A $4 tip plus $2 from the service nets me $6. I average 3 to 5 deliveries per hour, grossing $18 to $30 total. Minus $3 to $5 in expenses, and I’m earning $13 to $27/hr on that. Not great, but not terrible.

That was uncalled for.

In my area, I would not feel insulted by a $4 tip for a ~2-mile delivery.

The 15% or 20% guidelines are based on the amount of work performed by the tipped employees (who earn less than minimum wage before tips.) the amount of the check correaponds pretty closely to how much time a waiter has to spend serving a table.

Drivers are not usually employees; they usually have $0/hr in wages, and pay their own fuel and vehicle expenses. Delivery services typically pay $2 per trip, and a trip will involve 2-4 stops. The base pay from the delivery service does not even cover fuel costs, let alone the driver’s time.

The amount of work a delivery driver performs is not at all related to the amount of the check. The 15%/20% rules are not remotely close to the amount of work the driver performs. $8 on a $20 order is a garbage tip if it’s a 10-mile delivery to a fourth-floor walkup. $4 on a $70 order might be a decent tip if it’s a 1-mile delivery to a front porch.

The appropriate tip for delivery is based on mileage, not food price. $1 for pickup, $1 for dropoff, and $1 per mile is a pretty basic tip. A driver can complete about 3, $2 runs per hour. $3 tips gives him a gross income of about $15/hr, and he can net about $10-12 of that after expenses.

Neither of those options is particularly appealing to me. I’d look at building a more respectable file server, with 4 or more SATA ports. I’d have a relatively tiny SSD to host the OS, and any number of HDDs in some variety of RAID array

SSDs are fast; HDDs are slow. I would not want my operating system hosted on an HDD if there is any way to avoid it. An external USB drive would have slow file operations to and from that drive; an internal HDD would slow the entire system.

The scenario you describe actually demonstrates my point. Where anonymity is “illegal”, the only entity you can trust to protect your privacy is you.

That fact does not change when anonymity is “legal”. That fact does not change even when anonymity is mandated. Even if it is a criminal act for me to make a record of who is accessing my service, that is only a legal restriction. It is not a technical restriction. You can’t know whether I am abiding by such a law at the time you are accessing my service. A law mandating anonymity doesn’t actually protect your anonymity; it just gives you the illusion that your anonymity is being protected.

The relevant difference between your scenario and reality is that in your scenario, nobody is blatantly lying about whether your privacy is under attack: it most certainly is.

The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.

When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.

You’re keeping the people willing to make sacrifices to keep their jobs. You’re keeping the most desperate, most readily exploitable people, and getting rid of anyone who won’t tolerate your abuse.

It’s a layoff, but without having to call it a layoff.

Gentrification isn’t the problem. Rent is the problem.

Eliminate rent. Convert rentals to land contracts or private mortgages. Convert apartments to condominiums

When the residents of a neighborhood are owners instead of renters, they gain an unexpected windfall from gentrification.

How do we eliminate rent? How do we convince landlords to sell? How do we convince them to issue land contracts instead of rental agreements?

Massively increase property taxes, but issue owner-occupant credits to revert those increases. Only owner-occupants get the credit. Investors do not.

Eat up their profits, unless they switch to an investment strategy that puts the deed in the occupant’s name, such as a land contract or a private mortgage. With the deed in their name, the occupant gains equity as property values rise.

The concept of renting needs to die in a fire.

I got an email from the devs asking for style advice.

He had a short relationship with another “male” changeling.

Odo and Laas linked.

Or maybe it’s to do with the minutes being a quantization of something continuous, whereas usually we deal with the transition the other way.

I think this is correct.

Suppose she has a 4-gallon bucket, 3/4 filled. She has “less than 4 gallons.”

Contrast with a milk crate, which normally holds 4 jugs of milk, but it, too is only 3/4 filled. Same liquid volume of milk but now I would say that she has “fewer than 4 gallons”, because the milk now comes in discrete units.

Arguably, that is correct: “minute” is a countable noun, so should take “fewer” as a modifier.

Wired, VoIP phones are viable. Landlines aren’t. ATAs convert old landline phones into VoIP phones.

Am I Being Illogical

You Are Being Illogical

Not Being Illogical.

Haven’t figured out EIH yet…

The purpose of copyright is to promote the sciences and useful arts. To increase the depth, width, and breadth of the public domain. “Fair Use” is not the exception. “Fair Use” is the fundamental purpose for which copyrights and patents exist. Copyright is not the rule. Copyright is the exception. The temporary exception. The limited exception. The exception we grant to individuals for their contribution to the public.

“it can’t be copyright, because otherwise massive AI models would be impossible to build”.

If that is, indeed, true, and if AI is a progression of science or the useful arts, then it is copyright that must yield, not AI.

There is literally no way in hell someone can convince me what Meta and others are doing is not pirating

Then your argument is non-falsifiable, and therefore, invalid.

Major corporations and pirates are finally on the same side for once. “Fair Use” finally has financial backing. Meta is certainly not a friend, but our interests currently align.

The worst possible outcome here is that copyright trolls manage to convince the courts that they are owed licensing fees. Next worse is a settlement that grants rightsholders a share of profits generated by AI, like they got from manufacturers of blank tapes and CDs.

Best case is that the MPAA, RIAA, and other copyright trolls get reminded that “Fair Use” is not an exception to copyright law, but the fundamental reason it exists: Fair Use is the promotion of science and the useful arts. Fair Use is the rule; Restriction is the exception.