imroot

Dealers have almost wide latitude about submitting and getting paid for "good will" warranty claims, as long as they don't abuse it.

Sometimes manufactures will direct dealers to fix things that are long out of warranty when weird things happen (like in Seattle when that radio station sent out a bug that bricked the radios over RDS -- the manufacture directed the dealerships via a service memo to replace the radios and bill the manufacture).

Service is a decent part of most dealerships these days, and a good amount of that income is driven from warranty claims.

It really just depends on how comfortable you are in the command line. If you know how to get your transactions downloaded from your bank and don't ever want to leave the command line, hledger is great for you -- I've been using hledger since 2019 and love every minute of it.

If you need something point and click, or, need a high "wife-acceptance factor," firefly-iii is not a bad choice.

After coming from hledger, I did try firefly, but, stuck with hlegder due to how amazingly powerful it is with nothing but a text input.

I tried to help a family member set up E-Verify for her small manufacturing company in 2019, and the government would not approve her business for E-Verify, even though they had been established for 50 years and had almost 200 employees on the payroll.

They ran just about everything in-house (including payroll) and because they didn't use a PEO, the government didn't want to deal with them, and they had to get someone in Congress to intervene on their behalf before getting the approval.

I interviewed for a position on HN's "Who's Hiring" thread a few years ago. They asked me to do four different tech screens...but the kicker was, that they were all the same question.

During the second one, I mentioned that this seemed a lot like the first one, but, did it anyway, a different way. During the third one, I literally just used the same code/approach I did on the first one.

During the fourth one, I refused and said, "Hey, this...isn't for me." and then had two weeks of HR emailing me almost every day asking if I'd reconsider.

So, if I run a website, or a service, and there are people who abuse my service, and I can't take actions to protect myself and my other paying customers...I should be forced to allow those malicious actors an account and do what?

If I am on Twitter's Trust and Safety team, I'm sweating bullets today.

Which is becoming more and more difficult due to them focusing on Cloud Products (my on-prem renewal jumped almost 8x this year).

I’d rather use request tracker or bugzilla over Atlassian these days

No, but, I see great trends in threat reduction in using stuff like Oculus in military and space applications -- let's build some crazy robots, get some low-latency links between the front line and an operating base, and let the COD trained kids go ape-shit on whatever enemy might be out there. They use Oculus' (or similar VR technology) to stay on base where they can be well protected, vs the (hardened) robots that are on the front line.

I've completely written off FB and IG -- deleted my FB account about 7 years ago, I still have a 'legacy' IG account that I might log into once a year with a name that nobody would be interested in...and that's my extent of the Meta I have in my life. I have zero desire to get into VR (until they come out with something that will work for the guys like me that have poor vision), but, who knows what the world might bring in the next 40 years.

After pricing furniture at La-Z-Boy recently, I could see where 90K could be used to furnish a few rooms in a house. I was looking at a new living room set and it was close to 45K by the time we had finished customizing the fabric, seat fill, and adding options to the furniture.

There are other things that seem weird about this, but, the furniture store pricing wasn't one of them.

The FA’s do get around $100 as a bonus when they sign up on a flight.

I had someone in the law enforcement community reach out this week to ask if I knew of a way to determine an owner of an AirTag. I mentioned that they should be able to reach out to Apple to identify the owner, but, the serial number had been removed and wanted to know if there was a way to pull it from memory in a forensically safe way, as Apple required the serial number for these requests.

Simple:

They closed my accounts, which, is something that they can do in the terms and conditions that you agree to when you sign up for an account. They did not disclose to me where the money in my checking account went to, because, according to them, they did not have to.

I realize that 40K isn't a lot to some folks on here, but, it was the money that I had set aside to go and do a fun project after COVID-19 had subsided (here we are, two years later): if the bank does something with your money that it doesn't have to a.) disclose what they did with it, and b.) be judge, jury, and executioner with it, I'm not sure a lot of folks would really appreciate that.

In the end, I was out 40K-ish, a few hours of my time, and a reply from the CFPB that didn't really solve my issue.

I can make more money.

I can't make more time.

They share common reservations systems, so, it wouldn't surprise me if SABRE or another GDS shares no-fly lists.

I seem to recall that American, United, and Delta all use/implement Sabre in some form or another, and possibly shared a no-fly/ban list...but, my memory is a bit hazy on that.

I had 40K+ taken from me by US Bank after a payday in 2020. Writing the CFPB basically generated a response that "We're returning your money to the processors who send you money" from US Bank.

Guess who never reached out to me to ask why my bank was returning transactions? My employers.

When I called them to ask what had happened, their "Fraud Research & Gap Analysis" VP was shocked that this only caused a mild inconvenience to me (mainly because I split my payroll between a bank and a local credit union) and then pressed me to get the name of my credit union.

I was blacklisted on Uber a few years ago when I reported a security vulnerability to them.

They said no such vulnerability existed. I sent them video. They said I must have been doctoring the video because they couldn't reproduce it. They then banned me.

This was in 2015.

They were then sued because the vulnerability apparently identified someone's affair[0].

I sent my email exchange with Uber to the attorney who sued Uber, letting them know that they were aware of the bug two years prior. You know, because no good deed goes unpunished.

I get by just fine with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.

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0: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38948281

I wonder if this includes inactive sellers.

In 2014/2015, I would buy insurance cargo from truck accidents: I had the space and the ability to grab and store the items until I could resell them via secondary means: This usually meant working with buyers at stores like BigLots and other discount stores, but, occasionally I'd get electronics (which isn't something that those stores really wanted).

I came across a huge lot of LG monitors that were involved in some fender-bender. Out of the lot of approximately 24 per pallet, only two were visibly damaged, and I had 12 pallets worth of monitors and the cost per-pound evened out to approximately $35/monitor.

I would sell these monitors, which were retailing for right around $200/each new, for approximately $150 in "Open Box" condition on Amazon, and would consistently sell anywhere between 8-10 of them a week.

Amazon charged me:

Cost for getting my items to Amazon (Usually around 9-11/each, depending on season and how busy UPS is), Cost for storing my item in their warehouse (usually around $2-4/month, depending on season), cost for picking and shipping my item (around $30 because it was considered oversize), and the constant reminder that these weren't my customers, they were amazon's customers (customers would "return" items, so, I'd get the entire cost of the item removed from my seller account, because, Amazon wouldn't eat their own fees here, and then have to fight them to get my money back when that customer wouldn't return the item). Amazon also fiercely competed with me on these monitors -- they'd knock down the cost of their "new" items down to what my refurbished cost would be...cutting me out of the 'buy box,' but, losing what I can only assume is about $30+ per monitor wasn't something that they did for long, as after a week or so, the price would be set back at MAP until I'd go and build a new shipment of items into Amazon, set a price lower than theirs, and then they'd automatically bring down their pricing to meet mine.

Amazon's profit to me would be around 40% -- around 80 dollars.

In 2016, Amazon changed the rules so I couldn't sell the items as "Open Box" and would have to sell them as "Used" because I didn't qualify under the rules as a refurbisher.

(admittedly, by that time, I transitioned away from selling items on Amazon and use a different channel for the sales of these items).

There are a lot of snake oil salesman selling "how to make money on FBA" videos and courses online, but, the reality is that the only entity who makes money selling new items on Amazon is Amazon.

> - Kroger isn't charging you for storing your potato chips

That's not completely correct.

Kroger will charge you if you want an End Cap display of your chips, and Kroger will charge you if you want additional shelf space for your chips.

I believe it's more limited to things like Chips, Soda, Snacks, etc, but, it does happen in the grocery industry.

The first job I ever had was at a Radio station, where we were transitioning away from Harris 90 automation to an AudioVault/BEI controlled automation.

The only reason I got the job is because I could figure out how to use the interface: the other two kids from high school who went with me couldn't manage to record audio from the interview.

I remember so many late nights running football, basketball, and other games during the summer...only to turn around and do an afternoon game the next day, then my usual 4-midnight station rotation, all while making around $5/hour.

These are flight strips -- they go into a stack that help the controller know what planes he is working and usually include the destination, the flight time, the type of aircraft, and a few other things.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs/ -- a program to replace the paper strips with electronic ones.

About two years ago, where I worked really amplified up their phisting testing, and after the first batch when SO MANY PEOPLE failed (I heard the number was around 60%), they pushed out a new HR policy that included a suspension/termination for repeated offenders.

Less than 3 months later, HR was begging people to click the link in their email to set up their benefits for the year, because they had a 0% click-through rate.

My first introduction to troubleshooting computers was with the Norton Utilities.

I held onto the manual well into the late 2000's. I remember seeing the last few pages of the book where everyone who worked on the product had their signatures on it, and kind of hoping that my signature would be in a book like that one of these days.

Honestly, even the preferred Experience at Avis leaves a lot to be desired. I’m switching back over to Hertz after being a National (Emerald for almost 10 years) and Avis (President’s Club for the last 8 years or so) and having horrible experience after horrible experience this year.

I’ve literally had Avis come and get a vehicle that I still had a week left on its rental from a hotel parking lot…and still can’t get an explanation from Avis as to why (or, even better yet, why they charged me for that extra week!)

When I worked retail, I was on-site, troubleshooting an issue with a store. It was getting late, and the store associates started their end-of-day procedure.

Since I was logged into the server, I could see that we were doing a LOT of database intensive processes and that the tables that we were pulling data from to generate the end-of-day reports didn't have indexes on them.

I couldn't leave until all of the associates left (policy), so, I started looking at why we were doing what we were doing, and trying to figure out how to optimize it.

Being stuck at that store helped me figure out that we were probably losing close to $(rnd(2-8)13.509400)/day -- at least 253,000 per day in labor costs just in the US by having the employees wait for this to finish up -- so, I can say that sitting there and watching them struggle to wait for it to finish up would have never alerted me to these issues, as, closing our test stores only took seconds with the few transactions that we'd do during the day for our testing.

I think that this is a good thing, but, only because I've seen the benefits of getting a second perspective on things. Eliminating pain points leads to happier employees. Happier employees means you don't see posts about your company in /r/antiwork these days.

I was blacklisted on Uber a few years ago when I reported a security vulnerability to them.

They said no such vulnerability existed. I sent them video. They said I must have been doctoring the video because they couldn't reproduce it. They then banned me.

This was in 2015.

They were then sued because the vulnerability apparently identified someone's affair[0].

I sent my email exchange with Uber to the attorney who sued Uber, letting them know that they were aware of the bug two years prior. You know, because no good deed goes unpunished.

I get by just fine on Lyft these days.

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0: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38948281

The Ham Radio Village folks from DEFCON[0] and other conferences provide online testing once a month. Keep an eye on their twitter account if you want to do something online, but, if you look on ARRL's website, it's possible that you can find close to you.

It's usually under $20 to take the test, but, there are many times where you can test for free if you're willing to wait a few weeks.

[0]: I have volunteered as an examiner for Ham Radio Village for a few years now.

There was a fair amount of fallout from this with other services as well -- customers who were hosted on GoDaddy but had their accounts compromised had other services spun up with their domain and their credentials.

I know that the company I work for was hit at least once by this, until we implemented stronger KYC checks.

Amazon has really turned a little more hostile to Third Party Merchants in the last few years.

In 2012/2013, I was doing FBA on damaged cargo/insurance buyouts (If a truck gets into a wreck, 99.9%, they can't use the goods on the truck, so, Insurance companies will sell them for pennies on the pound. Yes, pound) when I found a company that was selling a trailer full of LG 27" monitors for what would equate to about $18/each. I had some office and self-storage space and a SUV, and would literally take 10 them from my self storage unit every day, take them to my office space, test the monitor out, open the back to inspect for damage, and then repackage everything in the box and sell them as Used/Tested/Refurbished depending on what I needed to do to get them working again.

My biggest complaint was that when someone would return a monitor, it'd never make its way back to me -- as in, it always looked like someone would never return the monitor. I'd set calendar reminders to follow up with Amazon Seller Support, and I'd always get the money credited back to my account.

I've watched the fees go up and up (when I was doing FBA, my Amazon fees would cost me around $10, shipping included, per piece. Today, the same fees would run me around $30/unit per device: my item is considered 'oversized')

As someone on the Seller Forums mentions a few different times -- you aren't amazon's customer, the end-user is. Amazon is just a channel for selling your goods. Unfortunately, dealing with Amazon as a channel partner is just basically russian roulette -- no matter how well you can describe your problem, you're working with a team that just doesn't care.

I've had offers from the same trucking insurance company over the last few years -- even a truck load of PS5's this summer -- but, didn't really want the headache of dealing with Amazon, so, I've turned the offers down.

Also, wasn't US Cellular bought by Sprint in 2012?

I did some work on their compliance team in 2010/2011 and the merger was one of the reasons why I left.

Slowing down the correction?

I had 40K taken by US Bank last year...365 days have passed and they're still coming up with excuses as to why they can't disburse that amount to me.

Thank god that I had the insight to start a savings account at a Credit Union about 10 years ago, and moved half of my paychecks there via direct deposit.

I now keep cash in a safe (what safety am I getting keeping that cash in a CD at .05%?) as my savings account.

You've never had a bank take your checking account assets and freeze them on a payday because they suspected "Fraud."

The bank is Judge, Jury, and Executioner -- and I'm still fighting with US Bank, over a year later, to get the 40K that they have of mine, but, I'm honestly at the point where I don't think I'll ever see that cash again.