Interesting Links for 27-01-2018

[andrewducker]

How Does MoviePass Make Money? We're About to Find Out

(tags: movies money )

The Presidents Club is not the only prestigious men only event

(tags: society men OhForFucksSake )

This Is the Coolest Homemade Lego Millennium Falcon of All Time

(tags: StarWars lego viaSwampers )

Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

(tags: numbers )

Six more countries sign multilateral tax treaty instrument to prevent international tax avoidance

(tags: tax GoodNews )

Cape Town runs out of water in 90 days

(tags: water southafrica epicfail )

I subscribe to Ars Technica. If you're interested in tech news you should too

(tags: need money technology )

Men Don’t Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree.

(tags: healthcare jobs patriarchy society OhForFucksSake usa )

Edinburgh Trams sees huge shift in payment method after contactless launch

(tags: money Edinburgh trams )

What it's like writing fake news

(tags: fraud writing money OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[drplokta]

The article on big numbers is rather outdated: “And in Go, which has a 19-by-19 board and over 10150 possible positions, even an amateur human can still rout the world’s top-ranked computer programs.”

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I was amused by that.

[cmcmck]

You seem to be finding ever more offs!

[momentsmusicaux]

I do think it's daft that you have to validate your pass on the platform, rather than in the tram.

The trams in Paris have the things to stick your pass on / your ticket in in the area between each set of doors. It means you can just run on.

[andrewducker]

Validating only takes two seconds, so that doesn't bother me.

Sucks more for people who need to actually buy tickets.

[momentsmusicaux]

That's if you have your pass out already. If it's at the bottom of a bag, it's time you maybe don't have.

And if there are lots of people, you have to wait at the stop while the tram is about to go, whereas if it's on board the tram, you all get on and there's no longer a rush.

And it's easy to forget if you're in a rush: that happened to us once (and T managed to hop out and validate and the next stop before we got inspected!)

Ultimately though, it's a different system from the bus where you board and deal with ticketing once you're there, which makes it confusing for people.

[andrewducker]

True. It would be nice if you tagged in when you were on the tram. Or, frankly, if you didn't need to tag in if you have a pass. I'm not sure what they gain from it other than knowledge of who gets on where and the inspectors check regularly enough for them to get that, I'd have thought.

[momentsmusicaux]

Ah. The Paris transport company did an ad campaign about that a while back, because lots of people weren't tagging their passes. It lets them gather data on usage, so they can better plan timetables and capacity and future development and so on.

[andrewducker]

Does Paris also have inspectors at the same frequency?

Because I rarely even travel one stop before an inspector checks me, and you'd think that would give them the same information.

(I don't travel during rush hour though)

[momentsmusicaux]

No, you're pretty much left to your own devices. Ticket inspectors in Paris are like on the buses in Edinburgh -- once in a blue moon, random inspection.

Several decades ago they started letting people board buses at the rear doors if you had a travel pass, and then when they started having contactless ones, they put the pads to swipe them on board. Then carried that over to the trams when those started.

[nojay]

The idea, as I understand it is that a validating terminal on the tram would allow people to avoid paying for a trip on a smartcard unless they see the ticket inspector coming along the carriage at which point they can make a mad rush for the validating terminal.

It doesn't apply on the Edinburgh trams for various reasons -- most passes are "all you can eat" unlimited travel cards rather than working as pre-paid debit cards like Oyster, Suica etc. so not validating the card doesn't save anyone any money. There would be no ticket-issuing machines on board.

From speaking to a conductor they validate passes so that the trams revenue stream can be separated from Lothian buses since the smartcards interoperate on the two services. The cards are checked 100% on entry to the bus but there are too many doors on a tram to enforce that check on boarding hence the patrolling conductor who checks tickets and smartcards most of the time (but not always).

The contactless debit card payment scheme (and smartphone-pay too) is a no-brainer solution for people digging through their wallets and bags to find enough change to buy tickets while the tram is pulling into the platform. It should have been implemented a lot earlier but wasn't for some reason.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that makes sense.

[alithea]

My husband left the civil service to retrain as a nurse with my support and neither of us have any issue with the fact I earn more than him. Obviously I'm not the target audience for that article!

[andrewducker]

Yeah. You're not trapped by a pathological society.

[alithea]

No, there is a chunk of privilege there.

But also, while it was a source of pride for my father that my mother never had to go back to work after they had kids, and could stay at home to be there for my sister and I in a way his own mother could never afford to be, I was brought up with the strong idea that I should always expect to work and be self-sufficient financially. There was never any mention of the idea that either of us should expect to be supported by a partner; instead my father insisted we have jobs from the age of 16 or so except when we were in full time education and neither of us got any pocket money if we weren't working from that age.