Out of curiosity, what response time do you expect on a page like that? And what level of detail? I'd much rather have their team focus on fixing this as fast as possible than trying to update that dashboard in the first 5 minutes.
> what response time do you expect on a page like that?
Faster than a free third-party website’s response time. Google should know they are down and tell people about it before Hacker News, Twitter, etc. Google should be the source of truth for Google service status, not social media.
> And what level of detail?
Enough to not tell people that there are “No issues” with services.
> I'd much rather have their team focus on fixing this as fast as possible than trying to update that dashboard in the first 5 minutes.
I'd expect within seconds that Google is alerted of a very large number of issues with their servers and that the status page would be updated (the green light going to red) within seconds. It's now quite some time after the start of the outage and everything is still green on that status page.
If they know its broken, one of the _many_ engineers/support across Youtube+Gmail+etc that are all known to be down related to this bug should be able to update it in first few minutes. Especially if this isn't a 5 min fix.
We should focus on finding a way to provide vulnerable groups a way to pay at cashless stores rather than increasing the overhead of operating a business (accepting cash, maintaining change, coordinating bank deposits, etc.). Many of these places are coffee shops where their entire ledger is automated.
How can we complain that small businesses are closing in NYC and then continue to add regulations which may make it harder for them to operate? That seems like an oxymoron.
The vulnerable are often underbanked. They might not have a bank account, debit or credit card, or smartphone with Venmo/Cash app/(whatever app is popular today).
Cash is the easiest way to help vulnerable groups. If a homeless person wants to buy a cheeseburger, its better to accept the cash rather than have him fill out FORM NY-892-F INDIVIDUAL RETAIL ESTABLISHMENT CREDIT ACCOUNT CREATION FORM, proposing to send a monthly bill to his non-existent address, or non-existent email.
The US has over 6 million unbanked which are not necessarily poor. Some choose to be unbanked. I'm developing an app and network to help with this problem, It allows businesses to become ATMs where you not only withdraw cash but some could accept to reload an E-wallet which in turn would allow you to buy things online without a bank account. (maybe later we would launch a physical card) - DO you think it will work ?
Nope. Businesses can and do already reload value cards (including prepaid debit cards) which allow (among other things) buying online without a bank account, and it hasn't solved the problem.
Sure your one proposed hyperbolic alternative is significantly worse than cash. That doesn't mean that there doesn't exist an alternative that is better or not significantly worse than cash.
If we made access to prepaid debit cards dead simple (i.e. going to a bank and getting a debit card for the equivalent amount of cash) easy for small amounts, then they would not only get access to the cashless shops in town but they'd also be better served online and could access cheaper goods through online retailers.
This gives the individual an easy way to get around it without penalizing small businesses. Larger businesses likely all take in cash without issue.
Maybe there should always be a way to open a bank account, even without a home address? If you don't have a bank account, you get excluded from a lot of options that might solve your homelessness anyway. It seems to me that being able to open a bank account should be a fundamental right of some sort.
There are lots of catches like this that make life difficult to the poor and vulnerable in our modern society. Most of these catches are some status obtained and managed through privatized means with little-to-no oversight that are becoming more and more fundamental functions of daily life as they are abstract processes to follow leading to obtaining necessities: food, housing, healthcare, etc.
The vast majority are never exposed to these institutional barriers because they are financially above those barriers but for working poor, poverty stricken, etc. these are daily challenges to deal with with little or no recourse of action.
Take paying utilities as an example. For most it's as trivial as logging on your phone one time and setting up the account with auto recurring payments on a credit card--then setup auto payment of your credit card from a checking account where you have some portion of income automatically transferred to.
For others, they have to carefully pick and choose when and what to pay and make sure they can pay cash, check, etc. There's all the additional overhead too: traveling to a valid payment location or the post office for stamps to mail things in, cognative load/stress for keeping track of the schedule or putting it down on a calendar, etc. That's just paying utilities. Plenty of other processes have all sorts of other headaches.
In most locations in modern society, owning and maintaining a vehicle is a necessity when factoring all alternatives (aside from moving), yet vehicle ownership considered a privilege.
This list goes on and on. It's no wonder many Americans are not happy.
Does cash make it harder to operate? That sounds backwards to me. Traditionally, small businesses love cash. The open secret is that no small business reports 100% of their cash income to the government.
I've had small business owners tell me that literally no small business could survive if it had to pay all the taxes they technically owed. There are some near me which offer significant discounts for paying cash.
Yes, perhaps I was too subtle but the point of my comment was that (from what I have heard) virtually all small B&M businesses evade taxes when they're starting out.
I don't think it's coincidence that all the cashless businesses I've seen are for higher-end (and presumably higher-margin) products. Customers buying a $15 sandwich don't care about cash transactions because the difference between $15 and $17 is meaningless to them. They never pay cash anyway.
Hey,<redacted first name>, It's Pam on Pat be just driving up to the lake with his check in and see if you had a nice thanksgiving and enjoy the parade yesterday, and you were missed you had a nice thanksgiving with Kevin ward and it's only for a couple days just grandma died so talk to you later, okay. Alright
Relevant part: "it's only for a couple days just grandma died so talk to you later, okay."
This is similar to a realization I had the other day: for many people collecting things is less about the objects and more about the memories and nostalgia and associated with those objects.
I have been having a lot of "identity" problems lately, and it occurred to me that very little of what I own has any substantial story about it nor does it say much about who I am as a person.
The objects we collect exist as affirmations of the identity we've chosen for ourselves.
Ikea has lots of products that are made of solid pine. If you use some wood glue during assembly, their stuff will stay together quite well. I have some stuff I bought 10+ years ago hold together after a half-dozen moves with some basic mods.
I recently furnished my first "adult" house after years of having an Ikea apartment. I was pretty amazed at how up-market you have to go in order to exceed Ikea quality in commercial furniture. Lots of stuff sold in furniture stores is held together with hex-bolts and lock-tite anymore. Meaning you have to move up to Amish furniture if you want something higher quality. But that's like a 3-10x jump in price.
I ended up spending big on couches & dining table, then used Ikea stuff in the bedrooms and offices. I feel like that's a mid-point of cost and quality.
I've observed the price of furniture to run, lowest to highest, something like:
Bad Ikea, Flat-Pack Furniture from Anywhere Else, Beat-Up Antiques, Good Ikea, Unfashionable but Good Antiques, Oversized Overstuffed NFM[1] crap, Actually Good New Furniture, Fashionable Antiques
Not linear, there's a big jump for the last two categories.
While the quality/longevity runs more like:
Flat-Pack Furniture from Anywhere Else, Bad Ikea = Oversized Overstuffed NFM Crap, Good Ikea, Beat-Up Antiques, Unfasionable but Good Antiques = Fashionable Antiques = Actually Good New Furniture.
Basically my conclusion's been I need to either buy good stuff (unfashionable antiques, occasionally good new stuff—fashionable antiques are out of my price range) or just get Ikea. The whole rest of the low-end market's at least as bad, and usually more expensive. Some of it pretends it's part of some non-existent middle tier of quality and is priced to match, making it the worst possible furniture to buy (oversized overstuffed NFM crap—it's also usually in a tasteless faux-antique style).
I also think people who complain about Ikea's directions haven't assembled much shitty furniture from anywhere other than Ikea. It's all much worse.
[1] Nebraska Furniture Mart, here used as a category.
You can get pretty decent solid wood furniture. Often it's "Amish" which doesn't mean hand-made or made with old-timey tools, of course, just made in an air-powered factory, probably, assuming it's not just marketing BS. Gotta watch out, a lot of it's not put together all that well. And you're not gonna find anything trendy (mid-century modern, say) looking in the lower (so, semi-reasonable) end of that price range, it's all Shaker and such. Wood itself may be from inferior (but cheaper) species, and of course there just isn't amazing lumber in any quantity anymore like there was 100+ years ago. Any mechanisms may be kinda crap, mostly just avoid fancy stuff. But quality can be had if you watch out to make sure you're not getting screwed.
I haven't found anything amazing that's upholstered but I assume the good products there are just out of my price range. I've got a couple Flexsteel pieces and they're at least a hell of a lot more durable than your average Ashley Furniture near-future-landfill-fodder, while being similarly priced to the "higher end" (LOL) of that sort of thing. The upholstery itself still sucks but at least the frames and springs may pass the decade mark. Good fabric and good stitching are very expensive (see: any non-terrible clothes) so, again, I probably just can't afford the good stuff there so I've not really seen it.
[EDIT] meanwhile I have my grandparents' couches they bought something like 40 years ago, and despite heavy use they've probably got another 3-5 years left in them (springs starting to go, finally) and no burst seams or rips in the fabric, even on the cushions. Hell, the cushions aren't even getting flat. I guarantee they were just normal ol' furniture when they bought them, nothing fancy. Furniture quality has definitely gone downhill. Then again those couches, though likely on the cheaper end back then, would probably be a lot more expensive than our modern low-end in today's dollars. More so if you factor in wage growth. I don't even know where to find a couch that's likely to last 40+ years, now. It'd probably cost $10,000 if I did find it.
I'll bet that like almost everything throughout history, "good" furniture is far better quality than it's ever been, and "bad" furniture is now more stylish and accessible to more people than ever, albeit less durable than the best stuff. Do people really believe we've forgotten how to make couches?
I suspect there's a "very bad" tier that didn't exist before, is now the most common (because cheapest), and has undermined the "cheap (more expensive than what's cheap now, but formerly cheap) but pretty good" tier, eating its demand and causing it to become more expensive. So yeah, I think OK furniture's more expensive now than it used to be. But now there's even-cheaper crap readily available so... maybe that's better. IDK.
While "good" furniture may be better than it's ever been, it's also more expensive than it's ever been. I don't know how much a good table cost in 1945 but I bet it wasn't the equivalent of $5,000 which is what it would be now.
I buy IKEA furniture. I bought Ikea kitchen. 20 year warranty and I know they will be around for it. Hardware is the best you will get for the money on those cabinets.
Some IKEA furniture is actually decent. I don't want antiques in my house because I remodeled to have a modern look.
My dad bought kitchen cabinets from a small retailer, they gave him shit when he tried to replace one door because it was warped.
Honestly, I would rather deal with a major chain/retailer. I bought stuff at IKEA that wasn't wood but lasted over 10 years and served its purpose, and when it comes time to remodel I can buy something new and still end up paying less than for some "wood" furniture.
>Much rather buy from the Amish furniture store and pay more, than the disposable shit from Ikea.
First of all, the main reason Ikea is so popular is because the stuff is usually packed in small boxes to be assembled, which is easier to move and ship. That's more efficient in shipping logistics and allows for people to live in higher density housing. Have fun moving your hand-made furniture from 100+ years ago down that condominium stairwell.
Second, Ikea has a strong corporate focus on the environment and sustainability:
If you're in the position to afford hand made Amish furniture, you can probably afford movers. OSB is great for inexpensive furniture that doesn't move. The downside is once the wood gets wet or damaged it degrades quickly, unlike solid wood which will warp and split if not properly treated. One of the absolute best furniture products for strength and durability is actually plywood but people see it as a "cheap" product instead of the engineering marvel that it is. I think what it really comes down to is that when you're younger it makes sense to buy cheaper more disposable furniture. It's going to see more wear and tear and you're still finding your own style which is likely to change when you have a partner. When you become an adult and start moving less it makes sense to buy something that is going to be able to last longer with proper care. Solid woods tend to wear better over time because it's not a paper veneer over the OSB. Like most things it's about using the appropriate tool or resource for the task. I recently had to build a behind the sofa table for my wife. There simply didn't exist a product that fit our needs (12 feet long and thin) went with solid oak and while it fit we did indeed have the problem that it wouldn't fit through the stairwell and we had to walk it around the outside of the house. I doubt it would fit in an apartment.
I did this a while ago. What happened was I ended up checking my phone significantly more due to FOMO. Hiding your phone is a better solution, since it's more out of sight.
My only guess is that large companies suffer from too much bureaucracy when it comes to naming. As a result, you'll never get a phenomenal name, but you also won't get a really bad name either. Odds are you'll get something within a couple standard deviations of "normal" and end up with a name that's just kind of... boring.
