It's definitely a shower, not a grower.

I mean, I agree with you, but the comic comes off as complaining about wait staff "demanding" tips for doing their job when the other jobs in it don't despite the fact that the waiters get paid a fraction of what the others do and are expected to make up the difference in tips.

It comes off as complaining about the workers being greedy and not the system that abuses them, and that's what I was responding to. It's the kind of opinion frequently held by people who act like "unskilled labor" is a real thing.

To me the issue seems to be that they are blaming the server for asking tips and not the restaurant for not providing a liveable wage to their employees.

Yes, that's my entire issue with this comic. It seems like they're upset about wait staff "demanding" tips for just doing their job, when the real issue is that restaurants don't pay their servers what their job is actually worth. It's often an opinion of people who look down on "unskilled labor" like service industry employees. Fun anecdote: airplane mechanics were considered "unskilled labor" throughout WW2 and into the early Cold War, when the profession was suddenly rebranded as "skilled labor" due to a pressing need for aircraft mechanics with the rising demand from fighter jets and airliners and a lack of people entering the field. There's no such thing as "unskilled labor," just undervalued work.

And my second bit that I always make about the 2 years retail service is that it would either destroy the country or make it a nicer place where people respect each other more, and at this point I don't know which is better.

Apparently they were originally intending for it to be around the $750-800 range for the base model.

You do also have to factor in that it's about a 6 inch cube, though, so it's no surprise that the specs are underpowered.

People like this artist are why if I were ever elected President I would mandate 2 years of retail service for the entire population. They simply do not understand the stress of dealing with people in a customer-facing role in a service industry.

There was a study on job stress done a number of years ago now (I wanna say in the 2018-2020 range) by psychologists on determining the most stressful jobs, and much of the top of the list is what you would expect: firefighters, EMTs, non-active duty military, EOD technician, active duty military, etc. But the top 3 on the list, above everything else including jobs that have life or death situations, were all customer service related - baristas, customer support techs, wait staff, that sort of thing.

And the reason for this ranking was simple: jobs like bomb defusal, active duty soldiers, and firefighters are incredibly high stress but with long periods of little to no stress in between. A soldier is only on duty a few months out of the year, and in active combat for a small portion of that time. They have tons of low stress time to allow them to destress and heal from the time they spend fighting for their lives. Meanwhile, your average wait staff is in a medium to high stress environment of having to handle the abusive general public every day of the week, day in and day out. They have very little time to recover from a consistently stressful environment that only mounts higher and higher as the years go on.

As somebody who worked a job for 10 years that could basically be described as all 3 of the jobs in this comic rolled into 1 (I worked at a fish market), if there's one group of people that I will bend over backwards to help have an easy time, it's the kid at the grocery store, the cashier at Walmart, and the waitress at the restaurant. They don't get paid anywhere near enough to deal with the shit that they do.

It's also 6 inches across. I don't think my graphics card alone could fit in a 6 inch cube, let alone my full PC.

Hard agree. It's a shitty practice with shitty origins that allows companies to pay incredibly low wages and justify it with the idea that the employees should make up the difference with a nebulous performance-based appeal to customers' sense of charity.

And that's why. For a lot of states they're making like $2.75 before tips.

Plus, it's also very relative to what exactly you are doing. A decent bartender can pull like $200+ a night on a weekend in tips.

Plus then there's the variance of the individual. If you're naturally good with people, you're likely to get tipped better. If you're a pretty young girl, you'll probably make decent money even if you're not good with people, etc.

It's such a complicated situation to talk about.

I didn't know "any license plate reader" also scanned your phone as you went by and added your dog to their database to better identify you as an individual.

They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.

They definitely lost sales because of how horrible the user experience was/is, too.

Remember how the store launched without a fucking shopping cart so you had to buy each game as a separate transaction? Pepperidge Farms remembers that Epic isn't even capable of the most basic of features required for an online store.

Of course, they'll never get a cent out of me after they pulled that scumbag move of putting games on sale without ever asking the devs - they put games that hadn't even released at like 50% off!

...you do realize that pensions and 401K's are what companies replaced actually paying their retired workers a living wage with so that they both didn't have to pay retirees and to forcibly inflate their own wealth with the wages of their workers, right?

If you work for a big enough company that they provide either of those two, a certain percentage of what you make every week is taken by the company and put into the stock market via index funds (like the NASDAQ, which nows invests your money into SpaceX) and sometimes their own stock without you ever having any say in the matter. It's not "excess", it's wage theft.

If you're investing in SpaceX directly, that's one thing and you deserve what you're going to get just like the people buying Teslas. But there's very little difference between this and billionaire bailouts on your tax dollars.

You guys got home ec? 😞

This isn't really true internally for Russia. The USSR collapse was the result of the greed of the government officials who are now the Russian oligarchy (in collaboration with some Ukrainian officials IIRC who wanted to break away from the USSR?). The USSR didn't even have a stock market, and the "government" installed one for the specific purpose of allowing government officials to buy up major parts of the economy to become billionaires practically overnight while they caused a major economic recession to ensure that nobody else could profit from the short entry window because they were too busy selling off their heirlooms to buy bread. It's called Shock Therapy, and the Russians flew out at least one or two Wall Street execs in order to help them set the whole thing up. Modern Russia operates a lot like the US (at least economically).

Set it up so that it also runs at a randomized interval within a range so that it not only looks less uniform and more realistic but it also keeps you somewhere solidly in the middle of the pack, and it should be fairly hard to pick out as abnormal activity while still burning credits.

The damage will still be done, but it will be far enough down the line that by the time they need to figure out what happened, you'll be in the clear. By then, they should be looking at the cost of AI as a whole, not each individual employee's usage costs.

To add to what the other user said, this is why the rich convert their money into real estate wealth as well. Not only does it hold its value better than cash, it appreciates faster than any savings account ever could, and the wealthy take a loan out on it when they need cash, and then pay that loan off with money from a loan on a different piece of property.

By repeating this over and over, they go their whole lives without ever having to actually give up any of their assets to pay off any of these loans, and when they die, the debt disappears alongside them.

I can see how they'd get to the conclusion that they did, at least. I'm sure they saw the grills in the oven and thought that it was like an outdoor grill, and then never thought about it beyond that conclusion and assumed that everyone just had to deal with cleaning the gross oven mess every time.

Because if playing a female character confuses young boys' genderes, surely playing a mal characte will certainly not confuse young girls in their gender identities.

You see, that's the neat part: this would never even occur to them. The thought that there could potentially be such a thing as trans men doesn't even occur to these people. And when it does, they think of them as poor misguided victims, because of course women would jealously desire to become men, the superior sex. Everybody wants to be a man, obviously.

One of the reasons that they're so obsessed with trans women is that the very concept that someone would actually prefer to be a woman shakes the foundations of their patriarchal view of the world and its rigid gender binary.

Oh, so Kirk was the new college gargoyle, not just grotesque. Now I get it!

That stereotype originates from propaganda from McDonald's in order to discredit the woman who had the skin of her labia melted to the point where it fused together when she spilled her coffee in her lap.

Not that we're not dumb (case in point, anything that's happened basically anytime ever), but fuck corporate propaganda and fuck McDonald's for trying to smear a woman who only wanted them to pay for her medical bills.