The phrase “SQL programmers” is so fucking weird. SQL isn’t a programming language. It’s a query language. You don’t “program” things with SQL. You utilize SQL as a component of programs for data insertion and lookup, but the actual logic of execution is done in a programming language. Unless you’re doing Oracle PL/SQL, in which case why are you giving money to Oracle?
This doesn’t make sense to me. SPs and functions are in every major database. If I wrote a bash script that runs like a program, and sounds like a program, did I program it? Script it?
And lots of systems have nested logic in the DB, optimization often leads to that to reduce overhead. Unless you’re being lazy with an ORM like prisma that can’t even join properly.
Getting high performing queries is just as difficult as any other programming language, and should be treated as such. Even Lemmy’s huge performance increases to .18ish came from big PG optimizations.
It seems to be about yelling at others that “you’re not a real programmer!!!” mixed with being so “technically correct” my eyes can no longer roll the same way they used to.
Admittedly, this discussion is more one of semantics than anything. It’s pretty clear I’m arguing that SQL is not a “General Purpose Language,” and that proficiency in that domain is what constitutes programming. Which, yeah, is arguably somewhat arbitrary. But my point is that, colloquially, someone who only works with SQL isn’t a programmer. Data Engineer, sure. DBA. Also, sure. Depends on what you do. Programmer? Not really. Not unless you (as in the person, not “it’s theoretically possible”) can use raw SQL to read in video data from a linux system device file and then encode it to mp4 and just nobody’s told me.
Do that in Javascript. Or HTML. Or CSS. Or by that logic is a web developer not a programmer? What about microcontroller programmers?
I could easily write a full logic program in SQL where the API just feeds it data, which is the inverse of how you treat SQL. Admittedly that’s not as common, but it happens pretty frequently in areas of big data, like medical.
I’ve hired Senior Software Engineers that were DBAs, and others that weren’t. They were a development team, all programmers in their own right.
MS SQL Server has this thing called Replication. It’s a feature to keep tables in sync between databases, and even database servers. There’s merge replication (two way), snapshot replication (one way scheduled publishing), and transaction replication (one way live-ish publishing).
And the logic is all implemented in T-SQL stored procedures.
T-SQL is turing complete. While the MS SQL server has limitations on OS level operations, if you allow yourself some leeway with CLR wrappers for the win32 API, there’s no reason I can think of you wouldn’t be able to get the database engine to be a webserver reacting to incoming requests on port 80, or drawing GUIs based off of table state.
Your knowledge of data engineering may be limited. SQL is predominant in data processing nowadays. FOSS tools such as DBT allows to write efficient data processing pipelines with SQL and some YAML config without the need for a general purpose coding language.
Why would anyone want that? Because SQL has the interesting property of describing the result you want rather than describing how to compute it. So you can put inside the database, a query engine with decades of optimizations, that will make a much better job at finding the best execution plan than the average developer.
It also means it’s easier to train people for data processing nowadays.
LaTeX being called “programming” I can see, but I’ve never heard someone try to justify Markdown as programming. It’s just formalizing things people were already doing to format text in plain text files into approximately half of a standard.
Why not? It sounds like you haven’t written any OLAP queries :)
I’ve written ETL data pipelines using a system similar to Apache Airflow, where most of the logic is in SQL (either Presto or Apache Spark) with small pieces of Python to glue things together. Queries that are thousands of lines long that take ~30 minutes to run and do all sorts of transformations to the data. They run once per day, overnight. I’d definitely call that programming.
Most database systems support stored procedures, which are just like functions - you give them some input and they give you some output and/or perform some side effects.
So is Tex. And, yet, I still don’t put it under the “programming languages I know” section on my resume. Probably because it’s not a programming language.
It’s important to keep an up to date resume, even if you’re employed. That’s a little life pro tip for you kids out there, with your iphones and your tik toks and your Fortnite dances and your existential malaise brought about by encroaching climate disaster and advanced technoindustrial capitalism.
The general census is that latex actually is an example of programming languages sharing semantics with non programming languages and not being intend as a programming language.
since you linked to wikipedia:
The domain of the language is also worth consideration. Markup languages like XML, HTML, or troff, which define structured data, are not usually considered programming languages.[12][13][14] Programming languages may, however, share the syntax with markup languages if a computational semantics is defined. XSLT, for example, is a Turing complete language entirely using XML syntax.[15][16][17] Moreover, LaTeX, which is mostly used for structuring documents, also contains a Turing complete subset.[18][19]
Sometimes even non Turing complete languages are considered a programming language but Turing completeness usually is the criteria agreed upon:
The majority of practical programming languages are Turing complete,[5] and all Turing complete languages can implement the same set of algorithms. ANSI/ISO SQL-92 and Charity are examples of languages that are not Turing complete, yet are often called programming languages.[6][7] However, some authors restrict the term “programming language” to Turing complete languages.[1][8]
Is it any different than speaking in front of your smartphone?
I don’t own an echo or Google whatever but I’ve definitely mentioned things and then got ads for that thing within the hour/day. Like cat litter when I don’t even own a cat, just mentioned it once for cleaning up spills.
More likely there’s a bunch of data points it can use. Coming within BT range of someone who does have a cat for example. Otherwise all the major smart phone companies would need to be in collision to keep the secret because the battery drain would be so blatant of it was recording, processing, transfering etc.
I don’t have a smoking gun for Google advertising based on conversation, but I mentioned in an email (Gmail) that someone I know was going to the Calgary Stampede, and Google Ads flogged Stetson cowboy hats and the Stampede for weeks after that. It was so conspicuous because normally it’s just, “hot singles in your area”, “hot Christian singles in your area?” maybe, “hot Christian moms in your area?” Nowadays it’s like, “grannies near you want to fuck.” FML.
My pastor mentioned a specific verse in his sermon recently. I went to type it in my notes. My phone’s keyboard (Gboard) suggested that specific verse immediately. Not just the book. The chapter and verse numbers, too.
It’s more likely you’re getting those hyper-targeted ads because of location tracking and relationship tracking than because they’re listening. It’s much cheaper and easier than running voice recognition on shitty audio clips from a mic in your pocket, and honestly much scarier.
People only ever have anecdotes to support the claim that tech companies are listening in on their conversations, but these companies openly admit to targeting ads based on your location data and specifically who you’ve been associating with.
It’s more likely that others in your congregation searched for that verse, so it was suggested to you based on your proximity to others who already searched for it.
It was in my hand. I was taking notes on it. So I doubt the audio was all that bad. My pastor also uses a mic, so his voice is not too quiet for a phone to pick it up.
because of location tracking and relationship tracking
I also find this unlikely because of how specific it got. It got the chapter and verse correct. The only input it got from me was my beginning to type out the name of the book of the Bible.
It’s more likely that others in your congregation searched for that verse, so it was suggested to you based on your proximity to others who already searched for it.
While that’s possible, I’m not sure it’d work so quickly. I typed the reference in my note-taking app literally as soon as my pastor said it.
Get out of here with your reasoning. It’s more fun to feign outrage because it gives me an opportunity to feel smart. If you start to invalidate my superiority by pointing out how arbitrary and dramatic my response is then I’m going to downvote you.
I don’t know about you, but I generally turn my phone off completely when I’m at a doctor or hospital, as per the rules they have posted in the lobby asking me to do so.
In Sid Meier’s Civilization sure, but real history is a lot more complex than that. There were people who came to that conclusion since ancient times without it leading to a scientific and industrial revolution, because there were a lot more factors at play with those than just simply the idea of it.
The actual reason science took off is that there was a plague leading to a worker shortage leading to a wealth boom, while a lot of rich people had access to coffee and nothing to do.
While I, too, am a big fan of the Coffee hypothesis, it should be noted that lots of civilizations had access to caffeine and other stimulants, including the Arabs, Chinese and Incas and probably the Roman’s, Greeks and Persians too.
And there were a lot of plagues, but most of them happened long before the scientific revolution.
Free time and the wealth to have that time is what I also think the catalyst is. Same with arts. You can’t do experiments or spend time on art if your entire life is consumed by labor.
speaking of health, wouldn’t you die to some disease you are not immune to? or even more likely you would cause a plague that their bodies don’t lnow how to fight off, like imagine bringing back some covid variant with you.
I mean, us bringing back something to kill them seems more likely, despite our comparatively weak immune system’s. Be it COVID-19 or an STD. Hell, even our metal/plastic ridden bodies would be a potential issue for their environment if we died.
pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.
The main problem with that is that you can’t make the types very small with wood, and the singlemost expensive ingredient in this whole printing press concept is the paper.
So you would end up having books with very little text on each page, and especially in a slave economy, it would just be much cheaper to make handwritten copies, since you could cram a lot more words on each page.
And again, this is not adressing the issue of even having the skill to make paper in the first place.
Not to mention inventing an alphabet depending on where and when you go to. Or you could go with ConstantScript if you feel like being a gigantic troll.
Abugida might be workable if you reform it so that vowel markers can only appear above or below the modified consonant.
Yeah, the whole point is having a legally binding contract that sets wages, hours, and working conditions. Also the “going through your union instead of your manager” is super dumb. It’s like saying, “why talk to your lawyer when you can just confess to the police?”
No guarantee as in “theoretically, we could fold up our entire business instead of bothering to negotiate”. They won’t, of course, but it’s not liably false (IANAL) because there’s a valid weird hypothetical.
Ye, i remember they mentioning this, and people i know confirm it works fine. It just doesnt work on my end. I do have firefox set up to be very private though ( no 3th party cookies and more )
That's definitely a part of it. All of the MS web platforms rely heavily on first and third party cookies. You can't even log in properly to Teams if your browser is in incognito/private mode.
Chrome is the new IE in terms of support. “Best viewed in Chrome”
Safari is the new IE in terms of weird bugs that no other browser encounters. Some of their web APIs like LocalStorage and IndexedDB still have odd quirks (but at least they’re not completely broken any more).
I’ve calculated if it would pay off to build a house with four units on a piece of land that I already have. It would barely pay for itself after 30 years but let’s be honest, 30 years is when the first big renovations are in order. I’m not sure if the “landlords are rich leeches” - trope holds up outside expensive cities with inherited properties.
It really depends on the nature of the rental and your area. If instead of building a house you build 4 closely stacked duplexes and charged each one double what the mortgage would be you’d definitely make money, but you’d also be an extortionate leech. In my area someone built 4 nice duplexes on a double lot (probably around 1.5 acres) and is now renting them at $1800 each. The land was probably less than $55k and the cost of construction was likely less than $1 mil. At 5% interest on a 30 year loan their monthly payment would be $5,600, but they’re bringing in $14,400 per month.
$1800 for rent is an extortionate price in my area (it’s big city apartment rental prices, with a pool and gym), even after interest rates went up.
On the other hand, I knew a couple who were landlords for nearly 20 years. They rarely raised the rents and even in 2022 they were still charging <$1000 per month for a full house because that paid the costs and for them it was an investment, not a source of income.
They finally sold their rental homes and made about $70k over what they originally paid on each house. Doing the math that comes out to be a roughly 8.5% annual percentage return without counting the rent gained each month. That’s a fairly solid investment without being a sucky person.
This is the answer, literally this is what millionaires have been doing for ages. It’s just unique that the COVID era interest rates were so low that it made it so that 100-thousand-aires could do what millionaires had already been doing.
I couldn’t qualify for an investment loan worth a million dollars without making some really poor/speculative decisions
Being a full time landlord is super profitable and trouble free until it isn’t. If you get some troublesome tenants your sweet business decision can become a freaking nightmare.
This estimate doesn’t include taxes or insurance
I think these rental prices are outrageous and I’m surprised anyone agreed to them. Not sure who these people are, but someone took the deal. Maybe there was some sort of arrangement so that they didn’t pay the listed rental price (like x number of months free, waived deposit, etc).
I wouldn’t be surprised if the owner is overleveraged unless they were already independently wealthy or they got in before the interest rates went up.
For a while between 2020 and 2022, if you had your home paid for, you could take a mortgage out on that property and invest that money and make more money on the return on investment than the payment for the mortgage and the taxes owed on your profits. That’s how low the interest rates were for a while. I have a coworker who refinanced his house for 2% on a 30 year fixed rate, inflation is generally higher than his interest rate. Doing that sort of thing, taking a loan out on one house to invest with, is stupidly speculative but I wouldn’t be surprised if people did it.
Yeah, well, here they don’t. Currently, building from new costs about 3200€/m^2^, provided you own the ground already.
Average rent for a newly built, low energy appartment with fibre to the home and covered parking including a wallbox (so, basically the optimum you could build with a high rent in mind) around here is about 9 to 10€/m^2^. So that’s 26 years before the building is paid off and that does not include interest for a loan or upkeep for the building. With 4 percent of interest which seems to be the lower end of the market right now I’d never break even.
Buying here is cheaper (1600 per sq meter in the commie blocks part of the city) and rent is about the same. Outside of those blocks you’d usually get copper and no real insulation, with street parking. A brand new apartment in a nice place might net you 15-20 eur per square meter.
Of course, I live in the ass end of Europe where wages are half of what they are in the west so it makes sense our rents, food costs, etc are higher. The peasants shouldn’t have too much to their names.
Tenants also pay any loans associated with the apartment building repairs, or the repair fund collection, not by law but because apartments are in demand and tenants are not. The law actually says it’s the responsiblity of the owner, but there’s literally nothing saying that responsibility can’t be shifted.
Whenever I do the math on buying a multi-family, I find you’d either not be breaking even or barely breaking even with the mortgage, insurance, and taxes by charging market rent. The current landlord is basically claiming future rents as his own when he sets the asking price at level that takes all of the current market rent price for himself.
If you buy the property and want to have enough to do repairs / renovations and cover unexpected risks like tenants that can’t pay and won’t leave, you HAVE to go up on rent, otherwise you will go broke and lose the property.
Maybe there was a golden age when being a landlord meant instant cash flow and money making opportunities, but I find most of the stuff on the market today are just people looking to cash out all future value in the property and assuming the next landlord will basically just jack up rent to cope with the high cost of that cash out.
Being a landlord is pretty risky. You could end up with a bad tenant that ruins your property or won’t pay and won’t leave. You also are responsible for costly repairs and renovations that can have long breakeven timelines. You have to cover that cost some how, and that is by charging rent. Who would assume that risk without a reward?
Good luck getting 11% a year in the stock market. I think your stats include the pandemic and I don’t think we’ll see increases like that again, at least we can’t count on it.
11% has been a financial planning standard since time immemorial (ok, well, since after the great depression). If a hedge fund or other investment isn’t hitting 11%, you should be in S&P or NDQ which flattens to 10% over time… or “only” 6-7% after adjusting for inflation.
The last 30 years are considered “below average”. The market only grew 9.9%/year on average. Which apparently that 0.1% is a big deal for investors.
Here’s a fairly good breakdown on SOFI. Obviously, we’ll never know what the future holds, but 10% over time is the “bad return” that rich people talk about.
“Landlords are rich leeches” is still true because the vast majority of property in the US is not owned by hard working people who are investing their earnings owning a handful of properties at most, but by property companies and hedge funds.
I’m not sure what you used to calculate it, but it definitely isn’t only “expensive cities with inherited properties”… I did the math on the last house I rented: lived there for 8 years. It was a duplex in a city in a very cheap cost of living state. Just my rent alone for those 8 years more than covered what the entire duplex was purchased for 3 years prior to me moving in. That means if both sides were occupied, which it was for all but 1 month in the 8 years I was there, it’s paid for in full in 4 years. Even if you “have to renovate” in 30 years, hell even 15 years, you have 10 years of pure profit even after considering insurance and property taxes and probably even maintenence costs…
Maybe your area doesn’t have high demand for rentals or you under-valued your rent price, but there wouldn’t be so many people doing it if it wasn’t profitable.
That’s how a mortgage works. But the point is that after those 30 years you have a million dollar asset. That you had your tenants pay for.
For a regular plebs like us that’s not a winning proposition because we can’t have our money tied up for 30 years but for people who don’t need their money liquid, it’s free real estate
It’s hard to get a good return on your investment in residential real estate without using leverage.
For instance: You don’t buy one place outright. You buy 5 with 20% down. You may not have positive cash flow, but at long as it isn’t negative not only do you get all the increase in value, you also get more equity every month as the tenants pay your mortgages.
If you bought it outright and over some period of time the tenants have paid your entire investment and the price of the property doubles, you doubled your money. If you buy 5 and over some period of time the tenants pay your mortgage and initial investment and the properties have doubled in value you have increased your initial investment 10X. And before the big expensive renovations come in, you can sell and buy something else if you’re not equipped to deal with that.
Also if you are just breaking even to get free property but you want to start getting passive income, after a few years you can refi to a longer term and lower your mortgage payments to get in the black every month.
This isn’t advice, fuck anybody buying up single family homes to rent, just showing one way they can generate both wealth and passive income for nothing. Literally nothing if they’re using a property management company.
Fuck anybody buying up single family homes to rent. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating.
Sure, but I think this example also commingles labor with ownership (as is often the case).
Like you said, your plan involves building a four-family home. That’s labor and worth fair remuneration. It’s just that, in order to get that remuneration you’d be taking payment from tenants who build no equity for their money. Yeah, you’ll have to renovate in 30 years, but you’d still have property and the money paid in rent while they don’t.
A landlord can also simultaneously do valuable work supervising and managing a property. That’s not mutually exclusive with profiting from ownership, and we can separate how we evaluate the two. It even comes up with billionaires: Bill Gates obviously did work worth payment as CEO of Microsoft, it’s just not where he got most of his fortune. It can simultaneously be true that he’s a talented guy who deserved to be paid, but most of his fortune came from exploitative business practices and profiting off of the labor of others.
Also, to be clear, there’s a difference between structural and individual criticism. Obviously slumlords are pieces of shit, but there’s a difference between that and someone who really does work as a property manager doing right by their tenants, or a family renting out a part of their home to make ends meet. I can think that landlords should be judged on an individual basis, while landlording as a thing shouldn’t exist.
I’m on your side mostly but the property prices going up in those 30 years would net you a fortune alone. You could likely sell it as is and triple your money
The old saying ‘buy land because they aren’t making anymore of it’ is true. As the world population grows, owning large amounts of land will be scarcer and scarcer. Most young people can’t afford a home in any western nation across the world and it’ll only get worse the world over as time goes on and the population continues to grow.
The big money’s isn’t in the rent, the rent is just to pay the mortgage and upkeep. It’s that you’re getting in debt that someone else is paying for you while they gaurd your asset which is only gaining in value, you then sell that somewhere in the futute.
On average, the same amount of money dropped into the NASDAQ will have much better overall returns. Real estate ROI is about 4% per year, where the stock market has held close to 11% over the long haul nearly a century.
For small-time landlords, it’s often about “I have a place for me or a family member to live if things go bad”. For bigger ones, it’s the tax-shelter and the low volitility of real estate, as well as diversity in case you need to sell when their stock is down.
Being a landlord isn’t a way for someone who doesn’t have wealth to acquire it. It’s a way to park your existing wealth in quickly appreciating assets preferably purchased from other losers when they lose their asses and collect monthly rent too.
If on day one you have 700k and you purchase an existing property and in 30 days after you rent it out your property is still worth 700k and you are now ahead of the game in 30 days not 30 years.
If you purchased at a reasonable time a year later its worth 750 and you’ve collected 84k 1% of property value per month.
quickly appreciating assets preferably purchased from other losers when they lose their asses and collect monthly rent too.
I wouldn’t say quickly appreciating, though. It’s a fairly slow growth rate for someone with that kind of money. They diversify into real estate because it creates some tax protections (your costs) and it’s fairly stable. Like buying into a terrible small business, but one that magically won’t fail. The things that could cause total loss to real estate are usually handled in standard insurance, unlike a business that can just tank.
The thing is, as you and the other person said, it’s all about the big companies who own tons of real estate AND the big companies that manage rental properties.
“No, wait, it’s not what you think! There’s a continuous integration system, a commit would’ve triggered a new build! It might have paged the oncall! Babe! The test suite has been flaky lately!”
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.
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