They even ambush me every time I go to the grocery store. And they’ve doubled my bill since I signed up. Why bother marketing when you can raise rates whenever you want? They could save so much money by not mailing every day and hiring people to hunt me
Doesn’t that ultimately punish not the company, but anyone who lent money or sold material to the company? Usually assets would be liquidated to pay off creditors but if all the assets go to employees creditors don’t get paid. This really hurts all the small businesses who sold supplies or materials to the company and haven’t been paid for them yet.
And of course, this all ignores the fact that for most companies most of their valuation is in their intellectual property, mainly their brand identity and recognition. And for manufacturing company’s, even most of the tangible assets are going to be things like factory buildings and equipment. Those things are all highly specialized so it’s very difficult to get someone else to come in and use that space to the same level of productivity. That will result in major damage to the local economy when a huge source of tax revenue and jobs suddenly disappears.
I’m not saying all this because I think companies should get away with whatever they want. Not at all. I just want to give some context for why these “obvious solutions” aren’t being used. It’s not that the entire world is in some conspiracy. Many of these problems are legitimately very difficult to solve.
where is the money going to come from if they can’t sell anything?
I have engineer in my title, I work in software, and there kind of is a PE available for software but it’s actually just an EE license with maybe half a dozen software questions tacked on. I’ve never heard of anyone in software actually getting it. It’s slightly more common in EE and ME, and I think a lot more common in civil and structural engineering.
I don’t know how aggressively state engineering boards actually enforce their hold on the word “engineer”, but I still try to be careful. The last thing I want is to get sued for misrepresenting qualifications.
The article is pretty short so it’s hard to tell, but I know in other cases there can be a significant difference between whether or not you say you’re an engineer when you make these claims.
The term engineer is effectively a trademark controlled by a state licensing board. They want to protect the word engineer so it’s clear to the public when someone is speaking as a professional licensed engineer vs not. Overall, this is a good thing and a direct response to specific and numerous very bad things that have happened in the past.
However, this has also resulted in some very awkward situations because the word engineer has almost become a genericized trademark in that there are many people who have the word engineer in their job title but do not have or need a professional engineer’s license.
Based on the fact the guy won the case, I’m going to assume he wasn’t substantially misrepresenting his qualifications. The headline is very sensationalized though and the article is lacking any detail, so I don’t know how relevant this little anecdote is but I find it interesting.
Honestly I would be perfectly happy with the service like this, even if I had to manually input what groceries I need. It’s still an incredibly complex problem though. AI is probably better suited for it than anything else since you can have iterative conversations with latest generation AIs. That is, if I tell it I need cereal, it looks at my purchase history and guesses what type of cereal I want this week, and adds it to my list, I can then tell it no, actually I want shredded mini wheats.
So it would probably have to be a combination of a very large database and information gathering system with a predictive engine and a large language model as the user interface.
This is surprisingly difficult problem because different people are okay with different brand substitutions. Some people may want the cheapest butter regardless of brand, while others may only buy brand name.
For example my wife is okay with generic chex from some grocery stores but not others, but only likes brand names Cheerios. Walmart, Aldi, and Meijer generic cheese is interchangable, but brand name and Kroger brand cheese isn’t acceptable.
Making a software system that can deal with all this is really hard. AI is probably the best bet, but it needs to be able to handle all this complexity to be useable, which is a lot of up front work
They could be, and probably should be repurposed
But also, brand new chrome books are ~$80
By the time you collect, clean, repair, and reimage the older computers, it may well be cheaper to just buy Chromebooks.
I hate seeing anything useful going to the trash but the economics aren’t great in this case
You know that’s not actually going to happen though. Maybe one in a hundred will get intercepted and saved at best.
I think there’s some ability to distinguish as anything intentionally discarded due to spillage or damage should be accounted for directly, as opposed to only showing up at inventory
Obviously it is impossible to separate out honest mistakes, intentional theft, and disgruntled employee semi-intentional shrink. If you ask the company, 500% of shrink is theft by organized crime rings and the general public should definitely be spending taxpayer dollars on police enforcement and jail time for pretty thieves. So I would assume most of it is actually accidental check out mistakes and employees “accidentally” checking things out wrong.
Indeed. It would be interesting to run the same analysis for censorship of pro Israel content and compare the differences between the two, though the data would likely still be noisy and inconclusive.
It’s a “potato bar” not just a potatoes to presumably that price is intended to include all the bacon, cheese, etc.
Really though it’s probably just whatever the hotel cafeteria charges for potato because that’s a lot easier than coming up with a new price and then justifying it in case of an audit.
As a potential purchaser, the greatest concern is if it’s already been more than 10 years. In my mind this is exactly the kind of situation adverse possession is for.
Even if adverse possession doesn’t apply, trying to actually evict those home owners from the land is going to be a nightmare. The validity of the lot itself may even come into question. Generally I would expect the laws governing the creation of lots to try to prevent useless lots like this.
Honestly I don’t understand how lots like this even get listed. I looked at one in my city that was a little piece of a corner between two homes. It’s far too small to build on and you probably couldn’t even fence it off legally. Literally the only thing you could do with it is try to coerce the adjacent homeowner who’s been using it to buy it from you, but that’s just evil, and who wants to be evil?
The reality is they’re almost certainly already using that land and buying it would give you nothing because they could claim it under adverse possession. Actually taking possession of that strip would be nearly impossible.
The only thing I miss it for is plugging into the car. I’ve got Bluetooth adapters now though that work pretty well. In theory I might run into a situation where it would be nice to be able to plug into a speaker or someone else’s car or something, but BT is so common it doesn’t really come up.
Polls are important especially in economics because people’s opinions matter. Everyone thinking the economy is bad will cause a recession even if there isn’t an economic reason for one otherwise.
Doesn’t that chart show wages going up during the pandemic then coming back down to basically the same level they were at before?
It depends on how close it is to the house. I’m in a low cost of living area in the US and my neighbor has a tree that’s going to be over $3k to bring down. If it can’t be felled they have to bring in a crane and take it apart one piece at a time. Lots of equipment costs and very skilled and dangerous work
What’s your workflow that merging into other people’s WIP is normal? I’m so confused
That’s the worst part. The fact they keep doing it means it probably works. I just don’t understand how.