Rov_Scam
9hr ago
To illustrate the point from my own retail experiences from years and years ago: We had to do customer service training every year. I worked the service desk a lot, and my first year there I was always baffled by the manager's willingness to give refunds for stupid shit. For example, it was a grocery store, and we sold deli pizzas that you took home and made yourself. Someone tried to return one that 1. Was already cooked and 2. Had two pieces left. The couple's stated reason for the return was that it "wasn't as good as we remembered it being". I had to call the manager because I wasn't allowed to refuse refunds (this wasn't normally an issue since most refunds were pretty routine), and I was incredulous when he gave them store credit.
It wasn't until they started the customer service trainings that I realized that $3 was a small price to pay to keep from pissing these people off. They shopped there every week and weren't constantly returning items, and it would probably cost the store a lot more in the long run if they decided to go somewhere else. We had already disappointed them with the pizza, after all. Add to it the fact that stores will spend huge amounts on advertising without even thinking about it and then try to nickle and dime the customers as soon as they get into the store. I was told that we needed to provide an absolutely flawless experience to the extent possible. If someone asked where an item was we weren't allowed to tell them; we had to walk them to the location. The thing is, it's not like it was that great of a store or anything. Good service is just a customer expectation, and if you can't provide it, and can't make up for it in other ways (like having rock bottom prices), people will take their business elsewhere.
Rov_Scam
10hr ago
Oh, you can find out from the address which schools your kid would go to, there just isn't a way to make a map that makes any sense. I just checked it out, and if you live in the trendier parts of the East End like Friendship you will not only be going to high school with kids from the Hill District but the school is actually in the Hill District. Honestly, though, it's not that far from where Schenley was, so it does make historical geographic sense.
Rov_Scam
10hr ago
Right now the churn is more in recent grads leaving for what they perceive to be greener pastures. The problem right now isn't so much a shortage of lawyers as it is a shortage of experienced lawyers. I work at a smaller firm, and just a couple months ago a younger guy who clerked for a judge after law school and whose wife works across the street from us quit to take a different job. I don't even know if the pay is any better, but it seems like everyone under the age of 35, and several people who are older, think that whatever job they're doing is unsatisfying and wants to do something closer to what they imagined the practice of law would look like. In the meantime, we can't find anyone to replace these people. Hiring out of law school only makes the situation worse because it takes several months to get an attorney to the point where they're actually making money for the firm, and they're unwilling to do that for a guy who is going to bolt in six months.
Rov_Scam
13hr ago
What are the schools for each of these neighborhoods?
Nobody knows. I mean that literally; the district doesn't publish feeder maps and an independent effort to produce them 15 years ago resulted in a complicated patchwork of school zones. The district proposed a controversial consolidation plan a couple years ago that would close a bunch of schools, but they had no idea what effect it would have on the feeder patterns. So they hired a consulting firm from Boston that put professional demographers on the case and even they couldn't make heads or tails of the situation and couldn't draw a new feeder map that would make sense based on the schools they wanted to keep open. The problem arises from two issues. The first is that Pittsburgh half-assed their integration plan compared to other cities. White parents were opposed for the usual reasons, but the preferred solution of black parents was to bus white students in to their schools so their own kids wouldn't have to leave the neighborhood. The school board decided that only black students would be bussed, a solution that satisfied nobody, and they tried to avoid bussing as much as possible by implementing magnet schools, which took a school building "out of circulation", so to speak. Then when financial difficulties and declining enrollment forced them to close schools, they closed the ones that were the most expensive to keep open. So now the schools aren't distributed in any way that's close to even, and the feeder patterns reflect 50 years of gradual tweaks.
The interesting thing about your comment is that Friendship, Shadyside, and the Hill District all fed into Schenley HS until the 1980s, when they started bussing kids from the Hill to Brashear in the South Hills as part of their integration attempt. Shadyside Academy is a prep school for the rich and famous that has nothing to do with the PPS system.
I haven't used AI for work and I don't know of anyone who does. I honestly don't know what I would even use it for. I guess I could theoretically load deposition transcripts in case I needed to see if there was one taken in the past where a witness said something I could use, but that would literally require millions of tokens of input context, assuming it was even capable of handling such a request, and the utility of that would be limited, i.e. I'd do it if it were cheap enough but there's no way it would be cheap enough. People bring up research a lot and it might be useful there, but I do research like twice a year.
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