As a final rant on the subject for the day, I think it all boils down to how you think about paying for services.
** spoiler omitted **
Captain Yesterday and David M Mallon would be the best people to consult on this. In my area finishing ahead of time would result in (1), because everyone plays loosey goosey with time and it would indeed seem like someone is ripping someone else off because depending on the type of arrangement made along with the definition of services, now nothing can happen for 2 days because work was supposed to be done at that time.
Yep. And that's the huge issue. When they keep it secret, everything goes smoothly. Every garage that has more than 3 mechanics has the manufacturer's list of "job times"; for example, replacing the brake pads is 1.5 hours of labor. So when you get your estimate it's for 1.5 hours of labor. And that's what they bill you for, even though an experienced mechanic might do it in 20 minutes and the new guy might take 2.5 hours. You're paying a price for a service, the time estimate is nonsense, but you don't see it so your cost matches the estimate and you're happy.
Once that service is being done in a public area, they do the same thing: "1000 square feet of yard typically takes 50 hours of labor so we're going to charge you $1250 and it should take 3 days."
But you get CY and his crew and they're done in 1 day. And people get angry because they got the best of the best and the job got done faster than expected. It shouldn't be a negative.
EDIT: GothBard put it well: There are two types of contract: "I will pay you $xxx to do this," or, "I will pay you $yy/hour to work on this until it is complete." Most yard work is of the first type, in which case it doesn't make sense to complain about it getting done early if they're charging a rate that's competitive with everyone else you talk to.
EDIT 2: I'll admit, I have more of a vested interest in this than most because today I got TWO sets of wandering gardeners aimlessly pushing leaf blowers around for no reason because the people who hired them insisted on getting "their money's worth". As I've mentioned, the Thai guys across the street routinely spend over an hour blowing the 40' in front of the house because they have nothing better to do and they're not allowed to leave or be inactive, and they were here today. Then there were the guys next door hired by the property managers, and I got to watch one of them spend 5 minutes weed whacking a small slab of concrete. Another, "Look busy in case the boss looks this way," moment.
As a final rant on the subject for the day, I think it all boils down to how you think about paying for services.
Personality Test:
Q: You are looking to hire a gardener to clean up your property to prepare it for the next rental. One gardener offers to do it for $500 and tells you it will take three days. You check around and this is a reasonable going rate, so you hire them. On the afternoon of Day 1 they tell you they're done. You inspect the property and everything is absolutely spot-on perfect; there isn't a blade of grass out of place. They did the entire job to your complete satisfaction. What is your reaction?
(1) That rip-off artist overcharged me! I'm going to demand 2/3 of my money back or else I'll sue them!
(2) Wow; they finished way faster than they said they would. I obviously overpaid. Next time I'll be more careful and talk them down in price.
(3) Wow! These guys are really good! I paid them the going rate and they finished way faster than they said they would! Awesome! Now I can move on to the next guys!
-----
I think the fundamental issue is that the technically correct answer is (3): You paid the going rate for a service and the service was finished ahead of time so you have received a concrete benefit. And yet every property manager with whom I've ever discussed the matter has had an attitude of (1), so every worker they hire makes sure they look busy for the entire allotted time. I don't think the guys next door are actually doing anything useful today; they're just making the property manager happy.
I'm having the opposite issue: Spring has finally arrived and we've had our first few "nice" days of the year last week and this. (High 60s to low 70s, mostly sunny, a slight breeze.). And there hasn't been a single one of those days where someone wasn't using high-decibel tools within 50' of my house for the entire working day, frequently gas-powered, so I haven't been able to open the windows to air out the house at all in spite of the nice weather.
The neighbor's house is the frustrating one. The guys who did the required structural repairs (drywall, painting, hardwood floor refinishing) were pleasantly quiet. Today marks the third day of gardening with a gas-powered weed whacker. Which baffles me, because when we moved back in to our current house our tenants hadn't tended the garden in years so our gardener came in and it took one day for him and his wife to clear the entire property. I don't know how these three guys are justifying taking 3 days to clean up the foliage on a 3750 square foot lot, over 2000 sq.ft. of which is covered by house or concrete.
So yeah, Monday I got the street repairs (a necessary distraction). Tuesday was these gardeners and our gardener (perfectly reasonable). But then Wednesday and today these gardeners are still here, and I'm thinking, "What's left to cut?"
Our local pub had one of the best steaks in the area at a pre-COVID "what a steal" price of $26. It's now up to $55, but it's still the best steak deal around here. $85 at a good steakhouse isn't that far out of line with prices around here.
Speaking of voice recognition, I was on the phone with my mail order pharmacy to reverse a double charge. Needless to say, they're all voice recognition; there's no longer even the option of pressing a button. And needless to say, I have never had voice recognition recognize the problem. I've never had it call 911 on me, either, so I guess that's a plus.
So I gave it a game try.
"In a few words, tell us why you are calling."
"I was double-billed."
"I understand you want to refill a prescription. Is that correct?"
...
"Now so we can better find your records, tell us your birthday."
"<gave them my birthday>"
"I'm sorry. I didn't understand. Please say it like this." (Relates a birthday exactly the way I said mine) (Finally fed up, I spewed a string of nonsense syllables at the phone just as Impus Major walked in)
"I'm sorry. I didn't understand. Let's move on."
Me: Okay phone, set an alarm called "movie" for Friday at 8 pm!
Phone: You got it Freehold! Calling Indiana Power Company like you asked!
Me:...what?
And that is my eternal experience with voice recognition. Corporate wanted to know why I hand-write all my Closed Captions instead of using the highly-touted speech-to-text feature of the software they were paying a mint for.
I took one of the videos I wasn't done with, let the speech-to-text do its thing, and played the resulting comedy show for them with the sound muted so they couldn't hear what I'd actually said.
I have never been asked about using speech-to-text again.
I'm missing an important meeting because I'm going to a Babymetal concert.
Instead of chastising me, they all got excited and asked for links because they'd never heard of them. And right there during team meeting my manager started watching Doki Doki Morning.
Um... DHL? I really don't feel I needed 22 emails over the last five days just to tell me that my coffee pot would eventually arrive. It just wasn't that important to me.
comprehensive real-time tracking isn't just all the rage in logistics, for some companies -- it has become a standardized feature of the throughput from shipper to recipient, and the slightest error in that procedural has serious financial repercussions. don't ask me how i know that, 'cause i don't. but it just might be an avenue by which you can cut your costs, if ever a step is skipped. the process may be rather impenetrable, but if you ever notice one of your shipped packages "disappears" for more than 12 or 24 hours with zero flags, call customer service and complain.
again, i don't know anything, and i haven't said anything, and you didn't read this.
Y'know, every other company sends me maybe a grand total of 3 emails when something gets shipped to me:
(1) We've received a shipping notification.
(2) Your item has been shipped. Here's the estimated delivery date.
(3) Your item has been delivered.
DHL apparently feels I need a blow-by-blow of all their trials and tribulations: Every day I'm getting, "Your item has been transferred to xxx." Then yesterday I got three emails saying, "Your package will be delivered today." They failed, since the road was closed and all. Then another three today. "Your package will be delivered today."
Um... DHL? I really don't feel I needed 22 emails over the last five days just to tell me that my coffee pot would eventually arrive. It just wasn't that important to me.
(We ordered a Portmeirion coffee pot to go with the dishes. And apparently it was critically important for us to hear all about its adventures getting to us.)
We have confirmation: After finding out that I'd failed to remove the shipping cover from the motion sensor (that clear sticky plastic that's utterly undetectable until it comes loose), I set up the camera again last night...
...and was rewarded with video of a pair of raccoon kits coming onto our deck, looking around, and then one of them carrying the ball onto the deck and starting to play with it and roll around with it.
I am looking forward to the obscenities I hear from the work team.
I know, I know. Cue CY saying, "We don't really care if the residents are a*****s. We work around them, do our job, and get paid one way or the other, so they don't bother us at all."
But it's always nice to believe that the workers care, and will one day steamroll that stupid car...
EDIT: Impus Major was so amused by the scene that he took a picture and showed it to me... and they have a new car!!! It's the same color and shape as the old one, and parked in exactly the same spot. But it looks like they got themselves a new car with which to ruin the street in front of their house...
EDIT: I'm wondering whether it has anything to do with callouses. CY, David, BNW, and anyone else who works with their hands all day to the point of having significant callouses on your fingers, do you have issues with fingerprint recognition as well?
I've never needed to use any kind of biometric ID, and if I did, I'd refuse on principle. That said, I don't really get calluses on my fingertips from my job, but I do have some from playing guitar--does that count?
Probably. I probably spend 8-10 hours a day at a keyboard, but then 3-4 hours cooking, cleaning, and repairing so I have callouses thick enough that I can touch boiling water or a hot cast iron pan and not get burnt. I suspect guitar callouses would be similar. Everyone tells me how great touch-to-unlock is for modern devices and I've tried to set it up maybe a dozen times, but every time it tells me my fingerprint is registered, works a few times that day, and never works again.
When I was a kid, I loved white chocolate. As I grew older, either my tastes changed or the quality declined (I suspect the latter) and now I don't care for it. I don't loathe it, but I prefer not to eat it.
In other news the offending car has now driven away, leaving a car-shaped unpaved spot for the steamroller to deal with when they do their final work in an hour or so.
I am looking forward to the obscenities I hear from the work team.
Speaking of being pseudo-Lawful, I typically appreciate our city's laissez-faire attitude about parking enforcement, but sometimes I feel they go too far.
After a multitude of complaints over the years about lack of sufficient notice, this year the city went above and beyond to notify us of our day of street closure: Letters in the mail. Flyers on our porch. Sawhorses with No Parking signs on them 72 hours in advance. And the 72 hours is critical, because Albany has a law that you're not allowed to keep your car parked in one place for 72 hours, and, as one officer put it, "We will never enforce that law unless a homeowner is calling about a car parked directly in front of their house."
So in theory, we got 72 hours' notice, and since all our cars were surrounded with No Parking sawhorses, any cars that didn't move were there for over 72 hours and the city could tow them.
And you know where this is going. A car got left on our street. And instead of towing it, they very carefully paved around it so there's a car-shaped unpaved spot on the street.
I'm both amused (they really did a careful job around the car) and frustrated (yet another law we're not going to bother to enforce, even when it impacts our infrastructure).
The problem is, that very car has blocked street repair the last few times it's come by, to the point that in 2021 a sinkhole opened up under one of its tires because that portion of the street hadn't been maintained in so long. So someone moved the car, repaired the sinkhole, put the car back in place, and it's continuing its litany of blocking street projects forevermore.
Thus, it frustrates me that they're perfectly capable of moving the car as needed, but they choose not to because the city doesn't do anything about it. Not even a ticket.
I swear, sending a young man with a negative Perception bonus to do your shopping for you in Berkeley is perilous. Because of the staggering profit margin on niche foodstuffs, everything at eye level in every store is some kind of niche product. And unfortunately, Impus Major frequently misses these labels.
Gluten-free, sugar-free, vegan cookies? Check. And yep, these we ended up having to throw out.
No-sodium chicken broth? Check. And you'd think you could just add salt, but no, whatever they did, it was terrible and another throwaway.
Low-sodium beef broth? Check. And at least it was salvageable.
Chocolate-free candy using carob instead? Check. Another throw-away. I don't know how he got fooled into buying this one. But "chocolate-free chocolate" really is a thing.
And this tirade is brought to you by his latest acquisition: Lactose-free milk. At least it's perfectly drinkable. But I don't appreciate spending an extra $2 on a half gallon of milk for something totally unnecessary for our family.
Well, they still haven't reached the point where you have to spill the blood of your firstborn each time you log in.
You realize that we're talking about my firstborn here, don't you?
NobodysHome: Hey, Impus Minor! The dentist sent your wisdom teeth home with you. Do you want them for any reason?
Impus Minor: No! Why would I?
NH: Hey, Impus Major! Do you want your brother's teeth?
Impus Major: Oh, boy, do I!
I have no idea what he's going to do with them, but he was cacklingly ecstatic to get them.
Speaking of which, after whining about it excessively I set up fingerprint recognition on my iPad again. Just like always, it worked for about an hour after I set it up and then never again.
I've got to have some Mighty Morphin Fingerprints the way fingerprint recognition works for me...
EDIT: I'm wondering whether it has anything to do with callouses. CY, David, BNW, and anyone else who works with their hands all day to the point of having significant callouses on your fingers, do you have issues with fingerprint recognition as well?
I have to admit, I don't know how much more "simplification" of my sign-in I can take from Global Megacorporation's IT department. They keep telling me they're doing all this for me so I can eventually enjoy "passwordless" sign-on:
12 months ago: 2 passwords.
- I signed in to my Windows domain, then used my single sign-on (SSO) to access all corporate resources.
6 months ago: 2 passwords plus two-factor authentication.
- Same deal, except now I had to use a phone app to confirm my SSO login.
4 months ago: 2 passwords, one of which had to be at least 16 characters long and contain no recognizable strings, plus two-factor authentication.
- I could tirade at massive length about how requiring users to change their passwords every 90 days is one of the worst security blunders you can make: It encourages users to use simpler passwords, re-use passwords across sites, and write down their passwords in insecure locations (Google Drive, anyone?). Using an AI filter so even something like "F00d" is considered illegal makes the passwords completely incomprehensible to people, and thus they'll use simple numbers (pi) or write their passwords down.
This month: 3 passwords, one of which had to be at least 16 characters long and contain no recognizable strings, plus two-factor authentication.
- Same deal, except now I have to use a Windows PIN to sign in to Windows, but I need to remember my Windows domain password to change any Windows settings.
NobodysHome's Story Time, Threefer Edition, Part III:
As I mentioned in part II, we liked to shoot air rifles. So Future Cop wanted us to learn how to use a shooting range, so we started loading the rifles in the trunk as we were supposed to do to transport them legally to the range when She-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless showed up, grabbed a gun out of the trunk, and pointed it straight at my face. I have never forgiven her for doing something that abjectly stupid, even if it was "just" an air gun. We yelled at her, put the guns away, and started driving towards the freeway.
A couple of blocks later we noticed that the vice principal of the high school and the school narc were following us. We had no idea why; we'd all graduated and She-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless wasn't with us, so there were no high schoolers in the car.
We ignored them turned down Solano and got about halfway down when a cop car cut us off diagonally, we slammed on the brakes, and they were out with guns drawn pointed straight at us. A quick check behind and we'd been surrounded by three cars and there were six officers with guns out covering us.
So, Future Cop and I very carefully obeyed the exact instructions we were given. Hands on head. Out of the car. And even at 5'6", try climbing out of the back seat of a VW Beetle with your hands on your head and a bunch of guns pointed at you. Sociopath refused to get out.
I am thankful that Albany is a small town and Albany cops are less prone to violence than cops in larger towns. Instead of going after Sociopath with force, they kept him covered while they got Future Cop and me clear and patted down, then told US to convince Sociopath to get out. So, we managed that, but then he refused to take his hands out of his pockets, even after they told him they'd shoot him if he didn't. We told them he was unarmed and he was just a d***. They pulled the same trick as in Part II: "If you can't get him to take his hands out of his pockets, you're going to have to watch us shoot him."
I think our answer chilled them: "Then you're going to have to shoot him, because we can't make that a****** do anything he doesn't feel like doing, and right now he feels like messing with you."
I have no idea what might have happened if the vice principal hadn't stepped in. Here were two of his honor students being held at gunpoint, one of whom had never had a disciplinary issue in 7 years at school. He walked up and spoke quietly to the officers, then one of them lowered his gun and patted down Sociopath. Determining that he was clean, they searched the car, confiscated the weapons (with no charged filed), and let us go on our way.
It took Future Cop 8 weeks for us to get our guns back, even though we hadn't done a single illegal thing.
NobodysHome's Story Time, Threefer Edition, Part II:
This one would've been funnier except the police had fewer witnesses and therefore got much more serious much faster.
We used to go out shooting air rifles all the time. Our most common pastime was going to Luckys, getting a few cases of the undrinkable generic sodas and beers of the time (Lucky Lager and Craigmont Diet Cola), going up into Tilden park, and shooting bottles and cans (and port-a-potties if anyone was dumb enough to use one) until the whole area reeked and then heading home.
One day the gang wanted to go have an air rifle fight on some open land one of them knew about east of Tilden. I had no desire to lose an eye doing something that stupid, plus I had to work, so they went on their way. Got all dressed up in their heaviest leathers (including a lot of kevlar) helmets, and gloves, went to the field, and started crawling around and shooting at each other.
Apparently, right in the mayor of Orinda's back yard.
So, a full SWAT team got called in for an assassination attempt on the mayor, complete with helicopter. Most of my friends had brains in their heads and did not screw around in the slightest. Guns down. Hands on head. Standing in the clear where they were completely visible. Except my best friend, who for some reason took it as a challenge to try to avoid a SWAT team and a helicopter.
After 2 minutes of nonsense, the SWAT commander told the rest of my friends, "I don't care what you were doing here. If you can't get him to come out I'm giving orders to shoot."
I have no idea whether he was serious, but considering what we've learned about police in the 30 years since then, he probably was. But my friends desperately begged and pleaded and got Best Friend to come out and surrender.
So they got arrested, and all the information was taken down, and they were given an order to appear before the D.A. And the D.A. reviewed their statements and the evidence, said, "I don't have time for this," and sent them home with no charges filed.
I never got a felony, I got a ticket for having pot once but even then I was taking the fall so my friend wouldn't get kicked out of college.
I'd do it again every time.
Oh, we were never caught doing anything illegal, but we have plenty of "hilarity" getting caught doing perfectly legal stuff. I'll list a few from mildest to worst.
From the length of things it looks like it's going to be three posts.
It's
NobodysHome's Story Time, Threefer Edition, Part I:
(1) My friend was driving us through the El Cerrito Plaza parking lot (private property) in a junkyard-worthy 1974 Chevy Impala. It was chugging along at maybe 8 mph but then he took a turn too hard and the tired screamed in protest. We howled with laughter. We were literally wondering how he could have possibly screeched the tires at such a low speed when the siren blared and we got pulled over.
So yeah. Here's poor Yelly (he could yell so loud you could hear him at just over half a mile in the city. It was incredible.). He's been pulled over by the cops in his mom's car. And there are four punk rockers paralyzed with laughter in the rest of his seats. We could barely breathe.
We'd almost recovered when the cop walked up and drawled, "Goin' kind of fast, weren't you, son?"
That was all she wrote for us. We couldn't talk any more.
As Yelly desperately tried to explain that it was his crappy car that made the screeching noises, the cop glared at us and snarled, "Your friends think this is kind of funny, don't they? How'd they feel if I were to arrest you?"
Of COURSE we all had to scream, "Yes! Yes! Do it! Please! Arrest all of us!" (We had no plans for the evening and it honestly sounded like fun.)
Then, holy crap, he asked us whether we had any weapons.
At that point we were rolling around, begging him to search the car and suggesting that he tear the seats open looking for contraband drugs while Yelly got paler and paler thinking of what his mother was going to do to him, which was impressive, since he's half-Japanese.
At that point the cop knew that anything he did would get him in trouble. Tons of witnesses watching the idiocy in the parking lot. Kids begging to be arrested and for him to search the car, making it obvious they weren't hiding anything. We obeyed every order, got out of the car, got into the car, I think he patted a couple of us down, and then he just stormed off, warning Yelly that, "I'd better not see you driving around this parking lot like this again."
Well, in "news that only LM can truly appreciate", when I moved to Davis and needed to get rid of the signs, I didn't want to be wasteful...
...so we snuck back into the facility and returned two full carloads of signs to them...
EDIT: And there are several key ways to ensure guards don't want to see you...
I’ve seen traffic lights that hang down from a cable that was stretched over the street. Seems like those could rotate if the wind is strong.
Sign posts around here are square and steel. With special nuts to make the sign hard to steal. Because that’s what the kids around here do. A stop sign hanging in your bedroom is super cool. The county has more difficulty with drunk drivers running signs over than anything else though.
There are steel power poles with dents in them for the same reason. And years back I had to replace a fire hydrant. The car hit it and it tipped over. The top was supposed to snap off, but for some reason it didn’t. And somehow, there was no geyser The underground concrete thrust block held, even though the hydrant was tipped, probably 30 degrees sideways.
Yes, indeed. One of my childhood felonies was stealing street signs. Ended up with so many I had to start giving them away because there was no more room on my walls.
But even back then my Lawful nature showed: I *never* vandalized traffic control signs such as Stop signs or Do Not Enter signs. Those I got directly from CalTrans facilities.
Ok, that was funny. I was walking in downtown Berkeley and yet another a****** driver started honking at me for daring to cross the street in the crosswalk with the light, blocking them from doing their left turn. I texted GothBard about it.
Turns out it was her and a mutual friend who's known me for nearly 40 years... But who still thought they should honk at me to say, "Hi!"
I guess they don't know me as well as I thought they did...
A traffic signal that can rotate?!?!? In the wind?!?!?
Don't they have teenagers in New York?
Rotating street signs so visitors get lost was practically a rite of passage around here. Kids would sneak off with their dad's full-length monkey wrench in the middle of the night, rotate the sign 90°, go to bed, and wake up in the morning to giggle at the confusion. Once they started doing it to Stop signs and One Way signs the Powers That Be started using square posts for everything. So you'll notice all our Stop Signs and One Way signs are on square wooden posts embedded in concrete and bolted in, so you'd need a full tool kit to perform that "prank" these days.
But yes, we have several One Way streets in Albany, and when I was a teen you'd see the signs rotated about once every two months. Surprisingly, honking was incredibly common, but accidents were rare because all of the streets were really narrow so people drove slowly on them.
Yes, maintaining correct inventory is one of the hardest things a retail outlet does. I used to do it at the video store, and the number of employees who sold stuff without so much as writing a receipt was appalling. But with "modern" UPC codes and scanning, all you need to do is buy software that tracks that s***.
The problem with that thinking is that you forget what happens at the intersection of you needing an OLD part, which if I understand is indeed the case, and the rollout of easier scanning-based computer-managed inventory systems. When those things started being affordably rolled out it was almost certainly AFTER the part that you're looking for had been bought and was at one point on their shelves so it existed on the original inventory listing and was at one point cataloged as being in stock when it was actually used or otherwise transferred when that inventory system wasn't well maintained by staff. When they transitioned to the new system they simply imported the old inventory list they had been using and it integrated all the errors from beforehand that WOULD be easy to avoid going forward as they'd have a new SKU scanning system but it predates all that and there doesn't even exist a SKU in their building to scan to say it isn't present. Couple that with less NEED to do regular and thorough inventory searches to rebuild it from the ground up and what you get is a ton of ghost items in inventory that are only ever discovered when that item is requested and some poor employee has to go look for it when in reality a tech probably transferred it to another location a decade ago and then the paperwork for updating the inventory either never got done by mistake/incompetence or there was human error involved with handling that tracking system manually.
I ran into this type of thing every single day at my former job doing systems work for a supermarket chain maintaining all manner of computers, inventory lists, merchandise return claims, fraud paperwork,...
Wow! Great insight! And says something about those companies...
...'cause at the video store when we upgraded to a new system I had the "honor" of re-scanning everything into the new system. And no, we didn't have a portable scanner, so it was "pull everything off the top shelf, scan it all in, put it all back. Now do the next shelf. All while still helping any customers who come in."
It took me about 4 days to do 10,000 items, and then about 2 months to get the strays (videos that had been checked out when I scanned, misplaced videos, etc.) in. But at the end of it all we had an accurate inventory.
But yeah, "We don't want to pay our employees to actually check our inventory as we transition," checks out.
In cuter news, it's springtime, which means baby animals are running amok through our neighborhood. While I haven't seen them, every day for the last week or two there's been some kind of ball on our deck. An old baseball. A blue rubber ball from the kids' childhood. Just a lone ball, sitting somewhere in the middle of the deck.
So some animals are using our deck as a nighttime playground. I fully approve.
EDIT: Aaaand... cue GothBard encouraging me to get a nighttime hunting camera so we can record and watch our furry friends' shenanigans. *SIGH*. Ah, well, Mother-in-Law will squee in delight if we get any decent footage.
And finally, in IT news, it's entertaining that Global Megacorporation uses a Microsoft Exchange server and builds everything around using Microsoft Outlook, then pushes Mozilla Thunderbird to all our machines.
I'd prefer to use it. I've tried to use it. But with our entire infrastructure built around Exchange/Outlook, it just plain doesn't work.
And yeah, last night was kind of funny. <anonymous> wasn't around so we got a different fourth who actually focused on working with the rest of the group and not causing spawns everywhere he went. And all evening we kept asking, "Are you sure you set this to the right difficulty level? This is way too easy."
We've played many, many games where <anonymous>' selfish play style made things harder than they had to be. And yes, when we get frustrated we just leave him dead for a while so we don't have to deal with him. (He dies a lot because staying with the group isn't in his DNA.) But Helldivers 2 is the first game where his play style is literally 2-3 levels of difficulty in the game. It's amazing.
It's kind of uplifting and depressing at the same time to watch Global Megacorporation make such incredible leaps and bounds in its software that I'd actually recommend it these days, while at the same time I'm constantly running into companies that really need it but probably couldn't afford it.
The "universal one-size fits all" replacement antenna for my Celica didn't, so I've been scouring the world for a replacement. (You'd be surprised what kind of OEM stuff is lying around in boxes if price is no issue.)
I found one left in stock at a dealership in Colorado Springs. "Oops. Sorry. No, we don't actually have that in stock." I found one at an old parts specialist in Japan. "Oops. Sorry. No, we don't actually have that in stock." I found one that actually managed to be out of my price range in the U.K. (yeah, I'll live without a $750 antenna, thanks). "Oh, no, that was listed by accident."
Yes, maintaining correct inventory is one of the hardest things a retail outlet does. I used to do it at the video store, and the number of employees who sold stuff without so much as writing a receipt was appalling. But with "modern" UPC codes and scanning, all you need to do is buy software that tracks that s***.
So yeah, frustrating, but I can live without an antenna. I have for many, many years now.
(And yeah, they sell a host of used ones on eBay for $240 a pop, but considering that I had two break in under 3 years each, $240 for one that might last a year is a bit much, even for me.)
EDIT: The same applies to grocery shop apps. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nopesaurs Rex.
Oh, in this case it makes absolute sense. Since they're a "gym agglomeration service", they need to know how much to reimburse each gym (and I guarantee they do it on a per-visit basis, not as a monthly fee). And they don't want the gyms self-reporting, because that way lies madness, or at least gross corruption.
So, "Once you're a member of our service, use our app to get into the gym," is a reasonable request.
"You may not become a member of our service until after you've installed our app," isn't.
At the start of this year Global Megacorporation offered us free membership to Gympass, a gym membership company. I figured, "Great! That means I can occasionally go to the Y and get in a workout."
So I enrolled, went to Gympass, and nope. You can't check which local gyms are available to you until you enroll. And you can't enroll without installing their app on your phone. Their web site will not let you search participating gyms, and will not let you enroll.
In short, I can't even check whether or not membership would be useful to me without handing over whatever data they happen to be able to slurp from my phone when I install the app.
Nope.
I canceled my enrollment. HR is pretty good about asking about such things. I'll let them know exactly how I feel about the service.
EDIT: OK. Full and fair disclosure. I went back to Gympass' web site and all of a sudden, miracle of miracles, I can see the local gyms and their tier levels without having to enroll. But while I was researching this post I saw a lot of grar about their pricing practices and how they treat participating gyms.
I'd rather just give the $8 to my local Y for a daily pass, thanks.
so, on my way home this morning, i'm scrolling through my YouTube feed, and . . .
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **
not my kids. not my problem(s).
but WHATTHEACTUALF!#+??!!
** spoiler omitted **
I've become so d**ned jaded over the last 8 years that if Shiro told me that sunrise at his house was at 8:02 am this morning, I'd look it up to confirm.
well, at least one part of that can be regarded as somewhat mitigated. cool.
i'm still givin' it side-eye, though.
As you will. But, considering I get training on this every year from Global Megacorporation, I'm afraid that the answer lies in, "Lawyers being lawyers" rather than "nefarious conspiracies".
Suppose Global Megacorporation gets sued for something about Product X. Our procedure is quite straightforward:
(1) We receive a notification from our legal department that we've been sued and we must provide ALL documents, communications, instant messages, and anything else we have that so much as mentions Product X, directly or indirectly, and we dump that vast data store in a file share the lawyers set up.
(2) The lawyers and their staff then have the unenviable task of going through those tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands, or, as I've heard in one of the Trump case, millions) of documents, and redacting everything they aren't legally required to hand over. And the bold italics is what feeds conspiracies worldwide. I could write a memo that said, "I think Product X sucks," and it would go into the document pool, get fully redacted, and the redacted document would be handed over to opposing counsel. It's that bad.
I've said it before but I like to repeat it often: My lawyer friend said, "The law has nothing to do with 'right' or 'wrong'; it's all about what's written down, and how you can interpret that in a way that's most favorable to your client."
So the lawyers redact every single word that they're not legally required to provide, but they're required to notify opposing counsel that they redacted it in case opposing counsel wants to subpoena some of the redacted stuff.
So 148 pages of redacted memos?
(1) They were required to notify the litigant that the documents existed.
(2) They were legally allowed to redact them, so they did.
Redacted documents are far more boring than people make them out to be. Stuff isn't redacted because it's damaging; it's redacted because lawyers figure out that they're allowed to redact it.
EDIT: And yeah, FOIA documents "look" far more exciting than corporate documents because FOIA has much stricter limits on what you can redact, so you see these documents covered with carefully-placed blackout. And it's hard to imagine it's not some damning piece of evidence. But in general it's, "A legal clerk determined that it was legal to black out that sentence so they did."
I'd tell you all not to get old, but it beats the alternative.
This morning in the dim kitchen light:
"OK. What garbage did the kids leave on the kitchen table this time? I wish they'd stop doing that."
(Getting closer)
"Oh. That's the Cranky Calico."
so, on my way home this morning, i'm scrolling through my YouTube feed, and . . .
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **
not my kids. not my problem(s).
but WHATTHEACTUALF!&%??!!
As, to the first one, as usual it's already been debunked. But I appreciate the heads-up. In my view,
Opinion:
the rate of myocarditis was significantly higher than the 0.047% reported, but they went ahead and rolled it into COVID when they could, which is a disservice because COVID-caused myocarditis was still a couple of orders of magnitude higher than vaccine-caused myocarditis, so they could have been honest and still had data showing that the vaccine was better than the disease.
EDIT: Here's a better article that explains that the guy who filed the FOIA got the study he wanted, but also 148 pages of internal communications that were fully redacted. It wasn't the study that was redacted, it was internal communications relating to the study. Still a bad look, but at Global Megacorporation we're exactly the same: Don't release anything unless legally required to do so.
Sorry to hear that. But it does make me political: What is the Greater Good? Allowing those who need pain medication to receive it rather than living in agony, or blocking everyone from getting pain medication to avoid abuse and/or addiction?
I know which camp I'm in.
But yes, whether or not we all seem to agree on something doesn't mean it's not political, so I'll drop it now.
However, I'm also going to publicly give credit where credit is due and demonstrate how a well-trained professional can massively mitigate the issues. I didn't even know I'd been scanned until I got home. This was classic:
NobodysHome: Hi, I need to fill this prescription for my son.
Clerk: OK. (Takes paperwork and, most importantly, holds it in such a way that I can't see it.) And his birth date is (gives correct month and day, but the wrong year)?
NH: Almost. (Corrects year) Clerk: Oh, right. My mistake. And I see he fell and broke his arm?
NH: No, he just had his wisdom teeth out.
Clerk: Oh, right. OK. Well, your prescription is filed. You can pick it up in about an hour.
I love how carefully she took away the paperwork, then carefully fed me incorrect information in a casual manner, so I just figured she was having a busy day. But then I realized that she'd made me verify every bit of information on the prescription after taking it away from me.
It was really clever, and it would be wonderful if we could train all clerks that well.
I suppose this may be considered political by some, so
A brief tirade:
As a Lawful individual, one of my greatest peeves is laws or policies that negatively impact everyone due to the misbehavior of a small number of individuals. And I'm not talking mask or vaccine mandates where there is a clear benefit in requiring everyone to comply. I'm talking idiocy like being required to take your shoes off to get on an airplane.
In this case, Impus Minor just had a couple of wisdom teeth removed, and the prescribed painkiller is Percocet, an opioid.
And holy c*** good luck trying to find a place that will fill that prescription! The smaller pharmacies all have signs up: "We no longer carry opioids of any sort." OK. I can understand that. But try calling one of the bigger places before you go over there. "I have a Percocet prescription."
"I'm not allowed to talk about that with you, sir."
"But you haven't even heard my question."
"No. We can't discuss it. Goodbye."
So I am left having to drive from large pharmacy to large pharmacy, present the prescription, and find out whether or not they'll fill it. (And most places won't because it's a physical copy, even though the oral surgeon had to switch to physical copies because their e-prescriptions kept getting hacked and forged.) A massive pain in the rear. Because somehow someone somewhere made it policy that even discussing any opioid over the phone is forbidden.
And I won't even get into the tirade about GothBard being allergic to Vicodin so she has to get codeine, but of course as soon as she tells anyone that they immediately suspect her so she can't get anything. (Yes, the last time she had major surgery she had to recover with nothing stronger than ibuprofen because the only thing they would prescribe was Vicodin and they wouldn't believe her claims of an allergy.)
EDIT: And the thing that really peeves me is that they already have all the systems they need in place for illegal drugs: If you try to buy pseudoephedrine, you have to present a Real ID, which they scan into the system that tracks how much you buy, and if you try to buy too much you get an interview with the DEA. So, if you're so concerned about opioids why not implement the same exact system?
Judging from the videos, killing enemies in Helldivers 2 seems to be extreme fun, even if it is counterproductive, goal-wise.
It's fun to drop a strike on an enemy base and mop up the rest. It's not fun when some unmentionable idiot sees a random patrol and drops a mortar turret, causing 4-5 spawns in a circle around you...
Moving on, it's really interesting to watch anti-performance psychological tactics work incredibly well against one of your friends, even after you explain to him what's happening.
As briefly as possible, Helldivers 2 rewards you for successfully completing missions, completing them quickly, finding hidden items, and getting everyone out alive. Notice the fundamental missing thing: Killing enemies. Not only is it a "worthless" activity, but getting into a firefight with enemies causes spawns to happen, bogging you down and increasing your time to complete the mission.
In short, killing the baddies very concretely decreases your overall score and rewards. It's a pretty clever design, because at the end of every level, the top 3 stats are enemies killed, shots fired, and accuracy.
Needless to say, <anonymous> is absolutely obsessed with getting the highest kill count on the team. So he shoots everything in sight. Generating spawns. Getting us all killed. Increasing our mission time. And generally making the game so much harder that we've reached the point that the other three of us can casually do "Suicide" missions (a difficulty level, not a goal) without any trouble, but as soon as <anonymous> joins us we have to reduce the difficulty by two levels to "Challenging" just to have a chance of surviving.
And we explain over and over again that shooting the bad guys is the wrong thing to do in this game.
But he sees that "Number of enemies killed" as the first stat listed after every match, and if he's not #1 he gets upset, and goes back to shooting everything in sight.
If you zoom in, you'll notice that Albany (94706) is still covered, whereas the North Berkeley Hills (94707) aren't. Quite literally our back yard neighbor over the fence can't renew (in theory), whereas we can.
I'd normally not particularly care (our lot is worth much more than our house), but our mortgage requires us to carry homeowner's insurance, so that's a bit of a scare. And it makes me wonder how many corporate single family home sales are being driven by houses being uninsurable...
Well, we survived peak eclipse here in the Bay Area. At 34% it was pretty darned boring, especially after doing the total eclipse in Oregon in 2017. But GothBard is proudly wearing her, "I survived the eclipse" shirt today, so we're happy she didn't turn her shirt into a lie.
