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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Because it’s not real. It’s purely for marketing, not for actual wide-spread implementation.

    Even in the best of cases, even factoring in economy of scale and all that, a robot like that will cost upwards of €50k at least, probably closer to double that, will require constant maintainance, and the risk of vandalism or accidental damage is really high. And you’ll likely need a (skilled) human operator nearby anyway, because the delivery vehicle doesn’t drive itself.

    The purpose of projects like this is marketing and public perception.

    • The company looks futuristic and future proof. That’s good to get investors.
    • The company looks like they could replace humans with robots at any time. That’s good with negotiations with unions and workers.
    • The company gets into headlines worldwide. That’s advertisement they don’t have to pay for.

    This robot is not meant to ever go mainstream. Maybe there will be a handful of routes where they will be implemented for marketing purposes, but like drone delivery and similar gimmicks, it won’t beat a criminally underpaid delivery human on price, and that’s the only metric that counts for a company like Amazon.


  • “Prescription glasses” only mean “glasses with optical properties”, so glasses that actually do anything with focus, as opposed to e.g. non-prescription sunglasses or non-prescription accessory glasses that people wear to look smart or something.

    It doesn’t mean you need a prescription for them.

    (That said: in some countries you need a prescription for your prescription glasses if you want your health insurance to pay for them.)








  • The Nigerian understanding of religion is fascinating. They just take what they need from any place they want. In the western world most people stick with the faith they were born in, or maybe switch once or twice in their lifetime. In Nigeria it’s common to switch very frequently, always taking the parts they like best and leaving behind the rest.

    It’s a very open and interesting way to look at things, not so much tied to their own personal identity (“I am protestant, so I must hate catholics” as it used to be common in the west), but instead they build their own faith from all the best sources they can find.



  • Yeah, could totally be a regional difference.

    I had the same thing when negotiating for salaries too, so it wasn’t just when talking to people, but it was in a more official way as well, and I even got it in my contract like that.

    When I was working as a tutor, my contract listed my pay in hourly pay, because I worked varying hours and I was paid by the hour. On my entry-level job my contract was in monthly before-tax pay, but negotiations were with monthly after-tax pay. And my later jobs were all in yearly before-tax pay, which might also have been relevant that way because in some of these jobs I had yearly bonuses and/or part of the payment in stock I got once a year. So with these yearly figures in there, probably it just made sense make everything yearly.



  • In Europe people use annual gross salary when they earn enough too.

    Monthly after-tax is usually used by lower income people, where low short-term numbers really matter (“Can I make my rent this month?”, “Can I afford to buy/do this small thing this month?”), while annual gross salary is used by people who make a lot of money, where the day-to-day financials don’t matter, but long-term stuff does, and where you also generally have much higher tax pay backs.

    I used per-hour salary when I was in university and only worked a few hours per week. I switched to monthly after-tax when I got into an entry-level job that paid quite little, and when I got to higher-paying senior/expert level jobs, I started using yearly figures.