Yea, it's basically restaurant owners trying to get their customers involved in their political whining.
Notice how you never see things like "Business License Fee" or "Restaurant Electricity Bill Surcharge" listed out as separate line items on customers' bills. Those are things restaurant owners have to pay, too, so why don't they get their own charges to customers? Why does only "Living Wage" get a line item on the customer's bill?
"Fuel surcharge" on flights. Which should be illegal: the cost of hedging fuel cost risk should be included in any ticket price.
A friend said that Uber was charging a fuel surcharge here in New Zealand, but that it wasn't passed on to the driver (who pays for the fuel). If true I would find that interesting.
> A friend said that Uber was charging a fuel surcharge here in New Zealand, but that it wasn't passed on to the driver
I did a bit of a dive on this and I think it’s not correct.
I have a low threshold for hating them, after the reports of how females staffers were treated a few years back, but this new thing seems to be untrue.
Great link. Sounded suss to me. Could easily have been a bullshit taxi driver, or a social outrage story. I should have tried to validate before repeating, sorry.
Unfortunately you’ve spoken too soon on this one. I recently had an energy surcharge added due to the “Iran war” (as explained by the server) added to every check.
Hey now, let's not get carried away, these jackass restaurant owners want to make it clear, the "Living Wage" guilt trip is the tip part, and the fees THEY put on are to pay for "benefits like healthcare" and you're not allowed to consider it part of the tip.
Nevermind that California doesn't even have a lower "tipped" min wage like some states do, so by supporting tipping, we're just saying that servers simply "deserve" more money for some reason than people who stock shelves or pick orders at Amazon or Walmart.
> Nevermind that California doesn't even have a lower "tipped" min wage like some states do, so by supporting tipping, we're just saying that servers simply "deserve" more money for some reason than people who stock shelves or pick orders at Amazon or Walmart.
Isn't this the thing the government is saying in California? They passed a law requiring restaurants to pay the same minimum wage as jobs where workers don't get tips, on top of the tips, essentially making it the law that people in tipped occupations have to be paid more than what can be paid to people doing any other kind of work.
Unless the point is to get customers to stop tipping because a) the workers are now guaranteed the same minimum wage as anyone else even if they don't and b) they can't afford the tip on top of the prices that now have the higher minimum wage priced into them anyway.
One person can tell a lie, but a company consists of many people. You must ensure that only few people know of the logging or there will be a risk of a leak.
Well, there should only be a few people with the access needed to discover logging is happening. Just put the logging configuration in whatever secure configuration management tool is storing your TLS keys and suchlike.
Make it look like an accidental misconfiguration and if an insider who isn't an NSA mole does somehow discover the logging, there's a fair chance they'll turn a blind eye anyway. After all, if you work at a VPN, publicly outing your employer for logging will tank the business, then you and your colleagues will all be out of a job.
Still I think it's easier to avoid the need for more people than necessary. "Just lie" sounds like the easiest solution but on closer inspection maybe it is not?
Because if you lie you get infinitely more data than if you don't lie. And if you lie you can do it completely in secret whereas if you don't lie you get articles like the OP exposing the teeny amount of data you're trying to collect. It makes no sense.
leakers and whistleblowers are extremely rare. History is filled with examples of conspiracies involving many people that went on for long periods of time before one person eventually risked everything and said something. The Tuskegee Experiment went on for like 40 years! If keeping secrets were all that hard none of them would have been allowed to go on as long as they did.
How the heck is this going to pan out? Memory prices are already crazy high and forecasts say there is going to be no respite till end of 2026. Are people just going to stop buying devices and computers? The downstream effects of this (in a scenario where every device needs memory) are bonkers.
Both Hynix and Samsung won't be expanding production very much (see https://www.hankyung.com/article/2025120168881 ), so I expect the shortages to continue. Obviously buying RAM a la carte will be extremely cost prohibitive until they end. Eventually GPUs will go up as well. AMD already doesn't bundle VRAM with its GPUs, and nVidia just announced they'd stop bundling VRAM as well. If you're looking at getting a new GPU, I'd say puill the trigger now. Cell phones and prebuilt computers shouldn't be as much of a problem (assuming the shortages aren't extremely protracted), as those manufacturers have long-term deals with their suppliers that don't expose them to as much volatility. It might help Apple's RAM upgrade prices seem sane :)
So far is this just affecting PC builders? Has Apple adjusted their prices? Is this as bad as peak ETH mining yet where every prebuilt is sold out because it's getting raided for parts and was priced at MSRP?
> Are people just going to stop buying devices and computers?
I'm sure Apple and Samsung will still have access to chips. Maybe this is just the beginning of the end for access to general-purpose computing for the masses.
No, India has draconian laws about search and seizure (and one could argue, about a whole lot of other legal issues) when it comes to the Income Tax department. It doesn't require a judicial warrant, merely authorisation from a senior official in the Income Tax department (the list is given in the link posted below by another person.)
In practice, Income Tax "raids" have been used as instruments of oppression by governments of the day against political rivals, media outlets critical of the government, or pretty much any person they didn't like following a "the process is the punishment" philosophy. You have to justify every last thing. It's "guilty until proven innocent" when it comes the to Income Tax department in India.
They already could seize all your electronic equipment - phones, computers, etc. - as part of a raid and go through all your files to check if you were "evading income". These new amendments allow them to get even more draconian by compelling you to provide access to your email and social media accounts, which means you have absolutely zero privacy and evidence could even be planted on your accounts if needed. Of course, that would never happen because there is zero corruption in India. /s
Absolutely. Sounds like a slam dunk case. Which is why you sued them for trademark infringement, right? You had them dead to rights because if you google "wordpress hosting", WPEngine is the only site that comes up.
Oh, that didn't happen. Because you know you would lose that case.
The latest childish tantrum Mullenweg has thrown is this passive-aggressive post where, ostensibly to get a Wordpress fork off the ground, he's deactivated the Wordpress.org accounts of 5 people, including the people who just asked for a change in the governance model of Wordpress. That entire post is a huge ball of bitter passive-aggressive shit couched in "howdy" language. [1]
This includes the account of someone who has not been involved with Wordpress development since 2020. [2] [3]
Having only been exposed to Mullenweg on the Tim Ferriss podcast, I perceived him as the benevolent, zen-like steward of one of the biggest open source projects ever. Watching this drama over the past few months has been... interesting. It's like the dude on the podcast hit his head badly and had his whole personality replaced.
Maybe this is the performance. The podcast, based on the GGP, is a far more realistic form of human behavior. The current mode seems like a performance, following the trend of other SV CEOs.
For people who claim to be really smart, original thinkers, they follow the herd right toward the cliff.
I haven't learned much in my career, (cue "burn after reading" clip [0]), but I do know that CEOs hate it when changes in governance are discussed by underlings, it's way more of a threat to power than any fork.
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