4 ms·

Radical idea for this century: pay someone to stand at the entrance of the packing area to put cash in a safe or hold a card reader up to the drivers' windows.

Radical idea for this century: pay someone to stand at the entrance of the packing area to put cash in a safe or hold a card reader up to the drivers' windows. With some training, this person is also your health and safety officer, your security personnel and even your 'sorry sir/madam we are out of spaces' person (who saves each customer ten minutes of driving in circles). As a computer programmer, I love it when technology allows us to automate things and do more with our time. But I also love the human connection that being greeted by a service professional offers; I don't mistake it for friendship, but it is valuable to me in its own way. Socially, these kinds of jobs fill an important hole in contemporary western economics. The lower end of the pay-scale is being squeezed out of existence, gambled away on the slim chance of saving megabucks at scale from automation. Possibly the only downside is the unpleasant behaviour that members of the public might show towards service professionals. However, maybe a culture of mutual respect can be promoted more effectively when companies are not always data-harvesting, corner-cutting and penny-pinching as side-hustles.

raverbashing 3y ago
No, sorry, this doesn't have an App or uses AI, no VC will put money in this idea /s
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  But it is DeFi; the finance is decentralised between all the parking attendants!
silexia 3y ago
Cash in a box with a person at the entry? In Seattle??? That would be a bad business decision - the cash would be stolen daily without consequences and if the person you hired was harmed in the theft, you would be liable as a business.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I don't live in Seattle, so I don't know what it's like there, and nor am I an expert in physical security. However, if it's a social norm to pay for human parking attendants, it's not a stretch to assume that there would be human police officers around too. Ultimately, you can't have people doing some jobs without other people doing supporting jobs, but the same is kind of true for digitalisation too: the reason these parking systems are so disliked is that we don't have a conventional or standard parking charge infrastructure to support it yet. I'm sure people would be much happier with paying for parking via the internet if it was done with an open, reliable and secure protocol with plenty of easy-to-use implementations. But given how impossibly far that is from the digital systems that are used for parking currently, human parking attendants seem to me to be an attractive option. My original comment was 'radical' when seen from the current standpoint of industries being so 'anti-human' that they won't employ workers even when labour is cheap, the work is humane, and it improves the experience for the customers. So I've no idea if it would be a good decision for Perfectly Profitable Parking LLC, but I think it would be a good decision for the world :)

raverbashing 3y ago

No, sorry, this doesn't have an App or uses AI, no VC will put money in this idea /s

seabass-labrax 3y ago
But it is DeFi; the finance is decentralised between all the parking attendants!

silexia 3y ago

Cash in a box with a person at the entry? In Seattle??? That would be a bad business decision - the cash would be stolen daily without consequences and if the person you hired was harmed in the theft, you would be liable as a business.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
I don't live in Seattle, so I don't know what it's like there, and nor am I an expert in physical security. However, if it's a social norm to pay for human parking attendants, it's not a stretch to assume that there would be human police officers around too. Ultimately, you can't have people doing some jobs without other people doing supporting jobs, but the same is kind of true for digitalisation too: the reason these parking systems are so disliked is that we don't have a conventional or standard parking charge infrastructure to support it yet. I'm sure people would be much happier with paying for parking via the internet if it was done with an open, reliable and secure protocol with plenty of easy-to-use implementations. But given how impossibly far that is from the digital systems that are used for parking currently, human parking attendants seem to me to be an attractive option. My original comment was 'radical' when seen from the current standpoint of industries being so 'anti-human' that they won't employ workers even when labour is cheap, the work is humane, and it improves the experience for the customers. So I've no idea if it would be a good decision for Perfectly Profitable Parking LLC, but I think it would be a good decision for the world :)