Looks like the permanent driver security barriers are rolling out now. I'm glad this can improve their safety and these don't require swinging the door out back at every stop.
But it's a shame that driver interaction is pretty non-existent now.
Every few weeks I get a blank notice which looks terribly important, with no return address. You have no choice but to open it carefully lest it be a banking or government notice of some sort.
It's presented as what's called a pressure seal item or folded self-mailer, which simply means that its folded upon itself and must be opened carefully at the perforated ends.
Every single time it's the same thing which is an ad for company called "3-day Blinds"
For this reason I will never do business with them and I would encourage the same from everyone. they waste probably millions of minutes of people's time and sometimes make people's hearts skip a beat thinking and it was something of great importance.
Strong turnout today at City Hall for a special event to adopt available kittens.
I've noticed a deluge of these dialogs across many vendors the past couple of years, where the Opt-Out path is reframed as 'I promise to do this later, but just not now.' The implication is the vendor has your implicit consent to continue repeating the offer.
Before the trade wars started, I would routinely order items from motorcycle gear sites in Italy, Spain, Netherlands or Germany. Sometimes they have unique brands or deals not found in the US, and the price is usually better, even after paying shipping costs.
For a while, I discontinued using these suppliers because of the high tariffs, but then the US Supreme Court declared the basis for them to be illegal, and some refunds started coming back.
My impression was that we're trending back to business as usual, but I just ordered a jacket from Germany, and got hit with an almost 100% tariff on it's value, which UPS is collecting!
So beware, I'm no lawyer but my understanding is that the US administration has simply shifted the justification to apply these high fees to rely on other laws and loopholes.
So this isn't a post about the politics of it -- just to warn riders, beware of getting your wallet hit !
At SEA today AS boarding procedures had changed so that they were calling A and B groups about a minute apart (some gates) or at the same time (my gate). Most of the fliers in A got stuck behind a massive B group now.
I realize it's a first world problem but this really dilutes earning Gold even more.
This just popped up on my Google Pixel phone.
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Would you like to allow us to use your personal purchasing history to do advertising now, or do you want us to keep asking you??
Even in this age where we're seeing all these new AI powered features doing incredible things, speech recognition on the Pixel devices seems downright awful. In fact, my experience is that it's actually worse than it used to be a couple years ago.
Random capitalization in the middle of a sentence, misuse of words without any context relevance, and sentences just ending randomly. Also a lot of word errors.
The latest problem seems to be the microphone just turning itself off halfway through your sentence so you have to turn it back on.
I don't understand why Google seems to be letting this capability atrophy. It's quite frustrating.
What's your experience?
I wonder if anyone is aware of the reason that sometimes Bonvoy stay points are posted immediately or within a day, and sometimes a week or more later. Surely Marriott's computer systems can't be so slow as to take days to process a transaction.
The reason it matters is that I like to verify I earned my points on the way home, rather than having to check it 7-10 days later.