we did it like Canada where bottles are returned to the bottler to be refilled instead of crushed and reprocessed, it eventually pays for itself after 10 or so refills. Of course this would have to be coupled with an appropriate bottle deposit to encourage returning (or at least high enough to allow the manufacturer to recoup costs if someone discards the bottle after it's only been refilled once or twice).
They're also a good "try before you buy" option, where they directly hire the best of the contractors after seeing how well things go for a few years. The huge companies (and governments) basically point at contract companies' non-compete section where the contractor can't work directly for the client for x years, laugh, and say "yeah strike that or not a penny of our multi-million dollar contracts will go through you".
Presumably the rate is in the... well, contract. A well run business will have a plan to counter such tactics at contract renewal time.
Of course not many are that prepared, and it's entirely possible they were either foolish enough to allow the rate to be variable, or (more likely) are royally screwed if they don't renew your contract, and yes at that point you have them by the balls.
If the client likes you they can have the contracting company over the barrel. It can be as simple as "well, we really like person X. The previous people you sent were borderline useless. If we can't have him, maybe we don't need this position at all". Halving their cut to increase person X's pay makes more business sense than calling client's bluff...
$600/month for dental is insane. Because it's usually negotiated separately here in the states, the uninsured cost comes out to $600... in a year. And that's if some non-surgical work needs doing (fillings, etc). So unless you have a family of 12 you might be overpaying a smidge there...