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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • Doesn’t that ultimately punish not the company, but anyone who lent money or sold material to the company? Usually assets would be liquidated to pay off creditors but if all the assets go to employees creditors don’t get paid. This really hurts all the small businesses who sold supplies or materials to the company and haven’t been paid for them yet.

    And of course, this all ignores the fact that for most companies most of their valuation is in their intellectual property, mainly their brand identity and recognition. And for manufacturing company’s, even most of the tangible assets are going to be things like factory buildings and equipment. Those things are all highly specialized so it’s very difficult to get someone else to come in and use that space to the same level of productivity. That will result in major damage to the local economy when a huge source of tax revenue and jobs suddenly disappears.

    I’m not saying all this because I think companies should get away with whatever they want. Not at all. I just want to give some context for why these “obvious solutions” aren’t being used. It’s not that the entire world is in some conspiracy. Many of these problems are legitimately very difficult to solve.





  • The article is pretty short so it’s hard to tell, but I know in other cases there can be a significant difference between whether or not you say you’re an engineer when you make these claims.

    The term engineer is effectively a trademark controlled by a state licensing board. They want to protect the word engineer so it’s clear to the public when someone is speaking as a professional licensed engineer vs not. Overall, this is a good thing and a direct response to specific and numerous very bad things that have happened in the past.

    However, this has also resulted in some very awkward situations because the word engineer has almost become a genericized trademark in that there are many people who have the word engineer in their job title but do not have or need a professional engineer’s license.

    Based on the fact the guy won the case, I’m going to assume he wasn’t substantially misrepresenting his qualifications. The headline is very sensationalized though and the article is lacking any detail, so I don’t know how relevant this little anecdote is but I find it interesting.


  • This is surprisingly difficult problem because different people are okay with different brand substitutions. Some people may want the cheapest butter regardless of brand, while others may only buy brand name.

    For example my wife is okay with generic chex from some grocery stores but not others, but only likes brand names Cheerios. Walmart, Aldi, and Meijer generic cheese is interchangable, but brand name and Kroger brand cheese isn’t acceptable.

    Making a software system that can deal with all this is really hard. AI is probably the best bet, but it needs to be able to handle all this complexity to be useable, which is a lot of up front work


  • I think there’s some ability to distinguish as anything intentionally discarded due to spillage or damage should be accounted for directly, as opposed to only showing up at inventory

    Obviously it is impossible to separate out honest mistakes, intentional theft, and disgruntled employee semi-intentional shrink. If you ask the company, 500% of shrink is theft by organized crime rings and the general public should definitely be spending taxpayer dollars on police enforcement and jail time for pretty thieves. So I would assume most of it is actually accidental check out mistakes and employees “accidentally” checking things out wrong.



  • But the stadium will bring so much economic benefit to the city! Well get at least 4 new fast food restaurants hiring only minimum wage workers, and a small boost in hotel revenue!

    Transit won’t bring any return on investment. Only poor people use transit and they don’t have any money. And if someone who has a car does use transit that’s hurting the economy! Think of the poor gas station owners and car dealers!

    /S /S /S /S /S



  • Athletics is actually petty profitable, since athletes can’t be paid, so the school gets all the money for sponsorships, tickets, merch, etc.

    It can actually be a problem for the schools, since athletics isn’t allowed to be profitable. They have to spend all the money athletics brings in on athletics, which is why the athletics department ends up with all the fancy new buildings.


  • Because they like having money? Running a university is legitimately very expensive and there’s always more to do. I think it’s more common with people who went to business school or became pro athletes, etc. They end up with very profitable careers and a fond recollection of their time in college. It’s worth it to the university to ask almost everyone just in case, because sometimes they find that one whale alum.


  • Getting rid of a toilet might be easy. My trash company accepted one as my once a month “large item”. I just had to dry out all the water and bag it up with the tank and bowl in separate bags.

    Upgrading to a modern toilet with a good MAP score was a huge upgrade and not terribly expensive compared to other projects. I think we’ve plugged it maybe once since we got it? The old toilet needed to be plunged regularly.

    If you decide to take it on just give your trash company a call first and see what their policies are.