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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • When I’m given free stuff I tip as if I paid for it. So if part of a meal is comped, for example, I’ll use the original subtotal, pre-discount, to figure out what to tip.

    If I’m only getting drinks (coffee, alcohol etc.) I default to a $1 tip per drink, and if given a free drink I’ll add on to that while factoring the cost of what I’m given. But if any food is involved I start at 20% on the subtotal, then round up or down to the nearest 50¢ or $1 depending on how long I stay at the establishment and how much the subtotal is.

    For takeout, I’ll tip less since I’m spending much less time in the establishment; I might round the total up to the nearest $5 or $10 depending on how much I spend.

    And for delivery, I have basically never ordered for delivery in my entire adult life, and don’t plan to, I’d rather just go and pick up whatever I order. I was a pizza delivery driver before UberEats and the like were common and quickly got a feel for that etiquette (people were usually pretty generous) and decided it was a luxury I could live without.

    Compared to you I guess I’m a bit cheap but I’d still tip the same even if front-of-house people were making more money, unless they explicitly tell me not to tip them (which has happened before). I don’t think people should feel bullied into tipping, because I think the business should be paying them the living wage instead, but just like at any other job good performance should always be rewarded.



  • I mostly know of him from Behind the Bastards, a podcast about prominent historical figures (usually 1800s through present). The twist, apart from their regular Christmas “Non-Bastard” episodes is of course that these influential people actually behaved questionably at best during their time. I really think Robert’s research and storytelling are great, he and the guests he brings on really can make an hour fly by sometimes. Most of the biographies are split up into a couple parts, with people like Kissinger and Vince McMahon having such dubious pasts to earn them 6 parts each.

    Anyway, the interview with the AI home assistant dude was from another podcast which he frequents, called It Could Happen Here, a more news-oriented podcast. Both of the podcasts can be found on YouTube, published by Cool Zone Media. I believe they did 3 episodes of CES coverage for this year, the final part contained the interview. After all the dunking Robert talks about another interview he had at CES which was a lot more uplifting.







  • They’re useful tools, as is the Lincoln Project, for example. Once the existential threat in Trump is gone it’ll be back to business as usual and their MO will be “oppose meaningful change without enabling a monster to take advantage of us again” again in no time. Trump is such a unique and unhinged threat that they resent what they’ve created, and in an equally unique moment of self reflection, created the Never Trump movement. But longtime allies to leftists, or even liberals for that matter, they absolutely are not. There’s no ambiguity around it.


  • You can spare Lemmy the whataboutisms with this one. Everyone is taking a little money from everyone else, but:

    Neo-fascists absolutely prefer giving to the Republican Party above all other major parties and vice versa. It’s an open-and-shut case. Hardliners in the party routinely echo anything and everything that gets them brownie points from dictators and the country’s most degenerate billionaires.

    The Democratic Party is not perfect (Israel being the elephant in the room, but make no mistake, Bibi 100% wants Trump back in office). But if anyone is pushing back against the return of fascism the most it’s the Dems. And you can see that in hostilities from Republicans and authoritarian governments alike.

    The Green Party’s main candidate accepted gifts from the Russian Federation through their news network RT, which is basically a propaganda machine for the government which owns them. Stein’s ads openly said in 2016 that the Greens wanted Hillary to lose, fearmongering nuclear war with Russia. And this year it’s the same old shit with her: just make the Dems lose.

    (Side note, Sputnik hired PSL’s Eugene Puryear as a long-time host. Also, PSL also has absolutely insane foreign positions. Like I’ll be the first to say the West is absolutely an imperfect cultural entity, but you don’t gotta just hand it to Putin or Kim Jong Un because they also have a problem with the hegemony.)



  • Not the lowest, for sure, but I’m going to put my hat in for auto technicians. Master techs can make over $100K in southern New England but the cost of tools can easily rival college tuition by the time you’re a master tech. Everything except proprietary equipment and the car lift needs to be bought by the technician, which can cost thousands of dollars. Health insurance is prohibitively expensive, the flat rate pay system means you only get paid when you complete jobs, and it’s an ergonomic nightmare because you’re picking up heavy objects and working in cramped areas all day.

    As someone who whose fiance was a mechanic until last year, I think it’s really disingenuous to hear so many people say that the trades are your fast track to making money. Very little of that $150/ hr that you pay goes to the person working on your car. For every lift the shop has they’re taking 80% or more off the top of that $150/ hr, and if the job takes longer than expected the mechanic doesn’t make any more money. In fact they’re losing money because they’re stuck figuring out a solution instead of moving on to the next car.

    And don’t even get me started on tool loans. It’s straight up worse than student loans because they’re classified as personal loans. My student loans all hover around 5% interest, but right now personal loans go up to 18% depending on the term. The only saving grace I can think of is that they’re usually dischargeable in bankruptcy.

    I really could go on all day about how broken it all is because I’ve lived it secondhand for a while now, and now that I’m trying to gain more of these skills for my classic motorcycle hobby it’s all so obvious. Not sure if the other trades like plumbing and welding have the same “take out loans to pay for tools to make money to pay for the loans, then learn more skills within the trade to make more money, and then take out more loans for tools to do the more advanced work” cycle but no one ever mentions this when they talk about how this kind of work is so lucrative.

    Don’t get me wrong, college is really badly overpriced in the US, but the trades absolutely can be just as expensive once you’ve made it your career. And I don’t want to dissuade people from considering it as a career, either, but it’s a monetary risk that you need to really sit down and calculate before you take the plunge, just like college.



  • Trump would absolutely make the genocide significantly worse than the track it’s currently on if he wins. And he’s gonna make life in the US worse too. The “both sides are equally bad” rhetoric has absolutely failed over the last 8 years. If he lost in 2016 the entire world would be on a completely different track and if you don’t want to believe it then I’m confident that you don’t actually know the differences in policy and ideologies between the Democratic and Republican parties.

    And before anyone says I’m accuses me of being a liberal, I’m a libertarian socialist and I’m registered to the Socialist Party of Massachusetts. I voted Bernie in both primaries then Green Party in 2016 (which I’ve come to regret even though Clinton was going to win my home state by a huge margin) then Biden in 2020. I voted this way in '20 because while Biden ignores socialists Trump wants them all dead.



  • The most expensive thing I’ve had that was really notable (as I’m sure I’ve ordered something pricier and thought nothing of it) was half an A5 wagyu steak from Wegmans. I think it was originally around $250/lb but it was on a manager’s special sale. I think it was around $80 for a ½lb, which is genuinely insane to me knowing that manager’s special means it’s the last chance to buy something before it goes bad.

    Anyway, it was really good. A very odd experience though because afterwards I kinda stopped craving/ cooking/ ordering beef for a couple months. It was like I achieved some superlative thing and was just done with the concept of beef for a little bit. A strange reaction to such a positive experience, that said I do still eat beef occasionally.


  • He doesn’t just “give a platform to everybody” for the sake of free speech, that’s not how free speech works when you’re a host and/ or owner of a media company. He hosts a certain crowd because he wants to. It’s his show.

    Literally all media is biased. If someone tells you that they are unbiased or if some other show is, they are lying. Rogan is friendly to capitalism and drug legalization, and there’s nothing wrong in disclosing it (even if I don’t personally agree with the former).