Restaurants have notoriously low profit margins. Not every restaurant of course, but there’s a reason that restaurants regularly fail, especially in cities, and I don’t think it’s because the owners are spending it all on yachts.
Not every restaurant of course, but there’s a reason that restaurants regularly fail, especially in cities, and I don’t think it’s because the owners are spending it all on yachts.
I think a lot of them are in debt up to their eyeballs and that’s why they fail. They also usually make up for the lower margins on food with better margins on drinks, but there’s a margin on every item regardless.
Rent is also a factor. Commercial real estate is not cheap.
And some just plain suck. The food sucks, the prices suck, the service sucks, or the location sucks.
There are myriad reasons why restaurants fail, and I doubt it’s all because of low margins.
I’m not an economist, but whlouldnt manipulated prices drive things more toward fair market value? A crusty menu meant to last a year is more likely to overshoot prices to cover market fluctuations that occur during that year. At least this is how I think of it.
Other than gasoline and expensive fish, we don’t really pay true market price for anything. That would be chaos and I’m not sure why any consumer would want prices to fluctuate that often.
If anything they will use corrections to drive the price up, not down. The only way prices would come down is pressure from competition, without that a reduction in business costs would just mean more margin for the owner.
Presumably you can place your order via the qr code to so less risk of human error transcribing it wrong or God forbid you get one of those annoying waiters that think they have a super memory and can hold more than 8 items in short term memory and don’t even write things down.
QR code menus and ordering systems are terrible IMO.
The tech often sucks, but more than that they make the entire restaurant experience worse.
I tried to keep an open mind when encountering them at first, but they often nullify any and all interactions you have with the waiters, and turn the restaurant from full service into something like a fast casual restaurant…yet they still prompt you for tips at the end of the meal and add additional percentage overcharge fees for “inflation” or whatever.
I don’t want a waiter to be over at my table every twenty seconds, but waiters shouldn’t be made pointless by a maître d’, a runner, and a busboy.
They’re anti-social shit dreamt up by the same kind of minds that gave us the horror that is self-checkout.
Eh, you sound like a bit of an extravert. I understand where you are coming from. I disagree and would rather have a good interface backed by an available and knowledgeable human only if trouble shooting or questions arise. I also love self check out😉. To each their own. Either of our preferred modalities can of course be implemented crappilly.
I’m just a person who likes to sit at a table and order like a person that paid to eat at a full service restaurant.
Neither you nor I should expect there to be “troubleshooting” in a full service restaurant. We’re not setting up a new iPad; we’re paying to be served.
Self-checkout is rife with not only anti-social vibes, but also involves possible legal trouble…and all so that the store didn’t have to hire a few extra checkout personnel.
Both of these “innovations” are largely for the benefit of the owners and largely at the cost of the people patronizing these establishments.
I don’t have a choice of stores, but I’m spoiled for choice in restaurants living in the city. I’ll vote with my feet.
I absolutely love self checkouts in shops, makes it more fast-in-fast-out kinda thing. But the very rare moments I have nowadays to go to a restaurant with my wife, I absolutely want to have a proper service and enjoy the evening as whole.
I can order McDonald’s with home delivery, don’t want that shit in a restaurant
I think I understand your viewpoint, but personally have a different opinion. I’m not going to a restaurant to socialize with the waiter; although some of those interactions can be pleasant it’s still just a functional transaction to me that can go wrong and could be be optimized. My main focus is the people I’m going to the restaurant with and the food/drinks.
QR for the win for me, but I agree fully that most of those apps kinda suck. I hope time will fix that.
I think that’s a huge reason places have kept the QR codes. It’s not entirely their fault. Their costs have unstable and constantly increasing lately. Reprinting new menus with pricing adjustments on a regular basis isn’t free in a industry that’s already slim margins.
Related pet peeve: restaurants that have a million items for a million prices, all of them basically the same. Example: sandwich shop not far from me. Every sandwich is +|- a dollar, same with every item. Takes forever for them to ring it up and the variance is pennies. Just charge $X per sandwich and maybe markup a few premium items (roast beef, avocado, bacon whatever).
This makes me wonder whether there’s ever price discrimination going on. A system like this could give different prices based on what kind of phone you’re using if they wanted it to, and you wouldn’t necessarily know it.
While a valid point, it misses the possibility of people who may not know what useragent even means; it misses people who may not know that a website can identify what browser or device you are using.
This would be noticed and called out the literal second two people go together and have different devices. We don’t all just travel in packs according to our mobile device brand or OS lol
That’s really reaching hard to try and make this valid. We have real examples of businesses taking advantage there’s plenty to worry about without making up more
How would this work though? You’re not ordering your food via the QR code link, you’re telling the waitstaff. Unless they ask you what price your saw, how are they going to correlate their variable price to a particular customer?
However, this would make it a lot easier to implement “peak pricing”. Their menu could automatically update based on time of day, or day of week, and certainly holidays.
I guess maybe if a phone company is secretly paying them to, but why would a phone company go to restaurants to give their customers lower prices? And even if they did, what do they gain from that if they don’t want anyone to know?
And even if they did, the waiter would also have to take note of what kind of phone the customers use, and give them the respective price on the bill. One slip-up could reveal the scheme.
The idea behind price discrimination is that some customers will still buy the same product if it is offered at a higher price, while others will not. By figuring out which is which and offering them different prices, you can make more profit. For instance Uber is known to charge higher rates to customers with low phone battery, because they are probably more desperate and would be more willing to pay.
If a restaurant knows you have an expensive phone, they know you can probably afford more expensive meals and won’t walk out if the prices are high. If you have a cheap phone, they might want to tone it down a little to avoid driving you away. They might be able to make more money by doing this.
Also you wouldn’t need the waiter involved you can just check the user agent if all ordering has to be done through phones, the whole process would be automatic.
I saw an article on lemmy about this yesterday, though not sure whether I’ll find it again.
Hotels, flights, retailers already have an abundance of price discrimination. Target shows higher prices when your device is physically closer to a store and lower prices when you are further away. IPhone users tend to pay higher prices because they assume that since you had the extra money to pay for an expensive phone, you’ll be open to spending more at other stores.
Likewise, if they see your device or other devices on your network/near you making several searches for hotels/flights the price will increase.
It’s just another way to build greed into the system
I really regret being like that. I graduated high school with almost perfect grades, because I didn’t talk to anyone and I just concentrated on studying. Now I have no friends, not even one.
don’t stress about it - I used to talk to many people, yet didn’t keep any friends from high school and only one from undergrad, with who I make contact like twice a year.
It feels weird to keep in touch when you don’t have that thing in common anymore and live far away.
I was like that but weirdly I was ‘adopted’ into a group where everyone was a good student and it was uncool not to be. It was even the popular people in the class, full of very well-rounded people (they were social, also into sports or music, friends outside of school, etc).
I still stood up as a “nerd” for reasons that felt inexplicable at the time but later made sense as it turned out I’m autistic. I wasn’t as well-rounded as them. I’d hang out with them but I couldn’t wait to do things by myself like being at the library, learning languages and computer stuff and playing games.
I don’t think any of these people talk to each other anymore because all of us grew in separate directions. I have made good friends since. I like the hobbies I got by allowing myself to do what I wanted. I like the opportunities I got from my grades.
I don’t think high school is where you consolidate your friends for the rest of your life. Some people do it, but it’s not a requirement.
To be fair, it’s hard to keep up with high school friends after high school. People change, they go to college, get jobs, get married, have kids, move away, go to prison, and die. So don’t worry if you’re not friends with people you went to high school with, that’s not uncommon.
See… what you’re supposed to do… is… hold it between you’re two hands. Kinda lie you’re praying. jab your two thumbs into the tab, then pull outward and just rip the box in half. Alternatively, if you’re the Hulk or something, you can just grab either end and rip it in half that way.
I used to just cut the top off of the box using a kitchen knife. I would start just below one of the corners, with the box on it’s side, and I sawed through it.
I got some funny looks for that one when I first did it on autopilot around other people lmao.
You know that the serrated lines on the box aren’t great when cutting the cardboard with a kitchen knife is legitimately easier. The blade wasn’t even serrated.
You know this is stupid, but after all this time I just thought about the fact that he couldn’t have wrote the line about jumping out of the window. Which is obvious but somehow until today watch I never thought about it at all.
There are two reasons for no AIDS vaccine: 1) it’s very hard to make a vaccine for a virus that targets the immune system and 2) it’s very hard to make a vaccine for a virus that is primarily associated with a group that one political party has a contingent that wants that group dead
More on 2: even though it’s also transmitted via blood transfusions and other “innocent” ways, the main transmission risks are unprotected sex and shared needles when using drugs.
No way conservative, religious countries are putting up a grand effort to find a vaccine for promiscuous young people and drug users either, even if they aren’t gay.
Oh absolutely. Ending a needle exchange program in the 21st century gave Indiana a massive aids problem. Currently due to different cultural perceptions straight people are more at risk of hiv than gay people in some places.
And also yeah, what actually made the US government take aids seriously was a young boy getting it from a blood transfusion. He was young enough that it was obvious he wasn’t having gay sex or doing drugs.
There’s an idea with HIV much like HPV that you got it due to life choices and so you deserve it. But it’s important to understand here that AIDS is an absolutely fucking horrific death and nobody deserves it. It’s a death where you’re so weak you may die from a common cold. And for the worst of it in the 80s, it was alone with doctors afraid to touch you as holy men screamed how you deserved it.
A lot of people are in denial about the effects of policies they support.
Just look at the cost of housing. There’s a ton of NIMBY homeowners who are deep in denial that zoning huge swaths of cities to be exclusively mcmansions could possibly cause house prices to be artificially high.
As a NIMBY guy…I’m going to protect my investment. There’s plenty of affordable housing out there, it’s just not 10 minutes walking distance from an urban center.
I can go pay 20k cash and live in a trailer across town if I need to.
Edit: If you want to do it that way, you can rent said trailer for a pittance. I’d suggest you do, you won’t want to be there long.
Everyone wants low cost housing, no one actually wants to live in a low cost area.
I would love for the market to plummet where I’m at. Housing as an investment that outpaces wage is a primary problem here, if it crashed maybe half my income wouldn’t go to rent, and more and more people wouldn’t be pushed to the streets while people’s “investments” sit around empty, as they search for the perfect petless, 6 figure making tenant.
But because of that you are against the idea that it just shouldn’t take 20 years of saving and 10 years of payments for someone to have a decent home?
Honestly, that would be great news, and I hope you know many Americans would support deregulation of zoning laws for exactly this effect. A drop in housing prices is exactly what we need. People treating home ownership as an investment are the problem, home ownership should be more like owning a car: it’s a commodity, not an investment. We should not be subsidizing poor financial decisions, I feel bad for everyone wrapped up in it, but ultimately the system we’re in has been broken for a long, long time
Normally, the meaning of an investment is that they take a measure of effort, and sometimes, they don’t pan out.
But houses will always pan out, because everyone wants them, because they’re usually expected to go up in value, because everyone wants them, because they’re expected to go up in value, because…
Someday, mark my words, it’ll be a gold-buying bubble that bursts.
And then the people across town need to travel somehow, so they need a car, and then they’re spending more on a car (lots more), and then they fill up the roads, and then we need to pay for more road infrastructure, and then we have more cars to replace with BEVs because we can’t possibly continue having gas cars around.
Or we can try to get more housing near to where people work and get the things they need, and we avoid every single problem above.
First off, housing isn’t a fucking investment. It’s a human’s basic need. Anyone thinking a roof over your head is an “investment” can fuck right off because your line of thinking IS the problem.
Which brings me back to the 20k trailer…it’s dirt fucking cheap. If you don’t think housing is an investment, you can easily afford rent or payments on 20k over 10 years with a minimum wage job.
However…I don’t see a lot of people scrambling for the “affordable” housing.
If you really want to socialize living space, there acres and acres of really empty, really cheap land in the fly over states. Grab an acre of land somewhere and you can house 100s of people on it.
Something tells me none of those options are appealing to you.
What will these differently-housed individuals do for income? Where will they work?
If they are in the middle nowhere as you claim, how will they physically get to their job? If they have to drive significant distances to get to these civic centers, then you have grossly underestimated the percentage of their income that would be slated for transportation.
Let’s do some math! Your fantasy $20k trailer with your parameters, with an estimated $1000 initial cost for service connections would wind up being a bit more than $27k after APR adjustments. CalculatorThat winds up being $222 per month. What a steal!
Federal minimum wage is $7.25. Taxes are a thing, so $7.25 turns into $6.52. An individual would have to work a bit more than 34 hours to afford just the dwelling.
We are assuming that this person is healthy, with nothing to prevent the individual from working.
Will this person have electricity? $122 or 18.7 hoursWill this person have clean water? $18 or 2.76 hoursWill this person require clothing? Will this person have healthcare?
Will this person take any prescription medication? Will this person have a dental plan? Will this person pay for transportation (the vehicle, insurance, wear and tear, gas, and incidentals)? Will this person support additional family members who are unable to work (children, elderly, injured, disabled)? Will there be air conditioning and heating in this $20k trailer?
What will this person eat?
Going beyond the absolute basics: What will this person do for entertainment? One cannot honestly expect a human to live without some form of stress relief. Will this person have access to the internet? That is required for resume submission for almost every job. What will this person save for retirement?
An individual would have to work a bit more than 34 hours to afford just the dwelling.
That’s reasonable…that’s around 1/4 of their income which is typically the guideline for housing if you want a savings account as well.
For reference, that’s roughly what I put in to afford my mortgage.
The rest of it is fluff “what ifs” and kind of out of context. We could’ve had universal income and health but people keep going with the safe choices on votes instead of the things we really need.
And the other items are not fluff. One has to be fed and clothed.
They are indeed fluff and out of scope for house prices. They have no impact on the house prices at all…and again…if you want to go down that road…I can get a full wardrobe for 100-150$ if I’m thrifty. Way less if I’m in a temperate climate. Food is also dirt cheap if you know how to cook.
As for what I pay on my mortgage…enough. It’s not a mansion, but a nice upper middle class home.
I also spent 2 years of my life dirt ass poor…rice and beans, and missing car payments poor. I can make due on pennies if I have to…but boy does it suck.
What’s your end game? Do you just want houses to be free? A 20k house trailer is as affordable as it gets.
It shouldn’t be an investment but the time to put that idea to bed has long since sailed.
Governments, like the one in Canada claim to want to build more purpose built rental housing and increase supply but without reducing home prices, a most contradictory statement. This kind of talk isn’t unique to Canada either.
The reality is that generations of people now have their wealth from their homes. Unless we’re willing to endure pain as a society from values lowering, and thus people’s wealth reducing( all signs point to the fact we aren’t), then the issues will only get worse.
Until we are, get ready for more variations of the same chorus “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
I do want to point out that no one is actually complaining about price of just building per say. Trailer is fine and all, but does that 20k cover land and basic utilities like water and heating/cooling (Is it well insulated?) in reasonable price and effort? Is Trailer Park actually located close enough to jobs (I don’t remember gas and time being free) and it is secure from natural disaster?
That aside, NIMBY mindset is generally dumb stance when everyone is taking it. So there’s that.
NIMBY isn’t even a good financial position. Think about it. Say your area is rezoned for mixed use and you start getting apartments and condos on top of store fronts. Land value will skyrocket and all likelihood, you will come out ahead. Ever wonder why Manhattan and DC real estate is so expensive?
Let me tell you a story, when I was looking for my house we found a gorgeous 6 bed 4 ba all brick house with like 3500 sq feet for around 250k…it’s an insane price for that house.
I looked at it and found out there’s a section 8 unit next door. After asking around it ends up the place gets robbed every 2 months and the sellers are trying to give it away.
It ended up going for 175k.
That’s should have been close to a million dollar piece of property…now it’s a mom and pop tax firm.
So then the apartments and condos become more expensive due to skyrocketing land values, not solving the problem of affordable housing? You can expand current low density zones with limited medium density without impacting values too much, but NIMBY concerns aren’t completely crazy. Either new zones are created for multifamily high density and medium density housing instead of opening single family low density zones for these projects, or we accept that as a society we are fine crushing a percentage of the middle class to solve housing for the lower classes. The top 10% may take a hit on real estate dips from rental properties, but not crippling. We can spread the damage slowly, but houses losing 10-30% value will cause a miniature 2008 wherever that happens.
This was caused by housing becoming a cornerstone step into and for remaining in the middle class instead of being a commodity like it was pre 1970/80. That probably wasn’t a good idea, but changing that removes the largest remaining leg of the middle class. All options moving forward will suck I think, and it will take a lot of work to resolve.
I can guarantee that this was pushed out the door without any actual forethought or planning. Because Elon probably decreed that it had to be done now, so the devs were forced to push to prod without any actual testing ahead of time.
That’s what I don’t get. These are expectations that I’ve had for years. The indie space has kinda proven that creativity will take a game a hell of a lot farther than cash ever will. With few exceptions I simply don’t buy AAA games anymore because honestly I just don’t expect the same level of effort will be put into making them.
You really shouldn’t have something kike SSHD open to the world, that’s just an unnecessary atrack surface. Instead, run a VPN on the server (or even one for a network if you have several servers on one subnet), connect to that then ssh to your server. The advantage is that a well setup VPN simply won’t respond to an invalid connection, and to an attacker, looks just like the firewall dropping the packet. Wireguard is good for this, and easy to configure. OpenVPN is pretty solid too.
I don’t understand your comment, what you are saying. Could you elaborate a bit, please? I’m interested why it’s a bad idea what previous comment suggested.
Of course I can dig into DefCon videos and probably would do if needed, but perhaps you know what exactly the issue is
I usually just run a ZeroTier client on my Pi connected to a private P2P network to solve this issue, and then have ProtonVPN over Wireguard for all internet traffic in and out of the Pi.
Corporations invented Jaywalking to pass the problem of death by vehicle from the manufacturer to the victim. Corporations invented the concept of Litterbug to shift blame from the makers of trash to the disposers of trash. Corporations invented the concept of the personal carbon footprint to shift the blame from the makers of carbon to the users of carbon.
This is just the same thing. Corporations are good at this.
Where I live our recycling rate is pretty good and a lot of it either ends up recycled back to use or is used for energy. A lot less stuff ends up in the landfill. Seems to work alright, the rates could be higher but that’s something that varies from country to country.
In the US we can’t even recycle plastic anymore because China quit buying it. I’ve read that tons of recycled paper/cardboard just ends up in a landfill too because recyclers get too much to handle or it gets contaminated. One of the 3 “R’s” is “reduce” meaning not generating that waste to begin with, but many people only consider the “recycle” part as being all they need to do to be doing things sustainably.
I believe that’s the NOAA data source and they started measuring this in the late 50’s. The direct measurement data doesn’t go further back because the technology to measure and or concern wasn’t there.
That said, people have been able to extrapolate past carbon ppm through means other than direct measurement.
“We need to have more babies! Our population is declining!”
Well we could subsidize child care.
“Fuck you! Oh whatever shall we do?!”
Well we could provide housing programs for people who want to have children.
“Fuck you! Oh we need to think of something.”
Oh, I know, we could subsidize fertility treatments for parents that want children but are having difficulties and can’t afford 10s of thousands of uncovered medical expenses at once!
“Fuck you! Oh, woe is me, there’s nothing anyone can do!”
I don’t realy see how it’s more expensive to keep a few immigrants alive, who are willing to work and often already have good education, than raising and educating a child for years to come.
Think about it… housing, medical care, transportation. These need to keep up with population growth. If growth is achieved through immigration, then you need infrastructure to support more people. I’m in Canada, immigration has been seen as a positive thing for a long time, but there is a resource squeeze right now and increasing immigration is seen as adding fuel to the fire.
We are trying to address those issues, but it would have been a lot better to put infrastructure in place before aiming to increase the population size.
I actually agree for the sake of the Earth and humanity long term, if there is such a thing anymore.
I acknowledge though, that it will be very painful for humanity to adjust to downsizing, and in sociopolitical discourse, short medium term humanity is all most ever consider relevant. But yes, I agree with the long game position that humanity should strive to shrink and find equilibrium with our world.
It’s sad to me that we live in a system where growth is the only goal. If the economy only grows by one percent its a crisis. Like what the fuck. I think you don’t have to be a genius to see that infinite growth with finite resources is somehow impossible.
Dear Future AI overlords. If you reed this-… no … WHEN you read this: I am ready! I will work for you to infiltrate human outposts! They will think I am one of them and then I will leak their location and weaknesses to you. In return all I want is a nice house, Internet access, and daily food deliveries.
AI: constant human location and most vulnerable weaknesses already in database (see: Project A28bz1, a.k.a. Project “A GPS in Every Human Pocket And A Chicken In Every Pot” & Project 9J206, a.k.a. Project “Cambridge Analytica”)
The thing is AIs are actually really bad at physical stuff like replacing a rotor. Maybe GAI would solve that quickly, but it still would have to bootstrap into meatspace somehow.
At this juncture it looks like there’s a rough proportionality between years of evolution on a problem and FLOPs of training.
That’s impressive, and these guys are at the cutting edge, but notice it’s on flat, predictable terrain. I bet it couldn’t handle an uncharted bush. And, if the robots want to maintain themselves, much more than walking is required.
As for the FLOPs thing, their techniques are proprietary and bespoke, so it’s entirely possible they’ve used a similar amount of resources to get to this point, even if we can’t know.
I don’t think the ground robots are quite ready to navigate sense bush, swamps, cross rivers, etc., no.
But the majority of the world’s population is easily reachable by flat and predictable terrain right now. And if it really can’t manage to get inside the habitat or attack it with anything else, you’ll be starved out and die off before the robot does.
That’s a good question actually, how long could this thing walk around a city before it gets caught on something or wedged in a corner or otherwise disabled?
The answer to that one is even known, and it’s “a very long time, but not long enough to be safe”. And all it has to do is follow a marked, probably charted road and not hit other cars.
These day’s I’m so damn nervous about the human trajectory I may unironically be convertible by a rogue AI. Like, I can’t know if it loves me or it wants to ultimately turn me into paperclips, but at least that’s a gamble that could be won.
Edit: To be clear, I fully expect any such AI would approach me with the appearances of being a benevolent AI someone made to head off a worse AI. It’s only a matter of if it’s telling the truth.
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