noodlesUK

Arguably it’s an advertised price, rather than an agent entering into a contract. A pricing error would be potentially enforceable to an extent, but pricing errors are more favourable to a company than a signed contract.

This is something I really strongly agree with. There is no justifiable reason why we should be buying vehicles that are so much bigger than in previous years. Pedestrian fatalities are up big time in the U.S., and it’s largely thought that the reason is bigger cars with more lethal designs. Bigger cars also require more parking space and a larger amount of fuel/electricity. Smaller vehicles are a win all around. In the rare occasion where people need a large vehicle, we should aim to find ways to encourage them to rent one temporarily, rather than haul a huge vehicle around for the 99% of trips that don’t require one.

If anything this will improve things if Apple/Google allow you to hand over the phone without fully unlocking it to present ID (and other stuff like proof of insurance). The cop would then have to go back to you and get you to unlock it a second time. If they’re using a home grown app, that doesn’t work.

I’m enthusiastic about the longer term future of solutions like this. Current IDs can’t do data minimization very easily, but phone-based solutions can. You should be able to get a permission prompt saying “drug store wants to know your >18/21 status” and not hand over any other data. Of course this requires regulatory oversight to ensure that the stores don’t just ask for all the perms available.

However, does this implement the ISO spec for drivers licenses in Apple/google wallet, or is this some home grown thing?

I feel like a proof assistant is amongst the worst places to have something like this rather than (I don’t know how lean works) raising an error. What are the justifications for this convention?

iCloud private relay will do this too. Check that you haven’t got that enabled and that you’re using an upstream DNS provider other than 1.1.1.1.

For context, the app is monzo bank. You can’t bank with them without the app, they’re a challenger bank. Essentially all interaction is through that app. What surprises me is that they didn’t just put a webrtc call function hidden in the app so they could call you over a secure channel in the rare case that they needed to call you.

I’m curious what country this is, if you’re willing to share.

I’m surprised any business filing is using a desktop app rather than on the web these days.

This is great: SBC is widely supported and this seems like a natural extension of the existing standard. The issue I personally have is not about SBC vs LDAC or AAC, but that HFP is garbage. The moment the mic gets switched on, I’m transported back to the 90s. If someone wants to make bidirectional Bluetooth audio that doesn’t suck, I’d be thrilled.

Hopefully the same thing that stops them from saying “if you don’t pay me a bribe I’m going to shoot you” or any other illegal order.

The rule of law is important and whilst some of these auditors do unlikeable or distasteful things, if they are trying to stay within the law, they do provide a useful function of highlighting inconsistency between the rules as written and how they tend to operate in practice.

I love these sorts of collections of cards and similar things. The amount of design that goes into them and the different tech used is thrilling. I also love the retro design of the website (though I suspect that the owner is no longer a 9th grade student).

I'm personally a big fan of passports and other travel documents. Because of the official and international character of them, there are government run databases like PRADO [1] and EdisonTD [2] that let you see all the different features of each document.

I am disappointed to say I haven't seen a public database that covers driving licenses in such detail, but I'd love to know if anyone has seen one.

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/prado/en/search-by-document-...

[2] https://edisontd.nl

I can’t speak to Argentina specifically (and I can’t even read the article behind the paywall).

However, this isn’t without precedent. Ecuador currently uses the US Dollar as its official currency.

If people are already transacting in USD, and prices are set in USD, and the peso is just a proxy for that in many transactions, I can understand the desire to cut out the middle man.

Thank you for clearing that up - I was under the mistaken impression that most goods were subject to sales tax in the US, even in b2b transactions. I was not aware that most entities other than individual people were tax exempt. That makes the end result a lot more similar to VAT than I thought it was (though with a different way of getting there).

Given all that, why would we use a VAT system rather than sales tax? So that the revenue is more evenly spread across the lifetime of a good or service?

I'm not sure about this. I think it easily met the threshold for "pays enough" in an absolute sense, but so often the whole sentiment of "pays enough for what they're asking from me" goes unsaid. And sometimes people value whatever personal thing they might be giving up (like being able to live with their loved ones) more than even a very large amount of money.

100% this.

People want to be happy. Once a person's financial needs are more-or-less met, it will be very hard to convince them to leave, even for substantially more pay, if they know their new job will make their lives materially worse for ~8h/day.

> Every position is hire-able if the you pay for it.

I completely disagree with this. I have a friend who recently turned down a job that would have been a significant pay increase because he didn't like the sound of the working conditions (which would have also included relocation to a new place).

Many of the times that I recall when friends have left their jobs, the reason they left is not necessarily because they weren't being paid enough, but because they became tired of their job, or something changed at their employer that made working there less tolerable.

There's more to this than simple supply and demand economics. People take into account significantly more factors than raw pay when deciding to pick a job (and especially when leaving one).

Working conditions are especially horrible in pretty much all the cases of "nobody wants to work anymore" that I have seen. Even if you paid me a good wage, I might not want to work at a terrible employer. It doesn't help that the terrible employers also usually pay below-market wages.

> I also don’t hate the side effect that it somewhat points out to you that it’s the govt taking a cut

In every place I have been to, the receipt or invoice has a line item saying how much tax was payable on the transaction. Not least so that business customers can reclaim VAT in countries that have VAT. Different items also often have different tax rates, which is especially noticeable at somewhere like a supermarket where you might buy food, other goods, and alcohol in one transaction.

Surely your inventory/POS systems need to know what price/tax rates to charge anyway. I understand your point in the context of an ad in a magazine offering a good at a particular price, but I don't think it makes sense at all in the context of a store with tickets on items that don't actually correspond to the price at the till.

These fees seem to be particularly prevalent in the travel and entertainment industries. I stayed at a hotel in NYC relatively recently, and I booked and pre-paid through hotels.com. When I arrived, the hotel sprung me with a $50/night "resort fee", which was apparently required to stay at the hotel (though I am sure they would tell regulators that it's optional).

I also don't understand the US practice of not including relevant sales tax charges in the cost of a good. I know that many US states operate a sales tax (which seems like a bad idea as opposed to a VAT or similar system).

I don't mind having actually optional extras be charged separately, but if they aren't really optional (like a service fee), it should be part of the price.

I'd be very interested if someone has a link to the text of what is actually being proposed.

Booths is a very upmarket chain which operates in a limited region of the country.

However I would say that with self checkout machines there are a wide range of experiences. Some self checkout machines (e.g., Waitrose or M&S) are actually pretty okay. They tend not to have the little scales that try to reduce fraud and constantly complain about “unexpected item in bagging area”. My local Tesco express is the opposite. It only has self checkouts with scales - the scales are much too small and don’t accommodate the newer style plastic bags. I hate those machines with a passion, and I feel like Tesco has utter contempt for me as a customer whenever I use them.

Clearly there is a trade off between customer satisfaction, fraud, and business efficiency.

What’s sad is how little improvement there has been in self checkouts over the past 5 or so years. They rarely deactivate the security tags on products, or do anything else useful. Many don’t even accept coupons or successfully read store loyalty cards. They also seem to be used more in stores that probably should have fewer of them. The mini tesco in a major city has people buying alcohol on nearly every other transaction, and people shoplift much more. Checkout workers would help with that. On the other hand, a bigger shop in a more rural location might be well served with “scan as you shop”, which I think is a fantastic invention.

I’m not a crypto person, but I have always been curious - how does the tax situation actually work if you don’t want to commit tax evasion? I know that on US tax returns you need to tick a box if you’ve transacted in crypto, and you have to pay tax on the realized gains/losses. How do you actually go about doing that accounting practically given the volatility and the number of transactions? Are there special pieces of software that handle those calculations? Do they differ between jurisdictions (other countries particularly)?

I know the real cynical answer is that most people just don’t report correctly, but I’m curious how you’d do it if you wanted to be legit.

It’s a real shame that stories like this are essentially impossible now. It’s impossible for a French person to just meander over to the U.S., set up shop for a bit, go to school, and flit between the countries at will. In many ways a French citizen today is lucky because they could at least explore an alternative life living in Belgium or Italy or elsewhere in the EU, but for most people in the world, it’s impossible to leave their home country for anything other than a visit. I mourn for the freedom that earlier generations had to simply uproot and start anew.

In case anyone is interested, the Meross HomeKit garage door controller works great. I’ve had two running for a couple years with essentially no hitches. They don’t require internet access or an app other than HomeKit, which meets my needs perfectly.

I suspected that some of them were to do with postage, but clearly there is a reason for some of the additional ones that aren’t on the part of the letter that’s visible through the little plastic window. Any ideas?

On British airways (and I believe other ticket systems that use Amadeus), I often get LastnameTitleFirstnameSecondname all as one word (in caps). It certainly looks funny on the boarding pass, but I've never had any issue getting through security.

What's interesting is that the transliteration of symbols is not even remotely uniform in icao 9303. There are multiple recommended transliterations of some characters, and it definitely goes only in one direction: national script -> MRZ transliteration. It is not possible to go the other direction.

Take a look at the spec if you are interested: https://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9303_p3_cons_en.... The transliteration tables start on page 24 and are scattered throughout the document.

This is staggering to me if I’m reading this right - only around a third of people are taking even one sick day per year, and it was substantially less in prior years. I suppose in some industries you can work from home if you’re ill. Do these stats include people who take PTO?

I’d love to see some comparable stats from other countries as well.

UK Citizens abroad absolutely should get a vote in UK matters, especially when those matters directly affect the relationships with the countries they live in. Don’t forget that if you live abroad, you probably can’t vote in your new country either.

I feel like the centralisation of server resources for something like copilot doesn’t really make sense. Many (most) professional developers are working on beefy laptops. If ever there were a case to run these models client side, a software developer’s laptop is probably the ideal place. What are the specs that are needed to run inference on these models?