chanced

I agree with you 100%. Tipping is by far my biggest pet peeve followed by hidden surcharges, specialty taxes, and regular sales taxes that are all added on after I've emotionally committed to the advertised price.

What's more is that now almost any place that prepares food has a tip line or a tip jar. Kid behind the counter just scooped some icecream on a cone? "Tip please." Hand me a cup of coffee? "Add whatever amount you want to the already hyper-inflated price of that joe you got there. I poured it, remember?"

The worst offender that I've run into is a sandwich shop called Jersey Mikes. I absolutely love their food but they recently rolled out a new system that has me so annoyed that I will never go back. As part of the payment process you are now required to either select from a predetermined set of tip percentages or explicitly opt-out.

The thing is, I actually feel for the guy preparing my sandwich or the girl that writes down my order and hands it off. I know that unless they are a waiter in a swanky, up-scale restaurant or a bartender pretty much anywhere then they are probably not making a ton of money.

Yet customers are made to feel as though they have some moral or social obligation to bring them up to a livable wage. In reality what is happening is the restaurants & bars are passing on their wages directly on to us. We are expected to pay a tax so that they don't have to pay them enough to survive on.

Ah, this after I laid awake in bed (or so I believe) until 5, decided to get up and get to work. I'm cursing myself with insomnia by cycling in and out of 24, 48, and, in rare cases, 72 hour cycles. Yet I seem to work best with at least some degree of exhaustion.

I generally hit peak efficiency between 20 and 32 hours. Beyond that, I'll have bursts of productivity with the remaining time filled by mindless distractions. Those bursts last anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours but their frequency drops as the day(s) go on.

If I'm well rested I feel a lot better in general but I'm so easily distracted that my productivity drops like a rock.

Having written this,I suspect I'm on a perpetual downward spiral where my sleep patterns fuel an unhealthy lifestyle which I then remedy by subtracting sleep...

This was posted on reddit awhile ago but taken down and reposted several times.

This bio really made me go "wtf?":

> Loraine was born in London. She was an ordinary, hardworking family person, with nothing to worry about beyond paying the rent at the end of the month or keeping the fridge full. Until in 2009 she came to Barcelona on holiday. Soon after she arrived her passport was stolen from her and she had a series of problems with the British embassy. Somebody had made illegal use of her passport. So Loraine found herself in a strange place, unable to get home. She didn’t know anyone there and her circumstances meant she couldn’t ask for help from England, either. She had to sell all her possessions and, in time, learn to speak Spanish. “Living in the street is a wonderful adventure,” she says. In the street she discovered a new city, a new country and a new culture. “There are lots of people who prefer to sleep under the stars.” She also made lots of friends who helped her in a completely unfamiliar world.

I'm not suggesting the company is involved but that story is incredibly suspect. They also seem to somewhat glamorize the "street life" in some of their bios.

Somewhat interesting that this occurs weeks after the tariff increase on subsidized Chinese solar panels. I wonder how closely those two events are aligned beyond mere coincidence.

> Sherlocked:

> To have developed a product and just started shipping it, only to have Apple come along and provide exactly the same functionality in a system update.

> It happened to Karelia Software twice. Once with Sherlock and again with iWeb.

I was still under warranty & nothing changed between that visit and the last. What does it matter how long I waited?

I had started to use a monitor and got a macbook air for when I needed to go mobile just so I didn't have to spend a day dealing with it. Over time I just forgot about it and if 10.9.2 hadn't been released preventing me from using my display, I probably would have kept going.

Sure, I spent a lot of money creating a temporary solution that I used for too long but that doesn't negate the facts:

1. It was a warranty issue, I was still under warranty (or a day out, but they explicitly told me that was fine)

2. Due to a mistake on their end, I wasn't able to get the repairs done when planned and was promised that I could bring it back whenever

3. Their reasoning for denying the warranty claim was due to light damage to the case. That damage occurred well over a year before the flickering started and there were notes backing that up.

Yep, I understand the motive behind the requirement. There's a lot of good that can come out of it; students are forced to learn the "steps" or "mechanics," teachers can see where things went south and give partial credit or offer assistance, and finally it is a great way to circumvent cheating.

I totally get it and it makes total sense except for when it doesn't. The problem with our education system is that it's fundamentally flawed. It is designed to work best with the typical student being taught from a skill set chosen for optimal widget-making. People learn/think differently and yet we cater more and more to the mantra of pump-and-dump where children with the ability to retain the most frivolous information wins.

It took until my junior year as a comp-sci student for me to figure out what I personally needed to learn the material. I absolutely had to understand the big picture before I could ever attempt to solve the problems. If I didn't and I relied entirely on memorization then I was destined to fail.

In order for me to understand the big picture, I had to ask questions, sometimes a lot of them. Abstract questions would annoy some professors and certainly other students. Engineering classes, like most college classes, are full of people brought up in a system where the slide-show-after-slide-show of formulas, facts, or bullet points was all they needed. My questions were irrelevant and an interruption to their note taking.

Upon seeing the list of commands, I immediately thought "this is great! I could alias betty to b and then maybe a few more aliases here and there. I could take "betty next song" and make it 'b n s'!"

and then went "oooooh, so that's how this all started."

"You have to show your work Chance" was the sentence that drove me to despise school. As a 6th grade visual spatial student in a "gifted" algebra class, I could see the answer as if I were reading english but struggled to show my work.

I read/write slow and I have an incredibly hard time memorizing anything so I rebelled. Even after I got my act together, got my GED, and went to college I suffered through the various levels of Calculus because it was the same tune all over again. Classes like Linear Algebra were a lot harder for me to "see" but it was still faster & easier for me to take the time to visualize it.

> [Millenials] take [their parents] on job interviews for support

No wonder my generation can't get a damn job.