If you had reliable internet without a data cap, there are IPTV options for Kodi. Legal? Probably not. $10 a month for about 400 channels. It works.
It's too bad Comcast won't just sell this sort of service. But I have found out I like some of the European channels Comcast (and indeed nobody else in North America) doesn't offer.
The solution is easy but so radical, nobody would ever do it: stop making workplaces so far from places where people live. The problem is, jobs are rarely where the people want live. So we need to look at what IS a job and what IS where someone lives and find ways blend them in a way that affects neither work life nor home life.
Allowing remote working solves the issue immediately but it's not compatible with many workplaces. Breaking up huge offices into multiple smaller ones spread around shows promise. Yet companies like Yahoo have done the opposite, as well as forbidding remote working. I am not sure being that way has helped Yahoo at all.
There is probably a kink for eating things other people have eaten.
um
My unfortunately not imaginary ex-girlfriend, whom facebook insists I really still want to refriend, may have dumped me and moved on, but every guy after me is, well, going after me. I was the first to enjoy eating there.
I doubt that has discouraged any of the guys she has been with since me.
This is a bit of a crude example that people regularly DO put their mouths on things other people have had in their mouths. And other places. So I don't think it would work as a discouragement.
Equally true though, I once worked in a very small office of a very big tech company. That location had a lot of temps and a lot of thefts of lunch from the break room. It was a freeforall in there. One of my coworkers, who was openly gay, got very fed up with his lunches being stolen and began marking them with "Go ahead and steal my lunch. I SPAT IN IT! YUM!" The building was unsure whether he had any diseases or not, but it DID keep his lunches from being stolen again.
Cut off your finger? No they don't need to do that, unless they want to.
No, a fingerprint lock is great except it's a lock where you leave the keys everywhere you go. Your prints. It is basically simple to lift prints from anything you have touched, copy them in a suitable manner and material, and boom the device is unlocked.
So no, they don't need your finger. A lucky one would be to lift your own print off the phone itself and use that to get in. But you touch many other things all day long so it's not hard to find something.
The PCB mold with silicone trick doesn't work any more?
Yes it works. Moulded gummy bears and even photocopies also work in some cases.
Fingerprint locks are generally trivial to defeat provided there is access to a suitable print to copy. Of course prints are a key people leave everywhere they go. You don't get that with PINs or passwords or passphrases, or metal locks and keys.
Colleges are stuck on this idea that they need to act like a for-profit corporation and show revenue increases quarter over quarter.
There is no other reason schools have raised tuition so much over so short a period of time. They want that revenue and they want more of it than they had before, even if a LOT of the money ends up doing nothing for students.
At the same time, the schools know the students will pay because they mostly have loans anyway so it's not really the student's money. They won't notice the cost has increased unless they realize they have lots more loan payments. But nobody thinks about that when they sign up for classes.
How the hell does Foxconn claim 30 to 50,000 jobs?
Any panel factory like the propose would be very highly automated and probably only involve humans at the edges of production: loading in raw materials and then final assembly and shipping. All the fabrication would almost certainly be done by robots.
So unless they plan to build a factory the size of a city -with product demand that does not exist- there is no way they will need more than a few hundred workers. Maybe a thousand.
I think Foxconn may be thinking of how they DO run plants in China, which is to hire a lot of cheap labor to do everything. Need it done faster, no problem, plenty of job seekers lined up every morning. But nobody in the US runs plants like that.
That said, I don't think the economics work anyway. Chinese companies keep lowering the bottom line on panel cost and consumer demand has largely eased as nearly everyone who wanted a flat TV has gotten one or more. Prices for 32" TVs are now approaching $100 at retail. There just isn't going to be a lot of profit in something like that shipped from China. A US-made version would have to be no more expensive or else nobody will want it. And there definitely would not be much profit in it.
Various Korean rail companies have supplied trains around the world and nobody doubts they make a lot of rolling stock.
But many of the Korean-built mass transit and passenger trains seem to suffer extreme defects and lawsuits. Boston MBTA, Philadelphia SEPTA and California Metrolink are all suing Hyundai Rotem over different issues with their rail vehicles. Rail lines in Australia are also engaged in lawsuits.
Now, problems and disagreements happen with rail. But there is a big pattern of Korean rail suppliers overpromising what they can do, underbidding competitors, and then either failing to deliver on time or delivering equipment with massive faults and defects.
It seems to be mainly a case of trying to bag contracts before Chinese or Japanese suppliers can get them, even if the Korean companies can't really deliver. This is what happens when all these municipal rail systems have very star-eyed visions of what they want and pocket change to pay for it, so they go for the biggest dreamer and low bidder all at once with a very optimistic timetable. And it just can't work that way.
So here is KRRI promising the unproven and yet to be invented faster than anyone else AND for the best price. Yeah goody for you. Somebody will fund it.
Disclaimer: Aside from the US, there is no nation I love more than South Korea. It's in my blood. I proudly own a Korean car and go nuts over Korean pop culture. But there have been just so many rail issues. It really sullies the Korean reputation.
He's been too much of a coward to man up and face his rape accusations, so did anyone REALLY think he would grow a pair and face his accusations? Of course not. Everything this man (and I hate using that word for such a pathetic cow shit of a human being) does is related to dodging responsibility for his actions. He's like a child hiding from mommy.
And in May, when Chelsea is actually released, Julian will have yet another excuse for why he still won't man up.
The thing is, the Qualcomm product is demonstrably better than the competing options. It's not even close. As a user, I don't give a care if they strongarm Apple or Samsung or other companies and force them to pay more. What I want is the best performing phone I can get and I don't want excuses that some company opted for an alternative that stinks.
We can see that right now with the intel chipset iPhones falling flat on their faces compared to the superior Qualcomm iPhones. There. THAT is why I want Qualcomm in my phones. They know this stuff better than anyone and it works and runs rings around even supposed experts like intel.
Since I cannot just replace the chips and modems in my phone, I need this to all happen as the phones are designed and made and if it costs Apple or Samsung more, so what? Add a dollar to the price of the damn phone so I don't have to be stuck with a junk modem for years and years.
Come on! PAY the premium! I for one would pay Qualcomm directly if I could. I can't. So it's up to the phone makers to do it for me. The FTC can stuff it. If they turn around and force Apple to offer iPhones with a Realtek chipset or some such junk, it's going to damage Apple and I promise I will sledgehammer such a phone rather than use it.
ATT is gone, the company bearing the name today is southern bell company, SBC. ATT split itself up and sold all the pieces, SBC bought the name.
EXCUSE ME, but do not sully the name of Southern Bell so casually. AT&T as it currently exists is the renamed Southwestern Bell Company. SBC.
SBC was not the same as Southern Bell or BellSouth. BellSouth was almost a beloved company in its territory, far more liked than any of the other baby bells in their territories. Unfortunately BellSouth got bought by SBC and merged into the trainwreck of AT&T.
ALL blame for anything AT&T does deserves to be dumped in SBCs lap. But please leave Southern Bell and BellSouth out of it. None of this is their fault.
She didn't fail at Google, she was widely respected both internally and externally. Hence why the Yahoo board chose as CEO of the company.
The reality is Yahoo has been a zombie for years, only the investors weren't ready to admit it and put it down.
Her reputation was for working at Google. Not for being some kind of super worker. No. Her rep was for being there and having been there early on and long enough to be somebody important without actually contributing a hell of a lot. It's really a lot like having a low/. user number. It gains some respect and whatever but it doesn't really mean much.
The only reason Marissa's adventures at Yahoo lasted this long is that she was fairly smart and it helped obscure that she had no clue what the hell she was doing.
3D failed because a lot of people had already made the jump to flat panel TVs and were relatively happy with those purchases.
3D basically said take the TV you are happy with, which you just got, and throw it, oh and the 3D sets are more expensive and don't really have any compelling content to watch anyway.
Flat TVs have also continued to improve in quality while also getting cheaper all the time. So for 3D or even 4K to be compelling, they are going to have to offer a tangible reason for someone to choose that over a normal TV. 4K is doing a lot better at this than I would have expected, as there still isn't that much 4K content.
They were pushing it pretty hard before. For a while I had to spend 10-30 seconds to get out of the uberpool offer attempts and order a regular Uber.
As an Uber driver, Pool makes Uber money mainly because the pay to the driver is MUCH lower. And this matters because Uber has had to subsidize what drivers are paid versus the fare charged to riders. This is why Uber is losing so much money. Pool rides charge significantly lower fares and pay the drivers far less.
Meanwhile it does two useful things for Uber: One, it keeps the riders using Uber versus a competing service or transport method. They want that mindshare lock. Two, it keeps the Uber drivers busy and saturated with work in many cases, which keeps them out on the roads and makes them available for other pool riders or Uber Eats or XL services. Uber's biggest weakness is not having cars available when riders want them so this helps address that.
Uber Eats is Pool for food and it's getting a huge push. It sucks for drivers because you end up stuck at restaurants waiting for food to be ready. Restaurants HATE IT because the Uber tablets nag them to accept the order and immediately dispatch a driver to pick it up long before the food is ready, and if the restaurant does not acknowledge the order in a hurry, Uber starts calling them to nag. Uber Eats also pays drivers a pittance and we end up with bad reviews because the food is cold, which is not our fault. They stack multiple order pick ups and we have to wait wait wait for all of them to be ready, so even if one order IS ready, we have to wait for the next one. And we're sitting there making zero money while all this goes on.
And then the food stinks up the car which makes human riders mad.
Meanwhile. Pool is a disaster for drivers who could make, say $15 on an XL run would instead make $3.75 on a Pool ride, both being before gas and taxes are taken out. I've had Pool riders where the trip generated under two dollars to me. Less than bus fare! And that was on a 15 mile trip pickup from the airport far out in the suburbs. With the fuel cost, I absolutely lost money on that run. And it should be noted, Drivers has no idea what the destination is or the fare until after they have picked up the rider. So I didn't know I would only be paid two bucks or even WHY only two bucks.
Additionally, there is a lot of confusion among riders on what Pool even means. I picked up a couple going to the airport with luggage. They were under a time constraint to make their flight. Not normally an issue but they had chosen Pool because they had two people and figured that's what you do when you have two people. They had no idea what Pool meant.
Uber immediately paired up these travellers with a sweaty man going home from the gym. It was on our way but it added at least 15 minutes to the trip due to really bad traffic I could have otherwise avoided. It threatened to make these people late and caused a lot of concern. It definitely did make them very unhappy as they'd wanted a fast ride to the airport and got a smelly shared ride with a man who also got angry that the other people were mad at him. The car was also totally full of people and luggage and gym bags at that point so nobody enjoyed any of it and I had a car full of pissed off people.
I could not cancel Gym Dude before pickup because that would affect my ratings and anyway Uber would just assign another Pool rider to me, maybe worse than the one I had. I could not expedite the airport drop off because Gym Dude was on the way, technically, even if his side trip dragged us into bad traffic. Everybody ended up unhappy on that run, through zero fault of mine. I got one star rated by both parties and of course no tips.
So I contacted Uber Support and demanded to be let out of Pool. I don't need passengers almost fighting in my car over something I can'
Despite heroics I bet they still didn't tip the driver and probably only gave him a 2-star rating.
And he probably made $3.75 for it.
Do everything right AND save the kid and Uber will give you:
"Your Uber rating is slipping. Don't worry, your account is still active! But here are some tips from Uber Pros on how to improve your driving rating!"
Whatever may be going on with the passenger app, the driver app certainly does track even when the driver is set to "offline" status i.e. not doing Uber work at that time.
They also track various things like braking and acceleration when the app is online but not actively carrying a fare. They like sending reminders when they feel your driving hasn't been smooth enough. I drive an SUV which is otherwise qualified for Uber. It happens to have truck-like handling which they interpret as harshness. Well yes. It's a truck-based SUV. If you didn't want that, why let me sign up to drive?
BTW, it is very hard to make money as an Uber driver. The company is on-boarding around a hundred drivers a day in my area so the competition for fares is intense. And at the same time, Uber is pushing Pool rides and UberEats fares, neither of which pay much.
With the money they lose every quarter, they are artificially subsidizing the costs they charge riders and businesses and probably padding what they pay drivers, which is already minimal anyway. So this company is poised to collapse entirely when the money runs out, and it will. Uber is already dead. They just don't know it yet.
The thing nobody seems to realize is that while all these jobs are being automated, from making hamburgers to driving trucks to Uber cars to who knows what, an awful lot of jobs are going to be eliminated, especially at the low-skilled end of things. Starter jobs. Mundane jobs. Boring jobs. Dangerous jobs, which are all these people can do in many instances.
The jobs are going away but the people are not. They will still be here, looking for work, but most likely hungry, out of work, unhappy, angry even. More immigrants will continue to come in as well. The population will soar.
What are we as a society going to DO with millions or tens of millions of angry and unemployed people with nothing to lose? Some say society does not owe them a job but what the fuck are they supposed to do when they cannot find work? Well I don't know what they should do but what they ARE going to do is riot and burn cities down. They'll take it out on the ones who still have money and jobs. Class warfare will reach a level perhaps never seen before in the US.
For years, the company where I work had an automation product which terrified everybody at the firm. We'd had no training on it. An Executive dropped a lot of money on it before anyone could even see if it would work for us, and directly, it didn't.
But we had it and had some incentive to use it. And I spent a couple years learning it on my own and mastered that goddamn thing where I could make it do anything I wanted. I was a wizard and magician and chef and used that product to DO the very automation project they said could not be done, which terrified far more talented people than me. I was soo good at it, my team was eliminated except for me. We didn't need all those people because the automation project worked.
The software was still scary and dangerous to touch but I knew it inside and out. It did not scare me. Among the dangers was that you could right click in the wrong spot and be presented with two different 'delete' options, one of which wiped the entire database rather than just the item you were looking at. The software was apparently designed by an idiot. But I mastered it all anyway. I made that damn thing sing barbershop quartet and fly rings around the moon.
So all was well until they decided to get rid of me, which was not a surprise to me.
What they did was hire a woman from Mexico, apparently off the street. I don't know what her skillset was but it wasn't like mine. And they had me do a few hours of instruction over the phone and webex and boom she took over running this program that had slain experienced people before me.
And that was that. My understanding is that they had a critical issue the next week and they were forbidden from calling me for help. I am sure it went to pieces. It took expertise to run. They hired cheap to replace me, not smart.
18 months later I am still out of work because a LOT of the comparable IT work has already been outsourced or automated. I failed to pay my rent this month and bills are stacking up For the first time in my life, I am facing no future. Can't find work, I'm broke, and there is no hope. But I automated something that was supposed to be impossible. I will go down in flames proud of what i did.
Laws like this are as much about revenue collection than actually stopping anything. They would love it if people gave up porn.
But if not, and they get caught, then there will be punitive fines (aka revenue), perhaps currency and property forfeitures (revenue!), penalties and court costs (revenue!) and they'll wave the sex offender list in everyone's faces and tell them they should be glad to plead guilty, pay the fines and not end up on that list, OR they can risk trial and risk being convicted and risk being put on the list.
So of course most people will pay up and beg the judge for leniency and promise to never look at boobs again. Which of course will fail, and get them in trouble with the law again facing even bigger fines and penalties (revenue!!!!).
It's all really just a scam. And chances are, the people sponsoring this crap have drives jammed with the most depraved porn there is. History has repeatedly shown the moral warriors who go all-out to ban things like this or ban homosexuality or other things are extremely likely to be members of the very categories they want to ban, and the bans are motivated by a deep inability to accept who and what they are. If you are a gay politician or preacher deep in the closet and unable or unwilling to admit it and come out, of course you go crazy trying to have gays burned alive and shit.
The person you hate most is the one you see in the mirror.
Well, I hope you never find out you can use Kodi and an IPTV package that blows away everything you are doing. Because you'd have to undo all you have done and probably be very sad about how much overspending and overthinking you did.
If you use XfinityWifi, you are either using it on a free temporary pass (some restaurants do that) or you are a Comcast customer using your own login.
But either way, Comcast uses your device MAC to determine what you are allowed to do. So even if you aren't logging in, they still know it is you and that your device is associated with your account, mainly so the bandwidth you use on an XfinityWifi hotspot is counted against your bandwidth cap.
None of this has anything do with Comcast TV.
If you want TV and sports, get Kodi and an IPTV package for ~$10-15 a month and you'll get hundreds of channels including all the pay channels, porn, sports, and more. It does use a lot of bandwidth so you need the 1GB Comcast cap level.
$10 too much? There are freeTV options via Kodi. Anyone into any sport can probably find a free feed there.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had reliable internet without a data cap, there are IPTV options for Kodi. Legal? Probably not. $10 a month for about 400 channels. It works.
It's too bad Comcast won't just sell this sort of service. But I have found out I like some of the European channels Comcast (and indeed nobody else in North America) doesn't offer.
The solution is easy but so radical, nobody would ever do it: stop making workplaces so far from places where people live. The problem is, jobs are rarely where the people want live. So we need to look at what IS a job and what IS where someone lives and find ways blend them in a way that affects neither work life nor home life.
Allowing remote working solves the issue immediately but it's not compatible with many workplaces.
Breaking up huge offices into multiple smaller ones spread around shows promise. Yet companies like Yahoo have done the opposite, as well as forbidding remote working. I am not sure being that way has helped Yahoo at all.
There is probably a kink for eating things other people have eaten.
um
My unfortunately not imaginary ex-girlfriend, whom facebook insists I really still want to refriend, may have dumped me and moved on, but every guy after me is, well, going after me. I was the first to enjoy eating there.
I doubt that has discouraged any of the guys she has been with since me.
This is a bit of a crude example that people regularly DO put their mouths on things other people have had in their mouths. And other places. So I don't think it would work as a discouragement.
Equally true though, I once worked in a very small office of a very big tech company. That location had a lot of temps and a lot of thefts of lunch from the break room. It was a freeforall in there. One of my coworkers, who was openly gay, got very fed up with his lunches being stolen and began marking them with "Go ahead and steal my lunch. I SPAT IN IT! YUM!" The building was unsure whether he had any diseases or not, but it DID keep his lunches from being stolen again.
Cut off your finger? No they don't need to do that, unless they want to.
No, a fingerprint lock is great except it's a lock where you leave the keys everywhere you go. Your prints. It is basically simple to lift prints from anything you have touched, copy them in a suitable manner and material, and boom the device is unlocked.
So no, they don't need your finger. A lucky one would be to lift your own print off the phone itself and use that to get in. But you touch many other things all day long so it's not hard to find something.
The PCB mold with silicone trick doesn't work any more?
Yes it works. Moulded gummy bears and even photocopies also work in some cases.
Fingerprint locks are generally trivial to defeat provided there is access to a suitable print to copy. Of course prints are a key people leave everywhere they go. You don't get that with PINs or passwords or passphrases, or metal locks and keys.
Colleges are stuck on this idea that they need to act like a for-profit corporation and show revenue increases quarter over quarter.
There is no other reason schools have raised tuition so much over so short a period of time. They want that revenue and they want more of it than they had before, even if a LOT of the money ends up doing nothing for students.
At the same time, the schools know the students will pay because they mostly have loans anyway so it's not really the student's money. They won't notice the cost has increased unless they realize they have lots more loan payments. But nobody thinks about that when they sign up for classes.
How the hell does Foxconn claim 30 to 50,000 jobs?
Any panel factory like the propose would be very highly automated and probably only involve humans at the edges of production: loading in raw materials and then final assembly and shipping. All the fabrication would almost certainly be done by robots.
So unless they plan to build a factory the size of a city -with product demand that does not exist- there is no way they will need more than a few hundred workers. Maybe a thousand.
I think Foxconn may be thinking of how they DO run plants in China, which is to hire a lot of cheap labor to do everything. Need it done faster, no problem, plenty of job seekers lined up every morning. But nobody in the US runs plants like that.
That said, I don't think the economics work anyway. Chinese companies keep lowering the bottom line on panel cost and consumer demand has largely eased as nearly everyone who wanted a flat TV has gotten one or more. Prices for 32" TVs are now approaching $100 at retail. There just isn't going to be a lot of profit in something like that shipped from China. A US-made version would have to be no more expensive or else nobody will want it. And there definitely would not be much profit in it.
Various Korean rail companies have supplied trains around the world and nobody doubts they make a lot of rolling stock.
But many of the Korean-built mass transit and passenger trains seem to suffer extreme defects and lawsuits. Boston MBTA, Philadelphia SEPTA and California Metrolink are all suing Hyundai Rotem over different issues with their rail vehicles. Rail lines in Australia are also engaged in lawsuits.
Now, problems and disagreements happen with rail. But there is a big pattern of Korean rail suppliers overpromising what they can do, underbidding competitors, and then either failing to deliver on time or delivering equipment with massive faults and defects.
It seems to be mainly a case of trying to bag contracts before Chinese or Japanese suppliers can get them, even if the Korean companies can't really deliver. This is what happens when all these municipal rail systems have very star-eyed visions of what they want and pocket change to pay for it, so they go for the biggest dreamer and low bidder all at once with a very optimistic timetable. And it just can't work that way.
So here is KRRI promising the unproven and yet to be invented faster than anyone else AND for the best price. Yeah goody for you. Somebody will fund it.
Disclaimer: Aside from the US, there is no nation I love more than South Korea. It's in my blood. I proudly own a Korean car and go nuts over Korean pop culture. But there have been just so many rail issues. It really sullies the Korean reputation.
He's been too much of a coward to man up and face his rape accusations, so did anyone REALLY think he would grow a pair and face his accusations? Of course not. Everything this man (and I hate using that word for such a pathetic cow shit of a human being) does is related to dodging responsibility for his actions. He's like a child hiding from mommy.
And in May, when Chelsea is actually released, Julian will have yet another excuse for why he still won't man up.
The summary manages to mention someone named Malone, but only once and without saying who that person actually is.
Nice work there editor. You lost the subject but left in a reference to it. Maybe the inevitable dupe post will fix this.
The thing is, the Qualcomm product is demonstrably better than the competing options. It's not even close. As a user, I don't give a care if they strongarm Apple or Samsung or other companies and force them to pay more. What I want is the best performing phone I can get and I don't want excuses that some company opted for an alternative that stinks.
We can see that right now with the intel chipset iPhones falling flat on their faces compared to the superior Qualcomm iPhones. There. THAT is why I want Qualcomm in my phones. They know this stuff better than anyone and it works and runs rings around even supposed experts like intel.
Since I cannot just replace the chips and modems in my phone, I need this to all happen as the phones are designed and made and if it costs Apple or Samsung more, so what? Add a dollar to the price of the damn phone so I don't have to be stuck with a junk modem for years and years.
Come on! PAY the premium! I for one would pay Qualcomm directly if I could. I can't. So it's up to the phone makers to do it for me. The FTC can stuff it. If they turn around and force Apple to offer iPhones with a Realtek chipset or some such junk, it's going to damage Apple and I promise I will sledgehammer such a phone rather than use it.
You'd probably be better off with Kodi and a subscription to one of the IPTV services. Hundreds of channels for less than DTN costs.
ATT is gone, the company bearing the name today is southern bell company, SBC. ATT split itself up and sold all the pieces, SBC bought the name.
EXCUSE ME, but do not sully the name of Southern Bell so casually. AT&T as it currently exists is the renamed Southwestern Bell Company. SBC.
SBC was not the same as Southern Bell or BellSouth. BellSouth was almost a beloved company in its territory, far more liked than any of the other baby bells in their territories. Unfortunately BellSouth got bought by SBC and merged into the trainwreck of AT&T.
ALL blame for anything AT&T does deserves to be dumped in SBCs lap. But please leave Southern Bell and BellSouth out of it. None of this is their fault.
She didn't fail at Google, she was widely respected both internally and externally. Hence why the Yahoo board chose as CEO of the company.
The reality is Yahoo has been a zombie for years, only the investors weren't ready to admit it and put it down.
Her reputation was for working at Google. Not for being some kind of super worker. No. Her rep was for being there and having been there early on and long enough to be somebody important without actually contributing a hell of a lot. It's really a lot like having a low /. user number. It gains some respect and whatever but it doesn't really mean much.
The only reason Marissa's adventures at Yahoo lasted this long is that she was fairly smart and it helped obscure that she had no clue what the hell she was doing.
3D failed because a lot of people had already made the jump to flat panel TVs and were relatively happy with those purchases.
3D basically said take the TV you are happy with, which you just got, and throw it, oh and the 3D sets are more expensive and don't really have any compelling content to watch anyway.
Flat TVs have also continued to improve in quality while also getting cheaper all the time. So for 3D or even 4K to be compelling, they are going to have to offer a tangible reason for someone to choose that over a normal TV. 4K is doing a lot better at this than I would have expected, as there still isn't that much 4K content.
I love Uber, but I HATE Uberpool.
Does Uberpool make them more money?
They were pushing it pretty hard before. For a while I had to spend 10-30 seconds to get out of the uberpool offer attempts and order a regular Uber.
As an Uber driver, Pool makes Uber money mainly because the pay to the driver is MUCH lower. And this matters because Uber has had to subsidize what drivers are paid versus the fare charged to riders. This is why Uber is losing so much money. Pool rides charge significantly lower fares and pay the drivers far less.
Meanwhile it does two useful things for Uber: One, it keeps the riders using Uber versus a competing service or transport method. They want that mindshare lock. Two, it keeps the Uber drivers busy and saturated with work in many cases, which keeps them out on the roads and makes them available for other pool riders or Uber Eats or XL services. Uber's biggest weakness is not having cars available when riders want them so this helps address that.
Uber Eats is Pool for food and it's getting a huge push. It sucks for drivers because you end up stuck at restaurants waiting for food to be ready. Restaurants HATE IT because the Uber tablets nag them to accept the order and immediately dispatch a driver to pick it up long before the food is ready, and if the restaurant does not acknowledge the order in a hurry, Uber starts calling them to nag. Uber Eats also pays drivers a pittance and we end up with bad reviews because the food is cold, which is not our fault. They stack multiple order pick ups and we have to wait wait wait for all of them to be ready, so even if one order IS ready, we have to wait for the next one. And we're sitting there making zero money while all this goes on.
And then the food stinks up the car which makes human riders mad.
Meanwhile. Pool is a disaster for drivers who could make, say $15 on an XL run would instead make $3.75 on a Pool ride, both being before gas and taxes are taken out. I've had Pool riders where the trip generated under two dollars to me. Less than bus fare! And that was on a 15 mile trip pickup from the airport far out in the suburbs. With the fuel cost, I absolutely lost money on that run. And it should be noted, Drivers has no idea what the destination is or the fare until after they have picked up the rider. So I didn't know I would only be paid two bucks or even WHY only two bucks.
Additionally, there is a lot of confusion among riders on what Pool even means. I picked up a couple going to the airport with luggage. They were under a time constraint to make their flight. Not normally an issue but they had chosen Pool because they had two people and figured that's what you do when you have two people. They had no idea what Pool meant.
Uber immediately paired up these travellers with a sweaty man going home from the gym. It was on our way but it added at least 15 minutes to the trip due to really bad traffic I could have otherwise avoided. It threatened to make these people late and caused a lot of concern. It definitely did make them very unhappy as they'd wanted a fast ride to the airport and got a smelly shared ride with a man who also got angry that the other people were mad at him. The car was also totally full of people and luggage and gym bags at that point so nobody enjoyed any of it and I had a car full of pissed off people.
I could not cancel Gym Dude before pickup because that would affect my ratings and anyway Uber would just assign another Pool rider to me, maybe worse than the one I had. I could not expedite the airport drop off because Gym Dude was on the way, technically, even if his side trip dragged us into bad traffic. Everybody ended up unhappy on that run, through zero fault of mine. I got one star rated by both parties and of course no tips.
So I contacted Uber Support and demanded to be let out of Pool. I don't need passengers almost fighting in my car over something I can'
Despite heroics I bet they still didn't tip the driver and probably only gave him a 2-star rating.
And he probably made $3.75 for it.
Do everything right AND save the kid and Uber will give you:
"Your Uber rating is slipping. Don't worry, your account is still active! But here are some tips from Uber Pros on how to improve your driving rating!"
Fuck you Uber. With sand for lube. Fuck you.
Whatever may be going on with the passenger app, the driver app certainly does track even when the driver is set to "offline" status i.e. not doing Uber work at that time.
They also track various things like braking and acceleration when the app is online but not actively carrying a fare. They like sending reminders when they feel your driving hasn't been smooth enough. I drive an SUV which is otherwise qualified for Uber. It happens to have truck-like handling which they interpret as harshness. Well yes. It's a truck-based SUV. If you didn't want that, why let me sign up to drive?
BTW, it is very hard to make money as an Uber driver. The company is on-boarding around a hundred drivers a day in my area so the competition for fares is intense. And at the same time, Uber is pushing Pool rides and UberEats fares, neither of which pay much.
With the money they lose every quarter, they are artificially subsidizing the costs they charge riders and businesses and probably padding what they pay drivers, which is already minimal anyway. So this company is poised to collapse entirely when the money runs out, and it will. Uber is already dead. They just don't know it yet.
The thing nobody seems to realize is that while all these jobs are being automated, from making hamburgers to driving trucks to Uber cars to who knows what, an awful lot of jobs are going to be eliminated, especially at the low-skilled end of things. Starter jobs. Mundane jobs. Boring jobs. Dangerous jobs, which are all these people can do in many instances.
The jobs are going away but the people are not. They will still be here, looking for work, but most likely hungry, out of work, unhappy, angry even. More immigrants will continue to come in as well. The population will soar.
What are we as a society going to DO with millions or tens of millions of angry and unemployed people with nothing to lose? Some say society does not owe them a job but what the fuck are they supposed to do when they cannot find work? Well I don't know what they should do but what they ARE going to do is riot and burn cities down. They'll take it out on the ones who still have money and jobs. Class warfare will reach a level perhaps never seen before in the US.
For years, the company where I work had an automation product which terrified everybody at the firm. We'd had no training on it. An Executive dropped a lot of money on it before anyone could even see if it would work for us, and directly, it didn't.
But we had it and had some incentive to use it. And I spent a couple years learning it on my own and mastered that goddamn thing where I could make it do anything I wanted. I was a wizard and magician and chef and used that product to DO the very automation project they said could not be done, which terrified far more talented people than me. I was soo good at it, my team was eliminated except for me. We didn't need all those people because the automation project worked.
The software was still scary and dangerous to touch but I knew it inside and out. It did not scare me. Among the dangers was that you could right click in the wrong spot and be presented with two different 'delete' options, one of which wiped the entire database rather than just the item you were looking at. The software was apparently designed by an idiot. But I mastered it all anyway. I made that damn thing sing barbershop quartet and fly rings around the moon.
So all was well until they decided to get rid of me, which was not a surprise to me.
What they did was hire a woman from Mexico, apparently off the street. I don't know what her skillset was but it wasn't like mine. And they had me do a few hours of instruction over the phone and webex and boom she took over running this program that had slain experienced people before me.
And that was that. My understanding is that they had a critical issue the next week and they were forbidden from calling me for help. I am sure it went to pieces. It took expertise to run. They hired cheap to replace me, not smart.
18 months later I am still out of work because a LOT of the comparable IT work has already been outsourced or automated. I failed to pay my rent this month and bills are stacking up For the first time in my life, I am facing no future. Can't find work, I'm broke, and there is no hope. But I automated something that was supposed to be impossible. I will go down in flames proud of what i did.
Laws like this are as much about revenue collection than actually stopping anything. They would love it if people gave up porn.
But if not, and they get caught, then there will be punitive fines (aka revenue), perhaps currency and property forfeitures (revenue!), penalties and court costs (revenue!) and they'll wave the sex offender list in everyone's faces and tell them they should be glad to plead guilty, pay the fines and not end up on that list, OR they can risk trial and risk being convicted and risk being put on the list.
So of course most people will pay up and beg the judge for leniency and promise to never look at boobs again. Which of course will fail, and get them in trouble with the law again facing even bigger fines and penalties (revenue!!!!).
It's all really just a scam. And chances are, the people sponsoring this crap have drives jammed with the most depraved porn there is. History has repeatedly shown the moral warriors who go all-out to ban things like this or ban homosexuality or other things are extremely likely to be members of the very categories they want to ban, and the bans are motivated by a deep inability to accept who and what they are. If you are a gay politician or preacher deep in the closet and unable or unwilling to admit it and come out, of course you go crazy trying to have gays burned alive and shit.
The person you hate most is the one you see in the mirror.
Aw come on. It's not really a competition when these services generally have different video offerings.
Well, I hope you never find out you can use Kodi and an IPTV package that blows away everything you are doing. Because you'd have to undo all you have done and probably be very sad about how much overspending and overthinking you did.
If you use XfinityWifi, you are either using it on a free temporary pass (some restaurants do that) or you are a Comcast customer using your own login.
But either way, Comcast uses your device MAC to determine what you are allowed to do. So even if you aren't logging in, they still know it is you and that your device is associated with your account, mainly so the bandwidth you use on an XfinityWifi hotspot is counted against your bandwidth cap.
None of this has anything do with Comcast TV.
If you want TV and sports, get Kodi and an IPTV package for ~$10-15 a month and you'll get hundreds of channels including all the pay channels, porn, sports, and more. It does use a lot of bandwidth so you need the 1GB Comcast cap level.
$10 too much? There are freeTV options via Kodi. Anyone into any sport can probably find a free feed there.
The McDonald's drink robots have been around for years. They do a reasonably decent job and free up a person to pick orders.