Something I don’t get, why is it percentage based? I mean, I get it from the waiters perspective. But as a customer? Whether my one plate of food is 20$ or 200$, he did the same thing. Scaling with more items or time spent would seem more appropriate.
Well usually more people means a higher bill, more people is more work. Lots of places even just add gratuity to the bill once a group size is large enough.
But tipping is dumb, and working in the service industry sucks… I have no easy solutions.
There’s an easy one that could be legislated tomorrow by any states.
Raise minimum wages and enforce it throughout ALL workplaces, including wait staff. Nobody should be earning less than a living wage just because they’re restaraunt staff.
Politics is one of those things that’s easy when you say it, but much harder for you to do. But if that’s easy for you to do, then please do it, for all our sakes.
Nobody would work in a restaurant for minimum wage. Full stop. It’s a shit job.
That’s the secret nobody in the industry wants to tell you. They make way more than minimum wage on good nights. You could come away at $25-30/hr on a Friday night.
Minimum wage staff still get tips though. I still tip here now that it’s mandatory they get paid min wage. Overall, means that they make more than before they were earning min wage as well.
it’s a big win. They ge ta living wage doing their jobs and they get bonuses in tips on top of their living wage instead of relying upon it.
Seattle’s minimum wage is $16.28, but most restaurants seem to pay a fair bit more than that. Tipping is still rampant and has not been reduced. I don’t think this solution would work
I think the $20 vs $200 was a per person price. Like, if I order the steak for $50 and you order a grilled cheese sandwich for $8, we both got the same amount and quality of service, why do we tip differently?
Serving a $200 meal requires a lot of knowledge and physical skill that the server down at Chili’s probably doesn’t have. The kind of restaurant that sells a $200 meal also has a larger support staff that must be given a percentage of the server’s tip
But, a more expensive meal comes with higher service standards. More attentive, but not intrusive. More knowledgeable about the menu. More readiness to make adjustments based on customer need.
So in that situation you are asking for a more experienced, or more skillfully employee, and that costs more.
I think you’re looking for the difference between fine dining and nouvelle cuisine / haute cuisine. Think of it like the difference between a nice steakhouse where the server essentially takes your order and gives you a plate, and one of those Instagram dinners where they serve your dessert in hollow chocolate balls and serving is a more involved and delicate process because of the nature of the food you’re serving
You’re not wrong, that’s the logic behind it. It’s not like you’re defending it so idk why you’re getting down voted! What you also didn’t mention is that at these restaurants is that it is a much more leisurely meal and experience, so there isn’t high table turnover which lessens the tips. I suspect they also have smaller sections.
Everything is probably a la carte. You gotta know what is in every dish, what pairs with it from appetizers to sides to wine to dessert. You don’t walk out and ask “who had the cheeseburger?” because the expectation on the experience is higher. You’re controlling the timing at the table as well. When do you fire the main after they get the appetizer? Salad? Bread? Drinks? Which SIDE of the person do you give or remove plates? And yeah you gotta tip the bartender, the bussers, the expediters sometimes, and who knows who else.
It is still horseshit, but it’s not as easy as dropping a rib basket on the table.
Be mad about the tip line on the sandwich shop menu, be mad about 20% tip on the burger joint that has a modern industrial interior and a $22 burger, don’t be mad about paying out the Friday Saturday night white tablecloth servers with a tough fucking job of conducting your whole anniversary meal. You get to have a good experience once a year, they’ve got 15 other once a year meals to solve and it’s just a regular dinner shift.
I’d say you also shouldn’t be made at the server at the $22 burger place, because they’re also working hard and probably covering more tables. I used to get mad about tipping for counter service because I assumed that they were making standard minimum wage, but then I found out one of my favorite cafes was paying $5 an hour (a dollar less than tipped minimum in my state). Point is, don’t get mad at anyone but the National Restaurant Association, they’re fighting to make sure you’re subsidizing your servers wage.
Because it’s a con, and if it were a flat rate, people would see it for the con it is. By making it a percentage of sales, you can delude people in to believing they’re going to make more in tips than they would on an hourly rate.
Sometimes that’s true, for the vast majority of servers it isn’t.
I see it as a sneaky incentive from management for waiters to upsell you on more sides, drinks and desserts.
Since the more marked up extras a waiter/waitress can fool people into getting, the better tip they can hope to earn at the end because of the %-based expectation.
Not every meal in a “$x/plate” restaurant is gonna cost the same though. It’s not hard to reach a disparity between the cheapest and most expensive reasonable meal (similar sizes) of around a factor of 2 at many restaurants.
Why is the server getting twice the tip if I order the most expensive plate and dessert vs cheapest plate and dessert?
Make what right? They’re just bringing it to my table. If the food or service sucks I’m also told that you should tip anyway, so it seems like tipping isn’t based on quality (and really, it isn’t).
$20 is like, one entree, maybe a beverage at a cheap restaurant. $200 is probably closer to 3 entrees, 2 or 3 cocktails and an app at a moderately priced restaurant. You’re crazy if you think the amount of work for those two orders (putting them into the bar/kitchen, making sure they come out correct, running them, all while juggling your other tables) is equal. I also want tipping culture to end, but the price tag scales pretty well with the amount of work being done.
I’d say that varies more regionally than anything else. I live in a major northeastern city, and you could barely feed 1 person for $20, even at cheap chain restaurants. Drive 2 hours away and things get a lot more affordable, not only for food prices but also rent. In that respect, 20% actually scales with cost of living as well.
It mostly bothers me when I just order 1 entree and a water. At one place that might cost $10, and at another place it might cost $30, and all the wait staff did was carry a plate from the kitchen to me in both cases.
It doesn’t seem fair that the wait staff at the more expensive place gets tipped more than the less expensive place just because of an arbitrary custom.
The extra cost of the expensive meal is mostly due to ingredients, the cooking process, the location, and maaay slightly more complicated table setting.
Yeah, I agree, but if you don’t like it, take it up with the National Restaurant Association. They spend millions every year lobbying against ending the tipped wage.
Yeah, I know. As is said, I want tipping culture to end. We’ve created a system where the customer pays for servers salary by the job instead of the restaurant paying by the hour. I’m saying that running a $200 order is more work than running a $20 order, just like bagging $200 worth of groceries is more work than bagging $20 worth of groceries. A percentage tip does roughly reflect the amount of work being done, but acknowledging that isn’t an endorsement of tipping culture.
If you’re getting the same level of service at a restaurant serving $200/plate meals as you are at TGI Fridays, either you’re being ripped off of your local Fridays has amazing servers.
I mean if you have a functioning phone and you felt you were in danger, would you sit around waiting for someone to call you?
Our guy was obviously having a merry old time out hiking, and ignoring unknown numbers. Then only found out later someone else was freaked out about him being lost.
But a story like that isn’t going to get shared as a facebook meme…
This is like when I was 11 and my family went hiking up a mountain in Yellowstone. My young cousin and I thought my brother was ahead of us on the trail so we hurried up trying to catch up to him. We were passing many hikers on a busy trail and being safe.
An hour later my brother comes running up behind us saying everyone is looking for us! Apparently the park rangers had been mobilized to search for us, the missing children, and when we got down the mountain an hour or more later our families were down there in tears fearing we had fallen off the mountain or something.
Point being, it’s totally possible for everyone to think you’re lost and in danger when you are fine and know exactly where you are.
Yes it was annoying how our families kept bringing up how we “got lost on the mountain” during the trip and we kept having to remind them that we weren’t lost, just hiking!
In my economics 101 gen ed course back in college, I remember a story about some society somewhere that used boulders as currency. But they were such a pain to lug around that often times they wouldn’t move them. They’d just keep track of who owned which boulders. “I’ll give you one boulder for a cow.” “Ok, it’s a deal.” “Cool, cool. The boulder over in so-and-so’s field is your now. Pleasure doing business with you.”
There was even a case where someone tried to transport a boulder across a lake but the boat sank midway and the boulder ended up on the lakebed under many feet of water. But they kept exchanging the boulder as currency for goods and services.
I’m imagining a dystopian Idiocracy-like future where Bitcoin has deleted itself, but people still trade seed phrases on slips of paper or pressed into metal plates with a “there’s 7 whole Bitcoins in this wallet. Trust me bro.”
The Triganic Pu is a unit of galactic currency, with an exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu. This is simple enough, but, since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
Funny, I was thinking about the point where the Golgafrinchams on Earth adopted the leaf as currency and then burned down all the forests to control inflation.
“I’ll give you one boulder for a cow.” “Ok, it’s a deal.” “Cool, cool. The boulder over in so-and-so’s field is your now. Pleasure doing business with you.”
This is how gold standard currencies work (or used to work). Most western currencies like the US dollar used to be permanently pegged to a specific value of gold kept in national treasuries (the Bretton-Woods system), and the dollar was meant to be redeemable for this gold. But because of the impracticality of handling and storing actual physical metals actual trade was almost never handled in gold.
In reality, the US financial system already kind of runs like your “dystopian future”, and has done so since 1971. There is no inherent value to a US dollar besides the federal government saying “trust me bro”.
The fact that people give money to the US, or any country, for essentially an IOU slip of paper promising to pay you back with interest is so weird.
Speaking of gold reminds me of this sci-fi book where aliens come to earth and cause damage. They ask how they can make things right and are explained gold and the monetary system. They go oh, we can totally filter gold from the oceans and pay you back in tons of gold per day. This caused panic as the huge influx would crash the system. I think it was an asimov short story.
IDK is it really, to me pegging the value to some arbitrary piece of metal seems weirder. If we actually traded real gold and the government decided “hey no, that doesn’t count” you’d be forced to give it back anyway, and they could also force you to do it for no gold. Monetary value only ever had one real source and that’s the person with sufficient force to enforce the trade, which in any stable country is the government.
Funnily enough about that “forced to give back real gold used for trade”, the US kinda did that at one point, making it for a time illegal to possess more than a certain amount of gold and requiring people give anything over that amount to the government for a set price.
Oh, it’s so much weirder than that. When you take a loan, the bank just creates the money based on a percentage of their deposits. Then, they can count that deposit as part of their “real” money. They now have a debt, which does not count against their “real” money
They can then package the loans together, and sell those. This is again “real” money, so can be deposited and used to give out more loans.
But wait! You’re probably thinking “that’s way too simple, let’s run statistics on this!” You’d be right, welcome to the first layer of modern banking.
What happens if a bunch of people can’t repay? Then the bank hides whatever money they can before admitting they can’t make their payments, collapses, and a federal banking system takes over to repackage the assets and loans to another bank (usually without the customers noticing). Or the government writes you a bailout check.
You might think “wait, my constitution says who can print money, why do we have to take loans?” Because they haven’t declassified what happened to the last US president who thought private banks probably shouldn’t be given the monopoly to print money.
What happens if this happens all at once? Well that’s the government’s problem. They can devalue their currency by printing more money or take a loan from the world bank.
Then, you get a bank official that gets to take over your country’s finances. Depending how much the US likes you and how hard you bend over, either you get austerity and they sell off your economic future for a bit more cash now, and you get milked for tax dollars indefinitely, or they cut you a deal, and they give you a way out eventually if you do everything they say.
You might think you could just let the banks fail, but no. That’s how you get an injection of freedom.
You might think about pinning the printing of money to exchange rates or to tax income and managing the banking system socially (since the risk is socialized, why let someone take the profits?), but no. That’s how you get an injection of freedom, comrade.
You should probably stop thinking about other systems before you look a little low on freedom, this is how banking and money work.
Their being wrong is pretty self-evident with even the most cursory of Google.
I’m not the person arguing in favor of wild climbs, but rather the person suggesting that those arguments have no proof, and don’t match the accepted reality. The more wild the claim, the stronger the necessary proof.
I was being glib, because I find our monetary system so ridiculous I have to embrace absurdity or it’s upsetting
Obviously the JFK conspiracy is light on evidence, but the entire situation is definitely a conspiracy - something happened, it could’ve been geopolitical or the people keeping tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald really messed up. His story alone is pretty crazy… But anyways, every time I dive into it I find myself leaning more towards it being related to his banking statements than the alternatives, but who knows.
The foreign interventions are mostly declassified though, they’re an absurd read. It wasn’t always the US, but it was always one of the 5 eyes who got involved when alternate systems started to gain traction.
The IMF/World bank piece wasn’t even exaggerated though. Obviously they make it sound a lot more innocent, but I don’t think I even exaggerated this - it’s a legitimate conspiracy working out in the open. It’s truly horrifying. I didn’t even know how it worked until I took an install in a relatively rich Caribbean country (aka big tourist Island with a large “white” population).
It was a tiny contract - I took it to help someone out and see somewhere beautiful, couldn’t have been more than $15k all together - literal hobbiest level gear. It’s not working and I’ve only got a day left to make it work (at least it turns out it wasn’t my fault), and this dude comes up with a big camera like he owns the place, says he’s from the world bank, and starts “politely” asking me to pose for the camera and do an interview about how this will help the country. I have no idea how to answer, I’m sunburnt, this isn’t really my field, and after seeing the computer center has all the computers on dirty blocks because it floods, I genuinely doubt this would be helpful in any situation… It’s basically a backup for if their Internet goes down, but in that case the place is probably flooded anyways
Turns out, the country was getting a pretty big uptick in income from tourism, so the world bank “offered” to fund a bunch of (from my perspective at least) unhelpful infrastructure projects. They’d had decades of austerity before that, their roads were worn out, the power grid was janky, obviously there was seasonal flooding in important places, and although tourism was their main income they didn’t have transportation or hotels… Just bed and breakfasts and a dude I could arrange to give me a ride in the mornings.
So instead of fixing anything critical, they had some plan to build a road straight across the mountain range, with some crazy long tunnel for an insane price and a multi-year time frame.
People were pissed. Their economy was basically government funding allocated by the IMF “recommendations”, which come with the stick of “we’ll pull out and downgrade your credit if you don’t pass this”, and people hanging around waiting for odd jobs from the people on the government payroll.
So the world bank was doing a bunch of little projects that changed nothing, and covering them like the staged rescue effort videos China loves so much.
This felt very weird to me. Google any 2-3 descriptions of the IMF (just read an and you’ll notice they allude to a lot Investopedia, first result, just read the IMF part carefully, then hit Wikipedia if you want to go down the rabbit hole). It’s pretty dark, it’s stuff you’d think was from a century ago, but it’s actively happening still.
So if anything, I think I undersold the reality of that real life conspiracy.
I’d be genuinely interested to know if I was actually wrong about any of this… I’ve found a lot of post-hock justifications why things are the way they are, but to me, monetary systems seem like layers of justifications for an organization too powerful to call them out on it when they cheat. Debt doesn’t produce value when housing prices go through the roof, when you take on credit card/payday debt, or when you get stuck with medical bills… It seems to me like it only works when you take out a loan for a small business, something that used to be big, but now more and more it creates nothing, expands no capability. It just flows upwards endlessly
I barely got so far as interventions and the IMF. The IMF is not involved in the political aims of the US, so your entire point about “bending over for the US” is absurd. Nothing in either of their descriptions is “dark,” and their interventions have ended total systemic collapse of nations - very notably those of Spain and Greece.
I am generally pro US intervention, especially in opposition to communism.
Between the above and ideas like this:
Debt doesn’t produce value when housing prices go through the roof
Which don’t even correlate, or necessarily even have any actual meaning as-written, it’s fair to say your baseline is grossly misinformed
As a for-instance, this example produces value twice
Yeah, that’s why I gave you some starting links… It’s a complicated topic, and I’d hope you’d at least take a look…I gave my anecdote. It’s not hard to find reputable accounts of them being straight up monsters, and the results speak for themselves… They have not been a good thing for the “third world” no matter how you slice it.
And I didn’t mean the US government, I meant spreading those cheeks for investors to buy up the underdeveloped resources at an extremely low value, and they’re forced to drop export taxes to the ground and maintain the roads from their mines to the port, they miss out on both the money leaving their country (reducing their tax income, because velocity of money is a huge part of taxes, and it’s not bouncing around their country anymore). It’s crippling.
But the alternative is economic warfare, a tool that the IMF has and does use with anyone who doesn’t play ball. They downgrade your currency, lowering the exchange rate. You then have to print more, until you get to balance between hyperinflation and getting cut off from global trade, because now you have to use dollars, and the exchange rate only gets worse (cough Argentina and Venezuela)
But again, this is complicated and I can’t do the necessary reading for you.
I’m more worried about your understanding of value… Friend, I don’t know how to tell you this, but money is symbolic. Categorically.
It is representative of actual value… It’s not the value itself - if money had intrinsic value, you’d just be bartering with commodities. We used gold and silver notes, because they were worth almost nothing themselves… It’s a necessary aspect of money, because if the underlying commodity, say iron ingots, suddenly had a critical shortage and shot way past the value of the notes, you’re back to bartering.
And money isn’t valuable because of intrinsic trust - you have to be able to buy things with it or it’s just paper.
You need actual value, otherwise we could all just print money and be billionaires. When a person or company is able to do a new thing, do more of the old thing, or do the old thing better - that’s value. There’s more of the things people want, or better things to buy, and that justifies more money being introduced into the system.
This is like age of mercantilism economics, this is why money is minted, and they used carved shells, beads, and pretty rocks pretty much everywhere beforehand. The value of money is the value of all the stuff divided by the money in circulation, and the king would hoard and spend to keep things healthy (ideally)
So debt is sort of like negative money. But it’s not really - it’s just the promise you’ll give them more money later. A payday
The amount of things didn’t change - but neither did the amount of money. Let’s go with payday loans since it’s clear cut. These people still have to pay rent, they still have to eat, and the positive money doesn’t melt when it encounters negative money. You introduce money with the debt, people buy the things they had to buy anyways, and maybe they buy a little less… Except we don’t live in a mercantile system, we live in a consumerist system that is transitioning to some sort of unholy techno-fuedalism hellscape.
In consumerism, the amount of money doesn’t matter as much. Velocity does. Velocity generates taxes now that we don’t do straight tithes to the lord, it drives production, increases worker wages, hires more people, pays for r&d. At every stage, things get cheaper, people can buy more, the whole pie grows. I think it’s horrifying, but that’s the value of money - it used to be normal for factory workers to have a vacation house and/or a boat.
They create new things and make a demand for it. Everyone got more stuff, science and technology chugged along fantastically. Basic needs were met, and they made new shit… Value
Then we get to regenomics, the mofo actually convinced people that what we really needed was more inequality.
And here’s the problem… They’re not putting that money into r&d, they’re putting it into gaming the system. Money begets political power begets money. It’s far more lucrative to play with money than to create value
When someone takes a payday loan, where does the value come from? The amount of money is the same… But now it goes to someone not because they created value, but because they had money to lend. The guy paying his mortgage isn’t creating value - the money flows up to bounce around with people who use it like points in a game. You now make someone on the edge just a little closer to producing no value, because homeless people have less subjective value in their life now, because now they get to scramble to balance staying healthy with doing something, and the guy with the money either puts it in the quants, unfair advantage side of the investment markets gatekeep, he invests it into lobbying or media, or he stashes it in his hoard in the Caymans.
You can’t spend a billion dollars on adding value to your life - there’s only so many mansions to buy and so many that yacht a guy can buy before it becomes a chore (2… Boats are a pain). The money doesn’t have velocity, we’ve slashed taxes on hoarding too thanks to neolibs/conservatives.
One guy gets less value for his money, the other guy gets respect from his peers for screwing over a few million poor people on the edge.
Where’s the value? I don’t even agree with these systems of value, but I don’t think even post hock undergrad economics sees value here
I couldnt force myself to read this entire thing because it’s full of very incorrect gems like
They create new things and make a demand for it.
That’s not how demand works at all
The guy paying his mortgage isn’t creating value -
You know these things aren’t up for debate right? Like whether or not value is created is a fact, not an opinion.
Your worldview would be less weird if you understood the actual world . I mean cmon-
This is like age of mercantilism economics, this is why money is minted,
Really?
And money isn’t valuable because of intrinsic trust - you have to be able to buy things with it or it’s just paper.
How stoned were you when you wrote this?
I’ve seen some things on this site man. Some people totally unhinged from reality. This one might take the cake.
Lol Jesus dude I want this cross-stitched and framed
This is like age of mercantilism economics, this is why money is minted, and they used carved shells, beads, and pretty rocks pretty much everywhere beforehand. The value of money is the value of all the stuff divided by the money in circulation, and the king would hoard and spend to keep things healthy (ideally)
… Ok dude, I literally got that from a macroeconomics course.
But you’ve just called me crazy a bunch of times, I left a bunch of tidbits for anyone who sees this later, and you haven’t really made any argument. Maybe something I said will pop into your head later, you’ll crack a book to attempt to disprove it, but I accept I’m not going to educate you today.
But let’s hear from you - there’s one answer I’m really dying to hear.
It’s not weird once you realize that almost nothing has any inherent value if it isn’t food, medicine, ammunition, or fuel.
Gold does not have any inherent value. It has value for the exact same reason money does, only fiat currency isn’t prone to the problems a gold standard causes.
Seriously? You’re that mad at me for telling the truth? For all I know, you’re using bots to downvote me and try to get revenge against me on the internet.
I swear I’ve seen every single company from Netflix to Disney to Spotify to Youtube to Apple doing the same sort of thing in like the past 3 months. This is GROSS.
I can’t wait for their suprised pikachu faces when they put so much friction into using their products that piracy starts eating into their profits. Us nerds are already fed up, and when that happens piracy alternatives grow. That makes it that much easier for the general public to also sail the high seas. I give it 3 years or so before they’re all shocked and crying to congress about the problem they created
I don’t think that piracy will get to a point that it will eat into their profits. Most people want whatever is easiest, and doing the basics of torrenting in a way that doesn’t cause drama with the internet provider and then either using some kind of Jellyfin or continuous streaming setup is far beyond “easy” for the general populace. In order for piracy to get to the public, it would need to be just as simple as streaming through a TV.
Folks predicted that Netflix would see a mass exodus when they cracked down on account sharing and they actually increased accounts instead.
Piracy will definitely continue its upswing, but it is more likely that the majority of people will just watch whatever is available on maybe one or two streaming options or just slowly return to just broadcast TV or even cable. Piracy didn’t kill television when the VCR was invented, and it didn’t kill music when the first iterations of Napster and such first became known. Piracy will always be present, but it has a lot of hurdles before it really makes a dent in corporate bottom lines.
Already is as easy as streaming. There’s a site that I won’t link directly called movie web. Takes 15 seconds to search for what you want to watch and cast to your tv
Nah they’ll put out a bunch of news articles talking about how much money pirates are costing them. If they get enough public support or line the right pockets we might also see Congress crack down on this ‘scourge’ that’s probably totally linked to terrorism somehow and “must be dealt with swiftly.”
Sopa/pipa was the one and only time the American people beat the corporations+Congress. Don’t mess with our circuses is the one thing everyone agrees on.
A lot of these streaming companies are just cable companies who needed to change their business to keep up, but don’t want to change their predatory practices
You see, this impacts them. Never mind that there’s no actual impact, they only want those among them who behave as expected. Also, he got excessive attention due to his attire, which gave him a bigger audience for his political views.
As someone who agrees with his dress style It shows that he’s young and different And the uproar against his style made me interested in him as a person
*Btw this is the first time I’ve heard about it and strictly on first impressions
Those who dismiss him because of his attire would, most likely, not listen to him, regardless. It’s the others, who otherwise would know nothing of this man or his policies, who may be swayed in some way.
I work for the Canadian government. During an all-staff meeting for my department, our Deputy Minister said in front of God and everyone that he figured the carbon emissions were about the same between working from home and commuting to government offices. A couple months later he got promoted to be the Deputy Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada.
The guy has only studied political science… Imagine if they put people with a background actually related to their ministry in place instead…
Fucking hell, he’s been the DM of six different ministries since 2015… No wonder we keep receiving emails telling us a new DM is in charge, it’s a game of musical chair!
Wait until the dumb asses in our country put Pierre Peckerhead in power. He also studied Political Science and then went straight to government. Actually I think he studied IR, but you say Potato, I say Potaato.
No disrespect to people that studied Political Science (I studied Political Science), but people that studied Political Science and then just went straight to government have absolutely no idea what the real world is like. There was a type when I went to school, for example do you remember when you went to elementary school and you saw little Peter and you just knew he was going to grow up to be a cop? You just knew, like there’s a certain personality type that you can absolutely predict their future profession, right? Well same thing, there were a few ding dongs that I was forced to suffer through my University days, none of which have disappointed my predictions in that they all work in government, and they are all insufferable knobs who wouldn’t know an honest days work if it kicked them in the ass.
Microsoft threatened me with $140 to reactivate windows because I changed my motherboard, and since this is my 2nd time doing so without reinstalling windows, I can no longer do so for free. I just typed 2 lines into powershell and then it became activated.
At risk of sounding like an insufferable individual, I’ve completely had my fill of Microsoft. I’ll have to still use it at work, but I’m transitioning everything into Linux.
What finally made me make this decision is when I read about Microsoft’s vision to make the Windows OS completely cloud-based.
I’ve also had to fight with Windows 10 so much just not to be redirected into Edge, show me unwanted promotions, or, worst of all, restart my machine without my deliberate consent and in spite of making registry edits (If I leave my computer on overnight, there’s a reason, I don’t care if it’s “inactive hours” or whatever they want to call it.)
Whatever I miss out on by using Linux just isn’t worth the hassle anymore.
The first device I installed Linux on is an old gaming laptop that was so slow that I almost disposed of it. It’s like a new machine now. I’m not sure why, but it just never ran well with Windows for some reason.
i joined dxcomplex because it was the smallest instance i was confident wouldn’t fold (and i liked the name);
then it folded so i joined .world because it was the smallest instance i was confident wouldn’t fold (and i liked the name);
then it got massive so i joined lemm.ee because it was the smallest instance i was confident wouldn’t fold (and i liked the name)
yeah you’re right, but i’m not (just) being funny when i said that - lemmy.world had only just started when i joined (10 days), still had the old (much nicer) icon and no banner, etc. it had 188 users / month, compared to .ml’s (at the time) 1.8k and lemm.ee’s (current, according to the above infographic) 3.7k…
actually i almost went for sdf instead of l.ee. the reason i didn’t was that it seems almost too good to be true? i see so many sites around that proclaim they’re hosted on sdf, the biggest text on their homepage says “create a free account” and yet there isn’t a donate button
i realise there’s one on their lemmy instance, and i might choose them if l.ee does fold, but i felt like i was taking advantage of something meant for others
I don’t understand how after all these years Steam doesn’t have more granular control over what games / activity you show to the world. Why can I just hide some games?
I prefer it this way. Having to hide all games provides a chance for introspection about the finite amount of time we get in our lives and wether or not tentacle Anime kitten girls are the company in which we want to spend it
Steam recently updated to make it way easier to switch between accounts. It used to be you had to authenticate every time, which was a pain with Steam Guard. Now there’s a Change Account function which won’t invalidate your authentication token though it does seem to sign you out until you switch back.
I use that to ensure I’m not advertising certain games to the world.
I mean, that’s a good one. But the problem for me is that I already have a few special games, and even without playing them they would show up on my profile if I ever set it to visible.
I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that spending more debt than every government before them every single time for decades is austerity. They spent more than all the money constantly. Some austerity would have actually helped but they didn't do that.
You're rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. You get into some pretty absurd taxation levels, you just won't get the sort of revenue that you need to balance a budget that is so much spending.
And the worst part is, the government's already taxing you for stuff that you should just get. The United States spends more public money on health care than most countries, as much money on health care as some single payer nations. Everyone seems to think that there needs to be more money, but there doesn't. The money is there. It's just not being used properly. In any other country on the planet that amount of money should result in universal healthcare. Instead, the government program is run so incompetently that every family needs to spend absurd amounts of money on Private health care.
This just seems to be the way that the US government works. They take the money to do a thing, then they just don't do the thing. That is an austerity, it's incompetence.
That’s exactly the neoliberal agenda: austerity is spending less for workers and public services, and more to help companies so that growth can come back and make earth a paradise free of socialism.
Austerity has nothing to do with spending less. It’s all about taking the money from the poor to give it to the rich.
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