Viewing profile — surrealvortex

If I had to guess, probably because most people stop drinking coffee after around 7 pm so that they can actually get to sleep at a reasonable time, and it is not economical for the…

At least some of the 30% would go to back-end staff. The article I linked to presents a case where the cooks etc had a raise because of this.

I also don't understand tipping at food carts. Customers stand in a line to pay and get their food, and are also expected to tip (either via Square or through tip jars). Edit: the …

Unless everyone decides to kill tips all at once, this will never work out. No server will work for a fixed 20% increment when they have the potential to get a lot more than that, …

Load balancing strategies are also important. For a service that receives requests that take different amounts of effort to fulfill, weighted least conns is almost certainly better…

To supply a counter-point, I'm underweight, and I had sore wrists and lower back pain before I made my workspace ergonomic.

You get used to working in a dense workspace after a while. I think companies mainly like dense workspaces because it costs less, while justifying it as increasing collaboration. I…

I have a standing desk. So my monitor is visible to everyone in the area. Discourages me from doing anything other than work when I'm at work. It's not like someone is going to com…

You can join/ create a family plan. $15 for up to 6 people.

As a vegetarian teetotaler, I end up partially subsidizing most other people's meals. We do split checks evenly though (one of us pays), and use Splitwise to register that. It's ju…

Just one of a long list of arguments against the privatization of the prison system. There are very few things that should be in the exclusive purview of the government, and the pr…

Curious about the last part. How does that work? If they make small changes and get patents based on the new formula, won't other companies be allowed to use the original formula? …

I didn't take a position one way or the other in my comment. But if anything, I definitely did not support the company. I was more concerned about the billions of people in other c…

Well, my point was that if everyone decided to source it through India, they will no longer sell anything for $84k. Even if 10% of people did that, their profits will slip enough f…

Most of the criticism against drug companies is that while they invest x for R&D and actual manufacturing, they earn back at least 100*x in profits. I don't think there are many ot…

I'm conflicted about this article. On the one hand, the pharmaceutical companies gouging ordinary Americans is abominable. Doing something to circumvent their greed is something to…

> "Dot, a hockey-puckish satellite, extends the range of an Echo or Tap" No. The Dot is standalone, and is not a range-extender. I think Amazon's tactic of allowing only those peop…

Not entirely sure, but don't credit card companies charge a considerable minimum fee per transaction? I'm guessing the fee kicks in for each month. That'd be a significant marginal…

What? Trucks do have a bounded capacity. A truck cannot carry more than x kgs of packages or y liters of volume. Are you arguing against that? If Amazon had asked for a single truc…

That's just sad. I guess I can understand the motivation, though that doesn't justify anything. It's becoming very difficult to monetize online newspapers, and they are forced to r…

Um, if someone else cancels, they free up the resource (volume or weight or number of packages). This allows some other package to use the resource. This essentially makes it non-s…

Or maybe the transportation resource Amazon had to use to ship later in the day had some cancelations? It's impossible to build a distributed system that has fully consistent resul…