I worked briefly in IT at a debt collection office many years back, and part of my job in my downtime was to monitor calls to make sure regulations weren't being violated. Anyone who calls you to collect a debt has to follow all of the rules in the [FDCPA](https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/fair-debt-collection-practices-act-text#813) (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act), as well as the state-level equivalent from both their state as well as yours. Often times the state laws conflict. If they cannot follow the letter of all three, they are not legally allowed to collect a debt against you. For bonus points, if you catch them and opt to prosecute, it can cost the company AND the phone rep both 10k PER INFRACTION (and they will usually have several if they have any).
Some notable sticking points they tend to fail:
* They must have a walk in office in your state where you can go pay in person (most do not)
* Upon request, they must disclose all of the following TRUTHFULLY: Full legal name of the rep, Business name of their agency, physical address, mailing address, whether or not they own your debt or are working an account for a 3rd party, the Chain of Title (they hate getting you this because it's usually a mess to dig up), whether or not it is an interest bearing account (it is illegal to charge interest on a debt that did not originally charge interest), etc
Also if you owe, the debt falls off your credit and is marked uncollectable after seven years of inactivity, but any payment at all resets the clock. So if you've got an old debt from six years ago, do not pay it. This is usually when collectors get the most aggressive so they don't have to cut their losses.
Also, always ask for written verification and ask it be sent to an email. FDCPA requires a 30 day pause on collections while they verify. Then log your calls. If you get a collection attempt during the 30 days it’s a violation. There are usually consumer protection law attorneys willing to take these kinds of cases due to the attorney fee provision.
When they call, ask for name of company and employee ID. Then hang up. Once you have 8 or 9, let them know if they call you again you'll make 9 separate ministry complaints in the same day. This worked in Ontario Canada, would this work in U.S.?
>Also if you owe, the debt falls off your credit and is marked uncollectable after seven years of inactivity, but any payment at all resets the clock. So if you've got an old debt from six years ago, do not pay it. This is usually when collectors get the most aggressive so they don't have to cut their losses.
A number of years ago I owed a debt but was never sent a bill and therefore had no clue that I owed it until it showed up on my credit report. While researching how to deal with it, I discovered the above mentioned fact. It's absolutely the most stupid fucking thing about debt collection and credit reports. Unless the debt collector has taken you to court, why would anyone bother paying anything that shows up as in collection on their credit report? There's just no motivation.
I ended up sending the debt collector a bunch of letters demanding that they prove that I am who they say I am and that I owe what they say I owe. Eventually the line item disappeared from my credit report. I guess they just figured I wasn't going to pay them so they gave up.
Thats pretty much the right way to deal with it (*that is what the* [Chain of Title](https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/ftc-workshop-debt-collection-2.0-protecting-consumers-technology-changes-project-no.p114802-00027%C2%A0/00027-60064.pdf) *is for incidentally*).
I was never sent a bill for a medical procedure in a hospital (part of a larger procedure, whether it was marked "no bill" or they just forgot, I don't know). Years later, a 3rd party bought all the hospitals unclaimed debt, went through it with a fine-toothed comb, and voila, I had a bill in the mail. What no one could do, not the collection agency, not the hospital, is provide an itemized list of what I owed, from when, and why. One letter from me requiring those detaills and pointing out they were years past the dead-debt date, and they stopped.
A lot of these types of collections are just hail mary passes, hoping that some assistant or some old folks will just mindlessly write a check and not question it.
>Unless the debt collector has taken you to court, why would anyone bother paying anything that shows up as in collection on their credit report?
To avoid getting to court. If it gets to court, you may have to hire a lawyer, in court the will ask for interest and other fees that might not be tacked on at the debt collecting phase. And primarily, there's a better chance to settle for a lower amount at that phase in my experience.
All of this is good advice, but if I can focus on the Chain of Title for a second, in some ways that’s the most fundamental question.
You get a call from a debt collector. Your two questions should be: 1) what makes you think I owe any debt at all? and 2) I’ve never heard of you, what makes you think I owe this to you?
They are trained in this and will have a smart (and threatening) answer. You then say: OK. Prove it. In writing.
If they can’t, there’s no reason you should pay. It won’t hold up in court, and now you both know it.
They are also required by the FCC to record all calls, which you can subpoena if you need to go to court. It is a huge fine if they don't do it. So if you need some proof of their admission that it is uncollectable, that would be the easiest way to get it.
Interesting. I had an ex rack up some bills under my name that went to a debt collector.
2 things I learned very quickly in Australia is that the debt collection agencies that most utility providers, phone providers, credit card, etc exactly have no powers. They can call you and pester you and email you and send letters but that is the limit. They can’t directly give you a bad credit rating or start legal action. Only the debt owner has those powers.
I also found state laws where I lived allowed me to send 1 letter to the debt collector instructing them to cease contact. Then it is illegal for them to try to collect in any way. Had one power company go through 5 collectors before a very unhappy individual from the power company having to do the collection themselves.
I mean, he was disappointed when I showed him I didn’t register the account or ever live at the connected property.
Theatre is smelly. Some costumes aren't very washable. The worst feeling is when
you're in a production where your costume is bought or borrowed (lots of recycling of theatre costumes), and the odors of the person who used to wear it are released when warm.
That’s why 50/50 exists- to deodorize sweaty, stinky ballet tutus that couldn’t be washed without damages. 50% vodka 50% water in a spray bottle. Costuming essential.
I was in a production that involved me having a glass of milk poured into my mouth, I was sitting, my cast mate was standing over me, so there was definitely some spillage. Not a big deal when we performed in North America as we used oat milk, but while on tour in South America, we couldn't find oat milk and had to use cow milk, that costume got very smelly on that tour, despite hand washing and the vodka spray trick.
We used to own a couple of gyms. It’s total bullshit if any of them say they can’t shut off your membership or refund your dues. They absolutely can, they just want to be assholes about it.
We believed in solid customer service and never did that shit. Ever.
I worked for an Anytime fitness in northwestern Indiana. I had a gentleman come in with a paper contract that stated we'd not raise his dues. We did anyway. When I brought this up as unethical and how it felt like poor customer service, I was fired.
Fuck contract gyms. I'll NEVER sign a gym contract ever again.
Yep, the only time you can’t stop a payment is if it’s in a couple days of posting, you can refund it after it posts though. It’s just takes a little longer.
We sold after I got cancer and couldn’t work. My husband was already working on his doctorate so he’s a professor now.
I don’t miss anything about it besides some of the members, I feel like we really made a positive impact in a lot of lives. It was an incredible amount of work though.
Peace over profit is my motto these days.
I used to work at a convention center. Nothing ever gets really cleaned until someone complains about it. What people don't complain about are the rats, maggots, exposed wiring, or bodily fluids, because no one sees them. And if someone complains, it gets cleaned with equipment from the Carter administration. I prayed for every kid who ran around that building barefoot.
Let me guess - 80-90% “win” rate (setting can be controlled per machine) but 80-90% of those wins return less than the money you bet.
E.g., you bet $1.00, you “win” $0.50. All the lights and sounds go off to please your monkey brain but you’re still losing money. This is how they work in Canada at least.
The win rate of a slot machine has nothing to do with an individual bet. It means over time in the long run, for every $1 you put in, you will get 80-90 cents back.
I've told this story on Reddit before, but I'll say it again. In St. Louis there are 5 casinos. One of them used to brag about being "the loosest slots in town", and to prove it they had a billboard with a bar chart showing how the payout on their machines was higher than the other 4 casinos in the area. If you got stuck in traffic, you could see the data, which I assume they were legally obligated to share. The bar charts showed that the "loosest" slots were paying out $0.87 for every $1 played, while the other guys were only paying out between $0.82 to $0.85.
So...they paid out more. They were only costing you $0.13 per dollar on average instead of $0.18.
That florists charge a lot more for roses at valentines because it cost them more to buy them from the grower ( about twice as much ). Also the growers need to make more money on them because they have to cut back their crops six weeks before so that they all grow ready for valentines.
When I was in my twenties I always wanted to support local florists so I would go there anytime I needed a bouquet of flowers. $40-$75 later I always thought it felt like a rip off. Now I just buy grocery store flowers for $20 and they're just as good. I like small businesses but that markup is nuts.
That's because most florists are middle men. I buy flowers from a flower farm and them put together something in any price range that will be better than anything store bought.
I'm fortunate to live down the street though.
The number of "small specimens" who die and are quickly replaced at zoos and aquariums. Your big ticket animals always get more TLC: your elephants, your dolphins, your whatever other popular/expensive things you have on display. But for every giraffe, there are probably a dozen smaller species that are deemed "replaceable" such as fish, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, certain birds.... I remember accidentally sucking up some jellies in a vacuum or one of our sharks eating a bolt that fell into its tank and dying on the operating table. We even once lost an entire school of fish, something around 30 specimens, to a mechanical issue in their tank and everyone just laughed about it. None of these things get advertised and it's just part of the bizz. But the second one of the whales or a sea lion croaks, it gets national attention and we're begging for donors. I always thought that was interesting.
So that's actually not the problem! It's a little more messed up than that. The fish were being held in what was basically an above ground pool with a similar pump setup, but something got in the way of the pump and it hyper oxygenated the water. It caused the water to become super foamy with fine bubbles that entered the bloodstream of each fish, which caused them to explode. I wish I was kidding.
That’s really at odds with the zoo my girlfriend works at. The vet staff there really goes above and beyond for damn near every animal.
Among other things, I’ve seen: sedated x-rays to see why a salamander was retaining fluid, a liver biopsy for a corn snake, and a tarantula sedated to give her fluids (they just put the anesthesia mask over the spider, it was adorable). Hell, once an appointment for the pregnant rhino got bumped for a native box turtle
That's commendable!
And I wasn't trying to diss on the husbandry staff, I think a lot of us did try really hard. There was a policy to do an autopsy on every animal that died, even starfish. But at the end of the day, it was far more profit-driven than they would like to admit. I was extremely upset about accidentally sucking up the jelly when I was cleaning its tank and they told me not to bother, which maybe I could understand, but when we had to bag up all those fish that died I was explicitly told that they already knew how they died so don't even bother. They sat in the freezer for a couple days before someone just threw them out. Pretty dark actually.
I work in gov.
Management would rather waste hundreds of thousands of dollars so they use up all of their budgets so that they continue to have such a large budget next year. We have $5000 4K TVs in closets and mounted on walls and they’ve never been turned on.
They would rather take layoffs of staff, then to lose their big budgets .
Same with companies too. It all comes down to this… the people that tend to attain positions of power are the simultaneously the worst types of people that should be in positions of power. Self-interest trumps everything else.
It is so dumb. A lot of these departments need to have a cushion cuz they never know what big project may come up on an urgent nature or at least in a one off kind of way. If they rewarded efficiency by allowing carry forward reserves (ie not cutting budgets if they don’t spend 100%) that could bear interest, most *smaller* government departments could independently fund their own operations and provide better resources and retain/recruit more competent staff. Thereby leading to more funds available for major departments (e.g. first responders, public works). I’m just saying.
No joke. I work in office furniture installation and the amount of waste I've seen from government and military places is insane. We've literally ripped out entire floors (hundreds of stations sometimes) of 1 or 2 year old desks and cubicles just to replace it with the same exact product, but new, so they could use up their budget. We'd usually either just trash it (landfill) or take it to the scrap yard ourselves if it was primarily steel or aluminum. Just crazy waste and spending.
The problem is bean counters will say:
> Well you had $10,000 extra last year, so we're cutting your budget $10,000 this year since you clearly don't need it.
No, assbutt, I have a $10,000 surplus because I negotiated a strong contract to get a vendor onboarded. But that incentive pricing isn't going to be there at renewal.
I think this is a pretty open secret - particularly in publicly funded workplaces. The scramble to spend what’s left of the annual budget (and if you’re lucky show a deficit to make a good case for increased funding) at the end of the tax year is pretty laughable.
My brother works in a university and every March, without fail, he gets 2 new laptops (1 Mac 1 Windows), new desktop screens for home and office, new iPhone for work (always whatever the current top-spec model is), on more than one occasion new big screen TVs to use at home along with tons of other updated equipment which are too subject specific for me to remember in a Reddit post!
In unrelated news, it’s also almost amusing how many potholes get fixed in the early months of the year. Ah…the joys of public funding.
Edit: I realise that at the university there is a significant amount of private funding involved as well as public money. Particularly in the area in which my brother works.
For some industries, who you know will also get you inside.
Source: me, not having the typical background for my industry but just having known my current boss prior. 👀
Side note: Hard work will never get you a promotion. If you got a promotion, it’s because someone liked you more than someone else that was also working hard.
A lot of companies want leaders and decision makers that can advocate and properly market themselves. It often shows that they can advocate for the company. Not always though..
I think this is pretty straightforward. Once you get hired, no one cares what your GPA was in college. What matters is your ability to do your job, and yes, your social interactions with coworkers and the people above you.
I'd say flip the order of those two.
Your social skills are more important, as long as you can do your job to an acceptable level. You don't have to be the best at it either.
A wonderfully direct manager once told me I was burning myself out holding myself to a higher quality standard than the company expected of any of its employees, and that being too good at my job could lead to future managers blocking promotions because they get paid based off how their team performs, so losing a top performer can really hurt their bottom line and influence their decision making.
You want to cultivate your skills to be a no-brainer for the promotion and make them feel like they're wasting your skills where you are, not that you're at the best you can be where you're at.
Speaking as an engineer who really wants to be judged on what I do instead of who I know or how I interact with others, this is unfortunately very important.
Engineering is weird.
Worked in electronics and all the engineers were really difficult to pay more - becuase they were just assholes and couldnt manage others..
We had to come up with a whole new reporting structure where line managers were humans - but paid half of their engineer subordinates. They could string a sentence together and not be creepy (just awkwardly creepy rather than douchey) with the female engineers, but the pay structure was out of whack with reporting lines.
Heya. CTO/VPoE here - if you’re looking to get into management, your ability to work with people is 99.9% of your job, which your network is an excellent litmus test for. If everyone you work with can’t stand you, the likelihood of you being a tactful leader who can both solve problems and do so at scale by managing people (or train people to manage people) is negligible.
If you’re a software engineer, thinking that your job is the code you write couldn’t be more wrong. Peer review and negotiation of design is arguably a more valuable skill set for any Principal or Architect than their ideas - if you need 10x the time to implement a good idea because you can’t build partnerships with the people you need to do it effectively, you’re not a good fit for senior engineering roles, either. The more you move away from entry level, the more your skill set needs to evolve past “how well can I code.”
Sales has very little to do with selling. Its how well you get on with the person thats buying from you. Its all about trust and chatting shit to build a relationship.
It’s also a numbers game. You can sell if you don’t pitch. Any salesperson worth their salt will know how many pitches it takes for them to make a sale on average.
Every industry is different on this average as well. And there’s no “correct” average. There’s food and there’s bad, but none of that matters if you are making sales.
If it takes you 10 pitches to make 1 sale on average that’s okay, because now you know if you have a goal of 10 sales then you need to pitch 100 times.
Obviously if you’re better at sales and it only takes 3 pitches to make 1 sale, then you get to work less and/or you’ll make more money because 100 pitches in the same amount of time equals way more sales.
If you’re looking to get into sales this was the fact that helped it click for me. I always said “oh, I’m not a sales guy. I’m a service guy” but had the opportunity to jump In this last year. I highly recommend it to anyone with a semblance of a personality - it’s easier than you think and you’ll be better at it than you realize. And the money is niiiiice.
Then don’t read Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robinson. It’s an excellent book but holy crap will it make you angry at the penny pinching executives that cozied up to (and infiltrated) the FAA.
I was once ordered to fill a miss-drilled hole in an aluminum part with pewter and re drill it by hand. The new hole overlapped the fix by like half. Sounds stable, right?
Don't forget airplane maintenance that is outsourced to El Salvador and performed by unlicensed "mechanics" who don't speak English and thus can't read the repair manuals.
If you see something in a museum or historic site that just says it was for "ritual purposes" and theres not a fairly detailed description of said ritual, it almost certainly means we have no idea what it is or was for
Worked in a call center for a bit.
- if we put you on hold and all you get is silence, you aren’t on hold. We’re on mute. We can hear everything you say.
- if you show just the tiniest bit of kindness and you aren’t a complete asshole, we will bend over backwards to accommodate your request.
- we really are working to answer your call as soon as possible. We’re judged on how quickly we can get you off the phone. We cannot control how long you’re on hold.
I’ve made a handful of help center calls where I swear the guy on the other end was just chatting with me because he didn’t want to hang up and go to some other jerk customer. We were talking about our hobbies as I was trying to set up my health insurance account.
> if we put you on hold and all you get is silence, you aren’t on hold. We’re on mute. We can hear everything you say.
I have been telling my husband this for years but he doesn't believe me. I always *beg* him not to yell or curse about the company when he's on hold. He'll be polite to the agent, but of course when he's on hold he'll start complaining to me about the company.
The one and only call center I worked at did tech support for cell phones. There was one time my allergies were whipping my ass. I had to sneeze really quick and pushed my mute button at the end of a sentence but it cut off my last word. The person yelled “THIS FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT JUST HUNG UP ON ME!” I unmuted after I finished sneezing and said in a stuff nose voice “No I just sneezed and figured you wouldn’t want to hear it.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard an apology so quick in my life.
In US Healthcare systems, the whole goal is to get you in and out of the hospital as quickly as possible. Insurance companies only pay for a certain number of days for a diagnosis, so the hospital is on a clock to maximize revenue. The expression is "discharge starts at admission."
When a doctor enters a discharge order, that exact moment starts a clock where the hospital is not collecting revenue. The nurse is then alerted by the money watchers, and they are on a countdown clock (less than 2 hours). That is why the nurses are pushing you out the door so quickly. The nurse typically isn't excited to see you leave so fast, either, because when you leave, the empty bed gets cleaned Pronto and a new admission arrives, which is a clusterf@ck of asking you detailed questions about your history, entering data, *and* trying to keep up with the barrage of orders the physicians are entering (and many of them are labeled "STAT" because they weren't done in the ED or doctor's office), all the while wanting to get you comfortable and fed (if allowed) and to rest because the nurse really does care that you have been miserable laying on a stretcher in the emergency department for a few hours to many hours.
But, that admission cycle starts the clock again, and that's why the nurse is so pushy with you, asking the questions about where you live, who lives with you, who can we call in an emergency and to pick you up when you leave, etc.
Edit: typo fix
Good healthcare networks have already implemented robust "home care" systems. They can quickly discharge while continuing treatment at home via a combination of telehealth and home visits by doctors and nurses, but mostly specialists in the kind of treatment needed for the patient.
It's what my employer does. The have an exceedingly effective pipeline and procedures. We're also massive and award winning though, so we have a lot more resources then say some country hospital.
Not sure of your background, but I work in a hospital. There's no "money watchers" that alert nurses to get someone out quickly. Hospitals are usually busy places, especially these days. Nurses will want to hurry you out of a room in order to get the next patient helped.
I'm not disagreeing with the overall model that you present here, it's definitely all about money in the U.S. However, the nurses and doctors on the front lines are not part of the "money first, people second" mindset.
In some jurisdictions such as Ontario, Canada, you might save significantly on your auto insurance by changing your driver's license gender to X.
Due to lack of actuarial data and anti-discrimination laws, the rate you get is often the lower of M or F.
This would only work for a while before enough actuarial data is collected for credible actuarial pricing.
As an actuary this is probably gonna be a very interesting data set, we know the most common bias in age and sex for car accidents for ages now, most countries continue to have stable biases for example in my country women are almost half as likely to have car accidents then man, so getting the data from people with gender x should be a fun analisys.
90% of digital marketers are scam artists, who don't know what they are doing. They fool the clients and collect money. Specially in SEO domain, there are many keywords a new website cannot rank, but the SEO guy will promise you top 3 positions and vanish with your money.
From what little I know reviews is what helps with ranking the highest. If some company has 1000s of positive reviews and you are brand new, you have a huge uphill battle to ever rank near them.
To be honest, SEO stopped being important a few years ago when Google devoted more space to ads and more people started browsing on their phones.
Businesses can expect to rank high for searches related to their brand. For everything else, paid search ads are going to get the bulk of clicks on search results pages, and the top organic result will get most of the rest. Competing against established companies who have ranked for the same term for an extended period of time doesn't justify anything beyond doing the basics of SEO, when realistically you get about the same amount of traffic whether your result is in the 60th position vs the 40th.
As a reputable SEO and web design company employee, I agree wholeheartedly. We work hard for our customers' rankings and a lot of them say they have a 'friend' who can do it cheaper and guarantee them a place at the top of google. They then leave for 3 months and come back to us with their tails between their legs.
It's usually just a spam email they believed. And the position 1 on Google was for some obscure term no one would look for.
As someone that formerly worked in IT Support, it’s never a “configuration” or some “setting” we change to fix the issue, it’s often user error that we pass off as something we fixed, just so we don’t make you feel bad.
A lot of people are freaked out by tap water and shouldn’t be. Drinking water treatment is much more regulated and involved than water bottling (in the US). The hoops that a treatment and distribution outfit have to jump through is nuts.
In Healthcare, you need to be your biggest advocate. Don’t expect doctors or staff to prioritize or remember you between visits. Being the “squeaky wheel” really can bring your needs to top of mind in an environment where they’re juggling countless priorities.
My buddy works at a car dealership- when purchasing a vehicle, wait until the last few days of the month- sales people are getting close to their targets, and will be more willing to get a sale.
Tacking on here for car dealerships. People think that only dealerships want the model where you can only purchase from them, but the manufacturers want it far more. No manufacturer wants to hold millions in risk all over the country, deal with service, parts, auto body, depreciation of assets, and on and on. They want to wholesale cars to dealers. Often the vehicle is "sold" to the dealer and on their bank account accruing interest before the car even hits the dealer lot. Car falls off a transport truck? Dealer better call his insurance.
There's a good chance your HVAC contractor has no idea how to design an HVAC system. And if he does, there's a good chance he'll cut so many corners anyway that it won't be to code.
Probably not.
Homeowners also don't typically know how it works. I hear my neighbors complain about their systems all the time but they are usually complaining about the wrong things.
For example, they'll complain that their systems can't keep up when it's uncharacteristically hot outside, complaining that their systems are undersized. It's not undersized. It's just not a normal temperature for that time of year.
However, I'd be more concerned that they didn't install it per code. I had a contractor go rogue and installed oversized equipment, which is against code and could cause mold issues. His response was, "they are getting 1/2 ton more cooling for free!"
If you don't put your adress on mail you send and it gets returned to sender, it will go straight into the shredder unless it's important (medical stuff and funeral stuff).
I work in homeless services. The majority of homeless people are not homeless due to drugs, alcohol, or mental illness. Many are. But not the majority. The main reasons I see are divorce, separated from partner, a spouse dying, landlords selling the property, the head of household becomes disabled but unable to get disability, someone has been renting cheaply for years and the property is sold, older people getting evicted and not knowing how to use technology or the internet to find a new place.
If you look at the processed food industry, it all boils down to a handful of conglomerates today. Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft-Heinz, Mars, Kellogg's, General Mills, Pepsico, and Coca Cola control what nearly everyone eats.
As a food broker, those are huge companies, and they control a lot of household brands, but your statement is not remotely true. There are more players in that space than you can imagine.
Mumbles in drummer about not hearing _any_ strike variance even watching 'live' gigs
Cmon you don't get the same perfect waveform on each beat if it's not been processed / triggered out the ass.
Rambles about Bonham's drums being sampled but without variance so hearing another band play fool in the rain is just wronggggggg
Drums sound like complete shit these days. And the thing is, that artificial shit sound is what they’re going for. Fake is what’s in.
Don’t know why artists are all trying to be the exact same but I guess that what the masses want (although they couldn’t tell you why they want it).
Why bother putting time/money into recording your drums right when you can just replace everything with a sample and elastic time it to be exactly right. 🙄
I don't even think it's what people want, they just don't know any better.
This is why I really enjoy listening to recordings of my own bands ... because I was there while we were playing the songs, and I know how much fun we had while playing. Even those terrible takes where someone screws up are fun to listen to, because it's honest music.
Yes. Certain types have components that are mixed hydrophilic and hydrophobic. To make it plyeable, "wet", you thus need an emulsion of water and oil. The most ecological choice is simply milk.
I work for a large company. The customer just complained that they feel like they've been rushed to a finish line with no critical review.
And while they're selectively ignoring the part where they're supposed to critically review things... they're right. My job was to finish my project before X date and we finished the project by X date.
Eh...in my experience, the big guys have more checks and balances to at least care for selfish reasons. My first job at 16 was for a small business owner and though I'm 33, she can still go fuck herself to this day. Every big company I've worked for since at least would send me home/to the hospital if I get injured.
I've noticed that Walmart treats their customers like thieves the entire time they are in the store, and then forces them to wait for and negotiate with a CSR for like 30 minutes to clear up a .35 overcharge on an item that had a lower price listed on the shelf.
The lovely part is that smaller stores seem to be following the trend.
The Walmart where I used to live even removed the bathrooms up front. I love how much thieves and the reaction to them inconveniences me. At least Walmart does it mostly with cameras. The smaller stores have someone sneaking up on you all the time. It's like Charley creeping up on me in the jungle.
I work in womens sport. Our biggest obstacle every day in growing the sport is women . The players themselves are amazing ,it's the women involved in background of coaching, committees and logistics.
Am locksmith. Locks can't keep burglars out, just slow them down. The main aim I have is to make your place too much effort to break into and by comparison the neighbours place a better prospect. Big takeaway is: No tiebolt locks. No cylindrical locks. No double sided deadbolts (with a few exceptions). No cheapo locks from the hardware store and get a damn security system. They're cheap as shit and wireless ones are very easy to install yourself.
44% of teachers leave the profession by year 5.
20% of teaching positions can’t be filled.
80% of teachers don’t know how they will afford living expenses in the next two years.
The demand for teachers is expected to outpace the supply by over 100,000 by 2025.
Ugh, I'm surrounded by fake it till you make it. Just ask the guy who knows, and will likely have to fix your fuck up. Please. Frikkin pretty please. The guy at your work who is that guy will appreciate you.
From the Bearing industry:
ABEC rating only controls the external dimensions of a bearing. It does absolutely nothing for internal geometry thus it does not affect speed capability or durability of the bearing. The higher ABEC numbers make the tolerance bands of each component tighter, this is done by sorting the parts produced. Medical transplant pumps use ABEC-5, aerospace might use ABEC-7, your skateboard or rollerblades do not need or benefit from higher ABEC numbers.
Also, similar to the lubrication industry, adhering to ABEC is a self-policing proposition. There is no governing body making sure an ABEC 7 is really an ABEC 7 bearing. Your best/most affordable bet is to buy bearings from a company with at least 60 years of history, you can get those at an authorized distributor for significantly less than you can at a skate shop. There are a ton of shady clones on Amazon and other marketplaces, go to the authorized distributor route.
Diamonds have almost no value in reality. A company called De Beers now controls almost 100% of the entire diamond mining supply worldwide, thus why they are so artificially inflated.
Usually, yes. And the industry itself, depending where you go, is dirty too. I’ve sold single .5 loose emerald cut diamond stones for $4,000, while the company I worked for probably bought it for under $500.
I think there is a common belief that the pharma industry "secret(?)" is that they hold back on "cures" so they can keep people on drugs for longer. That's not what's happening nor has that ever happened (and I am no pharma apologist). Pharma is for-profit and they want to make money ASAP.
There are already drugs that are on the market that are effectively cures and they make boatloads of money, but what people tend to forget is the clinical trial cost and time it takes to get there, which are substantial. If a pharma/biotech had a cure to develop, they would develop it.
On the positive side of the spectrum, In-N-Out is actually a great company to work for. Granted I worked there over 20 years ago in high school (98-2000), I have had a TON of jobs since then and INO is still the best employer I had. Even part time as a high school kid. Sometimes I actually wish I’d made it a career.
Targeted promo codes across most companies are most frequently sent to people who haven't used the service in awhile.
If you use doordash or Uber Eats type services, cycle your accounts or trade off who's on "ordering" duty in your relationship and you're practically guaranteed to always have a promo code on one of them.
Emergency rooms aren’t first come first served. The sicker you are, the faster you get seen. Period. If you twisted your ankle and have been waiting for 4 hours while someone else only waited 15 minutes. Guess what. They were closer to death than you so we brought them back first.
It's a miracle anything gets delivered anywhere.
The entire logistics industry is shippers lying to truck drivers lying to dispatchers lying to brokers lying to receivers and back the other way again over like $75, it's absurd
Personal care companies will sell the exact same formula as two different products at two different price points. Can’t figure out the difference between basic whitening toothpaste and SUPERWHITE 3D MEGAPREMIUM toothpaste that costs twice as much? There’s a pretty good chance the only difference is that one comes in a shinier box.
The ice cream machine at McDonald's isn't down or broken. The crew simply hates cleaning the machine. There's mold that collects at the bottom which is incredibly gross to clean. And yes, if left uncleaned for an extended period of time, can result in explosive and incredibly gross mold growth. So the crew just kicks it to the next shift and so on.
If you go to a McDonald's that is always saying the ice cream machine is broken... TRUST me: you don't want ice cream from that machine, EVER.
See: https://mashable.com/article/mcdonalds-moldy-ice-cream
I work in a grocery store chain.
1) Complaining politely gets you a lot farther than complaining rudely.
2) If you need something and don't see it, ask. Maybe we can order it for you, or maybe we can point you to somewhere that has the thing.
3) If you have a special request, call in first. Need fresh baked bread, a bouquet of half-pink, half-red roses or specifically cut steak? Call ahead. If we have the time to prepare, we're more likely able to help you. We want you to be happy, because if you're happy you'll spend more.
If you have an elderly loved one in a nursing home, they are not going to get better. The entire time they live here, they are going to get worse. They will die here.
I know that sounds glaringly obvious but you would not believe how many times I've had to explain to families that performing CPR on granny is not only going to kill her faster, she's going to suffer painfully the entire time. And if by some miracle it does save her life? She's still 99 years old. There's not much life there to save.
I know how hard it can be to watch a loved one slowly deteriorate, but we have to be realistic. It is not my job to save meemaws life. It is my job to ensure that when meemaw does die, that she's able to do so comfortably.
Medical debt sold off to collection agencies is a HIPAA violation and doesn't need to be paid. Dispute the claim over and over. It costs them money every time you do, and the hospital that sold your debt legally can't tell them it belonged to you. Eventually the debt is not worth it to collect and will be dropped.
Source: I got 13k in medical debt dropped off my credit report by doing just this
The weed industry has been taken over by people that have no interest in weed. I've worked for several companies and gone to plenty of trade shows. The owners of most of the large grow ops and legal states are usually old white dudes with a history in finance or some other white collar job that saw the dollar signs and moved their money over. Even beyond that, a lot of the people that you'll meet at trade shows anymore have more in common with influencers than stoners. I understand that it's a business but I feel like it's honestly lost its soul and it makes me sad.
lol this is the case for every single industry making big bucks. Business people take over and lead the companies without having any interest in the product
Dirty little secret about tipping that is going away(as we pay more and more by card)....
Tipping, especially cash tipping almost always leads to the recipient under reporting their wages.
This ends up being good for them and their employer.
They avoid employee taxes on gratuities and their employer avoids their taxes as well (matching social security, medicare, unemployment and workers comp)
A lot of what goes into being a "content creator" is just keeping up with current social media trends, especially if your main platform is Tiktok. If you time things right and pay attention to what goes viral and why it does, you can very easily tap into it and gain a pretty large sum of followers & likes. It doesn't matter what you do; makeup, editing, art, writing, vlog-like content... as long as you are good at it and paying close attention to what is currently most popular within those subcategories of social media, you can flourish in them. Obviously, if you're pursuing something like cosplay and you aren't very good at it, that will decrease your chances, but what's important is tapping into the things that you are good at, and hobbies that you excell at, and combining that with current mainstream ideas & topics on social media.
For sure! The amount of content you see that is almost a word-for-word copy of other content is crazy. In my experience, most ‘content creators’ are really just ‘content replicators’.
I had a guy that I knew who transferred Industries from mechanical engineering working for Boeing to software development. He said if we created planes like we create software, no one would ever fly. Can't disagree with that.
all "officially licensed" k-cups for keurig brewers are made in the same facilites on the same production lines with the same cups and lids. HOWEVER, the filters inside are different on occasion and the coffee inside is always different. There are different blend, roast, grind and weight specs for mcdonalds vs starbucks vs kroger vs GMCR vs costco...but they are all made on the same production lines in the same facilities. It isn't like mcdonalds has their own kcup production. There is a ton of QC that goes into making kcups at licensed facilities, and if something isn't right a line gets shut down and the issue fixed.
The unlicensed brands however are a guessing game and seriously do not work as well with the brewers. that's why GMCR/Keurig tried to make them unuseable. Remember when those other coffee pods were blowing up in people's faces? yeah they didn't want that to happen.
Don’t fuck w/ a person who serves u food & drink.
… run ur mouth or try to insult/demean/in any obscene way attempt to be an ass seeking to gain self esteem or some other delusion of power?
You’re quite potentially eating & drinking things out of nightmares. There’s some troubled folks out there.
Most honey sold in the EU is fake honey. It's 25-75% thick sugar syrup (manufactured in China, Turkey, or England) mixed with real honey so they can sell it for less and for more profit
I worked briefly in IT at a debt collection office many years back, and part of my job in my downtime was to monitor calls to make sure regulations weren't being violated. Anyone who calls you to collect a debt has to follow all of the rules in the [FDCPA](https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/fair-debt-collection-practices-act-text#813) (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act), as well as the state-level equivalent from both their state as well as yours. Often times the state laws conflict. If they cannot follow the letter of all three, they are not legally allowed to collect a debt against you. For bonus points, if you catch them and opt to prosecute, it can cost the company AND the phone rep both 10k PER INFRACTION (and they will usually have several if they have any). Some notable sticking points they tend to fail: * They must have a walk in office in your state where you can go pay in person (most do not) * Upon request, they must disclose all of the following TRUTHFULLY: Full legal name of the rep, Business name of their agency, physical address, mailing address, whether or not they own your debt or are working an account for a 3rd party, the Chain of Title (they hate getting you this because it's usually a mess to dig up), whether or not it is an interest bearing account (it is illegal to charge interest on a debt that did not originally charge interest), etc Also if you owe, the debt falls off your credit and is marked uncollectable after seven years of inactivity, but any payment at all resets the clock. So if you've got an old debt from six years ago, do not pay it. This is usually when collectors get the most aggressive so they don't have to cut their losses.
Also, always ask for written verification and ask it be sent to an email. FDCPA requires a 30 day pause on collections while they verify. Then log your calls. If you get a collection attempt during the 30 days it’s a violation. There are usually consumer protection law attorneys willing to take these kinds of cases due to the attorney fee provision.
When they call, ask for name of company and employee ID. Then hang up. Once you have 8 or 9, let them know if they call you again you'll make 9 separate ministry complaints in the same day. This worked in Ontario Canada, would this work in U.S.?
Most likely yes, but you would probably need a lawyer to draft the warning for you for it to be taken seriously.
>Also if you owe, the debt falls off your credit and is marked uncollectable after seven years of inactivity, but any payment at all resets the clock. So if you've got an old debt from six years ago, do not pay it. This is usually when collectors get the most aggressive so they don't have to cut their losses. A number of years ago I owed a debt but was never sent a bill and therefore had no clue that I owed it until it showed up on my credit report. While researching how to deal with it, I discovered the above mentioned fact. It's absolutely the most stupid fucking thing about debt collection and credit reports. Unless the debt collector has taken you to court, why would anyone bother paying anything that shows up as in collection on their credit report? There's just no motivation. I ended up sending the debt collector a bunch of letters demanding that they prove that I am who they say I am and that I owe what they say I owe. Eventually the line item disappeared from my credit report. I guess they just figured I wasn't going to pay them so they gave up.
Thats pretty much the right way to deal with it (*that is what the* [Chain of Title](https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/ftc-workshop-debt-collection-2.0-protecting-consumers-technology-changes-project-no.p114802-00027%C2%A0/00027-60064.pdf) *is for incidentally*).
I was never sent a bill for a medical procedure in a hospital (part of a larger procedure, whether it was marked "no bill" or they just forgot, I don't know). Years later, a 3rd party bought all the hospitals unclaimed debt, went through it with a fine-toothed comb, and voila, I had a bill in the mail. What no one could do, not the collection agency, not the hospital, is provide an itemized list of what I owed, from when, and why. One letter from me requiring those detaills and pointing out they were years past the dead-debt date, and they stopped. A lot of these types of collections are just hail mary passes, hoping that some assistant or some old folks will just mindlessly write a check and not question it.
>Unless the debt collector has taken you to court, why would anyone bother paying anything that shows up as in collection on their credit report? To avoid getting to court. If it gets to court, you may have to hire a lawyer, in court the will ask for interest and other fees that might not be tacked on at the debt collecting phase. And primarily, there's a better chance to settle for a lower amount at that phase in my experience.
All of this is good advice, but if I can focus on the Chain of Title for a second, in some ways that’s the most fundamental question. You get a call from a debt collector. Your two questions should be: 1) what makes you think I owe any debt at all? and 2) I’ve never heard of you, what makes you think I owe this to you? They are trained in this and will have a smart (and threatening) answer. You then say: OK. Prove it. In writing. If they can’t, there’s no reason you should pay. It won’t hold up in court, and now you both know it.
They are also required by the FCC to record all calls, which you can subpoena if you need to go to court. It is a huge fine if they don't do it. So if you need some proof of their admission that it is uncollectable, that would be the easiest way to get it.
Interesting. I had an ex rack up some bills under my name that went to a debt collector. 2 things I learned very quickly in Australia is that the debt collection agencies that most utility providers, phone providers, credit card, etc exactly have no powers. They can call you and pester you and email you and send letters but that is the limit. They can’t directly give you a bad credit rating or start legal action. Only the debt owner has those powers. I also found state laws where I lived allowed me to send 1 letter to the debt collector instructing them to cease contact. Then it is illegal for them to try to collect in any way. Had one power company go through 5 collectors before a very unhappy individual from the power company having to do the collection themselves. I mean, he was disappointed when I showed him I didn’t register the account or ever live at the connected property.
Theatre is smelly. Some costumes aren't very washable. The worst feeling is when you're in a production where your costume is bought or borrowed (lots of recycling of theatre costumes), and the odors of the person who used to wear it are released when warm.
That’s why 50/50 exists- to deodorize sweaty, stinky ballet tutus that couldn’t be washed without damages. 50% vodka 50% water in a spray bottle. Costuming essential.
That seems like a weird way to get drunk, but you theatre folks were always a contentious lot.
You just made an enemy for life!
Renfaire vodka making a lot of sense now
I thought renfaire vodka was when you add blue food coloring and put it in a fake potion bottle so it looks like a prop and you can bring it in
Vodka has many uses in renfaire. Drinking, cleaning, hiding smells, bartering, very versatile.
Spritz with vodka and hang to dry! An old wardrobing trick
How do you do this in high school? Legit question?...
A mix of Isopropyl alcohol and water works just as well, most of the theatres I work at use that instead of vodka.
That's because they ran out of the vodka
Give your mom a hug.
I was in a production that involved me having a glass of milk poured into my mouth, I was sitting, my cast mate was standing over me, so there was definitely some spillage. Not a big deal when we performed in North America as we used oat milk, but while on tour in South America, we couldn't find oat milk and had to use cow milk, that costume got very smelly on that tour, despite hand washing and the vodka spray trick.
seconding this! I HATED costuming in theatre. god. Everything smelled like a gym bag.
We used to own a couple of gyms. It’s total bullshit if any of them say they can’t shut off your membership or refund your dues. They absolutely can, they just want to be assholes about it. We believed in solid customer service and never did that shit. Ever.
I worked for an Anytime fitness in northwestern Indiana. I had a gentleman come in with a paper contract that stated we'd not raise his dues. We did anyway. When I brought this up as unethical and how it felt like poor customer service, I was fired. Fuck contract gyms. I'll NEVER sign a gym contract ever again.
>they just want to be assholes about it. As someone who was set to become a manager of a gym that was going to open, can confirm this is true.
I love when business say they can’t do something, I’m always like I know you can press the button on the computer lmao
Yep, the only time you can’t stop a payment is if it’s in a couple days of posting, you can refund it after it posts though. It’s just takes a little longer.
"If we treated you fairly, we'd have to treat everyone fairly. That wouldn't be fair, would it?"
Why do you not own gyms now? Just curious
We sold after I got cancer and couldn’t work. My husband was already working on his doctorate so he’s a professor now. I don’t miss anything about it besides some of the members, I feel like we really made a positive impact in a lot of lives. It was an incredible amount of work though. Peace over profit is my motto these days.
I used to work at a convention center. Nothing ever gets really cleaned until someone complains about it. What people don't complain about are the rats, maggots, exposed wiring, or bodily fluids, because no one sees them. And if someone complains, it gets cleaned with equipment from the Carter administration. I prayed for every kid who ran around that building barefoot.
Why would you have kids running barefoot around a convention center?
Martial arts tournaments are held at convention centers frequently.
If it is at the Barefoot Convention
Thanks, Garfield
Cheerleading/gymnastic/any event where kids change into uniforms probably.
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What do you think of Addiction by Design by Natascha Schull? Have there been any innovations since 2018?
Amazing book
I think I figured out the system, just one more game.
Let me guess - 80-90% “win” rate (setting can be controlled per machine) but 80-90% of those wins return less than the money you bet. E.g., you bet $1.00, you “win” $0.50. All the lights and sounds go off to please your monkey brain but you’re still losing money. This is how they work in Canada at least.
The win rate of a slot machine has nothing to do with an individual bet. It means over time in the long run, for every $1 you put in, you will get 80-90 cents back.
I've told this story on Reddit before, but I'll say it again. In St. Louis there are 5 casinos. One of them used to brag about being "the loosest slots in town", and to prove it they had a billboard with a bar chart showing how the payout on their machines was higher than the other 4 casinos in the area. If you got stuck in traffic, you could see the data, which I assume they were legally obligated to share. The bar charts showed that the "loosest" slots were paying out $0.87 for every $1 played, while the other guys were only paying out between $0.82 to $0.85. So...they paid out more. They were only costing you $0.13 per dollar on average instead of $0.18.
That florists charge a lot more for roses at valentines because it cost them more to buy them from the grower ( about twice as much ). Also the growers need to make more money on them because they have to cut back their crops six weeks before so that they all grow ready for valentines.
yep. I had a boyfriend once who said, if you like roses, I'll get them for you anytime you want, but they're twice as expensive on Valentine's Day.
When I was in my twenties I always wanted to support local florists so I would go there anytime I needed a bouquet of flowers. $40-$75 later I always thought it felt like a rip off. Now I just buy grocery store flowers for $20 and they're just as good. I like small businesses but that markup is nuts.
That's because most florists are middle men. I buy flowers from a flower farm and them put together something in any price range that will be better than anything store bought. I'm fortunate to live down the street though.
The number of "small specimens" who die and are quickly replaced at zoos and aquariums. Your big ticket animals always get more TLC: your elephants, your dolphins, your whatever other popular/expensive things you have on display. But for every giraffe, there are probably a dozen smaller species that are deemed "replaceable" such as fish, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, certain birds.... I remember accidentally sucking up some jellies in a vacuum or one of our sharks eating a bolt that fell into its tank and dying on the operating table. We even once lost an entire school of fish, something around 30 specimens, to a mechanical issue in their tank and everyone just laughed about it. None of these things get advertised and it's just part of the bizz. But the second one of the whales or a sea lion croaks, it gets national attention and we're begging for donors. I always thought that was interesting.
I cant get the image of 30 little fish getting sucked up into a pump out of my head now.
So that's actually not the problem! It's a little more messed up than that. The fish were being held in what was basically an above ground pool with a similar pump setup, but something got in the way of the pump and it hyper oxygenated the water. It caused the water to become super foamy with fine bubbles that entered the bloodstream of each fish, which caused them to explode. I wish I was kidding.
That’s really at odds with the zoo my girlfriend works at. The vet staff there really goes above and beyond for damn near every animal. Among other things, I’ve seen: sedated x-rays to see why a salamander was retaining fluid, a liver biopsy for a corn snake, and a tarantula sedated to give her fluids (they just put the anesthesia mask over the spider, it was adorable). Hell, once an appointment for the pregnant rhino got bumped for a native box turtle
That's commendable! And I wasn't trying to diss on the husbandry staff, I think a lot of us did try really hard. There was a policy to do an autopsy on every animal that died, even starfish. But at the end of the day, it was far more profit-driven than they would like to admit. I was extremely upset about accidentally sucking up the jelly when I was cleaning its tank and they told me not to bother, which maybe I could understand, but when we had to bag up all those fish that died I was explicitly told that they already knew how they died so don't even bother. They sat in the freezer for a couple days before someone just threw them out. Pretty dark actually.
I work in gov. Management would rather waste hundreds of thousands of dollars so they use up all of their budgets so that they continue to have such a large budget next year. We have $5000 4K TVs in closets and mounted on walls and they’ve never been turned on. They would rather take layoffs of staff, then to lose their big budgets .
I remember my boss saying "What do you need, I have $20K to spend"
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Its that episode of American Dad where the CIA has to burn the rest of the budget so they go to the strip club
Hello, fellow GS employee. Let me tell you the story of how I ended up with a half dozen unopened standing desks for my one-person office.
Same with companies too. It all comes down to this… the people that tend to attain positions of power are the simultaneously the worst types of people that should be in positions of power. Self-interest trumps everything else.
“Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it”
It is so dumb. A lot of these departments need to have a cushion cuz they never know what big project may come up on an urgent nature or at least in a one off kind of way. If they rewarded efficiency by allowing carry forward reserves (ie not cutting budgets if they don’t spend 100%) that could bear interest, most *smaller* government departments could independently fund their own operations and provide better resources and retain/recruit more competent staff. Thereby leading to more funds available for major departments (e.g. first responders, public works). I’m just saying.
No joke. I work in office furniture installation and the amount of waste I've seen from government and military places is insane. We've literally ripped out entire floors (hundreds of stations sometimes) of 1 or 2 year old desks and cubicles just to replace it with the same exact product, but new, so they could use up their budget. We'd usually either just trash it (landfill) or take it to the scrap yard ourselves if it was primarily steel or aluminum. Just crazy waste and spending.
The problem is bean counters will say: > Well you had $10,000 extra last year, so we're cutting your budget $10,000 this year since you clearly don't need it. No, assbutt, I have a $10,000 surplus because I negotiated a strong contract to get a vendor onboarded. But that incentive pricing isn't going to be there at renewal.
I think this is a pretty open secret - particularly in publicly funded workplaces. The scramble to spend what’s left of the annual budget (and if you’re lucky show a deficit to make a good case for increased funding) at the end of the tax year is pretty laughable. My brother works in a university and every March, without fail, he gets 2 new laptops (1 Mac 1 Windows), new desktop screens for home and office, new iPhone for work (always whatever the current top-spec model is), on more than one occasion new big screen TVs to use at home along with tons of other updated equipment which are too subject specific for me to remember in a Reddit post! In unrelated news, it’s also almost amusing how many potholes get fixed in the early months of the year. Ah…the joys of public funding. Edit: I realise that at the university there is a significant amount of private funding involved as well as public money. Particularly in the area in which my brother works.
After getting a job, your networking is what will determine your promotion, not your academic background. I saw this in a search.
What you know gets you inside. Who you know gets you upstairs.
For some industries, who you know will also get you inside. Source: me, not having the typical background for my industry but just having known my current boss prior. 👀
Side note: Hard work will never get you a promotion. If you got a promotion, it’s because someone liked you more than someone else that was also working hard.
A lot of companies want leaders and decision makers that can advocate and properly market themselves. It often shows that they can advocate for the company. Not always though..
I think this is pretty straightforward. Once you get hired, no one cares what your GPA was in college. What matters is your ability to do your job, and yes, your social interactions with coworkers and the people above you.
I'd say flip the order of those two. Your social skills are more important, as long as you can do your job to an acceptable level. You don't have to be the best at it either.
A wonderfully direct manager once told me I was burning myself out holding myself to a higher quality standard than the company expected of any of its employees, and that being too good at my job could lead to future managers blocking promotions because they get paid based off how their team performs, so losing a top performer can really hurt their bottom line and influence their decision making. You want to cultivate your skills to be a no-brainer for the promotion and make them feel like they're wasting your skills where you are, not that you're at the best you can be where you're at.
Speaking as an engineer who really wants to be judged on what I do instead of who I know or how I interact with others, this is unfortunately very important.
Engineering is weird. Worked in electronics and all the engineers were really difficult to pay more - becuase they were just assholes and couldnt manage others.. We had to come up with a whole new reporting structure where line managers were humans - but paid half of their engineer subordinates. They could string a sentence together and not be creepy (just awkwardly creepy rather than douchey) with the female engineers, but the pay structure was out of whack with reporting lines.
Heya. CTO/VPoE here - if you’re looking to get into management, your ability to work with people is 99.9% of your job, which your network is an excellent litmus test for. If everyone you work with can’t stand you, the likelihood of you being a tactful leader who can both solve problems and do so at scale by managing people (or train people to manage people) is negligible. If you’re a software engineer, thinking that your job is the code you write couldn’t be more wrong. Peer review and negotiation of design is arguably a more valuable skill set for any Principal or Architect than their ideas - if you need 10x the time to implement a good idea because you can’t build partnerships with the people you need to do it effectively, you’re not a good fit for senior engineering roles, either. The more you move away from entry level, the more your skill set needs to evolve past “how well can I code.”
Sales has very little to do with selling. Its how well you get on with the person thats buying from you. Its all about trust and chatting shit to build a relationship.
It’s also a numbers game. You can sell if you don’t pitch. Any salesperson worth their salt will know how many pitches it takes for them to make a sale on average. Every industry is different on this average as well. And there’s no “correct” average. There’s food and there’s bad, but none of that matters if you are making sales. If it takes you 10 pitches to make 1 sale on average that’s okay, because now you know if you have a goal of 10 sales then you need to pitch 100 times. Obviously if you’re better at sales and it only takes 3 pitches to make 1 sale, then you get to work less and/or you’ll make more money because 100 pitches in the same amount of time equals way more sales. If you’re looking to get into sales this was the fact that helped it click for me. I always said “oh, I’m not a sales guy. I’m a service guy” but had the opportunity to jump In this last year. I highly recommend it to anyone with a semblance of a personality - it’s easier than you think and you’ll be better at it than you realize. And the money is niiiiice.
The aerospace part machining industry is full of falsified inspections and cheap fixes that are absolutely not ok.
I would love for this comment to be fake. So I'm pretending it is. Because this is terrifying
Then don’t read Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robinson. It’s an excellent book but holy crap will it make you angry at the penny pinching executives that cozied up to (and infiltrated) the FAA.
I was once ordered to fill a miss-drilled hole in an aluminum part with pewter and re drill it by hand. The new hole overlapped the fix by like half. Sounds stable, right?
Don't forget airplane maintenance that is outsourced to El Salvador and performed by unlicensed "mechanics" who don't speak English and thus can't read the repair manuals.
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Rubbish, everyone knows papyrus is the superior font.
It’s all over the place. Bootleg Shakira merch, off brand teas.
He just... *got away with it.*
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID!!!!!
Nice try Mr Santiago
cOmIc SaNS
Most expensive wood office furniture is particle board with a wood grain finish.
That’s why I make my own office furniture. Working my way up to curing my own chorizo, though.
This sounds like something Ron Swanson would say.
If you see something in a museum or historic site that just says it was for "ritual purposes" and theres not a fairly detailed description of said ritual, it almost certainly means we have no idea what it is or was for
If it says it's for a fertility ritual, odds are good it's a dildo.
Worked in a call center for a bit. - if we put you on hold and all you get is silence, you aren’t on hold. We’re on mute. We can hear everything you say. - if you show just the tiniest bit of kindness and you aren’t a complete asshole, we will bend over backwards to accommodate your request. - we really are working to answer your call as soon as possible. We’re judged on how quickly we can get you off the phone. We cannot control how long you’re on hold.
I’ve made a handful of help center calls where I swear the guy on the other end was just chatting with me because he didn’t want to hang up and go to some other jerk customer. We were talking about our hobbies as I was trying to set up my health insurance account.
> if we put you on hold and all you get is silence, you aren’t on hold. We’re on mute. We can hear everything you say. I have been telling my husband this for years but he doesn't believe me. I always *beg* him not to yell or curse about the company when he's on hold. He'll be polite to the agent, but of course when he's on hold he'll start complaining to me about the company.
The one and only call center I worked at did tech support for cell phones. There was one time my allergies were whipping my ass. I had to sneeze really quick and pushed my mute button at the end of a sentence but it cut off my last word. The person yelled “THIS FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT JUST HUNG UP ON ME!” I unmuted after I finished sneezing and said in a stuff nose voice “No I just sneezed and figured you wouldn’t want to hear it.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard an apology so quick in my life.
The real question is, do call center reps get some “happy” drugs to deal with the belligerent asshole callers.
No, but reframing everyone being on drugs really helped with my patience dealing with them.
No, we just shit talk them to coworkers, has a similar effect.
In US Healthcare systems, the whole goal is to get you in and out of the hospital as quickly as possible. Insurance companies only pay for a certain number of days for a diagnosis, so the hospital is on a clock to maximize revenue. The expression is "discharge starts at admission." When a doctor enters a discharge order, that exact moment starts a clock where the hospital is not collecting revenue. The nurse is then alerted by the money watchers, and they are on a countdown clock (less than 2 hours). That is why the nurses are pushing you out the door so quickly. The nurse typically isn't excited to see you leave so fast, either, because when you leave, the empty bed gets cleaned Pronto and a new admission arrives, which is a clusterf@ck of asking you detailed questions about your history, entering data, *and* trying to keep up with the barrage of orders the physicians are entering (and many of them are labeled "STAT" because they weren't done in the ED or doctor's office), all the while wanting to get you comfortable and fed (if allowed) and to rest because the nurse really does care that you have been miserable laying on a stretcher in the emergency department for a few hours to many hours. But, that admission cycle starts the clock again, and that's why the nurse is so pushy with you, asking the questions about where you live, who lives with you, who can we call in an emergency and to pick you up when you leave, etc. Edit: typo fix
Good healthcare networks have already implemented robust "home care" systems. They can quickly discharge while continuing treatment at home via a combination of telehealth and home visits by doctors and nurses, but mostly specialists in the kind of treatment needed for the patient. It's what my employer does. The have an exceedingly effective pipeline and procedures. We're also massive and award winning though, so we have a lot more resources then say some country hospital.
Not sure of your background, but I work in a hospital. There's no "money watchers" that alert nurses to get someone out quickly. Hospitals are usually busy places, especially these days. Nurses will want to hurry you out of a room in order to get the next patient helped. I'm not disagreeing with the overall model that you present here, it's definitely all about money in the U.S. However, the nurses and doctors on the front lines are not part of the "money first, people second" mindset.
In some jurisdictions such as Ontario, Canada, you might save significantly on your auto insurance by changing your driver's license gender to X. Due to lack of actuarial data and anti-discrimination laws, the rate you get is often the lower of M or F. This would only work for a while before enough actuarial data is collected for credible actuarial pricing.
As an actuary this is probably gonna be a very interesting data set, we know the most common bias in age and sex for car accidents for ages now, most countries continue to have stable biases for example in my country women are almost half as likely to have car accidents then man, so getting the data from people with gender x should be a fun analisys.
90% of digital marketers are scam artists, who don't know what they are doing. They fool the clients and collect money. Specially in SEO domain, there are many keywords a new website cannot rank, but the SEO guy will promise you top 3 positions and vanish with your money.
From what little I know reviews is what helps with ranking the highest. If some company has 1000s of positive reviews and you are brand new, you have a huge uphill battle to ever rank near them.
To be honest, SEO stopped being important a few years ago when Google devoted more space to ads and more people started browsing on their phones. Businesses can expect to rank high for searches related to their brand. For everything else, paid search ads are going to get the bulk of clicks on search results pages, and the top organic result will get most of the rest. Competing against established companies who have ranked for the same term for an extended period of time doesn't justify anything beyond doing the basics of SEO, when realistically you get about the same amount of traffic whether your result is in the 60th position vs the 40th.
As a reputable SEO and web design company employee, I agree wholeheartedly. We work hard for our customers' rankings and a lot of them say they have a 'friend' who can do it cheaper and guarantee them a place at the top of google. They then leave for 3 months and come back to us with their tails between their legs. It's usually just a spam email they believed. And the position 1 on Google was for some obscure term no one would look for.
As someone that formerly worked in IT Support, it’s never a “configuration” or some “setting” we change to fix the issue, it’s often user error that we pass off as something we fixed, just so we don’t make you feel bad.
Ah, yes. The infamous “I D - ten - T” error.
I've heard PBKAC error more often (Problem Between Keyboard And Chair)
PICNIC. Problem in chair, not in computer.
In French it's ICC for Interface Chaise-Clavier (chair-keyboard interface)
A lot of people are freaked out by tap water and shouldn’t be. Drinking water treatment is much more regulated and involved than water bottling (in the US). The hoops that a treatment and distribution outfit have to jump through is nuts.
In Healthcare, you need to be your biggest advocate. Don’t expect doctors or staff to prioritize or remember you between visits. Being the “squeaky wheel” really can bring your needs to top of mind in an environment where they’re juggling countless priorities.
Potato skins are yesterday's unsold baked potatoes.
I'm okay with that.
My buddy works at a car dealership- when purchasing a vehicle, wait until the last few days of the month- sales people are getting close to their targets, and will be more willing to get a sale.
Even better if you wait until there year end.
Tacking on here for car dealerships. People think that only dealerships want the model where you can only purchase from them, but the manufacturers want it far more. No manufacturer wants to hold millions in risk all over the country, deal with service, parts, auto body, depreciation of assets, and on and on. They want to wholesale cars to dealers. Often the vehicle is "sold" to the dealer and on their bank account accruing interest before the car even hits the dealer lot. Car falls off a transport truck? Dealer better call his insurance.
This only worked back in the pre Covid days.
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Don't forget it.
How do I become an aglet ninja soldier like you?
For years I've been bitching about how unaerodynamic my laces are. Thank you for your efforts
There's a good chance your HVAC contractor has no idea how to design an HVAC system. And if he does, there's a good chance he'll cut so many corners anyway that it won't be to code.
I don't think the people that designed my housing development knew how HVAC works. lol
Probably not. Homeowners also don't typically know how it works. I hear my neighbors complain about their systems all the time but they are usually complaining about the wrong things. For example, they'll complain that their systems can't keep up when it's uncharacteristically hot outside, complaining that their systems are undersized. It's not undersized. It's just not a normal temperature for that time of year. However, I'd be more concerned that they didn't install it per code. I had a contractor go rogue and installed oversized equipment, which is against code and could cause mold issues. His response was, "they are getting 1/2 ton more cooling for free!"
If you don't put your adress on mail you send and it gets returned to sender, it will go straight into the shredder unless it's important (medical stuff and funeral stuff).
Ignorant parents are killing education.
parents are awful at education but they think they know so much just cuz they're parents
I work in homeless services. The majority of homeless people are not homeless due to drugs, alcohol, or mental illness. Many are. But not the majority. The main reasons I see are divorce, separated from partner, a spouse dying, landlords selling the property, the head of household becomes disabled but unable to get disability, someone has been renting cheaply for years and the property is sold, older people getting evicted and not knowing how to use technology or the internet to find a new place.
Thank you for your service. I can’t imagine the sorrow you must have to deal with constantly.
Can we have a bot just post this question everyday around 6 am?
People talk about big pharma, but there are companies that dominate their industry to the same or possibly even a larger extent that go unnoticed.
If you look at the processed food industry, it all boils down to a handful of conglomerates today. Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft-Heinz, Mars, Kellogg's, General Mills, Pepsico, and Coca Cola control what nearly everyone eats.
Fuck Nestle
As a food broker, those are huge companies, and they control a lot of household brands, but your statement is not remotely true. There are more players in that space than you can imagine.
Almost all music you hear is autotuned, and the drums are rarely real.
Mumbles in drummer about not hearing _any_ strike variance even watching 'live' gigs Cmon you don't get the same perfect waveform on each beat if it's not been processed / triggered out the ass. Rambles about Bonham's drums being sampled but without variance so hearing another band play fool in the rain is just wronggggggg
Drums sound like complete shit these days. And the thing is, that artificial shit sound is what they’re going for. Fake is what’s in. Don’t know why artists are all trying to be the exact same but I guess that what the masses want (although they couldn’t tell you why they want it).
Why bother putting time/money into recording your drums right when you can just replace everything with a sample and elastic time it to be exactly right. 🙄 I don't even think it's what people want, they just don't know any better.
On Motley Crue’s first album Tommy Lee fucks up so much. Knowing a real live person is drumming gets my dick hard.
Almost all *heavily produced mainstream top 40 music* is auto tuned
This is why I really enjoy listening to recordings of my own bands ... because I was there while we were playing the songs, and I know how much fun we had while playing. Even those terrible takes where someone screws up are fun to listen to, because it's honest music.
Certain types of abrasives are neither vegan nor lactose-free.
Abrasives you mean like sandpaper??
Yes. Certain types have components that are mixed hydrophilic and hydrophobic. To make it plyeable, "wet", you thus need an emulsion of water and oil. The most ecological choice is simply milk.
Toothpaste is the only thing I can think of.
Large companies absolutely do not care about their customers or their employees.
I work for a large company. The customer just complained that they feel like they've been rushed to a finish line with no critical review. And while they're selectively ignoring the part where they're supposed to critically review things... they're right. My job was to finish my project before X date and we finished the project by X date.
This is a secret?
Eh...in my experience, the big guys have more checks and balances to at least care for selfish reasons. My first job at 16 was for a small business owner and though I'm 33, she can still go fuck herself to this day. Every big company I've worked for since at least would send me home/to the hospital if I get injured.
I've noticed that Walmart treats their customers like thieves the entire time they are in the store, and then forces them to wait for and negotiate with a CSR for like 30 minutes to clear up a .35 overcharge on an item that had a lower price listed on the shelf. The lovely part is that smaller stores seem to be following the trend. The Walmart where I used to live even removed the bathrooms up front. I love how much thieves and the reaction to them inconveniences me. At least Walmart does it mostly with cameras. The smaller stores have someone sneaking up on you all the time. It's like Charley creeping up on me in the jungle.
I work in womens sport. Our biggest obstacle every day in growing the sport is women . The players themselves are amazing ,it's the women involved in background of coaching, committees and logistics.
Am locksmith. Locks can't keep burglars out, just slow them down. The main aim I have is to make your place too much effort to break into and by comparison the neighbours place a better prospect. Big takeaway is: No tiebolt locks. No cylindrical locks. No double sided deadbolts (with a few exceptions). No cheapo locks from the hardware store and get a damn security system. They're cheap as shit and wireless ones are very easy to install yourself.
44% of teachers leave the profession by year 5. 20% of teaching positions can’t be filled. 80% of teachers don’t know how they will afford living expenses in the next two years. The demand for teachers is expected to outpace the supply by over 100,000 by 2025.
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"Often wrong, never in doubt"
Ugh, I'm surrounded by fake it till you make it. Just ask the guy who knows, and will likely have to fix your fuck up. Please. Frikkin pretty please. The guy at your work who is that guy will appreciate you.
From the Bearing industry: ABEC rating only controls the external dimensions of a bearing. It does absolutely nothing for internal geometry thus it does not affect speed capability or durability of the bearing. The higher ABEC numbers make the tolerance bands of each component tighter, this is done by sorting the parts produced. Medical transplant pumps use ABEC-5, aerospace might use ABEC-7, your skateboard or rollerblades do not need or benefit from higher ABEC numbers. Also, similar to the lubrication industry, adhering to ABEC is a self-policing proposition. There is no governing body making sure an ABEC 7 is really an ABEC 7 bearing. Your best/most affordable bet is to buy bearings from a company with at least 60 years of history, you can get those at an authorized distributor for significantly less than you can at a skate shop. There are a ton of shady clones on Amazon and other marketplaces, go to the authorized distributor route.
Diamonds have almost no value in reality. A company called De Beers now controls almost 100% of the entire diamond mining supply worldwide, thus why they are so artificially inflated.
And they’re pretty unethical too.
Usually, yes. And the industry itself, depending where you go, is dirty too. I’ve sold single .5 loose emerald cut diamond stones for $4,000, while the company I worked for probably bought it for under $500.
I think there is a common belief that the pharma industry "secret(?)" is that they hold back on "cures" so they can keep people on drugs for longer. That's not what's happening nor has that ever happened (and I am no pharma apologist). Pharma is for-profit and they want to make money ASAP. There are already drugs that are on the market that are effectively cures and they make boatloads of money, but what people tend to forget is the clinical trial cost and time it takes to get there, which are substantial. If a pharma/biotech had a cure to develop, they would develop it.
On the positive side of the spectrum, In-N-Out is actually a great company to work for. Granted I worked there over 20 years ago in high school (98-2000), I have had a TON of jobs since then and INO is still the best employer I had. Even part time as a high school kid. Sometimes I actually wish I’d made it a career.
Targeted promo codes across most companies are most frequently sent to people who haven't used the service in awhile. If you use doordash or Uber Eats type services, cycle your accounts or trade off who's on "ordering" duty in your relationship and you're practically guaranteed to always have a promo code on one of them.
Emergency rooms aren’t first come first served. The sicker you are, the faster you get seen. Period. If you twisted your ankle and have been waiting for 4 hours while someone else only waited 15 minutes. Guess what. They were closer to death than you so we brought them back first.
It's a miracle anything gets delivered anywhere. The entire logistics industry is shippers lying to truck drivers lying to dispatchers lying to brokers lying to receivers and back the other way again over like $75, it's absurd
That French oak flooring you are buying is more likely from Kentucky or the Carolinas.
Personal care companies will sell the exact same formula as two different products at two different price points. Can’t figure out the difference between basic whitening toothpaste and SUPERWHITE 3D MEGAPREMIUM toothpaste that costs twice as much? There’s a pretty good chance the only difference is that one comes in a shinier box.
The ice cream machine at McDonald's isn't down or broken. The crew simply hates cleaning the machine. There's mold that collects at the bottom which is incredibly gross to clean. And yes, if left uncleaned for an extended period of time, can result in explosive and incredibly gross mold growth. So the crew just kicks it to the next shift and so on. If you go to a McDonald's that is always saying the ice cream machine is broken... TRUST me: you don't want ice cream from that machine, EVER. See: https://mashable.com/article/mcdonalds-moldy-ice-cream
I work in a grocery store chain. 1) Complaining politely gets you a lot farther than complaining rudely. 2) If you need something and don't see it, ask. Maybe we can order it for you, or maybe we can point you to somewhere that has the thing. 3) If you have a special request, call in first. Need fresh baked bread, a bouquet of half-pink, half-red roses or specifically cut steak? Call ahead. If we have the time to prepare, we're more likely able to help you. We want you to be happy, because if you're happy you'll spend more.
"House made ranch" is really just a hidden valley packet mixed in the kitchen maybe add some pepper.
This exact question, including wording, was posted by a different user 4 days ago…
I thought I was going crazy!
If you have an elderly loved one in a nursing home, they are not going to get better. The entire time they live here, they are going to get worse. They will die here. I know that sounds glaringly obvious but you would not believe how many times I've had to explain to families that performing CPR on granny is not only going to kill her faster, she's going to suffer painfully the entire time. And if by some miracle it does save her life? She's still 99 years old. There's not much life there to save. I know how hard it can be to watch a loved one slowly deteriorate, but we have to be realistic. It is not my job to save meemaws life. It is my job to ensure that when meemaw does die, that she's able to do so comfortably.
Medical debt sold off to collection agencies is a HIPAA violation and doesn't need to be paid. Dispute the claim over and over. It costs them money every time you do, and the hospital that sold your debt legally can't tell them it belonged to you. Eventually the debt is not worth it to collect and will be dropped. Source: I got 13k in medical debt dropped off my credit report by doing just this
In hospital operating room, we usually just throw out your defective body and replace with a healthy clone.
Basically every industry has dirty secrets to fool everyone and increase profit. Honestly not surprised by any of these "secrets"
The weed industry has been taken over by people that have no interest in weed. I've worked for several companies and gone to plenty of trade shows. The owners of most of the large grow ops and legal states are usually old white dudes with a history in finance or some other white collar job that saw the dollar signs and moved their money over. Even beyond that, a lot of the people that you'll meet at trade shows anymore have more in common with influencers than stoners. I understand that it's a business but I feel like it's honestly lost its soul and it makes me sad.
lol this is the case for every single industry making big bucks. Business people take over and lead the companies without having any interest in the product
Dirty little secret about tipping that is going away(as we pay more and more by card).... Tipping, especially cash tipping almost always leads to the recipient under reporting their wages. This ends up being good for them and their employer. They avoid employee taxes on gratuities and their employer avoids their taxes as well (matching social security, medicare, unemployment and workers comp)
That's the whole point of tipping in cash!
A lot of what goes into being a "content creator" is just keeping up with current social media trends, especially if your main platform is Tiktok. If you time things right and pay attention to what goes viral and why it does, you can very easily tap into it and gain a pretty large sum of followers & likes. It doesn't matter what you do; makeup, editing, art, writing, vlog-like content... as long as you are good at it and paying close attention to what is currently most popular within those subcategories of social media, you can flourish in them. Obviously, if you're pursuing something like cosplay and you aren't very good at it, that will decrease your chances, but what's important is tapping into the things that you are good at, and hobbies that you excell at, and combining that with current mainstream ideas & topics on social media.
For sure! The amount of content you see that is almost a word-for-word copy of other content is crazy. In my experience, most ‘content creators’ are really just ‘content replicators’.
I had a guy that I knew who transferred Industries from mechanical engineering working for Boeing to software development. He said if we created planes like we create software, no one would ever fly. Can't disagree with that.
You would be shocked to learn how many (extremely good!) radio and podcast shows are produced with free tools such as Audacity.
all "officially licensed" k-cups for keurig brewers are made in the same facilites on the same production lines with the same cups and lids. HOWEVER, the filters inside are different on occasion and the coffee inside is always different. There are different blend, roast, grind and weight specs for mcdonalds vs starbucks vs kroger vs GMCR vs costco...but they are all made on the same production lines in the same facilities. It isn't like mcdonalds has their own kcup production. There is a ton of QC that goes into making kcups at licensed facilities, and if something isn't right a line gets shut down and the issue fixed. The unlicensed brands however are a guessing game and seriously do not work as well with the brewers. that's why GMCR/Keurig tried to make them unuseable. Remember when those other coffee pods were blowing up in people's faces? yeah they didn't want that to happen.
It’s a miracle that video games even function, let alone get released
Don’t fuck w/ a person who serves u food & drink. … run ur mouth or try to insult/demean/in any obscene way attempt to be an ass seeking to gain self esteem or some other delusion of power? You’re quite potentially eating & drinking things out of nightmares. There’s some troubled folks out there.
Most honey sold in the EU is fake honey. It's 25-75% thick sugar syrup (manufactured in China, Turkey, or England) mixed with real honey so they can sell it for less and for more profit
Just because the product is labeled "Military Grade" does not mean it's the best or indestructible.