epilogue
Meanwhile Qantas - a private company, who took over a billion AUD in government support during Covid are expected to pay the outgoing CEO over 20 million AUD in bonuses.
Having flown several times between Qatar and Australia in the last couple years, I don’t think I’ve had a single flight that wasn’t completely booked out. In comparison to the following legs to Europe which have been more like 75% full.
There is a real need for additional capacity on these routes (for those outside of Australia, the gulf countries, Hong Kong and Singapore are the most popular layover countries for Australians travelling to Europe, Africa and Asia due to their location) and the way I see it is that Qatar acknowledge that, tried to buy additional capacity and failing that have had to come up with some creative solutions to work around a government that values a sub-standard flag carriers profits over what’s best for the Australian consumer.
Giving the account owners enough time to contact the bank if the payment is unauthorised, but when the waiting period is up you can then choose to release the funds at a time that suits you (eg. for a car sale, when you hand over the keys) or you can choose to can the transaction returning the funds to your account.
Wishful thinking I know, given how much of a mess the instant payment system is at the moment. I had an account that supported PayID with Macquarie and tried to transfer money to another PayID account with Up bank and found that because one of the banks (Macquarie iirc) didn’t support whatever underlying payment system Up used (Osko possibly) I wasn’t able to use PayID and had to use regular EFT instead.
Of course you could ask the buyer to transfer the money and wait for it to clear before handing over the keys, but that just moves the uncomfortable and stressful situation to the other party (I wouldn’t want to transfer someone money and then have to wait a few days for it to clear before they handed me the keys) and doesn’t actually solve the underlying issue.
Having lived in the UK for a while I noticed how bank transfers there seemed to be instant regardless of the amount (just my experience, never did anything over a few thousand).
But I was stuck in the position of either asking for way to much cash that I would be comfortable having to then take into the bank (and probably hard to find a bank that even had that much to withdraw in the first place) or accept a bank cheque which while most people say it’s “as good as cash” I noticed certain banks like NAB have a disclaimer that they can cancel them if they are reported lost or stolen.
I ended up accepting the bank cheque on Friday afternoon, couldn’t deposit it till Monday and then had 3 nervous days of waiting for it to clear.
While PayID and Osko seem to be taking us in the right direction, the limits are still too restrictive for large in person transactions like this.
As long as you're not downloading copyrighted data there should be no issue with using the BT protocol on a company or academic network, providing their is no outright ban on the protocol in your network usage policy. The BT protocol itself actually lends itself quite well to large datasets such as what is hosted here due to its inbuilt error checking (so no more spending hours downloading a huge dataset only to find your connection did something silly for a second and corrupted the whole file) and can provide much faster download speeds on popular files due to the number of peers available, instead of a normal hosting arrangement which would likely provide slower speeds on popular files due to network congestion and file access speeds.
If their data is already clean enough for SQL queries to work reliably and they are familiar with the SQL syntax, why not look into things such as DMX in MSSQL to make predictions on what these customers are likely to want to buy. This solves the whole marketing breast pumps to a man who bought sneakers scenario, while it also providing more personalized recommendations.
If your current technique is to send an email about sneakers to recent sneaker purchasers, do you really thing they are in the market for another pair?
Sure, it might not make sense to implement a deep learning neural network just to send something like a semi-personal marketing email but their are so many varying levels of AI/ML that seem to get ignored in favor of the flavor of the month Tensorflow/IBM Watson/Whatever else. Quite frankly, the whole thing just comes across as a very closed minded rant from someone who isn't interested in exploring what new technologies are capable of.