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How do we pay for parking?

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Re: How do we pay for parking?

#341

Post by silexia »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #254

Radical idea for this century: pay someone to stand at the entrance of the packing area to put cash in a safe or hold a card reader up to the drivers' windows. With some training, this person is also your health and safety officer, your security personnel and even your 'sorry sir/madam we are out of spaces' person (who saves each customer ten minutes of driving in circles). As a computer programmer, I love it when te…

Cash in a box with a person at the entry? In Seattle???

That would be a bad business decision - the cash would be stolen daily without consequences and if the person you hired was harmed in the theft, you would be liable as a business.

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#342

Post by justjustin »

mikeryan wrote: post #236
crote wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole concept of "allotted time" is a scam anyways. Sure, it made sense with analog pre-paid parking meters, but it's complete nonsense when you are modernizing it like this. Billing the actual parking time down to the minute is pretty trivial, so having to reserve a specific time means they are intentionally trying to defraud you by either a) making you pay for time you won't use, or b) fining you for not reserv…

In downtown Santa Cruz the only way you can pay is by the minute via ParkMobile I believe. I always forget to stop the timer when I get back to the car and pay the Max so I hate it. YMMV Maybe it’s me but I prefer the allotted time. I only regret that when paying at a meter at least if I have excess someone else can use it.

[dead]

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#343

Post by apricot »

GaggiX wrote: post #116
apricot wrote: post #6

I don't have a cell phone. What should I have done in this situation?

Without a cell phone I would be more concerned about other things than the parking lot, such as how people contact you when you are out?

They email me, or call and leave a message on my answering machine, or sometimes even write me a letter that eventually finds its way to my house. I get the message and answer it when I have time.

In the not so distant past, it was perfectly normal for a person not to be reachable at all times. Today it became a luxury. I choose to indulge in it.

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#344

Post by apricot »

GaggiX wrote: post #195
klyrs wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Why do I want people to contact me while I'm out? It's almost always spam, and assuming it's not, it's almost always a them problem. 2. If I did want people to contact me, a flip phone would work fine for that. Without a smart phone with a data plan, it is becoming harder and harder to navigate the world made for advertizers and cellular providers. And these parking companies don't want to make it easy for you to…

>Why do I want people to contact me while I'm out? I mean I would think you have a family and just to organize something you would need to communicate, even when you're outside. >a flip phone would work fine for that. Yes flip phones are indeed cell phones.

I do have a family. We often organize things. We do that in advance and stick to our plans. It works well.

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#345

Post by Encrypt-Keeper »

deathanatos wrote: post #201
lucidguppy wrote: post #92

I was at Dick's sporting goods and the cleats section was this special "app" area where you could either enter in your search criteria or scan shoes so associates would approach you with the shoes in hand. The app was slow as f - and only really worked if you brought up and scanned the shoes. Was there any instruction? No - you had to figure it out yourself. To be honest if felt like you were playing myst. Why was th…

… I was also recently at Dick's, and witnesses this same stupidity. Am I supposed to … what, have the attendant haul out pair after pair while I attempt to determine what my size in this brand+model is, or if, like so many shoe stores, they even carry my size? Let alone whether I like the look. … the best shoe store I even went to, hands down, just had all the boxes laid out in stacks upon stack on the floor, where y…

You're not wrong, but you should know that the "kids system" are just mens sizes. Womens sizes are the outlier.

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#346

Post by seabass-labrax »

silexia wrote: post #341
seabass-labrax wrote: post #254

Radical idea for this century: pay someone to stand at the entrance of the packing area to put cash in a safe or hold a card reader up to the drivers' windows. With some training, this person is also your health and safety officer, your security personnel and even your 'sorry sir/madam we are out of spaces' person (who saves each customer ten minutes of driving in circles). As a computer programmer, I love it when te…

Cash in a box with a person at the entry? In Seattle??? That would be a bad business decision - the cash would be stolen daily without consequences and if the person you hired was harmed in the theft, you would be liable as a business.

I don't live in Seattle, so I don't know what it's like there, and nor am I an expert in physical security. However, if it's a social norm to pay for human parking attendants, it's not a stretch to assume that there would be human police officers around too. Ultimately, you can't have people doing some jobs without other people doing supporting jobs, but the same is kind of true for digitalisation too: the reason these parking systems are so disliked is that we don't have a conventional or standard parking charge infrastructure to support it yet.

I'm sure people would be much happier with paying for parking via the internet if it was done with an open, reliable and secure protocol with plenty of easy-to-use implementations. But given how impossibly far that is from the digital systems that are used for parking currently, human parking attendants seem to me to be an attractive option. My original comment was 'radical' when seen from the current standpoint of industries being so 'anti-human' that they won't employ workers even when labour is cheap, the work is humane, and it improves the experience for the customers.

So I've no idea if it would be a good decision for Perfectly Profitable Parking LLC, but I think it would be a good decision for the world :)

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#347

Post by t0mas88 »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #333
t0mas88 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I close the YouTube app anytime it makes me watch more than a 5 seconds skippable ad. This was one of those times so I have no idea what was in the video :-) In other words: Fuck Google and their ad bullshit.

Raising the question: why do you have the Youtube app installed at all? Modern phones can play Youtube in the browser just fine, and browsers like Vivaldi come with adblock built in.

The Microsoft Edge Adblocker on iPhone doesn't work on YouTube ads. On desktop using uBlock Origin works great.
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