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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • 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).



  • 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.





  • Even though costs of AAA games have gone up for some games (certainly not all) because of the size of teams/labor hours, so have the volume of sales. Publishers have made more and more profit while the average price of AAA games had stayed about the same for a long time.

    Games selling in the hundreds of thousands was considered really good decades ago but now those are in the tens of millions.

    Publishers aren’t having problems with profitability, so much so that they’ve been buying up large swaths of development houses and IPs and then dismantling them when they have a single flop.

    EA’s gross profit in 2010 was $1.6B, in 2014 was $3.03B and in the past 12 months have been $5.8B right now according to macrotrends.

    But the current trends are unsustainable

    The current trend in profitability is increasing, not decreasing. It isn’t a minor trend or minor increases either.

    Major publisher profitability has vastly increased in spite of stagnant game prices. They don’t have to increase prices to increase growth. It is simply that the market allows the increase of the price with more profitability and so they do.



  • 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.


  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.