Yes tipping in Canada is weird, agreed. But from the time I lived in Toronto I didn’t feel it was as mad as the US is nowadays.

Thank god we don’t have a law that allows some lines of work to basically be unpaid, which forces tipping.

That’s the thing us Europeans have to remember. People who work for tips actually need tips or they make no money.

It’s an incredibly evil and dumb system. But a foreigner huffing about it while visiting the US isn’t going to change the system. Tip.

Children. Once there’s children you have 0 hours to look after yourself. It requires a Herculean effort for both your partner and you to carve out 30 minutes per person per two days

Constructed vs evolved.

I think authentication will be huge.

Lots of commercial alternatives are starting to bet on the future (eg https://swear.com/), where something gets fingerprinted and the fingerprint gets signed and put on an authentication block chain (something block chains are actually useful for).

I imagine a future where this gets built into browsers (ie “this picture was verified by NY times, and it went through this editing chain, starting from a canon camera which recorded on this date”) and you can switch over to have unauthenticated assets highlighted.

My worry isn’t that we will have a rational war. War isn’t rational to begin with.

My worry is that we will have an irrational war. All it takes is a button push to end the world.

Going with the spirit of the question, not the text (I don’t really think we are forced to pay for “extra” things, it’s all choice):

But one area I cannot comprehend is people buying cars on finance only to keep up with others who buy cars on finance.

People make mistakes too.

Yes. Like people, if you want the nuggets of gold, you need to go dig them out of the turds.

It’s different if you’re away from family though. Oil rig workers, navy folk etc. When it’s just you, running that kind of lifestyle is doable (speaking from experience). But good luck being a human/parent next to that commitment…

6 hrs on average I’d say.

Would love 8 hr average. Feel a completely different person on 8 hrs.

We have four kids (4, 6, 15, 18) all still at home, so once the little ones are in bed, there’s lunch boxes and teenage dramas to sort out, plus getting some time with my wife and some time in the man cave. It’s easily past midnight every night before all needs are seen to, often gets closer to 1am.

Unfortunately my job has a quarterly cycle which destroys 4 weeks every quarter; during that time I get less, probably 4-5 hrs. Brutal. But hey, everyone’s fed, warm, healthy and happy - that is what parenting is about; paying back what your parents put into you.

The world is definitely worse for younger people. I’m raising four kids and I weep for them.

Smart phones and social media have a LOT to answer for. I know that won’t necessarily be a popular opinion but that’s where I find the root of the problem. Well, that and FPTP election systems.

I’m still rocking a license from early 2000s

Fastmail. Getting better and better, profitable and charging for services.

Posthaven. Not getting better and better but started good and staying good. Profitable and charging for services.

Unraid. Getting better and better. Not cheap, but a lot simpler to operate than TrueNAS for day to day stuff.

Kickstarter. Yes they’re a virtual monopoly but so many awesome things I’ve joined through it (though fuck you Eve/Dough for roping me into your shitty monitor which never really worked).

Virpil controllers. Rock solid, made by fanatics and rightly loved by fans. Cannot speak highly enough about their hardware (though their attitude to customer service is … Eastern European).

Affinity products. They might be cresting though and about to roll steeply downhill towards enshittification valley. But I still love them for now.

Linux. What’s not to love.

Lemmy. In fact so so many open source products. Honestly, it’s hard to grasp the quality.

This 1000%

We should be thrilled that menial, manual, backbreaking labour is no longer required. We should celebrate the removal of these jobs.

IF AND ONLY IF the benefits that Amazon accrued were taxed fairly and the spoils distributed into society.

I would love a world where people could choose their passion and follow it, safe in the knowledge that they would always have housing, warmth, health and food available to them.

“AI” and robotics could save us all and lead to a flourishing of creativity and human happiness.

But in the world where Amazon - and many other large corporations - can have an effective 0% tax rate and only the shareholders win out, this entire plan can go f*** itself.

And unfortunately it is neigh on impossible to imagine how the alternative could exist.

And in the darkness bind them?

The western economy is a boom and bust cycle, most often driven by US loosening of economic controls. I’m sure the Chinese property bubble will burst too and then we have to deal with that one too.

How I long for social democratic, Nordic style government everywhere.

Setting up a fully automated system to download, track and organise Linux distributions onto a NAS under the stairs. I used to subscribe to a bunch of services that would provide access to all sorts of Linux distributions for a flat monthly fee, but I realised that I often was only really interested in one or two specific Linux distribution so I really didn’t need to pay for these services.

Now I just download the Linux distributions that I actually want to install. It also prevents my kids from endlessly installing different Linux distributions. Not really a productive use of time.

Congrats, you managed to turn this conversation into a socialism vs fascism conversation. It wasn’t easy but you spotted an opportunity and you took it. Now we can all talk about your favourite topic!

Of course not speaking for experience. I’ve personally never broken the law.

But often when companies listed their contact information they’d have a phone line and a fax number. If those numbers were near each other, you could pretty much guarantee that there would be a phone number somewhere in that sequence, or just past it, that would let you dial into their network, often weakly guarded with default password on common user names.

While it could take a little while, I’m aware of people collecting company phone numbers and war dialling overnight to find the network service number. Once you spoke to a modem it would give you a telnet connection and there was hardly ever any form of rate control. The worst I’ve hear about was getting chucked off after three attempts. But you could just dial up again.

I’ve heard of many, many company secrets being found that way.