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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Tipping is bad culture because we as customers should not need to directly subsidize the employees paychecks. There is too much variability in that. I’ve worked in restaurants where there is a slow day. I’ve seen servers on busy nights leave with $10 in tips because tables just refuse to tip anyone.

    The restaurant should raise their prices and pay all employees a livable wage regardless of position. It’s not about being bad at math. It’s about some people not wanting to tip and the only one getting fucked over is the person on the very bottom with no control. It’s about that same person having to spend 8 hours on a slow Wednesday morning with maybe 2 customers all day just not getting the tips to feed their family. It shouldn’t matter how many customers a server gets. They should get paid for the hours worked, not the customers served


  • Except they literally couldn’t? Official documentation for 3.0 is 100 up and 1G down in a lab setting. As someone who’s actually tested that with an ISP it doesn’t work in the real world. 500/50 was what was achievable in most cases. Then 3.1 pushed the download with OFDM splits, but practical applications still couldn’t hit the 1G they got in lab environments. 3.0 was never advertised to hit 200 up and 3.1 hasn’t actually hit it in real world. 4.0 will get us closer to symmetrical max.

    I will say that Comcast being the biggest ISP does likely mean they’ll reach true d4 first but to my knowledge they haven’t achieved it yet.




  • The technology is there, but we need to free up that space. Cable companies don’t just do things to their own beat. Cable Labs is the one responsible for organizing how that bandwidth is used and removing the cable frequencies to open up more internet frequencies is literally the next step.

    But you need to do entire markets at a time. We can’t just upgrade the people that move to IP tv because at a certain point they share lines with people who haven’t upgraded so that bandwidth is already used.

    Everyone needs to upgrade in an area to allow the business to reallocate that bandwidth. What you described is literally what is in progress right now. It just takes time


  • The asymmetrical aspect of cable will be here to stay. Fiber can do it because it was build on a different foundation.

    Copper cable transmits data using electric signals in various frequencies. There are a batch of frequencies reserved for phone and TV. ALL of the tv programming is constantly streamed to your lines whether you have TV or not and whether you pay for it or not. It’s encrypted and is only decrypted by your cable boxes when your provider says they can decrypt it. The phone frequencies are reserved so you can make phone calls and still max out your download.

    So what about the rest of the bandwidth? Well, way back in the early days of cable it was pretty much everyone for themselves. Every company did things its own way. That’s where DOCSIS came in. It’s a platform that allows modem manufacturers to make modems that will work on any cable network that supports Docsis. And the key part is that DOCSIS is always backwards compatible. The network upgrade to 3.1 did not break the old d2 devices.

    When it was developed the download was extremely more necessary than the upload. You’d be sending small single line commands on upload and receiving entire files in download. So more frequencies went to download than upload. In a lab setting 1.0 could reach 40mbps down and 10 up. That’s not what was sold because real life isn’t a lab and there’s loss over large distances. Realistically most people got 10 mb down and upload wasn’t even listed.

    Whats changed? Well today those same download and upload frequencies are still used. We’ve added more around them to deliver higher speeds. But we’ve also kept the same principles that people need more download than upload. Docsis 3.1 was released in 2013. We really didn’t start stressing over upload until Covid and work from home had us on zoom calls all day.

    Docsis 4.0 is technically released but requires quite a bit of overhaul to work with existing networks. We pretty much need to do away with cable tv. That’s why many ISP’s are pushing IPTv. It removes the need for all that bandwidth devoted to just TV. If everyone in a region drops traditional cable for IPTv they can easily switch to d4. D4 does increase upload but does not make it symmetrical.

    Your cable company does not decide their highest tier realistically. It’s the most that medium will offer. It’s gonna be a while too for d4 to be available everywhere. Everyone would need to drop traditional cable (which is honestly a nice move regardless) and people don’t upgrade plans very often. When I worked in tech support I would frequently deal with customers complaining about slow speeds while on plans from 2002.




  • Your electric bill absolutely will not go up by as much as your saving on gas. It’s tough to figure out how much because it depends on your electric rate and how much you drive as well as your charging habits.

    I charge my car to full every night and live in western PA, but not sure of what the rates are for electric. My bill is under $150/month though. Gas is almost $4/gallon. Before our first EV in 2018 we spent about $200 a week on gas and gas has only gotten more expensive. We spend less on Electric per month for the entire house (not just the car) than we did on a week in gas.

    As for long trips, that’s an area seriously lacking. I use ABRP which is a mapping software that uses your specific model, battery charge, distance, elevation, traffic, and weather to figure out when to charge and for how long. You can also link up a OBDII sensor to get live data for more accurate route adjustments. I’d recommend giving that a look and mess with different cars to see what cars fit the routes you drive the best.

    I drove to Kentucky from western PA and only had to stop three times for about 2 hours of charge total in a Kia Niro 2022 EV. But we then didn’t stop to eat at other times we would have because we stopped in places with restaurants so it wasn’t 2 hours lost.

    We also did a trip to Washington DC to see the pandas before they left and made it the whole way with no charge. We only had to charge on the way home.









  • I’m not completely sold. I’m going to do some math, but full disclaimer, I am using national averages and recommendations so mileage will vary.

    That being said, $20k/ year comes down to roughly $9.62/hr to send our kids to daycare.

    So let’s figure out an estimate of what it should cost. First we need the salaries of the employees. Average wage for daycare staff in the US is $11.26/hr. Now we need to find how much each kid pays to their wage. Recommended staffing levels say a maximum of 6 kids per adult. Every daycare I know is understaffed so we’re being generous with 6:1. So $11.26/hr divided by 6 children is $1.88 per child per hour.

    Now there are other expenses. So on average your employees wages are 15-30% of your revenue. Note, there was no guideline for childcare, this is a general business guideline.

    So we have a range. That $1.88 needs to be 15-30% of what that child costs to send. $1.88 divided by 0.15 is $12.53 and $1.88 divided by 0.3 is $6.26.

    Now, I live in a really awful place with a lot of corruption. I don’t have much faith in much of the national averages. In fact during my research the national average cost is only $14k but the $20k is an actual value of what me and my wife pay at one of the cheapest daycares in the area. It’s also a poor city. Most of the people I know make under $10/hr. Many make minimum wage which is currently only $7.25/hr. I’d wager more heavily on the $8-$8.50 range for employees which makes our final cost range $4.40 to $9.50 which means best case we are still paying slightly over what we should expect.

    Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic since my city constantly ranks as one of the worst places to live in the country but I think childcare is just another division run by a bunch of for profit companies trying to squeeze everything they can and screw over as many people as possible.


  • It’s too fucking expensive to be reasonable. $20k a year for fucking childcare. That’s almost $10/hr wage. Tons of jobs around here don’t even make that much. Realistically you need to make even more because there’s taxes coming out of the $10/hr. Anything less and you’re better off just not working at all. Then you need to calculate your bills. If you need to pay rent, utilities, gas, car payment, etc you need to be making $25-$30/hr to get by. Realistically a single mother isn’t making it on her own and it’s disgusting.

    Not to mention that $20k doesn’t get you jack shit. We still need to supply food, diapers, drinks, and even a fucking pack and play for her to nap in as well as a fucking high chair. All that $20k gets you is a couple people sitting in a room with 20 other kids letting them all do their own thing.

    Fuck childcare



  • This is complicated.

    In one hand, law enforcement has to break the law at times to enforce it. A cop will need to speed to pull over another speeder. There needs to be barriers. There needs to be lines even law enforcement cannot cross. But sometimes law enforcement needs to break the law.

    In this case, what if they’re impersonating a child to catch a predator? What if they’re undercover and need a fake account to pass as legit. There’s acceptable cases for fake profiles too.

    Again, there needs to be boundaries and limits. But some is acceptable.

    Also, who’s getting prosecuted for having a fake account? I think as long as your not scamming people your fine and not going to get in trouble with the feds.