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On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

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Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#231

I wish there were a rule against posting paywalled content here.

If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18356886 and marked it off-topic.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android I browse by default with Firefox Focus and only to use sessions like posting this response I copy the URL to chrome and make the post. Than I'll go back to Focus. It's crude but Firefox Focus beats all browsers privacy and responsiveness on Android imo.

Same. My one wish for Focus is that I could open another tab. Even just one more tab during an active session would make life easier.

You can open more than one tab with Focus. I did it accedentally a few times. The bin action button changes to a number if you have more than one tab open.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/open-new-tab-firefox-fo...

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#233
post #114
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume you're making a distinction between services from private businesses and services from the government, and I feel like there are also nearly equivalent succinct arguments for how terrible government services are for certain groups of people (particularly poor people and minorities). So, yes, you can call that a succinct argument against privatizing everything , but very few people actually advocate for that…

It seems a ridiculous opinion to say privatize everything , but I've seen more and more politicians in the US who support that, or at least that's what I hear when they talk about privatizing education, healthcare, and even the FAA. I agree that, as you point out, some government services are terrible for certain groups of people (poor and minorities), but I don't think that's an argument for privatization because at…

> but I've seen more and more politicians in the US who support that, or at least that's what I hear when they talk about privatizing education, healthcare, and even the FAA.

We're still losing the distinction between privatizing more things and privatizing everything. I'm not aware of any federal-level US politicians who want to privatize, say, the military.

> but I don't think that's an argument for privatization because at least we try to pretend we hold the government to those standards.

Personally, I'm not interested in the standards we pretend to hold the government accountable to. I'm interested in actual outcomes. If privatizing some service can vastly improve outcomes, then great, if government can do it, then great. Sure, there's the high school social studies explanation that governments are accountable to the people while corporations aren't, but in reality I think that varies vastly from one sector of society to another. Sometimes government accountability to the voting population seems to work, but sometimes it fails miserably. Sometimes corporate accountability from the market seems to work, but sometimes it fails miserably.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#234
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they link my identity to my browser They link your phone number to a session/user along with ad networks who have stored cookies on your machine and use predictive modeling to guess at who you are/what you do. It doesn't work on 90% of the HN crowd, people who block ads/disable javascript, or just don't do a lot of traditional "browsing", but yeah.

It doesn't work on 90% of the HN crowd Hahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhaha. No.

Please don't, regardless of the 'HN crowd'.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#235
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you aren't in the top tier, fly Southwest as much as you can. I do. All the same seats with minor differentiation possible. There are many reasons they have been the only airline to be profitable for decades, but having good service for everyone is definitelty one of the reasons.

Absolutely not. Not ever. Their service is fine, but the last thing I want to do is have to pay extra or race to checkin at the exact right time to get the right boarding group to stand in the right place to fight for a seat. I want my seat to be there, waiting for me, when I feel like getting on the plane. I don't even go to movie theaters that force me to have seat anxiety. I'm sure not gonna do it on an airline.

You prefer climbing over people and/or being climbed over? I like assigned seats, too, but they make me time anxious.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android I browse by default with Firefox Focus and only to use sessions like posting this response I copy the URL to chrome and make the post. Than I'll go back to Focus. It's crude but Firefox Focus beats all browsers privacy and responsiveness on Android imo.

Same. My one wish for Focus is that I could open another tab. Even just one more tab during an active session would make life easier.

you can, hold the link and click open in a new tab

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cheap seats have very low margins, oftentimes negative… so it just infeasible economically to give everyone good service. An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. They can’t exactly fly just 189/233rds of the plane.

Things are much more complicated than that. Ticket prices are often high shortly before a flight. That's because those tickets are usually bought by business travelers who don't want to wait and are willing to pay the higher fare. So it can make sense to have 5 empty seats if you sold a few more for a premium. There's a lot of math going into optimizing ticket prices.

And they can also backfill standby passengers or flight crews for other flights into those capacity gaps at the last minute if they still exist.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I'm quickly reaching a point where I want the default browser to work in Incognito mode, and the browser should only switch to regular mode when I explicitly whitelist the domain.

There are extensions like "Cookie AutoDelete" where you can explicitly whitelist what coookies are not supposed to be delete. I think it does not automatically clear localstorage, though. But if you combine this with a blocker extension to remove the usual suspects when it comes to tracking, you are mostly there already.

Firefox supports the whitelisting natively.

The only thing it doesn't have is a way to auto delete cookies without restarting (which expires session cookies, which is a native option).

That's how I use it, cookies default to session only and a few sites get saved across sessions.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#239
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume you're making a distinction between services from private businesses and services from the government, and I feel like there are also nearly equivalent succinct arguments for how terrible government services are for certain groups of people (particularly poor people and minorities). So, yes, you can call that a succinct argument against privatizing everything , but very few people actually advocate for that…

"I feel like there are also nearly equivalent succinct arguments for how terrible government services are for certain groups of people (particularly poor people and minorities)." Is that argument coming from the poor and the minorities, or from you?

I'm not making any such arguments from my personal experiences or from experiences that other people have relayed to me. But there is no shortage of studies showing vast outcome inequalities in government services. Two very obvious ones are education and the justice system.

The quickest study I could find from a Google search:

https://www.frbsf.org/community-development/files/CI_Summer2...

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#240
post #228
post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

You're not wrong, but I feel like they're chasing diminishing returns. Every other segment of the economy has shown us that people are willing to pay a premium (20%? 50%?) to be treated like a human and get a better service/product. On airlines, you have to pay 100% more just to get a refundable fare. 300% for premium economy (a slightly wider seat with slightly more legroom). 500% for business class. It's insane, an…

The price differences are not as stark as you say. Business class in particular has gotten quite cheap these days. In the past few months, I flew round-trip California to Beijing 3 times for $1,900 in business class. That's affordable to many people, and quite reasonable.

There are a lot of perks even when you don't get an upgrade. The intangibles (being taken care of when issues arise — I've received amazing service, even when the issues were my fault) are invaluable.

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