TIL: you can use an existing oil or gas well as a geothermal well. Also most of Texas is viable for geothermal even without improvements to drilling technology. Even without making this transition, restaurant productivity per worker has gone up significantly
“Apparently some places put a QR code on the receipt that you can scan to pay.”
The biggest limiting factor here is that many restaurants in my experience (this happens with QR code menus as well) simply do not have good cell signal, nor a guest WiFi. Ideally, there would be some kind of WiFi appliance that would advertise limited access that a phone would automatically use when trying to connect to the domains for payment platforms and where the menu is hosted. Maybe some kind of hinting in the QR code itself, but phones would have to be aware in their QR scanners.
Airlines do a version of this, where their WiFi will only allow you to go to their portal to pay for broad internet access or only the App/Play Store domains to get their airline app to access in flight entertainment. Some offer access only to messaging services as well. In both cases though, the user has to manually connect and doesn’t really understand this routing and filtering trickery.
“Apparently some places put a QR code on the receipt that you can scan to pay.”
The biggest limiting factor here is that many restaurants in my experience (this happens with QR code menus as well) simply do not have good cell signal, nor a guest WiFi. Ideally, there would be some kind of WiFi appliance that would advertise limited access that a phone would automatically use when trying to connect to the domains for payment platforms and where the menu is hosted. Maybe some kind of hinting in the QR code itself, but phones would have to be aware in their QR scanners.
Airlines do a version of this, where their WiFi will only allow you to go to their portal to pay for broad internet access or only the App/Play Store domains to get their airline app to access in flight entertainment. Some offer access only to messaging services as well. In both cases though, the user has to manually connect and doesn’t really understand this routing and filtering trickery.