I'm in a rural area with literally zero street illumination. I cannot begin to describe my frustration with the blue tint, ultra bright lights, and off-road LED light bars. Install those on every other lifted truck (redneck's a plenty) and night time driving is hazardous.
I don't care who installed the lights, whether it was the factory, the current or previous driver/owner. If I can't see because of your lights, they're too damn bright.
Lights should block out your night time vision no matter what, that is unavoidable. It is only a matter of how much goes.
When driving in rural areas, I sometimes flip off the lights to see much more in my periphery than I could with the lights on. This is dangerous of course, as the lights are meant more to be seen than to see.
> the lights are meant more to be seen than to see.
That's definitely false for headlights, fog lights, and for the extra light bars (well, maybe those are often installed as stylistic choices rather than utility).
Tail lights, running lights, turn signals are all more to be seen than to help the driver see.
I don't dispute that you can see more outside the beam of the light if the light is off.
You can see a surprising amount even just by starlight - but I wouldn't want to drive that way, knowing how I've stumbled over things a flashlight would have shown me.
Headlights are definitely to help the driver see (cloudy moonless nights, reflective road signs, etc.). Only at twilight or in fog would they be mostly to help you be seen. When it's really dark, running lights would be sufficient for that.
When you are traveling in the high desert, going without headlights is a great way to see and avoid deer. The deer aren’t going to be dazed by your headlights, and you can see them before they dash out in front of you on the road.
But this isn’t recommended because if another car came along they wouldn’t immediately be able to see you! Light makes you much more visible, and it also allows you to better see a narrow part of the road (more if wide beams are used), but it hides a lot. Of course, being in the high desert in the middle of the night off a freeway, there aren’t many other cars around anyways, if any.
I don't know what rural areas you're driving in, but on the roads to my house, flipping off the headlights would result in total darkness unless the moon's out. You won't see more in your periphery, you just won't see squat.
The moon is usually out. I’m referring to eastern Washington scrub land. I’ve also done it when driving through the four corners in the middle of the night, and then it was because of deer.
Do you think that the owner(s) of the hotels shouldn't be compensated for the risk that they're taking by building and operating the property? There's a ton of risk associated with investing like that.
You mean the properties they now own for a decade? Those that are fully developed and barely require maintenance? The same properties that are fully insured even against natural disasters that obliterate them to their foundations?
Yeah, let's compensate them for being insured and at the worst case scenario lose 500 euros a month every now and then when a shadier employee comes around and leaves quickly. Poor them. Whatever will they do, 1 million euros a year can barely get your ends meet!
Many risks. A disaster (war, bad weather) could keep customers away. A competitor could build next door, and resulting in your hotel being half full instead of full. A competitor could start a price war. Tastes in vacations could change resulting in less customers than expected coming. The laws could change in many different ways, each of which can change either your income or expenses.
That is just off the top of my head.
Of course as has been pointed out, your suppliers could demand more money than you have left in your budget (employees are a form of suppler - the human aspect has been intentionally ignored)
I think the GP's comment was unhelpful, but there is always risk in starting a business, particularly in hospitality, and especially as an independent operator.
There's risk in the construction (that budgets/timelines will blow out, contractors will be unable to complete the work to specifications), in whether the hotel will be appealing to customers, in the possibility of a recession or natural disaster or civic crisis that will keep tourists away.
I pay for recurring stuff with a CC for this very reason. I had an insurance company refuse to cancel my insurance unless I physically came into their office all the way across town (would have been about two hours of my time when it was all said and done) to show them proof that I had insurance through another agency. I declined that request and explained that they simply weren't getting paid any more. I called the number on my card and explained the situation to them and that I told them to stop billing me and they refused. The rep noted this issue on the account. Sure enough, they didn't stop billing me. I called the card company again to report that the insurance company had billed me again. They immediately reversed the charges and blocked all further charges from the company.
The insurance agent reported me to DMV (the relationship had soured pretty badly before this all happened) for not having insurance. It was a 2 minute call to my new insurance agent to let them to know to send proof of coverage to DMV. Problem solved in ~10 minutes of my time instead of 2 hours.
> The insurance agent reported me to DMV (the relationship had soured pretty badly before this all happened) for not having insurance. It was a 2 minute call to my new insurance agent to let them to know to send proof of coverage to DMV.
This wasn't necessarily a malicious act on their part, most likely regulatory, and you probably didn't have to do anything to rectify the situation.
I don't know what state you live in but when I was working for an insurance broker (~2004) CA, TX, PA, FL, and GA all received at least monthly if not nightly uploads of vehicle coverage.
I also know that GA shares that info and DMV records with FL and NC.
Yeah Comcast refused to cancel online about 5 times in a row despite me repeatedly citing their ToS which explicitly says you can cancel by e-mail in section 9b. The parrots on the other end kept repeating that they needed to verify my identity (Ehm, stopping payments should be sufficient verification, thanks.)
I've long deprecated phone calls as a method for businesses to reach me. I don't know why businesses don't get it already.
I got my way after about 7 e-mails with Comcast. Still saved time at ~1 minute per e-mail.
Can Google Assistant please stop working on the haircut reservation systems and make "automatically fight with customer service departments" the priority feature?
Comcast is terrible. They called me 3 hours after I had just returned their modem and cables back to the store and they said "we never got it" and tried to charge me $300 for non-return of equipment. Had I not specifically asked the store rep. for a receipt and taken a video of myself returning it to the store, then it would have been their word against mine over the phone. I'm convinced this is a con they play on purpose to milk customers for extra money when they cancel their service (plus Comcast also had an ISP monopoly over the area, so they just didn't give a shit about their customer service).
> The parrots on the other end kept repeating that they needed to verify my identity (Ehm, stopping payments should be sufficient verification, thanks.)
I don't understand — how does stopping payments verify your identity?
Because I say I am going to do it, and then I do it, which requires me to authenticate myself to my bank. If the e-mail were sent by an impostor, payments would still work.
I don't have enough exposure to the product (not available in my region) but I really liked the _idea_ of privacy.com where you can create a credit card proxy for every subscription you have.
This seems extremely valuable for managing subscriptions, tracking your funds, and of course, some modicum of privacy where your original credit card is only shared with one party.
edit: Seems like privacy.com is a direct-to-bank connection instead of depending on a credit card for funding.
I'm a frequent user and fan of Privacy.com, however I've had merchants decline charges when I provide a proxy card, only to have the charge succeed when I provide a real card linked to the same account as the aforementioned proxy card.
I suspect that Privacy.com uses gift cards as proxies, and some merchants reject payments made with gift cards. If so, this could be why I experienced the above.
If someone knows better than I do, please correct me. Genuinely curious how the service works under the hood.
Digital Ocean also refuses virtual Visa card. Maybe there is higher amount of fraud with such cards or maybe they want a credit card so they can charge you even if you don't have money. Of course, I would never agree to this.
In Portugal every debit card can be used through the MBWay service, with one-use cards that look like the credit counterpart to the physical one (Maestro -> Mastercard, Visa Electron -> Visa), but can be single use (with a per-card limit) or multi-use (with a limite and an expiration date), locked to the first purchase's merchant.
It also allows instant wire transfers between accounts in different banks using a phone number, and to withdraw cash at virtually any national ATM.
CapitalOne offers the same service on their credit cards with a browser plugin. It also disallows charges to the virtual card numbers from any source other than the site it's associated with.
It seems less than coincidental that your second poll was in the late 80's when the crack epidemic was in full swing. Parallel that to the opiate of now, and I think the dramatic swing can be normalized quite a lot.
That may be the case in an "emergency" that threatens your life. But if you come to the ER with something that doesn't fall into that category? Something life changing like a detached tendon in your hand that will* render your hand permanently useless for life if not fixed within a few days? No insurance? Fork over 50% of the cost of the surgery, upfront, before they'll do anything about it. (this happened to somebody I know)
It seems like a perfect pairing given the rise of the "fitness trackers" that are so popular. They could build vastly better risk models for [to sell to] the insurance companies with access to "anonymous" health history combined with all the data that the fitness trackers collect.
And I, as an informed consumer, acknowledge that the my electronic devices are not going to last more than a few years due to either mechanical failure and/or processing limitations. To counter this, I don't buy the latest and greatest anything. My $60 (USD) Samsung J3 does everything that I ask of it and it feels light-years ahead of the HTC 626s that I bought ~2 years ago for $80. It finally died of mechanical failure and it didn't make me feel anything at all to drop sixty dollars and change on a new model.
I'll never understand the consumer dynamic that allows there to be a never-ending lineup of $800+ phones at every store that sells electronics. Congratulations, your [electronic device] was expensive and in about two years, you're going to need a new one, just the same.
I used to feel the same way about having a data plan. There's WiFi pretty much everywhere, so why spend hundreds of dollars a year for that small bit of extra connectivity?
Once I got a smartphone with a data plan, it turned out to have a fairly high value in my life. $2/day roughly covers my data plan and buying a new $800 phone every two years. The consumer dynamic is that having the latest phone is worth $2/day.
Dropping $800 recently on a new phone did make me feel something, but it was a positive feeling.
Am I the only one who finds it endlessly annoying to refer to anything that's primarily (or exclusively) powered by a battery as "green" or "emissions free" or "pollution free" or anything else?
What about the energy to manufacture, ship, assemble, design, test (or clean up when it fails), etc. That all takes energy and most of that energy probably comes from coal or some other environmental nightmare resource.
All manufactured goods needs to be produced, and that production invariably requires energy and raw materials.
There is no alternative method of production that requires no energy or resources. Instead, the distinction is made between things that cannot be used without creating harmful emissions (ICE for example) and things that can be used without creating those emissions (like battery power).
But you are correct that it takes energy to "manufacture, ship, assemble, design, test" etc. This is true for literally everything, from pencils to houses to flying cars, and it always has been.
>That all takes energy and most of that energy probably comes from coal or some other environmental nightmare resource.
Maybe, but it's easier to replace centralised pollution from something like a coal electricity plant, than decentralised pollution of every appliance generating it's own power.
A battery appliance doesn't care if the electricity that coms to it is from a hydroplant, a nuclear facility, or coal. It's decoupled from the source, and so allows you to improve things iteratively.
I'm not sorry to say that Candy Japan will never see any of my money for the simple fact that there's no way that I'll sign up for anything that expects a recurring charge. The whole "service" attitude is flawed in that this is not a service, software as a whole is not a "service" it's an end product. Good for everyone whose pulling money out of these schemes but not a single cent of it will come from me. And $29/mo * 12 = $348 per year. (forming assumptions about the contract i.e. predatory "cancel early" clause and similar) On candy? give me a break, I don't spend that on candy over 5 years even if you include other needless crap like soda and sports drinks I doubt I'd hit that number over 5 years.
I should also add that I'm the epitome of anti-advertisement. The more that I am forced to see (thinking of YT style of ads here) an ad, the more likely I am to NOT* use that product or service. In fact, the more likely I am to purposely avoid that product out of spite.
We should resist this by wasting as much time as humanly possible. How about carrying multiple data devices with brute force able encryption for meaningless data? Encrypted linux ISOs, 8051 datasheets, trivial C programs, etc. There's clearly a file structure in place, it's clearly not easily readable, the person who was carrying it will not (or maybe cannot because they genuinely don't know) divulge how to read it. All this just to waste their time and resources dealing with piles of this shit.
Anybody remember that USB stick that kills whatever it's plugged into? I could throw 2-3 of those into my luggage and forget about them.
If you have plenty of time sitting around while they work in your stuff and potentially being denied entry for the next few years you should absolutely do this.
I don't care who installed the lights, whether it was the factory, the current or previous driver/owner. If I can't see because of your lights, they're too damn bright.