Just don’t pay. I stopped paying for street parking a long time ago (around the time they started insisting on apps). You get a ticket once and awhile but it all works out.
Mail in a check a few times a year and park whenever you want.
Valid, though I expect this being down the block from the festival theatre, it probably was being actively patrolled. I was a bit shaken by a prominent sign threatening a $400 fine for illegal parking, though having just checked the website for the City of Stratford, it looks like the standard municipal parking ticket is $40 if paid promptly, so the $400 fine was probably specific to parking in the theatre's dropoff zone or fire access or something.
All that say, I think you're probably right... next time instead of using my phone to install and sign up for a parking app, I'll just use it to check what the fine is and wipe hands on pants.
I agree that in this case its VERY likely to be fraud.
However, there are many jobs where you might be stuck at work. Being at work == getting paid. Thats not really that shocking of a thing. My wife's dad worked at a children's 'training school' (kid jail) and they often had lock downs or were legally required to have certain number of people on site for certain operations. So he might be there and simply couldn't leave, but might not be 'working'. He was paid for those hours, which I think is pretty reasonable.
That sounds like an excellent solution for locals.
But it also seems very inefficient because of the need to keep rolling stock in reserve, ready to go just in case. That’s a lot of maintenance, staff, and machine time to burn.
It was the locals who decided that it was worth the extra hassle and expense (and that doing the same thing at St. Margrethen wasn't).
There was probably a referendum at some point. :)
I am not sure whether the stats are comparable, but I read somewhere that about half of Deutsche Bahn trains are late into Basel (and there are many trains a day). While I don't know this for a fact, it wouldn't surpise me if patterns of delays are relatively predictable and can be planned for.
There was some talk about just ending those routes at Basel at some far-away point in the future, but I'm not sure if that's something that's been decided.
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But it also seems very inefficient because of the need to keep rolling stock in reserve, ready to go just in case. That’s a lot of maintenance, staff, and machine time to burn.
Considering how often the Deutsche Bahn isn't on time (I say this as a German), the SBB should have use for this rolling stock nearly all the time - so it's rather efficient. :-)
That inefficiency is the very reason, why the Swiss have a more reliable network. The DB used to have all these inefficiency too and was reliable. Then they decided to cut all that and that's the current state now.
Personally I think that there is no "real inefficiency", the money just achieves something else, that you don't consider the goal yet. Sometimes that is making someone else richer, sometimes that is making the system more reliable in ways you couldn't plan.
They are in large setups. Including mail order and bulk dispensing places (like Walmart pharmacy—most pills are dispensed at central locations and delivered to the store prepackaged).
I'm a moderator on a moderately popular and active subreddit, and I can assure you that there is an unreasonable amount of bot activity on reddit. They range from just spam (usually obvious) to bulk astroturfing. We try to stop what we can, but plenty gets through.
Inside of Reddit itself? Not with the tools we're given from Reddit. We know Reddit has internal tools to block spam/bots, so I believe what we see is the most sophisticated ones (they're not too sophisticated mostly, but they're not the zero effort bulk spam that reddit catches easily).
Something that would make things far easier for mods would be if the posters hashed IP was shown/made available to mods. Thats mostly for more localized bad actors/astroturfers and not large spam/scam rings with proxy networks.
Things we've done that have made a difference with the tools we've got from Reddit:
1) we don't allow new accounts or ones with negative accounts to post in our subreddit
2) any posts that match criteria or hit the front page are automatically put in a mode where you must have a positive subreddit karma over a threshold to post. This helps filter out brigading and low effort shit posting from front page plebs
3) we're using a reddit app that allows us to remove posts from people that have posted in identified subreddits. Right now we're just experimenting with this and we're in a data collection mode, but we can see that the people its catching (while some of our most prolific posters) are also some of our most problematic posters, so I think we're going to go from data collection to just straight up having the bot remove comments from people that post in those troublesome subreddits.
I'm not comfortable disclosing them because we don't want our 'secret sauce' to be leaked and let people know we're on to their BS.
I will tell you that it's mostly the ones you expect if you're heavily engaged with Reddit and moderation. But there are several new gathering places that I didn't know about until we started spelunking on the most annoying posters histories.
This is one of the places where a tool that scrapes reddit and lets you see deleted comments is absolutely clutch--these people are very good about removing the worst of their vile spewing on reddit, or changing their comments to look innocuous after people have gotten worked up. It's all about making people they disagree with look like bullies and idiots.
We're maintaining a space where people with actual skin in the game can have conversations about hot button topics. We do not maintain the subreddit for large numbers of outside agitators to parachute in, shout down local discourse, and then fuck off immediately.
There is room for people on any side of an argument to come in and discuss. They can do so in a civilized, adult manner, or they can fuck right off. Call it censorship if you like.
This is my Hail Mary hope with LLMs. They're obviously going to get to the point that any sort of reasonable validation of a person online becomes impossible. LLMs could ultimately destroy online chatter. I like shitposting as much as the next guy, and probably a good deal more, but in reality the sort of discourse you get online is so mediocre relative to real life. It's just somehow quite addicting for whatever reason.
OS 9 running Microsoft Internet Explorer! I can remember the puck mice and the noise of the hard drive grinding away while pulling up Ebay and the campus webmail (Horde/Roundcube debates going on and on...)
Mail in a check a few times a year and park whenever you want.