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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • darharrison@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mldeleted
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    1 month ago

    When I’m given free stuff I tip as if I paid for it. So if part of a meal is comped, for example, I’ll use the original subtotal, pre-discount, to figure out what to tip.

    If I’m only getting drinks (coffee, alcohol etc.) I default to a $1 tip per drink, and if given a free drink I’ll add on to that while factoring the cost of what I’m given. But if any food is involved I start at 20% on the subtotal, then round up or down to the nearest 50¢ or $1 depending on how long I stay at the establishment and how much the subtotal is.

    For takeout, I’ll tip less since I’m spending much less time in the establishment; I might round the total up to the nearest $5 or $10 depending on how much I spend.

    And for delivery, I have basically never ordered for delivery in my entire adult life, and don’t plan to, I’d rather just go and pick up whatever I order. I was a pizza delivery driver before UberEats and the like were common and quickly got a feel for that etiquette (people were usually pretty generous) and decided it was a luxury I could live without.

    Compared to you I guess I’m a bit cheap but I’d still tip the same even if front-of-house people were making more money, unless they explicitly tell me not to tip them (which has happened before). I don’t think people should feel bullied into tipping, because I think the business should be paying them the living wage instead, but just like at any other job good performance should always be rewarded.





  • darharrison@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.ml"leftists"
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    2 months ago

    If you think you’re gonna bait me into defending or denying America’s history of foreign intervention then you’ve got another thing coming. It happened. Plenty of it is downright evil.

    But sadly, it’s not uniquely evil. Russia is waging an imperialist war of aggression and attempting a genocide of the Ukrainians, all while enriching their oligarchs as their civilians starve. China is repressing the Tibetans, committing genocide against the Uyghurs to create a Han ethnostate, threatening Taiwan, and is violating maritime borders in the South China Sea with their expansion of their naval presence.

    Dissent, especially in China, is heavily policed. They took our dystopian monetary credit system and cranked it up to 11 with social credit, and work their people to the bone with companies in the country defying the ban on the 996 schedule enforcement. Russia considers LGBT people as a whole dissenters and arrests them simply for existing. Prominent political dissidents of Putin are simply murdered.

    The fact that you and I are allowed to post about America’s past transgressions and speak highly critically of the government (and believe it or not, I do that quite a lot) is proof that we as a global superpower are freer than them, and principally why I categorically reject the notion that we are the world’s primary evil. It’s just not that simple. But I’ll take our flawed, bourgeois democracy over domination by than the outright fascist rule by our competitors.

    But above all that I prefer peace and freedom. No more violence in Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Civil rights and decent living conditions for all.




  • I mostly know of him from Behind the Bastards, a podcast about prominent historical figures (usually 1800s through present). The twist, apart from their regular Christmas “Non-Bastard” episodes is of course that these influential people actually behaved questionably at best during their time. I really think Robert’s research and storytelling are great, he and the guests he brings on really can make an hour fly by sometimes. Most of the biographies are split up into a couple parts, with people like Kissinger and Vince McMahon having such dubious pasts to earn them 6 parts each.

    Anyway, the interview with the AI home assistant dude was from another podcast which he frequents, called It Could Happen Here, a more news-oriented podcast. Both of the podcasts can be found on YouTube, published by Cool Zone Media. I believe they did 3 episodes of CES coverage for this year, the final part contained the interview. After all the dunking Robert talks about another interview he had at CES which was a lot more uplifting.






  • They’re useful tools, as is the Lincoln Project, for example. Once the existential threat in Trump is gone it’ll be back to business as usual and their MO will be “oppose meaningful change without enabling a monster to take advantage of us again” again in no time. Trump is such a unique and unhinged threat that they resent what they’ve created, and in an equally unique moment of self reflection, created the Never Trump movement. But longtime allies to leftists, or even liberals for that matter, they absolutely are not. There’s no ambiguity around it.





  • You can spare Lemmy the whataboutisms with this one. Everyone is taking a little money from everyone else, but:

    Neo-fascists absolutely prefer giving to the Republican Party above all other major parties and vice versa. It’s an open-and-shut case. Hardliners in the party routinely echo anything and everything that gets them brownie points from dictators and the country’s most degenerate billionaires.

    The Democratic Party is not perfect (Israel being the elephant in the room, but make no mistake, Bibi 100% wants Trump back in office). But if anyone is pushing back against the return of fascism the most it’s the Dems. And you can see that in hostilities from Republicans and authoritarian governments alike.

    The Green Party’s main candidate accepted gifts from the Russian Federation through their news network RT, which is basically a propaganda machine for the government which owns them. Stein’s ads openly said in 2016 that the Greens wanted Hillary to lose, fearmongering nuclear war with Russia. And this year it’s the same old shit with her: just make the Dems lose.

    (Side note, Sputnik hired PSL’s Eugene Puryear as a long-time host. Also, PSL also has absolutely insane foreign positions. Like I’ll be the first to say the West is absolutely an imperfect cultural entity, but you don’t gotta just hand it to Putin or Kim Jong Un because they also have a problem with the hegemony.)