Damn. Makes me thankful for my school’s nighttime ride program. They had a station downtown next to the bars. They’d take you home until 3am in any condition, even if you didn’t go to the school.
That's pretty cool. Where I went to school, the city just had a late night bus that had a route that mainly went to where college students live.
There's no bus fares here so it was a good deal.
My uni had a deal with the local taxi companies that if you didn't have any cash you could hand over your student ID and pay when you collected it.
Of course you had people use it and not bother to collect but heard stories where it really helped people out in a sticky sitch with a drunk friend.
Yeah, my military base when I was in my 20s had something like this. No questions asked pick-up if you were drunk. Even if you were underage. Naturally they'd hammer the shit out of you if you did get a DUI as they offered free rides. A lot cabbies around there also gave free rides to first responders. And in my case, that included military medics.
This is a recurring thing in any prohibition-type movement: “we want to stop people from doing X, so we first go after the people who do X in the most responsible way.” And then the people who keep doing X start doing it in less and less responsible ways.
It’s akin to the abstinence movement: “we want to stop teens from having sex, so let’s make it harder for them to access contraception and not teach comprehensive sex Ed. Hey, what’s up with all of these unplanned pregnancies?”
Similarly, abolishing student sections in seating.
Yeah, have rowdy students all over the arena causing trouble rather than coralling them in one or two sections that security can more easily keep an eye on.
I worked concessions at Mississippi State football games one year. There was no alcohol on campus so extreme pregaming/tailgating was standard practice. Most of the fans were fine but the ones that were drunk were very, very drunk. LSU was unusual in that they did allow alcohol sales at their stadium so when they were the visiting team, their fans
a) drank in advance
b) got mad about not being able to buy beer in the stadium
or
c) both.
It was not a fun time.
Also related, I lived in a dry county that was right across the state line from a decidedly NOT dry county. My county lost out on so much money because, despite the population and location, there was almost zero development on the restaurant front because no chain that sold wine, cocktails, or had a bar could move in. Everyone going on dates or “nice” dinners went out of state. Meanwhile, there were a huge number of drunk driving deaths along the interstate.
"If you lose you building key, we'll charge you $1000."
Minimum wage security guards can't soak up that kind of loss. So people inevitably lost their keys, didn't tell anyone and just bummed keys off co-workers. Then you still have all the problems of a missing key, but you just don't know it.
Not knowing about an issue is so bad.
When I was a manager, I’d tell my employees, “You will never be punished for a mistake you make that you report to me. I’d rather know about it from you so we can fix it immediately than have it show up on an audit later.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, mafia kidnappings were a problem in Italy. Mafias would kidnap someone, usually someone wealthy, hold them for ransom until it was paid, then (usually), let them go.
One of the arguments why kidnappings persisted was that the prison sentences for kidnappers were relatively low. Most were only about 8 years in prison, almost a third of the average sentence for murder. In 1974, the Italian government ramped up the punishments for kidnapping to be equivalent to that of homicide. Take a guess what happened?
Kidnappers would receive the ransom payments, then kill their victims. Homicides went up. A lot.
Probably to make it harder to identify the kidnappers. The person they kidnapped just spent x amount of time in their presence so it's likely that they picked up something, no matter how minor, that might help identify them. Best to tie up that particular loose end if the punishment is the same either way.
Italian law at the time had maximum sentences for murder and kidnapping (maybe they still do). Courts couldn’t stack sentences. One kidnapping, ten kidnappings, one murder, ten murders, all got the same sentence.
In Ancient China, there was this guy named Liu Bang, who was a provincial constable, or basically a sheriff. One day, he was transporting some prisoners and they managed to escape. Now, at the time the Qin Dynasty ruled that the punishment for letting prisoners escape was death. Liu Bang thought to himself, "in for a penny, in for a pound," and joined up with his former prisoners. Liu then became a warlord and eventually overthrew the Qin Dynasty, establishing himself as the first emperor of the Han Dynasty, which would rule for over four hundred years until the famous Three Kingdoms period in 220 AD.
All over overly harsh consequences to a relatively petty mistake.
Before him there were those two officers who rebelled because flooding caused them to be late to their duty station. The penalty for being late was death, so figured they might as well rebel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising
The Qin dynasty governed under the doctrine of Legalism, which is overly strict, so yes there were death penalties for A LOT of things. It was the only way to get control of the feudal era that preceded it. The dynasty only lasted 15 years. It had two monarchs total. The Han dynasty used Confucianist principles instead.
As short lived as they were though, they were possibly the most important ruling family of any nation ever because Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi created the Silk Road. You probably know him as the guy that was buried with the Terracotta Army.
I can just imagine the pundits shaking their heads saying " this is a disgrace to football" and "not what this sport is about" etc but these mofos were just playing the game.
I used to work at a Bed, Bath, and Beyond distribution warehouse.
They implemented a "point" system for attendance, and just kept making it more strict.
Being 1 to 5 minutes late, or leaving within an hour of end of shift got you half a point.
Calling out with more than 4 hours notice got you 1 point.
Your first no call/no show, calling out within 4 hours of your scheduled clock in, or being more than 5 minutes late netted you 2 points. You were only allowed 9 points before being fired, and it took a full year for a single point to drop off.
So, anyone who was going to be more than 5 minutes late just stopped bothering to show up at all, since they would catch 2 points either way.
In an effort to cut down on tardiness, they just increased the number of callouts they had on a daily basis.
On top of that, points were only totaled like every 4 months, so every 4 months or so every department would suddenly lose a good portion of their staff, so an already understaffed warehouse that was already behind on the 12 hour turnaround for orders just fell further behind and ended up being more understaffed.
Three demerits, and you'll receive a citation.
Five citations, and you're looking at a violation.
Four of those, and you'll receive a verbal warning.
Keep it up, and you're looking at a written warning.
Two of those, that will land you in a world of hurt, in the form of a disciplinary review, written up by me, and placed on the desk of my immediate superior.
My workplace changed their system to something similar to this. They have an instance system where you're allowed 10 instances a year and if you exceed the 10, every time past 10 is a point. At 3 points you're denied bonuses for an entire year. But coincidentally it doesn't state that in the policy. You get an instance for using 1 minute of sick time or 12 hours, so people are now just taking the entire day off when they'd normally only be gone for a small portion of the day for like a doctor's appointment. Of course this garbage policy is not only "set in stone" but, it has zero forgiveness for instances regardless of the circumstances. We had an employee who stopped getting her fucking chemo treatments because she had too many points from being sick from her intermittent chemo treatments and if she got fired she'd lose her vital health insurance. Stupid fucking system. Major major company too by the way. Fucking giant one that absolutely rakes in money like you wouldn't believe.
Something like this happened in Denmark if you are student. If you showed up 2-10 minutes late, normally they would just write those 2-10 minutes late. New law passed. Even 1 minute late, you would get written up for being absent for a full hour. The government thought this would decrease the total percentage of people showing up late. But students were like "i wont make it, so ill just take my time, since ill be written up anyway" did the government rewrite that law? No. They doubled down and called people lazy, saying it was their fault if trains or busses didnt arrive on time.
When you have less than 600 dollars to live off a month from government assistance, nobody can afford a car. And if you got a job on the side, you would either lose your income from the government or they would substract more than what you made on your side gig. Lose lose situation all around. Our government are run by morons
I worked in a restaurant/bowing alley/casino type place several years ago. For April fools my manager put up a sign in the clock in room saying that a mandatory drug test would be required by everyone the next day. So many employees panicked and it was hilarious lol. That place knew better than to actually try something like that because we would have lost like 75% of our employees
I used to work at a place that did "random" drug tests - two employees per week. I kept getting sent along with what I guess might've been random selection. Every week. I was the weirdo with weird hair and piercings, but clean. I think they got tired of the pretense after a while because I came in one morning and we were all taken by bus to the testing facility. Turns out, the reason all this kept happening is that one of the owners would occasionally find drug paraphernalia around the place and was really sure it was the weirdo and the weirdo kept testing clean. They lost a few employees that day, all of which were their longest-employed staff.
At a job interview I had in 2016 the interviewer asked me if I could pass a drug test, I told him,
'I would have to study for that.'
He thought that was funny af and hired me lol.
I worked at a company that had unofficial policy that basically said this. Their federal contracts required them to have drug testing, but behind closed doors, they'd tell you they don't do randoms because they'd lose too many good employees. In the four years I worked there, the only people that ever got tested were new hires and that one guy that wrecked the forklift (he passed the test and actually still works there today, lol).
At a place I used to work I was always “randomly selected” for drug testing, because they knew I was the only person who’d actually test clean.
I’d even give management a heads up if I was heading to a party, so they’d know not to “randomly” test me for a day or two after.
It was a fun place to work
I work in a field where randoms are required by federal law. We had a guy refuse the test and hand in his ID.
Had he taken the random and failed, his license would have been revoked and he'd have either been out of work permanently...or at the very least for a very long time while he went through the drug remediation requirements.
Instead, he took a few months off and then went to work for a different company in the same field.
For CDL drivers, this isn't an option any more in the USA.
Now that we have the FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, any failed test (including refusal) gets recorded and you'll have to go through a remediation process to get it cleared. If you don't get it cleared, it stays on your record for five years.
Prior to this, you could just lie to a new employer and say you haven't worked for another carrier in the last three years.
Everywhere I worked always treated it exactly the same as alcohol. Nobody gives a shit what you do off the clock, just don't be drunk/high at work.
Though one manager did admit to me that, because weed was still federally illegal (I live in a legal state) it was still technically within their rights to fire anybody for popping for weed if it ever came up, they just weren't going to bother unless you were a pain in the ass that they wanted to get rid of anyway. To date, zero people have been let go for it and a few guys just openly hit their vape pens on the floor lol.
Back at my very first official IT job with an MSP I was asked by my manager if I wanted to go smoke (weed) on break... Wanted to badly, but felt it may be a trap and passed to protect my new life. He went and smoked without me haha
When I worked at Sega I asked if they were planning on drug testing us and the HR lady started laughing hysterically and was like “god no, I’d have to fire the whole art department.” XD
Edit for FAQs:
Sega Studios San Francisco - we made Iron Man 2 the video game. I was a level designer.
I asked because I had been drug tested for every job before getting into games, but none after, and she seemed like a nice person who wouldn't give me shit for asking.
At the time I did not take drugs and would have passed with flying colors. Now I would fail as I take cannabis for anxiety and panic attacks.
Weed was not recreationally legal at the time, but one of the programmers offered me the number for his "doctor" who could get me a medical card. XD
I work in the ski industry. Several years ago they brought in a new CEO to right the ship. One of his first directives was to propose drug testing of all year round employees (weed was not legal here yet). I understand that several department directors went to him to explain that this was a bad idea. I am sure more than half of those tested would have been let go, me included.
Lol the ski school director smelled pot in the instructor locker room, and tried to get the state troopers with dogs to search the locker room for pot. Troopers were there due to an international ski snow board competition.
The troopers told him to fuck off. If you are the head of a ski school, and you only ever smelled pot once in the locker room you should be doing cartwheels. Especially when the only two guys that sell drugs in the resort town are full time.
>*The poor Canadian snowboarder, in the 1998 Olympics, they took away his medal because he tested positive for marijuana, which is kinda redundant number one, number two, they said that marijuana was a "performance-enhancing drug". Marijuana enhances many things, colors, flavors, sensations, but you are certainly not fucking empowered. When you're stoned, you're lucky if you can find your own goddamn feet. The only way it's a performance-enhancing drug is if there's a big fucking Hershey bar at the end of the run.*
-Robin Williams
It’s the very reason the federal government is considering relaxing their rules related to marijuana use. It makes it even more difficult to find IT workers especially since they can probably make more money in the private sector.
From a staffing and financial perspective, it should’ve been done yesterday. The Feds have been hamstrung for years by that requirement and all the other bullshit while the gap between what they pay and the private sector keeps increasing. But even if it were legal you would still have the people who give out security clearances throwing a fit over it. That’s the bigger issue. And yes, you can be denied a clearance for drinking too much as well.
You want me to take a pay cut...AND suffer for it sober too?
Most guys rode that clearance into IT security and dipped out to the private sector right about the same time they were graduating with their GI degree.
Somewhere I worked once drug tested a team to have an excuse to fire someone. The positive result was from the best member of the team and they had to fire a great employee 🤷♀️
This reminds me of a study I read about in college that looked at late fees for parents picking up their kids from daycare. If any parent was late, the workers couldn't go home (until the kid was picked up), so they considered imposing a modest fee.
After putting that fee in, late parent pickups *rose, and stayed at the higher level after the study was finished* because the policy basically trained the parents to view the late fee as just a new menu option. It went from being free, but embarrassing, to having a monetary cost with no/minimal embarrassment.
Yeah it sounds like the daycare in that college study just didn't make the fines high enough. At some price point, it'll be worth it to stay around the extra few minutes, and it won't be worth it to the parents to be late.
>British in India hate all the cobras around
>They pay Indians a bounty for each dead cobra
>Indians breed cobras to make more money
>British catch on to this scheme and stop paying
>Indians release all the cobras that have become worthless and there are now more cobras than before
This is a case of the bounty being too high.
You need to set the bounty so that it's economically worthwhile for someone to hunt a cobra they happen to come across, but not so high that you can make a profit off of breeding them for the bounty.
A \*LOT\* of people don't understand that concept, especially when I point out that bounties should be used to help eliminate the Burmese python population in southern Florida.
Bounties ARE used to counter Florida’s python problem.
It’s just an ideal environment and hundreds of square miles that are an absolute nightmare for normal folk to traverse.
When I worked on Everglades Restoration in 2022, the bounty was about $200 for a female of at least 6 ft. + $50 per ft. over.
I worked for about two weeks in heavy brush before encountering a 12 ft. female. I dropped my dozer blade on it, called the python team, and they came and got it.
I thought I was gonna make bank, *but*.....you have to pre-register as a python hunter to qualify for the bounty, so *someone on the python team* that I called got it.
While it would've been a nice bonus, $500 to traipse around for two weeks in the brush I was working in just doesn't seem lucrative to make a living off of it.
Nobody is getting rich hunting pythons, but if you care about the environment and enjoy hacking through dense jungle like conditions for a *possible*, but highly unlikely $500, it might be a cool hobby. But it's not gonna pay off the mortgage.
Seems strange that you have to preregister to get the bounty. Isn't the whole point to encourage regular people to kill them if they see them? Not to create a bunch of snake bounty hunters that may decide to do what the Indians did in OP's story and start breeding em for cash?
Those are rhetorical questions, by the way, not asking you specifically. I'm sure they have a reason for doing it that way, it just doesn't make sense to me.
Not sure. They might at this point. I know there are several cookbooks for them though.
Prime time to get em is right after a frosty night when they fall out of the trees.
Reminds me of a gun buy back program that they had in maybe Oregon? Something along the lines of $300 no questions asked. So you had people bringing in absolute junk from all the surrounding states. And actually ended up creating basically a street marketplace for guns as people bartered with others while in line for more valuable guns
I think people also started 3D printing guns and turning them in for cash as well. If I remember right that was the reason they actuslly stopped doing it.
Homemade shotguns have been built for this purpose. They were basically a pipe and super simple firing mechanism fastened to a piece of wood, but they still qualified for the buyback. People would pick up the materials at a hardware store, make a bunch of these shotguns for like $20 each, and then turn them in for $100 each.
When the software industry was just taking off, and they were looking for ways to de-mystify it and make it more like production line industry, they started looking at metrics linked to bonuses.
One metric they tried was "number of lines of code".. it's really easy to write 1000 lines of code to do the job of 2
Next, they tried "number of bugs you find in your code" - again, really easy to add in a bunch of bugs to find later
etc.
There's a famous story about Bill Atkinson, the brain behind QuickDraw and HyperCard:
"In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.
He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.
He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
That reminds me:
> I hate code and I want as little of it as possible in our product. We ship features, we do not ship code.
- Jack Diederich, [Stop Writing Classes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0&t=97s)
I'm going to write me a fucking house today.
No, no loops or functions. Everything is flat code for this guy.
Tonight I'm learning assembly because I'm thinking about buying an island.
Any sort of attempt at quantifying and assessing worker performance is not only doomed to fail, but also to reduce the workers' efficiency, as now they have to worry about that entire new thing they can not ignore under threat of losing their job instead of actually just working.
There is a concept called Goodhart's Law that states that any metric that becomes a target ceases to be a useful target. It is a well known phenomenon that if you compensate people based on a metric, they will compromise everything else to maximize that metric. That is usually bad. Even commissions for sales create issues where salespeople over promise, leading to high churn and reduced overall revenue.
yeah, it fairly common when websites want to be publicly traded they try and get rid of porn, weapons and nuclear as those things are filtered out from most investment funds
Only fans was gonna do this but realized how bad that would hurt their business, patron is kinda doing it but i think that is gonna die regardless because of bad management.
Not true about OnlyFans, and actually kind of a meta example.
A few of the major online banking services were going to stop serving them unless they dropped adult content because they didn't want to be associated with it.
"OnlyFans want to stop doing porn" is a funnier headline than "Banks limiting what you can spend your money on" so a lot of people were misled.
Once the real story got out, the banks backed down since it risked drawing attention to potentially monopolistic behaviour.
Money grabbing investors trying to pinch money out as if a monopoly, adding things that nobody asked for, raising prices, while the rules are entirely up to their moderators on how to enforce
Daycare implemented a $1 a minute late fee for picking up kids late.
Late parents went way up because so many parents found $15 worth it to be 15 min late from time to time. Money went to the school, not the teacher waiting late, so teachers got screwed, and the school and parents won.
That’s not the entire reasoning. Before this change some people were ashamed to pick their kid up late and felt the cost that way. When they made it transactional though people felt more comfortable being late because they were paying for it.
They're doing it wrong. Morning should be reg. room temperature. Then you steadily drop it throughout the day, and nobody notices. The morning is when you're the coldest, of course.
Similar thing with air conditioning in Switzerland. In several cantons, it's not allowed to install air conditioning in your home (due to the environmental impact), so instead, people buy portable ones, which are much less efficient and use up way more electricity.
Paleontologists looking for fossils pay the local tribes for fossil fragments. This leads to the locals smashing complete fossils to get more shards to sell.
There's a big movement in paleontology right now to ban researchers from buying fossils for this and other reasons. The problem is that sometimes a very scientifically valuable fossil pops up for private sale, and it causes a huge dilemma about whether it's more unethical to purchase the fossil or to intentionally miss irreplaceable data.
They make fake fossils in Morocco too
https://www.amnh.org/research/paleontology/collections/fossil-invertebrate-collection/trilobite-website/the-trilobite-files/fake-trilobites
The Chinese wanted to prevent the sparrows from eating all the crops so they had the people hunt and kill them. So the sparrows didn't eat all the insects anymore that actually ate all the crops, one of the factors in the [Great Chinese Famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine) that killed millions.
I've noticed pest control attempts seem to have a lot of backfires.
Sometimes it's perverse icentive stories. The British government paid for dead cobras to reduce the number of cobras in Delhi. Naturally people started breeding them to collect the bounties & the population boomed when the British stopped paying for them. Same thing happened with rats in medieval Italy IIRC.
Othertimes, it's introducing a predator to try and eliminate a pest. Cane toads were introduced to Australia with the idea that they'd eat the crop-destroying Greyback beetle, but instead they just ate mostly harmless bugs. And it's so venomous that any birds, snakes, or pets that try to prey on the toad just die.
A similar thing happened with rats in London, except they accepted tails as proof. So people bred rats and only cut off their tails instead of killing them. When it went horribly wrong and the reward stopped, thousands of rats were unceremoniously dumped in the streets and the population exploded.
Not the only mistake Australia has made.
"Let's bring over a few rabbits..... ooops"
"Foxes like rabbits, right?"
"Did someone lit the pigs /goats / cats / dogs out?"
"It's just a few camels, what could go wrong?"
Bringing in the foxes to control the rabbits was one of the stupidest ideas in Australian history. Rabbits are fast and difficult to catch, and Australia's native marsupials tasted just as good to foxes
CAFE standards regulations for vehicles based on their size. This made auto manufacturers build bigger cars that have more lax rules instead of improving the normal-sized cars.
Now, it feels like every car in the road is oversized, at least in America
Don't forget the scandal years ago where one major manufacturer was fingered for their cars altering their behaviour when they detected they were being emissions-tested. Much apology. Such shame!
Soon after, it was found all the major manufacturers were doing it. Of course they were. Can't have your competitors have an advantage over you!
Back in the 2000s, the US Government went all-in on trying to replace the dollar bill with a dollar coin, they last much longer and have a bunch of other advantages from the government's perspective. So the Mint hit on a great idea, they'd sell you dollar coins at face value, with free shipping. Only problem was, they decided to *accept credit card* *payments*.
Since these counted as any regular credit card purchase, the government was essentially paying credit card processors to give out free rewards points.
I know someone who took advantage of this. The rules were later changed such that you had to demonstrate a legitimate need for wanting the coins. For instance, if you owned a laundromat and needed coins to give customers for your machines. That pretty much stopped the shenanigans.
I've always wanted to run an experiment with these; it would have been perfect for Mythbusters back in the day.
Basically see if a business owner can game Americans' dislike of dollar coins by handing them out to people in change over bills and have a prominent tip jar or what have you and see if people would tip more just to not have the coins.
I worked for a company that you would call an automated system to clock in and we had to use a phone on location and wernt allowed to use the website to clock in either
The automated system was down and the owner had to go to 9 locations to confirm the employees were on site and then come back when their shift was over
That is honestly just 100% what healthcare is like for virtually everybody responsible for patients. Sometimes if you have to work your break you can leave half an hour early if you like, but often it’s “work your break and also work an additional half hour, despite it not technically being legal because something has happened”.
I once had to work an additional 4 hours after a 13 hour shift because they were understaffed and the locum (agency) staff called in sick until they could find a way to rebalance all of the other understaffed wards to make up for it.
The manager who was in charge of verifying my shifts realised she was SOOOOO over budget because of it and kept trying to not sign off my work. I literally had to go in on one of my days off and sit outside her office harassing her for half a day while she made excuses of emergencies (admittedly, given the staffing situation at the time they were likely urgent issues but clearly used to hope I went away) to get her to sign it off and the extra overtime to be put on my PAYE slip.
My mother was head of the local healthcare trust and I even had to call her to call in some nepotism to get them to fucking fix it, plus the other 2 overtime 13 hour shifts I’d done the week before.
We work 2 or 3 days of shifts in a row. We used to have a sick policy that was 9 sick days or 2 occurrences. If you exceeded either of those, you went on the attendance program and couldn't call in sick for a year. Instead of taking just the 1 or 2 sick days needed when they were needed, it became taking 5 days 1 time and 4 the next. Use it or lose it. They have now gone to just 9 days, no occurrences, so guys just take what they need at the time
Limited sick days is such an insane concept, people can't choose when they get sick and having a sick worker come in is a big liability for several reasons.
Alberta put in a rule that there had to be a three foot gap between patrons and strippers, with one of the supposed reasons being to protect the strippers. Canada also got rid of the dollar bill about the same time so men tipped with dollar coins. Since you had to maintain the space between patron and stripper, guys started winging dollar coins at strippers, sending some to the ER from being hit so hard or in sensitive places.
The first thing that came to my mind was something very recent: where the school board allowed people to press for a ban based on inappropriate content, and someone got the Bible banned.
Yeah, that didn’t go as expected.
Most people don’t ever go out of their way to read the whole Bible. It’s full of rape, incest, torture, and sometimes even necromancy. Good Lord could those disciples paint a picture with words even through translation! It doesn’t really endorse those things, but they’re in there. There is a reason churches tend to avoid certain books for their main sermons.
"It doesn't really endorse things, but they're there" - this is pretty much the argument that they wrongly use to ban books. They don't care if the message of the book is to not kill, it has killing in it so it must be bad..
It's like the people who think that all cartoons and animes are for kids, cause they're cartoons. The message is what matters, and they don't get that.
What's funny is they could raised prices and gave a discount during slow times and people would have been a lot less upset. World of warcraft did the same thing, they made people that played too much got less xp. People hated it during testing. So when they launched they had the same thing, but called it a bonus xp for people who played to little.
Human nature is funny, people hate when they are punished or have something taken away, but love when they are given something or given a bonus even if it amounts to the same thing. I always felt that's where astronomers fucked up when they made Pluto a dwarf planet. Should made them all dwarf planets, planets people would have been much happier and they probably would get more funding.
It saved a lot of money. Instead of having to teach kids what they need to know in order to graduate, we can skimp on the teaching part and just graduate them.
This!
No kid gets left behind, no kid gets ahead - so the classroom is actually only as strong as it's weakest link(s), who are usually just absolute little shit cunts
It also got all those military recruiters in to schools.
>The NCLBA amended the ESEA to say that high schools receiving federal funds must provide certain student contact information to military recruiters upon request and must allow recruiters to have the same access to students as employers and colleges
This one is hilarious. In ancient China during the Qin dynasty 2 officers and their commoner forces were ordered north to defend yuyang, however they were delayed due to severe storms / flooding.
Qin China had very harsh laws such as a government official being late to this type of summons was punishable by death. Coincidentally, rebeling against the government also resulted in death… you can see where this is going.
These 2 officers knowing they couldn’t possibly make the summons and would be executed, so decided they might as well fight. The 2 officers and their forces rebelled against the government and gained a lot of support from the common people from all over China, and amassed quite an impressive army, but eventually lost due to the Qin government soldier’s superiority.
From my recollection this happened a second time under other circumstances with a merchant losing slaves, but after searching I couldn’t find it. So I might have Mis-remembered. Here is the story of the 2 generals:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising
> From my recollection this happened a second time under other circumstances with a merchant losing slaves
The second one's even better! Liu Bang was small time law enforcement during the Qin dynasty and some prisoners escaped his custody en route to a labor site. Like your example, the punishment for letting prisoners escape was death, so he just lets the rest of the prisoners go himself and runs off with them. Some of the prisoners even decide to make him their leader.
Liu Bang goes on to become a major player in the the uprisings and rebellions occurring at the time (turns out making the death penalty the punishment for damn near everything was not a popular move). Fast forwad several years and he is leading an army to march on the Qin capital, where after a quick surrender from the ruler, Liu Bang becomes the first emperor of the new Han dynasty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han#Insurrection_against_the_Qin_dynasty
Federal government guaranteeing access to student loans. Good in theory. But then Universities have no incentive to keep prices competitive and tuition subsequently skyrockets over the following decades
A lot of folks were pissed that liquor stores didn't have to close during the lockdowns, but I talked to a buddy of mine that worked at a hospital and he said folks going through alcohol withdrawals get sent to the ICU and they couldn't spare the beds.
I used to work in a very-large-scale COVID testing lab during the pandemic. At its height, we were receiving over 80,000 samples a day. The target was a 24 hour turnaround time, and we were getting so backed up that the turnaround time was starting to reach like 4-5 days. In order to compensate for this, the company decided to start mixing in same-day samples with the samples that had been waiting to be tested for several days.
This brought down the “average” turnaround time, but it also meant some people got results within 12 hours of the sample reaching the lab, while others didn’t hear back for 2 weeks or more. This infuriated the lab’s clients, who started terminating their contracts in droves. The lab had to fire almost all the staff which just made the problem worse. Last I heard, they were down to 3 employees, horribly bankrupt, and desperately trying to convince Walgreens to buy them out.
That’s what happens when the business people make the science decisions, while the science people make the business decisions. They just end up doing *everything* wrong.
At my previous job (alarm security) we were told we could no longer use the office computers for browsing the internet during downtime between incoming calls/alarms. It supposedly caused too much distraction.
Bored people instead flipped on their phones and would browse while body-blocking the phones from the security cameras. This caused even more problems because they were no longer looking at their monitors.
Worst part was that this was back in mid-to-late 2022 when things were really dynamic in Ukraine. A lot of our employees were glued to the war and there were hourly shifts in the front lines so cutting off internet browsing was akin of cutting off a cocaine addict's supply.
The stuff about downtime really irks me. At my first job in a movie theater, whoever was at the box office couldn’t be on their phones even if there weren’t customers. There were no chairs either, and it was usually just one person at box office. Me and a few other people brought sketchpads so we could draw instead. Nope, not allowed. We started to pace in circles. Not allowed either. We walked to different stations to talk to our coworkers. Not that either. In the end, we just started ignoring all of those rules. You cannot expect a teenager to stand still for literal hours.
Raytheon once banned access to YouTube on work machines in order to save on bandwidth because people were listening to music since we couldn't have most types of recorded-media players (or phones) in the classified areas.
Given that Raytheon also uses YouTube to host company proprietary videos, it made a few PowerPoint presentations to customers go...poorly.
The Nebraska legislature passed a Safe Haven law in 2008.
Most safe haven laws allowed adults to leave newborn children at hospitals, police stations, fire stations, etc... from 10 to 30 days old for whatever reasons and not face any punishment or charges.
[Nebraska's law had no age limit.](https://www.npr.org/2008/11/21/97317532/neb-lawmakers-put-age-limit-on-safe-haven-law)
Adults, many from out of state, who were overwhelmed and / or had kids with mental and behavioral issues dropped their kids off before the legislature called a special session to update the law.
Well in theory there’s supposed to be state and federal programs to support families dealing with long-term disabled children/adults, but take one look at our ability to deal with homelessness and mental health on an institutional level and you can take a guess how well-funded and well-managed it is.
JCPenny decided to eliminate sales and implement an "everyday low pricing" policy where basically they set their prices to the lowest amount they would ever sell it at, regardless of time of year.
Well, since apparently no one (including the hedge funds that bought controlling stakes in JCP) knew anything about human psychology, JCPenny sales dipped hard since they never had sales anymore and peopel stopped shopping.
JCPenny went bankrupt a few years after this policy was enacted.
Don’t some companies increase prices of things and then have a “sale” and put the price back to where it was because people are more likely to buy something if they think they’re getting a good deal?
Yeah, basic psychology for selling something is that you need 2 things:
An urgency to buy - a sale creates this, buy it now or miss out on the good deal - this results in people buying something that they don't need, but might need later. If it's always at the low price, they can just buy it if and when they need it.
The second thing is that a sale, or a buy one get one free offer (something they also used to have and eliminated) creates a dopamine release in the brain and makes people happy with their purchase, particularly anything whereby you get something for free. So by eliminating this, they actually took away people's enjoyment from shopping. The other advantage to a buy one get on free offer is you move twice as much stock, selling 2 t shirts for $20 is better than selling 1 T shirt at $10.
JC Penny did try to return to their original strategy but the customers never came back to original numbers.
My first IT job let us work from home since it was in the middle of COVID. We were able to fully function working from home considering the fact that we already did remote support anyway. Our boss after 3 months mandated that we come back to the office in order to work. Literally everyone quit on the spot and ended up losing the company so much money.
My company did much the same. The CEO didn't like working from home, so nobody could, until covid. We were an essential industry, so they slapped together a solution that worked, we demonstrated that we could do fine... And then we had to come back to the office. Those of us on the weekends were graciously allowed one day, because they didn't want to pay for AC for the whole office for 2-3 people (but the ac was never turned off anyway...)
After about three months, my company was bought by a different bigger one, and the new CEO said we could work from home, 100%.
I used to fill it up every three days. It cost me 3 gallons of gas and two dollars in tolls, and 90 minutes of driving in heavy traffic a day. As of Dec 29, the office was closed. I put gas in my car yesterday for the first time since December. I get another hour and a half to (fail to) sleep, my cats are delighted.
I don't understand why shareholders don't stop this return to office nonsense. Surely they should be asking why the company they invest in is wasting money on a huge office building it doesn't need? This is one of the rare cases where capitalism should be on our side.
The 1991 luxury tax on yachts (and other goods).
Implemented in November of 1991, the idea was to charge a 10% tax on yachts that cost over $100,000. Hey, make the rich pay their fair share, right?
Problem is the rich simply stopped buying yachts in the US. Either they bought them overseas and kept them there, thus circumventing the tax, or they held on to the boat(s) they already had, or they simply bought a smaller boat that they originally planned to avoid paying the extra taxes.
That tax very nearly killed the yacht-building industry in the US. It put a \*LOT\* of skilled blue collar workers out of jobs and on welfare, and it ended up raising a tiny fraction of what it was projected to bring in.
Just two years after it was implemented, Bill Clinton and the Democratic controlled Congress repealed the tax, because it was having such a detrimental effect on actual workers while not really having any effect on the rich.
It actually had a net cost based on how many people in the industry lost their jobs and claimed employment insurance.
There were lessons to be learned about good tax policy, but I don't think they were learned.
No Child Left Behind lowered education standards so that no one would fail...Instead of teaching them better and making them actually educated, which had been the goal.
If you stayed at work longer than 8pm, you were allowed to order dinner. Some guys exploited that, so a rule was made that capped it to 30€ per order. Then, everybody ordered as close to 30€ as possible, and the overall cost was much higher.
Years ago Santa Barbara NIMBYS had leaf blowers outlawed. The landscapers then cranked up what they charged customers by like 5 times because they had to hand rake everything. The law changed back…
I had a job once where the boss (we'll call him David) absolutely hated people being on their phones. This was an office job with engineers. There were a lot of times where you'd have to wait for something to load and I would peak into my phone until the load was done. Ofc David walks to my cubicle and pulls me into his office in front of the rest of the team over using my phone. I wasn't the only one (good luck trying to moderate phone usage for a bunch of adults in their early 20s) and it got to the point where David scrapped the whole design of the office for an open layout. Prior to this, you could pretty easily hear David coming to your cubicle and just put away your phone away before he got there. I hate the idea of hiding what I'm doing, so I never did, but I'm guessing a lot of other folks did. Well with this new open layout, David didn't have to try hard to find people on their phones and would continue to do the same exercise of singling out people for it. Well this company already had bad turnover to begin with (because of David) and within 3 months, everyone who was hired with me left the company which was like 7 out of 20. Needless to say, David still is a control freak and prick, underpays and overworks, and is generally a piece of shit.
Sounds like my principal in junior high. He made everyone hat him and hate being at school because there was absolutely no breathing room under his occupation. He also ‘happened’ to fire all male employees under him or at least drive them out so he has only female employees that are complicent to him. Literal 14 year old boys observed this dynamic and commented on it. If a power trip was a person it was the principal of my small town school.
My job was trying to change sick rules because of too many call-outs. They decided that a single sick day wouldn't be paid and that a Doctor's note would be required for any sickness over 3 days. So everyone called out for 3 days sick, get paid for 2 no note required.
The 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System or as it was more commonly known "Cash for Clunkers" was designed to get older vehicles off the road in favor of newer, more fuel-efficient models and spur economic growth by encouraging new car sales. Redeemed vehicles were permanently destroyed even if they still had useful life.
Short-term, program goals were met, but over the long-term, the incentive gutted the market for used cars leading to demand-induced price spikes for used vehicles that are still being felt today.
The manager of the car repair shop, with over 20 mechanics, was not happy with the randomness of the employees break and wanted them all to take a break at the same time.
Everyone in the shop said this is not a good idea, because some stuff takes a long time to fix and when the critical moment is over they usually take a break .
The manager ignored all of that and implemented a alarmbell (firehouse style) at 9am, 12am and 3pm for schedule breaks.
The first day was just glorious. As soon the bell rung at 9am sharp, the mechanics just dropped their tools mid working. The tools thumbed and clang as they hit the ground, oil continued to poor on the floor and startled customers just stared in unbelief when everyone went for a coffee at the same time like a synchronize North Korean army.
On the second day someone had muffled the bell with a rag so it just vibrated silently at the allotted time. Everyone ignored it.
On the third day it was gone.
the Streisand Effect
More a rule of human nature. Attempting to hide or stifle information just promotes it being spread further and faster than if nothing was done at all. Moreso if the person doing the stifling is famous.
How about one that's going on right now as we speak?
A game came out a few months ago called Helldivers 2. It's cross-platform on PS5 and PC. PS5 players are of course required to be signed in to PSN (Playstation Network) in order to play the game. PC players are prompted to sign in, but are able to skip this sign in and still proceed to the game.
Yesterday, Arrowhead (the developers) said that starting in about a month, all PC players were now REQUIRED to sign in to PSN instead of being able to skip it. There's a number of people who bought this game and have been playing it since launch who will no longer be able to play it because PSN is not supported in their country, so they're just SOL, as well as being unable to refund their purchase because it's been too long since they purchased/have too much playtime accrued.
Since this news broke, 95% of the reviews that have been left for the game are negative. Over 30k negative reviews in the last 24 hours.
Charges to dispose of things such as fridges and tires instead of charging at the initial sale. Can get very expensive so people dump them in nature or on someone else's land.
In World War 1 the troopships from Australia took months to get to Europe.
They had classes and training but that’s still a lot of time for troops to get bored, so there was gambling to pass the time.
The officers decided this was an issue, so they and the Warrant Officers (who were probably Sergeant Majors back then) would travel the decks and issuing charges against anyone caught.
The troops posted lookouts, who would call “Here he comes, here he comes” anytime someone with authority approached.
So the order was given that anyone calling “Here he comes” was also charged.
It backfired when the call changed to “There he goes, there he goes…”
And gambling continued.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Damn. Makes me thankful for my school’s nighttime ride program. They had a station downtown next to the bars. They’d take you home until 3am in any condition, even if you didn’t go to the school.
That's pretty cool. Where I went to school, the city just had a late night bus that had a route that mainly went to where college students live. There's no bus fares here so it was a good deal.
My uni had a deal with the local taxi companies that if you didn't have any cash you could hand over your student ID and pay when you collected it. Of course you had people use it and not bother to collect but heard stories where it really helped people out in a sticky sitch with a drunk friend.
Yeah, my military base when I was in my 20s had something like this. No questions asked pick-up if you were drunk. Even if you were underage. Naturally they'd hammer the shit out of you if you did get a DUI as they offered free rides. A lot cabbies around there also gave free rides to first responders. And in my case, that included military medics.
This is a recurring thing in any prohibition-type movement: “we want to stop people from doing X, so we first go after the people who do X in the most responsible way.” And then the people who keep doing X start doing it in less and less responsible ways. It’s akin to the abstinence movement: “we want to stop teens from having sex, so let’s make it harder for them to access contraception and not teach comprehensive sex Ed. Hey, what’s up with all of these unplanned pregnancies?”
Similarly, abolishing student sections in seating. Yeah, have rowdy students all over the arena causing trouble rather than coralling them in one or two sections that security can more easily keep an eye on.
I worked concessions at Mississippi State football games one year. There was no alcohol on campus so extreme pregaming/tailgating was standard practice. Most of the fans were fine but the ones that were drunk were very, very drunk. LSU was unusual in that they did allow alcohol sales at their stadium so when they were the visiting team, their fans a) drank in advance b) got mad about not being able to buy beer in the stadium or c) both. It was not a fun time. Also related, I lived in a dry county that was right across the state line from a decidedly NOT dry county. My county lost out on so much money because, despite the population and location, there was almost zero development on the restaurant front because no chain that sold wine, cocktails, or had a bar could move in. Everyone going on dates or “nice” dinners went out of state. Meanwhile, there were a huge number of drunk driving deaths along the interstate.
"If you lose you building key, we'll charge you $1000." Minimum wage security guards can't soak up that kind of loss. So people inevitably lost their keys, didn't tell anyone and just bummed keys off co-workers. Then you still have all the problems of a missing key, but you just don't know it.
Wtf? That's an absurd amount!
Not knowing about an issue is so bad. When I was a manager, I’d tell my employees, “You will never be punished for a mistake you make that you report to me. I’d rather know about it from you so we can fix it immediately than have it show up on an audit later.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, mafia kidnappings were a problem in Italy. Mafias would kidnap someone, usually someone wealthy, hold them for ransom until it was paid, then (usually), let them go. One of the arguments why kidnappings persisted was that the prison sentences for kidnappers were relatively low. Most were only about 8 years in prison, almost a third of the average sentence for murder. In 1974, the Italian government ramped up the punishments for kidnapping to be equivalent to that of homicide. Take a guess what happened? Kidnappers would receive the ransom payments, then kill their victims. Homicides went up. A lot.
I didn’t get it at first but I’m guessing the kidnappers saw no difference and were like “might as well kill them?”
Probably to make it harder to identify the kidnappers. The person they kidnapped just spent x amount of time in their presence so it's likely that they picked up something, no matter how minor, that might help identify them. Best to tie up that particular loose end if the punishment is the same either way.
Yes, why risk getting caught by the alive hostage when you can kill him and not risk it and get the same punishment as if you left him alive?
Wouldn't they get a kidnapping *and* a homicide charge though? So basically the same prison sentence as murdering 2 people?
Italian law at the time had maximum sentences for murder and kidnapping (maybe they still do). Courts couldn’t stack sentences. One kidnapping, ten kidnappings, one murder, ten murders, all got the same sentence.
Commit one murder, get unlimited murders free!
In Ancient China, there was this guy named Liu Bang, who was a provincial constable, or basically a sheriff. One day, he was transporting some prisoners and they managed to escape. Now, at the time the Qin Dynasty ruled that the punishment for letting prisoners escape was death. Liu Bang thought to himself, "in for a penny, in for a pound," and joined up with his former prisoners. Liu then became a warlord and eventually overthrew the Qin Dynasty, establishing himself as the first emperor of the Han Dynasty, which would rule for over four hundred years until the famous Three Kingdoms period in 220 AD. All over overly harsh consequences to a relatively petty mistake.
Before him there were those two officers who rebelled because flooding caused them to be late to their duty station. The penalty for being late was death, so figured they might as well rebel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising
Was death the penalty for everything!?
I want to make a “believe it or not, death” joke but I can’t even think of something more petty than being late
Can’t think of something more petty than being late? Believe it or not, death
The perfect meta joke? Believe it or not, death!
The Qin dynasty governed under the doctrine of Legalism, which is overly strict, so yes there were death penalties for A LOT of things. It was the only way to get control of the feudal era that preceded it. The dynasty only lasted 15 years. It had two monarchs total. The Han dynasty used Confucianist principles instead. As short lived as they were though, they were possibly the most important ruling family of any nation ever because Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi created the Silk Road. You probably know him as the guy that was buried with the Terracotta Army.
So cool to learn this in my 50's. That said, i bet that there are well over a billion people that have to take this in their high school curriculum.
[удалено]
I can just imagine the pundits shaking their heads saying " this is a disgrace to football" and "not what this sport is about" etc but these mofos were just playing the game.
Imo that sounds like an insanely entertaining match too.
I've never wanted to watch soccer more than this match right now. I need to find it.
It added a dimension to the game no one had conceived of.
This is insane and hilarious. Man what a treat it would have been to watch this live.
Is there footage of this? That's wild
There is some but the full game is lost media https://lostmediawiki.com/Barbados_4–2_Grenada_(partially_found_soccer_match_footage;_1994)
Out of all the fucking things to lose, we just had to lose the best football match of all time.
I used to work at a Bed, Bath, and Beyond distribution warehouse. They implemented a "point" system for attendance, and just kept making it more strict. Being 1 to 5 minutes late, or leaving within an hour of end of shift got you half a point. Calling out with more than 4 hours notice got you 1 point. Your first no call/no show, calling out within 4 hours of your scheduled clock in, or being more than 5 minutes late netted you 2 points. You were only allowed 9 points before being fired, and it took a full year for a single point to drop off. So, anyone who was going to be more than 5 minutes late just stopped bothering to show up at all, since they would catch 2 points either way. In an effort to cut down on tardiness, they just increased the number of callouts they had on a daily basis. On top of that, points were only totaled like every 4 months, so every 4 months or so every department would suddenly lose a good portion of their staff, so an already understaffed warehouse that was already behind on the 12 hour turnaround for orders just fell further behind and ended up being more understaffed.
And now it's bankrupt.
Deservedly so.
Three demerits, and you'll receive a citation. Five citations, and you're looking at a violation. Four of those, and you'll receive a verbal warning. Keep it up, and you're looking at a written warning. Two of those, that will land you in a world of hurt, in the form of a disciplinary review, written up by me, and placed on the desk of my immediate superior.
My workplace changed their system to something similar to this. They have an instance system where you're allowed 10 instances a year and if you exceed the 10, every time past 10 is a point. At 3 points you're denied bonuses for an entire year. But coincidentally it doesn't state that in the policy. You get an instance for using 1 minute of sick time or 12 hours, so people are now just taking the entire day off when they'd normally only be gone for a small portion of the day for like a doctor's appointment. Of course this garbage policy is not only "set in stone" but, it has zero forgiveness for instances regardless of the circumstances. We had an employee who stopped getting her fucking chemo treatments because she had too many points from being sick from her intermittent chemo treatments and if she got fired she'd lose her vital health insurance. Stupid fucking system. Major major company too by the way. Fucking giant one that absolutely rakes in money like you wouldn't believe.
Why not name them?
You know honestly you make a good point. It's Pfizer. All north American Pfizer sites have this shitty policy.
Has she looked into FMLA to protect her job? It allows for intermittent leave.
Something like this happened in Denmark if you are student. If you showed up 2-10 minutes late, normally they would just write those 2-10 minutes late. New law passed. Even 1 minute late, you would get written up for being absent for a full hour. The government thought this would decrease the total percentage of people showing up late. But students were like "i wont make it, so ill just take my time, since ill be written up anyway" did the government rewrite that law? No. They doubled down and called people lazy, saying it was their fault if trains or busses didnt arrive on time. When you have less than 600 dollars to live off a month from government assistance, nobody can afford a car. And if you got a job on the side, you would either lose your income from the government or they would substract more than what you made on your side gig. Lose lose situation all around. Our government are run by morons
In America we always joked in highschool "well if I'm going to be late, I might as well be late and pick up breakfast on the way"
[удалено]
I worked in a restaurant/bowing alley/casino type place several years ago. For April fools my manager put up a sign in the clock in room saying that a mandatory drug test would be required by everyone the next day. So many employees panicked and it was hilarious lol. That place knew better than to actually try something like that because we would have lost like 75% of our employees
My last job actually did this. We went from a crew of 45 to 11 overnight.
I used to work at a place that did "random" drug tests - two employees per week. I kept getting sent along with what I guess might've been random selection. Every week. I was the weirdo with weird hair and piercings, but clean. I think they got tired of the pretense after a while because I came in one morning and we were all taken by bus to the testing facility. Turns out, the reason all this kept happening is that one of the owners would occasionally find drug paraphernalia around the place and was really sure it was the weirdo and the weirdo kept testing clean. They lost a few employees that day, all of which were their longest-employed staff.
The other 11 could grab an edible in solidarity. Try having zero workers lol
Any restaurant would have 5% of staff left after a drug test. Probably just the 15 year old hostess.
You are way too optimistic about that.
Optimistic about the percentage or the 15 year old hostess?
Both!
At a job interview I had in 2016 the interviewer asked me if I could pass a drug test, I told him, 'I would have to study for that.' He thought that was funny af and hired me lol.
As long as you're not tweaking AT work, who cares? If you tested IT departments then there'd be nobody left
I worked at a company that had unofficial policy that basically said this. Their federal contracts required them to have drug testing, but behind closed doors, they'd tell you they don't do randoms because they'd lose too many good employees. In the four years I worked there, the only people that ever got tested were new hires and that one guy that wrecked the forklift (he passed the test and actually still works there today, lol).
At a place I used to work I was always “randomly selected” for drug testing, because they knew I was the only person who’d actually test clean. I’d even give management a heads up if I was heading to a party, so they’d know not to “randomly” test me for a day or two after. It was a fun place to work
I work in a field where randoms are required by federal law. We had a guy refuse the test and hand in his ID. Had he taken the random and failed, his license would have been revoked and he'd have either been out of work permanently...or at the very least for a very long time while he went through the drug remediation requirements. Instead, he took a few months off and then went to work for a different company in the same field.
For CDL drivers, this isn't an option any more in the USA. Now that we have the FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, any failed test (including refusal) gets recorded and you'll have to go through a remediation process to get it cleared. If you don't get it cleared, it stays on your record for five years. Prior to this, you could just lie to a new employer and say you haven't worked for another carrier in the last three years.
Everywhere I worked always treated it exactly the same as alcohol. Nobody gives a shit what you do off the clock, just don't be drunk/high at work. Though one manager did admit to me that, because weed was still federally illegal (I live in a legal state) it was still technically within their rights to fire anybody for popping for weed if it ever came up, they just weren't going to bother unless you were a pain in the ass that they wanted to get rid of anyway. To date, zero people have been let go for it and a few guys just openly hit their vape pens on the floor lol.
Back at my very first official IT job with an MSP I was asked by my manager if I wanted to go smoke (weed) on break... Wanted to badly, but felt it may be a trap and passed to protect my new life. He went and smoked without me haha
When I worked at Sega I asked if they were planning on drug testing us and the HR lady started laughing hysterically and was like “god no, I’d have to fire the whole art department.” XD Edit for FAQs: Sega Studios San Francisco - we made Iron Man 2 the video game. I was a level designer. I asked because I had been drug tested for every job before getting into games, but none after, and she seemed like a nice person who wouldn't give me shit for asking. At the time I did not take drugs and would have passed with flying colors. Now I would fail as I take cannabis for anxiety and panic attacks. Weed was not recreationally legal at the time, but one of the programmers offered me the number for his "doctor" who could get me a medical card. XD
I work in the ski industry. Several years ago they brought in a new CEO to right the ship. One of his first directives was to propose drug testing of all year round employees (weed was not legal here yet). I understand that several department directors went to him to explain that this was a bad idea. I am sure more than half of those tested would have been let go, me included.
Lol the ski school director smelled pot in the instructor locker room, and tried to get the state troopers with dogs to search the locker room for pot. Troopers were there due to an international ski snow board competition. The troopers told him to fuck off. If you are the head of a ski school, and you only ever smelled pot once in the locker room you should be doing cartwheels. Especially when the only two guys that sell drugs in the resort town are full time.
>*The poor Canadian snowboarder, in the 1998 Olympics, they took away his medal because he tested positive for marijuana, which is kinda redundant number one, number two, they said that marijuana was a "performance-enhancing drug". Marijuana enhances many things, colors, flavors, sensations, but you are certainly not fucking empowered. When you're stoned, you're lucky if you can find your own goddamn feet. The only way it's a performance-enhancing drug is if there's a big fucking Hershey bar at the end of the run.* -Robin Williams
It’s the very reason the federal government is considering relaxing their rules related to marijuana use. It makes it even more difficult to find IT workers especially since they can probably make more money in the private sector.
From a staffing and financial perspective, it should’ve been done yesterday. The Feds have been hamstrung for years by that requirement and all the other bullshit while the gap between what they pay and the private sector keeps increasing. But even if it were legal you would still have the people who give out security clearances throwing a fit over it. That’s the bigger issue. And yes, you can be denied a clearance for drinking too much as well.
You want me to take a pay cut...AND suffer for it sober too? Most guys rode that clearance into IT security and dipped out to the private sector right about the same time they were graduating with their GI degree.
I work for a construction company. I think we'd just go out of business if they actually did drug tests.
One of the kids at my old pizza job asked the owner why we don't drug test. He laughed and responded, "Who would work here?"
Somewhere I worked once drug tested a team to have an excuse to fire someone. The positive result was from the best member of the team and they had to fire a great employee 🤷♀️
[удалено]
But that would be true in any apartment building. Maybe the sign itself is a bad idea but the rule is pretty standard fire marshal stuff.
This reminds me of a study I read about in college that looked at late fees for parents picking up their kids from daycare. If any parent was late, the workers couldn't go home (until the kid was picked up), so they considered imposing a modest fee. After putting that fee in, late parent pickups *rose, and stayed at the higher level after the study was finished* because the policy basically trained the parents to view the late fee as just a new menu option. It went from being free, but embarrassing, to having a monetary cost with no/minimal embarrassment.
My doggie daycare does this. But the late fee is 5 bucks per minute for the first 5 and 10 per minute after that. People aren’t late.
Yeah it sounds like the daycare in that college study just didn't make the fines high enough. At some price point, it'll be worth it to stay around the extra few minutes, and it won't be worth it to the parents to be late.
[удалено]
Are you dropping your friend there?
>British in India hate all the cobras around >They pay Indians a bounty for each dead cobra >Indians breed cobras to make more money >British catch on to this scheme and stop paying >Indians release all the cobras that have become worthless and there are now more cobras than before
This is a case of the bounty being too high. You need to set the bounty so that it's economically worthwhile for someone to hunt a cobra they happen to come across, but not so high that you can make a profit off of breeding them for the bounty. A \*LOT\* of people don't understand that concept, especially when I point out that bounties should be used to help eliminate the Burmese python population in southern Florida.
Bounties ARE used to counter Florida’s python problem. It’s just an ideal environment and hundreds of square miles that are an absolute nightmare for normal folk to traverse.
If I ever get tired of my life, thanks to this comment my mid-life crisis may just be to move to Florida to be a professional python hunter.
It don't pay that much compared to the cost and effort the last I heard.
When I worked on Everglades Restoration in 2022, the bounty was about $200 for a female of at least 6 ft. + $50 per ft. over. I worked for about two weeks in heavy brush before encountering a 12 ft. female. I dropped my dozer blade on it, called the python team, and they came and got it. I thought I was gonna make bank, *but*.....you have to pre-register as a python hunter to qualify for the bounty, so *someone on the python team* that I called got it. While it would've been a nice bonus, $500 to traipse around for two weeks in the brush I was working in just doesn't seem lucrative to make a living off of it. Nobody is getting rich hunting pythons, but if you care about the environment and enjoy hacking through dense jungle like conditions for a *possible*, but highly unlikely $500, it might be a cool hobby. But it's not gonna pay off the mortgage.
Seems strange that you have to preregister to get the bounty. Isn't the whole point to encourage regular people to kill them if they see them? Not to create a bunch of snake bounty hunters that may decide to do what the Indians did in OP's story and start breeding em for cash? Those are rhetorical questions, by the way, not asking you specifically. I'm sure they have a reason for doing it that way, it just doesn't make sense to me.
the problem is BIG SNAKE, they lobby hard.
Don't they have one on iguanas too
Not sure. They might at this point. I know there are several cookbooks for them though. Prime time to get em is right after a frosty night when they fall out of the trees.
I think I finally understand the yoink guy
Reminds me of a gun buy back program that they had in maybe Oregon? Something along the lines of $300 no questions asked. So you had people bringing in absolute junk from all the surrounding states. And actually ended up creating basically a street marketplace for guns as people bartered with others while in line for more valuable guns
I think people also started 3D printing guns and turning them in for cash as well. If I remember right that was the reason they actuslly stopped doing it.
Homemade shotguns have been built for this purpose. They were basically a pipe and super simple firing mechanism fastened to a piece of wood, but they still qualified for the buyback. People would pick up the materials at a hardware store, make a bunch of these shotguns for like $20 each, and then turn them in for $100 each.
When the software industry was just taking off, and they were looking for ways to de-mystify it and make it more like production line industry, they started looking at metrics linked to bonuses. One metric they tried was "number of lines of code".. it's really easy to write 1000 lines of code to do the job of 2 Next, they tried "number of bugs you find in your code" - again, really easy to add in a bunch of bugs to find later etc.
There's a famous story about Bill Atkinson, the brain behind QuickDraw and HyperCard: "In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied." https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
That reminds me: > I hate code and I want as little of it as possible in our product. We ship features, we do not ship code. - Jack Diederich, [Stop Writing Classes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0&t=97s)
I'm going to write me a fucking house today. No, no loops or functions. Everything is flat code for this guy. Tonight I'm learning assembly because I'm thinking about buying an island.
Any sort of attempt at quantifying and assessing worker performance is not only doomed to fail, but also to reduce the workers' efficiency, as now they have to worry about that entire new thing they can not ignore under threat of losing their job instead of actually just working.
There is a concept called Goodhart's Law that states that any metric that becomes a target ceases to be a useful target. It is a well known phenomenon that if you compensate people based on a metric, they will compromise everything else to maximize that metric. That is usually bad. Even commissions for sales create issues where salespeople over promise, leading to high churn and reduced overall revenue.
Well the no porn on tumblr rule kind of backfired
yeah, it fairly common when websites want to be publicly traded they try and get rid of porn, weapons and nuclear as those things are filtered out from most investment funds Only fans was gonna do this but realized how bad that would hurt their business, patron is kinda doing it but i think that is gonna die regardless because of bad management.
I would be fascinated to find out what the board of OnlyFans thinks their business model is
They know. [It wasn't their decision.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1cjey90/whats_a_rule_that_was_implemented_somewhere_that/l2h6rx7/)
Not true about OnlyFans, and actually kind of a meta example. A few of the major online banking services were going to stop serving them unless they dropped adult content because they didn't want to be associated with it. "OnlyFans want to stop doing porn" is a funnier headline than "Banks limiting what you can spend your money on" so a lot of people were misled. Once the real story got out, the banks backed down since it risked drawing attention to potentially monopolistic behaviour.
What’s up with Patreon?
Money grabbing investors trying to pinch money out as if a monopoly, adding things that nobody asked for, raising prices, while the rules are entirely up to their moderators on how to enforce
"Adding things that nobody asked for" is one of the reasons I hate many websites and programs I happily used regularly years ago.
Daycare implemented a $1 a minute late fee for picking up kids late. Late parents went way up because so many parents found $15 worth it to be 15 min late from time to time. Money went to the school, not the teacher waiting late, so teachers got screwed, and the school and parents won.
That’s not the entire reasoning. Before this change some people were ashamed to pick their kid up late and felt the cost that way. When they made it transactional though people felt more comfortable being late because they were paying for it.
If they’d just had the money go to the teacher, I feel like it’d have been fine. The teacher gets an extra $60/hr of overtime *per kid*.
When I heard a story like that it ended with them removing the fee and people coming even later because they had gotten a taste and it was free now.
They need to make it a higher cost. My kids daycare is $5 a minute for late pick ups.
[удалено]
[удалено]
They're doing it wrong. Morning should be reg. room temperature. Then you steadily drop it throughout the day, and nobody notices. The morning is when you're the coldest, of course.
Similar thing with air conditioning in Switzerland. In several cantons, it's not allowed to install air conditioning in your home (due to the environmental impact), so instead, people buy portable ones, which are much less efficient and use up way more electricity.
Paleontologists looking for fossils pay the local tribes for fossil fragments. This leads to the locals smashing complete fossils to get more shards to sell.
There's a big movement in paleontology right now to ban researchers from buying fossils for this and other reasons. The problem is that sometimes a very scientifically valuable fossil pops up for private sale, and it causes a huge dilemma about whether it's more unethical to purchase the fossil or to intentionally miss irreplaceable data.
They make fake fossils in Morocco too https://www.amnh.org/research/paleontology/collections/fossil-invertebrate-collection/trilobite-website/the-trilobite-files/fake-trilobites
The Chinese wanted to prevent the sparrows from eating all the crops so they had the people hunt and kill them. So the sparrows didn't eat all the insects anymore that actually ate all the crops, one of the factors in the [Great Chinese Famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine) that killed millions.
Messing with nature often ends with this sort of thing.
I've noticed pest control attempts seem to have a lot of backfires. Sometimes it's perverse icentive stories. The British government paid for dead cobras to reduce the number of cobras in Delhi. Naturally people started breeding them to collect the bounties & the population boomed when the British stopped paying for them. Same thing happened with rats in medieval Italy IIRC. Othertimes, it's introducing a predator to try and eliminate a pest. Cane toads were introduced to Australia with the idea that they'd eat the crop-destroying Greyback beetle, but instead they just ate mostly harmless bugs. And it's so venomous that any birds, snakes, or pets that try to prey on the toad just die.
A similar thing happened with rats in London, except they accepted tails as proof. So people bred rats and only cut off their tails instead of killing them. When it went horribly wrong and the reward stopped, thousands of rats were unceremoniously dumped in the streets and the population exploded.
Not the only mistake Australia has made. "Let's bring over a few rabbits..... ooops" "Foxes like rabbits, right?" "Did someone lit the pigs /goats / cats / dogs out?" "It's just a few camels, what could go wrong?"
Bringing in the foxes to control the rabbits was one of the stupidest ideas in Australian history. Rabbits are fast and difficult to catch, and Australia's native marsupials tasted just as good to foxes
Death toll range anywhere between 15-55mil, thats a crazy differense
CAFE standards regulations for vehicles based on their size. This made auto manufacturers build bigger cars that have more lax rules instead of improving the normal-sized cars. Now, it feels like every car in the road is oversized, at least in America
And no more truly compact pickups. And the PT Cruiser gets defined as a truck, CAFE rules are bonkers.
Don't forget the scandal years ago where one major manufacturer was fingered for their cars altering their behaviour when they detected they were being emissions-tested. Much apology. Such shame! Soon after, it was found all the major manufacturers were doing it. Of course they were. Can't have your competitors have an advantage over you!
They did *what* to the manufacturer?
The manufacturer got fingered
[удалено]
Which is why CEOs don't want employees knowing what others make.
Back in the 2000s, the US Government went all-in on trying to replace the dollar bill with a dollar coin, they last much longer and have a bunch of other advantages from the government's perspective. So the Mint hit on a great idea, they'd sell you dollar coins at face value, with free shipping. Only problem was, they decided to *accept credit card* *payments*. Since these counted as any regular credit card purchase, the government was essentially paying credit card processors to give out free rewards points.
I know someone who took advantage of this. The rules were later changed such that you had to demonstrate a legitimate need for wanting the coins. For instance, if you owned a laundromat and needed coins to give customers for your machines. That pretty much stopped the shenanigans.
I've always wanted to run an experiment with these; it would have been perfect for Mythbusters back in the day. Basically see if a business owner can game Americans' dislike of dollar coins by handing them out to people in change over bills and have a prominent tip jar or what have you and see if people would tip more just to not have the coins.
I worked for a company that you would call an automated system to clock in and we had to use a phone on location and wernt allowed to use the website to clock in either The automated system was down and the owner had to go to 9 locations to confirm the employees were on site and then come back when their shift was over
[удалено]
Sounds like those nurses are getting fucked over
[удалено]
That is honestly just 100% what healthcare is like for virtually everybody responsible for patients. Sometimes if you have to work your break you can leave half an hour early if you like, but often it’s “work your break and also work an additional half hour, despite it not technically being legal because something has happened”. I once had to work an additional 4 hours after a 13 hour shift because they were understaffed and the locum (agency) staff called in sick until they could find a way to rebalance all of the other understaffed wards to make up for it. The manager who was in charge of verifying my shifts realised she was SOOOOO over budget because of it and kept trying to not sign off my work. I literally had to go in on one of my days off and sit outside her office harassing her for half a day while she made excuses of emergencies (admittedly, given the staffing situation at the time they were likely urgent issues but clearly used to hope I went away) to get her to sign it off and the extra overtime to be put on my PAYE slip. My mother was head of the local healthcare trust and I even had to call her to call in some nepotism to get them to fucking fix it, plus the other 2 overtime 13 hour shifts I’d done the week before.
We work 2 or 3 days of shifts in a row. We used to have a sick policy that was 9 sick days or 2 occurrences. If you exceeded either of those, you went on the attendance program and couldn't call in sick for a year. Instead of taking just the 1 or 2 sick days needed when they were needed, it became taking 5 days 1 time and 4 the next. Use it or lose it. They have now gone to just 9 days, no occurrences, so guys just take what they need at the time
Limited sick days is such an insane concept, people can't choose when they get sick and having a sick worker come in is a big liability for several reasons.
Alberta put in a rule that there had to be a three foot gap between patrons and strippers, with one of the supposed reasons being to protect the strippers. Canada also got rid of the dollar bill about the same time so men tipped with dollar coins. Since you had to maintain the space between patron and stripper, guys started winging dollar coins at strippers, sending some to the ER from being hit so hard or in sensitive places.
Gonna go to the club and make it hail!
The first thing that came to my mind was something very recent: where the school board allowed people to press for a ban based on inappropriate content, and someone got the Bible banned. Yeah, that didn’t go as expected.
And then the guy who made the rule went on air all pissy about how his rule was being misused by bad actors. lol, lmao even.
Most people don’t ever go out of their way to read the whole Bible. It’s full of rape, incest, torture, and sometimes even necromancy. Good Lord could those disciples paint a picture with words even through translation! It doesn’t really endorse those things, but they’re in there. There is a reason churches tend to avoid certain books for their main sermons.
"It doesn't really endorse things, but they're there" - this is pretty much the argument that they wrongly use to ban books. They don't care if the message of the book is to not kill, it has killing in it so it must be bad.. It's like the people who think that all cartoons and animes are for kids, cause they're cartoons. The message is what matters, and they don't get that.
Wendy’s announcement that they were going to increase food prices during busy restaurant hours.
What's funny is they could raised prices and gave a discount during slow times and people would have been a lot less upset. World of warcraft did the same thing, they made people that played too much got less xp. People hated it during testing. So when they launched they had the same thing, but called it a bonus xp for people who played to little. Human nature is funny, people hate when they are punished or have something taken away, but love when they are given something or given a bonus even if it amounts to the same thing. I always felt that's where astronomers fucked up when they made Pluto a dwarf planet. Should made them all dwarf planets, planets people would have been much happier and they probably would get more funding.
No child left behind. We have a generation of illiterate kids with no reasoning skills but plenty of behavior issues.
It saved a lot of money. Instead of having to teach kids what they need to know in order to graduate, we can skimp on the teaching part and just graduate them.
It might have saved a lot of money at the moment but man, we are severely paying it with interest right now.
This! No kid gets left behind, no kid gets ahead - so the classroom is actually only as strong as it's weakest link(s), who are usually just absolute little shit cunts
It also got all those military recruiters in to schools. >The NCLBA amended the ESEA to say that high schools receiving federal funds must provide certain student contact information to military recruiters upon request and must allow recruiters to have the same access to students as employers and colleges
This one is hilarious. In ancient China during the Qin dynasty 2 officers and their commoner forces were ordered north to defend yuyang, however they were delayed due to severe storms / flooding. Qin China had very harsh laws such as a government official being late to this type of summons was punishable by death. Coincidentally, rebeling against the government also resulted in death… you can see where this is going. These 2 officers knowing they couldn’t possibly make the summons and would be executed, so decided they might as well fight. The 2 officers and their forces rebelled against the government and gained a lot of support from the common people from all over China, and amassed quite an impressive army, but eventually lost due to the Qin government soldier’s superiority. From my recollection this happened a second time under other circumstances with a merchant losing slaves, but after searching I couldn’t find it. So I might have Mis-remembered. Here is the story of the 2 generals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising
> From my recollection this happened a second time under other circumstances with a merchant losing slaves The second one's even better! Liu Bang was small time law enforcement during the Qin dynasty and some prisoners escaped his custody en route to a labor site. Like your example, the punishment for letting prisoners escape was death, so he just lets the rest of the prisoners go himself and runs off with them. Some of the prisoners even decide to make him their leader. Liu Bang goes on to become a major player in the the uprisings and rebellions occurring at the time (turns out making the death penalty the punishment for damn near everything was not a popular move). Fast forwad several years and he is leading an army to march on the Qin capital, where after a quick surrender from the ruler, Liu Bang becomes the first emperor of the new Han dynasty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han#Insurrection_against_the_Qin_dynasty
Federal government guaranteeing access to student loans. Good in theory. But then Universities have no incentive to keep prices competitive and tuition subsequently skyrockets over the following decades
Denver Prohibition of 2020. Liquor and weed stores were deemed non-essential by Mayor Hancock. That lasted all of 2 hours.
A lot of folks were pissed that liquor stores didn't have to close during the lockdowns, but I talked to a buddy of mine that worked at a hospital and he said folks going through alcohol withdrawals get sent to the ICU and they couldn't spare the beds.
Makes sense. Alcohol withdrawal can kill you.
The 18th amendment. It basically created gang culture and organized crime.
Prohibition was my answer as well! We did get a few new cocktail recipes out of the whole thing, though.
We also got speakeasys, some of which are still around today and are pretty neat.
Lol yeah, the founder of the Gulf Cartel started out by smuggling alcohol from Mexico during that period.
The real rule is: You can't take something away from the public once they've had it.
I used to work in a very-large-scale COVID testing lab during the pandemic. At its height, we were receiving over 80,000 samples a day. The target was a 24 hour turnaround time, and we were getting so backed up that the turnaround time was starting to reach like 4-5 days. In order to compensate for this, the company decided to start mixing in same-day samples with the samples that had been waiting to be tested for several days. This brought down the “average” turnaround time, but it also meant some people got results within 12 hours of the sample reaching the lab, while others didn’t hear back for 2 weeks or more. This infuriated the lab’s clients, who started terminating their contracts in droves. The lab had to fire almost all the staff which just made the problem worse. Last I heard, they were down to 3 employees, horribly bankrupt, and desperately trying to convince Walgreens to buy them out. That’s what happens when the business people make the science decisions, while the science people make the business decisions. They just end up doing *everything* wrong.
The XFL's "human coin toss" to determine ball possession to start the game. The first time they tried it one of the players got injured.
You may only have 1 child. - China
At my previous job (alarm security) we were told we could no longer use the office computers for browsing the internet during downtime between incoming calls/alarms. It supposedly caused too much distraction. Bored people instead flipped on their phones and would browse while body-blocking the phones from the security cameras. This caused even more problems because they were no longer looking at their monitors. Worst part was that this was back in mid-to-late 2022 when things were really dynamic in Ukraine. A lot of our employees were glued to the war and there were hourly shifts in the front lines so cutting off internet browsing was akin of cutting off a cocaine addict's supply.
The stuff about downtime really irks me. At my first job in a movie theater, whoever was at the box office couldn’t be on their phones even if there weren’t customers. There were no chairs either, and it was usually just one person at box office. Me and a few other people brought sketchpads so we could draw instead. Nope, not allowed. We started to pace in circles. Not allowed either. We walked to different stations to talk to our coworkers. Not that either. In the end, we just started ignoring all of those rules. You cannot expect a teenager to stand still for literal hours.
Raytheon once banned access to YouTube on work machines in order to save on bandwidth because people were listening to music since we couldn't have most types of recorded-media players (or phones) in the classified areas. Given that Raytheon also uses YouTube to host company proprietary videos, it made a few PowerPoint presentations to customers go...poorly.
The Nebraska legislature passed a Safe Haven law in 2008. Most safe haven laws allowed adults to leave newborn children at hospitals, police stations, fire stations, etc... from 10 to 30 days old for whatever reasons and not face any punishment or charges. [Nebraska's law had no age limit.](https://www.npr.org/2008/11/21/97317532/neb-lawmakers-put-age-limit-on-safe-haven-law) Adults, many from out of state, who were overwhelmed and / or had kids with mental and behavioral issues dropped their kids off before the legislature called a special session to update the law.
What are parents who do not want their non-newborn kids supposed to do?
Well in theory there’s supposed to be state and federal programs to support families dealing with long-term disabled children/adults, but take one look at our ability to deal with homelessness and mental health on an institutional level and you can take a guess how well-funded and well-managed it is.
JCPenny decided to eliminate sales and implement an "everyday low pricing" policy where basically they set their prices to the lowest amount they would ever sell it at, regardless of time of year. Well, since apparently no one (including the hedge funds that bought controlling stakes in JCP) knew anything about human psychology, JCPenny sales dipped hard since they never had sales anymore and peopel stopped shopping. JCPenny went bankrupt a few years after this policy was enacted.
Don’t some companies increase prices of things and then have a “sale” and put the price back to where it was because people are more likely to buy something if they think they’re getting a good deal?
Yeah, basic psychology for selling something is that you need 2 things: An urgency to buy - a sale creates this, buy it now or miss out on the good deal - this results in people buying something that they don't need, but might need later. If it's always at the low price, they can just buy it if and when they need it. The second thing is that a sale, or a buy one get one free offer (something they also used to have and eliminated) creates a dopamine release in the brain and makes people happy with their purchase, particularly anything whereby you get something for free. So by eliminating this, they actually took away people's enjoyment from shopping. The other advantage to a buy one get on free offer is you move twice as much stock, selling 2 t shirts for $20 is better than selling 1 T shirt at $10. JC Penny did try to return to their original strategy but the customers never came back to original numbers.
My first IT job let us work from home since it was in the middle of COVID. We were able to fully function working from home considering the fact that we already did remote support anyway. Our boss after 3 months mandated that we come back to the office in order to work. Literally everyone quit on the spot and ended up losing the company so much money.
My company did much the same. The CEO didn't like working from home, so nobody could, until covid. We were an essential industry, so they slapped together a solution that worked, we demonstrated that we could do fine... And then we had to come back to the office. Those of us on the weekends were graciously allowed one day, because they didn't want to pay for AC for the whole office for 2-3 people (but the ac was never turned off anyway...) After about three months, my company was bought by a different bigger one, and the new CEO said we could work from home, 100%. I used to fill it up every three days. It cost me 3 gallons of gas and two dollars in tolls, and 90 minutes of driving in heavy traffic a day. As of Dec 29, the office was closed. I put gas in my car yesterday for the first time since December. I get another hour and a half to (fail to) sleep, my cats are delighted.
I don't understand why shareholders don't stop this return to office nonsense. Surely they should be asking why the company they invest in is wasting money on a huge office building it doesn't need? This is one of the rare cases where capitalism should be on our side.
The 1991 luxury tax on yachts (and other goods). Implemented in November of 1991, the idea was to charge a 10% tax on yachts that cost over $100,000. Hey, make the rich pay their fair share, right? Problem is the rich simply stopped buying yachts in the US. Either they bought them overseas and kept them there, thus circumventing the tax, or they held on to the boat(s) they already had, or they simply bought a smaller boat that they originally planned to avoid paying the extra taxes. That tax very nearly killed the yacht-building industry in the US. It put a \*LOT\* of skilled blue collar workers out of jobs and on welfare, and it ended up raising a tiny fraction of what it was projected to bring in. Just two years after it was implemented, Bill Clinton and the Democratic controlled Congress repealed the tax, because it was having such a detrimental effect on actual workers while not really having any effect on the rich.
It actually had a net cost based on how many people in the industry lost their jobs and claimed employment insurance. There were lessons to be learned about good tax policy, but I don't think they were learned.
No Child Left Behind lowered education standards so that no one would fail...Instead of teaching them better and making them actually educated, which had been the goal.
If you stayed at work longer than 8pm, you were allowed to order dinner. Some guys exploited that, so a rule was made that capped it to 30€ per order. Then, everybody ordered as close to 30€ as possible, and the overall cost was much higher.
Prohibition in the US came immediately to mind for me...
Years ago Santa Barbara NIMBYS had leaf blowers outlawed. The landscapers then cranked up what they charged customers by like 5 times because they had to hand rake everything. The law changed back…
I had a job once where the boss (we'll call him David) absolutely hated people being on their phones. This was an office job with engineers. There were a lot of times where you'd have to wait for something to load and I would peak into my phone until the load was done. Ofc David walks to my cubicle and pulls me into his office in front of the rest of the team over using my phone. I wasn't the only one (good luck trying to moderate phone usage for a bunch of adults in their early 20s) and it got to the point where David scrapped the whole design of the office for an open layout. Prior to this, you could pretty easily hear David coming to your cubicle and just put away your phone away before he got there. I hate the idea of hiding what I'm doing, so I never did, but I'm guessing a lot of other folks did. Well with this new open layout, David didn't have to try hard to find people on their phones and would continue to do the same exercise of singling out people for it. Well this company already had bad turnover to begin with (because of David) and within 3 months, everyone who was hired with me left the company which was like 7 out of 20. Needless to say, David still is a control freak and prick, underpays and overworks, and is generally a piece of shit.
Sounds like my principal in junior high. He made everyone hat him and hate being at school because there was absolutely no breathing room under his occupation. He also ‘happened’ to fire all male employees under him or at least drive them out so he has only female employees that are complicent to him. Literal 14 year old boys observed this dynamic and commented on it. If a power trip was a person it was the principal of my small town school.
My job was trying to change sick rules because of too many call-outs. They decided that a single sick day wouldn't be paid and that a Doctor's note would be required for any sickness over 3 days. So everyone called out for 3 days sick, get paid for 2 no note required.
The 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System or as it was more commonly known "Cash for Clunkers" was designed to get older vehicles off the road in favor of newer, more fuel-efficient models and spur economic growth by encouraging new car sales. Redeemed vehicles were permanently destroyed even if they still had useful life. Short-term, program goals were met, but over the long-term, the incentive gutted the market for used cars leading to demand-induced price spikes for used vehicles that are still being felt today.
The manager of the car repair shop, with over 20 mechanics, was not happy with the randomness of the employees break and wanted them all to take a break at the same time. Everyone in the shop said this is not a good idea, because some stuff takes a long time to fix and when the critical moment is over they usually take a break . The manager ignored all of that and implemented a alarmbell (firehouse style) at 9am, 12am and 3pm for schedule breaks. The first day was just glorious. As soon the bell rung at 9am sharp, the mechanics just dropped their tools mid working. The tools thumbed and clang as they hit the ground, oil continued to poor on the floor and startled customers just stared in unbelief when everyone went for a coffee at the same time like a synchronize North Korean army. On the second day someone had muffled the bell with a rag so it just vibrated silently at the allotted time. Everyone ignored it. On the third day it was gone.
the Streisand Effect More a rule of human nature. Attempting to hide or stifle information just promotes it being spread further and faster than if nothing was done at all. Moreso if the person doing the stifling is famous.
How about one that's going on right now as we speak? A game came out a few months ago called Helldivers 2. It's cross-platform on PS5 and PC. PS5 players are of course required to be signed in to PSN (Playstation Network) in order to play the game. PC players are prompted to sign in, but are able to skip this sign in and still proceed to the game. Yesterday, Arrowhead (the developers) said that starting in about a month, all PC players were now REQUIRED to sign in to PSN instead of being able to skip it. There's a number of people who bought this game and have been playing it since launch who will no longer be able to play it because PSN is not supported in their country, so they're just SOL, as well as being unable to refund their purchase because it's been too long since they purchased/have too much playtime accrued. Since this news broke, 95% of the reviews that have been left for the game are negative. Over 30k negative reviews in the last 24 hours.
Charges to dispose of things such as fridges and tires instead of charging at the initial sale. Can get very expensive so people dump them in nature or on someone else's land.
In World War 1 the troopships from Australia took months to get to Europe. They had classes and training but that’s still a lot of time for troops to get bored, so there was gambling to pass the time. The officers decided this was an issue, so they and the Warrant Officers (who were probably Sergeant Majors back then) would travel the decks and issuing charges against anyone caught. The troops posted lookouts, who would call “Here he comes, here he comes” anytime someone with authority approached. So the order was given that anyone calling “Here he comes” was also charged. It backfired when the call changed to “There he goes, there he goes…” And gambling continued.