blntechie

I assume because the US credit card customers are obsessed with reward points and miles and it need to be paid by someone. It's usually the merchants through high MDR. The merchants pass on the costs to the card customers or debit card/cash payers.

One of the first ublock origin rules i setup is to block intercom chat overlays.

I’m in mid of one of those exact death spirals. Finalizing a launch date before even knowing full well what the scope is. Yeah there is a general fuzzy idea of what the end goal is but that’s not what requirements are. A well defined requirement takes too much time to arrive on especially if multiple stakeholders involved, that people trivializing it really get to me.

Horizontal sandwich toasters are the popular kind of toasters around my parts. It can make from plain toasts to fully stuffed sandwiches and are not that hard to clean either. I guess Americans will consider them more as a grill though.

They need to go the way of Telegram and build parallel products themselves and let the better one prevail after some time. Basically build your own competitor in-house.

We used TFS in 2010 to create issues and stories and development workflows and i remember it worked fine with no major complaints. Especially as a full VS shop ,it even had very good integration for everything which can be done inside the Visual Studio itself. We eventually moved to JIRA though couple of years later.

I believe that TFS product evolved to Azure DevOps now.

In college, viva-voce is a significant part of non-theory exams. It’s another matter it was not run well by many colleges but I always loved those chit chat sessions with some of the good professors. Some professors treat it like a boring Q&A which reduces its effectiveness.

This is not new for anyone who had used Ubuntu with GNOME on low RAM machines (<2GB). earlyoom is the answer.

I upgraded to 22.04 (with GNOME) in my 2GB laptop and still is very usable.

Image Capture is really not good even with 20GB of pictures I have. It just crashes or freezes and have to start over.

Seems expensive for just curation even though I don't discount the work required for top quality curation.

Very nice aggregation blog. Is it possible to have a rss feed for your blog I can add to the readers?

Coconuts fall at different stages of their life. We have 4 trees surrounding our home and we have a net around the trees which catches the fall of the coconuts. Also parking under a coconut tree is always risky, I have had my parked car along a road dented and windshield broken because of a falling coconut from the tree above. If I had noticed the tree that day (they curve a lot), I wouldn't have parked below.

Because for NYTimes e.g. they don't allow online cancelation and need to through the phone retention loop.

RBI mandate thing could have been implemented better but I absolutely support the idea that recurring payment control should be with the consumer and not the merchant.

UPI works on USSD[1]. You need a phone but not necessarily a smartphone.

[1] https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/99/product-overview

I have been burned couple of times by them. I thought it's a genuine and useful feature.

First, they offered a poor conversion rate.

Second, they said they will charge in INR and hence no further markup by banks which was an outright lie as they charged in INR from PayPal Singapore which applied foreign markup anyway by the bank. So I paid double markup.

It's basically a scam.

Wise is too slow (especially for transactions involving the US) and still expensive.

I believe UPI of India and Pix of Brazil actually cross absorb features from each other which is nice to see.

UPI is getting from 1st December a way to send payments by phone number or random number(key) which I believe are partly inspired from Pix. Earlier phone number lookup was a layer on top of the UPI built by the fintech companies and now it will be part of the base system.

Now that UPI's operator NPCI is focusing on cross border transactions, some day Pix and UPI can interoperate. UPI is already integrated with Singapore's payment system and similarly in discussions with few other countries.

Twitter videos for e.g. is pretty dumb. It tries to do adaptive bitrate for a 10s video. By or before the time the video quality improves, the video has already ended.

Also before the recent PWA app, their mobile site used to very bad. PWA sure also crashes sometimes.

Facebook newsfeed itself is so buggy to me but maybe it’s because of all the trackers are blocked. Maybe it works well if they are not blocked.

It might sound repetitive that recently only I wrote a similar comment. Sometimes it makes me wonder why are people in FB or LinkedIn put on a pedestal when the output (we can see) is bad quality websites and apps. Maybe I’m trivialising the problem considering the scale involved but still makes one wonder.

> P.S: I'm someone important at LongShort.Finance

So I opened the site and it pretty much only asks me to connect to the wallet. No explanation of what it does, what it’s for etc. which are even standard in scam websites. They sure appears extremely scammy even though it might not be.

I was thinking about this the other day and a wasteful solution to the packaging problem in open source is the decentralized build solution on a blockchain like platform. Either with PoW or PoS. In PoS, a node builds the code pulled from source control, multiple other nodes validate the build and its hash and add to the blockchain and to the repository. Now the builds are relatively trustable. Of course need to figure out an incentive structure for miners/validators to do this expensive work.

Of course the US is not a poor country. Sorry if my sentence structure meant that way. The US is in a special cohort when it comes to healthcare where rest in the group are all developing or under developed countries.

It’s simply astounding to me that if someone runs for an election saying they will reduce home prices, they are guaranteed to lose as land and homeowners simply don’t want that to happen. They don’t care about people who don’t have homes or simply cannot afford to even rent but only about protecting their ‘investment’. The whole setup about HOAs, bylaws, zonal regulations etc. all written around protecting the ‘investment’ instead of just seeing a home as a place to live exacerbates the problem.

There actually are several silver bullets to use like - efficient use of land, better zoning regulations and including more use of land to build more homes etc. but they are all non-starters because of greedy land and home owners.

Germany is public-private healthcare insurance driven healthcare model compared to the pure play private insurance or out-of-pocket driven healthcare model in the US and other poor countries. Germany has statutory public insurance while the examples I’m quoting including the US don’t have any such. For a private driven healthcare system, it’s strange there are no smaller, cheaper and nimble competitors.

I don’t understand why LinkedIn is and need to be so heavy and slow at all. In a way, similar to Facebook I guess?

Even though they provide several services - social network, jobs (for hiring managers and jobseekers), learning etc., none of them really have any tight integration with each other and can easily exist as separate services.

The website and apps are clunky and slow to load and has tons of dark patterns (contacts upload, profile visit tracking, everything over-shared by default, email blast when you sign-up etc.). I have heard LinkedIn hires lot of bright people and pays them quite well - but why their product still sucks?

Distinctive thing I found in the US is that hospitals are always big and do everything under one roof. There are some smaller clinics run by chains in some states but they operate primarily only for insurance money and are not common. At the bottom of the chain, some doctors run their own operations from a strip mall like place but they again provide very minimal service.

Meanwhile, in developing countries, it's not that hard to find a decently qualified doctor running his own small clinic with couple of nurses in a busy street. And to the next level, there is always a small 20-bed hospital around with 3-4 doctors and a bunch of nurses. And options keeps increasing in size and cost from small to the big hospitals like you typically see in the US. Almost 95% of primary healthcare are met by these small-mid level operations and people go to the big hospitals only for complicated surgeries and intensive care.

In this example of just 6 stitches, it probably would have been administered by a nurse in a 20-bed hospital for fraction of the cost of a big hospital.

>The main reason this is likely to be bad financially is that your house won’t appreciate like a house in Seattle.

So the only solution then is endless appreciation of house prices and salaries?

Paid every 2 weeks is still the norm in the US. It’s nice, I wish I get paid every 2 weeks in my country.

Your reward is basically money paid by the poor routed via the merchant and bank.

Only solution is to build more houses but NIMBYs and people with vested interests in the keeping the home prices appreciating will never allow it.