Might be worth remembering here that Lemmy instances, including .world are hosted by regular people. Not massive multinational companies worth billions who can engage the best legal talent around.
If Hollywood comes after a Lemmy instance, Holywood have a huge legal team and endless money. The Lemmy instance has some guy. They could quite literally destroy a persons life. With that in mind, I don’t blame any instance owners for erring on the side of taking a stance that won’t put them in the legal firing line.
This is a well reasoned answer. If this were my instance I would also ban communities linking to pirated software. A single lawsuit and lawyer bill for a regular guy, and that can fuck your life up all because you tried to run a decent community. I have a username I use for browsing lemmynsfw, I’ll make one for browsing piracy related things too.
Best bet I think is to set up a non-profit limited liability type of company. Then at least there is a good chance the individual doesn’t get fucked. (Ymmv depending on legal jurisdiction of course)
You still need expensive lawyers to defend yourself. Registering a LLC isn’t a get out of jail free card and corporations don’t shield you from personal criminal liability (unless you’re rich, see comment about expensive lawyers).
I’m not saying they are or aren’t. I’m simply saying that we all know the big media companies go after people at the drop of a hat. They recently tried to get reddit to expose the identities of people discussing piracy over there. To their credit reddit told them no and defended themselves legally. And that’s the issue. The media companies can accuse anyone of anything if it even slightly smells like piracy and the target has to legally defend themselves. This is fine if you’re a multibillion valued company. Not so fine if you’re just some guy who just wanted to run a Lemmy instance out of his own pocket.
Sony Music is currently coming after DNS provider Quad9 for resolving a piracy related domain, and they’ve succeeded in two courts so far. At this point I don’t think any copyright lawsuit is too stupid to happen.
It’s be nice if there’d been some discussion first, and perhaps a solution other than an admin vanishing a community without notice. Even just some text informing the user “You can’t see this content on lemmy.world. Please go to the instance directly”.
Regardless if the decision is understandable, the method used here is not going to sit well with people. After how many years of spez, these kinds of behind the scenes snap decisions that change the site overnight with no apparent regard for the community is going to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. It wouldn’t have hurt to bring it to the community rather than just shadow banning without a word.
Not even because there needed to be a discussion, but just as a basic courtesy.
It doesn’t inspire confidence or endear the instance to its users.
But it links to it, which is equally as bad. In your logic thepiratebay would never have any problems with law enforcement because they technically don’t host any of the pirated content, just link to it.
For me, it looks like people are mad at the US defaultism of the decision.
I understand why. It makes for part of the users no sense as they are protected by the law. It looks like a US “shitshow”. Countries are protecting the IP of the person, making it nearly impossible to pursue someone. Others have law allowing the use and the copy of copyrighted material for educational purposes. Some allow the download of copyrighted material.
It’s the same with GDPR. Meta must comply. There is no exception because US defaultism.
And we can understand this point of view too. It’s not binary as the US people think it is. It’s more mixed depending of the country.
Generally, outside of this drama, on the internet, people are reclaiming they right and don’t want the US “example” anymore. They want the internet following their local laws like the GDPR for Europeans. They have the right to claim it. Thanks to GDPR, mandatory usb-c, battery replacement and others laws in Europe and outside, the consciences of are awakened that the US is not the model to follow in terms of law on the internet and technologies.
Well, hypothetical speaking, if there were two completely absolutely identical jobs, but the one had a ping pong table. I might choose the one without and ask them to get a Foosball table, since I’m no good at ping pong.
Most places that have HR like this work their employees too hard for them to have time to use a ping pong table anyway, so it’s really just a hollow gesture.
Ping pong tables are loud as fuck and disrupt the whole office. If they invest in a soundproof room to put it in, sure. Otherwise it just makes you feel like a massive douche.
It’s always about autonomy, one way or another. People want to be able to control how they work and what they can get out of it. For some that does mean more money, for some it would mean less stress, for others it could means less meetings.
It’s pretty easy for management to address all of it by just giving people more power over what their work lives are like, but that could mean less control over their workforce. No “owner” wants that, to them, they own their employees’ time/work life.
Eh. Toxic work culture can drive people away regardless of the pay. Obviously some people suck it up but not everyone. Ultimately the goal is to treat employees well all around. Good pay, benefits, and work culture will keep people happy.
My last job had a pingpong table. We’d even use it occasionally. That is, until people started getting pissy when they’d see us playing pingpong. Then management started bitching that we were playing pingpong instead of working. Eventually, nobody was allowed to use the pingpong table - it just sat there, in the middle of the room, with brand new paddles and packs of balls that we weren’t allowed to use.
The money was okay - not great, but not terrible. After some management fuckery, I left for a $10000/yr raise and 100% work from home. I’ve gone up $20K since then, been promoted to senior, still have upward trajectory, and still work 100% from home. I have a desk in Memphis somewhere, but I’ve never actually seen it.
My employer really covered their bases. We have ping-pong, pool, and foosball. That guarantees that everyone has something that will keep them from quitting.
If I had been well paid and treated well I would not have ever started that job search. Further even just having one of those two thing might have kept me from looking.
At that job I hit the tipping point of both. It’s was getting shittier everyday and the pay wasn’t budging year after year. Finally mid-Covid the power flipped to the employee and jobs were much easier to get. I started looking and jumped shipped.
I don’t want to link to them because fuck them, though the current top comment contains a link to that site.
The interesting thing is that you get this error message on /us while when you remove it, you get redirected to /global and there is no such message. They went out of their way to collect the data of US citizens while still complying with the GDPR for other users.
I am hearing that tune in my head with teenage me playing the flute in school. I can hear the horrible screeching noises coming out from that plastic tube.
When I was in middle school, some girl sang this song at the talent show. Except she didn’t just sing any version of Ode to Joy. No, she sang this milk commercial version of the song.
Some of the comments in here are a fucking disgrace and a disappointment.
I just shut down my own self-hosted instance the other week because of legal concerns. Caching anything and everything that gets pushed to my server and basically having to put all my faith in other admins taking care of illegal stuff in a timely manner was stressful and not worth the risk. And that was a solo instance!
It’s only a matter of time until lawyers backed by millions of dollar come knocking on the door of lemmy admins and I can’t fault lw for being pro-active. Whether or not it’s legal in your jurisdiction to host communities like this doesn’t matter at all if you’re not the one with a name attached to the server. Even wrongful legal claims by copyright holders are costly and time intensive to fight back against.
Why should a private person who hosts an instance for thousands of users for free subject themselves to such a risk?
The entitlement is ridiculous, especially when you can easily switch to another instance and the “problem” is solved. If this was a corporate site, that would be impossible to do.
But obviously that’s too much work and it’s easier to just be a crybaby.
I agree, very sad to see the comments in here. the instance owners don’t really have much choice in this matter considering there’s no easy tools right now on Lemmy to deal with legal issues and they’d likely end up having to shut down completely if they did nothing
I feel this is the fatal flaw of the lemmyverse. Before I heard about lemmy I was building my own similar system where you would subscribe to servers/instances specifically, without any cross instance caching. That way you will only see what you want to see, and if an instance gets overloaded they have to scale up, but won’t bring down your whole browsing in the meantime. It would be up to the client apps to aggregate all your instances/feeds to show you a list to doomscroll through, but you would have one account (activity pub compatible) to subscribe to them all with. If there were private, invite only communities for piracy then it wouldn’t legally jeopardize the rest of them either. I keep chipping away at it. One day I’ll publish is.
If Alice, a user of lemmy server A, subscribes to a piracy community on server B, all content of that piracy community will be pulled to, cached on, and served to Alice through their home instance, server A.
All it takes is a single user subscribing to a community from another federated server to pull that entire community’s data into their home instance. It’s bad when it’s a copyright violation risk. It’s massively scary when it could happen with something like child porn, because now whoever is running the home server is storing and distributing it unknowingly.
Eh. I’m a lawyer. I wouldn’t be afraid of the civil risk unless I was accepting donations. Suing regular people isn’t really a profitable endeavor. I’m more concerned about paying for the hosting and being subscribed to enough of the fediverse to have a representative instance.
Yeah, but Rudd probably doesn’t have the expertise or resources to swat away people that knock on his door with threats of litigation.
And there are a lot of dumb ass lawyers out there that have no problem lobbing threats and cease and desist over the wall. I know, I encounter them all the damn time.
This sums it up pretty well imo. From a legal standpoint hosting a site like Lemmy likely isn’t going to be a problem in most countries (I know it isn’t in mine with some caveats) but that won’t stop the average lawyer from pretending otherwise.
I can’t really blame the lemmy.world admins here, rather I blame the laws that still don’t account for this sort of use case in terms an average human can read and be reassured by.
There’s also those that sue for political reasons and not for money. Perhaps we need more lawyers to step up and offer their services pro bono to fediverse admins. The admins are volunteering their time for you. Might as well return the favor.
This really isn’t all that different from old school forums and the way they were run. Have people forgotten what those were like? That’s one of the biggest reasons I like the direction of Lemmy to begin with. The owner of the site can’t assume those risks, they’re not a corporation.
Completely agree. This is definitely a smart move for lemmy.world in order to protect themselves. With that being said, switch instances if you want to see those communities. Do not fault a person, who already provides a free service, for trying to protect themselves.
That’s a fair point. Anybody know of any servers hosted in countries where all this stuff is legal? I wouldn’t mind registering on the servers where my illicit interests are legal.
I see the decision you made as the ultimate end to this path you and lemmy world tread. At this rate all federations should defederate each other, or just shut down the whole fediverse. We can go back to individual hyper-specific forums on phbb again.
I mean there is obviously a line between what should federated and what should not. But i feel the reasoning here is fundamentally different then the others chosen in the past.
No one forces you to. What you do is called fear-mongering and catastrophizing. There are dozens of lawyers vigilling day and night and ready to pounce as someone uploads child porn in your instance lol.
Not a surprise though, someone with passion for computers is an anxiety-ridden thingy
Yes he does. I got in an argument with him the other day and he called me the thought police for saying that people who get off to kids are mentally unwell lol
9.99/m is 119.88/y and it doesn’t stop. Maybe OP thought that the purchase was a one time purchase, and I don’t really blame him, since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?
He bought a piece of convenience tech designed for a specific piece of software, when said convenience tech is totally unnecessary to the function of that software, then got mad that he needed the software
I am shocked that everyone in this thread isn’t roasting this dude nonstop. He’s an idiot.
They just don’t consider personal responsibility to even exist. It’s the corporation’s fault they spent a hundred bucks on a thing your old phone and a 15 dollar magnetic mount could have done for you, because said device needs a subscription service.
I had a guy tell me in this thread that I had “privilege” for saying Spotify didnt expect people without a paid subscription to be spending money on such an overpriced device. OP is throwing hundo’s away on stupid shit but it HAS to be the corpos fault somehow, people will toss logic right out the window to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay.
Doesn’t stop? You sign on the dotted line for a lifetime of payments? You can’t cancel your subscription?
since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?
That’s the exact logic that would lead someone with an ounce of intelligence to go “oh yeah, this product is a completely stupid piece of shit that’s marketed toward people with more money than brain cells.”
Did it say anywhere on the package that it gets you a lifetime subscription to Spotify? No. Does OP understand that Spotify works on a subscription model? Probably, Saas isnt fucking new.
This is the kind of boy-who-cried-wolf bullshit that keeps corporations from actually being held accountable, because people who want better worker’s rights and taxes on corporations look like idiots when lumped in with children like you who consider personal responsibility and thinking for yourself to be too scawy.
They say never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence. But with a corporations I’m pretty sure its the other way around.
I’d usually agree but this product seems exclusively intended for someone who’s heavily into Spotify, and the marketing clearly states you need a subscription.
Knew what? That people buying the device already have one?
You still have it backwards. They didn’t sell you the device to get you on the subscription, they assumed only people with money to spend on a subscription would WASTE A HUNDRED BUCKS ON SOME DUMB SHIT LIKE THIS.
Am I missing something, or would basically any old smartphone work in place of this? I have a Pixel which sits in a cradle and takes care of anything I’d use this for. I guess a physical button or dial might be nice, but I have a volume dial on the car dash.
Seems plainly obvious that it’ll require a sub. It’s a Spotify box.
You’re correct, I have a five or six year old kindle fire i got for like 60 bucks that I rooted and installed stock android on, it’s just a really cheap tablet now. Works perfectly for stuff like this.
My last smartphone would also have worked.
This whole thread is just a bunch of moron-consumer apologists. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate corporations and their practices, but this is just a bad purchase and buyers remorse packaged as big corpos fault.
I mean, on all the purchase advertisements they said you must have Spotify premium to use this.
They subsidized the price the device based on the expected return from convincing people to keep their subscriptions. Since it supports other clients they probably also have to manage software updates.
Spotify is a bag of dicks for a lot of other reasons but this really doesn’t seem to be one of them.
They’re small services that you load your libraries into, and select content you want to get and the quality of that content. Then the service goes out and finds the torrents for you and adds them to your library.
Ah, my bad. I’m so used to it all that I can’t help but spit out jargon with no context sometimes 😅
I’m referring to apps like Sonarr, which basically keeps an eye on torrent/usenet providers and downloads episodes for you automatically. So you tell it you want some show, optionally set the quality you want it at, and it takes care of everything so that the episodes just show up on Jellyfin/Plex after they air and it grabs them. There’s also Radarr for movies and a whole bunch of related ones.
Tbh JF is faaaaaaaar from a ‘great UI’, it suffers from the ‘open source design’ of developers who have no idea how to design a good UI as the designers for the UI. I shouldn’t need to click vaguely in the direction of where I think the X (close) button is to make it appear in the first place. The settings for a user should be in the same location as the admin settings. The main screen shouldn’t look like it came straight out of 2000, it should have the categories all visible by default, it should be easier to setup https (plex was WAY easier in this regard), ota channel guides shouldn’t be outsourced to a paid project, there is no built-in import/export (I recently moved to a docker image and found that out, yay)…
It ‘works’, but fuck me it’s so rough around the edges that it draws blood. Plex has issues (downloading content from a server is wonky, metadata can grab the wrong movies, paid sub/lifetime etc) but it’s so, so, so much closer to what an all-in-one media platform should be, imo.
That’s because it’s a fork of Emby from 13+ years ago, still running 90% of that old code. They’ve kept it functional, that’s about it.
If you want something that’s actually still being developed/improved look to Emby or Plex. Emby is more focused on ‘personal’ media servers with your own content and users under your own control; plex is more focused on cloud services, integrating content they can run advertising on and requiring your users to authenticate through their public servers to be able to access your local/private server.
I’ve had plex running on my nas for 6+ years now, and have it set to where all the cloud stuff is available but out of the way, as I have a small collection so I don’t need to lean into the cloud streaming. I remember trying Emby in my evaluation of Plex, but as I recall the UI was bleh and it too followed a paid model. I know of Kodi but I haven’t looked into it in a long time, and I never ended up actually trying it.
Plex is fine for my needs, but I decided to get setup with JF just ‘in case’ plex takes a sharp new direction or something (I’ve had it installed since the whole ‘watch stuff free with ads’ kicked off), so if/when I can just be like ‘hey all plex did [stupid thing] so I just need you all to uninstall plex, grab this jellyfin app, and login with [credentials] and we will be all set’.
Emby used to be entirely open source, it’s free to use the base product (server software and the built in web browser based app) but requires a license for the installable apps and some server features so that the developers have some income from their work and incentive to keep spending their time+efforts on it.
Some people don’t like paying others for their hard work so they’d regularly fork Emby as it releases updates so they could remove those paywalls.
Unwilling to continue supporting this, Emby went closed source so their work could no longer be stolen. Jellyfin is the final fork of emby before it officially closed its source code. They have since kept it running, but have made little to no improvements or changes beyond that.
I’m not arguing that any of your complaints are invalid. I just want to say that I use jellyfin to organize my movies and TV shows and access them from other computers on my home network. It works, is easy, was free. I like it.
Yeah, there’s a reason I keep it installed and at the ready, but it’s just less user-friendly and that is essential when my users aren’t tech savvy, they just want things to ‘work’. If JF reaches feature parity I’ll migrate my users, but I can’t be asked to explain why they need to pay a monthly fee for ota guides or why everything looks different, if I also need to explain that features are missing and why can’t I move their watch history. It’s got to be easy for them, but also for me too.
I’ve found that most FOSS projects just have a “for us, by us” mentality where nobody cares about making things easy to use to the point that it’s not even possible if you’re not an experienced coder AND have strong knowledge of networking.
Not to mention the setup for hardware encoding which basically expects deep knowledge of the matter to even get it to run, let alone run well. Plex on the other hand hides it behind a license but it JUST WORKS, there’s no setup or anything.
I really wanted to use Jellyfin, but there’s just too many pain points
I highly discourage 1337x. They got caught not banning a user who intentionally uploaded malware. Forgive the reddit link, but there aren’t a lot of piracy news sites.
Damn. Just learned that trusting 1337x and IGGGAMES was a bad idea. Trying to teach my little pirate how to be safe on the high seas only to find out the places and people I thought were safe aren’t so.
Realdebrid just finds the torrents for you though, right? You’d still need a VPN since you’re technically downloading the movie to watch it. I know a lot of ISPs send notices if you torrent a copyrighted movie
Nope. It also downloads the torrent for you and gives you download link or stream link to the video. Most of the time, the torrent is already on their cache, so it’s instantly available to you.
They’re more like a private storage server. You can’t see what movies they have. Technically you can only download what you ‘add’ there, but they cache everybody else’s downloads too, so your download is readily available. I’m not sure of all technicalities, but there are a few different debrid services, so there must be some way they are able to do this.
There’s now a whole ecosystem of applications to streamline the download of series (sonarr) and movies (radarr) using torrents or Usenet (prowlarr). Pair those with a good player like Jellyfin or Plex and you have a nice media center that for sure won’t stop working everytime your family tries to watch a movie…
But it’s totally free. You don’t need app unlocks, you can have as many devices as you want, and you can hardware transcode without paying for premium.
Paid ~$100 for the lifetime license 9 years ago. So less than 93 pennies a month.
Throughout that time Emby has constantly been developed bringing bug fixes, UI improvements, and new features; while also providing excellent support as needed on the forums.
TBH I think I’ve vastly underpaid and plan to donate to the project shortly.
In that same time, I’ve seen very few meaningful updates to jellyfin. Just scrolling through their changelogs it’s mostly filled with:
Facts. I run both but JF is not ‘family-ready’ and thus sits on my server, receiving updates and idling until that changes. Plex took 5 minutes of explaining and the folks have been happily using it for a few years now.
Plex and Jellyfin are two ways to host your own content. Basically, instead of streaming from a Netflix server, you’re streaming from your own server.
Plex was the original, and Jellyfin is the FOSS alternative. In short, you run the program on a computer somewhere, and tell that program where all of your media is stored. It’ll scan your media depending on the library type (movies, TV shows, music, etc,) automatically pair it with the appropriate metadata, and make it available for streaming via the computer.
You can combine this with the *arr suite (Radarr, Sonarr, etc) to have your torrent client automatically download new content as it comes out. Basically, the appropriate *arr program listens for when new content gets released, then automatically tells your torrent client to search for that content (based on specific rules like language, bitrate, capture method, etc) and download it automatically. This pairs nicely with Plex/Jellyfin because you can use automatic torrent management to drop the files directly into the right folders for your server to scan and make available.
It does have a few drawbacks. One of the most annoying is port forwarding. Lots of VPNs have stopped offering port forwarding, because some creeps figured out how to use it to share/trade CSAM anonymously. But Plex and Jellyfin require an open port in order to be made available outside of your network, and you don’t want to run the server+torrents without a VPN. Some VPNs allow port forwarding, but randomly assign the port every time you connect. So it may work fine for a while, but will require occasional attention when that port changes.
There’s also the issue with needing a computer that’s turned on all the time. Some people (like myself) just run it on their home desktop. But that means I needed to set up Wake On LAN to be able to boot my computer up remotely, or just be okay with letting it idle all the time and never sleep. Personally, I chose to enable WOL, so I just remote into my network and send a magic packet before trying to stream. But that’s an extra step some people won’t want to do every time. If you have an old computer sitting around gathering dust, it can be a great weekend project.
Plex is actually a fork of Kodi (XBMC). Kodi is still actively developed, and easily supports both local media (for example, downloaded using one of the *arrs) and streaming from various sources using addons.
You can literally say the same thing about any fork, and yet nobody ever does. I’ll reiterate, Kodi is XBMC - there was no fork, no split in development, only a rename.
Higher quality and more reliable. I spent like 2 hours trying to find a site to stream the show I’m currently watching that didn’t have excessive audio issues. Were I a true pirate, I could simply download the highest quality available, and watch it whenever I want.
I wouldn’t want to use Plex, though. If you know what you want to watch and it’s already downloaded, just throw it on a flash drive or transfer it to your phone, no need to stream. If you want a netflix-style 2 terabytes of stuff that you may or may not ever watch, just… Spend the money on Netflix. Your time is worth more than that subscription fee. If Netflix doesn’t have the show you want, do the thing I said in the first paragraph.
Last Exile. I like obscure old anime, so it’s been on my list for a minute. I needed something to watch, so I checked Hulu. At some point in the last few months, they stopped streaming it.
So I definitely didn’t go to theindex.moe, and I super didn’t click on every damn streaming site they link to. I “promise” I didn’t settle on animeflix dot live, and I definitely didn’t put up with awful audio issues until I realized that the default server it streams from is in SD so you have to click the gear and set it to one of the HD servers instead.
Which sites are those? From my experience it’s hard to find 4k/Dolby Vision on those free streaming sites, which is where pirating and streaming your own stuff is the better option.
The main benefit for me is the app accessibility (easier to search through an app than a file system), the convenience of not needing to carry around a bunch of data all the time, and the ease of sharing it with family.
If I understand your setup, when you decide you want to a new movie you have to download it, pull the hdd over to the machine, transfer it to the hdd, rename, perhaps even transcode, and then put the drive back on the TV.
In the type of setup described above or like mine, I can pull out my phone and using a very simple search all of the file handling and such is taken care of for me. I don’t ever have to worry if I have the right filetype for the device I’m on, and I can watch that from any device on my local network, or just about any device that has an internet connection. Also, while I’m watching one thing, several other people can be watching whatever else they want on their devices.
I have a smart TV where you can just plug in a NTFS formatted USB drive and it plays perfectly. Never had to rename or transcode anything. It plays 4K files more smoothly than most computers I’ve had.
The only problem I’ve had is when I’m watching a foreign film and the subtitle file is in the wrong file format.
That covers a small subset of the reason a lot of us set it up the way we have. I mean, if that is working for you, great. But you still have to move a physical device, and the ability to watch media is still limited to the location of said device.
The better free streaming sites are my go-to, because I have plausible deniability, I don’t with a torrent. And unfortunately my VPN throttles you unless you start paying. Which I am thinking about going ahead and doing.
I’ll tell you, I have my setup to the point where I go to one website, subscribe to a show, and episodes of that show appear to watch on my TV same day they are released.
I also set myself up to get email alerts telling me what new episodes I have to watch when they are done being downloaded.
… Setting all that up took me awhile and will take tech skills. But now that it’s set up, it’s zero touch aside from adding new shows.
Plus, I never have to worry about trying to find where to stream at it and even if my Internet goes out I can still watch my shows
(even if the computer is yours, whereas you have created your own ‘mini cloud’. I hate that term, it’s just a machine running software. It’s all just machines, consuming us all. screams … anyway)
Where can I find good tutorials for the *arr suite? I have Jackett installed for easier searching in Qbit, but I half assed that somehow into working. I would love to have auto downloads for content, especially those shows that still release episodes like a drop feed. An almost fully automated Plex would be amazing the TV show requests I get.
I’m like you, hadn’t pirated outside of games since early 2000s and just started again. Wait until you see the shit we have now, it’s mind-blowing how far it’s come.
And with Jellyfin if you have the upload speeds you can even host for family etc, so anyone sharing your Netflix now can just login to your Jellyfin server, for them it will be a comparable experience.
I’m still maining plex, and at least there, they just create a plex account, you grant access to that account, and that’s it. Don’t even have to open ports. My guess is with JF since there isn’t a central account host, you’d probably have expose some ports on your network to be able to login without a VPN.
Pirating games is basically unheard of for me, unless it’s a product not readily available on a modern storefront.
Nintendo has a problem with me playing Pokemon Omega Ruby on a 3DS emulator? they are free to offer a switch version.
This is because steam is not an asshole, which is a big reason why I kind of got disappointed when they stopped offering movies. I like having those on the same platform
Nevermind that shit, Stremio + Torrentio + Real-Debrid. I’m fucking done with these greedy-ass companies. I was paying Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, Paramount , MLB.tv and HBO, and pretty content to do so, and they all continually removed content and adjusted their pricing to reduce what I was getting for my money. They finally pushed me beyond my tolerance limit a few months ago and I’ve been back to sailing the high seas for the first time in 20 years.
I have more content now, all at acceptable quality options, all with good subtitles instead of the mess HBO was, and all on the same platform instead of having to jump between 7 different apps. I’m done with them and I’ll stay done with them until they pull their heads out of their asses.
Edit: if you get a cheap computer, a Chromecast, a FireTV, or what I have - an Nvidia Shield TV, then you get even get a nifty remote controller and a good standard browsing platform for everything.
Just set this up on a cheap Onn 4k box from Walmart. Works fantastic. Also setup the Trakt integration to keep up with what I watch across multiple devices.
I’ve tested jellyfin this week on my dedicated server. It’s cool but most of my files need transcoding to be played on the browser, which my weak server CPU cannot handle. The best option I found to stream any file format without eating up all server resources on this machine is to set up a simple nginx server with autoindex streaming the files to VLC. I use the “Open with VLC” browser extension to quickly open the links. Playback performance is quite good (scrubbing is fast) and everything plays well.
Convenience and cost, means amazon isn’t going anywhere. You can spend more time, and more money avoiding them if you want, but don’t be upset others aren’t willing.
But of course, and I'm not saying that. But I do think it's perhaps a little bold to actively criticize a stranger for having the audacity to do business with Amazon as if they aren't, for instance, using AWS-backed websites literally every day.
I'm not saying Amazon is good, but rather that hypocritically trying to call out people for failing purity tests that you yourself almost certainly don't pass isn't a particularly productive or positive use of one's time.
Plus, even when you do find what you’re looking for elsewhere, are Walmart, Target, and Home Depot really so benevolent? The odds of me finding what I need from a small locally owned business (at least in my area) are pretty slim.
I know that feeling all too well. The small local grocery store is, at minimum, 2 to 3 times more expensive than Walmart, or even the Dollar General a block away. The local hardware stores aren’t much better.
This is also my experience. Recent example, I can buy a 1.9L container of mayonnaise for $8.99 at Costco to make homemade potato salad for my grandmother’s 95th birthday party. But I forgot to prepare until the last minute and realized I had no mayo, and so I went to the local place who charged $7.99 for 443mL of mayonnaise from the same brand.
Amazon sells 3.78L of mayonnaise (dear God who needs that much mayo?) for $18.70, making them not quite as competitive as Costco in terms of price per mL, but pretty damn close, and moreover still way better than the local place.
Increasingly I can’t be confident what the quality level of products will be at those places. Amazon has huge counterfeit item and poor quality item problems that they don’t care to fix. I know Target will have reasonable quality, I know if I buy a brand name product l, I’m getting that product. I know if I buy Walmart brand, the quality is lower, but not pure garbage. I currently get none of those guarantees on Amazon, even Amazon basics aren’t safe from these problems.
Definitely had issues with quality and/or damage, haven’t gotten a true counterfeit yet to my knowledge, but I can at least partially attribute that to the fact that I almost never buy things that aren’t shipped/sold by either Amazon or the manufacturer.
When I shop I usually search for something on Amazon, check if the manufacturer has a website & it is comparably priced, check if the local stores (Target, etc.) stock it at a fair price, and if all else fails I buy through Amazon (after checking CamelCamelCamel to verify I’m getting a good deal).
To my knowledge the worst offers for counterfeits are tech items like cables, chargers, and drives. I’ve also learned some designer board games are commonly counterfeits. Amazon comingles stock so it doesn’t matter who you buy from, if someone puts counterfeit product X into the system you have a chance to get it.
Although I agree that might happen I think they have improved on it and at the end except for time lost that you cannot recover, the customer support is so good that you always get your money back or s replacement without issues.
If you're buying a branded product and it is shipped by the official brand store on Amazon, then you can be assured it is not counterfeit. If you buy a branded product that is shipped by Amazon it could be co-mingled with counterfeit stock.
Then I decide I want to try and support a small business. So, I find a website for one that looks legit enough. So far so good. Find the product. Yep! Go to check out… $10+ delivery fee. I know that’s not their fault. I do. But I’m not spending $20 on a $10 item that’s just not reasonable. Sometimes it’s fine to eat that cost if it’s like a cart full of stuff with just the one fee but for a bunch of individual things that I can’t get locally it doesn’t work.
That’s exactly why climate change is going to kill us all.
Edit : you can downvote me, but if you systematically go for the easiest and cheapest solution, and can do otherwise (and generally, you do), you’re a big part of the problem.
On Kbin, we see the # of upvotes and # of downvote separately, is that not the case here?
Also, the goal should maybe be turning the systematically easiest and cheapest solution into one that's also green. Definitely some steps to get there though
It is faster to have 20 slaves in 20 different parts of the warehouse stuff 20 different envelopes than it is to have 1 single slave go to 20 different locations in a warehouse and stuff a box.
Their obligation is just to get the product from their facilities to your door. They don’t give a shit HOW it gets there.
I mean, if it were 20 different items I could probably put it down to that but there were six packets of each of the flavours and types. You'd think all the Alfredo's could go in one package, for example, not each in their own padded envelope. Does pasta even need padding? It was just ridiculous, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were a disgruntled worker engaged in a bit of malicious compliance!
I used to work in a shipping depot that delivered to Amazon, among others.
And whenever a shipment went out to Amazon, we had to take packages of 20 items, like they’d be delivered to retailers, and rip them open to put each item into packaging carton individually, before it was even delivered into an Amazon warehouse.
In our case, it was parasols, so it could be different for smaller items or just items that are more likely to be ordered in bulk, but yeah, I imagine, Amazon just does not want to deal with the packaging in their warehouse, if possible.
I’m in the process of manually transferring my wishlists for ebooks and physical books to Kobo and B&N atm. Then I’ll be transferring my other wishlists to Notebook.
After all that I’ll just use Amazon like a search engine.
It’s not just about the monopoly though. Their site is rife with counterfeits and is basically Wish now. Want a GE lightbulb? There’s a 50/50 chance you’re getting a counterfeit that isn’t UL tested so you don’t know it’s safe, and that’s if you can even find the product at all hidden between the random name generator company listings for random garbage that’s slightly similar to the search term you entered.
And if there was a competitor that sold only legit products without having to compete with AmazonBasics (who just steals designs and sells them for a cheaper price) or from JSOIY (who also steals designs, and yes, I made up that name), people would use them instead of Amazon.
A monopoly enables this behavior, since there are no other options.
Our personal responsibility is to make the State not deficient though, not a boycott of amazon.com or whatever you’re suggesting. A boycott of even their digital and physical storefronts probably wouldn’t even change much, since Amazon makes most of their profit via AWS. Something like 33% of all internet traffic goes through AWS in some fashion, so boycotting that is even harder. The only real option I can see is to make the State regulate them in some manner because all the people in the world can’t fight a trillion dollar company themselves.
There are certain things I can’t get anywhere near me from anyone other than Amazon, and I live in a city of 6 million people. Sadly I need to use Amazon about once a month. Getting groceries from them is ridiculous though.
Aren’t there any online shopping alternatives to amazon? Are they really the only online vendor who is allowed to mail stuff to your 6 million people city?
Hey, if anyone else or any store can get me the things I need within the week I 100% go there. but no one else is stocking specific temperature controllers anywhere near me. I can’t get 3D printer resin anywhere that isn’t a 40 minute drive away. Specific wiring I need, AliExpress is the only other company with it. Amazon stocks a lot of niche things that no one else is carrying.
Same. I also used to have a great store near me that carried random electronic parts, motors, hobby shit, bits of hardware. Any time I needed to fix something, or wanted to make a little device I could go there for supplies. RIP Active Surplus.
I really wish I had a store like that near me. I hate being in the middle of a project and having to wait 2+ days to finish it if I end up needing something. There’s a microcenter location that’s supposed to open near me within a few years, which will be nice
They’re not shipping groceries from an Amazon warehouse lol. It’s usually just whole foods. Basically the same as doing a doordash or Instacart etc. It actually used to be pretty sweet because if you had prime they didn’t add the delivery fee so it would save me a trip. Sadly, they got rid of the free delivery. I believe there is or was a class action about them charging the delivery fee now
As an ex-warehouse employee, I will go out of my way of I have to get something just to not buy something online. The conditions of most warehouses I’ve seen, especially in this heat, should be illegal.
They can’t do this in Europe, plus they actually have decent refund policies where normal stores shit on you after purchase. Getting groceries from them is also a great convenience for the same reasons. Part of the order got missing? Free refund or same day delivery. Plus, some local stores charge even more for products without delivering them to your door.
So at least in Europe, where they can unionize and can and do protest for their rights, I don’t see them as any worse than many other multinational chains that do the same. And if they had to stop operations in my country, there aren’t going to be a proportional number of stores that are going to start opening up. If the number of their employees does increase, it’s going to be for worse paying jobs.
So at least in Europe, where they can unionize and can and do protest for their rights, I don’t see them as any worse than many other multinational chains that do the same.
Do you happen to know whether they actually are unionized in EU countries though, or just could? Genuine question, as I couldn’t tell you (as a German citizen)
Aside from that though, even if warehouse and delivery workers’ conditions were absolutely fine, their monopolistic tendencies are still somewhat of an issue. I’ll try not to turn this into a full essay, because this topic can get real philosophical REAL fast (we’re about 3 winded sentences away, I’d guesstimate).
But: AWS aka Amazon’s cloud business prints SO incredibly much money that they can perhaps unfairly undercut a grocery competitor like Kroger’s, Aldi, and whatnot are their names, that they can start to have a really, really good advantage quite quickly (as hinted to by OP’s order above: not plastics, not electronics, not household goods – food). In case any reader isn’t aware, grocery chains’ margins are absurdly, comically low.
The firm policies/microeconomics philosophy comes in here: how much cross-subsidizing should an undertaking actually be allowed to do? In other words, when is a company expanding too much – even though expansion is something that you could argue to be a core, if not the integral part of what defines a business? Europeans will perhaps see this a bit more strictly, whereas Americans might be inclined to answer close to unlimited here, but keep in mind, this can lead to Mega-everything-corp faster than you realize or like.
I didn’t make all of this up on the spot just now, BTW (some first further “readings”). This has been a somewhat well known issue for some years now, and people knew there could be a day coming where we as a (global) society have to ask ourselves: How many areas can a company dominate in before it becomes too dangerous?
Amazon may be monopolistic, but I have access to more products through from different brand names than I do through the rest of the local multinational chains. I see your point, but it’s also pretty hard to address without favoring other potential mega-corporations nowadays. The core problem is that there is one country that can realistic regulate it, and it is profit driven. Individually, each country can try to compete by subsidizing the competition in the areas those companies succeed in, by say putting decent refund and customer care into the law, subsidizing insurance to that extent, and making distribution networks accessible to small business. Once those standards are in place, it becomes easier to prosecute Amazon for anti-competitive monopolistic practices if they don’t stick to them. The problem is, each country usually has their own interests that don’t care for that either, and it wouldn’t be international.
Amazon should be divided into different businesses, but if US telecoms have proved anything, it’s that they usually end up working themselves back into the same group. But I see that as a separate more overarching issue than the rights of the workers it employs and the quality of their employment in their distribution warehouses.
Amazon may be monopolistic, but I have access to more products through from different brand names than I do through the rest of the local multinational chains.
That’s the core issue, I think.
Amazon might be the first major case of monopolistic tendencies where the firm’s behavior hasn’t been obviously disadvantageous (or obvious it will be in the not so distant future) to the consumers from the getgo. So you’d effectively be regulating and banning towards a worse consumer experience, as of now…
A good analogue might be the taxi industry, which has fostered an industry accustomed to misleading its clients through a number of means because of an outdated means of charging for fares. In some countries, they require special licenses, and they’ve forced restrictions on companies like Uber and who can work for them. It’s a case of new industries versus the old ones, and once Uber made it through, they also paved the way for their alternatives.
It’s sort of the same with Amazon and e-commerce, except Amazon has much more cash flow available due to the reasons you’ve discussed. Traditional multinational chains say they are threatened, but maybe they should be and should consider innovating and letting the consumer experience they should expect be put into law.
People here are saying they want to pay Amazon’s competitors, and your argument is that they shouldn’t do that because the workers should be starting their own Amazon competitors…
If you know exactly what you’re looking for and you know the seller, Amazon can be alright. I just bought an album CD there from MusicMagpie who’s set up shop on Amazon.
But if what you want is vague, be prepared to be bombarded with a bunch of Chinese sellers with weird brand names going through shittier couriers than Amazon themselves. It’s getting worse than AliExpress at this point.
You mean you don’t want the Zhrmgdtech USB C Charger Cable 2M 2Pack Type C Charger Fast Charging 3A Lead Nylon Braided for Samsung Galaxy S21 S20 S10 S9 S8 A12 A20e A21s A40 A51 A70,Huawei P30 P20 P40,Google Pixel,Xiaomi,Sony Xperia,Switch?
It’s a catch 22 because if you already know the seller but are opting for their Amazon vendor e-commerce channel you’re undercutting their business by taking Amazon’s promo discount on shipping today and forcing the seller to make up the difference in vendor fees. Then when your favorite reasonable merchants that balance price and quality get squeezed out of business by cheap knockoffs competing on the same platform in 1-5 years you’ll wonder why you can’t find quality products of that type anymore except from niche boutique merchants who have to charge even more to ship quality to your door than they used to.
Not exactly true for Australian consumer laws. The retailer has to resolve a and b. C manufacturers and sellers need to adhere to standards but Amazon would be liable for selling dangerous products. Also get insurance.
It’s also so much more expensive to buy from small, local businesses. Not everyone can afford to do that, no matter how much they hate buying from Amazon or Walmart.
Genuine question, what better alternative is there? I put a lot of effort into buying from small businesses with good morals, but I have no idea how to do this for the things I would buy online. If I don’t buy from amazon, i’m buying from target, Walmart, or some other supermarket. I don’t see how those are better.
The difference that there is at least some choice. The choices may all be bad, but still better than Amazon. They have no realy big competition. The fact that it is so hard not to order on Amazon is very concerning.
eBay is ok for a good portion of what Amazon sells, but it’s not a perfect replacement. It’s not all auctions now. There are lots of things you purchase outright and they ship very quickly. Watch out for people who resell Amazon items at a mark up though. It too is not all that much better than Walmart, Amazon, etc, but at least you keep anyone from dominating.
Otherwise, sometimes there are small sellers you can find for niche products.
Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.
These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it’s a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it’s not something that replaces or complements the tip, it’s just a shitty price-adjustment.
A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.
pay them , what You want to ... And increase the price on your menu ... BUT DO NOT STICK 😞 YOUR CUSTOMER WITH A HIDDEN FEE ...
Especially when we(customers) HAVE to pay tip 😉 ... {{ Like 'TF was the person who came up with the hidden fee even thinking... 😞🤔 ? }}
Because that’s not how it works in America. You know this. Don’t ask a question; it’s stupid. Declare your intention that it should be changed, and propose a way to do it.
If you actually care more than posting online, you can start a restaurant.
Is that really what Lemmy needs? Discussion on a topic that’s been hashed out a million times before? It would be more productive to talk about the weather than to keep circling the drain on this shit ad nauseam.
I feel like there's been plenty of discussion. Everyone knows it's a problem.
It continues to happen because there's no pressure to change it. Just discussions that fall into the abyss of the internet at this point, repeating things everyone already knows.
Part of the reason there's less pressure to change it than you might imagine is that we now have a hundred years of cultural inertia working on, yes, the customers and restaurants, but also on the waitstaff labor pool. At this point, the Americans who seek work as waiters are generally the ones who feel they work with the system and even turn it to their advantage. It's far from all, of course, but the "best" servers at most restaurants probably feel like they're going to make more working the customers than negotiating with their bosses.
So, you've got restaurants keeping their list-prices low and a built-in workforce motivator, customers who expect friendly service and accept that they're culturally responsible for the staff's pay, and servers who stay at the job because they feel like they'll make more than the restaurant would be willing to pay as a "fair" wage (and they're probably right). Now, it's full-on bizarre that we have taken an entry level service job and made it an exercise in theatrical entrepreneurship, and it says some unsettling things about the underlying social order in the US, but I'm not sure that at the nuts-and-bolts level, it's as broken as the people like to imagine.
I hear this repeated so often and it ignores one glaringly obvious fact, servers aren’t the ones making any decisions…literally anywhere. They are the absolute bottom rung of decision-making. It is most definitely the restaurants that are just fine paying as little as possible. Servers do love mandatory gratuity however. Working a party of 10 when only one person tips on their own meal can mess up your whole night.
Point to your credit here: it’s illegal in this state to pay less than minimum wage whether the employee is tipped or not. ALL workers make at least $15.74/hr here, except for 14 and 15 year olds who can be paid 80% of minimum wage.
If I share the little green pieces of paper, I can afford a used Toyota. If I keep them all to myself, I can buy a new Cadillac and drive past my starving workers in style.
Especially nowadays with so many people looking up menu prices online before going somewhere, it's a way to present your prices as lower than they actually are.
That’s a good question, and the easy answer is ‘they should.’ As the commenter above you mentioned, they use it as a tactic to advertise the same (competitive to other local restaurants) price people are used to. A more transparent way of doing business would be raising the price of the menu items to compensate staff fairly. The restaurant owners/management fear that if they do this it would drive away customers who believe the food is overpriced and look to their competitors. It’s easy to say, ‘just pay the staff a fair wage,’ but not quite as easy in practice. Most restaurants are small businesses just barely scraping by. The OP is right to be annoyed, but as always, context and a basic understanding of a situation’s underlying principles make the easy answer difficult to implement.
I worked in restaurants for years and this is the correct answer. I also die a little inside at how many posts say to pay servers a living wage but then balk at the idea of paying extra for the meal. Where else would the money come from??! As you said, if they raise menu prices, their competition will undercut and do this. It would also affect takeout prices where tips are usually lower. People hate tipping and want a magic solution where waiters make more but also nobody’s charged more.
They would still have to add that living wage cost to the food prices. Hidden or not hidden only makes a difference in how surprised you are, not the cost.
Because liberal mystification with fancy-sounding concepts made to make you feel dumb so you don’t realize it’s just creative surplus labor value expropriation
Or they can get a less shitty employer. I see a hidden “service” fee, that’s the tip, take it to up with the owner, I’m not responsible for this. Restaurant staff really need to start directing their anger and efforts at their employer instead of customers.
Ya… That doesn’t seem realistic to me. Very few people will “direct their anger” toward someone with power over them. There’s always risk in a addressing issues with your employer because they can make your life worse. They can fire you, reduce your income or working hours, become inflexible with scheduling and demands, remove benefits, etc. No, it doesn’t always go this way and there are plenty of fine employers. But even if you have a reasonable employer and are free to raise concerns, there’s still risk and confrontation.
And what about alternate employers? Restaurant staff can go find a better employer, right? Except, job searches are very difficult and it’s near impossible to identify a good employer from a bad one while interviewing. Very real chance that you make a change and end up with more problems.
Don’t get me wrong. These hidden fees are 100% bs. It’s just not the employee’s responsibility to fix things. They usually have zero power in these situations. “Be good to the customer or I won’t get a tip. Be good to the employer or I won’t be scheduled to work.”
It’s not my responsibility to tip on top of a hidden 18% fee as the customer, either. That’s the point I was making. Waitstaff love to direct their anger at customers, as if it’s the customers fault. The employee does have the power to organize, campaign, and vote for politicians who could enact policy to make their situation better. Instead, they just bitch about customers somehow being terrible people because their employer doesn’t pay them a living wage.
Biden was in the news saying he wants to get rid of hidden fees. I was surprised that restaraunts weren’t on the list of industries being targeted. This kind of fee should be illegal. It should be required to be a part of the up-front price.
Hell, I feel the same about sales tax. It should be baked in to the price you see on the shelf or menu.
Thank you for posting this you are correct the fee goes to the restaurant and they use the money to pay the back of house. In my experience it is just so the restaurant can provide the same wages as before to back of house but not out of the restaurants pocket. This tends to result in people tipping less so the server directly makes less money. There is also often no accounting/oversight into how the restaurant uses the fee. If I recall correctly the city of Los Angeles is looking into the legality of how these fees are presented to the customer and the fact there is no oversight.
Owner wants to get his cut, server wants to put gas in their car. We’re a country of 350 million attempted unique make it rich stories and it’s a goddamn mess.
We need UBI and jobs programs aka Trek after WW3…but I fear we may have to fight the war to get it
The S in MSRP is “suggested”, so I don’t see any technical problem with it. I think we need a separate term if it’s meant to be a locked price point across sellers.
If you raise the price of everything by 18% the prices on the menu will be 18% higher, possibly discouraging people from eating there. If you add it at the end people will still choose to eat there at least once. It is practically the same as raising prices, just a lot more dishonest.
Also illegal. It’s called bait and switch. Advertise one price, provide the service, then change the price. What if you went to get $50 in gas, and after you put the nozzle back the price suddenly changed to $59. Unless there’s a very visible sign saying it would happen before you started pumping, it’s illegal.
I’m sure that they have a sign by the front stating that they do this. Probably on the menu as well. I doubt that most people are doing the math themselves and are more likely to see a $10 menu item and think it’s $10 + tax and fees. Basically the extra fees are an afterthought.
Because raising the price of everything lets you know ahead of time that you are paying more. I’m fine with a price hike if it means servers get better pay, but hiding it like this is scummy and borderline fraudulent.
It isn’t hidden. They tell you upfront there is an 18% charge, however they rely on people ignoring that or psychologically not caring and only looking at the item price.
I wonder how many people would see the warning and assume it just means an 18% auto gratuity? Because that’s very common and the amount is exactly what many auto gratuities have (or at least had when I last was in the US, which was several years ago). Because if I saw something saying there was an 18% service fee, that’s what I’d assume. I would not think there’d be a tip on top of that.
That said, the US custom of not including the final price (including taxes) in the posted prices is a shitty, toxic practice and should be illegal.
I saw elsewhere that workers are suing this restaurant over this specifically. If they are doing a service charge like this it should not be revenue generating to the restaurant.
It does make sense to increase all menu prices in order to pay higher wages, but it’s a sleazy dishonest practice to hide that increase from the customers until it’s too late.
It’s getting stupid in Canada too despite our laws being different (as in, you cannot make less than minimum wage if you work in a place that allows tips).
I got my oil changed a few months ago and the machine prompted me for a tip. For what? The mechanic did their job, I paid for said job. Transaction concluded.
I tried Crumbl cookies for the first (and last, holy crap overpriced) time. Got asked for a tip. For what? I got six cookies in a box and then had to leave the store because there’s no seating to eat them there. The person who helped me took my order. That’s it. Another employee put six cookies in a box and put them on a counter and said my number. Not a lot of wiggle room to go “above and beyond.”
What’s next? A tip at the grocery store for the cashier scanning my groceries? A tip at the drive-thru?
Here’s a tip. Don’t work for an employer who doesn’t pay you what you’re worth.
EDIT: Actually, the tip at the drive-thru is already a thing. Starbucks prompts for a tip at the drive-thru. For what? The barista took my order and made my coffee. I drove up to a window, took it, and fucked off.
I booked a hotel online the other day and was asked if I want to leave a tip… A tip for what? I didn’t even interact with a human. Just clicked a few buttons on a website. Am I tipping the web developer?? Lol
As a developer, I never get tips. Even on my open-source stuff, I have a “tip jar” PayPal link on the very bottom of my readme files. Never asked, never required. Know how much I’ve made in tips over the years? Exactly $0.
I know it feels gross, but asking is how you get people to do things. This is true for pretty much everything. That’s why mobile apps have a popup asking people to leave a rating, and Apple even has a standardized API for showing that popup since it’s so common.
So you should try something similar for you projects. Come up with an (ideally non-intrusive) ask that feels like a personal request rather than just a link dumped somewhere in a readme.
And if you feel bad about it, just remember that getting people to pay for OSS is a win for the whole ecosystem!
Superautomatic machines make inferior espresso shots objectively. For various mechanical reasons they will never make espresso as well as non-automatic machine.
That being said, I own one at my house. It’s very convenient and it’s passable espresso (when using decent beans, Starbucks burns their espresso beans and that’s the main reason it sucks). However, if I’m paying $5+ for a couple shots of espresso in whatever form I’m expecting it to be made right. Not worse than my mid range home machine makes with a couple button taps.
It clearly doesn’t suck or there wouldn’t be one on every street corner in North America.
But I’m sure you’re right about the automation. They don’t want variability in your experience. They want a coffee in Texas to taste the same as a coffee in Iqaluit.
In the US you generally cannot make less than minimum wage, the employer can directly pay you less as long as your full compensation (pay + tips) are at least minimum wage, if not they are supposed to pay more.
I think the explosion of tip questions is due to the card processors figuring out there was an untapped area where they could pressure people to tip and skim off a percentage of that.
I think you misunderstood. In some states, you will be paid below minimum wage if you make enough in tips. IIRC there was a story a number of years ago about servers in Tennessee (?) only making $2.15/hr. It was legal because they made enough in tips to cover the other $5.10/hr that the restaurant is supposed to pay. So instead of the tips being extra cash on top of pay, the restaurants were literally having the customers subsidize the majority of their pay.
I understand that, but I’m talking about Canada. In Canada if you’re paid $13, $18, hell $50 an hour, it doesn’t matter whether or not you make tips. Your employer must pay you your full hourly wage no matter what.
Listen to this scam.
I stopped at a Starbucks kiosk to get my kid a juice box the other day. When I paid for it by card the card machine prompted for a tip, 25%, 20%, and 15%. Here’s the kicker, 25% was selected by default! You actually have to use button on the machine to move through the selections to get to NONE. To top it off the lady behind the counter casually said, “Oh you’re using a card? Just press the green accept button when the menu comes up.” which would have selected the 25 option.
Honestly Reddit doesn’t infuriate me anymore. I haven’t been on reddit for 2 weeks now and I no longer feel the urge to check that site. I expect I’ll still end up there occasionally when I search for stuff, but gone are the days when I spend an hour or two every night on reddit.
The quality of the posts being worse makes sense, I’m guessing some of the Reddit power users moved here and they were generating the majority of quality OC on Reddit.
I also feel like it's become more right wing. Or at least now that some people have left, the balance has shifted further to the right. I went on yesterday, and r/WhitePeopleTwitter, a fairly left wing sub, is now having a lot of Republicans. Really killed my desire to go back. It was something I know a lot of people predicted would happen, but still sad in a way to see.
Edit: Also the fact that the main niche subs I went to are dead. They used to be pretty active, but since they reopened, a lot of users were not happy. So now it's a post every few days. I think one of the subs just got completely deleted. Sadly they're not as active here.
Same for me. When RIF stopped working I went into Lemmy and haven’t went on Reddit since. The FOMO I thought I’d get isn’t there because I’m active and welcome here. I have people to connect with, and that’s what I really only wanted out of a social site like this.
There’s still quite a few subreddits I miss. Plus the larger community. Some communities are here, but they’re dead with no users, and I don’t really have what to contribute.
I wanted to try listing all of them, but I realized there’s like 40 of them.
Mostly, I miss r/batteries, r/ElectroBOOM, r/linuxmint, r/ManjaroLinux, r/LinuxMasterrace, r/SpaceXMasterrace, r/pcmasterrace, r/computers, r/laptops, r/amateursatellites, r/whatisthisthing and r/RTLSDR which also had cool people like developer of noaa-apt and Ryzerth, the developer of SDR++, plus many more.
Edit: Oh, how could I forget dereksgc, another cool guy who puts out lots of useful info.
I can leave the larger community, but I do miss a couple subreddits.
The good thing about the Reddit before the dark times of 3 weeks ago, was that it had a large enough user graph that there were enough people with niche interests to have an active community. Facebook also has this critical user graph.
The good thing about ActivityPub based communities is that there is the potential to have much larger federated user graphs than the individual closed business-based platforms.
The only sub I go to now is my local city’s subreddit for a good stream of local news and happenings. That hasn’t migrated to Lemmy yet and I don’t want to moderate it so I’m not making it here lol
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Edit: Didn’t mean to ridicule any of you all. I based my comment on my experience when I signed up. At that time there were plenty of instances to pick from and getting approved at my instance of choice was very quick. My bad.
the only thing that exists is LASIM which will allow to transfert your communities, blocks and profile settings from one account to an other (but you need to create the new account first)
Not sure what OS you are using but make sure you have write permissions in the folder you’ve extracted the app to. If you’re on Windows you might want to try running it as administrator.
One benefit the Fediverse has over a centralized site is that, as long as you set the same display name and avatar, most people will recognize you after a migration. For example, I know a few fellow Lemmygrad guys who have alternate, identical Lemmy.ml accounts for posting on instances that block Lemmygrad, and you can’t even tell which account they’re using unless you visit their page.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn’t stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating
I highly recommend opening a lurking account in one of the NSFW instances. They are probably some of the fastest, most progressive and best funded instances on Lemmy. You do not have to browse the NSFW content.
I don’t think that makes sense if you’re worried about defederation. Porn instances are particularly at risk of being defederated from (and thus you potentially can’t interact with large communities).
It’s so easy to change instances, and there are extensions and things to export/import your subscriptions, etc. Just head over to one ones that’s hosting the content, or check out others to see if they will keep federated with the pirate communities. Make the same username, and most won’t even know that you’re posting from a different instance. You can still see everything you did before, just also possibly some other stuff. You might also get beehaw and hexbear (for better or for worse is up to you)! I feel like I might hop instances a few more times before I settle.
Okay, you’re not on Reddit anymore where things are just easy because they spent time to figure it out. Fediverse is just a fledging group of sites that are getting an influx of users, while still trying to figure out both their instance, and cooperative rules that fit both their values and the wants/needs of their users. You want a well oiled machine, jump back into the mainstream where they use your data to personalize the adds they place between all the things you want to see. Or, you can go with the flow as this new ecosystem forms, sans ads, and free of data collection.
I don’t remember where it was for me, but I do remember it being the hop-on point for me into Lemmy because it was already well populated, so I figured it meant “good”. Now that I understand lemmy better, I’ve realized I don’t need to patron it anymore - there are better instances for me. I suspect that this is a good thing that something is causing users to move. I’m sure .world is the face of fediverse, or at least lemmy, for many at this point and will continue to grow in user base. Maybe losing users on the back end will satisfy the DDOS attackers, and also lighten the load while .world’s admin get it figured out.
on the mastodon side at least quite a few people started off on mastodon.social and migrated over to smaller instances (or in some cases migrated to entirely different software families like pleroma or misskey)
i’d go as far as to say (jokingly ofc) that you aren’t a true member of the fediverse if you didn’t migrate at least once
It was the only server that was accepting when I joined. I still have applications at a few, but never got approved. Signed up on startrek.website yesterday. I was motivated by the ddos more than any thing else.
A strength and a weakness. The strength, as you say, is being able to move to a different instance. However, the weakness is that Lemmy (the software) requires each instance to keep a copy of every federated post for its users to interact with. This means they have to host (and be legally liable for) data that they can’t police beyond blocking the community / instance.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
To give credit where it’s due, when the big Reddit migration happened many instances could not handle the influx of migrating users. Some people might have only had .world as an option.
Situation still sucks tho. Hope upcoming Lemmy updates make moving accounts between instances easier.
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
its not a bug, its a feature! the faceless admins get to tell you watch content you can get now, not a faceless corporations! its so good that all the instances are starting a war with each other over the content they host because it means we have the choice of who gets to decide what content we like to see!.
I can sense the sarcasm of your post, yet the words you’ve written are actually true. This is exactly what decentralisation is all about. on some other websites you might lose access to the content entirely, on the fediverse you can just go there direct and still get all of the content, nobody can ever take that away from you except for the people who manage that content.
That’s literally the main selling point of this kind of setup. Nobody, faceless or otherwise, can stop you accessing any of the content.
I went with lemmy world so i could catch the widest net in content. And up till now i agreed with the reasoning of the other defederating.s But it seems like it won’t take much to provoke more restrictions. Guess i will have to lurk in other shores.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I’ll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.
Yeah, it really can’t be helped. The piracy community can always just shut down and congregate elsewhere. It’s significantly harder for a more general community to scatter and reform.
I still have it installed and even though it doesn’t and will never work, I still like to open it, and have it once again try to retrieve posts only to return “forbidden”. I do it for old time’s sake, like a digital pouring one out for RIF and the Reddit I used to know.
I still have to google search reddit when I’m looking for specific info like opinions on games. Unfortunately lemmy’s not reasonable to search, and Reddit has a much bigger userbase with a longer time to accumulate info about most topics.
That’s not accurate. The article is about Australia. Netflix Australia had a net loss of 200K subscribers specifically due to the anti-consumer moves they’ve made which affects a lot more than just sharing a password with a family member. That’s a 3% decline in a major country. Meanwhile, Netflix rivals had subscriptions increase overall and several saw huge surges. Netflix remains #1 by total subscribers in Australia, but that shouldn’t shock anyone given the inherit momentum they possess.
The article was never about Netflix globally. It was always about Australia. Companies operate business units in regions, and each region must perform.
The comments are just so much worse than the top posts. It is akin to Twitter after Musk pushed the main active user base away in exchange for a Faustian deal with right wingnuts. That or Reddit was truly duplicitous in their messaging and are perfectly fine taking money from propaganda organizations running in other countries which can pay the API fees to push narratives still. Not that they’d want that before an IPO or anything…
Legit had someone from my last job start going on a break room tirade about how “those damn unions just want your money” but strangely had no rebuttal when asked why giving them 2% of your paycheck is a bad thing when they negotiated your RAISE to be 15% and your health benefits add up to an additional savings of around 20%.
I’m SO SORRY you’re getting extra money and healthcare rather than the NOTHING you had before.
Nowadays I like to print up cards with unionizing information on them, facts vs myths, links to read up more, anti-union tactics, links to join unions, links to find HELP setting up a union, and basically anything I could cram into a business card. Now I leave about 10 of them any time I go into a non union store.
Given how previous management has reacted to “someone” leaving these in the break room, I’m sure I’ve caused a few sleepless nights.
For union dues, I’ll sometimes bring up strikes. People know that when unions strike, they aren’t working, and when they aren’t working, they aren’t getting paid. What they don’t realize is that most unions pay the employees during strikes, and that money has to come from somewhere.
Hmm. It’s been a thing for every union I’ve been a part of, but it makes sense it wouldn’t be ALL of them that do it. I’m sure some just simply aren’t large enough to do it like that.
That’s something to worry about in every arena that involves money, not just unions. It’s just a fact of life that there are crooks and liars in the world.
That’s true. I think that’s just what I’m trying to say. Unions are best for most jobs but are not great for all jobs. And they do have s lot of problems younger people might not realize. Some unions are bad for stiffing younger members giving work to older more experienced guys while younger guys pay the same dues. They can become the same shit different structure. So I’m not saying don’t unionize. But I am saying make sure the union serves its members and does not become just another thing that fucks you.
In the end I prefer things like cooperatives over unions but we’re a long way from there. But they also suffer the same old boys club. In the end I think we overlook that we’re all just evil corporation’s without power and money. In the end we should look at the culture itself because there’s a reason corruption is king
From the other side: I’m pro-union, but at my workplace I’m management.
One of the guys on my crew is terrible at his job. Just awful. Everyone hates working with him, he doesn’t get anything done on time, he’s either stupid or willfully ignorant, the list goes on and on.
The union, however, has negotiated that I can’t action for productivity. It literally doesn’t matter how badly he does his job, as long as he’s in his spot and something is happening, I can’t do anything. On top of that, this guy has seniority over most of the other guys on the crew, so I can’t even give him less hours without cutting the people who actually get shit done.
It’s incredibly frustrating, and the only thing I can do is watch his attendance like a hawk in the hopes I can get rid of him for being late one too many times.
The company is openly for its own interest. Corrupting the company would mean using the company for something other than seeking profit. A union, which is on your side, is the thing where corruption makes it go from serving you to not serving you. A company wasn’t serving you in the first place.
The downside is that you won’t get paid as much as you would working. My union pays $200 a day to anyone on a picket line, but as a strike goes on, the money starts to run out.
My local went on strike once in 2019, it lasted one day and everyone who picketed got $200.
Last year we threatened to strike, had an authorization vote, but our signatory contractors association wanted nothing to do with it and we basically got everything we asked for with no work stoppage.
The deal in my part of the country is that what with the CHIPS Act, there’s literally billions of dollars on the table and our signatory contractors can’t afford to get bogged down in labor disputes.
The upshot is that it leaves the unions sitting pretty since they can’t access these incredibly lucrative contracts without using highly-trained union labor.
There’s more to do with EMRs and the like, but I won’t bore you with the details.
I know this might not apply elsewhere as I’m in Australia, but I always bring up that your union fees are totally tax deductible so you get it all back at tax time.
It’s the same people that don’t get socialised healthcare. Union fees are like a tax that’s used to pay people to do work for you, in the case of worker unions, people that negotiate working conditions, benefits, and wages, in addition to lawyers that can both offer legal advice and representation should you be in need of it.
Here in Sweden we have lots of different unions. We have a tenants union that negotiate rent increases, ensure that landlords do their end of the contract, and will help you with legal proceedings should it be required.
There are also various “customer owned” institutions, like my bank, insurance company, and the grocery store I get most of my groceries from. The goal isn’t necessarily massive profits, but enough to sustain and develop the services, with surplus going back to the owners, that is the customers.
It just makes sense. We all make use of schools as children, so funding that with taxes makes sense. It ensures everyone gets a good education, and at least one good meal per day. Same thing applies to healthcare.
My mother WORKS IN HEALTHCARE as the intermediary for the hospital network and the insurance companies.
She literally sees the Financials of people every fucking day.
And still she thinks socialized Healthcare would tank the entire US. I’ve shown charts, studies, anecdotal evidence out the wazoo (which is where anecdotal evidence usually comes from) But no, I can’t possibly be right about this, it would mean someone who got stabbed will have to wait on 600 people with the sniffles to be seen by a doctor in 6 months. Because I guess in socialized medicine, triage doesn’t exist? You can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
Sure. People need to earn a living, after all. I'm talking more about general tendencies (unless you want to be extremely literal about that "always") in how people take in new information. Messing with ego, preconceptions, tribal status or money are great ways to make that really difficult.
My problem with paying more taxes so everyone gets healthcare is that I put in the work, so that I get to see premium doctors. The socialized system lowers the incentive for there to be a spectrum of quality care. Instead you get the government standard, which is going to be like the DMV of healthcare. You are getting as good as can be what is offered to all, which is the antithesis of a capitalist system where your benefit from the fruits of your labor with a variety of options. The person on welfare with ten kids and no job shouldn’t get access to the same doctors as me, a working professional who knows not to have kids until I can afford them.
Because they have kids when they can’t afford them and I don’t do that. They are a burden on society by making bad decisions. I don’t hate them, but feel that they shouldn’t get handouts for being failures.
What a long winded way to say “I am a piece of shit who likes to see others suffer, because feel I am superior.”
Either you stand to unfairly gain from the current system, or you’re an idiot who not only listens to companies like Walmart tell you about “welfare queens” but buys it hook line and sinker.
Or you’re a troll, I guess.
Because if you think what you pay in premiums is less than what you’d pay with properly managed universal healthcare, you’re simply stupid. Not ignorant, stupid. Unable or unwilling to learn.
My problem with paying more taxes so everyone gets healthcare is that I put in the work, so that I get to see premium doctors.
The U.S. spends the most on healthcare in the world, yet doesn’t have as good quality of healthcare as most countries with socialised healthcare. I get what you’re saying, and even ignoring the obvious social issues it raises, the system you’re defending just doesn’t work unless you’re obscenely rich.
If you’re on Lemmy I don’t think you’re obscenely rich.
Everyone else is (rightly) shooting on you for hating poor people. And there is some validity to what you’re saying about some portion of the poor adults you’re talking about. So the question you should be looking at is, “How do I get there to be less poor people?” Sure you could suggest a modest proposal, or you could promote ideas to minimize those poor children growing up to be poor adults. So what things make poor kids grow up to be poor adults? Well, the three biggest you’re going to see are lack of education, poor health and nutrition, and poor housing security. If you look at the numbers for anywhere else in the world, you’ll see that unless you’re fabulously wealthy you will generally see better health outcomes from universal healthcare, and it will probably cost you less, too. Properly funding public education is another key factor in making sure those poor kids have every chance to not be poor adults. Whiles you’re at it, keep funding those school lunch programs. Don’t worry, for every dollar spent on those, the economy sees multiple dollars of improvement. Housing can get a bit expensive, and even if you just did those other two, you would be doing a lot to reduce the number of poor kids who grow up to be poor adults. Now, if you were so outrageous as to propose police reforms to the point where the kids are less afraid of the cops than they are of the local gangs, that might be a benefit, too. Granted, none of this is quick or easy.
When it comes down to it, poor people are always going to cost something to deal with. You can worry about health, education, housing and social assistance, or you can worry about policing, jail, and supports and corrections for children. Neither option is free.
I don’t think the system would change that much, save for insurance companies not having a say in the healthcare a patient receives. It’s ridiculous that insurance companies come before the health of the patient.
Here in Sweden, if you have the sniffles, you don’t see a doctor. There’s nothing a doctor can do for you. If you get really ill, you go to the ER. Assuming you’re not actively dying, someone who gets stabbed will absolutely go before you. The ER doesn’t operate on a first-come-first-serve basis. If you come to the ER with the sniffles you’ll get to wait for a long-ass time, and at most they’ll send you home with some antipyretics and a suggestion to book a time at a clinic if your problems persist.
There are obviously issues. Gods do we have issues. In general though, the quality of care here in Sweden is ranked higher than that of the U.S.
Honestly I don’t see how it could be LOWER. I have a very dim view of the US Healthcare system, particularly where insurance companies are concerned.
Why do the surgery that only has a 93% chance of success that will give the person use of their legs, that costs $250,000 when a $300 wheelchair will get them from A to B.
Given that I have had to wait MONTHS for an appointment before, and my primary care Dr I have to schedule 2 months in advance, when people complain that they’ll have to wait longer than a week to see a doctor I wonder who they fucked over to get Healthcare that quickly.
Wait times differ greatly depending on where you are and what kind of care you’re seeking. I moved a couple of weeks ago, and decided to try and deal with my hot-flashes issue. Last Tuesday I opened an issue with my clinic, and I got an appointment for Thursday that week. In my old town I had a previously recurrent health issue that had me waiting for four months to see someone.
Sadly politics plays a part too. In the U.K. for example, if you’re a trans person and you’re seeking medical care your case will bounce around endlessly, and you might not ever see the care you need. Same procedures for cis-people can be organised really fast though. Philosophy tube made a really good video on the issue.
It’s also not uncommon for clinics to be understaffed, and the workers to be overworked. This obviously can also lead to issues. I’ve a friend whose cousin died because they didn’t recognise his type of cancer quick enough, despite him seeking help for it frequently. They honestly didn’t really look for it until they faked him passing out, prompting them to take him seriously.
And if the US educational system continues the way its going then you all are going to get more people who turn their noses up at unions because they lack the intellectual capacity to release that the short term loss in revenue will lead to long term benefits.
I’ve had to explain how tax brackets work to my parents multiple times. And my mother was a math substitute teacher for over a decade before quitting because educational work isn’t worth the bullshit for little pay.
I will always vote for increased education budgets.
end (and stop exporting) that vicious tipping culture of yours. Just pay decent wages to people in customer service.
change the design of yours bills, make them easily recognizable, with different colors and sizes like normal curencies.
take religion out of the money.
and since I’m at it, end gun culture and disarm your people. Also SUVs, end that too. And introduce controlled prices in health services, regulate, regulate, regulate, till it becomes a functional system affordable by everyone.
Tipping isn’t bad. Being underpaid is bad. If we as consumers want to add a little more for good service, I don’t see a problem.
Make dollar coins a thing again.
Remove presidents too.
Guns are for weak people. 100% of gun owners I know are massive cowards. Tell your friends. If we can’t get legislation, maybe we can change the culture. SUVs are fine, it’s the massive pickup trucks that are getting out of hand. Give us the Hilux already, and make it electric. Healthcare should be universal and single-payer. End the health insurance industry.
We are trying…
Edit: Please tell me why you disagree, don’t just downvote me. Downvote is not a “disagree” button. I’m just trying to share my thoughts the best I can.
Tipping had devolved from customers saying “I’ll give something extra for extra service” to restaurants saying “since you pay for the food, why don’t you pay for the staff too?”
Only real way to get rid of this culture is to ban it to start. Workers need to demand living wages at the same time as ban comes into effect.
Only real way to get rid of this culture is to ban it to start.
A ban would be a bit extreme. Is tipping banned anywhere?
For me, the fix is to establish a fixed tip like some parts of Europe used to have. E.g. $1—2 per person for good service regardless of bill. This would accomplish two things:
The tip cannot be an income supplement (thus wages increase if the resto wants to have staff)
There is still a quality control signal in place
Tipping isn’t bad. Being underpaid is bad. If we as consumers want to add a little more for good service, I don’t see a problem.
The two are at odds with each other; that’s the problem.
I think in this case, “banned” is referring to “paying workers below minimum hourly wage because they’re expected to make up the difference by convincing our patrons to generously donate +20% of their dinner bill”, not “citizens will be fined/incarcerated if they give someone money of their own free will”
Because it logically follows. If the businesses have to stop relying on customers to pay their employees what they are worth. Someone should have to pay their employees a valid living wage. And that logically would be the company.
Tipping is bad, since it has been taken to the logical extreme of making the customer directly responsible for paying staff, instead of the money going into the business’ coffers, to be redistributed as wage from there.
Actually not gonna complain about this one, but that does not take away from the fact that you need to inspect bills of the US dollar for what magnitude of currency it is. Be it a dollar, a fiver, or a hundred, they all have the same size and colour. Unlike more sane currencies, where each denomination of bill has a different size and colour, making it readily apparent if you’re holding five, twenty or a hundred of it.
you can’t see shit out of them, especially right near the bumper.
As a result of a stiffer frame and higher ground clearance, they’re more fatal in a crash with people, or even regular cars, both for the other party and for their own occupants. And because they’re big, heavy & unwieldy, they’re more likely to end up in a crash in the first place.
they hog space on the road, making traffic and parking worse
they weigh a fuckton, making road maintenance more expensive
there are vehicles out there that can do what an SUV or a Pickup truck can do, but much more efficiently & cost-effectively
The people most likely to vehemently insist these abominations are supposed to keep existing have been found, by market research, to be obsessed with status, be less likely to volunteer, have no strong connection to their community, be less giving, be less oriented towards others, be more afraid of crime, be more likely to text & drive and be more likely to take risks while driving. In other words, SUV fanboys are assholes.
When, a decade or so ago, one researcher put plastic animals along the side of the road, to see which ones people were more likely to hit, some people purposely went out of their way to run over them. Those people were in 89% of cases SUV drivers. The timing is relevant, since at the time, most American car makers still sold regular cars.
Most SUV’s and Pickup trucks end up being used for exactly nothing you would need them for.
Gun owners aren’t cowards, being afraid of guns makes you a coward. Learn to handle guns so you don’t have to piss yourself in fear.
SUVs are for bad drivers that need to be in giant vehicles to feel safe due to their own inabilities. Some large trucks are acceptable for work purposes but SUV manufacturers use legislation for work trucks made years ago to get away with ignoring safety standards.
Electric cars aren’t better for the environment in our current ecosystem. You might not be burning fuel in your car but you’re burning coal at the power plant. Beyond that all you’ve done is make yourself more dependent on the power grid. If you are one of the very few people with self sufficient electric in your home you can skip this one.
Free healthcare doesn’t equal good healthcare. People in places with free healthcare have to wait ages for treatment and may be turned away from treatment if the government is over their saving your life budget. The insurance industry could use some work though, hospital bills increase because they can get that money from an insurance provider, this fucks anyone without insurance because most people don’t realize they can negotiate those prices down.
Gun owners aren’t cowards, being afraid of guns makes you a coward. Learn to handle guns so you don’t have to piss yourself in fear.
Counterpoint, if no one has a gun, no one has to be afraid. And people that are so afraid that they feel the need to have a gun are the ones that are afraid. And if you want to claim that getting rid of guns won’t work because bans don’t work, why are the same people that are so vehemently pro gun also trying to ban books, healthcare for trans people, abortions, etc. If bans don’t work, why is that all they want to do?
Not to mention the same people that are 2nd amendment absolutists are the ones that are also supposedly very pro a government that’s oppressive and siding with the police. The very people they claim that they need their guns for. Spoiler, they don’t want guns for that. They want guns to persecute people they believe shouldn’t have rights like POC, LGBTQ+, women, etc.
Counter counter point: You can make a gun easily. Look up the looty.
Making guns illegal only keeps them out of the hands of people willing to follow the law. People who want to kill people with guns and commit crime do not care that they are not allowed to have a gun.
Counterpoint: You can make your own drugs. You can make your own bombs. You can make poisonous gases. Why bother policing anything if people can just make it themselves.
Well, we’ve recently explored the legalization of weed due to the fact that you can just grow it and it’s not that harmful. Other drugs I mean that’s quite a conversation to have but maybe one worth having.
Bombs don’t have a great use in the normal everyday market, but fireworks are used for agriculture and dynamite is used for construction. So they aren’t really illegal, just regulated.
We do have access to poisonous gasses again for agriculture and some for home use for bug extermination again this leans towards regulated not outright illegal.
Outlawing stuff just because we’re scared of it doesn’t make sense. Instead providing people with an education on what their scared of can protect them from someone who wants to use those things against them.
You could break down my garage door with a car or run me down in the street with one but we’re not outlawing vehicles. You know how to operate a vehicle and can see it’s practical uses you’re not scared of them. You don’t need to be afraid of them even though you’re much more statisticly likely to die due to a car then a gun.
Electric cars aren’t better for the environment in our current ecosystem. You might not be burning fuel in your car but you’re burning coal at the power plant. Beyond that all you’ve done is make yourself more dependent on the power grid. If you are one of the very few people with self sufficient electric in your home you can skip this one.
You really have to factor in the refinement and transport of fuel though. And then needing to drive to the pumps and the additional maintenance ICE vehicles
And not all energy is created by burning coal. There are solar, hydro, wind, and nuclear. In fact, only 20% of our energy comes from coal, www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3.
I can’t speak for every state, but California has only one coal plant and an abundance of renewable energy generation. Including what consumers dump back into the grid.
I love our EV, and encourage others to buy one. They aren’t perfect, but it’s about incremental improvements. The next problems to solve is battery improvements, long-term battery resource sustainability, and building a more durable and less polluting tire.
Though yes, California does have the least non-renewable power generation. Can you say the same for other states?
Additional maintenance is negligible when compared to the price of battery replacement.
I don’t think there are many people making trips in their vehicle just for gas. With a gas station on nearly every corner you’re able to easily stop on an existing trip to refuel.
When the power grid fails due to a natural disaster gas power is all you’ve got. With the limited range you have, is it worth the risk to try to drive somewhere for power?
I’m not against hybrids provided you can still get a reasonable amount of mileage off the gas. But like you said, we need massive amounts of improvement on batteries before we’re ready for mass adoption and for EVs to really be a viable replacement option.
You seem to be forgetting that places with socialised health care also have private healthcare and private insurance available so it’s the best of both worlds. Everyone can get treated regardless, but you can also go ‘premium’ if desired.
So I can pay for others healthcare in my taxes and pay for additional healthcare for myself because the “free” healthcare I’m already paying for doesn’t do enough for me? Wouldn’t it just make more since to pay for private “premium” healthcare off the rip?
Nothing is actually free. It all comes out somewhere. I’m a big fan of not relying on others and the government to support me.
It’s cold war era propaganda, it’s not even that old. There was a belief at the time among certain circles that since the USSR outlawed organized religion that the US needed to embrace organized religion even harder and to drive that point home we should put “In god we trust” on all our money. A lot of the US’s current issues can be traced back to cold war propaganda surprisingly. Boomers have been stewing in that garbage their entire lives and it rotted their brains to the point where you can reduce them to frothing incoherent rage by just saying “socialism” around them.
Did you read about the process to change Amendments? Do you think there’s any chance that 3/4 of the 50 states in the USA would ever vote in agreement to abolish their own right to bear arms? I’m confident enough that will not happen that I will bet you $5000 that it does not happen in the next 30 years.
27 times already. I’d say the math works. The Repubeicans are at their end. This is their last kicks. They know the world is changing and they are not in favor. That’s why they have the corrupt syrpeme court in a attempt to get in what the minority wants.
Yeah, historically it should be the people-focused parties that really want the people to be armed, not the business-focused parties. Of course the people-focused party here is also the big-government party, so that muddies things.
It amazes me how far behind America is simply because they hate poor people so much, passing regulation to ensure people have fee free access to banking services? Same answer as anything ‘nope, fuck the poor’ it’s crazy too because it’s greed of people saying ‘why should they get something for nothing!!!’ but everything to do with banking is more expensive and worse in the US, even cash machines charge a couple of dollars to get your money.
I think tipping culture is a weird social hierarchy thing too, like people love to feel like they’re a higher strata then their server plus have that control over them ‘your wages are in my hands, peasant, now serve me like the lord of the manor!’ everywhere else there’s a camaraderie with workers and I think it feels a lot nicer, the waiter isn’t trying to upsell or get into your graces to earn a dirty penny they’re just doing their job and interacting with you on a fundamentally human level.
I love using cash. I feel like I am thwarting The System since it keeps pressuring me to use credit cards or some other form of electronic currency. I mean I use some of those too when necessary, but I use cash whenever possible.
The first and the last bullets are never going to change sadly. Tipping is only on the increase, guns are just like an inherent part of America now - kids are getting slaughtered by them daily and it’s just like normal. Gun control is a laughable proposal in the US. If it hasn’t changed with all the reasons to change, it’s not going to. SUVs are actually becoming MORE popular. Healthcare is fucked.
mildlyinfuriating
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