Kid_Thunder

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.

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.

Actually, it highlights the importance of a proper distributed backup strategy and disaster recovery plan.

Uh, yeah, that’s why I said

it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure

The same can probably happen on AWS, Azure, any data center really

Sure, if you colocate in another datacenter and it isn’t your own, they aren’t backing your data up without some sort of other agreement and configuration. I’m not sure about AWS but Azure actually has offline geographically separate backup options.

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.

And the crazy part is that it sounds like Google didn’t have backups of this data after the account was deleted. The only reason they were able to restore the data was because UniSuper had a backup on another provider.

This should make anyone really think hard about the situation before using Google’s cloud. Sure, it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure but I’m surprised Google themselves do not keep backups for awhile after an account is deleted.

I was trying to find the old Level 3 blog post but didn’t because I believe they basically said that Comcast needed to upgrade its infrastructure and never did. Netflix was the cashcow they saw to essentially make them pay for it. As a Comcast customer, I see it as charging the customer twice – first for the Internet service for the content and again because Netflix is going to pass that extra cost onto you (and everyone else who isn’t a Comcast customer).

You’re right on about CDNs and edge / egress/ingress PoPs. It also keeps it cheaper for the likes of Netflix/Amazon/etc. in the long run with the benefits of adding more availability.

The problem historically isn’t that streaming services are paying for fast lanes but that they have to pay not to be throttled below normal traffic. In other words, they have to pay more to be treated like other traffic.

Even crazier is remember that there are actual peering agreements between folks like cogentco, Level 3, comcast, Hurricane Electric, AT&T, etc. What comcast did that caused the spotlight was to bypass their peering agreement with Level 3 and went direct to their end customer (netflix) and told them they’d specifically throttle them if they didn’t pay a premium which also undermined Level3’s peering agreement with Comcast.

Peering agreements are basically like “I’ll route your traffic, if you route my traffic” and that’s how the Internet works.

Why does it feel like EA tries really hard to kill off franchises with a loyal fanbase by constantly playing limbo under the lowering bar?

I accidentally overwrote /etc/passwd once and I allowed /boot to run out of space during a kernal update and I created a local user with the same user that was also on the realm/domain that I had joined and various bash script issues.
Some stuff I’ve had to fix that someone else did:

• named a file rm -rf
• rm -rf /bin instead of ./bin – Also the fact that they had sudo was crazy and also I guess this was the second time
• chmod -R 777 /
• Various software bugs running swap out of space or hitting the inode limit by creating files over and over again with a timestamp in the filename and having to remove all of them because there was no backup to the OS
• Someone disabled SELinux because something wasn’t working but didn’t tell anyone – ugh
• Compiled java because they googled some issue and followed some old tutorial without understanding anything instead of using alternatives and symlinked the old java from /bin to /home/theiruser/java – had sudo because he was a Windows domain admin.
• Cybersecurity guy didn’t know what some VMs did so he turned them off and figured he’d find out if/when someone complained. Caused a massive core services outage.
• Same Cybersecurity guy deleted a bunch of data because he wanted to see how the sysadmins would respond and witness backup restorations. He did not inform anyone.
• Cybersecurity guy above still has Domain Admin and sudo everywhere. I would have personally removed his privileged access regardless of what ‘CyberSecurity’ management thought but I was leaving for a new job by then anyway so I figured I’d just let them eventually lie in the bed they made.

There’s more but I don’t want to keep going because it is Sunday and I don’t want to ruin it.

“Gays for Trump. I’m with Dogs for Michael Vick!”

You can use Gnome Boxes to give you a front-end for KVM/qemu like VB. With the spice-webdavd package, you can share files similarly to the guest or send files directly to it.

As far as Samba goes, it is just a FOSS implementation of Microsoft’s SMB. Just like with Windows, you’ll have to open Explorer to the IP/Hostname of your Samba server or I guess have both join the same workgroup with the same name on the same subnet.

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Set is quiet as they are waiting for Mr. Ed to say his line.
“Do you need the Lion Mr. Ed?”

Maybe they’ll replace it with a few of the features of Waze but without ads, adds stuff that have been asked for by people for years and the Google Maps look, call it Google Ways and act like it’s going to be continued to be developed as Google Maps 2.0. Then Google Maps goes away but Google Ways never gets updated with anymore features.

All the competitors on the market lose a large part of their customer base now.

Then one day Google Maps makes a reappearance to replace Google Ways. You can now select an icon to represent your car but otherwise, it has no Waze features and has less features than the original Google Maps but they promise they’ll be porting those features over. They never do.

That’s pretty much the kind of thing I expect from Google.

How about adding speed limit without a destination, showing house/building numbers around you, traffic overlay without a destination, allow voice response to if reported hazards/speed traps/whatever is still there, better lane assistance, turn or which side the destination is on preview on the turn before so you know which lane to be in? Maybe a Recents list that doesn’t seem like it’s just a shuffle of a few random locations you’ve been to maybe once in the last 6 months?

Maybe some of that has been added somewhat recently?

I apologize. I didn’t know I had replies when I deleted my post. Yeah I know you can set that behavior in some editors. And other than what I just replied with on another comment, I like tabs because I also don’t have to worry about styling guides that some set down as ‘2 spaces’ or ‘3 spaces’ or ‘5 spaces’ or whatever. It is basically just universally a horizontal tab.

Sorry I didn’t realize I had replied with I deleted my comment. I understand some editors allow you to set tab and you can set actual spaces, like in vi. However, personally I feel like hitting tab gives me the whitespace I want for readability already.

For programmatic parsing it is simple because it’s just looking for an HT.