Often there are contracts. Sometimes for a very long time, often multi-year. There are sometimes escape clauses (like a morality clause for a spokesperson), but these aren’t easy to invoke.
I suspect many of them are up for annual review/renewal, when they can be terminated without penalty. It might also just be an attempt to get better terms.
FWIW, here is the US, the ground wire is often completely exposed. As in, no colored jacket, just the bare copper throughout the entire run. Attached to ground at the breaker box, and attached to any grounding ports or metal boxes throughout the building.
This is disinformation. Nate silver has directly called out the use of that screenshot.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/theres-no-normal-in-this-election
Everything is now 16.9oz (500ml). I think it started from bottled water
Now I miss Fruitopia, and 20 oz bottles…
Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.
Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of
Companies do not fuck around when an AG comes around. Enough complaints, or complaints that are ignored, is a quick way to get sued by the AG. The AG’s office has extensive resources to easily win in court, even getting your entire company’s - including parent and children companies - banned across the entire state.
It’s also pretty easy to get the AG involved. You have to provide a decent amount of supporting documentation, but most states have an online form you can file.
As an example, 20 years ago, a company tried to deny me a mail-in rebate. This was while my state AG was actively suing them for not paying rebates. I spent 30 minutes filling out the form with the required evidence. Receipts, etc. A month later I had my $15 rebate check, no additional questions asked.
Uber’s insurance is pretty bad. Many get the additional coverage from their regular insurer anyway because of this. That coverage also (usually) applies to this situation as well.
How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?
Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.
I’ve never used it, but Crossover Office was developed largely to get MS Office working on Linux. It looks like it’s still maintained.
It’s at least worth looking into.
If the locals - as a whole, not just some prominent extremists - dislike Starbucks being there, then the location will fail.
To add to this, imagine the reverse. Can you imagine if they passed up better opportunities, just so that it could happen on a specific date on the calendar?
Sounds absurd, right?
“handle” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as “safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control”. Which isn’t a small task in itself, but it’s a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.
I’m going to take a wild guess that this is also pretty close to the population share.
I think you’re approaching the wrong aspect. While that could be a scam where a man is impersonating a woman, there are plenty where it’s actually a woman running the scam. There are plenty of red flags here, and those don’t change.
The problem is that I’m sure your friend is aware of those red flags. He’s also choosing to ignore them. I suspect he doesn’t do well with women IRL, and this at least gives him hope.
Assuming that’s all true, this is way above the pay grade of random people on the Internet.
Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It’s clearly not an experience that people flock to.
OTOH, on the rare occasion I’ve visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.
As long as it’s advertised openly, I don’t see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It’s a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.
Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn’t particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.
I’m really interested in what data they will use to train the AI, and how they are going to wrangle it. Will they simply feed the text of any bills to it? Will they just use stock ChatGPT (or similar)?
Oddly, this is more vulnerable to human exploitation than AI. Through careful prompt engineering, it’s entirely possible to manipulate it to give whatever results are desired. They can then wash their hands of any repercussions.
Economies of scale affects the costs to the manufacturer. Competition/demand affect the price to the consumer.
On top of that, Bedford to Bainbridge looks to be a fairly urban route (Cleveland area). This means she had to at least reasonably stay in her lane and react to other drivers. They also found the car/girl at Target instead of from people calling 911.