kioleanu

I had this exact problem and I found an app called ScreenZen, which is built on top of Screentime in iOS and you can use it to block specific sites and apps pretty effectively. It just minimizes the app and doesn't let you access it.

I am now using it to easy off some sites and I've set a couple of 7 minutes sessions per day and I've limited my time time considerably in the last month

I use Fastmail for that and without noticing, I'm to 32 "fake" addresses. Got banned by EA for buying and playing a game with an account on such an address.

that's only one part of what they're saying. Sure, conflict of interest is imoral, but telling me I am only allowed to do work for acquaintances and that once in a while... you can gently fluff off. And they keep repeating "a few hours per month", when they pay me for 160 hours out of 700 something in a month :).

The only valid point apart from conflict of interest is this, otherwise they should stop pretending they own my body, mind and soul:

"Does it require you to be away during times when you’re needed at work?"

That’s the problem with the money incentive most stores have here - what I mentioned in the original post, that the security personnel receives 50 - 100 euros per “thief” caught

My problem was with Obi. Most stories I read on Reddit were from Rewe, especially when using those self scanning guns.

DM has indeed some pretty good self checkout tills. IKEA is pretty good also. Obi and Bauhaus are abysmal.

I’ll leave a comment I’ve made last time this came into discussion:

Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with stores rushing to put them to use and namely:

1) they have very bad interfaces

2) they don’t trust customers at all

3) it’s easy to report cases to the police and

4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the person caught)

Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not insignificant number of people having police files for missing an item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on Reddit.

Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the store’s app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say me having to operate two devices that I’ve never seen in my life and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I’m glad they didn’t call the police.

I don’t use self-checkouts anymore.

You can buy smart vibrations sensors for that. No vibrating should mean it’s done, unless it lets the clothes soak- I have no idea, washed clothes hundreds of times but I’ve never looked to see what the washer actually does

That is, I think, the only valid use case. I have an AEG washer that does some voodoo to decide wash times and only shows the estimate at the start, then it weighs the clothes, looks at how dirty they are and so on. The washer is two floors down and I never know when it’s actually done. As a side note, I think my washer is “smart” ready, meaning it has all the electronics already in and the panel has the lights already installed, just that it’s not activated because a didn’t pay another 100 euros for it.

I guess another use case would be measuring water and energy consumption but I doubt that people paying top dollar for these appliances are the type to keep an eye on such things.

A company I use often, Wizz Air, had/has to regularly ground these planes. It’s always a safe bet to book seats at the front of the plane to be sure that your seat doesn’t magically disappear when you are at the gate (happened last Easter when they sold seats for a 180 seats plane but had to ground it and sent a smaller one last minute). The only silver lining here is that they caught the problems before any plane actually crashed because of them

"He who dies with debts has made a profit"

They cache the preview for subsequent messages containing the same link. For example, if a link is making the rounds and gets sent 200k times in an hour, they don't call the URL 200k times to build the preview, as that's a huge waste of resources on both sides, with a huge chance that the servers containing the link gets DDOSed

I’ve heard some form of this from every company fighting unions. If that’s really the case, wouldn’t it be beneficial to the finances of the company overall if the union is requesting less benefits?

That won’t happen here because of point #4. Police usually drop the charges because it’s impossible to prove intent but you still pay them a few hundred euros for the bother.

Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with stores rushing to put them to use and namely: 1) they have very bad interfaces 2) they don’t trust customers at all 3) it’s easy to report cases to the police and 4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the person caught)

Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not insignificant number of people having police files for missing an item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on Reddit. Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the store’s app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say me having to operate two devices that I’ve never seen in my life and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I’m glad they didn’t call the police.

I don’t use self-checkouts anymore.

When I finished high-school, I really really wanted to become a journalist but failed to pass the University exam. Reading articles like this and thinking this might have been a path I might have followed makes me extremely thankful that I, in fact, didn't get into this profession.

Just checked, it’s only month to month for 30 euros

You pay 30 euros subscription and you have ads too? Jesus

I very very rarely use streams but what Sky fails to understand is that I wouldn’t buy their service even if there wasn’t any stream available. It is simply too expensive.

I am talking about Sky Sports here for example. Also in Germany for example. Last I checked, they wanted 30 euros per month and a yearly subscription when I want to see a Bundesliga match every x months. I have a season ticket for my team so I see all matches live and away games sometimes on TV. Even if I were to justify the price (it’s exactly the same price as my season pass), it’s not guaranteed that they show the match, it may be shown by DAZN, who also want 30 euros per month, but at least don’t ask for a year’s commitment. Neither service sells pay per view - I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen

No, they’re famous for pushing for cutting costs from unnecessary resources, like good employees most of the times they’re hired.

One example from my anecdotes is when they did consulting work for a telecom in my home country and pushed for firing half the technicians who were working in pairs. One of the reasons they were working in pairs was safety, like one holding the ladder and they used this as an argument and said they can just be replaced by a safer ladder. Said and done. After the fourth accident the telecom outsourced the jobs to an external company that only sent… two people teams

Mmm let me guess. McKinsey came to town?

In opposition to what the author thinks, I do think that the appeal was viewed by a human (probably from an outsourced agency somewhere far away) who simply didn't have 1) the capacity to understand what the author is selling 2) time enough to read the appeal, research and understand the problem and 3) possibly sufficient control over the English language

Not sure about the whole world, but in Germany and the EU, the limit is 50EUR for withdrawing money from DKB.

There are, of course, also disadvantages, like the fact that the new online banking apps are utter shit and offer maybe half of the functionality the old apps offered, but still they sunsetted them.

Advantages are that the have a really good exchange rate when paying with the card in foreign currency. Like really good and they don't charge the 2% tax per transaction that other banks charge.

Nope just a fancier dynamo

That’s super ideal as opposed to what I’ve got on Reddit, which is extremely graphic porn comments on an Ad for a product designed for parents for their children. The comments were basically phantasies of girls in different circumstances. I’ve reported the comment to Reddit and they came back and said “yeah, we’re not going to be removing that as it doesn’t violate our community guidelines”. I closed the account then and there. Apart from that, I would get about 5 or 6 real users per hundred clicks from them, where the clicks costed something like 20-30 cents. Money out the window.

I am assuming they had pretty high costs, more than 120 employees working on more than 10 different games, none of which was profitable. Offices in a high-rent European city for all these people and so on. Then comes marketing

The blockbuster hit was actually the first game, with success never to be replicated

I can't, of course, name the company, but no, none of the two

Many years ago I worked for a company that offers a very popular in-browser game. The company branched and expanded and had more than 10 games with various levels of profitability, but this game, which was bringing in about 30 millions EURO per month, was the only thing keeping the company alive.

Then they decided they want to try to sell the company to a fund and wanted to increase the revenue this golden goose was bringing, so they implemented a wheel of fortune. You could spin the wheel for free once per day and get some sort of in-game resource, but you had unlimited spins if you paid coins, which, you guessed it, costed real moneyz.

There was a huge uproar from the community stating that the game was now pay-to-win and virtually unplayable otherwise and they had to reverse the change. The company didn’t get sold in the end, but they’re doing fine still

They’re already in the shitter with the German government stopping subsidies for companies buying EVs and keeping it only for private persons (70% of VW market are companies)

Since the extensions themselves are still open source and very stable, they will probably be forked

Not yet but it’s in the works