This one, every time. Imagine buying a product or service for an agreed price, and then being guilt-tripped into having to pay 20% or more on top because the owners don’t pay their staff enough salary to survive on. It should be fucking illegal. Pay your staff a proper salary and charge your clients the price you published on your menu/price-list etc. Running a business isn’t a god-given right, and if you can’t do it with fucking your employees over, then you’re not capable of running a business period, and you should fuck off and let someone who is capable, and who isn’t an empathy vacuum have a go.
Well, luggage is weight, and weight means more fuel burned. That’s not the scam.
The scam is advertising your plane ticket as $20 cheaper than the competition with luggage included, and then make you pay $30 for the luggage at checkout.
Traditionally, airlines would not charge for the first two pieces of checked luggage unless they exceeded weight limitation. But in February of 2008, United Airlines began charging $25 for the second checked bag. In July of that year, US Airways (LCC, Fortune 500) started charging $15 for the first checked bag
Eh, no, surely not. Pool the risk and only pay for your share of the risk. Somebody takes some risk in that, because statistics don’t always pan out, even at large, so the risk taker gets a return. Literally couldn’t be further from a “scam” - it’s one of the few amazing upsides to using money instead of bartering.
Ah right. Yeah US healthcare is utterly fucked. I’m very happy to live in a place with decent public healthcare, even if the local government is trying to screw it over.
Car centric cities. Cities can and should be designed for people, keeping cars mostly out. The result is beautiful cities designed for people that make governments lots of money but the car companies will be earning a little less, ooffff
Make cities walkable, create actual safe roads for bikes, create 15 minute cities.
Public transport is unacceptably slow and/or prohibitively expensive in suburbs. It may work well in densely-packed cities, but that requires you to live in a densely-packed city, and that’s straight-up dystopian in my book.
If you live in the suburbs and commute into a major city then traffic going into said city is also unbearably slow. But to quickly counter this point, millions of people commute using the NYC suburban spurs for metro north, and south and I can assure you the desnity falls of a cliff as soon as you pass the NYC border.
Likewise there are plenty of alternatives even for suburbs involving things like park and rides and train stations with garages that can help funnel people into roads and on public networks. Ideally a good station should be centralized in the town and but walkable(Ive seen some NYC train stations literally be a random parkinglot in the woods and then there’s GoTransit in toronto) but as it will take a long time to right the ship I think making sure theres spots to park your car is important too.
Moving forwards though there should be improvements in zoning law to help right the ship when it comes to car-centric american infrastructure and urban planning.
The frustrating thing is decent density doesnt mean high rises and big city concrete jungle. There are tons of east coast and midwestern neighborhoods that are mostly single family homes on lots, with some multifamily and low rise apartments mixed in on tree lined streets near parks and shopping areas that have densities of more than 11,000 people per sqmi.
The problem with multi-family housing is that it’s ripe for abuse by building managers. Unless you own the entire building you live in and the entire plot of land it sits on, you don’t own anything, and your home can be taken from you at will without meaningful recourse.
I gather this isn’t an issue in Europe, where people have actual protections under the law, but as long as real estate in America remains the Wild West, living in single-family housing is and will remain an absolutely necessary act of self-defense.
Mixed zoning would be good, though. Being able to walk to at least a convenience store would be, well, convenient. If the prices there aren’t ludicrously high, anyway, which is a serious problem with convenience stores today.
10s of Millions of people in the united states live in multifamily housing. You’re responding to concepts like multifamily housing and public transit as if these are abstracts that huge numbers of americans rely on. There are plenty of areas with bad infrastructure today for this, but thats all the more reason to improve. More missing middle density housing is important to make housing more affordable and improve density and supply.
We can certainly use better and actual proper public housing options like in places like the netherlands, and better renter protections to keep a landlord from upping your rent too much, but thats all the more reason to push forwards.
10s of Millions of people in the united states live in multifamily housing.
And every last one of them is made to abide by unnecessary and cruel rules, like prohibiting the use of air conditioners because they change the exterior appearance of the building. Renters are also getting fleeced like sheep and regularly evicted to make room for richer tenants.
Building more non-single-family housing will only exacerbate this problem, not solve it.
We can certainly use better and actual proper public housing options like in places like the netherlands, and better renter protections to keep a landlord from upping your rent too much, but thats all the more reason to push forwards.
No, it’s not. Those protections have to happen first, and in this country, they never will.
Yeah, park and ride, bike and ride, complete public transit, or even driving on less crowded highways to cities with more available parking because other people chose other modes.
Ultimately how anyone would commute depends on their own personal factors and what’s available. In the future we’ll have more multimodal transport and that should make things nicer for everyone.
It’s funny people always act like it’s impossible for this to work when millions of people do it to NYC from as far north as Dutches county, way down long island, and into Connecticut. Millions more also drive sure enough, but suburban trains are viable the problem is they just dont exist or when they do have poor schedules.
True, I could solve that problem. I have another problem, though: I live in a small apartment, I’m not allowed to store anything on the patio, and storing a bike just about anywhere else would get it stolen, so…where would I put a bike?
Well I’d say it’s easier to store a bike than it is to store a car. Where exactly, I don’t know but buy a good lock. A good lock will easily set you back 100-200 dollars but they’re worth it.
On where to store the bike at the destination, There a lot depends on (local) governments. In the Netherlands there are bike parkings everywhere, and you start seeing it more and more in Canada (Vancouver at least) but I guess tou can just out it against a light post?
Hate to break it to you, but cars too are trivial to steal for the right person, just like bikes. I’ve seen too many “gone in 60 seconds” type of videos (but then the real thing) to have the illusion that any lock will stop everybody.
If there is a car parking garage, then bikes are trivial to park there, unlike cars. Put good locks on the bike, and you’re risking 500 insurable dollars versus 20000-60000 more expensive insurable dollars.
Lol no it’s not. Been there once, and it’s an ugly shithole. Compare Montreal to any people first city and you can either agree it’s shit or lie. Give me trees, give me places I can walk, give me nice clean fresh air, give me silence, give me cities designed for humans.
The problem is, our cities (most of them) are already designed for cars. To change them to accommodate walking and public transit would be somewhere near the largest sociological project the world has ever seen. It would require upending every single aspect of everyone’s lives in order to refit them around walking and public transit. I think it’s unreasonably infeasible at the current time.
Their prices have gotten completely out of control. I’m just a home user though, so I use FreeCAD. It’s a little janky, but I can work at about 80% of my previous speed after about a month.
Stock can be used well for some things but the stock market needs to be significantly limited. It’s ridiculous how much is contingent on it. And because of legislation in place in America, good markets rarely benefit the average person, but bad markets often hurt the average man.
This is the third post I’ve seen on Lemmy recently where people seem to overwhelmingly think the word “scam” just means “something I don’t like”. To be a scam, something needs to be dishonest in its representation, usually either by falsifying the true cost to the buyer, or lying about what is being provided in return.
Lol, not everyone lives in your random ass location that forbids private sales. It’s very possible to do where I live, but it’s one of those things that it’s good to have professionals handle in most cases in my opinion.
The tradition isn’t as old as people think and was literally started by a jewelry company to sell more jewelry. Specifically diamonds, which are not as rare as commonly believed and if not for the false scarcity and misinformation, would be dirt cheap.
It’s crazy that even when people are told about this, they usually still defend it. I don’t get why the heck any normal person would like the idea of spending a few months salary on a ring. It’s such a terrible way to start a new marriage, especially with wages being what they are these days.
Back before lab-made perfect diamonds were a thing, the DeBeers cartel marketed that they had the highest quality diamonds out there, with the fewest imperfections.
Now they market that the imperfections are what gives it character, and you should avoid the actual perfect diamonds and instead get their (blood) diamonds.
Diamonds were fairly rare when we used to mine them in Asia and America. And it’s a nice shiny stone which is also very durable.
Then, we found out Africa is actually full of diamonds and DeBeers said “we can’t have that!” and started buying all the African diamonds to keep them away to artificially inflate the price and scarcity.
Then we found out we can make them in labs better than the mined ones and DeBeers sai “that’s not a natural diamond, you don’t want that!” and so on.
The whole marketing about “A diamond is forever!” is to make you think you’ll never want to sell your diamon ring, so you don’t find out your precious gift paid $2,000 is actually wortth $50.
An EA spokeperson would say “it’s all about the experience”.
Penny auction apps like dealdash, they always have bots that will outbid you so you can never actually win one of their auctions. If you do win an auction, you’re not actually guaranteed to ever the see the product you won.
Both this, and that winning an auction doesn’t get you the item but the ability to pay for the item. The “penny” refers to the fact that you pay to buy bids in the auction, not that you pay pennies for items.
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