sjjshzvuiajhz's comments

The server doesn’t know whether you will follow through with a tip when they decide how well to serve you. The information asymmetry goes one way or the other.

Complain though whatever feedback mechanism the app gives you. Same thing you’d do if the food didn’t show up at all.

On the other hand, what does the driver do if they go above and beyond to give you great service, but then you don’t tip?

Although if drivers hear about this story and find out that some prepaid tips are doing nothing for them, their perceptions of the cash tip may change. I figure they have the ability to give the customer zero stars if the promised tip isn’t given.

In the US tipping is standard, not for over-the-top service.

In general, higher pay for better quality goods and services is part of a negotiated sticker price. Tipping is the anamoly here. In the DoorDash context, if the user were given the option to tip after delivery, they’d most likely just forget about the app once they got their food and never tip. So there’d be little incentive for the drivers to work hard for a good tip.

I wonder if you added a note stating that you planned to tip in cash, whether the drivers could see that and give you better service.

The issue as described here is that the service captures most of the value of the tip, so the drivers are wasting their effort when they rush to complete tipped orders.

This driver isn’t paid until after the delivery anyway, so that shouldn’t be a factor.

When deciding to tip before or after the service is rendered, these are the considerations likely to be weighed:

Pros for asking for tips before delivery:

1. Tips are more likely (eliminates scenario where user ignores the app after the delivery and never sees request to tip).

2. Tips are larger (user may perceive that the tip will influence the quality of service).

Cons:

1. Tip option increases perceived cost of order (or guilt if not tipping), so this additional step reduces number of completed orders.

With the DoorDash policy this article is referencing, where the company probably only makes a profit if you tip, it makes sense to ask for tips upfront. For the Uber/Lyft policy where tips are more for the benefit of the driver, it makes sense to tip after the ride.

I don’t think it’s fraud. Your money went to the driver, instead of DoorDash’s money. This is exactly how restaurant tipping works in much of the US. As usual, if you want the person you are tipping to keep the money you are giving them in addition to their minimum wage, better tip in cash.

I don’t think so - the owner of this issue is the tech lead of Progressive Web Apps at Google according to his LinkedIn. He probably envisions a future where GMail can run as a web app on a mobile phone with zero lag. Combined with previous additions to web APIs such as notifications, GMail the web app can be at parity with GMail the native app.

I’m not saying you can instantly change the way your brain works on a dime, but you can make it happen given time. Read a good book about the history of hip hop. Put Warren G’s Regulate album on in the background while doing something you really enjoy. Intentionally listen for parts of the music that you’ve read about, and be proud of yourself for recognizing them. Suddenly you’ll find that hearing a sample from a song you heard before gives you a dopamine hit, just like a Star Trek reference feels for a sci-fi fan.

Appreciating the world around you is a skill, just like criticizing is. And it’s a skill you can get good at if you apply yourself! Smart people who suffer from depression and anxiety automatically get really good at criticizing things. It may not be worth the effort to learn to appreciate hip hop, but it is definitely worth the effort to learn to like interacting with the people around you.

Antidepressants are like a performance-enhancing drug for appreciating things. They make the positive thoughts last longer. My psychiatrist tells me I should try to wean myself off them eventually, so maybe training wheels are a better analogy.

I’m not telling you to pretend to be nice, I’m telling you to actually be nice. You won’t have to hide those feelings of contempt because you won’t be feeling them. Before you start the conversation, get your brain in a place where you like the person you are talking to.

I used to be convinced I was autistic, I had a really hard time connecting with people. The median number of friends I had in my childhood was one. I might be on the spectrum, I definitely behave in a quirky way and I’m bad at small talk. But since I started taking the antidepressant I’ve had more positive thoughts about other people, which makes me nicer. Suddenly it’s easy to make friends. I went to a bar on Saturday and made a friend and he invited me to hang out at his place tonight. If you had told me that would happen five years ago I would have laughed in your face (or cried inside). Now it’s normal.

Most people want to like people. You have to give them reasons to not like you. If they sense aggression from you, that’s the best reason for them to not like you. You don’t have to play the part of a normal guy perfectly. You just have to be a decent person who doesn’t behave like they are surrounded by Ferengi.

We’ve never met, but from what you’ve said in this thread, it sounds like you have a low opinion of the people around you. You’re good at finding flaws. That’s a valuable skill, but when you direct that fault-finding toward other people, they will become defensive.

It’s rarely productive to ask someone that was wrong, why did you do that? You may have steel skin, but for most people, that feels like an attack. The person you’re questioning can perceive in your body language and tone of voice the “he’s just another illogical idiot” thought that’s running through your mind. The basic instinct when faced with an attack is fight or flight. Productive adult humans have usually learned that diffusing conflict by disengaging works better than fighting back. This means that you are unlikely to get the answer that you are looking for.

This doesn’t mean you can’t question people and find out why they do what they do! The importing thing is to be nice about it.

Don’t think: I wonder if this illogical idiot can come up with an explanation for his bullshit?

Think: It seems like this thing X Bob made contributed to a problem with thing Y and that’s making me angry at Bob - but I bet Bob thought a lot about thing X when he made it, but he didn’t think about thing Y, and now he knows thing Y is broken and he feels guilty about it. Why don’t I ask him about what he likes about working on X so I can appreciate the good ideas he had, and maybe tell him a little about what I like about how Y works so he knows not to break it next time.

Communication is hard. It requires two brains that are full of different memories and habits to sync with one another. You really have to want to understand the other person. I’d go further and say you need to care about them, and know what they care about, for your interactions with them to make sense and be satisfying for the both of you. I’ve found that intentionally caring about the people around me improves my relationships with those people and makes life more enjoyable.

A public market gives you access to millions of potential buyers, so you get the best price, with minimal fees. That’s liquidity. A private company could try to provide something like that without using the public market, but it won’t be nearly as good.

Sure, if you’re sad because you’re starving in a drainage ditch, or your best friend just died, that doesn’t mean you’re depressed. But if your basic needs as an organism are met, you have great latitude to occupy your brain with thoughts that make you happy or sad.

People are constantly constructing internal narratives to explain their actions. From the perspective of the narrator, with a life’s worth of context, those actions fit into the narrative in a perfectly logical way. From the perspective of others who lack that context, those actions can seem illogical. Maybe you really are more logical than the people around you, but on the other hand you can’t read minds - maybe you can’t simulate the brains of the people you meet with sufficient accuracy to reconstruct their internal logic.

People do good things and bad things. If in the presence of a combination of good things and bad things, you focus on the bad things and the bad things dominate your subjective experience of existence, you are probably suffering from depression.

I think this is legally required in the US, if you book directly with the airline. This is a solid reason to never book through the flight aggregators.

Well, if we’re talking about corrupt cops who will plant drugs, might they also lie about you consenting to the search? Maybe you’re better off doing whatever it takes to make them like you, so they are less likely make you the person they plant drugs on?

I don’t know what the right answer is, it seems like a tough call. I’m skeptical of people who confidently say “consenting is never the right answer”.

Just going to throw out there that I’ve never seen a dev database that was anything other than fake data, or internal dogfood data. Have worked at major public tech companies and late-stage startups.

One could argue that the social value of insurance is to incentivize you to not take risks we know about, while protecting you from risks we don’t know about.