I was living less than 5 miles away from work for years, it made it very easy to commute by bike (although winter really sucked at times).
This year, that got bumped up to about 12 miles (work moved, not me). At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy. Not to mention, bike infrastructure to that location is much worse, mostly because the only option runs along a 6-lane road, and resulted in me crashing due to road debris in the dark. Bills from that incident could have bought me a car.
Other options are mainly limited to public transport (buses). Typically takes me about 2 hours one-way, including wasted time at the start of a shift.
Then there are cars. Guaranteed to save me a minimum of an hour a day, with much lower chances of personal injury.
> and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy.
I don't think we should be trying to convince people to ride to work every single day. This is much harder to do than just riding some of the time, and it would still make a big difference. Getting people to ride on average even one day a week to work would have huge benefits: reduced pollution, reduced traffic, reduced CO2 emissions, improved health.
I think daily (or nearly) is much easier than you think, mainly because it's so much harder to form a habit like that when you have to make a conscious daily choice between "easy" and "hard".
Context-dependence like "not raining or icy" does make sense.
> At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy.
Would an electric bike have helped? As car batteries get cheaper and better e-bikes are following suit, and many models get 40+ mile ranges and provide assist to 20-25 MPH even with hills.
Most laws don’t allow over 19-20mph on bicycles before its classified as a moped. That doesn’t mean you can’t provide the extra speed (I see up to 28mph on mine when I go hard), it’s just that the speed is limited but range increases (I’ve traveled over 30mi on a single charge so far)
Mechanical sorting (like shoe sorters) is very effective for discrete objects. Really cool to see stuff flying down a belt at 20mph+, get scanned/imaged from all sides, then thrown down one of 50 chutes without stopping.
Something that may not be obvious is how victims (companies, at least) frequently want to bury the story just as much as the person who conned them. "We lost 8 digits of internet money last night and have no idea who did it" just doesn't sound good to other people who are supposed to trust you.
Humans are the problem, not some mythical AI powering the bots. It costs a fraction of a cent to get a CAPTCHA solved. The only real counter being used is making it take longer to solve a CAPTCHA - which is exactly what the services like reCAPTCHA do, while minimizing the impact on heuristically 'good' users.
Making CAPTCHA solves take 30 seconds or a minute instead of 5 seconds is the state of the art.
The heuristic google uses for 'good' is 'compliance with the google surveillance system.'
And if throttling attempts is in fact the state of the art as you claim, you can do that without pulling in google code at all. I trust you are that competent at least. However the fact that the noscript version doesn't make you wait at all leads me to conclude your excuse for google's behavior is bullshit.
I'd say being "careless" means dropping that 60-80lb package to the floor instead of gingerly doing a squat with it, even 10 of those a day and your back will thank you unless you have impeccable form. "Use existing equipment" - perhaps a familiar phrase, one that protects your joints but not necessarily the packages.
Working at a large brown shipping company, I've never seen anyone go out of their way to mistreat packages marked as fragile (or anyone talk about doing it).
That said, it's policy not to treat packages marked 'fragile' differently. Boxes get reused a lot, and a sticker like that has very little correlation with it actually being fragile. (60lb box of bolts? Fragile! 2' by 4' mirror that shatters from a 1 ft drop? Not fragile!)
For bicycles in particular, the issue IMO is that they're typically packed terribly, while being large and awkward enough to be handled with all the other large and heavy (70-150 lbs) stuff.
Damages will occur, it's just a matter of statistical frequency at a scale of 20 million packages per day handled by 100,000+ employees. Frequently, the damage won't even be discovered until delivery, and then there's no easy way to attribute the damage properly. That means aside from particularly egregious stuff where it's obvious you screwed up (say, laying a 55" TV flat and dropping a 30 lb box on it) you have to go way up the management chain to find anyone who cares. At a lower level, easily measured metrics like process rate are far more important.
If everyone in management you ever interacted with only measured your performance by LOC written, how much time would you spend refactoring?
All of those were a pain in the ass for one reason or another, Discord caught on like wildfire because it was a huge step up from what existed. Pretty much a combination of the best parts of IRC + Teamspeak + Skype.
You don't think Discord has any lockin? For a lot of games, coordinating voice chat these days is "paste a discord server invite in chat". Pretty much any guild/clan/subreddit/group/whatever has a Discord (apart from ones with really old TS servers etc), so if you're in one of those, you probably have Discord. Much easier than negotiating Skype/Mumble/TS3.
I'd say Valve/Steam is feeling a lot more pressure these days than Discord.
I'm not sure Discord will ever be a hugely valuable company, but judging by the fact that every launcher in existence (Steam, Battle.net) is trying to clone their features, I'm sure they can at least sell it for quite a bit.
I was really expecting them to push out of the gaming niche, but with the store it looks like they're doubling down on that angle.
> who doesn't follow my delivery preferences and takes my stuff to random UPS stores that I have to pick it up from
Corporate policy, Access Point after 1 attempt is cheaper than 3 attempts when the resident is likely at work anyway. Driver release (most situations where the package is left at your house and the shipper didn't explicitly authorize it) is at driver discretion, it's their problem to a degree if something gets stolen.
This year, that got bumped up to about 12 miles (work moved, not me). At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy. Not to mention, bike infrastructure to that location is much worse, mostly because the only option runs along a 6-lane road, and resulted in me crashing due to road debris in the dark. Bills from that incident could have bought me a car.
Other options are mainly limited to public transport (buses). Typically takes me about 2 hours one-way, including wasted time at the start of a shift.
Then there are cars. Guaranteed to save me a minimum of an hour a day, with much lower chances of personal injury.