Restaurants rely more and more on tips to make up server wages as cost of living skyrockets and workers need more and more hourly in order to survive. It sucks that businesses aren’t making the difference from their own pockets, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tip. You’re not fighting the system, you’re denying people a living wage.

I worked at a coffee shop and 40% of my wage was tips. I wouldn’t be able to afford to live otherwkse. Please tip your barista.

Tipping isn’t really a social norm as much as it is a social imperative-- the food is considerably cheaper than it should be because you’re expected to make up the cost difference in tips.

To be clear, this is marketing crap to gather investors. Pretty much all “space colonization” proposals are. I was just talking about the theoretical technical feasibility.

I mean, there’s basically no good economic reason for any space colonization whatsoever, outside of potentially the asteroid belt. Neither Venus nor Mars have significant resources that aren’t found in similar abundance on Earth, where extraction is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier. Tourism would be an industry, but it would almost certainly be an extremely niche business similar to OceanGate’s Titanic visits, Blue Origin’s launches, or stuff like Dear Moon. Rich people might pay very well to go visit Mars or Venus or the Moon but that pay certainly would not be enough to offset the trillions of dollars (yes, trillions) and decades that true colonization would take.

With that in mind, discussions of real space colonization are entirely theoretical and probably always will be, at least within our lifetimes. It is very conceivable that humans will land on Mars and maybe establish permanent research outposts there, on the Moon, or hypothetically Venus. But those would be far more similar to something like the ISS-- hosting a rotating crew of mostly astronauts and the occasional space tourist. I find it hard to imagine an economic case for anything more anywhere in the solar system within a reasonable span of time.

The theory is that since most of Venus’ atmosphere is CO2 at this level, the breathable atmosphere of a human habitat is actually bouyant, which would make suspending a colony much easier.

Doing something like that on the scale of a research presence like the ISS is within the realm of current technology-- but you are right that doing so for a whole city is not technically possible at the moment-- nor is true space colonization in general, I would argue. There’s a lot of unknowns and unsolved problems.

I don’t wanna defend the guy but he did say floating colony, the atmosphere about 1 km up from the surface sits at earthlike temperatures and pressures-- astronauts would only need a breathing mask and some light skin protection as opposed to a pressure suit which is a major advantage.

If you’re talking about standard security cameras usually the footage will get completely overwritten after afeew days unless there was an incident to prompt review of the footage-- and even then it usually gets deleted at some point. Its not like with social media data gathering where they’re collecting all that information in order to build a personal profile of everyone-- security cameras just exist to review incidents that happen in the public realm and there’s no real incentive for a public transit agency to track every single person that appears on their cameras.

There’s cameras everywhere watching the road too if you really care that much and you better believe your car model and license plate is a much more reliable form of identifying information than a blurry face on a bus security camera.

Kate is great!

There’s a lot of non-Chrome Chromium browsers.

I’m typing this message on GrapheneOS. My point isn’t that it’s completely impossible but rather that degoogling basically has to become your hobby in order to fully do it. It requires a level of effort that’s not practical for the average person so its unreasonable to expect everyone to do it. Also, FOSS and non-google alternatives are often not as good as the service google provides for free, like Google Maps. I use OSMAnd as my daily maps app, but its pretty finnicky and isn’t anywhere close to the smooth, polished experience of Google Maps, and its lacking some important functionality. I still use it, because I’m committed to trying to avoid Google software as much as possible, but its definitely not the best experience.

Also, a lot of institutions andemployers use the G-Suite and so its impoesible for people that have to do business with those organizations to be entirely free of google. My university uses the G-Suite and when school comes back in the fall I’ll be stuck using it again. The local school district does too.

I run a degoogled Pixel 6A with GrapheneOS and Linux on my desktop. I logged in to Google once on my phone and still haven’t logged in a single time on my desktop. I don’t use any of the gsuite apps.

I don’t think the average person should or could reasonably do this. Google is so closely ingrained in society that removing it from your life requires a significant amount of effort to make sure you can still have as much of the stuff you need to participate in society as possible. Some of that stuff just doesn’t exist now without Google.

I’m glad that the software and tools and resources exist to de-google yourself for those that want to but its just not an option for most people.

Everyone is recommending Tails but I feel like that’s a lot more intense security and privacy wise than GrapheneOS, since Tails runs in a live environment only.

wear more clothes

Heat is the real killer. As someone else said with fenders and a raincoat the former is very manageable but there’s nothing you can do when the heat index is in the high 90s/early 100s every day from late May through the end of October.

Bikes are wonderful and amazing and awesome but I was a full-time bike commuter in my southeastern US city for two years and I can’t blame anyone here who doesn’t.

In the summer you get so hot that you need to expect to have somewhere to change or ideally shower wherever you go if you’re gonna be there for a long time. There’s very few dedicated bike lanes and a lot of roads may not even have sidewalks so you need to be able to bike on the open road sharing space with cars, which means you need to have an athletic ability to be able to maintain a decent pace on the road.

Even still you’ll end up having dozens of close calls from reckless cars and maybe even an accident or two which if you’ll be lucky are minor. I got hit by a Jeep that blew through a stop sign ironically on a bike path. I was okay but my bike had considerable damage. Another time I almost got sideswiped by a car that pulled through to parking on the other side of a bike lane without looking.

In short unless very significant infrastructure improvements are made (which are not expensive and are not really difficult to implement technically), biking is inaccessible as a regular form of transportation for most people in most parts of the United States. Which is very unfortunate, because biking is awesome.

I would not really recommend LaTeX or any of those other programs just for writing student papers. LaTeX is for academic papers and it’s pretty cumbersome and technical to learn, it would be very very extra to use it for writing just like your random freshman comp paper. I’m not sure why that list doesn’t have LibreOffice or OpenOffice or whatever.

The great news is that infrastructure to make cities more walkable and bikeable is actually really cheap. Like, compared to car infrastructure that can move a similar amount of people it’s nothing. It’s mostly an issue of political will to actually build the stuff.

I think a non-insubstantial amount of the comment activity was bots to be fair.