mseebach

> Wire transfer fees are a set amount, usually around $40, not a percentage of the total amount transferred. You can do the math to figure out at what dollar threshold sending wire transfers through your bank becomes cheaper than using Transferwise.

Absolutely do the math, but keep in mind that fees are not the only fees when doing FX: few banks will use the spot FX rate for wire transfers, they'll typically add a spread of about 3%.

This has happened very rarely to me, but when it has, the head purser would usually be carrying the manifest or an iPad and clearly referencing it. That takes the creepiness out of it. It's a nice, but ultimately not terribly important, touch that they make a bit of an effort to personalise the greeting.

On one or two occasions (flying to a short stay at an outstation, and catching the same crew on the return), the attendant clearly recognised me, and made a point of saying hello, welcome back (not by name though, that would have been creepy). That's rare, and not really to be expected, though.

I think there are two nuances missing here: First, it's easier to ask forgiveness -- this is a descriptive statement, it doesn't say better. Second, this is predicated on getting forgiveness. If what you do isn't relatively easy to forgive, you lose a lot, eg. getting fired or otherwise formally sanctioned. It's certainly neither easier, nor better.

If you "predict" that it might not make a bestseller list, it's not a particular leap to predict that it wouldn't make it past a publisher, either?

I am making no attempt to quantify this, I simply have no data, but it seems the argument is that today it is relatively more fashionable to write a book about black women doing something that is traditionally thought of as something white men would do, regardless of the "classic" qualities of the work. If it is the case (and I have no data to argue either way) that such a fashion means that a mediocre book about black women doing something (not saying the particular book is good or bad, I don't know it) gets published instead of a really good book about white men doing something, that could certainly be considered "diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West".

But there has always been literature pandering to political fashions, and fashionable literature has always enjoyed an edge over unfashionable literature. Some of it is good and has stood the test of time, and some (most, probably, this is a power law domain) of it pretty bad, and totally forgotten. It's easy to look at the literature that survived from 20 years ago and compare with whatever flash-in-a-pan is being hawked by publishers right this minute and see all kinds of diminished products.

That is a bad look for Marriott, for sure, but if you disqualify establishments for unfairly firing a low-level employee, you should get used to travelling a lot less. This particular situation just happened to be well publicised.

There's already a very easy and commonly deployed way to save on a concierge: don't have one.

> It's one thing to trust Amazon or Google, but now you also have to trust the hotel and its staff, the physical security of the device, and all the previous guests of the room.

You already had to do the physical trust thing. These devices are a new challenge because they could be remotely compromised.

The good thing about places like that is (a) they don't actually care about the money, it's a rounding error. For some smaller firms paying someone for three weeks of not working (regardless of fault) could actually be a problem. (b) They also have a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract because of a stupid mistake that a small cheque can make go away".

But, of course, the author is perfectly within his rights to just not pursue this, and I have no idea what processes he'd been told to expect for this -- it's just strange that he would emphasise something he doesn't care about in the post.

In which case the correct answer is to sit tight for a bit until you understand the deeper problem. And then you fix the deeper problem, and then you fix the process.

In theory. In practice, the code will often have corner case behaviours that eludes any of the tests, yet are still important.

As an aside, as I understand it, refactoring was popularised as a response basically to this conundrum - it's a technique for reorganising code without changing its functionality. So you can gradually "rewrite" your two page function without losing the accumulated knowledge.

The bit about the manager and director is in the main article. There's nothing about pay, but they're presented as entirely sympathetic and angry about the system on his behalf.

As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appeals process, it's open and shut, and if it isn't you have a lawyer deal with it, and recoup expenses, too. And if the guy just doesn't care about it, then why does he mention it twice?

And for the purposes of this, and the other sub-thread that is incredulous about this, this is not an American thing: If you're a contractor in Europe, and you don't get paid, and you then don't do anything about that, then you don't get paid. There's no process that automatically fixes things when the aggrieved party doesn't ask for them to be fixed (and yes, even in Europe, there's a bit of annoying process and paperwork to deal with).

He elaborates a bit in the comments - it seems he's entitled to the money, but couldn't be bothered: "So I had to do an appeal, and go through a long process that I did not care much to go through. I had a mind in quitting after all."

Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being supportive. Or get the agency to do it for him, and bill them for the trouble. Or whatever. Something smells a bit fishy about that part of the story.

So, this is about legalisation - I can totally see medical rescheduling working (and nobody seems to have countered Sajid Javid's announcement yesterday). It's a step in the right direction, but it's still a while to go to undo most of the ills of the war on drugs.

Yeah, well it's either that, or the significantly simpler explanation that involves very simple electoral maths: the tories are going to get exactly 0 voters to cross over on this policy, but tons of core tory voters might stay home on election day.