In other parts of the world, there is no tipping. This is because it’s expected for the employer to provide the employee a living wage, not statistics and an underground economy.
It’s a terrible practice and ultimately hurts workers. It should be banned simply because it promotes worker tax evasion, which is not what I really care about here, but it’s a good reason to make it illegal. Making it illegal is only way to stop it in the US. It’s absolutely rampant. You pick up donuts At the dunkin store and they ask for a tip now.
For your average waitress or diner worker, tips are their living wage. But for people at nicer restaurants or who “hustle”, tips can be REALLY good income. This is why there is always so much push back any time some politician says “this is real messed up”. I think it was a somewhat recent story where the restaurant the South Park guys bought got rid of tipping and the wait staff were angry?
But, of course, the wait staff who don’t know how to work a table and the bus boys and the rest of the staff all get screwed over. Because yes, some places pool tips but skimming is 100% a thing and management is never going to stop it so long as they get their cut too.
The reality is that food needs to be more expensive at restaurants so that the profit margins cover living wages. The top salespeople will get screwed, but… they are already screwing over their co-workers so fuck 'em.
But now you have the people who benefit from being tipped getting angry AND the people who “could otherwise not afford to eat out” suddenly angry that the base price includes a living wage rather than the 2 dollar tip they leave on a 30 dollar order being the decider.
All that said: Outside of higher end catered meals in Europe, service at even a halfway decent restaurant in the US is miles ahead. Mostly because the staff knows that is how they get their bonuses. Still doesn’t justify screwing over bussers and low totem pole cooks but…
Why do I think you’ve only gone to tourist trap restaurants in Europe? You should look at a guide before planing vacations.
Although it is true that service can be better in the lower end restaurants in the US. After all, one can afford to hire more when they pay them pennies.
Service in Japan and South Korea is better than in American restaurants and you don’t have to bribe the staff to be nice to you. The price on the menu is usually cheaper too.
Also, pooled tips are basically a slush fund for wages since the entire point of tipping is supposed to be to reward good service and if the tip isn’t going directly to the person who provides the service, what’s the point? Ditto for any tip on a service that hasn’t even been performed yet, such as delivery services.
All that said: Outside of higher end catered meals in Europe, service at even a halfway decent restaurant in the US is miles ahead. Mostly because the staff knows that is how they get their bonuses.
If your idea of good service is having a waiter with faked cheer jump at you every five minutes loaded with a jug of ice cubes to check if “everything is great”, then sure, the US style is miles ahead.
If you just want a professional to do his job as unobtrusively as possible, the European way is the one to pick.
It’s sad how much work has been put into convincing worker to buy this shit. It is not to their benefit. If you would make however much money after tips, you should still expect to make that same amount in a wage if we remove tips. It’s just a hurdle for everyone to jump through so restaurant owners aren’t held accountable to pay their staff. It’s also not uncommon for them to not make up the difference if the staff doesn’t make minimum wage after tips, which they are legally required to do.
Tipping is a racket. If it were in the workers favor, why would their bosses be so in favor of it? If the person who you’re working for is ever in favor of something financial, you should pay attention because you should probably be on the other side. If it makes them more money then it’s likely costing you money
The reality is that, for the people who “make it work”, tipping is a lot closer to being a sales person. You are talking them into buying the more expensive meal option or getting a bottle of champagne or whatever. And you are timing your check-ins just right so it feels like you are attentive rather than forced to interrupt someone the moment they take a bite to see if they like the food. And you know how to find the right tables to focus on because that group look like they have the right combination of money and awkwardness that they’ll tip higher so as to not be “jerks”.
Its pretty much the exact same bullshit that is used to discourage unionization in tech. When you are just starting out, collective bargaining is GOOD. As you get more experienced, you start to be able to negotiate much better terms for yourself… often at the expense of your co-workers. And thus, you become opposed to unionization efforts.
Because if you are a higher end waiter or waitress? You are potentially pulling in a LOT of bank. My ex was a waitress at the fancy French place in the rich people part of town and… she was pulling in low six figures. She ain’t getting paid that after a labor reform. But her co-workers also weren’t getting paid that and neither were the bus boys who cleaned up after “her” customers or the chefs who are implementing The Chef’s visions.
But, because there is an actual clear “bootstraps” route that people semi-regularly follow? Fuck my rights and wage now because I am gonna be rich in a few years and then will regret getting a living wage!
I worked at Pizza Hut in the 90s, and waitresses were usually making $200+ in tips for a 6 hour shift. This was in a state where they were paid full minimum wage of $4.95.
I delivered pizzas and made $5.50 plus an average of $30 in tips for a 6 hour shift.
I’m sorry but I have to take issue with “service is miles ahead”.
American table service is weird. It’s an uncomfortable experience for anyone who isn’t used to it. You can call it a cultural difference but it genuinely gave us a feeling of revulsion - the fake friendliness, the platitudes, the hovering near the table, the constant refilling, the fucking survey mid-meal, the attentiveness barely concealing the determination to extract your money and shove you out and get another mark on the door.
Perhaps because most of these things seem to primarily seek to recreate the experience of a slave owner and their chattel.
Tipping culture does not create better service, have you ever been to Italy? People tip because its the social norm, not because they like the service.
I mean, I get where you’re coming from. But modern US does not spend our tax money justly or wisely. Infrastructure crumbling, social services abysmal, arts funding abysmal…we are constantly taking our great revenue and mishandling it while people across the country suffer. Our system works for the rich, while running on money from the poor. The entire system is broken, taxing the rich will not solve the problem.
The thing is, America is culturally really influenctial. Here in Germany we have a wide variety of jobs that typically pay minimum wage. Some are service related, others aren’t. It’s roughly 20% of the workforce.
But we listen to american podcasts, watch your movies, your series and so on.
So waiters tend to get minimum wage + tax free tips, while cashiers just get minimum wage. Granted, tips are more like 10% here. I hate tips being an expectation.
She called out the shitty catholic church, got her career ruined for it, and 2 months later all the molestation stuff came out. Not once did she get an apology. RIP, Nothing truly did compare to you.
So you’ve got two modes of reproduction with Allium. Allium like this typically follows a biennial habit, so this years garlic will split into cloves around the fall, in preparation for sending up a flowering stalk next spring/ summer. The cloves are vegetative propagules; just another way to get more garlic other than seeds. Hence you can just plant a clove and get a garlic next year, or, you can plant seed and also get garlic.
Now for your actually question, I believe the segmentation is probably exogenous, technically yes, however, I am by no means an expert in Allium morphology (although I have done graduate coarse work in plant morph, and worked in a plant morph lab), so don’t quote me. However, it wouldn’t appear like you are describing. Think of the ring at the base of a clove of garlic as a bunch of ‘stems’. The branching would originate there.
I’ve enjoyed your wisdom so much lately! Thank you for sharing it!!! I’m learning about plant propagation in general… Is that ring at the base of a clove the same thing as a rhizome?
This is amazing info to me. I’ve been growing garlic at a hobby level for ages and never knew how the bulbs develop. Thank you for sending me down a garlic education rabbit hole!
There’s a series of works by an ancient poet, goes by the name of Rob Zombie. I’d suggest starting with Living Dead Girl and horndogging your way through the rest
I started to feel bad for the person with a concussion and gangrenous untreated wound, but then they pivoted to whether they could now acceptably creep on dead girls, and I just see a problem that’s about to solve itself.
People say all kinds of crazy shit after a good head wound. My partner fell off a staircase a few months ago and asked me why I was letting the government put roaches under the bathroom sink.
Wow, crazy to think what a concussion can do to a person. Imagine forgetting the Act to Ensure the Continued Existence of Under Counter Roaches of 2019.
Oh yes, we’re all operating in full knowledge that greentexts are 💯 percent truth.
But yeah, if this very real person did have a concussion they might also be having personality shift because of it. A good thing to keep in mind if you are dealing with a person who’s had a big head smash.
Tbf, they’re saying “dead ghost girls”. Wanting to romance a ghost is considerably less creepy than wanting to bang a corpse. At least the ghost must consent.
(For those who don’t know, FLDS is a fundamentalist branch of the Mormons that are basically an insanely oppressive and abusive cult. They still do polygamy!)
She’s extremely mentally ill and I am not friends with her anymore, but this is about her now deceased brother:
When he was about 2, he fell, head first, onto a rusty nail. Mom decided the medical solution to this was neosporin and a bandaid.
It went about a bit less than an inch into his brain.
He grew up extremely unable to regulate emotions, did violent dangerous things all the time, unfortunately killed himself a year back.
Point of me saying this is: Shit like this absolutely happens.
I feel like a whole lot of people who end up on 4chan are quite likely to be seriously neglected and abused.
I can very easily see a person with serious damage like this not being taken seriously and even assaulted by their parents for mentioning it.
They likely can’t get to a hospital on their own, and would be screamed at more if parents found out they went.
Similar to the reports of Russian soldiers putting plastic pipes up people’s butts to feed up razor wire to pull out slowly after the pipe is removed, or China putting electric shock sticks up people’s butts among the Uyghur camps.
We know and care about these atrocities because we don’t all suck. But there is definitely an economic structure in place that rewards this behavior as well as a fascist media apparatus that both censors and celebrates it.
While I’m sure that there was torture at Abu Ghraib, including electrocution, I’d just like to note that car batteries are typically only at 12 volts (sometimes 24) and at that voltage potential can’t really harm people. They could have wired up multiple batteries in series but I think it’s more likely they just used cables connected to an outlet.
A 12 volt vehicle battery was being disconnected using a crescent wrench, which slipped and grounded out when it came in contact with metal. The person received a burn on his ring finger as his gold ring had come into contact with the wrench. The injury was completely around the ring finger and severe enough to cause concern about the loss of the finger from a lack of adequate circulation.
It has been pointed out that most vehicle batteries have 600-800 cranking amps, compared to 75 amps for stick welding and 300 amps for air arc welding. Severe burn injuries can occur and caution should be exercised when handling such batteries, including removing rings and other jewellery before starting work near or on a battery/connected wires and equipment.
I would consider third-degree electrical burns harmful.
Ahh yes that totally what everyone will think when talking about torturing someone with a car battery. This is like saying tires are dangerous because cars run people over. The guy above was simply informing people that (rightfully) would get the idea that the ran electrodes to his nipples and cooked him like a hot dog. Sure a car battery is dangerous if used dangerously.
Right, but that’s not exactly electrocution, that’s just burning. Through a metal, 12V will be more than enough to create a current that makes the conductor very hot, but through a human it likely will not be able to cause any damage whatsoever.
Could that be used as a form of torture? Absolutely, not disputing that. But for electrocution, a car battery would not do, and for burning a blowtorch would be more effective.
Yes, if you run hundreds of amps through metal it gets hot, but that’s not electrocution which is what the person you’re replying to is talking about. You can’t really electrocute someone with less than about 50V because the human body has too much resistance. You can try it yourself; lick 2 fingers and touch both poles of a car battery; you won’t feel anything because your skin has too much resistance for 12V to meaningfuly pass through. The only danger a 12V battery poses is if you short it with a piece of metal then that metal will get very hot and often hot enough to melt or explode both itself and/or the battery. But as far as torture goes a car battery is a very round about way to heat up a chunk of metal when you could just use a torch or something.
Over the top descriptions of torture between an alleged soldier and his mother that seem almost scripted, published by the Ukraine military. I’m going to call this a maybe at best.
In time of war you’d do best to question news when it’s reported only by one of the sides and not by an independent source. Maybe it’s true, but militaries don’t value truth during war.
“Almost every single one of the Ukrainian POWs we interviewed described how Russian servicepersons or officials tortured them during their captivity, using repeated beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, prolonged stress positions and mock execution. Over half of them were subjected to sexual violence,” said Danielle Bell, the head of HRMMU.
Not an Israeli but according to some of our neighbors, we (Russia) haven’t had any reasonable moments either, at least not lasting more than a few months. Pic related
using repeated beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, prolonged stress positions and mock execution. Over half of them were subjected to sexual violence,”
Sooo… basically just how the Russian military treats it’s conscripts in general.
i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re depressed as well. real improvement there. when people google that they want immediate relief, not fucking oh go for a walk every day, no shit. the triviality of the suggestion makes the depression worse because you know it’s going to do nothing the first week besides make you feel sweaty and looked at and alone. like if i’m feeling recovered enough to go walk every day then i’m already feeling good enough that i don’t need to be googling about depression tips. this shit drives me insane.
The trouble with ketamine is that once you reassociate shit’s back to where it was. It can alleviate symptoms and in very serious cases that might be called for but it’s definitely not a cure. Taking drugs to lower a fewer also alleviates symptoms, in serious cases will save lives, but it’s not going to get rid of the bug causing the fewer.
Accept that your brain wants to do something different than what you had planned, thus
Cancel all mid- to long-term appointments and
Use the opportunity of not having that shit distracting you to reinforce good moment-to-moment habits. Like taking a walk today, because you can use the opportunity to buy fresh food today, to make a nice meal today, because that’s a good idea you can enjoy today while the back of your mind does its thing, which is not something you can do anything about in particular so stop worrying. And you probably don’t want to go shopping in pyjamas without taking a shower so that’s also dealt with. And with that,
You have a way to set a minimum standard for yourself that will keep you away from an unproductive downward spiral and keep depression what it’s supposed to be, and that’s a fever to sweat out shitty ideas, concepts, and habits, none of which, let’s be honest, involve good food and a good shower. That’s not shitty shit you dislike.
The tl;dr is that depression doesn’t mean you need to suffer or anything. Unless you insist on clinging to the to be sweated out stuff, that is. The downregulating of vigour is global, yes, necessary to starve the BS, but if you don’t get your underwear in a twist over longer-term stuff your everyday might very well turn out to simply be laid back.
…OTOH yeah if this is your first time and you don’t have either a natural knack for it or the wherewithal to be spontaneously gullible enough to believe me, good luck.
Also clinical depression as in “my body just can’t produce the right neurotransmitters, physiologically” is a completely different beast. Also you might be depressive and not know it especially if you’re male because the usually quoted symptom set is female-typical.
You’ve laid out your personal depression cure to someone stating that reading about other people’s depression cures is incredibly frustrating when you’re actually depressed.
It’s great that you’ve found a plan that works for you, but don’t minimise everyone else’s suffering by proposing your own therapy.
In most cases the best thing you can do to help is to try to understand how someone is feeling.
You’ve laid out your personal depression cure to someone stating that reading about other people’s depression cures is incredibly frustrating when you’re actually depressed.
That’s not what the complaint was about. The complaint was about the generic drivel. The population-based “We observed 1000 patients and those that did these things got better” stuff that ignores why those people ended up doing those things, ignorance of the underlying dynamics which also conveniently fits a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative. The kind of stuff that ignores what people are going through. Ignores which agency exists, and which not.
Read what I wrote not as a plan “though shall get up at 6 and go on a brisk walk”, that’s BS and not what I wrote. Read it as an understanding of how things work dressed up as a plan. Going out and cooking food? Just an example, apply your own judgement of what’s good and proper for you moment to moment. You can read past the concrete examples, I believe in you.
In most cases the best thing you can do to help is to try to understand how someone is feeling.
The trick is to understand why you’re in that situation, what your grander self is doing, or at least trust it enough to ride along. Stop second-guessing the path you’re on and walk it, instead. You don’t really have a choice of path, but you do have a choice of footwear.
Or, differently put: What’s more important, understanding a feeling or where it’s coming from? Why it’s there? What it’s doing? What is its purpose? …what are the options? Knowing all this, many feelings will be more fleeting that you might think.
There’s an old Discorian parable, and actually read it it’s not the one you think it is:
I dreamed that I was walking down the beach with the Goddess. And I looked back and saw footprints in the sand.
But sometimes there were two pairs of footprints, and sometimes there was only one. And the times when there was only one pair of footprints, those were my times of greatest trouble.
So I asked the Goddess, “Why, in my greatest need, did you abandon me?”
She replied, “I never left you. Those were the times when we both hopped on one foot.”
And lo, I was really embarassed for bothering Her with such a stupid question.
I seem to be speaking Klingon. I never told anyone to “un-depress” themselves. Quite the contrary, I’m talking about the necessity to accept that it’ll be the path you’re walking on for, potentially, quite a while. All I’m telling you is that that path doesn’t have to be miserable, or a downward spiral.
Make a distinction between these two scenarios: One, someone has a fever. They get told “stop having a fever, lower your temperature, then you’ll be fine”. Second, same kind of fever, they get told “Accept that you have a fever. Make sure to drink enough and to make yourself otherwise comfortable in the moment. Ignore the idiot with the ‘un-fever yourself’ talk”.
again, this is all long term executive function that you are generally incapable of performing or even contemplating when depressed. maybe you can protestant-work-ethic yourself out of depression but that doesn’t mean everyone can. oh yeah lemme just keep being fucking harsh with myself, that’s the ticket.
what i want to hear is
take a bath
have chamomile tea, it binds to your GABA receptors
go outside to breath the fresh air and look at the moon
etc
simple, actionable things that don’t have barely-hidden contempt or disinterest behind them
I’m sorry what’s long-term executive function about cancelling your appointments? What’s harsh about it?
What about “take a bath” and “go outside to breathe” is less protestant-work-ethic than what I was saying?
The simple, actionable things are, precisely, the simple, actionable things. “Breathe in the fresh air” is not actionable when living in a city. “Sit on a bench and people-watch” is not actionable in the countryside. You know much better where you live, what simple things you could do right now. The point is not about the precise action, it’s about that it’s simple and actionable thus you should do it. Also, to a large degree, that it’s your idea, something you want.
when people google that they want immediate relief, not fucking oh go for a walk every day,
The problem is that there is no immediate relief that isn’t either a) suicide, or b) won’t make things worse in the long run. Even something like ECT doesn’t work instantly; it takes several treatments. Transcranial magnetic stimulation seems promising, but it’s not a frontline treatment. The generic shit is the stuff that actually works in the long run, things like getting therapy, exercising, going outside more, interacting with people in a positive way, and so on. “Self care”–isolating and doing easy, comfortable things–will make things worse in the long run.
i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…
Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.
There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.
There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.
There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.
I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.
Edit: and the shittification of the internet has all been Google’s doing. The need for sites to get higher up in Google’s PageRank™ or be forever invisible has absolutely ruined it. The torrent of garbage now needed to ensure that various algorithms favour your content has fucked it for everyone. Good job, Google.
I feel like the user’s suggestion of “jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge” would be more impactful in that case, you know, to awaken your survival instincts, which prevents depression.
But on the off chance that someone actually goes and jumps off, a professional would probably not give that advice.
No, no, no; if you work really hard and really apply yourself, you too can become a titan of industry and make your billions of dollars. If you aren’t at least a millionaire, it’s because you are just too dumb and lazy to succeed. Go back to school, work longer hours, read more books, get better ideas. In the meantime, I’m hungry, flip my burger faster, and what do you mean you want more than $7.25/hour, it’s not like this is a real job.
These are a dead giveaway that someone speaks English as a second language. You can tell right away because they never mix them up. Native speakers use whatever they’re hearts desire.
Hah, funny. As a non-native speaker I never mix them up as I am very conscious of it when I’m writing. I’m also often translating from French in my mind to English on “paper” which helps differentiate all of them since they don’t sound the same in French.
Edit: Is that a thing though? I really don’t think I do.
Edit 2: Took a second to think about it and yeah I guess because actuellement translates to currently it could be mixed up but I don’t think I have or have I ever heard anyone mix those two up. I also speak English since I’m like 5 years old though so maybe I would have at some point but I can’t say I do now.
Being a German, my fellow countrymen have the same problem as the French, I hear the mixup a lot in my work environment :) We use “aktuell” for currently. But yeah, I have not spoken English from quite such an early age as you, but that particular mistake I also don’t make. I feel it’s the kind of mistake that people make for whom learning the language was a “necessary evil” / chore in order to succeed professionally or accomplish some other goal. People who actually enjoy learning a language will not keep repeating the same mistake if they can regularly witness native speakers using a word differently.
I feel it’s the kind of mistake that people make for whom learning the language was a “necessary evil” / chore in order to succeed professionally
Ahhh yeah that would make sense, I do love languages and have always found them fun. I also grew up in a bilingual area. My little village is French but most surrounding towns/cities are English speaking and was immersed in it from a very young age. I actually learned English mostly to argue with the kid next door who only spoke English (and from a whole lot of American English TV.)
True, my pet-peeve as an ESL speaker is that native speakers write it’s instead of its all the time. They could make it right and save one character, but nope.
As a native speaker who has to write grammatically correct, professional communications all day, it drives me crazy other native speakers can’t be bothered.
I’m pretty particular about my there, their, and they’re but what you described happens to me all the time. My phone defaults to using “it’s” and, unlike many other scenarios, I don’t feel like correcting that one is worth the time it takes to do so.
My phone is smart enough now that it corrects it depending on the context. Not always but most of the time, like if it write “it’s his aunt” it does it automatically and also if I write “my life has had its struggles” it writes it’s at first and then corrects it once I finish the next word
As a non native speaker I almost always type “it’s” out before my brain autocorrect reminds me “that means ‘it is’” and then I have to correct it to “its” - it’s kinda counter-intuitive…
The apostrophe is also used for possession. For example, the DoJ’s lawsuit against Apple was filed Thursday morning or Adrian’s baseball went missing. It’s only backwards for its.
The confusing part of “it’s” vs “its” is that “its” is a pronoun, and therefore its possessive doesn’t use the apostrophe, where as you use one with possessive nouns. So usually when you are writing you’re thinking about the possessive relationship, not so much about whether you are using a pronoun to describe your subject.
“My Lemmy account’s username”
“Its username”
It’s funny because my phone defaults to adding the apostrophe when I just type “its” but if I follow it with a noun (or adjective) it automatically goes back and removes it.
A lot of people would get “its” wrong anyway, but my autocorrect on my phone changes it basically every single time. Including just now. I sometimes don’t catch it, other times I don’t feel like fighting a touch screen to go back and fix it. Having said all that, it’s a pet peeve of mine too lol
The one that really kills me is the apostrophe for plural stuff. My boss did a PowerPoint the other day with fuckin apostrophes all over the place. It’s not that hard.
Well, native speakers are the ones that have decide what’s the future of the language. Maybe you guys think that each “form” holds irrelevant or redundant information and in a few decades you fuse them all into one.
Written and spoken language is usually not 100% the same language. And this is an error that comes up when you screw up converting homophone words of your spoken mother tongue into written language.
I knew the difference between the multiple you’s when I just started learning English and was around the A2 level, but when I read someone write “you’re not your” to another person I thought your was not an actual word, so I used you’re all the time, even for some freelance translation jobs (lol). It’s really weird that someone who speaks English all the time mixes these things up, while a beginner knows all about these.
Most of us without meaningful capital are either forced to do it in practice with our labor, or be cast out to serve the owners in another way: as capitalist scarecrows. Our homeless exist on purpose, it wouldn’t be that expensive to provide minimal shelter. They exist to die slowly and publicly of exposure, and constant police capital defense force harassment, to terrify the capital batteries into continuing to show up to their jobs to produce value for their owners.
One way or another, those without capital are forced to serve the owners. Nothing “voluntary” about modern market capitalism, short of slitting one’s own throat.
You will serve the owner’s insatiable greed directly, or you will serve as an example and threat to the others.
Our homeless exist on purpose, it wouldn’t be that expensive to provide minimal shelter.
This is literally the truth. The state of California spent billions on serving the homeless over the past several years, and studies found that it would have been cheaper to simply pay their rent. At market rates.
“But I go to work so it isn’t faiiiiiiir if they don’t die in the gutter!”
-Someone struggling to make rent/mortgage, and having 95% of the value they produce extracted to run up the ego scores of our con-men owners.
They propagandize us through the media they own, and the curriculum they influence, to look down and to the side for who to blame, because our benevolent job creators would never work against us, would they? It’s in-fucking-sane.
It's ironic because the cost of labor would be cheaper if the economic conditions that cause homelessness didn't exist. I wouldn't have to demand a six-digit salary if I could maintain my standard of living on five digits.
our society just rewards capitalism. it’s a simple economics problem, really. same product being made with fewer people to pay means company stock value goes up. if we really want to change, we need to flip that model over or heavily regulate it. things like increased hiring, pay raises, and societal contribution should be things that dictate the worth of a company to society, but we don’t speculate on stocks based on non monetary things like that. we just care about the bottom line at the end of the day…
And often, the people who laugh at “boomers” saying shit like “What global warming?” in weather events like this, don’t acknowledge or comprehend they’re doing the same damn thing, from the opposite perspective.
It’s a slot on a camera that you can use to attach accessories, like a microphone or flash. A hot shoe provides power to the accessory, a cold shoe does not.
Its a non-powered version of a hot shoe, both of which are the thing you use to mount an external flash that’s on the top of a lot of (all?) full sized cameras.
Social security has been 10-15 years away from being insolvent for 80 years. It will always be 10-15 years away from being insolvent because of the way it’s calculated.
When the CBO or whoever scores it they can predict certain things like the number of recipients, the size of their payments, and inflation. They aren’t allowed to take into account things that Congress may (but definitely will) do in the future, like raising the cap on social security taxes roughly with inflation. It went up from $160200 in 2023 to $168600 in 2024. This is a rare bipartisan, uncontroversial thing. Congress almost always follows the SSA recommendation exactly.
It would be more accurate to say “if the social security cap stays at $168600 for 10 years, social security will be insolvent.”
The people pushing this bullshit know it’s bullshit. They do it to make people think they’ll never get social security so they can get enough voters on board with killing it, like they’ve been trying to do for 88 years.
They’ve been saying that my entire life, my dad’s entire life, and when my dad was my age, my grandfather would tell him he’s heard the same things his entire life going back to the 40s.
For a couple decades the disingenuous doom -and-gloomers told us no way could social security ever deal with the baby boomers. All through the 80s and 90s they told us we might as well privatize it or kill it all together. The only time wall street shut up about it was when they were too busy jerking off to the thought of getting their hands on that money. Well, the youngest of the boomers turn 60 in '24, they’re almost all in and the end times keep getting pushed back, from the 80s to the 90s to the 00s to the 10s to the 20s and now 2035. It’s like a doomsday cult that keeps pushing the date when the apocalypse doesn’t arrive at the appointed time.
You’ll have to excuse me for not getting worked up over the 40th new year I’ve heard for the sky falling.
And for what it’s worth, managing the COLAs, the cap, the percentages, and anything else the SSA has done throughout it’s existence isn’t “tomfoolery,” it’s accounting. And damn good accounting so far. The SSA being such a well run government institution probably makes republicans hate them almost as much as the tax itself.
That exact comment would be at home in a letter to the editor in response to an article in any newspaper, in any year, for the past 80 years. And on any discussion board from the earliest days of the internet until now.
I’m not going to make any assumptions about your age or the length of time you’ve paid attention to these issues, but if it’s only been a decade or so, you should start seeing the pattern soon. It won’t even be at the last minute, it’ll just keep slowly moving out so it’s always 10-15 years away. Don’t let them scare you into helping them do what they’ve been trying for 88 years.
This program has kept a lot of elderly and disabled people out of poverty. Don’t let them take it.
People here making 90s talking points like they’re still relevant in this political climate. Have you seen the people Republicans vote for? Have you seen this Supreme Court?
Have you not been paying attention to what the Fed has been doing? Pardon my language but shoving cash up my asshole earns more than 1% these days.
In 2022, before most of the rate hikes, the trust fund earned $66.4 billion. This year’s high, and hopefully very temporary, interest rates aside, it’ll usually be around 2.5-3%.
I’m not sure what you think loss leading means or why you’re using it here, but governments storing reserve money earmarked for a specific purpose in their own bonds isn’t unusual or a bad thing. Should they stuff it under a mattress earning 0%? Should they risk it in the markets? Unsecured domestic bonds? Foreign bonds?
First of all, me calling myself a Commie is actually superfluous here as evidenced by the Siberian natives that were so damn communist that the USSR couldn’t deal with them.
Secondly, the fact that you use the artificial concept of ownership to describe Kender society, shows that you know nothing of Kender. We own nothing, we don’t understand ownership at all, unless you big folk explain what you mean.
The biggest crime one can commit as a Kender is not having children. That comes because we are afflicted with wanderlust. I’m a perfect example of this having lived in 49/50 states in the US, and planning to “‘retire’” on a ship that I own, but pay for with charter cruises to everywhere else I can get to. I digress.
If you don’t return to Kenderhome by your 60th birthday and have at least two children with your council chosen betrothed, or a romantic partner, then we will dispatch bounty hunters to bring you back, alive, and deposit you in the “palace” of Kenderhome. You are then on house arrest, and not able to leave the grounds. This is possibly the worst possible punishment one could give a Kender, other than solitary confinement, thankfully all your locks are trivial for us to pass through, so no one has ever held a Kender in solitary confinement.
The Kender on the whole are an annoyance to those of you primitive races that understand the concept of ownership, but that’s not our fault. You should learn the concept of belonging.
Edit, I didn’t downvote you.
Edit 2: I’m less than 20 years from having to have podlings, if Krynn has a direct connection to us.
Edit 3: while I have created a Hoopak and a Chappak, IRL, I don’t own them. If you need to borrow the Hoopak, or the Chappak,.or pretty much anything else in my possession, I will happily lend it to you, knowing you’ll give it back to the community as good, or better, than you got it. It’s a real shame I can’t rely on normal humans to do the same.
Edit 4: All Weapons should also be tools and musical instruments.
Edit 5: Yes I’m an angry Kender. We only use money because you force us to. We have/had a society that works so damn well the biggest issue we have is forgetting to have kids. I’m extremely disappointed in the lack of progress, despite the insane amount of wealth that human society has produced.
Apologies, but your specific example is incorrect. The cap on social security taxes is adjusted every year not by act of congress, but by existing law that indexes the cap to inflation. Therefore, it is already baked into the way it is scored and is not ignored.
You are correct that scoring cannot take into account any actions congress may take.
This time is a little different though than history. From 1984-2020, Social Security took in more in revenue than it paid out on benefits. It is now running at a deficit. Since being formed, it has run at a deficit less than 15 total years, and most of them earlier on. The social security trust fund has never been depleted during that time either. Without any changes to law, it will continue to run at a deficit until the late 2030s when the trust fund would be depleted and taxes alone would cover a projected 80% of benefits.
That 80% is why it’s bullshit to your point. There are so many simple, easy ways to solve this and if they do nothing, we could continue to pay out 80% of benefits with no other changes but that’ll never happen. It would be political suicide to literally starve our retired population. My favorite way to address it is removing the cap, but there’s other small adjustments that make a huge difference. Things like changing the inflation adjustment to a similar but lower index, raising the retirement age, raising the tax by less than a percent, means testing, etc … and the thing that pisses me off is the sooner we take one of these actions, the more of the trust fund is preserved, and the impact is so much greater. I don’t like the other solutions and would strongly prefer raising the cap, but I’d take most of them over inaction, depleting the trust fund, and reducing benefits.
I was trying to keep it short and simple by skipping a step but yes, the SSA follows a formula to raise the cap. But anything the executive does must be authorized by Congress, including the current formula which was set in a reauthorization bill back in the 80s (I think, maybe the 70s, apologies, but I’m not able to look it up right now). So far, every time a budget is passed and every few years when the SSA needs to be reauthorized, they’ve left them alone. Despite the occasional bill messing with the SSA getting introduced, they never get out of committee.
As far as the CBO goes I don’t recall ever reading about cap increases in their report summaries on the trust fund. Although I have read their reports on the effect of various proposed changes to the way the cap is calculated. I’ll have to do some more looking when I have the time, but I was definitely under the impression cap increases were in a category the CBO didn’t anticipate future changes to when evaluating the health of the trust fund. I thought normally the COLAs would also fall into this category but that is overridden by them being mandatory spending, as opposed to discretionary, so they have to be taken into account. I’m certainly no expert and wouldn’t be surprised to find out I missed something.
lemmy.world
Top