Could you elaborate? I have many years experience running a gas station. For five daily’s employees, handlung cash is about 4 hours labor a day. This is counting the till prior and after shift, validating voids and receipts, handling checks, cashiers checks, and bagging and dropping the cash. With cash there is always slippage, and it is never in the ledgers favor. So cash increases labor costs by 10% and incurs about 1% direct loss a day, prior to bank fees. Where as credit cards end up being about a 2.5% overhead.
Wait, you can still pay by check in stores in the US? That was phased out in the UK like 15 years ago. And even before then, I only ever saw old people do it.
I think in part it's because its harder to transfer money between banks in the US - no equivalent of the faster-payments-scheme which allows a free transfer within a few minutes in the UK. Cheques do provide a layer of universal compatibility.
I think its also the reason behind the success of Venmo (and earlier PayPal) to allow for free/very low-cost money transmission.
It amuses me that venmo / cashapp (multi billion $ innovative startups that reimagined something) simply do what regualar banks do and have done for decades in the rest of the world.
I don't have experience with a gas station so mine could be very different. I'm at 1-3 daily employees.
For me it's:
- counting the till pre and post : It takes about 3-5 minutes a till. (money counters are awesome, and I setup all pricing increments to avoid anything below a quarter, which wouldn't be practical for an average gas station. But it could be done down to the nickle or dime) I don't count before and after, just after. The before till should already be done from counting the after and using for a shift the next day.
- validating voids and receipts : it's mostly fully automated via the POS. Maybe 10 mins when something odd happens but it's not common.
- checks and cashier's checks : we get almost zero of these.
- bagging and dropping cash : labeled bags and a drop safe, I don't count until at least the next day, all in one quick go. All the time is in the counting part.
- cash slippage - ours has usually been fairly close. Some times a bit over sometimes a bit under. If its a few dollars off every now and then I don't worry about it. If its consistently off, either way, it signals a problem, usually in training. But every now and then its nefarious and corrected.
So weekly time breakdown is probably:
- counting daily tills : 30-45 mins
- making the change request, deposit and going to the bank, Ill just say 1 hr as the bank is about 10 mins away. I also usually do this when already out for another reason and I usually go only once per week as cash is so low post covid. I used to go 2-3 times a week pre covid. But if we have a large cash day I will make an extra trip so we are not sitting on as much.
- misc accounting etc. : our QuickBooks auto syncs to the POS, with each day's sales recorded and the corresponding expected credit card and and undeposited cash account records created. So when the physical cash deposit is made it with auto match the record already created by the POS and I just click the match button. But other things always can happen in the chain so let's give another 10 min buffer here.
So I'm out 1.75-2ish hrs/week, which actually feels like more than I spend on it. So for quick math for each 10k sold per week at a 2.5% cc rate (ours is higher around 2.8ish). That's $250 in credit card fees. That's About $125/hr to handle the cash vs take the card. Looking up the average gas station sales of about 109k/month that is around $2,725 in fees. So even quadrupling the time I spend that would yield a savings rate of $340/hr spent handling the cash. Seems worth it.
These are the book I always recommend to friends and colleagues. There are runners up based on taste, such as Zero to One,The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Anathema.
I found this exercise interesting, and as arcade79 pointed out it is the cost of replication not the cost to Google. Humorously I wonder the cost of of replicating Higgs-Boson verification or Gravity Wave detection would be.
Xenophobic is not really the correct term here. Political and social efforts to extract or maintain wealth for the incumbency is part of human society forever, e.g. the rollback of the Great Councils reforms in Venice and the fall of the republic Rome.
I think Xenophobic is exactly the right term. Many suburban zoning rules were designed to keep blacks and hispanics from being welcome - forcing them to stay in the city centers.
Of course, "xeno" implies that they are somehow alien to the area, which is particularly galling considering many black people were brought to the country against their will, and much of the country populated by hispanic people used to be part of Mexico...
Though I'm sure the people who passed the rules thought of such people as outsiders so I can see xenophobic being correct.
Because being bored and be boring is the same exact thing, just said in different words. Is there any thing that is boring for every single human being on the planet? Of course no, this means boredom only exists in our minds. So if you say some one is boring - that has nothing to do with them, it only means your mind is bored. Make sure to understand this clearly and not be trapped by language expressiveness and social influence.
My take on this would be that, if you can think of various activities to do when you have nothing to do, whether on your own or with others, you can't be bored.
Which completely fails to account for the fact that a boring person with great means may use those means to avoid boredom, while an imaginative person with little means may be trapped in boredom because they are forced to use their time to meet basic, boring needs.
So it's a shallow and naive statement that ignores externalities either way.
Imagine there is a blackout and both the rich and poor are equally affected. One person decides to go for a walk and notices a few interesting things along the way. Another stays at home feeling bored.
I know which person I'd rather converse with, wealth doesn't really matter.
"People can be boring or not regardless of wealth" is orthogonal to the original assertion of "Only boring people get bored": I raised the incredibly common situation where wealth does matter that dispels the original assertion. I don't disagree with your assertion.
I don't think you've dispelled the original assertion at all. Your assertion that 'wealth does matter' is as orthogonal to the original as 'wealth doesn't matter', and there are plenty of examples in favour of each position.
> I don't think you've dispelled the original assertion at all.
I did though. Otherwise what you're saying is that you've never known someone whose imagination and appetite for experiences was not constrained by their wealth. You've never know someone who had to endure boredom doing boring things in order to have a shot at doing the things that did interest them. That would be quite the luxurious and unencumbered circle to inhabit.
> Your assertion that 'wealth does matter' is as orthogonal to the original as 'wealth doesn't matter'
Re-removing the constraint from my example to make an orthogonal point has nothing to do with why I introduced it in the first place to disprove the original point - that's not really how the logic works.
> and there are plenty of examples in favour of each position
Yes and I only need one to disprove the original assertion. Thankfully I don't have only one - there are literally millions (billions?) of non-boring people who have been in that situation.
Except I didn't raise the orthogonal point, you did by introducing wealth into the discussion.
My example demonstrated the orthogonal nature of your argument and that it doesn't hold true in all circumstances, and according to your criteria of only needing one example to disprove an assertion, then yours has been dispelled as well.
I'll add that I also dislike the adage 'only boring people get bored'. However I think there is some truth to it, perhaps a more accurate phrasing would be 'people who are always bored are boring people '
Ok, imagine the original assertion was “All square numbers are even”.
I only need to introduce a specific example/constraint to disprove the original assertion: 1
My introduction of the example/constraint is directly relevant to disproving the original point. That is the whole point of introducing it, so it is absolutely not orthogonal.
If you then remove my constraint (1) and say: “but 4 and 16 can both be square numbers”: Sure you're not wrong, but that also has nothing to do with why I introduced my example in the first place, nor does it invalidate my example, and is thus completely orthogonal to proving/disproving the original point.
Yes, I understand the point and agree with the logic (of course). I still don't think the original statement has been dispelled.
A person 'doing boring things' isn't necessarily a bored person. The experience of being bored is entirely subjective. One person staring at paint dry could be driven insane but another could be meditating upon the physical experience of the passage of time.
The saying 'bored people are boring people' isn't supposed to be taken literally. It is as logically fallible as any other quip in English, I think the difference with this one is that it is used in a more directly negative and judgmental way (and often perceived as such by the recipient).
Sure, I think your characterisation of "people who are always bored are boring people" is much more credible! Thanks for the thoughts - I must return to doing the boring things I need to do today that I'm avoiding :)
If you can think of stuff to do but you are trapped doing boring stuff, you'll be bored. boredom at its core is a lack of furfillment and ability to realize it, not a lack of imagination.
No point imagining a wonderful summer vacation in Paris when you barely have $1000 in the bank for in case the car breaks down.
No, but you can probably get to the local library and check out some books (or movies, or games, or comics) for free.
Or go outside and take a walk.
Or assuming you have a computer, go online and learn one of hundreds of subjects for free.
Or if you have paper and a pencil, doodle or write something.
I was 'trapped doing boring stuff' at school all the time growing up, especially in elementary school and junior high which were always way too easy for me, but I would pass the time away during class by either daydreaming, or doodling, or writing poems, or trying to invent a new language, or printing stories in tiny font and reading them, or brainstorming ideas for things to do later, or designing levels to new video games I thought I'd create someday, or drawing out the structure of a web site I wanted to make, and then later when I got a calculator you could code on, I was coding simple games on it.
All you're saying is that your imagination and appetite for experiences should not exceed the means already available to you. Sounds unimaginative and boring to me.
What if I said the interesting person is the one that will tolerate being bored doing something boring, in order to be able to do the thing that satisfies their imagination and appetite for interesting experiences? Like you were forced to at school? Unfortunately many people are trapped being bored doing boring things as a means to an end for much longer than just childhood: That doesn't make them boring.
I could go even more extreme as an example and go back to the year I worked in a factory. I could have been bored out of my mind while sequencing and examining car parts, but instead I let myself daydream and think about things like crazy, and wrote down notes for various thoughts I had and things to do after work when I had a spare moment. In some ways I miss that, as my current job robs a good chunk of my mental energy for the day, also I was a lot more fit back then because I was constantly moving during my job (I don't miss the 90 degree heat with only an industrial fan to cool me off though, nor the fraction of the pay I was making then compared to now).
Sometimes people that are bored come across to me like my partner when she says there's nothing she feels like eating out, despite us living in an extremely restaurant rich area (we could go to almost 100 different restaurants and almost two dozen different types of regional cuisines in about a 15 minute drive). Although she's already decided she doesn't ever want to eat at like 20 of them, and there's still at least 50 she's never tried eating at once.
Meanwhile I once worked at a place that was far enough away from anything that you had to bring food from home for lunch, except on Fridays, when we'd pool money together to make a big delivery order of wings from a pub 15+ minutes away (lunch was a hard 30 minutes, and you'd get in big trouble if you were late, so no time to go get lunch). Same place as that factory, actually. Our current situation feels luxurious compared to that.
They are being overly picky about how they want to spend their time and attention, when there's so many options out there, even cheap or free activities (and even the non-cheap things can at least be saved towards, usually, barring some health reasons that prevent you from doing it in the first place...like it's probably a bad idea for me to go whitewater kayaking at my current fitness level, but if I really wanted to I could lose some weight and build up some muscle and maybe practice doing some kayaking on a calm pond first).
I think thats a good point. Most things bore me because i am hindered to do the thing i want to do. But the solution still is trying to do your best at the boring things.
To be able to do that, one needs some kind of purpose-giving overall philosophy.
One thing of the dutch language is that this statement in echoed by the language itself. The most common way to say 'I am bored' is 'Ik verveel me' which literally means 'I bore myself'.
one of the cool things I learned last week (from Inside Out) was the emotion of "Ennui" (pronounced IN-wah). Which can be associated with boredom, but a better meaning is "a lack of fulfillment or dissatisfaction". Perfect descriptor to concisely describe something without dismissing it as "well it's not fun".
Boring people don't get bored. frustrated people get bored. Especially in an economy like this.
What's funny is that I read the word and would have pronounced it as in-you-eye or something like that, and I had heard it pronounced, but it took me a bit longer than I'd like to admit to realize that it was the same word.
It’s not a myth. Every week my parents or children request I’d remove malware or adware from their android device that they installed. On my other children’s tablet or family iPhone this has never been a problem once.
If this story were at all true, then you know very well that not everyone in science works hard. In my graduate cohort, those who did the sets first year, set themselves into research, and worked hard graduated. Those who did not left with a masters, although many found success in other fields. It was quite clearly delineated.
I'm talking about at the PI level. And yes of course a few people don't work hard, but the overwhelming majority do not differentiate themselves by how hard they work, is the point I'm trying to make. Your average PI has the skill set to take advantage of getting lucky.
Not sure what you're insinuating about the story not being true, would you like to see maps?
In this area, Rivian's are everywhere and Cybertrucks are non-existent. Has anyone seen a compilation or response from Tesla why they didn't follow their own design decisions that started with the sportster through the E -- build a car that people already know and are familiar with -- and instead take a lark on the Cybertruck?
The original motive was that enough batteries for a truck were expensive, and if you did a radical redesign with a folded exoskeleton and didn't paint it you could radically reduce weight and cost, making an EV truck possible. They were also developing a next generation battery to make this feasible.
A lot of time time passed. 3rd party batteries got cheaper/better. Tesla abandoned the exoskeleton idea and failed to hit its battery targets.
So now they're putting a lot of effort into building a funny looking truck that is all form and no function while traditional truck makers are just jamming a lot of batteries into a standard truck and achieving something better on many dimensions.
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