uberduber

We had a dishwasher with auto-dispense where you pour the whole bottle of detergent into a reservoir and it would automatically dispense what was needed.

Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren't getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren't really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.

My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.

True, though tenants in corporate owned single family housing all tell me it's closer towards the worst landlords. The corporations won't harass you, but they essentially don't want to do anything. You just get an expensive "as-is" house, which can be okay if it's in decent shape.

I've been sick for almost ten years and had low vitamin D levels. Last two years I've finally found some treatments that work for me, now that I'm healthier my vitamin D level has gone up to about 40 even though I rarely go outside and don't supplement. It's typically 5 without supplementation.

Previously, I tried supplementing with 10,000IU daily, didn't help me feel any better and took a long time to get my levels up. Doctor even told me to lie outside in a bikini every day in the sun and not to burn myself. My doc's theory is that some process in sick people uses up their vitamin D and calcium, and that's what needs to be stopped. He says he has seen patients with Vitamin D deficiency where they are cured with supplementation and/or sun, but it's not very common. It's cheap, easy, and harmless enough though to try before moving on to other things.

Later, because they're more likely to have some sort of treatment, there's a large number of studies going on now.

Here's an article from the WSJ about how using serum from recovered measles patients prevented an outbreak decades before the vaccine was developed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-boys-blood-stopped-an-out...

A sizable portion of the car washes in Los Angeles have an aggressive chip repair salesman who will circle all the chips and aggressively try to sell you on free windshield repair. Guy was always confused and upset about why I wouldn't want to buy something that was free.

Finally one day my windshield had enough chips to be replaced. Guy sees me pulling out my insurance card and goes "Mercury? They don't cover anything!" so now when the guy starts walking over I say "I'm with Mercury" and he immediately moves on.

I do this on high value items. I pack the item in the car though for safety and film continuously until drop-off.

They have rental scams here where they will show you the house as well. One is where they pretend to be realtors and get the key from the listing agent.

Hospitals will pay their own money for residencies in specialties that are wildly profitable. Usually, some fancy types of surgeons. Primary care, endocrinology, rheumatology, and a lot of other needed specialists are not so the limited slots are whatever the government will pay for.

On the zero bezel phones the software makes a huge difference. I have very small hands where I can barely grip friends' XL phones. If they have some cheap off-brand, discount prepaid or even fancy Chinese Android I am constantly activating it despite barely touching the edges, whereas I never have the problem on the Google Pixel or an iPhone.

I’m in the same boat as you. My PT has helped a lot. I discovered many of the treatments were in the book The Perrin Technique. The symptoms in the book described me exactly.

I gave her a copy to read and it has helped greatly. My PT told another one of her patients with similar symptoms who has gone from mostly bed/housebound to regular outings.

Older people have had more practice operating the TV. Just getting the phone to work is often a mental challenge.

A ton of them are constantly inadvertently opening control center and then accidentally turning it on airplane mode or whatever. Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.

I know a ton of these older adults. I think the true problem is that they are not socializing enough which is the cause of the mental decline and often paranoia.

Some of them have moved somewhere cheaper to retire where they don’t have many friends, but most of the ones I know just watch tv instead of calling a friend to do something. The friend is the same even though they would love to hang out. I’ve tried nudging them with no success.

Active management is expensive. I've seen it for $1800/yr and the rate of followup was still poor. If you want a doctor to take care of you like family the rate seems to be $7500-30000 annually depending on what's wrong with you. Seems like it might be cheaper to hire a healthcare advocate though most of them are more about geriatric and end of life care.

Depends on the insurance company's contract with the provider. It is generally optional, though they will tell you otherwise. I would still pay it though. I feel like it is a good value and I want to maintain a good relationship the the doctor and their office.

An electric bike is too heavy and bulky, there's nowhere to store it in the house. Also a pain to store in the office which is upstairs. We can't leave it outside due to the homeless, they'll steal or vandalize or defecate on it.

There's a bunch of reasons, but mostly he just really hates walking. It's boring, too slow and too hot outside much of the year which causes the whole sweatiness problem.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the electric scooter rental services. For a while they did make traffic in Santa Monica and surrounding areas better. It went from horrific to less horrific but no one talked about that.

My boyfriend works 1 mile from work and he took them almost everyday in the beginning. When the cities all cracked down and required a licensing fee for each one, the numbers were drastically reduced and they were no longer consistently available within a 2-3 minute walk. So back in the car he went. We've looked into buying one but right now they're too expensive, heavy, and unreliable to own. It's so much easier to just leave it when you arrive and not worry about maintenance.

There's a huge number of people who use Uber as a payday loan who are completely unaware of finance. They just need cash NOW.

The most ridiculous one I saw was a drive with a cracked iPhone 7 Plus three days after release. In my half hour ride I saw 4 overdraft notifications and 2 please pay your bill notifications. We talked about waiting in line to get the phone and how she regretted not paying $50 for the case. She was also interested in buying a lot of stuff.

Many of them will do something stupid like trade-in their car impulsively, or total it backing into a pole where mileage doesn't really matter.

A lot of them will use the Uber gas card to get gas and then drive for Lyft to get the cash. Then next month when they need money they forgot they owe Uber and now have to drive to pay off the gas debt to Uber before they can earn anything.

I've only met three people who were willing to admit using it as a payday loan, they were all grad students. Two had financial aid delays, one blew too much money on his girlfriend.

I've also met quite a few older people (usually men) with high incomes that were laid off and need quick cash. These are often singles living paycheck to paycheck on $200k in LA and they can never figure out what to cut.

Agreed. I do remember reading somewhere that the average current full time working mother spends more time with her children than a housewife in the 50s. Children used to go outside and play and have more unstructured time. I feel like there is this whole odd child-centric culture in the US. It is bizarre how many young adults I meet nowadays who have not been left without adult supervision for more than 15 minutes their entire childhood.

Most of my friends are from childhood. For the ones who have children, about half of them have turned into uninteresting people who are incapable of carrying a conversation about anything other than their children. And some of them were extremely interesting beforehand. A few have snapped out of it when their kids have turned 3-5, but most seem stuck forever.

When I go to visit family and family friends outside the US, they all have a bunch of kids but none of them have this disease where they can only talk about the kids. But there's also much more family support nearby and societal norms allow the children to be more independent.

In LA, Hispanic neighborhoods have 24 hour urgent cares but the doctor quality is all over the place though usually bad.

Urgent cares used to be pretty upfront. I went to an urgent care a couple of years ago, $99 advertised in the window. I go in, fill out all the paperwork and they tell me it's going to be $150. When I point to the window, she says it's expired. I start to walk out and she tells me to come back and gives me price. This is not the only time I've had to walk out over various health things, it's ridiculous. They think you won't do it because you're ill and act that getting angry over this is some sort of insane response. So now I just pretend not to have the extra money.

Anyway, I use Heal now. So happy that the VCs are funding this, hope it lasts.

We eat the loss and the chargeback fee, it's just a cost of business.

It's not worth it to ban the customer. 90% of them don't buy again. Of the 10% that do, it's worth it to keep their business and risk the chargebacks. Most of them get better at hiding the porn. Also if we did this we would end up banning great customers who closed their card due to actual fraud and the bank just ending charging back everything after a certain date.

There just weren't really that many trying to scam us out of DVDs. Other business factors affect your chargeback rate way more than these customers.

Have worked in men's and women's porn. Women have this solved, all their porn is from Amazon. Historically don't chargeback so that hurdle never existed.

I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of Kindle revenue and certainly more than half of Kindle profits were just women's porn. Amazon occasionally has half-hearted crackdowns because some conservative finds it and complains.

Used to work in a business that sold porn DVDs and had to deal with chargebacks. We had an inbound sales call center, and a customer service one where you could cancel.

Among the chargebacks, fraud is the most common reason code, but the amount of true fraud such as stolen credit cards is astoundingly low to the point of being almost non-existent. I would say 90% of cases were the angry spouse and the man denying it. The most common actual fraud you would see is a relative who lives in the house using it, say a grandson using grandma's credit card or adult children running up a $4k tab after their parent died.

Also I had to find friendly merchant banks, the problem with this is it is very much a two-way trust street. Just as there are tons of shady porn providers, there are tons of shady merchant banks. Some will hold your money for no reason and can jeopardize your whole business, so we always had everything spread across multiple banks but that could still be problematic.

Interesting, I have a few friends who were formerly EMTs and when I spoke to some former paramedic acquaintances, they seemed to believe the speed bumps were detrimental in certain specific medical cases, things like cardiac arrest and aortic aneurysms.

I'm in SoCal and some of these neighborhoods are just full of speed bumps, so maybe it's all of those seconds adding to minutes? Also there are different types of speed bumps, some don't slow you down at all and others you go 5mph and feel like you're ruining your suspension. Or maybe there's some other confounding factor? Do you only have a few where you live?

You may be right. It's been a while. I remember reading a news article some place where they had the stats before they put them in, and found out after that ambulance times were delayed and the death rate went up, and then they tore them all out at great expense. The other ones I remember seeing are more like the one linked below. I think they proved the speed bumps result in ambulance delays, and assume deaths based on a rate. I also recall not being able to find any solid data that the speed bumps save lives.

Seconds count. We already know that speed bumps kill 9 for every 1 life they save, due to ambulance delays. Ambulances are heavy and can't go over speed bumps very quickly. The 1 life they save is from someone not going so fast.

I have managed many people in industries that attract low IQ (70-90) workers. I also know a lot of high IQ people since I went to a gifted high school.

I'm not a psychiatrist, but I believe the low IQ have WAY higher rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders, but almost none of them are diagnosed. Their lives run without much thought or planning so they often end up in very stressful situations. Sometimes they don't even realize that something is wrong or not normal. Or even if they do manage to figure that out, they cannot describe what they are feeling or communicate effectively which can be stressful in itself.

I still think high IQ people have mild to moderately higher rates of mental disorders than normal IQ people, but with low IQ I think it's massively higher.

I use Paprika as well. The most useful feature is that I can add a bunch of recipes to the calendar for a week, and then auto generate a grocery list synced to my phone. You can also easily scale the ingredients. I have a couple of friends who use it and say it clips recipes in foreign languages pretty well (but no ingredient scaling).

There have been a lot of apps in this space which were better but also subsequently abandoned by the developers. Almost all of my friends switched over to Paprika because they got tired of switching again and again.

If you are not already going to a large academic center in a large city, I would start there. Also depending on your condition and specialty it is fairly regional. For example, most of the good geneticists are on the east coast.

In large cities with rich people there are cash only and concierge doctors who will spend the time needed with you because you pay them for it. The going rate now here in Los Angeles seems to be $1000/hr for an appointment, though they do spend time outside of that on your case of that which they don't charge for.

If money is truly no object, there are services that you pay money who will do research, have connections to top doctors, and ensure the correct diagnosis. The best known one is Private Health Management. There are some smaller firms often started by people who used to work there that are more affordable. Years ago when I talked to some of these my personal case was around $50-100k which I don't have.

I live in Los Angeles. Waze only learns a new route if you teach it a route. One time I was stuck in the hills in the Valley and traffic was particularly awful. It kept re-routing, and I was wondering why it wasn't sending me on a particular route, so I decided to go that way. Well, next day the route is full of people. This has happened a few times.

So now I have routes that I know and purposely do not share with any of these apps. I make everyone in the car turn off Waze, Google, etc. If I am in an Uber or Lyft, I will just sit there. I once shared a route with an Uber driver and it's now filled with Wazers. I also have routes where I ignore the no turn signs but Waze respects those so I don't care.

Exactly. It also depends on your neighbors. Right now we have two relatively similar options, but for various reasons the neighbors are all the type to never switch. So, no one will negotiate and you just have to switch back and forth every year if you actually want the discount.