HN user
Cofounder of Fixed. Fighter of parking tickets. Recovering contrarian. San Francisco, CA · fixed.com
In Portugal, I’ve see them use speed activated red lights.
If you’re going too fast, an arbitrary red light will be triggered on your route. It’s quicker not to speed, than to wait out the red light.
Shout out to one of the greatest documentaries of all time: PBS's 'Ferrets - The Pursuit of Excellence'.
It is ever bit as funny 'Best in Show'... but the characters are real.
The only place I can find a streaming version is this low quality YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhSFMO4egI&t=4163s
The DVD is now ~$80 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Excellence-Ferrets/dp/B000RL2...
I think there's a difference between happiness and fulfillment. Parenthood unlocks a new level of feelings I never experienced before.
I cannot accurately describe the joy that fatherhood brings me.... despite the reduced sleep and increased stress.
By a magnitude of 10x, Fatherhood has surpassed anything i have experienced prior.
I learned to do this 5 years ago as part of a wilderness survival program. I was highly skeptical at first, but it was much easier in reality. I believe the practice is banned in most states because it is so effective at catching fish.
Going to echo this one. Plus the following two books: 1/ Richest man in Babylon 2/ Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
Both written for the simplest of readers but great advice clearly told.
(Summaries are probably good enough)
Love every opportunity to link to this story: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_t...
The Citigroup building in NYC had a fundamental design flaw that could cause it to collapse.
I know this thread is about Weasels... but can I just use this opportunity to drop a recommendation for one of the funniest documentaries ever made: https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Excellence-Ferrets/dp/B000RL2...
(I think it's available to stream on Prime)
Everyone has different views on what Liberal vs. Conservative means, but if you were to use these definitions:
Liberal: Promote group-oriented solutions to address economic disparities and historical social injustices.
Conservatives: Promote individualist-oriented solutions to create wealth and entrepreneurship.
... you'd start to see that the author's argument is a little circular.
'Education', in the author's sense of the word, refers to group-oriented institutional education (e.g. traditional universities).
So really what the author is asking is 'why do people educated in group-oriented educational institutions promote group-oriented political solutions?'
I think it would be interesting to know where 'self-taught learned people' sit on the political spectrum?
That's not how laws work. You can't have one set of rules for one stakeholder, and another set of rules for another. Particularly when one of those stakeholders gets to acts as enforcement, judiciary AND beneficiary.
1 inch over the curb... we're going to tow your car with $700 worth of fines.
No visible sign on the street and nothing within 100 ft (which there has to be by law)... it doesn't matter, you should have known we intended that street to have no parking between 4-6pm.
If you tried to come up with a system with more adverse and broken incentives, you'd be hard pushed to come up with a better one than the SFMTA. 1) Let's saddle this organization with $10Ms of losses each year. 2) Let's give them the authority to issue tickets and fine the citizens for breaking an arbitrary set of laws. 3) Let's allow them keep the fines and treat it as 'revenue'. 4) Let's allows them to regulate themselves and decided if the tickets they issued are fair.
I'm just going to quickly jump in here. I'm David, one of the co-founders of Fixed.
Every single contest is custom written, and has an extremely thorough review which includes: 1) automated check (check for missing/incorrect information) 2) low level review (primarily done by a team in India that uses Google Street view to measure the distance to closest signs) 3) high level review (performed by an Advocate in SF who double check the previous steps, and also reviews all notes and input from the user).
The advocate in SF then finalizes the contest letter and submits.
In general, about 2/3 of the tickets issued by the SFMTA and other parking ticket authorities have some issue with them.
I'd also like to point out, that it is not in our interest to submit frivolous contests. Each submitted contest requires time and resources on our end to submit the contest AND monitor the contest and process the return letter.
Finally... if your wife had two similar contest submitted, I might suggest that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of oversight, and continues to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.
BINGO!!! You da man. That's seems to work for all my examples.
Thanks!
Great. We have a blog post up: http://blog.fixed.com/post/116649853902/a-problem-we-need-he...
... I'll setup a GitHub later today.
@shortoncash - I like that approach! If you live up to your username, do you've any interest in doing it as a side project?
We take a huge amount of pride in our Customer Service.
We have a target response time of 4-5 hours, and try to make sure every user questions gets responded to in under 1 business day.
We think it's reflected in our reviews on the App Store (http://goo.gl/dn4zYC).
Someone not getting a response shouldn't be possible.. our workflows aren't setup that way. That's not to say that it hasn't happened, but when it does it's usually for a technical reason outside of our immediate control (e.g. user's spam filters).
Happy to de-bug the issue publicly on hackernews, but so far I can't find any record of a user with an email/name similar to that username, and the user hasn't contacted me.
I'll update as I know more...
Sorry to hear about your experience. This is definitely not the experience we are aiming for...
Can you email directly at hegs (at) fixed (dot) com and I'll figure out exactly what happened with your ticket.
Thanks.