Is that the Verizon/Sprint guy?

I did DoorDash driving for a while and they typically only paid $1.50-$2.50 per delivery. The goal I always heard from experienced drivers was you shouldn’t take less than $1/mile for the delivery or it wouldn’t be worth your time and expenses. That meant the balance had to be paid upfront by the customer to make it worth someone’s time to deliver the order. My suggestion for customers was always to look up the distance to the restaurant and make sure the tip was at least as much as however many miles away the restaurant was.

It’s really disingenuous in the article that DoorDash and Uber are complaining about being forced to let people tip at checkout since that’s how the apps have worked anyway every time I’ve used them anyways. They complain about customers tipping fatigue and that tips should be a reward for excellent service and not a basic expectation, but that’s exactly how they’ve structured their business to operate and more generally how employers in the US have been abusing tips for decades.

These companies have been hiding where a lot of the money goes and try to improve margins by exploiting the drivers, and restaurants. I wonder if something with a more upfront billing process would attract customers, or people would leave because of the more obvious high costs? Actually tie the delivery cost to the distance from the business, and if people want to pay less they’ll have to wait for some other customers nearby to also order something and pool their fees to make it worth a driver’s time. But they’ll know that upfront, and a tip can actually be a tip.

Tips probably shouldn’t be allowed to offset an employer’s responsibility to pay employees in most situations.

Maybe not a blacklist, but I know a house I lived at previously (back in the era when landline telephone was fading out but still common) one phone company didn’t offer residential service at my address but did for neighbors’ addresses and kept telling me I could only get business service. I assume a previous resident had used business service and the address was then in their system as the location of a business. Perhaps something similar is happening to you.

That’s like saying I can outrun a TGV (while it’s departing the train station)

I figured out what was going on when Wordle became popular and people started sharing their results simply because the results mimicked the Mastermind reveal clues, although I would try to not place the reveal clues in order in Mastermind just to make it harder.

On 9 December 2023, Halley’s Comet reached the farthest and slowest point in its orbit from the Sun when it was travelling at 0.91 km/s (2,000 mph) with respect to the Sun.

I really need to set myself up on LinkWarden or linkding; it would solve at least 95% of this problem and my massive tab problem as well

Yes, if somewhat indirectly, as in that wasn’t the goal.

Historically, the Romans invented the mile and it measured 1,000 soldier’s paces (if you speak a Latin-based language you will likely recognize “mile” as meaning 1,000). A soldier’s pace was supposed to cover 5 feet. Thus, one mile historically equaled 5,000 feet. Lots of countries influenced by the Roman Empire used to use some variant on that idea and they tended to stay fairly close in length, but there weren’t really any agreed-upon international standards.

I’ve seen several from this campaign and they’re so dumb I feel like someone was maliciously compliant in making these so that Delta’s opposition to the union would actually encourage more people to vote to join. Like, management came to someone in marketing, but that person actually wanted to support the union effort.

It used to be 5,000 feet but then the English decided to shorten the foot but keep the mile the same length in the Elizabethan era

Is the road part prone to flooding?

Wikipedia says Nicolas’s dad is August Coppola, brother of Francis Ford and Sophia; I’m assuming that’s accurate

I’m assuming this is entirely related to him financing the film himself by taking out loans against his properties, which are coming due and he’s now having to sell things off and take new loans. He’s convinced it will still become a cult classic!

He’s sure it will become a cult classic at some point

It was him; he financed it himself by taking out loans against properties he owned. He’s selling things off now to pay the loans back.

Nicolas Cage is his nephew!

I think it’s a projector

Is he still on TV? Twenty years ago I worked a part-time job doing data entry at a small local brokerage. One of the assistant brokers used to complain because they had a client who would call in almost daily wanting to buy a stock he had a hot tip on, which was invariably whatever Cramer had featured on his show the night before.

Not just the odds on the screen, there are entire networks with sports books in the name. When Disney bought Fox they were required to sell off Fox Sports and the Fox Sports Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) because they already owned ESPN. Sinclair Broadcasting bought them for way too much money (and formed a joint broadcast venture with Allen Media Group) and sold the naming rights to sports books, first Bally Sports and now Fan Duel Sports. ESPN also has their own gambling service that they heavily promote, often with their own on-air talent.

Meanwhile players and coaches are getting arrested for their gambling activities. College athletes—teenagers—are getting threats on their social media when they underperform or overperform because some random gambler lost a prop bet on the player.

I was not happy when the sports gambling was legalized in my state a year or two ago. A colleague reminded me that historically prohibition has not ended a problem, but it also doesn’t feel like the rampant promotions are something that should be allowed. At its core it’s a business largely built on taking people’s money and giving nothing in return except a slight hope that they might get more back. A slight silver-lining: I read an article a while back about how the explosion of legal sports betting in the U.S. brought a lot of startups and foreign companies in thinking they’d make a bunch of money on American gamblers losing, but the gamblers haven’t really been losing enough and the companies are hurting. Most American casinos have offered sports betting for decades but they don’t put a lot of resources into them and largely haven’t pushed as hard on the online gambling because it turns out that’s a hard business to be profitable in; there’s no inherent advantage for the house. There are professional gamblers who can actually make a living on sports betting. Often they end up getting banned by the casinos or bookies.

It seems like a really immoral business when they build it on people losing money and ban anyone who doesn’t lose money.

Sounds like we don’t know if this particular story is true, but that does seem to be a general bit of human nature that we see over and over again