i wonder if they could create a central locking mechanism where if a plane makes an emergency landing, it automatically locks all the overhead bins so passengers don't waste time trying to pick their baggage out. the only remaining thing would be smaller bags underneath the seats which i don't tihnk would delay anyone or at least not significantly as the overhead bins.
another anecdote taking Lyft - they showed me $10.76 price for a trip to the airport when Uber showed $21. obviously i called Lyft and they placed a temporary charge on my credit card for $10.76. Once the driver dropped me off, i noticed that the base charge jumped to $16.76 + airport fees and my total with tips came to a bit over $27. I contacted Lyft and they denied and claimed that they always showed me $16.76. smh. i have proof from my credit card that they placed a hold for $10.76 and yet they refused to adjust the price.
care to elaborate on that? also, it's not that hard to ask users to enter their shipping zip code to get more accurate prices. some websites do that already nowadays. my point is reverse ip lookup is a good enough starting point for the first estimation.
Nope. I hate when website use IP for anything, especially language selection. I travel all the time as well as use VPNs for work, and the idea that my IP represents anything other than what network I’m connecting from is just lazy UX.
Yes let’s keep a shitty UX for most users because of a few abnormal users. Be honest, frequent travel and shopping over VPN is an edge case here. The vast majority of users are shopping and buying from home with a VPN.
Or better yet, give municipalities an incentive to stop layering a kinds of taxes. Just have a VAT and be done with it.
> The vast majority of users are shopping and buying from home with a VPN.
I bet that's wrong, and that a huge chunk of shopping is from cell phones that usually have an effectively random IP when they're not at their home location.
It would be interesting to see the numbers. I know for my wife and I, most shopping is done at home on phone or tablet and connected to our home wifi. And even shopping away from home is generally in the same county, so taxes are the same (or close enough for an up-front estimate).
> Or better yet, give municipalities an incentive to stop layering a kinds of taxes. Just have a VAT and be done with it.
Switching our tax regime to VATs, effectively flattening 13,000+ sales tax jurisdictions down to 50, would be a monumental undertaking involving rethinking and reorganizing financing of literally everything below the federal level. And in the end it would solve a problem that is at best a minor annoyance to most Americans.
Be honest, frequent travel and shopping over VPN is an edge case here.
Everyone is an edge case in some form. You, included.
Just have a VAT and be done with it.
This just illustrates that you don't understand the that taxes have multiple purposes, and why taxes are the way they are. Attend a few city council meetings.
Yeah, I see a lot of advice on here that websites should make some guesses and you can always correct them later if it turns out they're wrong.
That seems like terrible advice. Oh, the price is $X. And once you've entered all your info "just kidding." I'd much rather know there are some things not included up-front if they're not reasonably factored in.
Do you often order things for delivery at home while you're travelling? Then the price will change when you provide the delivery address — just like it does now.
Meanwhile, 99% of people will see the price they can expect to pay.
it will never happen. these company executives are major donors to politicians of both aisles. laws and regulations are for the common people like you and me. not for the ultra-rich. heck, even the judiciary is corrupt these days.
tipping culture is so annoying here in the Bay Area. the other day i was at a coffee shop and cashier handed me a device that had suggested tips from 18-22% with no obvious Cancel button. i was infuriated and the cashier had a smug look on her face. she knew what i was looking for and she didn't bother telling me how to skip it. mind you, this was for a coffee to-go order.
I get very annoyed at things like that where there shouldn't be a tip. Tip is for service quality and counter service there is no differentiation in service between different servers. People do go to restaurants and ask for their favorite waiter. There often is a difference in service between different waiters at the same restaurant - enough that I like the ability to pay for good service (if you always give the same tip you are doing it wrong - you should be giving as many 10% tips as 20%.
but you did say that figuring out the final price is "unacceptable"? why is it unacceptable? my point is that other countries have figured out a way to display the final prices, but USA still hasn't figured out how to do it or they don't have any plans to do it.
they didn't prohibit charging more for App Store purchases, they prohibited mentioning it in the app. i.e, you cannot mention something like 'purchase this in-app product for $3 cheaper on our website'.
To be more specific, previously they prohibited telling about any other ways to buy elsewhere:
"Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other thanuse in-app purchase, except as set forth ...",
And that includes sending promotional emails if said emails were gathered via app.
i'll admit i have no idea what i'm talking about but isn't there some Plan B options? something that's more manual? or are surgeons too reliant on computers?
There are plan B options like paper charting, downtime procedures, alternative communication methods and so on. So while you can write down a prescription and cut a person open you can't manually do things pull up the patient's medical history for the last 10 years in a few seconds, have an image read remotely when there isn't a radiologist available on site, or electronically file for the meds to just show up instantly (all depending on what the outage issue is affecting of course). For short outages some of these problems are more "it caused a short rush on limited staff" than "things were falling apart". For longer outages it gets to be quite dangerous and that's where you hope it's just your system that's having issues and not everyone in the region so you can divert.
If the alternatives/plan b's were as good or better than the plan a's then they wouldn't be the alternatives. Nobody is going to have half a hospital's care capacity sit as backup when they could use that year round to better treat patients all the time, they just have plans of last resort to use when what they'd like to use isn't working.
(worked healthcare IT infrastructure for a decade)
> So while you can write down a prescription and cut a person open you can't manually do things pull up the patient's medical history for the last 10 years in a few seconds, have an image read remotely when there isn't a radiologist available on site, or electronically file for the meds to just show up instantly (all depending on what the outage issue is affecting of course).
I worked for a company that sold and managed medical radiology imaging systems. One of our customers' admins called and said "Hey, new scans aren't being properly processed so radiologists can't bring them up in the viewer". I told him I'd take a look at it right away.
A few minutes later, he called back; one of their ERs had a patient dying of a gunshot wound and the surgeon needed to get the xray up so he could see where the bullet was lodged before the guy bled out on the table.
Long outages are terrifying, but it only takes a few minutes for someone to die because people didn't have the information they needed to make the right calls.
Yep, when patients often still die while everything is working fine even a minor inconvenience like "all of the desktop icons reset by mistake" can be enough to tilt the needle the wrong way for someone.
I used to work for a company that provided network performance monitoring to hospitals. I am telling a Story second hand that I heard the CEO share.
One day, during a rapid pediatric patient intervention, a caregiver tried to log in to a PC to check a drug interaction. The computer took a long time to log in because of a VDI problem where someone had stored many images in a file that had to be copied on login. While the care team was waiting for the computer, an urgent decision was made to give the drug. But a drug interaction happened — one that would have been caught, had the VDI session initialized more quickly.
The patient died and the person whose VDI profile contained the images in the bad directory committed suicide. Two lives lost because files were in the wrong directory.
We can definitely get local imaging with X-Ray and ultrasound - we use bedside machines that can be used and interpreted quickly.
X-Ray has limitations though - most of our emergencies aren't as easy to diagnose as bullets or pneumonia. CT, CTA, and to a lesser extent MRI are really critical in the emergency department, and you definitely need four years of training to interpret them, and a computer to let you view the scan layer-by-layer. For many smaller hospitals they may not have radiology on-site and instead use a remote radiology service that handles multiple hospitals. It's hard to get doctors who want to live near or commute to more rural hospitals, so easier for a radiologist to remotely support several.
GP referred to "processed," which could mean a few things. I interpreted it to mean that the images were not recording correctly locally prior to any upload, and they needed assistance with that machine or the software on it.
Seems like a possible plan would be duplicate computer systems that are using last week's backup and not set to auto-update. Doesn't cover you if the databases and servers go down (unless you can have spares of those too), but if there is a bad update, a crypto-locker, or just a normal IT failure each department can switch to some backups and switch to a slightly stale computer instead of very stale paper.
We have "downtime" systems in place, basically an isolated Epic cluster, to prevent situations like this. The problem is that this wasn't a software update that was downloaded by our computers, it was a configuration change by Crowdstrike that was immediately picked up by all computers running its agent. And, because hospitals are being heavily targeted by encryption attacks right now, it's installed on EVERY machine in the hospital, which brought down our Epic cluster and the disaster recovery cluster. A true single point of failure.
Can only speak for the UK here, but having one computer system that is sufficiently functional for day-to-day operations is often a challenge, let alone two.
There are often such plans from DR systems to isolated backups to secondary system, as much as risk management budget allow at least. Of course it takes time to switch to these and back, the missing records cause chaos (both inside synced systems and with patient data) both ways and it takes a while to do. On top of that not every system will be covered so it's still a limited state.
There are problems with getting lab results, X-rays, CT and MRI scans. They do not have paper-based Plan B. IT outage in a modern hospital is a major risk to life and health of their patients.
It's often the case that the paper fallbacks can't handle anywhere near the throughput required. Yes, there's a mechanism there, but it's not usable beyond a certain load.
I think it's eventually manageable for some subset of medical procedures, but the transition to that from business as usual is a frantic nightmare. Like there's probably a whole manual for dealing with different levels of system failure, but they're unlikely to be well practiced.
Or maybe I'm giving these institutions too much credit?
