r00ty

Not sure how it is in the US. But here in the UK there’s two ways a business can export.

1: They pre-clear the customs duty and include it in the sales total (so it’s like paying sales tax at the checkout, except it’s the pre-cleared duty fees). Then the parcel has a nice duty paid stamp and goes straight through customs (I guess unless customs are suspicious and check into it).

2: They just charge you the item price with no tax applied. In which case you need to pay local tax and duties applicable once the product arrives. Here it’s a bit different. They will hold it at the local depot and you can either go there and pay + collect, or you can pay online and it will be rescheduled for delivery once you pay.

As others have said, it’s not a scam. There’s no requirement for a business to do option 1, and it’s likely only viable for large businesses to register and have someone/software that knows the various duties required for various countries.

I’ve ordered from newegg and B&M in the past for example, and in both cases the items were pre-cleared and arrived promptly without any hassle.

Maybe there’s something similar for imports into the US too?

What next? A toaster with butter spreader built-in?

Yes, but the it burns the logo of the highest bidder each month onto your toast.

Yeah, it’s not outside the realm of possibilities. But by far, they’re more likely to be updates for the smart features.

If you’re just using the HDMI ports, there’s not really many bugfixes you’re likely to need. Most bugfixes will be to the “smart” part. Which, if you don’t want to connect it to the internet, you aren’t using at all.

The sun always shines on pc.

I would agree. The best thing to do is as others have said. Disable read receipts and let them continue to get new numbers and wonder if they’re even getting through, document each one and the messages received but don’t respond. Keep the reports to police up to date with latest info. Even if they do nothing, it’s good to have a paper trail.

The thing is, they do already have lock-in in some ways at least. Otherwise I cannot imagine a restaurant wanting to give away 30% of each sale this way. Unless the other option is virtually no traffic.

Now see, I kinda had the idea for a syndicated delivery service (not online orders, but the internet would have been used to create the order data that would assign drivers) decades ago. I did some part time work delivering food back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I always thought it was so inefficient. The place I was at, was very busy, he had a very large delivery area but even so. There would be times he was paying people to sit outside talking shit to eachother in their cars.

I thought it would make sense to have a larger pool of drivers that service multiple restaurants/take-aways. Adding the economies of scale to the problem to ensure that people were being utilised and lowering the cost to each place using the service. Of course also paying some money to the person running the business that brought it all together.

I don’t think I ever considered paying less than this guy did (which wasn’t a lot, but would likely translate to $5 or so an hour in the 90s/2000s).

One thing I find really interesting about uber eats/door dash (US)/Deliveroo (UK/EU). When you add up their fees, they take a delivery fee from the user, a service fee from the user, an even bigger service fee from the restaurant and pay the lowest possible fee that will keep drivers interested. Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?

Take deliveroo in the UK. Looking now I can see (I don’t live in a city, so most places are some distance away). A place 4.5 miles away is charging £4.29 for delivery. Let’s make up an imaginary order:

Order total: £20 (including sales tax/VAT) User’s service fee: £2.39 (it seems to be 11% including the VAT with a maximum set of which I am not sure how much) User’s delivery fee: £4.29 (including VAT, since they need to charge VAT on a service) Restaurant service fee: £6 (30% on the VAT included total). I am really unsure how this works entirely in terms of tax though… Total for user: £26.68

Total deliveroo service revenue: Net: £10.57 VAT: £2.11 Total: £12.68

Reading between the lines from what I can see delivery riders are paid between £3 and £6 per delivery. Now, in the cities this is probably great. I do wonder how they do it in the towns and villages. When I look at the list of places available to me most are 3 miles or more away, with some up to 6 miles away. I do wonder how £6 compensates someone doing a 10+ mile round trip at times.

But OK the price they pay drivers doesn’t include any tax. So it comes from the Net total. This means per delivery in revenue they are always making £4.50 or more per delivery.

Yes, they need to pay support staff, but they are in low cost geographies. Yes, they need to keep development staff and the usual management overhead And yes, they need servers/cloud time to host this stuff.

Looking this up (not sure how good the source is) their revenue in 2023 was £2.7billion, which I believe. However they lost £38million. Where all the costs come from, I am not sure.

I wonder how these numbers compare to US based operators?

Well I cannot check, I’m in Linux right now. But I’m fairly sure when there’s an invalid value for conversion or other function the cell shows the text “VALUE!” in it.

Well, that would be good value! (there’s also an Excel joke just there but now I’ve ruined it). In this case, I was using the symbol to denote emphasis in linguistic terms and not embiggen a number.

You should instead use Toto brand toilet wipes. 39.99 for a value pack of 15!

I thought the web page layout looked familiar.

1999. I was part of the ADSL trial in the UK and have been on a form of broadband ever since.

Resistance alone doesn’t cause heat. Drawing current through resistance causes heat at the point (or points) of resistance. Which is why I clarified that it’s not likely so much a problem on small loads.

This is why resisters come in different physical sizes. Because they have differing abilities to dissipate power as heat.

A good example is of dummy loads in radio use. Which needs to dissipate the power output of a radio. That can be anything from milliwatts to a kilowatt. Up to probably 50w they will have a basic heatsink. I’ve seen huge drums filled with oil as 50ohm resisters to handle up to a kilowatt of dissipation.

Yeah, I think in this case there’s a lot more tiny conductors sharing what can add up to pretty high current loads on PD connections. Adding extra connectors adding resistance to low (5-20v) voltage high current connections is adding an extra failure point and increasing resistance on the whole cable run.

Not inherently unsafe, but just not a good idea to promote because you know someone will try to run a 200w charging cable for 30m with like 5 connected cables.

I think a lot of people are mostly on the money here. It’s to do with resistance. Now, I’m not a qualified electrician, but I’m an amateur radio license holder and a lot of what you learn for that is applicable here.

The main problem as many have said is resistance. This comes about from both the length of the conductors but also from every plug/socket connection adds resistance. Also in the case of the non extension socket multipliers, as you add more the weight bearing down would also likely start to make the connections less secure causing more resistance and possibly adding to the problem through arcing.

Now the resistance alone on small loads likely wouldn’t be a huge problem. But if you had a large enough load (specifically at the end of the stacked connectors/extensions), or a fault that caused a larger than expected load the current would cause the resistance to generate heat.

There’s a lot of ifs and maybes involved, but really why do it? There’s really no real world situation to need to have a dangerous amount of extensions like this though.

For larger loads here in the UK there’s some very specific other concerns when dealing with ring mains. But really you’d need to do really weird/unusual things for that to become a problem.

Instance level censorship isn’t much for the user to worry about (I run my own, so it’s zero problem for me). Most censorship happens at the group level by group owners, and the admins on the instance the group is hosted.

I still don’t have a problem with it though. You subscribe to a group on a certain instance, you cannot be too surprised if you get censored there.

Yeah but they’re a cheat. They’re lithium cells regulated down to 1.5v. Good ones are rare, when you find good ones they’re generally expensive and because they’re regulated down you generally get 100% battery showing until just before they fail.

I used them for some voltage sensitive stuff, but finding a brand that held a good charge for more than even 50-100 charges was hard.

Nimh is much better for anything that won’t be upset about the voltage too much.