Kid_Thunder

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Fast food was affordable because they paid sweat shop wages. That’s not the case anymore.

McDonalds gross profits are $14.68B over the last 12 months with over 9% year-over-year growth.

They aren’t struggling and other than covid (which just held steady for a few years at $10B), the trend has been going up, not down, not stagnant for many years.

Remember that’s gross profits. If wages were hitting them hard, then we’d see the trend decrease but that isn’t what happened or is happening.

I think what really kicked this off is that restaurants started putting surcharges on bills by directly passes specific legal requirement costs directly to the customers without increasing their menu prices. For example, now that servers get some health benefits in SF, they’ll have a surcharge that says something like “SF Mandate” or “SF Health Surcharge”.

This would also cover stuff like to go order surcharges where some places are charging more for takeout sort of like Doordash or Grubhub do, except of course, you’re picking it up yourself.

I do wonder how/if places with some more traditional surcharges are going to comply now. For example pizza places charging delivery fees.

Places will still be able to get away with “X% gratuity added to bill for Y seats (though I’ve seen some places do it for any number of people, including 1)” because that’s optional, even if they put it on your bill because you’ve always been able to make them remove it.

It is like on most people’s cell phone bills in the US. You’ll see stuff like “FCC surcharge” which is the company passing their FCC regulatory fees directly to the customer without changing their advertised prices for a plan, E911 fees for 911 services, various taxes levied on the company but not the consumer are also passed to the customer.

The purpose is to have restaurants take these fees/taxes/whatever and make them build those costs of doing business directly into their advertised pricing on their menus. Companies don’t like this because they can advertise cheaper prices and psychologically the customer doesn’t usually think or even know about the extra surcharges, companies can set those surprise charges to whatever they want (they aren’t regulated) and they do not have to really compete with those prices wherever they advertise (menus, flyers, etc.) thus driving them down for the consumer.

I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you’re using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are ‘wordpress security’ applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don’t know a whole lot about what you’re doing.

There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you’re webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the ‘stories’ as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.

Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.

Here’s a nice list of FOSS CMS’ (which includes Wordpress of course).

Just to be clear, if you’re in the US, you 100% have copyright protection as soon as you put pen to paper.

Yeah except that he ruled based on a previous ruling that the CFPB was improperly funded by Congress because it wasn’t constitutional. This time it was properly funded so that no longer applies (basically ruling the way that the CFPB is funded – via the Federal Reserve (they used to do some of the stuff that the CFPB now does) per the Dodd-Frank Act that Congress instead of being part of the normal annual budget is unconstitutional).

Seems like an easy target for SCOTUS to kick the lawsuit back down to the circuit court and tell the court that it was erroneous in its ruling. But the SCOTUS isn’t really predictable anymore, so who knows.

The restaurant owner arguments are all super weak as usual.

“Menu prices will rise!”

No shit, but everyone was already paying the prices but now you can’t just surprise patrons with the increase.

“There will be pullback. People will lose jobs and hours!”

Doubtful but even if true, that means that they knew they were lying to customers and clawing extra charges that they wouldn’t know about already.

“‘They’ are thinking restaurants will absorb the costs”

Not exactly but they will have to compete with pricing as it should be.

They’re just trying to get away with playing the same game Telcos have gotten away with for far too many decades.

Yes but in California they have been unenforceable for almost everyone for many years.

Other than the crazy horoscope stuff, a job wanting you to sign an NDA and a Non-Compete likely know they are a shitty place to work and won’t to keep you there so you can’t go somewhere else and also not able to tell anyone how shitty it is. They probably already know Non-Competes in California have been unenforceable for a long time but they don’t want you to know that.

It was a small group of people circa 2003. They added to the Dress and Appearance AFI as ‘mutilation’ and specifically called it tongue splitting.

All kinds of people go into the military for various reasons. Many to get out of some way of life back home regardless of how they feel about the military and US policies you know? They can get college paid for, cut ties with whatever or whoever, get a place to live, get meals taken care of, get money in their pocket and maybe learn a trade. Obviously, there’s a lot of cons there too but some people see it as their best way ‘out’ of something.

Back then OIF/OEF was just kicking off and everyone was all ‘Never Forget’ so the AF had so many people they actually started taking volunteers for people to leave early and then started forcing people out (called Force Reduction), which is crazy with the shear amount of deployments going on but the AF also had too many NCOs as well. So yeah. Shit show as usual.

yes AKA tongue bifurcation.

I remember many years ago, the AF was charging airmen when some were splitting their tongues. The least they could do is charge these local PD with felonies. Obviously isn’t going to happen.

What is crazy is the woman he was video chatting with said he heard a knock, asked who was there. No answer. Then a louder knock a couple of minutes later which is when he got his gun and they burst in. It sounds like it was unannounced.

I hope we get the video for this but Florida is trying to kill all of its open information policies, so we may never get to see it.

I really hope the cops are charged and convicted on at least manslaughter. Florida is pro-gun but also pro-cop. If the video shows them as being unannounced, I could see people actually being concerned because it could happen to any gunowner at that point, racial bias aside.

He’s not getting locked up. I doubt he’ll even be sentenced to any time in a cell even if he’s found guilty. He’s not even going to get probation. He’s going to completely show that the Justice system once again is not equal and fair but not for the reasons he will continue to whine about.

The conservative strategy has been to polarize politics in America in order to have a very aligned power. This means that if you aren’t 100% behind them, then you are an enemy to them.

It is only through this that the GOP can both say that they are protecting individual freedoms but limiting or taking them away (of course opponents to this will be quick to point out the one and only counter point which is fighting against restrictions of the 2nd Amendment and only that), say that they are for smaller government but yet want private companies to be regulated that attempt to censor hate and misinformation (which has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment when it comes to non-government entities) yet still say that they are for businesses to operate as unrestricted as possible. They are anti-union because they are corrupt and take away accountability yet strongly support the worst of the worst of unions – the police unions. The GOP constantly cries that there’s a nanny government, yet they push laws to restrict people’s choices, censor libraries and try to tear down citizen protections. The GOP cries that this country’s deficit is out of control but when they are in power, they over spend. They complain that public schools indoctrinate but at the local and state levels attempt to indoctrinate in public schools. They talk about needing to stay in power to turn America around, yet when empowered in all three federal branches fails to pass meaningful legislation and run the government that they are overseeing and yet blame the government because they will eat each other alive for their own individual gains.

There so much more but the GOP is a party of hypocrites. Without polarization mixed with some fear mongering their party would likely cease to exist with any real power because they do not stand for the ideals that their own voting base supports.

The GOP constantly tries to create an environment of being constantly under attack and spews hate. Their voter base is simply a product of that.

LAPD is over a billion and they don’t even serve the vast majority of LA. LASD does most of it (though they do a really bad job of it).

You still have a penis after castration…

So people training their AI models have to pay them instead of scraping them for free. Got to make those share holders happy, right? Even if it goes against its own founding ideals.

For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’

Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.

This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.

In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?

Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.

That’s just so they can treat you like crap and under pay you, so that you can’t just go be a handy many somewhere else. If you lived in California it would have already been unenforceable anyway though.