jqubed

Office work is largely paperwork, even if very little is on actual paper nowadays. Much of the work involves creating records or communicating with others to get things done. A salesperson will try to find clients for the product or service. They’ll typically create a record of customers or prospects with their contact information and notes about the negotiation. They’ll create a formal quotation or estimate for the customer and if the customer wants to move forward they’ll create an order confirmation. That document will trigger some other department to fulfill the order, either by providing a service or product to the customer. A work order might be provided to a service technician specifying what work is to be done and where. If a product needs to be delivered a picking slip might be created to tell someone in a warehouse where to get the product and how many to get. Once it’s been picked the product will go to the shipping department to be packed and shipped. An item fulfillment will be created saying what items were packed, how many, and what the tracking number is. Once the order is fulfilled an invoice will be created. If the customer paid in advance the payment will get applied to the invoice automatically or by someone in the accounting department. If the customer is on credit terms they’ll be sent the invoice with instructions on how to pay and when payment is due.

There are so many steps like this. The records help the business plan. They know how many parts and supplies to order. They can track if they’re selling more or less than forecast, if they need to place a rush order for more parts, ask people to work overtime or hire more employees. If something starts costing more they can look to see if they need to raise prices or redesign the product to use a different component, or find an alternate source. At the end of the day, it all comes down to accounting, making sure the company is generating enough income to pay the bills, suppliers, and employees, and hopefully make a profit.

And getting a completely new phone and number while you’re at it

Wouldn’t the phone users still be at risk of colliding with each other?

Not having read the article, I assume it has to do with Russia firing a bunch of cheap junk that’s not very precise but can still be deadly and costs a lot less than most of the defenses used to destroy them, and can be sent in such large quantities that the defenses can’t get them all.

I’ve always thought it dumb that the nation’s most populous state only uses seven of the possible eight characters on a license plate. Most states only use seven, but a dash separating letters and numbers means there is actually room for eight characters and many states will allow you to use all eight for vanity plates.

Can’t watch the video right now; does this one get the frequencies right? Unlike the one in California that Tom Scott featured in a video?

I’m glad to see them doing what they should’ve done all along, but doing what they should’ve been doing also doesn’t merit praise.

Where I feel like they have a suitable place is for vacation rentals. Like when I was a kid our family would rent a house at the beach for a week as our summer vacation. The beach we’d go to had several real estate companies that would manage the rentals and published little booklets every year with the listings. The houses were privately owned, though, so as Airbnb and especially VRBO came along this gave the homeowners another option that was perhaps less expensive than the agencies. These are houses in a vacation area, though, generally not taking away housing from locals. This also was traditionally a family that owned one extra house for family getaways and trying to rent it out when they weren’t using it, not investors creating “hotel” chains. Setting up what is effectively a hotel in a residential area and cutting off housing from people who need it should be an obvious problem yet many people don’t recognize it.

I still have a Facebook account. I mostly just check once a day to look at my Memories. I had already largely stopped using it because they stopped showing me things from my friends or pages I follow. Typically it would be one post at the top of the feed from someone or something I follow, then a bunch of “suggested” content, not what I want to see. I made my account in February 2005, back when you had to be a college student at a university Facebook supported to get an account. Over the years I had several hundred friends, although I got more selective as I got older and weeded out people on my list and added a lot fewer of the people I met. All that to say, I don’t think there was a lack of content available to show me, they just don’t want to show me what my friends and family are doing.

One of my goals for this year is to set up my own Friendica instance for myself and maybe a few close family members. I’d like to try to figure out a way to take a Facebook data export and import it into Friendica. It looks like there’s no direct way, but maybe an indirect way by importing the Facebook data to WordPress, then importing the WordPress data to Friendica.

Ford has 3, the F-150 Lightning and the unfortunately named Mustang Mach-E, and the E-Transit van I think is primarily for commercial customers.

On the more affordable end around here I see a lot of electric cars from Ford, Chevrolet, Kia, and Hyundai around here, and to a lesser extent Volkswagen. On the high end it’s mostly Mercedes-Benz and BMW, sometimes Porsche. Once in a while I’ll see Rivian but they don’t have a dealership in our state. Even more rarely I’ll see Polestar, which does have a dealership in a city at the other end of the state, and at least one person here has a Lucid Air.

Edit: also on the high end, there’s at least one Hummer EV driving around here.

For those of you unfamiliar with the flag and seal of the state of Virginia, here’s the Wikipedia page, including the image.