• 1 Post
  • 508 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 15th, 2023

help-circle


  • Having had some experience working in logistics in that time, I’ve realised that there are a huge amount of potential factors. It doesn’t have as much to do with the origin/destination countries so much as where the origin/destination addresses are in relation to the respective points of entry/exit, as well as other circumstances that may be specific to that point of entry/exit.

    Online shopping now represents the majority of retail trade so this will have a general impact, planes are costlier to fly than they used to be and the scheduling has never really recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

    It also varies a lot by service. DHL for example flies their own planes, Mainfreight leases space on DHL flights (which DHL can decide to deprioritise at any time).

    Auspost was corporatised in 1989 and we are still experiencing new flow-on impacts from that, e.g they mostly just fill up empty space on passenger flights to save money. With that comes high variance of actual shipment capacity compared to what was planned, and it’s very normal for things to be delayed.

    If you’re a retailer sending high volume and it’s important that your goods are received quickly, the shipping companies will work closely with you to establish fast lanes (e.g NZ to Perth in 1-2 biz days). Often the retailer will often subsidise their shipping options to be competitive. But the list of shippers that can afford this (and do the volume where it’s warranted) is short.

    You could probably ring the company and find out more details about the lane you’re shipping on and strategies to reduce transit time, but if you’re not sending big volume it’ll most likely come down to shipping on a particular day of the week etc.

    All that said, I remember ordering US to Australia 10 years ago and paying out the ass for economy shipping, it would take an actual month and was completely untracked.

    Tl;dr it really just depends




  • Yes, for a loading method which takes time to complete the conversion rate will generally be locked in from the time the transfer was initiated. You can always preview the received converted amount. Although the transfer method may vary depending on availability in the recipient account country, the various timeframes and fees (where applicable) have always been previewed accurately.

    For myself I have set up MFA for payments via the app, so I will routinely be required to use the app to authenticate a payment. However other MFA methods are available. I can’t think of any other function the website itself doesn’t do.

    Given there is no additional fee for converting at a foreign point of sale, I just load up in my home currency as there are free/instant methods available and convert to whichever destination currency at point of sale, ensuring to select not to have the balances converted by visa/master at terminals which have that function.

    Hope you enjoy your time in Japan!


  • I’d recommend searching about their fees this because it’s going to vary a bit based on your local currency. Their documentation on the topic is easy to read and answers your first two questions better than I could put it.

    I’ve rarely had to interact with support so I couldn’t give a useful response about that in earnest. They do have local support in the two major countries in which I’ve interacted with them and it’s been fine.

    The KYC process is standard for a digital money account AFAIK. I signed up in 2017 originally to handle a one-off transfer between local bank accounts in different countries, so I’d not have bothered investing much time in it if it was a hassle. I haven’t had to re-identify myself or think about it since, despite migrating across several countries, starting to use the physical card etc. I imagine I gave them my government ID though.





  • I’ve used wise.com for this sort of thing for many years (since they used to be called transferwise). Can spin up as many virtual visa cards as you need (I think it’s max 10 active at once). I also have a physical debit card with them which will do conversions at foreign points of sale from my local currency using the mid market rate and fees much lower than visa/master. Never had an issue with them, though this is more a sort of obfuscation rather than privacy



  • Yet when the lame duck admin was at its lamest, it voiced what is apparently now bipartisan opposition to the ban.

    Anyway, that isn’t to do with Bytedance’s response. It isn’t a mask-off moment for them to lament those who have materially damaged their interests in favour of those apparently saving them. The flip-flop is on the part of the politicians. Presumably if Bytedance existed under MLism, they would still desire to exist.




  • How were the trackers added to these torrents? Assuming either a) you added them manually, or b) the tracker you downloaded the torrent files from bundled them into the torrent file?

    If b), if you downloaded the torrent file again now that one of its trackers is defunct, would it still be bundled?

    If no, or if a), you could remove the torrents without touching the downloaded data, then locate your “snatch list” on the private tracker (a list of all torrents you’ve downloaded), batch download them all and add them to qbt, assuming same output folder they will detect the downloaded files and go to 100% without downloading anything.

    If yes, there isnt a way I can think of to remove the trackers as a batch, but aside from tidiness of your client there shouldn’t be any actual problem resulting from them being there.



  • Just to be totally clear: Steam OS is a distro for the Steam Deck. It’s great that they based their handheld’s OS on Linux. There is pretty much universal agreement that is a net positive for gamers. Up until recently, there wasn’t a way to install Steam OS on a device other than a Steam deck, except by using third party tools to hack together a bootable version of the Deck’s recovery image. That’s now changed - Valve have recently released generic install images of Steam OS. Hence this post about a Valve dev’s comments about Steam OS competing more directly with Windows, which it previously did not on really any level.

    I don’t think anyone in the thread is positing that Valve creating Steam OS is a negative. I and the other poster are saying that regardless of whether the dev’s comments are truthful, the reason Valve has now released Steam OS more widely is money-oriented, not some altruistic act toward gamers. The benefits to gamers generally associated with Steam OS are simply not related to this new development. Steam OS is not an especially useful distribution for PC gamers. For example, it doesn’t include Nvidia drivers like other gaming-oriented Linux distros. But one feature it does have is that it’s inseparable from the Steam ecosystem. And while you could describe Steam as “a games store”, you could just as easily and accurately describe it as “a DRM platform”. In other words, anti-consumer, money-grubbing, etc.