The janny smacked you but I thought you raised a valid point. The "moral high ground" is and has always been subjective. Do the ends justify the means? Depends on the ideology. Is a soldier surrendering a dishonorable act, or should he be treated with professional dignity? During WW2 the Japanese thought that surrender was dishonorable and treated POWs very poorly. They also deliberately shot at combat medics, they didn't have any sort of taboo against that. Nor did Europeans, until most of the way through the 19th century, think much about leaving wounded soldiers to lay dying in the field, or even casually murdering the wounded as they lay helpless after the battle was already decided (these sort of behaviors lead to the creation of the Red Cross.) In all of these cases it wasn't because those people were fundamentally evil. They were acting according to the norms and expectations of their culture. When two sides with radically different norms encounter each other in conflict, both can feel as though the other is depraved. But that's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the mental state of the other guys. American soldiers in the Pacific thought that the Japanese were savage animals, but with cooler hindsight we know that the Japanese had and still have a strong sense of honor. The catch is that it is, or at least then was, a very different sort of honor that held people to different expectations than Americans were accustomed to.
Indeed. I think anything short of tossing your drink at McDonalds workers probably doesn't phase them. They deal with much worse shit from the public than somebody snarking at the premise of having an app.
It sure seems like whenever a corporation grows old, large or expansive enough, it will inevitably morph into an spy agency. Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business wants to spy on people.
Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they only do apps now. "But I don't have a cellphone" - "Uhhh... You can also do it online?"
> a burger flipping business wants to spy on people
"It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17."
For example, the Manna software in each store knew about employee performance
in microscopic detail — how often the employee was on time or early, how
quickly the employee did tasks, how quickly the employee answered the phone
and responded to email, how the customers rated the employee and so on. When
an employee left a store and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other
Manna system could request the employee’s performance record. If an employee
had “issues” — late, slow, disorganized, unkempt — it became nearly
impossible for that employee to get another job.
If every restaurant is its own small/medium business and the corporate franchisor only ever interacts with the franchisees and never with the end customers, then all the direct revenue for the franchisor will be from services or licenses provided to the franchisees, not from directly selling burgers. But the franchisees are still much more dependent on the franchisor than they would be in a normal B2B relationship. And many of those "service costs" can be freely set by the franchisor and have the purpose of channeling revenue back from the restaurants - revenue that would not exist if no burgers were sold.
The specific point here is that the McDonald's Corporation is often the landlord of its franchisees. Of course most franchisees of any franchisor are required to buy supplies etc from the franchisor, but McDonald's is famous for also charging them rent.
In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card company. How much rent will they receive if they stopped selling burgers?
> The Founder"
Good movie but McDonalds is a long long way away from scrappy, morally-bankrupt Ray Kroc's time. I imagine using pink slime to make the nuggets he sold to kids would be right in his wheelhouse though.
American Airlines is more a credit card company than McDonalds is a real estate company. If McDonald's stopped collecting rent from its franchisees, there would probably be layoffs at corporate but the general public would still be able to buy Big Macs.
If American Airlines' credit card revenues dried up they wouldn't be able to pay their fuel bills and the company would be gone the next day.
> In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card company.
I thought the "they're not what you think" deal with airlines is that they're actually futures trading companies that happen to own and operate some aircraft?
I don't think the NYSE had any DEI requirements, but the NASDAQ created a rule where boards needed some minority representation in order to be listed. That rule was challenged and overturned in court though.
> On August 6, 2021, the SEC approved Nasdaq’s proposed diversity rule for companies listed on its exchange. The rule required Nasdaq-listed companies to (1) publicly disclose board-level demographic data annually and (2) have, or explain why they do not have, a certain number of diverse directors on their boards. Companies with more than five board members were required to have two members from an underrepresented group, including one female and one person who self-identifies as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, biracial, or LGBTQ+.
Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.
Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.
I’ve worked in tech support at all levels. At most companies it doesn’t matter what customer service is happy or sad about, their job is to deploy the policy given. Customer support as an organization’s opinion isn’t generally valued at most companies.
Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”
That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.
Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.
Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...
The cost of providing customer support is clear and easy to measure, while the benefit is nebulous. This leads to incentive structures centered around controlling costs. That means rewards for handling more calls, and thus punishment for taking too long on a call regardless of the merits. In such an environment, it is inevitable that the reps will care about their call times instead of the customer. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.
"Without those clouds the alien mind control rays from space will get you more often. You think it's deja vu don't you? Better get your tinfoil hat prepped."
As most people understand the word "dolphin", Orcas are not technically dolphins though they belong to the same family.
I've heard the claim that Orcas are a species of porpoise, like dolphins, but I can't even corroborate that since Wikipedia is claiming that porpoises are distinct from dolphins.
> The classification of orcas as dolphins stems from their scientific categorization. Both orcas and dolphins fall under the family Delphinidae, which encompasses oceanic dolphins. Despite their formidable size and fearsome reputation, orcas share more in common with their smaller dolphin relatives than with other whale species.
So Orcas and dolphins are both categorized in the family Delphinidae which is colloquially referred to as the "Oceanic Dolphins" so, depending on what you mean, yes Orcas are technically dolphins but then ... so are dolphins. Meaning that "dolphin" and "delphinidae" refer to two distinct things even though all dolphins are delphinidae and the colloquial term for "delphinidae" is "oceanic dolphin." But it's important to recognize that the oceanic dolphins is a pretty wide family that includes several species that have the word "whale" in their name, such as belugas and narwhals, in addition to orcas.
My friend, letting yourself be bothered by this is just pissing into the wind. Humans have been anthropomorphizing machines and other objects for as long as we've been making them, it's a fundamental aspect of human nature. Thousands upon thousands of ships and trains given human names. Tanks, guns, cars, anything that is at least moderately complex or that people find themselves relying on and forming relationships with. AIs have been getting human names since at least 1966 with Eliza, probably earlier, and certainly with many earlier examples in fiction.
