Yes, there's an element of self-fulfilling prophecy about it, but there's also acceptance of the inevitable. I know a few servers who I trust would remain professional and courteous to groupon customers. Universally complain that groupon users make poor customers. (Not strictly limited to groupon. "$2 specials everywhere" bar crawls of any ilk draw similar complaints.) I mean, it's not like all the servers got together and decided to A/B test groupon customers by being meaner to them than others just for the funsies. How does a server with no priors come to treat one group differently than another?
It's less self-fulfilling than you would expect. Research shows that tip amount isn't very affected by the quality of service, but much more affected by the person doing the tipping.
If you walk down a street and nine people punch you in the gut as they pass, it's a bit rich for the tenth person to complain that you flinched as they walked past. The wait staff are simply playing the odds.
If extensions like this became ubiquitous, I wonder what Google's response would be? Would they refuse to run their apps on iOS like they do on Windows Phone, or would they still have a sufficient revenue stream to not see this as an attack against them?
I tried AdBlockPlus last year on my android tablet. It had a bug that didn't close video streams. If you started watching something and closed the app or started another stream, the old stream(s) get coming as well. That burned through a lot of data.
Now I just root my devices and use a hosts file (MoaAB - Mother of all Ad Blocking).
PayPal has some serious issues with regards to what you say, but I used it last summer to transfer money from USA to Europe for my daughter and the fee was a fraction of what the bank wanted. Banks can be pretty scummy in their own way.
Have you ever tried TransferWise? With customers and family around the world, I'm thinking of switching to them to handle transfers instead of Paypal/Stripe. They seem to have the most honest fees around.
Disclaimer: not affiliated with them. Just genuinely curious.
About TransferWise. I checked their site based on your recommendation. However, something bothers me.
There's a form on the Top-right corner. "You send," "You Receive." I tried checking how much would be received in dollars if I sent $1000. However, the form wouldn't let me. It doesn't allow comparison between the same currency.
It felt shady to me.
I've sent this message to them already. But wow! They do support a lot of countries - far more than Stripe. I'm surprised I've never heard of them before.
The site says "transfer money abroad". If for some reason they only want the more difficult kind of transfer, it would help to make that clear.
I'm confused by you asking why when the answer is both obvious and explicitly stated in parent comments. Sending someone money in a different country, but they happen to use the same currency.
Since transfers are bank account to bank account, this would mean somebody abroad (say in Europe) would have USD denominated bank account? As far as I know TransferWise does require your recipient to have a bank account in the location where they want to receive the money, meaning usually transfers between accounts denominated in different currencies.
If its within EU there is of course no point in using TransferWise as EUR-EUR transactions are practically free.
It wasn't clear to me which is why I asked. I agree for that case the headline is a bit misleading though.
In the EU it's nearly always free to transfer funds between the same currency, even between different countries. Banks still get people with the exchange rates or high fees to make transfers between currencies. TransferWise is a UK company, so that being their primary market, they took off from European workers in the UK wanting to send money home.
Just for comparisons sake, my use case is transferring money between Ireland (EUR) and the UK (GBP) and vice versa. Compared to my bank they have both better exchange rates, lower fees, and are quicker.
I have used TransferWise for both USD and SEK/EUR transfers to INR. Works perfectly, their time estimates are spot on (usually I receive it on the day or one day early) and the exchange fees are very competitive (and I've probably compared most other forms of transfers - including Bitcoin/Localcoin).
I've used Xoom in the past as to send money to family in the UK, it's always been fast and easy.
However they charge $4.99 up to $2999, with TransferWise there's no fee and slightly better rates (0.6346 vs. 0.6262). I'm going to try them out next time, thanks for the tip!
TransferWise converts your money at the mid-market rate and matches you with people sending in the other direction. That's why it costs so little.
My understanding - after you've given the money you want to transfer to TransferWise, they find someone in your destination country who wishes to transfer money to the country where you are (kind of like a swap). This way, they cut off the banks and their fees and charge you a lower fee.
That's how I understood it, but then I thought "what if there's no one in that country?" Do they use their own funds or does the recipient wait several weeks.
I imagine it's the former, but at the time I just used SWIFT - rather expensive, but guaranteed to work everywhere.
It works by them having $90m in VC funding from people like Richard Branson and Peter Thiel which they then use to subsidise the super cheap transfers with the aim of growing big.
It works well, you initiate a bank account transfer from one country (denominated in say USD) and in a few days your recipient receives it as a deposit in their bank account in their local currency. In between TransferWise keeps you updated with status via e-mail and on the website.
I always compare with my normal bank when I'm forced to use paypal and so far they have always been slightly higher than the bank. I live in Sweden though.
My wife uses Nordea and they go out on a limb for her every time she needs something (and she lives in the US with me, so hardly can go into the bank for things).
Curiously for use abroad ICA banken (affiliated with the grocery store of the same name) turns out to be really beneficial, free withdrawals anywhere in the world and completely aligned with remote customer service (as they don't in fact have any branches that they can ask you to visit..).
I've heard good and bad things about both of them. I've been looking for a better international alternative, though.
Simple bank looks absolutely amazing (https://www.simple.com/), but sadly they are US-only. Does anyone know a similar bank to Simple that is friendlier to international travelers/EU citizens?
Ten folders puts me at the limit just on my family LAN with each user having their own folder and me having a couple so I can have a smaller set for syncing to laptop and a larger one for desktops.
I just installed SyncThing...
P.S. I just found out it is written in Go so that is a big plus for me as well.
I've been using btsync for a long time. I have seen high cpu or net utilization, but it was because of a changed name on one of the computers that were syncing. The other instance was still trying to connect to the device using the old name. The solution is to delete the synced folder and reestablish it under the new name. It does not need to recopy the data, but it does need to reindex.
Safari private browsing is broken too. Just private browse, quit safari, reopen safari and then check in the preferences on the privacy tab and see the cookies, etc.
My 14 year old daughter runs chromeOS and xubuntu on her Chromebook and she takes it to school and she has never had a problem with it being wiped. She is, however, aware that files stored on that machine internally could be lost and she takes precaution.
I bought our first HP Chromebook 14 as refurb off and love it so much I bought a second one. They are both in constant use in our household. My wife even prefers to use hers over her desktop.
To see how this relates to computer security, download the pdf linked in the article. After it exposes the methods of exploitation, it gives examples of internet computer scams.
I agree, but until Google gets the fix in you can have no way of knowing what it will look like because it all depends on the hardware and how it has been scaled.
I only came across this because my daughter's new laptop with an HD screen made Chrome look awful and I didn't understand why since it looked good everywhere else.
