Bullcrap. Nearly all restaurants offer takeout. They may not advertise or promote it, but if you call them and ask if they can box up an order to go, very few will decline the order. Chinese, burger, and pizza joints get most of their orders takeout. Even high end restaurants typically have 20% or more takeout.
If the delivery providers are charging too much, hire a fuckin' delivery driver. Jesus. $80 a day will buy you one.
You are assuming that only one driver is needed. Unlikely. Driving an order to a customer takes longer than carrying an eat-in order from the kitchen to a table, and many restaurants have more than one person even for that.
It seems obvious to me that if delivery isn't profitable, your business shouldn't be offering it.
If it is "obvious" to you, then you should try to learn more about how businesses work.
Takeout is marginally profitable. But it doesn't generate enough net profit to cover fixed costs such as rent. If you stop offering takeout, you will lose those orders, and the marginal profit, and your overall net profit will fall.
"Enjoy our fantastic food in a friendly atmosphere tailored for your enjoyment."
Good luck with that. When I order takeout, it is because I don't have the time to either cook or sit and wait in a restaurant. I am looking for good quick food, not "ambiance".
Wouldn’t it be simpler to just stop offering takeout.
If your customers want takeout, and you don't offer it, then they go elsewhere and you go bankrupt.
One Chinese restaurant in my area went the opposite direction: They stopped offering sit down meals. Your options are takeout or delivery. They vacated their retail space, and expanded the kitchen in their house. Mom and dad cook, and the kids do the deliveries.
A few generations ago, 16 year olds lied to Army recruiters to be able to parachute into Nazi-occupied Western Europe during WWII.
Could you image all these youtube/emo/facebook kids doing that shit today?
Today we have better records and it is much harder to lie to recruiters. But right now there are 18 and 19 year old "kids" among the 11 thousand American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Tools like this and others can only truly be useful when they are open and interoperable with the majority of devices on the market. Closed ecosystems are limiting the potential for technology to improve communication across the board and eliminate paper.
Indeed. Depending on where I am in my house, I can say:
"Alexa, put milk on the shopping list." "Siri, put eggs on the shopping list." "Bixby, put bread on the shopping list."
The problem is that each item goes on to a different list, because these companies refuse to cooperate.
There are some areas of cooperation. For instance, calendar apps interoperate pretty well.
The premise of summary is silly. I NEVER think "everything tech that is needed already exists." To the contrary, I am frustrated at how much stuff isn't available yet. WERE IS MY FLYING CAR!?!?! Where is my household robot? It is 2018, and I still need to manually load the dishwasher, and take out the garbage. WTF? How about a voice assistant that actually understands reality? How about really good telepresence so I don't have to go to work? How about a vacation on the moon? I could list a zillion other things.
This is a little tongue in cheek but Detroit is not high up on my list of places that I would want to visit anyway.
But keep in mind that Detroit's knee-jerk anti-business government, as demonstrated by this ordinance, is the reason that Detroit is such a SH to begin with.
With 10% unemployment, they should be welcoming economic opportunities rather than pushing them away.
Would you still be saying the same thing if you worked with me and saw the several million lines of VB6 code I maintain?
Yes. "Starting over" is almost certainly a mistake. That codebase handles much complexity and covers many corner cases that you likely fail to appreciate. It isn't complex because it is "bad code" but because it is solving a complex problem. By starting over, you will need to build and budget for a new team. One team to maintain the existing codebase, while another team works on the new code. Soon you will have this problem, as every change and new feature has to duplicated in both codebases. People will grow frustrated, and quit or transfer to other projects, taking their expertise with them. As the "vision" people leave, and the remaining coders are under pressure to get stuff fixed, the new code base will start to fill up with hacks and workarounds. Then a new manager will take over and ask what should be done. The programmers will unanimously reply: "Throw it all away and start over".
Instead of "starting over" here is what you should do: 1. Set up a VPS, with the best OS and all the development tools. Snapshot it onto a thumb drive. Now you can always rollback to a working system. 2. Set up a Git repository, and use it. Now you can track changes and rollback with much better granularity. 3. Set up a bug database. 4. Build a test suite. 5. As you fix bugs and add features, start commenting and refactoring the code. Refactor where the bugs are. 6. After every bug fix, add a regression test to the test suite. TDD & FBF. 7. Once the code is mostly refactored and cleaned up, then, and only then, should you start shifting to a new platform. Make sure you can do it incrementally, the way Johnny Cash built his Cadillac: one piece at a time. This means being able to make function calls from VBA into your new platform (maybe C#?) and vice versa. Run your automated suite after every significant change. 8. Use "continuous deployment". Don't roll out lots of big changes all at once, and alienate your users, but instead make lot of small changes regularly. Very importantly make sure the early changes are things the users WANT, like bug fixes and GUI improvements. This will give you stakeholder buy-in and build up karma that you can cash-in when problems arise.
If you truly have 'thousands' of dollars worth of damage on video, and UPS has done nothing, it's time to lawyer up.
UPS has reimbursed us for the damage, so we have no grounds to sue. But they didn't fire the guy despite our videos clearly showing him tossing packages out of the back of the truck in an arc with an apogee more than 8 feet AGL.
I understand that UPS is unionized, but there is still no excuse for keeping this jerk on their payroll. He still does our deliveries, and he no longer tosses our packages, but he does look up at the cameras and sneer almost everyday.
Will be intresting if Amazon can out-logistics UPS & USPS...
For UPS, that is easy. Their operations are not very efficient. Ask anyone who has worked there... or dealt with them daily. For a fun activity, try to get your incompetent and arrogant UPS driver fired for negligently causing thousands of dollars of damage to deliveries. Despite dozens of video recordings from your loading dock security camera documenting his behavior, he will keep his job, and his attitude and surliness will get even worse.
USPS is much better run, and Priority Mail and Media Mail are great deals for delivering small packages. But for anything big, or express, they are not so good.
Yes it is. You need to know enough so that you can interview a candidate and tell the difference between someone who is competent and a BSer who knows all the buzzwords, has a surface level understanding of many things, and can even do routine tasks like "set up a VPN on this server", but is unable to troubleshoot complex failures.
That is not easy, and even when interviews are conducted by professional IT managers, you are still going to get about 20% "bad hires".
I suspect there's been 15-20 years of programmers telling the higher ups that they need to rewrite this stuff
When programmers are faced with maintaining someone else's code, they ALWAYS recommend throwing it all away and starting over. This is rarely the correct thing to do.
It is difficult for non-techs to tell "good" IT folks from "bad" IT folks. Why pay more when you can't tell the difference? Of course, you can tell the difference when things go wrong, but by then it is too late.
A problem we've discovered with neural net AI is hardening... as you feed it more data, the neural net loses plasticity.
I don't think so. Do you have a citation for this?
Our solution to this has been to lock the neutral net after a certain amount of training.
Some ANNs are "locked" for commercial deployment, because it is more profitable to remove the learning mechanisms for mass production. But plenty of other ANNs learn continuously.
Never say never. There is already a proof of concept: the human brain. Unless you believe in magic, there is no reason that what can be done with carbon can't also be done with silicon. Silicon neurons can switch 10 million times faster, and unlike biological brains, an AI would not be encumbered by the detritus of millions of years of sub-optimal evolutionary local maxima.
I guess you don't have a name that sounds oriental, or Indian, or black.
I host a few spare rooms on Airbnb, and none of that matters. It is French people that are the biggest problem. They complain about everything. I had one French woman leave me a two star review because of heavy traffic on the freeway from the airport.
Sure a select few will become executives or successful entrepreneurs, but that is not possible for everyone.
Also, anyone moving into executive management and/or self employment will no longer be included in this data set. The data only includes people hired thru hired.com for tech positions. That is likely the reason why they report salaries peaking at 45. How many good people over 45 are going to be looking for a job on a website, rather than using their professional network?
Slashdot Mirror
Most restursnts don’t offer takeout.
Bullcrap. Nearly all restaurants offer takeout. They may not advertise or promote it, but if you call them and ask if they can box up an order to go, very few will decline the order. Chinese, burger, and pizza joints get most of their orders takeout. Even high end restaurants typically have 20% or more takeout.
If the delivery providers are charging too much, hire a fuckin' delivery driver. Jesus. $80 a day will buy you one.
You are assuming that only one driver is needed. Unlikely. Driving an order to a customer takes longer than carrying an eat-in order from the kitchen to a table, and many restaurants have more than one person even for that.
I would also like to see a takeout discount for not using up valuable dining space.
They already have that. It is called "not tipping".
You are expected to tip a server or a deliverer. But if you place a phone order, and pick it up yourself, no tip is expected.
It seems obvious to me that if delivery isn't profitable, your business shouldn't be offering it.
If it is "obvious" to you, then you should try to learn more about how businesses work.
Takeout is marginally profitable. But it doesn't generate enough net profit to cover fixed costs such as rent. If you stop offering takeout, you will lose those orders, and the marginal profit, and your overall net profit will fall.
"Enjoy our fantastic food in a friendly atmosphere tailored for your enjoyment."
Good luck with that. When I order takeout, it is because I don't have the time to either cook or sit and wait in a restaurant. I am looking for good quick food, not "ambiance".
Wouldn’t it be simpler to just stop offering takeout.
If your customers want takeout, and you don't offer it, then they go elsewhere and you go bankrupt.
One Chinese restaurant in my area went the opposite direction: They stopped offering sit down meals. Your options are takeout or delivery. They vacated their retail space, and expanded the kitchen in their house. Mom and dad cook, and the kids do the deliveries.
Twitter is banned in China. How did Xiaomi do this?
Xiaomi phones are popular in India and SE Asia.
A few generations ago, 16 year olds lied to Army recruiters to be able to parachute into Nazi-occupied Western Europe during WWII.
Could you image all these youtube/emo/facebook kids doing that shit today?
Today we have better records and it is much harder to lie to recruiters. But right now there are 18 and 19 year old "kids" among the 11 thousand American soldiers in Afghanistan.
The headline is garbage
Indeed. TFA is pure conjecture. It provides no actual evidence that hiring worse people leads to better or more creative results.
Tools like this and others can only truly be useful when they are open and interoperable with the majority of devices on the market. Closed ecosystems are limiting the potential for technology to improve communication across the board and eliminate paper.
Indeed. Depending on where I am in my house, I can say:
"Alexa, put milk on the shopping list."
"Siri, put eggs on the shopping list."
"Bixby, put bread on the shopping list."
The problem is that each item goes on to a different list, because these companies refuse to cooperate.
There are some areas of cooperation. For instance, calendar apps interoperate pretty well.
The premise of summary is silly. I NEVER think "everything tech that is needed already exists." To the contrary, I am frustrated at how much stuff isn't available yet. WERE IS MY FLYING CAR!?!?! Where is my household robot? It is 2018, and I still need to manually load the dishwasher, and take out the garbage. WTF? How about a voice assistant that actually understands reality? How about really good telepresence so I don't have to go to work? How about a vacation on the moon? I could list a zillion other things.
Some ROMs are OTP (One Time Programmable), so once you have loaded them they can't be changed.
That used to be common, but is rare today except in super cheap 8 and 4 bit chips. You can usually erase and rewrite programmatically, or using JTAG.
This is a little tongue in cheek but Detroit is not high up on my list of places that I would want to visit anyway.
But keep in mind that Detroit's knee-jerk anti-business government, as demonstrated by this ordinance, is the reason that Detroit is such a SH to begin with.
With 10% unemployment, they should be welcoming economic opportunities rather than pushing them away.
Who are these "they" you speak of?
Skynet
Would you still be saying the same thing if you worked with me and saw the several million lines of VB6 code I maintain?
Yes. "Starting over" is almost certainly a mistake. That codebase handles much complexity and covers many corner cases that you likely fail to appreciate. It isn't complex because it is "bad code" but because it is solving a complex problem. By starting over, you will need to build and budget for a new team. One team to maintain the existing codebase, while another team works on the new code. Soon you will have this problem, as every change and new feature has to duplicated in both codebases. People will grow frustrated, and quit or transfer to other projects, taking their expertise with them. As the "vision" people leave, and the remaining coders are under pressure to get stuff fixed, the new code base will start to fill up with hacks and workarounds. Then a new manager will take over and ask what should be done. The programmers will unanimously reply: "Throw it all away and start over".
Instead of "starting over" here is what you should do:
1. Set up a VPS, with the best OS and all the development tools. Snapshot it onto a thumb drive. Now you can always rollback to a working system.
2. Set up a Git repository, and use it. Now you can track changes and rollback with much better granularity.
3. Set up a bug database.
4. Build a test suite.
5. As you fix bugs and add features, start commenting and refactoring the code. Refactor where the bugs are.
6. After every bug fix, add a regression test to the test suite. TDD & FBF.
7. Once the code is mostly refactored and cleaned up, then, and only then, should you start shifting to a new platform. Make sure you can do it incrementally, the way Johnny Cash built his Cadillac: one piece at a time. This means being able to make function calls from VBA into your new platform (maybe C#?) and vice versa. Run your automated suite after every significant change.
8. Use "continuous deployment". Don't roll out lots of big changes all at once, and alienate your users, but instead make lot of small changes regularly. Very importantly make sure the early changes are things the users WANT, like bug fixes and GUI improvements. This will give you stakeholder buy-in and build up karma that you can cash-in when problems arise.
Good luck.
If you truly have 'thousands' of dollars worth of damage on video, and UPS has done nothing, it's time to lawyer up.
UPS has reimbursed us for the damage, so we have no grounds to sue. But they didn't fire the guy despite our videos clearly showing him tossing packages out of the back of the truck in an arc with an apogee more than 8 feet AGL.
I understand that UPS is unionized, but there is still no excuse for keeping this jerk on their payroll. He still does our deliveries, and he no longer tosses our packages, but he does look up at the cameras and sneer almost everyday.
Will be intresting if Amazon can out-logistics UPS & USPS ...
For UPS, that is easy. Their operations are not very efficient. Ask anyone who has worked there ... or dealt with them daily. For a fun activity, try to get your incompetent and arrogant UPS driver fired for negligently causing thousands of dollars of damage to deliveries. Despite dozens of video recordings from your loading dock security camera documenting his behavior, he will keep his job, and his attitude and surliness will get even worse.
USPS is much better run, and Priority Mail and Media Mail are great deals for delivering small packages. But for anything big, or express, they are not so good.
It will probably be more "dropping your valuable item on your front porch in view of everyone - by Amazon"
Solution: Put a lock box on your porch, bolted to the concrete.
I have had one for years. The delivery guys always use it.
It only works for the first delivery of the day, but I have never had a stolen package.
I also have a locking mailbox. The mailperson can put mail in, but I use a key to get it out.
It's not hard to learn things about IT.
Yes it is. You need to know enough so that you can interview a candidate and tell the difference between someone who is competent and a BSer who knows all the buzzwords, has a surface level understanding of many things, and can even do routine tasks like "set up a VPN on this server", but is unable to troubleshoot complex failures.
That is not easy, and even when interviews are conducted by professional IT managers, you are still going to get about 20% "bad hires".
I suspect there's been 15-20 years of programmers telling the higher ups that they need to rewrite this stuff
When programmers are faced with maintaining someone else's code, they ALWAYS recommend throwing it all away and starting over. This is rarely the correct thing to do.
Things you should never do
And banks don't want to pay for good IT folks.
It is difficult for non-techs to tell "good" IT folks from "bad" IT folks. Why pay more when you can't tell the difference? Of course, you can tell the difference when things go wrong, but by then it is too late.
A problem we've discovered with neural net AI is hardening ... as you feed it more data, the neural net loses plasticity.
I don't think so. Do you have a citation for this?
Our solution to this has been to lock the neutral net after a certain amount of training.
Some ANNs are "locked" for commercial deployment, because it is more profitable to remove the learning mechanisms for mass production. But plenty of other ANNs learn continuously.
AI will probably never exist ...
Never say never. There is already a proof of concept: the human brain. Unless you believe in magic, there is no reason that what can be done with carbon can't also be done with silicon. Silicon neurons can switch 10 million times faster, and unlike biological brains, an AI would not be encumbered by the detritus of millions of years of sub-optimal evolutionary local maxima.
... so that is also an unrealistic fear.
That is exactly what they want us to believe.
I guess you don't have a name that sounds oriental, or Indian, or black.
I host a few spare rooms on Airbnb, and none of that matters. It is French people that are the biggest problem. They complain about everything. I had one French woman leave me a two star review because of heavy traffic on the freeway from the airport.
as do the suicide nets!
The suicide nets were a PR response to pressure from the media to "do something" about a problem that didn't actually exist.
Sure a select few will become executives or successful entrepreneurs, but that is not possible for everyone.
Also, anyone moving into executive management and/or self employment will no longer be included in this data set. The data only includes people hired thru hired.com for tech positions. That is likely the reason why they report salaries peaking at 45. How many good people over 45 are going to be looking for a job on a website, rather than using their professional network?