r00ty

The thing is, they do already have lock-in in some ways at least. Otherwise I cannot imagine a restaurant wanting to give away 30% of each sale this way. Unless the other option is virtually no traffic.

Now see, I kinda had the idea for a syndicated delivery service (not online orders, but the internet would have been used to create the order data that would assign drivers) decades ago. I did some part time work delivering food back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I always thought it was so inefficient. The place I was at, was very busy, he had a very large delivery area but even so. There would be times he was paying people to sit outside talking shit to eachother in their cars.

I thought it would make sense to have a larger pool of drivers that service multiple restaurants/take-aways. Adding the economies of scale to the problem to ensure that people were being utilised and lowering the cost to each place using the service. Of course also paying some money to the person running the business that brought it all together.

I don't think I ever considered paying less than this guy did (which wasn't a lot, but would likely translate to $5 or so an hour in the 90s/2000s).

One thing I find really interesting about uber eats/door dash (US)/Deliveroo (UK/EU). When you add up their fees, they take a delivery fee from the user, a service fee from the user, an even bigger service fee from the restaurant and pay the lowest possible fee that will keep drivers interested. Yet I always hear the services are losing money too. How is that even possible?

Take deliveroo in the UK. Looking now I can see (I don't live in a city, so most places are some distance away). A place 4.5 miles away is charging £4.29 for delivery. Let's make up an imaginary order:

Order total: £20 (including sales tax/VAT) User's service fee: £2.39 (it seems to be 11% including the VAT with a maximum set of which I am not sure how much) User's delivery fee: £4.29 (including VAT, since they need to charge VAT on a service) Restaurant service fee: £6 (30% on the VAT included total). I am really unsure how this works entirely in terms of tax though... Total for user: £26.68

Total deliveroo service revenue: Net: £10.57 VAT: £2.11 Total: £12.68

Reading between the lines from what I can see delivery riders are paid between £3 and £6 per delivery. Now, in the cities this is probably great. I do wonder how they do it in the towns and villages. When I look at the list of places available to me most are 3 miles or more away, with some up to 6 miles away. I do wonder how £6 compensates someone doing a 10+ mile round trip at times.

But OK the price they pay drivers doesn't include any tax. So it comes from the Net total. This means per delivery in revenue they are always making £4.50 or more per delivery.

Yes, they need to pay support staff, but they are in low cost geographies. Yes, they need to keep development staff and the usual management overhead And yes, they need servers/cloud time to host this stuff.

Looking this up (not sure how good the source is) their revenue in 2023 was £2.7billion, which I believe. However they lost £38million. Where all the costs come from, I am not sure.

I wonder how these numbers compare to US based operators?

No, just this one particular crow.

Well I cannot check, I'm in Linux right now. But I'm fairly sure when there's an invalid value for conversion or other function the cell shows the text "VALUE!" in it.

Well, that would be good value! (there's also an Excel joke just there but now I've ruined it). In this case, I was using the symbol to denote emphasis in linguistic terms and not embiggen a number.

You should instead use Toto brand toilet wipes. 39.99 for a value pack of 15!

1999. I was part of the ADSL trial in the UK and have been on a form of broadband ever since.

Yeah, I think in this case there's a lot more tiny conductors sharing what can add up to pretty high current loads on PD connections. Adding extra connectors adding resistance to low (5-20v) voltage high current connections is adding an extra failure point and increasing resistance on the whole cable run.

Not inherently unsafe, but just not a good idea to promote because you know someone will try to run a 200w charging cable for 30m with like 5 connected cables.

Aha OK. Then yeah I misread it. That makes a lot more sense.

How I read it, they want to use a domain to validate the use of a handle. With the huge variety of tlds the same domain part could be registered many many times.

If I did misunderstand, then sorry. It's how I read it.

There's a lot of tlds. Do they explain the policy when two people have the same domain on different tlds? I mean oldest registered makes sense to me. But not without problems.

We can see it ourselves. We use rabbitmq for incoming (and maybe outgoing, it's been a while since I looked at how it is) federation. So, you can see the queues there. For incoming (from rabbitmq) and outgoing there are also queues (symfony messenger) and these handle failures and can be configured and can be queried.

After the upgrade I just took the default configuration again (because it seems queue names changed). But I used to have various rules setup in rabbitmq for retries and it took a fair few tries before the messages ended up in the proper "failed" queue (which needs manual action to retry). Some items you eventually need to clear (instances that just shutdown, or instances that lost their domain for example). They will never complete.

But it's not exposed in any way to my knowledge. Well unless people have their rabbitmq web interface open and without login of course.