Based on some experience, it's like a bond to appear in court. The number is mostly an arbitrary calculation designed to discourage you from not following through.
Microcenter has a total of 29 stores across the US. Yankee Candle has almost 10x as many locations (240).
Yes, Microcenter "exists", but primarily through selective cultivation of their locations. From a pure market footprint perspective, they are outclassed by a candle company, and many other niche businesses.
I think it depends on the kinds of places you regularly book at.
When I read your first sentence I thought "that is the exact opposite of my experience". Then when I read your second sentence I realize we're probably not using 3rd parties the same way.
I primarily book 4 star and up properties, that is just how I prefer to travel. For those kinds of places you'll often get a worse net experience when booking through a 3rd party (I've tried in the past). Upon check-in, it is made clear that your "discounted rate" doesn't qualify you for certain perks (loyalty points, check-in bonus like a free drink, etc.). I'm also not too worried about a name-brand property screwing me over.
But for a little "seaside hotel" kind of place, I can see where having a large 3rd party booking agent on your side could be valuable.
I think the only reason Booking.com paid the difference is because this was becoming a story. To assume that is their standard policy would probably be a bit naive.
Yeah but the hotels never do this. If you had booked with the hotel you’d just be out a room. That’s because booking.com has a bigger blast radius. No one cares if the Happy Fun Hotel Toronto does something because the fragmentation means that brand means nothing.
FYI that is an extremely challenging thing to do right. Especially if you care about accuracy and evidentiary detail. Not sure this is something that the current crop of AI tools are really tuned to do properly.
This is a good point. Some of the tools have a "creative mode" or "creativity" knob that hopefully drives this point home. But the simpler ones don't, and even with that setting dialed back it still has the same fundamental limitations/risks.
It's not uncommon, particularly for vehicles with composite body panels.
Smaller items like door trim, manufacturer logos, are primarily held on with adhesives.
Mid-size accessories like add-on spoilers on trunk lids, or other exterior styling pieces are frequently attached with adhesive.
A larger component commonly attached with adhesives are the rear fender flares on dually pickups. Very commonly these are built with a standard bed, and then the flares to cover the extra wheel width are applied with a 3M VHB-like adhesive strip.
But like anything, there is a way to do it properly, and a way to do it hacky.
Most plastic body panels are held on with conformal clips. But they couldn't do that with the metal panels of the cyber truck nor did they want visible fasteners so glue is the only option.
Glue isn't ideal because the part has to be clamped in place while the glue cures which is slow, and quality control is tough because you're doing a little chemistry experiment on your assembly line hundreds of times per day.
Normal cars have this problem with paint and quality control with paint is such a big deal that it has its own separate production line just for painting stuff pre or post assembly
Using composite panels is very uncommon in production vehicles and when they are used (for looks) traditional fasteners are used during assembly often with threaded inserts embedded in the composite panel during manufacture
Glue is uncommon in most cases, particularly for body-panel mounted things like the examples I gave. Adhesive-mounted components are common, to various degrees.
Glass-mounted items are commonly glued, the most prevalent one being the knob for the rear view mirror. And "prevalent" here means "99% of anything mounted to glass in a vehicle"
Tesla is using BETASEAL [0], which is designed for adhering to glass. I'm not sure what kind of weight rating BETASEAL is approved for, it is commonly used for other applications where a decent degree of strength is expected.
The lightbars mentioned in the article were an optional non-factory addon that were installed at the Tesla dealership. The steel body panels are not glued on.
"But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good."
This happens frequently in mixing and mastering audio tracks. You pile up incremental changes that all seemed good at the time. Then you go back and listen to a recording from 20 revisions ago and it sounds better than your current "best" effort.
Sometimes that is because you need 60 more revisions to make it good - though you may have to go back to the start several times to figure out which are good.
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