Not OP but also from the UK. Whilst a 10 minute hold time isn't too unusual for large companies, especially if you call at a busy time like midday when everyone takes a lunch break, anything over 20 minutes would certainly warrant complaining about to anyone unfortunate enough to ask how your day is going.
A big selling point for companies for a while was quick answering of calls. My bank has genuinely answered faster than 999 (our 911 equivalent) on occasion. Although during COVID hold times have gone up dramatically for some reason.
When I had an account with Beer52 I them and said, effectively, "This is my notice to cancel and the main motivation to cancel is because of anti-consumer behaviour like having to call to cancel. I do not authorise any further payments and any payments you do take will be subject to a dispute with my credit card company".
To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone.
This is ridiculous. In the UK it is accepted that all students get their own room, although they usually share facilities like bathrooms and kitchens etc. And they all have windows.
It is very different having a two week cruise, or working 9-5 in an office, but to have a windowless room as your only private space for 3 years+ is unhealthy and unfair on a segment of the community who get very little say in their living arrangements in any case.
This is a 98 year old man who thinks he is special because he is rich, and therefore everything he turns his hand to will be the best and damn those who disagree.
Also, it’ a Santa Barbara. You get enough sun in Santa Barbara, and don’t have sunless winters. If this were proposed in e.g. New York, I would object.
It seems possible university requirements for this will change, if part of the motive for this construction is [from OP] that "UCSB is experiencing a severe housing shortage and is being pressured by area residents to build new dormitories" -- seems like it doesn't meet that pressure unless they increase the number of students living on campus, right?
They're going to have to fill those 4500 beds (about 20% of the total undergraduate enrollment of UCSB) once they're built... seems safe to assume one way or another the portion of students living on-campus will increase significantly once this dorm is built.
It's also of note that private housing like this (or even more traditional dormitories) would be illegal in either Santa Barbara or Goleta; boarding houses are nearly impossible to get through zoning. Which would certainly make it more affordable for young, unmarried people to live in the area (who currently commute from Ventura, Solvang or Buelton).
Considering it has been reported that over half of potential customers will abandon a purchase if a page takes over 3 seconds to load, failing to load at all suggests you'll likely get similar - if not higher - losses
That's not on TeeSpring, that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy. The user is running code on their local machine that breaks his/her own ability to complete the sale.
> that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy
There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. The blocker does it because just deleting the object would let obnoxious websites to detect its presence and punish users for it.
The better question is why their checkout completely breaks because of this. Their reliance on Google spyware is 100% on them and they are losing sales because of it.
Modifying client code (especially with an addon you do not control) and then complaining to the original code owner when functionality stop working is wrong.
Analytics and ads are annoying, I get it. However if you use an automated script to clear them out, be aware that some things might brake.
If Ublock Origin devs think they need to replace GA with a dummy to stop tracking they should've put a copy of the original interface with empty functions into it so the flow doesn't throw exceptions when the app tries to use it thinking everything's fine. Those scripts are publicly available and aren't a secret.
That's on the site for requiring tracking to be successful in order to take my money.
They shouldn't require tracking to succeed in order for me to buy the product. If they want tracking, sure. But be resistant to it erroring out. Don't let errors in 3rd party tools prevent your user from getting their core goals completed.
The same goes for client apps. Don't crash the app if it fails to log to a file. Don't crash the app if it can't sync your cache. Etc, etc. Don't let these unnecessary conveniences get in the users way.
If your site put a selfish arrogant tracker in the way of completing the order... then you lost the sale. And the customer, who won't be coming back. I don't give a good god-damn about how it's "part of the site". It's not part of the transaction, and you put it there, and it broke things.
And practically speaking, the back-stop is that if uBlock Origin causes too many high-profile websites to break, it'll get a reputation for degrading user experience and fewer users will install it.
When two independently-owned systems on the web break each other, "who needs to fix their stuff" is a question more of social networks and business politics than technology. TeeSpring's "fix" could be to pop a banner that says "WARNING: uBlock Origin breaks this site and we can't test for that."
That's not how it ends up working, though. People just share screenshots or tell friends of the broken website and people stop using the website not uBO.
And there are sites that will throw up a banner that says 'Adblockers might break this, if you have problems disable your Adblocker and try again' which is pretty effective. Funny enough, in my experience, sites with that banner tend to work with uBO enabled (probably because they're testing it).
It goes much further than just "often aligning with EU laws":
Almost all EU regulations and rights – except those pertaining to agriculture, fisheries and the customs union – apply to the whole of the EEA, meaning all of the EU + Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein (in addition, many also apply to Switzerland, but in that case through a complicated set of bilateral Swiss-EU agreements that sorta-kinda emulate EEA membership, but isn't).
For all intents and purposes, apart from the three areas stipulated above + voting rights, Norway is an EU member. A business that operates in Norway (outside of the agriculture or fisheries sector) can be seen as operating in the EU. Likewise, Norway-based users of a service with a business presence in the EU are protected by EU laws, like the GDPR.
Norwegians have the same access to the EU labor market as, say, Germans. And EU citizens have the same right to take up residence in Norway and interact with the Norwegian state under the same conditions as a Norwegian.
I'm not going to argue with most of that list but Vietnam is absolutely a growing tourist destination, with over 18 million international visitors in 2019[1] and nearly beating India in 2018[2].
It is particularly popular with Chinese visitors lately but also historically with the "Gap Year" backpackers from Europe who travel around Asia.
Incidentally it is a beautiful and incredibly friendly country and I highly recommend it.
A big selling point for companies for a while was quick answering of calls. My bank has genuinely answered faster than 999 (our 911 equivalent) on occasion. Although during COVID hold times have gone up dramatically for some reason.