pacificenigma
1. Texted PIN to get into garage didn't work. After 5 minutes just tailed someone else through the door.
2. Locker rejected non-Euro drivers license. Call to contact centre overcame it.
3. "Prefilled" customer details were all wrong and didn't match confirmation email. So 10 minutes to retype them.
4. Exit boom gate wouldn't open. Garage said to call hire company. Hire company said they cannot open it. 3-way call resulted in garage employee begrudgingly pressing a button to remotely open it.
Not to single out Hertz, last week we returned an Avis car to the reservation specified location at the correct time (10 pm), but a sign there stated the key drop was "permanently closed" and to deliver it 5 km away. We had an overnight train to catch so were forced to urgently do so and incur the return taxi fare.
I'm unsure how far society can keep shoving incompetent automation down peoples' throats. I understand that people generally want to save money, but I think many want high-impact experiences (like 3 kids + 2 adults + transport mode changes) to go smoothly enough they will happily a little pay more to derisk it.
While the QSuites and the cabin crew are nice, you rarely get QSuites in reality. But you always get a stopover in Doha, and those stopovers generally include business lounges so busy you can rarely get a shower with a < 3 hour stopover, rarely get use of an airway for boarding (even at destination airports with numerous available, eg Stockholm), and you sit in the premium bus for 30+ minutes after "boarding" commenced waiting for other passengers (with dusty, fuel fume filled, unairconditioned Doha airport air).
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/071616/history...
We use a mutual bank for most of our transactional banking. We have several companies, trusts and superannuation (think IRA) accounts there.
My wife and I also have a joint account at a commercial bank. This is solely used for personal purchases on a debit card. The account has no international fees, which is unusual for Australia.
We use Ledger CLI to automatically ingest all transactions each day. I wrote a scraper for the mutual bank and commercial bank (needed to OCR the PIN pads they like to jumble around). This gives us great visibility into all expenditure and origins of funds. My wife and I get a daily email with PDF attachments for our various entities.
We use Interactive Brokers for most investments, along with IG Markets to mitigate some counterparty risk. We've mostly retired (thanks to a startup) so most of our wealth is held in there. I use IB's FTP delivery service to receive detailed daily account statements (with GPG encryption). I also use IB API to do some algo trading.
We also have some crypto with 5 different exchanges given we don't trust any of them so it's straight-forward counterparty risk management. These are also algo traded.
We avoid cash use because it doesn't auto-categorise into Ledger CLI. I wish we had more privacy but by spreading things around between the banks, brokers and exchanges no single institution has any real clue about us. Sure the government does, but they get that all the important info freely anyway via tax returns or simply asking nicely.
It's all reasonably automated, but I have to shuffle money around each quarter or so.
It does look simple, but I spent many years in the bulk materials handling industry and there are also rail receival stations, electromagnets to remove contaminants, belt weighing equipment (real time volume calculation), samplers, surge bins (with vibratory hoppers under them), stackers, reclaimers, yard machine anti-collision systems, stockpile impact detection systems and a vast array of PLCs, front end processors, and application-level logic to manage it all.
> When it breaks down the pressure to get it going is intense.
Yeah. When you get calls at 2 am as lightning struck a microwave which stopped a network connect which stopped a database replication which stopped a stockpile calculation which caused a yard machine boom collision you really know how much fun it is.
On the bright side this industry is safety obsessed and quality engineering focused, so cutting corners is neither expected nor tolerated.
> It also gives some insight into why as bushfires rage across the country fuelled by the highest ever recorded temperatures, it's somehow controversial to discuss climate change.
Agreed. Although there are plenty of other factors which can improve bushfire outcomes as illustrated by the national Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (of which most national fire agencies are members) research: https://www.bnhcrc.com.au/utilisation/overview.
- Is it a reasonable time expenditure relative to other priorities (an indie dev doing an MVP is quite different than a 20 person team at a bank)?
- Are the dependencies "large" (framework level) or "small" (tiny, focused library)?
- Can you rely on semantic versioning to give a clue as to upgrade cost?
- How long since you last upgraded (further behind means much more breakage)?
- Does the language / platform you use make it easy (ie do you need to synchronize native libraries as well)?
- Can you depend on your build system to reliably test the upgrade and report stability?
- Do you have higher-than-usual dependency requirements (security, compliance, risk reviews, license review, approvals)?
Having said all that, I upgrade our dependencies every month. It only takes a couple of hours and very rarely causes issues (maybe 1 in 6 monthly upgrades requires an extra hour to identify a regression in a newer version and adding a comment with an issue tracker link to pause upgrades of that dependency until it's fixed).
Email with Migadu and self-hosted beyond that.
Calendar and contacts with EteSync.
Search with DuckDuckGo.
Browsing with FireFox. I keep Chromium around to overcome the odd poorly-written web site.
Documents moved to LibreOffice.
Maps via Google Maps, but of minimal importance.
Chromecast on its own firewalled SSID and VLAN for streaming Netflix to a TV.
Voice assistants via Amazon Echos.
https://takeout.google.com/ was useful for extracting data.
Unfortunately wife and kids use GMail, Contacts and Calendar.
But then I'd use the moat GMail enjoys as a primary mail destination by statistically looking at the frequency an incoming email's metadata and content similarity has recently arrived at GMail as a whole, then moving suspicious arrivals into a progressive exposure pathway that tentatively delivers a small percent to known currently-active users (eg mobile GMail app open on screen and unlocked) and see what percentage are flagged as spam, archived or deleted. Then use that real time feedback to vary the delivery flow of remaining messages to inbox vs spam.
Personally I stopped working 10 years ago and have plenty of financial resources, but I still take the train or bus as much as possible, or if I must drive, walk a block to avoid paying for parking. It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with living the values that I care about and trying to communicate those to our kids.
There's more than one "system" out there. Millions of children attend schools where they prioritize dimensions other than simplistic mass testing (eg extra-curricular activities, sport, artistic, community service, compassion, spirituality).
A world where no consumer device works without the blue sky alignment of internet availability, vendor goodwill and security uneventfulness.
This is based on trends I've observed on most (but not all) new consumer devices I've purchased of late [1]:
* Requires internet for setup (always) and operation (usually)
* Only supports wifi (ethernet ports are rare, thus no easy VLAN option)
* Vendor mobile apps required (HTTP servers are crippled if available at all)
* Depends on MDNS / SSDP / proprietary multicast for discovery
* Requires a vendor user account (and rarely supports family access)
* Sends telemetry and updates firmware without any opt-in
* Service addresses are unconfigurable (eg NTP, DNS, MQTT)
* Documentation does not publish ingress or egress ports
The pendulum has swung too far toward plug and play (at the expense of reliability, security and privacy). Perhaps someday there will be an "ethical device" self-certification brand to promote those vendors trying to be more balanced.
In the meantime I mitigate using different SSIDs, VLANs and email accounts per vendor; relaying discovery protocols across IP subnets; logging traffic and denying by default; rewriting destination IPs for certain ports like DNS and NTP; local DNS to 127.0.0.1 attempts to call home; disabling options if given etc.
[1] Solar inverters (Enphase), house batteries (Sonnen), irrigation controllers (RainMachine), speech assistants (Amazon), amplifiers (Sony and Sonos), alarm panel (Paradox), EV (Tesla), SIP ATA (Cisco), home automation controller (Hubitat)
I read the quote, but as it was on a government web page discussing additional enforcement, I gathered they would have provided the most significant statistic to illustrate the safety criticality of such additional enforcement.
This seemed reasonable given that more than five years ago the NSW Centre for Road Safety was publicly stating mobile phone deaths are one of the "top five" causes of fatalities on NSW roads [4]. As such they have been aware of this factor and collecting significant causality statistics about it for an extended period.
Despite this they do not provide mobile phone death factors at all in their interactive tool [5] or any public reports that I could locate. The only public NSW mobile phone traffic death statistic that I could find was cited at [1]. If the government had more persuasive statistics than [1] (which they really should have given over five years of public assertions about the existence of such statistics) then they would have no hesitation publishing them at [1] or [5] or elsewhere.
> a significant number of those incidents caused in [2] and the general phenomenon of [3] is exacerbated by mobile phone use
Perhaps this is the case, but official NSW data on pedestrian trauma [6] does not reflect any mobile phone factors. The same document reports hundreds of pedestrian fatalities involving vehicles though.
In conclusion NSW's readily accessible official statistics reflect an annualised 2 mobile phone traffic deaths versus 54 pedestrian deaths over the same period. My comment simply argued focusing on pedestrian deaths would have been a better initial use of automated enforcement (and more importantly the education campaign and road sharing messages around it).
[4] https://www.drive.com.au/motor-news/phone-use-overtakes-not-... [5] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/statistics/interacti... [6] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/downloads/trauma-tre...
There were under 2 deaths per annum from mobile phone use in NSW according to Transport for NSW's own FAQ about this program [1].
With such a low attributed baseline for mobile phone implicated NSW driving deaths, it seems improbable that in the future there will be empirical evidence of improved safety outcomes due to this program.
An alternative for next-generation cameras would be focusing on the dozens of NSW pedestrian deaths every year [2] and in particular enforcement of the pedestrian right of way law [3].
As a frequent pedestrian I frequently encounter drivers unaware of (or ignoring) this right of way law. Camera enforcement would achieve a better ROI as the awareness campaign would motivate drivers to adopt a more charitable disposition toward all other types of road users (including cyclists) and help them understand a rule that is genuinely and widely misunderstood. It would also not require the same privacy intrusion as a camera engineered to photograph inside your car, and the empirical evidence would demonstrate fewer deaths (as drivers would be more aware of pedestrian's legal right to cross the road and would be more actively paying attention to this possibility).
[1] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/stayingsafe/mobileph... FAQ 14
[2] https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/newsroom-and-events/media-r...
[3] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/stayingsafe/pedestri...