>The obvious solution is to reuse the same plastic cup for all customers each morning. Voila, now you save 309 plastic cups/day.
Mysophobes[0] are quite common in the US, so multiple people touching the same cup wouldn't fly here.
That's why many folks won't take mints from a dish at restaurant cashier stations if they're not individually wrapped. Many folks take an extra paper towel in public bathrooms to use on the door handle as they exit.
And on and on.
The US is, mostly, a center-right to far-right country. And as many studies have shown, there's a correlation between higher "disgust sensitivity" and right-leaning folks.
Isaac Asimov drew that distinction pretty starkly in comparing (robot stories and later Foundation follow ons) "Spacers" to "Settlers".
>At the US hotel I stayed at they had a waffle machine so that you could eat waffles for breakfast. To make waffles you took a plastic cup to the "faucet" of the waffle machine, filled it with paste and then poured it into the waffle frying pan. Then you threw the cup away. Apparently, there was no need for a more efficient way. Americans seem to be very, very good at working very, very hard but not so good at efficiency.
I suppose that depends on how you define "efficiency." Using disposable cups and self-service dispensers/waffle irons eliminates the need for an employee to stand there making waffles and/or another employee washing reusable dishes.
If you compare the ongoing costs of disposable cups vs. the cost of at least one employee, one might conclude that it's more "efficient" to use disposable cups.
From a societal/global perspective, it may well be more "efficient" to use employees instead of disposable cups, but the corporation that uses the disposable cups can't increase their profits by using employees and reusable cups instead.
>Only 60% of US households earn enough to pay federal income tax.
That's the problem. It's not a spending problem per se, but the market's misallocation of resources. Too many resources are concentrated in too few hands.
That's not to say we should abandon capitalism, but rather we should change the incentives to support higher incomes more broadly, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not a coincidence that deficit spending/public debt skyrocketed when we cut the top tax brackets. That changed the incentives from encouraging paying good wages and investing in business growth to hoarding capital and the financialization of everything.
Feel free to disagree, but the historical numbers support that.
tl;dr: change the incentives to broaden the distribution of resources across the economy, strengthening the economy (70% of which is consumer spending) and increasing, in a broad-based way, tax revenues.
I am doubtful here (but eager to see data that says otherwise)
- The US median per capita income is quite high (top 2 or 3 globally IIRC). In light of that and the stat that the bottom 40% don’t pay federal income tax makes me think the tax brackets are already fairly progressive vs thinking the lower 40% is especially low earning.
- Additionally income inequality has been decreasing in recent years with lower percentile income earners increases outpacing even the relatively high inflation.
- I agree we should revert back to some policies.
- I don’t think there is much hoarding of capital, most high earners invest heavily.
Windows[0]: Static IP configuration is as simple as typing an IP address into the pretty dialog box. No DHCP required.
Linux[1]: # ip addr <ip4 address> <subnet mask> <device> will set a static IP address
>It requires assigning a range of addresses that's usually fairly small, and requires manual configuration as soon as you need more than 254 devices on a network.
Is 65,536 (172.16.0.0/16) or 16 million addresses (10.0.0.0/8) "fairly small"? Are DHCP servers unable to parse networks that "big"?
>Compare to IPv6: Nothing. All of these just go away.
They most certainly do. But they're not "problems" with RFC1918 addressing and aren't "problems" at all with IPv4.
There are many issues with IPv4 and the sooner it dies, the better. But the ones you mention aren't issues at all.
If you're going to dunk on IPv4, then dunk on it for the actual reasons it needs to go, not made up "problems."
>Now if you search for the USS Liberty, you get no results and instead a hardcoded link to a 'holocaust museum' website as the only result.
That's a lie. A search[0] shows these as the first three results:
USS Liberty incident - Wikipedia [1]
USS Liberty incident | Facts, Deaths, & Investigation | Britannica [2]
'We're Fed Up With It': Survivors of the USS Liberty Look for Answers [3]
In fact, the entire first page (and much of the second) of search results are specifically about the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. There are no links to the Holocaust Museum anywhere to be found. Did you make up that lie yourself, or are you just blindly parroting what others tell you to believe?
Edit: Apparently (or at least that was claimed here[4]), GP was referring to searches on TikTok, not general web searches. I can neither confirm nor deny as I don't use that cesspit (or any other of those odious sewers). If it is true, it's just another good reason not to use that dumpster fire.
Since I'm old and don't use TikTok, I have no way to confirm or deny the results of searches on TikTok.
If what GP claims (I doubt it) is true, that's certainly a problem and another reason why folks shouldn't use an entertainment platform to get their news.
>Google knows users care about their privacy, and it made the promise in its terms precisely for that reason. People pay attention to this stuff, as the popularity of this story shows.
Do Google users care about their privacy? I'd expect not, given that Google is (and hasn't been shy about telling us about it) reading all their emails in order to provide more targeted advertisements.
And, as I mentioned, Google hasn't been shy about saying that's exactly what they do (prioritizing their ad revenue over their users' privacy), so I have to assume that Google users don't care about their privacy.
If they did care about their privacy, they'd self-host their email on hardware they physically control.
That's orthogonal to Google giving up data to the government, with or without notifying the user(s) in question, except that the above makes clear what we already know: Google doesn't respect the privacy of their users.
> given that Google is (and hasn't been shy about telling us about it) reading all their emails in order to provide more targeted advertisements.
That hasn't been the case since 2017. Nearly a decade ago. They stopped precisely because Google users do care about privacy -- and tracking is one thing, but scanning the content of your e-mails is another.
And what you're linking to is NOT what you described, "in order to provide more targeted advertisements".
Your links are describing Gemini integration. If you ask Gemini a question about your e-mails, obviously it needs to look at them. If Google is suggesting a smart reply, obviously it needs to process your e-mail to do so. But these are features designed to benefit the user.
You were talking about target advertising. That's not what your links have anything to do with.
[0]: "Google publicly announced in 2017 it would stop using Gmail content for ad targeting but continued to scan emails for spam, malware, and other non-ad functionality, which leaves room for ambiguity about downstream uses of metadata or other signals"
Who cares why Google is reading your emails? Not me.
Oh, it's just for non-ad functionality? In that case, go right ahead!
From Project 2025[0], published by the Heritage Foundation:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it
should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be
classed as registered sex offenders.
>Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2]
That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.).
In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods.
Yes.
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