Repulsion9513

And good luck if whatever crappy barcode scanning library they picked up out of someone's trash doesn't like your phone... I'm not salty

<insert "they're the same picture" meme here>

Big company incompetence exists because, paradoxically, it's more profitable.

The solution is making it less profitable, or better yet treating the business like you'd treat a human. Put a derogatory report on their credit and make sure they can't get any kind of credit (often even including pre-paid rent) for 7 years....

When they've made approximately nine digits off of it. After all, they need to be able to keep some of their ill-gotten profits, the lawyers need at least 7 digits (more often 8), the class representatives need perhaps 5-6 digits, and everyone else (who was fleeced out of 3 digits) gets 1 digit.

Other than the "they have the right to refuse service" that sibling mentioned, umm... that's not what state or district attorneys do. In fact district attorneys prosecute crimes.

> Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company.

Hah. Your card company will accept the dispute, Hertz will provide them with the rental contract you signed and say "he agreed to pay it!", and your card company will close the dispute without ever even following up with you.

> But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake.

Actually the article makes it clear that they had to go round and round in circles with bot-like support reps who probably haven't ever seen a Tesla in whatever slum they can afford.

> If you entered into an agreement with someone to do business and then accidentally charged them the wrong amount, you would not go to jail.

It's not accidental when you keep doing it until the news gets involved. BTW, how can they even charge a fuel fee without a human being involved to... you know... fuel it? Shouldn't that human have noticed that there was no gas tank? Hmm... Almost like it wasn't accidental.

It actually is companies that do this stuff, in that if the company had sufficient monitoring and oversight in place the people working at the company wouldn't be able to do it.

That would of course require them to strive to provide the best product or service they can rather than towards maximizing their profit, though.

> We have this system in my country where there is a people's lawyer that can choose to take up cases that seem deserving

We also have this in the US, actually we have many (state attorney generals, federal FTC and CFPB, and so on). Unfortunately (similar to our cops with crime), they're only going to bother to do anything if a company is blatantly screwing over somewhere between hundreds and thousands of people, or if the person complaining is a wealthy political donor or otherwise a friend of an elected official.

> The issue is that it relies on people to be perfect and never try to abuse the system

Unlike the current system which relies on companies to be perfect and never try to abuse the system.

Of course, companies abusing the system happens far, far more often and at far, far larger scales than people abusing the system.

Welcome to the corporatocracy.

> The distinction between a supervisor watching their employee vs. cameras + CV vs. using wearables to automate the watching seems completely arbitrary to me.

I'd be pretty weirded out by constant camera and CV monitoring too

> Are you OK with a cab company monitoring its cars via GPS? Or a trucking company monitoring its loads via tracker?

Those are (a) not monitoring a person and (b) much more coarse than "what shelf is this person standing in front of". They tell the company that the cab driver parked, not that the cab driver took exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds in the restroom.

I suppose my biggest concern with it is that it's measuring the wrong thing. If someone's doing as much as their coworkers even though they leaned on a shelf for 5 minutes yesterday, is that really a problem?

By comparison monitoring a car with GPS has legitimate purposes that actually advance the interests of the business.

It's not that it can't do everything. It's that it pretends it can do everything.

The order is common throughout much of the world.

The separators (especially with that order) are not.

Except for that all the good answers are showing their age and there's no realistic mechanism for them to be replaced with newer answers.

I haven't worked in the rental car world but I used to work for a place that rented moving trucks and RVs (and was also the area maintenance provider for them) and... No. They did not get regular maintenance, at least not on time.

> For example, employers ... track [workers'] movements using wearable devices

2nd paragraph of GP's link.

> Abruzzo’s memo cites things like wearable devices for warehouse workers

6th paragraph of OP article.

I don't think the commenter meant literal ankle bracelets. But I think that's a bit pointless. I don't think it's okay whether it is a literal ankle bracelet, or some BLE tag in their badge. Do you think some option is okay?

The US has significantly less privacy in general than most of the EU. The way the whole freedom thing is implemented tends to skew heavily towards "businesses can do whatever they think makes the most profit".

I have found, between the span of $8/hour and $88,000/year, that the amount of tracking (and also the amount of "if you have time to lean you have time to clean"-type busywork) is very close to inversely proportional to income in the US.

Programmers discover the benefits of static linking, and then programmers discover the benefits of dynamic linking, and then programmers discover the benefits of static linking, and then...

Anyway containers go quite a bit further than just static linking, most people aren't out there linking all the binaries that their shell script uses together?

Even once I got to the end I couldn't actually use the map because the left side of it (with the legend and year-switcher) was off-screen :) best web design A++

If they look atypical for the last 100 years or so, and also look atypical from the less "granular", even-longer-term samples... then how do you prove that they're typical?

Hmm, maybe whatever I was running into problems with just doesn't recognize the extension then. Sadly I don't remember what it was. Coulda been Plex, which wouldn't surprise me.

> not every difference can be accommodated in every situation, even if disability advocates don’t always want to admit it

That's why labor law generally has the concept of "reasonable accommodations" and core parts of the job. I don't think anyone is seriously saying that every disabled person can do any job.

It's honestly even more subtle than this. I absolutely agree with you about talking on the phone. I avoid doing things when I know it will mean I have to call ahead - and I would much rather go down there in person and get looked at weird for making an appointment in person.

Yet I've worked 4 different call center jobs and had absolutely no issue talking to people on the phone there. (Probably largely because the "small-talk" in such a scenario is absolutely rote and mundane...)

Fast-forward to my current job (IT) and I hate answering the phone (or joining a meeting) again.

In this case since YouTube will provide it in Opus, Opus is the best choice, so that you're not re-encoding from lossy to lossy.

I remux into ogg which still supports Opus but seemed to have wider player support. Great way to get tracks that don't seem to be available anywhere other than streaming.

I've been meaning to do something similar but slap HTTP in front of it and use a bookmarklet. It seems like this script is both the daemon and the submitter though? That's nice.

> if the blobs (e.g. images) in the DBs are static, and transactions are read only/writes happen infrequently, then having all your blobs in one SQLite DB makes for an insanely easy backup strategy

Does it? Suddenly instead of just backing up the whole database you have to do delta backups which can make it quite a bit more difficult...

You're free to make that argument, and the stock market and capital will make a different one. Using that capital, the businesses competing against you will make sure that your good business is no longer a business. At which point it will indisputably be a bad business, failing to do anything for anyone.

No, I think it's pretty well connected to real world software development. Most software developers these days, especially in web, tend to be more of "copy the stuff I've seen in tutorials before or find a library that does it" rather than "understand how the stuff I'm copying works and adapt it"

Each layer of framework or abstraction you add, actually tends to make the complexity go up, as it includes so much crap you'll never use but gets in the way of the stuff you will use. And now when something goes wrong not only do you need to understand the programming language, and your own code, but also all the code in the paths you use through this framework, which can easily be 10-20 functions deep (hi facades), and is extremely rarely documented with enough specificity to understand what happens in various corner cases.