> Wire transfer fees are a set amount, usually around $40, not a percentage of the total amount transferred. You can do the math to figure out at what dollar threshold sending wire transfers through your bank becomes cheaper than using Transferwise.
Absolutely do the math, but keep in mind that fees are not the only fees when doing FX: few banks will use the spot FX rate for wire transfers, they'll typically add a spread of about 3%.
yeah, you're getting skimmed hard between wire transfer cost and that spread. If you have access to an FX brokerage with reasonable fee, definitely use that.
I personally use Interactive Brokers, one free wire transfer per month, and you can get spot price on your exchanges. Only fees I pay are a couple dollars IB charges on exchanges, and twenty dollars or so my bank charges for receiving wire transfers. Only downside is that they hold the money for 3 months before allowing withdrawal into a different bank.
"...and twenty dollars or so my bank charges for receiving wire transfers."
For business accounts or personal? I received a single wire transfer to a personal account two months ago and didn't pay a fee. Maybe I get one free. Maybe there would have been a fee for a business account.
But I'm certain I've never heard, until now, anyone mention fees for receiving wire transfers.
Mine was for personal. The bank payment system has myriads of complicated rules/methods determining how they will charge you on a transfer, where the bank is located, wire vs ACH vs direct deposit vs other clearing mechanisms, international vs domestic, individual bank's progressiveness, your account type, etc.
This has happened very rarely to me, but when it has, the head purser would usually be carrying the manifest or an iPad and clearly referencing it. That takes the creepiness out of it. It's a nice, but ultimately not terribly important, touch that they make a bit of an effort to personalise the greeting.
On one or two occasions (flying to a short stay at an outstation, and catching the same crew on the return), the attendant clearly recognised me, and made a point of saying hello, welcome back (not by name though, that would have been creepy). That's rare, and not really to be expected, though.
I think there are two nuances missing here: First, it's easier to ask forgiveness -- this is a descriptive statement, it doesn't say better. Second, this is predicated on getting forgiveness. If what you do isn't relatively easy to forgive, you lose a lot, eg. getting fired or otherwise formally sanctioned. It's certainly neither easier, nor better.
If you "predict" that it might not make a bestseller list, it's not a particular leap to predict that it wouldn't make it past a publisher, either?
I am making no attempt to quantify this, I simply have no data, but it seems the argument is that today it is relatively more fashionable to write a book about black women doing something that is traditionally thought of as something white men would do, regardless of the "classic" qualities of the work. If it is the case (and I have no data to argue either way) that such a fashion means that a mediocre book about black women doing something (not saying the particular book is good or bad, I don't know it) gets published instead of a really good book about white men doing something, that could certainly be considered "diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West".
But there has always been literature pandering to political fashions, and fashionable literature has always enjoyed an edge over unfashionable literature. Some of it is good and has stood the test of time, and some (most, probably, this is a power law domain) of it pretty bad, and totally forgotten. It's easy to look at the literature that survived from 20 years ago and compare with whatever flash-in-a-pan is being hawked by publishers right this minute and see all kinds of diminished products.
That is a bad look for Marriott, for sure, but if you disqualify establishments for unfairly firing a low-level employee, you should get used to travelling a lot less. This particular situation just happened to be well publicised.
> That is a bad look for Marriott, for sure, but if you disqualify establishments for unfairly firing a low-level employee, you should get used to travelling a lot less. This particular situation just happened to be well publicised.
I put this in parentheses: "less about the specific firing and more about censorship cowering sans transparent statement". I disqualify establishments without principles in situations like this. Very simple. It's why I alluded to Nestle as a company too. The they-all-do-bad argument doesn't mean we can't exercise any judgement within.
> It's one thing to trust Amazon or Google, but now you also have to trust the hotel and its staff, the physical security of the device, and all the previous guests of the room.
You already had to do the physical trust thing. These devices are a new challenge because they could be remotely compromised.
In which case the correct answer is to sit tight for a bit until you understand the deeper problem. And then you fix the deeper problem, and then you fix the process.
In theory. In practice, the code will often have corner case behaviours that eludes any of the tests, yet are still important.
As an aside, as I understand it, refactoring was popularised as a response basically to this conundrum - it's a technique for reorganising code without changing its functionality. So you can gradually "rewrite" your two page function without losing the accumulated knowledge.
Unless we really stretch the word "refactor", my "in practice" is different than yours. I've done plenty of re-writes that fixed more unknown bugs than re-opened previously solved ones.
He elaborates a bit in the comments - it seems he's entitled to the money, but couldn't be bothered: "So I had to do an appeal, and go through a long process that I did not care much to go through. I had a mind in quitting after all."
Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being supportive. Or get the agency to do it for him, and bill them for the trouble. Or whatever. Something smells a bit fishy about that part of the story.
The bit about the manager and director is in the main article. There's nothing about pay, but they're presented as entirely sympathetic and angry about the system on his behalf.
As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appeals process, it's open and shut, and if it isn't you have a lawyer deal with it, and recoup expenses, too. And if the guy just doesn't care about it, then why does he mention it twice?
And for the purposes of this, and the other sub-thread that is incredulous about this, this is not an American thing: If you're a contractor in Europe, and you don't get paid, and you then don't do anything about that, then you don't get paid. There's no process that automatically fixes things when the aggrieved party doesn't ask for them to be fixed (and yes, even in Europe, there's a bit of annoying process and paperwork to deal with).
The article is written, I think, to criticize the reliance on machines—not this individual company. I don't think he wrote it out of a grudge.
Even if he's legally entitled to the money, bringing a lawyer into the mix is likely to sour his relationship with his client (he's a contractor), and—rightly or wrongly—could give him a bad reputation in the local community, making it harder to find work in the future.
I'll also note that small, claims court might be able to handle a case over just a few weeks pay. He wouldn't need a lawyer for that. The risk and costs of losing are more manageable. He could send some emails about the pay he lost asking nicely citing the work he did while there. Then firmly. Then, once at a better employer, he can take the case to small, claims court.
I'd actually rather people sue over this to establish some kind of case law where companies' legal teams tell their management to make a default policy of giving the missed pay on demand. There might already be case law on it.
I suspect this is the difference. If this company is incapable of not firing someone, I imagine their appeals process could be equally miserable. Sure, maybe the manager and director want to repay him, but actually releasing funds to pay someone who "wasn't employed" is going involve a lengthy battle with some HR/Accounting computer system that just wants its invariants not to vary. Depending on somebody's financial position, I can see them deciding to just walk away on even a large chunk of money to avoid the mess.
The good thing about places like that is (a) they don't actually care about the money, it's a rounding error. For some smaller firms paying someone for three weeks of not working (regardless of fault) could actually be a problem. (b) They also have a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract because of a stupid mistake that a small cheque can make go away".
But, of course, the author is perfectly within his rights to just not pursue this, and I have no idea what processes he'd been told to expect for this -- it's just strange that he would emphasise something he doesn't care about in the post.
> a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract
This is a good point. I was thinking that no matter how trivial the money, actually dragging a check out of the accounting system would be a serious hurdle. But the solution I missed would be to sic legal on it - their machine tends to beat out everyone else's.
“Made available? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the appeals department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the forms, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes I did. They were made available in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”
Absolutely do the math, but keep in mind that fees are not the only fees when doing FX: few banks will use the spot FX rate for wire transfers, they'll typically add a spread of about 3%.