… I didn’t say they can’t do so. I said they’re allowed not to. Since it’s allowed, that’s what they do.

Because they’re allowed not to do so. The answer is shitty yet simple.

Someone not tipping won’t change that either; all that will do is stiff a worker. This needs to be fixed by changing labor laws.

Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.

These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it’s a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it’s not something that replaces or complements the tip, it’s just a shitty price-adjustment.

A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.

The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

BRICS isn’t an alliance or a cohesive entity. It’s the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn’t a geopolitical anything of any meaning.

I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They’re large enough that they can make it work, assuming they’re willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it’s entirely within their capability.

This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.

At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said “eh, they’re all teh same” and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn’t vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.

I wouldn’t blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.

RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.

Not a final decision. SCOTUS (via Kagan) refused to overturn a stay on a decision while legal proceedings continue. Basically just an order to keep things as-is until the case finishes working its way through the courts.

Which as I understand it is generally how things work: if there’s no clear likely winner, go with the interim situation that most easily can be rectified if it is later ruled to have been wrong. In this case, if the ruling goes against Apple than they can be ordered to give money to Epic and other app-owners based on the revenue brought in from them to Apple during the appropriate period. The opposite case would require more complex estimates (how much revenue was shifted away from Apple incorrectly, in the case where Apple wins) and further it’d result in unnecessary consumer friction: users would go from A to B then back to A again.

It’s smart, I don’t know how people will feel about it but it’s smart.

The US and China are in an escalating economic cold war. It’s goes completely against US interests to invest finite resources into growing the economy of an economic rival — and ditto for the converse of China investing into growing the US economy. Especially in an aggressively competitive economic sector where relative technological advancement is king for competitive purposes.

It’s convenience and efficiency. At the end of the day a single cable can provide that functionality needed for 99.9% of such devices. Getting everything on a single cable format reduces waste, simplifies people’s lives, and even opens up competitive spaces. There’s no need for it to be two cables.

This is speculation based on the combination of physical constraints and changing usage.

Phone batteries today are in the 10-20 watt-hours range for capacity, or at least iphones are and that’s the data I found. Going from the typical ~20W fast charging rate to the full 240W capacity of USB-C EPR would allow a twelve times increase in battery capacity with no change to charge times. Are batteries going to increase in capacity by twelve times in the next 17 years? I’d be shocked if they did. The change from the iphone 1 to the iphone 14 pro max is 5.18Wh to 16.68Wh — a three times increase in 16 years.

Likewise, with data transfer, it’s a matter of how human-device interaction has shifted with time. People increasingly prefer (a) automated, and (b) cloud based data storage, and (c) if they do have to move data from device 1 to device 2, they would rather do it wirelessly than with a physical connection. USB4 on USB-C is meant for 80 Gbit/s = 9.6 GB/s transfers. That’s already faster than high end SSD storage can sustain today, and USB4 is a four year old standard. People on phones are going to be far more likely to be worried about their wifi transfer speeds than their physical cable transfer speeds, especially in 2040.

Then, on top of all of that… USB will continue to be updated. USB-C’s limitations in 2033 will not be USB-C’s limitations in 2023, just as USB-C’s limitations in 2023 are not the same as USB-C’s limitations at its inception in 2014. In 2014 USB’s best transfer rate was 10 Gbit/s, or 1/8 what it can do today.

I’d be surprised if USB-C was a limitation on phone technology even by 2040. The bandwidth and power delivery capacity are way beyond what are needed now. Data transfers from phones are going to increasingly move to wireless in that time frame too, I expect.

The limitation on the viability of USB-C with phones won’t be the actual technological viability of the standard with respect to phones. Instead, the problem for USB-C for phones will be if another standard comes out and starts being used by other devices that do need higher bandwidth or power delivery capability. Monitors, storage devices, laptops (etc.) will eventually need more than USB-C can provide, even with future updates to its capacity. When those switch over to something new, that will be when phones (and other devices) will need to consider a new standard too.

In theory it’s exceptionally illegal to curtail unionization efforts.

In practice, the law has been whittled away by decades of conservative judiciary decisions and weak department of labor enforcement. This isn’t helped at all by the balance of power.

Companies can afford to scare off some degree of workers, especially at the lower end of the salary range. Big businesses can survive shutting down a store or losing business at locations indefinitely. Big businesses can afford expensive lawyers and to indefinitely stay in litigation over union busting efforts.

For workers, it’s a completely different proposition. Is Walmart or Home Depot or Starbucks going to want to hire someone that is actively suing another major corporation for anything at all? It’s even worse if it’s labor rights related, but just suing them in the first place is going to make it a struggle to find employment at a lot of places. That’s even pretending they can find & afford lawyers. Or that they can handle the transition period from job A to job B even if it isn’t difficult to find job B.

These businesses hold all the cards and they know it. You see similar thinking, though different details, behind Hollywood’s decision to just try and wait out the striking writers and actors. They can survive losing billions of dollars in income a year from now with unmade projects; striking workers will struggle to get by with no salary.

Bitcoin can fuck off.

The point here is that car companies already charge for these things. The reality is basically two scenarios when ordering a car:

A: You pay $x, and they offer you heating steering wheels for $y. If you do not get them then, you do not get them ever.
B: You pay $x, and you can pay $y at any time to get heated steering wheels.

The business “bet” that (B) represents is that maintaining additional SKUs for each upgrade-feature and splitting off production lines to include or not include various combinations of features 1-2-3-etc. will cost them more money than just including it in every car. Then they can sell it to you on a whim. The actual feature itself does not cost anywhere near $y in either scenario to include, which is an important component of making this possible.

Now, you can say that (B) is a shitty scenario in a vacuum: if they’re willing to include it in every car, they should just charge every car what it costs to include plus some minor markup to allow the business to operate. E.g. if it costs $50 to include, they can increase the price of every car $55. And in that vacuum I’d agree. But it isn’t in a vacuum. That is not the scenario (B) is competing with. (B) is competing with (A). In (A) you are going to pay $200 or $300 or whatever for that $50-cost feature up front, or you never get it ever. In (B) you pay that $200 or $300 whenever you like.

It operates in a similar world to how Apple charges $200 to go from 8gb of RAM to 16gb of RAM, when that might cost them $10-20 at volume pricing. Or to use a well-liked company, how Valve charges $250 for a ~$10 SSD + ~$5-10 carrying case + ~$5-10 glass coating, on the base Steam Deck vs the fanciest Steam Deck.

This is not a “as a service” model. It’s a simple upselling business model. Profits on base models are low so as to have a low sticker price, and then they try to create profit off of upgrades. In this case, the software locked version is preferable to the consumer over the default version because it’s something you can unlock at any time, instead of only at purchase. It is not a new business model, nor is it even limited to electronics. The overall business model is shitty, but that applies to every instance of it: (A) and (B), and (B) is not differently shitty.

Service based systems are based on recurring revenue, in this case anything with a subscription. Which I specifically called out as something that would make it shitty and pointed to their subscription based or subscription-incentivizing behavior as shitty.

You did not understand what I wrote if your retort is on the “car as a service” subject.

Also I’m p sure Ko-Fi has a better revenue split with those who use it than Patreon does

This line made me curious so I looked. Best I can find is that Ko-fi charges either 0% or 5% on donations, dependent on the type of donation and the type of account the receiver has with them.

Patreon used to charge 5%, but now has: 5% for grandfathered pro accounts, 5% for lowest tier accounts, 8% for non-grandfathered accounts on a pro plan, and 12% for a higher premium tier.

So yup, Ko-fi has a better split.

Most car manufacturers charge money for those kind of upgrades. The difference is they specifically build or do not build the features into the car. If Tesla doesn’t charge meaningfully more and if they do not turn it into a subscription, I wouldn’t knock them for it.

There’s a lot to bitch at Tesla about, but being able to decide after the fact that you want a heated steering wheel isn’t one of them. FSD being bullshit even if it was free (and it is far from free!), the refusal to allow Android Auto/CarPlay, the intentionally rosy range estimates, the association with Musk… those are what I’d focus on. Unlockable steering wheel heating is not an issue.

Yup! Source I have from 2016 has it even more unbalanced than your numbers. All shipping is 1.7% vs all road transport at 11.9%. Wish I had more recent data but their claim wouldn’t be true even if those top ten ships represented the entirety of ocean emissions and was tripled afterwards.

This is a direct result of congress intentionally giving greater funding to the IRS with the explicit goal of increasing revenue by decreasing tax evasion by the wealthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

The chances of congress shutting it down comes down to if republicans gain control over government in next year’s elections.

You’re also making the implicit and incorrect assumption that this assumption of future income is not already the status quo. It is. The IRS already does this with your automatic withholding. It just does it at a higher level than necessary, due to what I mentioned above. Withholding basically assumes that a person will continue to earn whatever their paycheck was in every future payment period (weekly, semimonthly, whatever).

Your assumptions on how this would be dealt with are not realistic. The outlines of how to implement this not only already exist, they are already used and have been used for decades. All the IRS needs to do is glue together its knowledge of your income sources and lower the withholding amount based on being able to predict an individual’s income far more accurately.

Data on seasonal income is known too, for the record. Consistent trends in income changes with parts of the year are not a surprise to the government agencies that care about it.

For the majority of people out there, all their income is going to have digital records. A cash only store still deposits money in a bank, after all. For the people that don’t… chances are their income without a digital footprint isn’t being reported, and is small enough that no one is worried about that in the first place.

If the IRS is being told by a person’s work how much they’re paid, by their bank how much interest they got, by any Etsy-esque services how much they were paid… then the IRS has every bit of information it needs to get automatic withholding correct.

Right now withholding systems default to taking too much money out, because it’s easier for the government to send you money than it is for them to request money from you. It also avoids the headache of most people being hit with surprise IRS bills. The IRS could keep that default, and then as the year goes on it could shift that withholding down until it’s laser close. The negative there is that variability is bad for budgeting too, but with some work they could make it start close enough that it shouldn’t be all that variable.