• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 4th, 2023

help-circle

  • Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don’t know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn’t feel new anymore.

    That might be me to be honest. I actually don’t watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I’m looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer’s own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn’t sponsored by the laser manufacturer.


  • Well if the risk is that they are paying $300 an hour in unnecessary labor, that’s a risk that would put almost any restaurant under. Perhaps a better answer would be a commission-based system, just build a 20% commission into the price of the food rather than making it a mandatory tip or a line item on the receipt. Problem is that makes marketing harder because you have to explain why your food is 20% more expensive than the competition and try to get people to understand that their bill will actually be the same or less. It also doesn’t necessarily incentivize the employee to provide better service. And while I conceptually agree that should be the responsibility of the manager, in practice it’s difficult. I’m not sure what the solution is. I agree there needs to be one.


  • It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.

    Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.



  • You can like him or you can dislike him, both are valid positions for various reasons.

    However the fact is, his huge compensation plan was at the time a wild shot that would only kick in if the company achieved certain performance metrics that were considered impossible. Under Elon, Tesla achieved all of them.

    Whether he is the right person for Tesla or not in this moment is immaterial IMHO. What matters is the performance. Contract was a King’s Ransom in exchange for an impossible miracle, and the miracle happened. So pay the man what he is owed.

    Fire him after that if he’s the wrong person to keep leading Tesla. But pay him what he is owed.





  • You aren’t giving the black market enough credit. Right now most of the illegal guns start as legal ones, and are either stolen or straw purchased. That’s the case because that’s the easiest/cheapest way to get them, NOT because it’s the only way. Even if you completely cut off that supply, even if you somehow ended all civilian gun sales in the US, it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. Guns are not difficult to make. Any decent machine shop can make guns, and unlike a drug lab, that machine shop has a legitimate daytime purpose so it can operate out in the open, pay taxes, employee people, just have a ‘night shift’ that makes guns.

    And even if we could somehow cut that off too, which we can’t, we illegally import billions of dollars worth of drugs every year. The government spends $30 billion a year trying to stop this, with pretty much no effect. If it’s that easy to import illegal drugs, why do you think it would be any harder to import illegal guns?

    Finally, you say gun owners aren’t being responsible because their guns are being stolen. How exactly do you expect to stop somebody who breaks into your house from stealing your stuff? You can put your guns in a safe but the thief can just steal the safe because that’s a guaranteed payday.


  • Exactly. And that’s why this won’t do shit. The people who are committing the vast majority of those homicides and other violent crimes are not using legal firearms. They don’t go to a gun dealer and pay a tax and fill out a background check. They buy illegal guns on the street.

    Those illegal guns can come from anywhere. Stolen, straw purchased in other states, or simply imported along with the equally illegal drugs that the firearm’s owner is probably selling on the street.

    All this text does is punish the law abiding gun owners who are not committing crimes who do fill out background checks who do follow the law and who do pay their taxes. Those aren’t the people causing the problem.








  • Not disagreeing, just providing a counterpoint.

    Take your basic non super fancy restaurant, dinner for two with appetizers, entrees, desserts, a two rounds of drinks will probably be $100ish. And that table of two will be there for an hour. Assuming server gets 20% tip average, that’s $20 for the table. An average server will have four tables in their sections. That means if the restaurant is full, they are making $80 an hour in tips. They will get to keep 60% to 80% of that, the rest going in a tip pool that benefits kitchen staff, bussers, barbacks, etc. But they’ll still be making pretty good money.

    Of course if the restaurant is empty or they only have one or two tables with people seated, they are making less.

    The problem comes that if you get rid of this system, there’s a lot of financial risk for the restaurant owner. Currently they don’t have to pay the server or the staff very much, most of their compensation comes from tips, meaning there is less risk to them keeping the restaurant fully staffed if it’s not going to be busy. If you pay all these people are constant hourly, now there is risk on the restaurant owner in terms of staffing. Bring on too many staff when it’s quiet and they will lose a bundle. Don’t bring on enough staff when it’s busy and those people don’t have a financial incentive to bust their ass. It also becomes solely their job to ensure quality, because the server that spends half the time on their phone in the back room is making the same money as the server who is attentive to their tables. It also means less risk for hiring an inexperienced server, because if the server does a bad job they just won’t make good tips.

    All that said, I agree something has to change. I think perhaps one answer would be a law requiring that each restaurant put 15% of gross receipts into a virtual tip pool. That way they aren’t paying through the nose to staff and empty restaurant, there would be a line item on the check like ‘automatic gratuity paid the staff $whatever on this check, further tipping is optional’.