Readit NewsWhat justifies pet deposits being different? What justifies pet rent but not, say, charging extra rent or an extra non-refundable deposit because you have a toddler?
(Is pet rent even collected and applied to the cost of repairing any damage your pet causes? I should find out what's common here.)
As an aside: I've also had a landlord charge almost $5 for a paper statement, or just under $1 to e-mail me a statement instead. (No statement was no option.) They're clearly not above nickel-and-diming their customers—which I found weird because $1 on top of, say, $800 (plausible rent for a two-bedroom unit in not-SF) is nothing—about 0.1% of rent. Which makes it a minor annoyance at worst, but… why bother? $400 (common pet deposit amount in not-SF) + $10/mo (common pet rent, when pet rent is charged) is also nothing—just over 5% of one year's rent. But it's more of a something than a $1 fee for them telling you what you owe this month, which they felt the need to do regardless.
A car insurance policy that costs $400 once but only pays for $400 worth of damage ever, and isn't refundable, is a bad deal. No one would buy this unless forced to.
False equivalence.
If a landlord isn't returning your pet deposit when you move out, it's not a deposit, it's a fee. If they're misrepresenting it as a deposit that will be returned, you might have legal recourse, depending on where you live.
You opted in to that price class, and that luxury of having a pet. When you lie that your dogs are service animals, you make life harder for people whose survival depends on it.
Not so with pet deposits in any lease I've seen. They take your money, which is usually non-refundable, and will still charge you for any cleaning and repair not covered by the deposits you paid.
Perhaps it's insurance from the landlord's perspective, but it's an added cost the tenant bears that offers them no financial protection at all.
If you really do have a model pet that damages nothing, why does the landlord get to keep your deposit anyway?
I can grant, say, compulsory carpet replacement—but even then, what if you live there 10 years and the carpet really ought to be replaced whether you had a pet or not? And do two pets double the cost of replacing the carpet?
(Also I know for a fact scroogier landlords will leave the old carpet in when they really shouldn't—when it's 10 years old, the last tenant's cat peed all over it, and also the last tenant chainsmoked indoors. But they'll still collect a non-refundable pet deposit, and probably bill for cleaning in excess of deposits even when that cleaning did not happen.)
Why is that reasonable risk management and not gouging?
I barely read half my mail, snail or electronic. The chances I'm going to see and read and act on a "your food is bad!!!" email (assuming it doesn't get eaten by some filter) before I eat the food in question is low, low low. Some device getting the message and physically stopping me is really the only way to be sure.
"If we recognize the bag, and it's recalled, we'll stop you—or at least yell at you. If you use someone else's bag you're on your own, but we won't stop you."
Surely they were capable of having this thought. That they didn't or chose to ignore it hints at ulterior motives—most obvious is overcharging for the bags, since not buying them makes you the proud owner of a $400 paperweight.
But a prediction: almost everyone who attempts to block consumers from consuming bad food with technology will do it to overcharge for the food. Safety will be the excuse, not the purpose.
Do you know that 'detect a cycle in a linked list' question? I can't imagine many people being able to answer that without having seen the question previously.
It's trivial to explain:
x^n = x(x^2)^((n-1)/2), if n is odd
= (x^2)^(n/2) , if n is even
Maybe that's what they intended. It's certainly legit if the job will have you actually doing, rather than applying, math. Except that it concludes you can math if you're smart enough to pretend to derive the answer you memorized after encountering it before. You might accidentally hire a bunch of crypto nerds.
Today, I recognize that good software development owes nothing to data structure knowledge or obscure algorithms. This knowledge can't hurt but very few jobs or languages require you build a skip list from scratch. Instead, writing good software requires the ability to maintain a system, to debug problems, and to give constructive code review. That's it.
How this plays in interviews is interesting for just how inconsistent it is. Sometimes I win the algorithm lottery and have had reason to implement the obvious solution myself at least once, and the interviewer learns my memory works. Sometimes I don't know what they're going for but come up with a reasonable answer anyway and the interviewer is thrilled I managed to have an independent thought. Sometimes I lose and the interviewer is clearly trying to guide me to the answer they want to see and I have no idea what they're getting at.
Though not quite as bad as a friend failing an interview for not using a hash table, even though the answer he described was a hash table—just with the identity function as the hash.
(Though maybe about as absurd as one interviewer digging for any formal training I might have had in C++. Like you can teach that language in a semester—please. There are maybe 4 proper experts on the planet.)