Coming from a higher end Subaru… the Tesla system is a god send. I have complaints with my model Y, but that doesn’t even register (autopilot on the other hand, definitely tops the list).
I was thinking some startup was a possibility. There’s obviously a ton of money to be made by making something go really fast. “Tesla sky teleport can get you from LA to Portland in 40 minutes.” Just sit in this cylinder as we launch you in your personal ballistic missile.
We saw a lot of recklessness with self driving vehicles. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar attitude while developing tech like this.
Yeah, that’s my question. I’ll assume someone (whether the US government, Elon Musk, or whoever) was testing a rocket of some sort. Why the hell was it in the same area as a commercial flight? I’ll add another stupid human error to my list of things to be afraid of while on a plane.
In my experience the "loudmouth" in-person is the same way on a video call. They always get their two cents in, and are sure to jump in regardless of whether or not another person is patiently waiting their turn.
I worked for a small company right out of college and we had some monsters under the bed too. Unfortunately the manager would rather new code written than cleaning up technical debt or resolving risks. So I would have to double my estimates and use my “spare time” to try to work toward some level of sanity... but there were still plenty of things that I felt guilty about and would be evasive about if someone asked.
It is better not to take ownership of someone else's bad decisions. At the very least, make sure that you do not become complicit in something unethical or illegal.
There are countless people in this thread (which concerns me because I generally think of HN as a pretty highly educated and moral group) who see errors like that at the register and walk away thinking they won a prize.
So you admit openly to stealing, just to put it plainly. You chose to shop somewhere, you chose to use a self checkout, you knew there was an error, and proceeded to leave with things you didn’t pay for. No matter how you justify it to yourself, you’re a thief.
If you can justify that you can justify stealing from your employer (hey I’ve been under paid for a while, taking this unsecured device is like making up for a bit of my salary), etc.
I find the logic here really interesting. When you participate in a buy-one-get-one-free offer, you "leave with things you didn't pay for". So imagine these scenarios:
You go to a greengrocers. The lady at the checkout sees you basket of 27 grapefruit and can't be bothered to do the maths, says "let's call it 5 [relevant currency]". You know you have something in the region of 7 relevant currency, but she insists she won't take a button more.
You go to the supermarket. The tills are misconfigured, a 10[currency] box of chocolates is coming up as 0.1[currency] [1]. You're buying 5 of them. The cashier has no facility to charge you more - whatever the system says is a divine edict as far as the company is concerned.
You go to the supermarket. You're walking by the main doors with your trolley when a fire alarm goes off; smoke is billowing from the back of the store, sprinklers are activated. In the blind panic, you - and your trolley - are pushed outside. After half an hour, they announce that the store will not be reopening. You tell security that you have not paid for your shopping, they gruffly request that you take it home and make use of it rather than litter the car park with rapidly defrosting frozen items, as nobody is allowed back in the building.
In most of these cases, you could probably pay the correct amount by queueing at another till, at another time, date, at your own time and cost. For the benefit of someone who doesn't care enough about the profit margin to worry.
These are much closer than your employer-theft analogy - I don't think that the parent poster's moral standpoint is at all far away from any of the above. In fact, the only difference is that because it's a technical "glitch" with no humans involved, you clearly feel you're supposed to go the extra mile to rectify the seller's mistakes, caused by the seller failing to invest sufficiently in the system.
I certainly wouldn't judge someone making any of these calls, regardless whether I personally would go that extra thankless mile.
I think the closest, albeit boring, analogy to the situation is you go through the traditional staffed register at a busy time. The tally comes out a little lower than you were expecting. Since it's not higher, you pay and get out of the way. In the parking lot, you look over your receipt and see that one item out of many didn't get scanned. Now you have the choice of either just accepting the benefit from the mistake, or spending your life waiting in line again simply to redo their job better than they did it themselves. IMO it's foolish to correct their mistake by harming yourself instead.
I've also corrected cashiers on the spot, especially for more significant errors. I once had a cashier ring up a manual 20% off coupon as 80% off ($20 vs $80 final price). Going through with that transaction could reasonably be called dishonest, despite it being perfectly legal.
So yes, 15 years ago I got a few items for free. I didn't act to get around their system - their system was just straight up broken, moving items to the have-paid-for-them area without counting them. I don't think it is a customer's job debug a store's system and manually move items back from the have-paid area. You're trying to push a paradigm wherein the store can shirk hiring even a single person to oversee their side of the transaction, yet make the customer responsible for applying diligence for both sides. Give me a break.
I guarantee you the store doesn't analyze their situation in such inflexible absolutist terms, because they could literally never do anything ("can't just put stuff on the shelves, someone might pocket something!!"). Rather they look at cost/benefit. The cost they incurred there was part of the development of the machines, which seemingly has paid off for them by now given that the machines are still around. That is how they chose to handle their half of the responsibility, end of story.
I myself only brought up the detail to make that point that even with the machine's obtuseness leading to missed items, the frustration of it grinding of my gears was still greater! Place the item here, place the item there. no, you did something wrong, go back. no, go back. okay now I am finally ready to take your money. bills first, sorted by serial number! And every time I have tried the machines in the following years, I find that same obtuseness. If you can't take the judgment of valuing my personal convenience over wasting my effort to get free stuff as an indication that I am not a thief, it only demonstrates how useless your paradigm is.
So get off your high horse. Maybe next you can write some grandstanding general comment about the countless other occurrences where something was wrong on a receipt but people didn't go back afterwards because the error was in their favor. Or I can even give you some fodder - I also defraud the stores by changing out my surveillance nym every few months. Meanwhile you can continue missing the forest for the trees and letting slide the emergent-complexity abuses caused by the wholly logical implications of absolutist morals and laws.
I bet you're one of those people that actually waits in a line to exit the store, so that the security guard can recheck your receipt and give you a gold star. How many are you up to now?
I was actually doing research a couple of days ago to support more remote workers for my company and... unfortunately almost all of the research I found was backing co-location. There are degrees of remote work, but it seems that for most teams and most products being co-located provides the most productivity.
There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.
my theory is that if you try to convert a co-located workforce to remote you are going to struggle because you have a mix of people that are able and unable to properly function that way. However if you start a company with that model from day one, over time you select for people that can handle the remote aspect. It becomes a core cultural value.
Southwest is the fun airline. What would american airlines have to do to become a fun airline? They would have to fire 2/3 of their staff.
