9 Likes
So apparently there’s some huge BOA/Zelle issue and a ton of people’s accounts went red because all the Zelle transfers that had already cleared just disappeared. BOA’s customer service is so overwhelmed they can’t even field calls, and their CEO is in Davos and hasn’t released a statement.
I got a super cynical update from Amazon:
If you’re not familiar with this, AmazonSmile was basically a separate gateway to Amazon’s website - if you just went to smile.amazon.com instead of the normal website, then like 1% of your order would go to your selected charity or something. I think I chose the Red Cross when I first signed up for this years and years ago, so every now and then I’d get emails like this:
That’s a lot of money! And now they’re trying to be like “welp this program just didn’t help enough, better shut it down”? lol fuck off, so transparent
2 Likes
We may need a Billionaire Slapsgiving thread.
My selected charity was one of those with too small an impact
Almost a billion dollars to charity globally, not good enough.
1 Like
If we can’t solve all the world’s problem by donating 1% of sales, why try at all?
1 Like
Give it six months and they’ll be doing what all the grocery stores do: ask people at checkout to round up for charity, then claiming it as their own charitable donations.
Weird article:
A couple things here:
- if you click through to the link (from the IIHS), it notes child bicycle deaths are down, a lot; the total number of deaths haven’t changed much since 1975 (even while the USA population has grown by ~50%), but the demographics have
- also in the link, it notes “In a majority of bicyclist deaths, the most serious injuries are to the head, highlighting the importance of wearing a bicycle helmet”
- important missing variable: how many bikers are on the road now versus 1975? How much time are they spending on the road?
Ultimately the headline just feels really clickbaity and misleading:
Cyclists are statistically more likely to die in urban areas, if alcohol is involved, and if they are male. In 2020 two-thirds of bicyclist deaths in the United States occurred in motor-vehicle traffic crashes, according to National Center for Health Statistics mortality data. That year, 938 cyclists were killed in traffic crashes, up almost 100 deaths from the year before; in 5 out of every 6 crashes with a single vehicle, the car, truck, or bus first hit the cyclist from behind—likely without spotting the rider until it was too late.
Several analyses suggest that U.S. riders are more likely to wear helmets compared with cyclists in other countries—all while suffering the highest fatality rate per distance traveled. Research shows that among a 14-country cohort, the Netherlands enjoyed the lowest bicyclist fatality rate per mile traveled. The Dutch also largely eschew the helmet: 73 percent of adults and 84 percent of children in the Netherlands report they never wear a helmet while bicycling. There’s a simple reason for that. Surveys show that Dutch residents feel safe biking, and attribute that sense of security to the country’s long-standing cycling culture and network of dedicated cycling lanes.
None of this suggests there’s some “danger” about bike helmets (actual subtitle: “The history—and danger—of a modern safety obsession”), but rather that the problem in the United States is a culture that values cars above, and at the expense of, other methods of transport like bicycling. The complaints about helmets are, like, a.) it makes cycling look dangerous (cycling is dangerous!) which deters more people from getting on the road and providing safety in numbers to bikers, and b.) some guy in the UK did a study where he dressed a bunch of different ways and looked at how much room cars gave him, and cars gave him less space when he was wearing a helmet. kool?
1 Like
Wasn’t there a thread on this back on 22 a hundred years ago? I remember someone arguing that helmets didn’t make you safer they just made you think you were safer so you did more dangerous shit on the bike.
This argument is so terrible it absolutely must have been made on 22 back in the day in either politics or OOT.
2 Likes
lol stupid fucks.
I don’t do much trauma anymore, but come try telling this shit to the people who do that day in day out and they’ll just laugh at you.
3 Likes
Mr. Gwin struck a defiant tone in an interview with ABC7 shortly after the episode, saying that he found it “hard to apologize when we have had no help with this situation.” After a meeting of city and religious leaders on Sunday night, Mr. Gwin said in a message that he read to the station that he was “deeply apologetic.”
FAAFO
1 Like
I’d be shocked if he gets convicted, though.
The BayArea subreddit was full of people defending this dude and blaming the cops for not “dealing with” the woman previously.
Bay Area subreddit is quite conservative
There’s weird stuff like that. Like in tech there’s this app “Blind” which I think uses your work email to verify you work at a company, but otherwise lets you post anonymously, and it’s full of conservative douchebags (who probably have no other outlet to let their inner dbag out).
Most of the local subreddits are ime. At least the ones I’ve lived in or around
One might think Zelle would be one of the best person-to-person money transfer options, but in my opinion it is one of the absolute worst for a multitude of reasons.
Update from Reddit, if you believe this user who claims to have worked for Amazon (and responses who say “yeah I worked there too and this is right”):
You are completely correct. The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks. Tax writeoff was a negligible side benefit, goodwill was just marketing fodder.
2 Likes