komali2

In what way will your life change if you never access twitter again?

> Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.

> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.

Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!

I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.

I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...

To clarify, your position is that everyone that works a tipped job is stupid. Correct?

So boy howdy, you must be a super smart guy! Smarter than all those dumbies. I bet you've leveraged your intelligence to accomplish incredible things.

> I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?

It is trivially easy to determine I'm a real person by clicking my username and following through to my site. Within two clicks you can find a video of me talking. But since we're in the business of blame game here, why do you choose to interact with a website where you're not even sure it's humans you're talking to?

> You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.

Your interaction with society isn't just through paying for things. You seem to enjoy a situation where things are cheap because the labor cost is subsidized via financial tricks like tip culture, and you can swim through the culturally established cracks by not tipping, basically the definition of antisocial behavior.

If you wanted to protest tip culture and low wages, you could, for example, protest. Or stop giving money to companies that do this. For some reason you've decided to blame humans for trying to make a living in this broken system rather than blame companies, who have far more bargaining power, for engaging in exploitative behavior.

Your purchase of the cheaper, tip culture goods over the more expensive non tip culture goods is a price signal rewarding the less ethical company. That's the incentive I meant. It doesn't make any sense for blaming people trying to make ends meet. I don't quite understand why people think their Uber drivers and waiters and whatnot super duper love these tip based jobs, there's a million reasons they are essentially forced to take whatever work they can get. Do you really believe working class people have the bargaining power or job opportunities to walk away from the minimum wage tipped job? You are here which means you have access to the internet which means you must know that many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - that means they can't miss a single paycheck without catastrophic consequences. So no time to quit and find a new job.

YC may pay for the webservers but there's plenty of commies on here :) for some reason they haven't banned us yet.

Nobody actually likes tipping btw, the question isn't whether it's good, but rather whether we should as individuals punish individual workers for our own failure to not raise minimum wage or ban tipping.

Regarding the restaurant industry, I used to run a restaurant, and my conclusion is that the economy is fake.

There is no profitable way to run a restaurant legally. Somewhere in the supply chain, if not in the restaurant then in the delivery truck or farm, there are undocumented laborers being underpaid and working in unsafe conditions. If we actually applied the typical worker protections we've come to expect for other blue collar jobs, with the expected wages, the already razor thin margins of the restaurant industry would completely collapse. The only thing left would be vertically integrated oligopolies like McDonald's.

Every meal out, somebody, somewhere, is subsidizing your meal to make it affordable enough for you to buy it. Adding the 28-32% margin that Uber eats charges is just increasing that pressure to the breaking point. It all barely survives through psychological tricks that make it seem cheaper than it is like hiding the tip or tax until after you actually get the full bill.

I think the only way the restaurant industry could function fully legally is if the government was the only landlord. There's just not enough margin to include the margins a landlord expects, and landlords pathologically increase rent to be just below causing a restaurant to collapse, or simply cycle through restaurant after restaurant, not caring about months of lost rent revenue because the high rent cost increases the value of the property.

You're also welcome to buy from a company that doesn't offload the fair labor price onto the customer, but instead, you actively incentivize these companies to continue the practice, and punish the worker meanwhile by not tipping. You take advantage of the subsidized lower cost that's normally borne by tipping, actively profiting off this broken system.

Why do you hold humans to a higher standard than corporations?

Why does your personal activism stop after the point that harms fellow humans but not before the step of rewarding an exploitative corporation that subsidizes its labor cost with tips and your tax dollars through welfare to its laborers?

This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?

You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!

Customers don't necessarily drive to restaurants, they walk, bike, or take public transit. Most frequently they walk to whatever is nearby when they're hungry, in most functional cities.

I just had some American friends visit me in Taipei and now that they're back in the States they're telling me that if they want food they have to drive 20 minutes, so I understand the situation is different for most Americans, but the suggestion then seems to be the obvious ones: the USA should modernize its urban infrastructure.

This still doesn't make sense to me because people will often stay in the same place that they may not like that much specifically because the landlord hasn't raised rent that much, even if they can afford to move. They can't justify it. Or California landowners that don't sell because of whatever that rule they have is that figures property tax against original price or whatever.

It doesn't seem liquid enough to justify an increase in cost of rent the instant minimum wage goes up or UBI is implemented. My point is that a lot of these "markets" are really just price controllers setting price as they please, and landlords particularly feeling like they're special and get to lay claim to some arbitrary percentage of people's income. Which, for structural reasons, they can do.

What's a government if not a bunch of organized activists?

This is being documented across the internet. Pro AfD posting plummeted and pro Trump posting plummeted.

It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.