I’m newer to linux, and kind of a moron, but I 1) bounced off Ubuntu and 2) haven’t seen this crap with Debian.

So I’m stretching it a bit because at the end of the day this really does apply to more than restaurants, but the other commenter had it right.

Things like rent, insurance, etc go into the cost for well above the plate. So the ingredients are one thing, but you have to make up the cost of rent, paying the staff when there’s low customer volume, all the insane amount of costs that go into running a business. That server has to make up for the cost of printing menus and delivering them by mail.

None of this is the servers fault, who should get a fair wage, but it all adds up in a way that makes it hard for the owner. In fact, the person who sold them the grills, refrigerators, and all the other equipment, knows exactly and empirically how hard it is and sets their prices accordingly.

And it’s not like that company’s delivery drivers, techs, and fabrication workers also don’t deserve a wage. Or the Tyson folks that are plucking the chicken delivered.

The issue is, at the end of the day, those companies probably should be less profitable. But instead of accepting that, we put all of the companies that make all the stuff that run that restaurant into bigger companies that are now part of mutual funds, and they sell it out knowing they can grab it back if it goes under.

So you might be able to get away with making a few plates and some money, but trying turning it into something that will let you pay your rent and put your kids into a school. “Bob’s Burgers” is pretty true to life.

Restaurants have notoriously thin margins. I’m not defending this bill, and there are definitely awful practices out there, but it ain’t easy. Even a $34 dollar steak only kind of covers all the ancillary costs that make it happen.

The biggest issue with the crunch we have going on is that food (prepared or otherwise) should be way more expensive, and that shouldn’t be an issue because most people should be making way more money. All of those should/shouldn’ts got way out of whack over the course of decades, and the circus only continued because people found crappy ways to keep it going.

It’s a lot of industries. Construction is a great example. The developers make money. The material vendors make money. The builders make money. The sub contractors who actually put the parts together get haggled on invoices and take the lower amount because they have payroll to make and equipment loans to pay. Loans that are happily given out because the equipment can be easily repossessed.

It’s a very good thing everything is correcting, but it’s going to be an ugly process as workers get their due and pass the burden on to the small business owners.

never underestimate the strength of boredom and time in a pre-DSL era lol

hahha, I’d just go on a spree picking up as much Ordinator armor as I could, sell it, and buy off my bounty.

Not quite “find your pocket change” but a solid value: Starcraft + broodwars for $20.

So, soooooooo many hours. And it came in a sweet looking box! Like the kind that people shell out an extra $50 for as a pre-order these days.

I’ll always remember you this way Blizz. You were one of the greats.

I played that game entirely to young and somehow finished the main quest line, eventually.

But man, I spent so many hours just murder hobo-ing it because I didn’t really understand the quest based game loop yet. I’d just pick a direction and look for something cool. When I found someone that looked like they’d have cool stuff I’d just kill them and take their stuff. The only time I’d reload is when I got the prophecy warning; I broke like every quest except the main one.

This was compounded by the fact that 1) I was really enjoying just exploring and 2) that game was not particularly hard to destroy the balance on. Even a kid with poor mechanical skills could get wildly OP pretty easily.

12/10 no notes.

That had to be wild to work on. You get brought into the kickoff meeting for what you assume is going to be some soulless marketing gimick, then they start laying it out.

It had a plot, a decent amount of levels. There was a good amount of heart that went into that.

I have only one thing to say about this book: “Good good good!” ;)

Oh fair point. My dumb-ass sitting here going what is he talking about? A motor can run backwards, most pumps and compressors can’t, or at least wont be effective if they do. Unless their something like a peristaltic.

it is, (although the design is slightly different, you couldn’t just run the motor on an AC backwards).

Heat pumps are better for the environment because it’s (usually) more energy efficient to extract existing heat than create it. Heat-pumps get more heat per unit energy spent than resistive heat (like electric radiators) because they’re not creating the heat, they’re just moving it.

Natural gas still kind of wins out, but that has the issue of constantly needing more natural gas.

The most environmentally friendly play would be, if you were like on a space station or something: Imeaditley stop producing more natrual gas, use up whatevers left in reserves, then install heat pumps. But of course that’s not how things work so we’re transitioning now.

edit: re: AC not being good for the environment. AC isn’t the problem, just the power is. So it’s just seen as a luxury as opposed to necessity, although obviously that’s starting to change.

As others have said yes, thats an air conditioner, but to expand: that’s why the outside of an air conditioner (either one of the big ground mounted ones outside or the window ones) gets hot while it’s operating. You could technically just mount your window AC backwards.

To expand further, that’s part of why heat-pumps weren’t in expanded use for a while. In the summer you’re extracting hot from the room and putting the hot outside, so your heat exchanger is hot. But in the winter when you’re extracting heat from outside and putting it inside, you make the heat exchanger outside more cold. So cold, infact, that icing becomes an issue, and when it ices over it’s less good at extracting heat. There are some neat tricks modern heat-pumps use to avoid icing over their outside heat exchanger (including running backwards to extract heat from inside and heat up the coils for a bit).

It’s also why you saw early adoption of heat-pumps in areas where people might need both heating and cooling, but it didn’t get bitter cold.

Another way this is avoided in some cases is to simply bury the heat exchanger to a depth below the frost line, where it can’t freeze. Then you can add/extract as much heat as you want. That’s geothermal heating/cooling. In some cases geothermal may be passive (ie: you’re just circulating a fluid and temperature you get is what you get), but it’s real strength is as a heat exchanger.

In fact, with the ground being able to accept/source as much heat as you want, you could actually place the “topside” exchanger in an area where you weren’t trying to control the temp, and take advantage of the temperature difference to create power. Thats geothermal power. However, the efficiency and payback of that is based on the difference in temperature, which is why you only see it in instances where there’s some natural source of higher temp heat underground. I suppose geothermal power would work just as well with a natural source of low temp cold (like the opposite of lava), but I’m hard pressed to imagine what that would be.

Oh I’ve got no shame in audio books. I have a lot of drive time depending on where work takes me, and it’s been amazing. Still love turning the trees over, but I don’t want that to stop me from all the good stuff out there. But I just know house of leaves does some cool stuff physically.

I’m just copy pasting from above because I liked this book and am trying to bait a conversation lol. It was a fun one.

I just finished! I liked it a lot to, although I give it a solid B. Humor was great, there were some really nifty concepts, I just don’t think it was a slam dunk. I think the author will do some really great stuff in the future though. It’s a perfect vacation read: Plot is pretty linear for the most part, it’s not terribly long, and it keeps a solid pace.

I’m going to compare it to a not so great book, but because of the elements about that book I liked: “NeXt” by Chriton. I’m in the biochemistry field, and “NeXt” is really interesting as a capture of where the public (and a lot of professionals) thought the field was going. The human genome project was well underway, everything seemed possible. “Lumpsucker” shoots into the future a bit (“Next” is 100% contemporary), but really captures a ton over the last 5 years that simmers in public consciousness the way Next did. It’s not like the topics both discuss don’t get plenty of headlines, but they both do a cool job capturing a general “vibe” around the topics as opposed to just facts. I found it really cathartic to read, actually.

So all in all, to anyone else, I’d give it a strong recommend. It wont go down as an all time classic but the author put together something beyond competent, and really added some spice here and there capturing something special.

I just finished! I liked it a lot to, although I give it a solid B. Humor was great, there were some really nifty concepts, I just don’t think it was a slam dunk. I think the author will do some really great stuff in the future though. It’s a perfect vacation read: Plot is pretty linear for the most part, it’s not terribly long, and it keeps a solid pace.

I’m going to compare it to a not so great book, but because of the elements about that book I liked: “NeXt” by Chriton. I’m in the biochemistry field, and “NeXt” is really interesting as a capture of where the public (and a lot of professionals) thought the field was going. The human genome project was well underway, everything seemed possible. “Lumpsucker” shoots into the future a bit (“Next” is 100% contemporary), but really captures a ton over the last 5 years that simmers in public consciousness the way Next did. It’s not like the topics both discuss don’t get plenty of headlines, but they both do a cool job capturing a general “vibe” around the topics as opposed to just facts. I found it really cathartic to read, actually.

So all in all, to anyone else, I’d give it a strong recommend. It wont go down as an all time classic but the author put together something beyond competent, and really added some spice here and there capturing something special.

Just started Bob Legion. LOVE it so far. If you like bob and haven’t done Project Hail Marry there’s some common DNA. Also the audiobook voice actor is the same.

I’ve got that sitting on my shelf! Have been only able to do audiobooks for a few weeks and know that’s one you want to read read. Glad to see another endorsement.

Until I read Project Hail Marry, Seveneves was my favorite book.

The only other Stevenson I got around to is Crypto (really enjoyed, putting a foot into “love”). My friend is a Stevenson nut, and is incredibly lukewarm on Seveneves, and I couldn’t tell you why. Go in as blind as possible (that infamous opening line is fine). It is a RIDE.

Same. I started with Ubuntu like a decade ago. I hated it and didn’t really see the fuss, kind of gave up.

But then I started putting in tons of time in rasbian, and windows kept getting more and more… Well, windows. I eventually realized how much more I liked working on stuff on the pi, and just needed proper hardware. That’s also when I started to understand the differences between distros. I’m not flaming Ubuntu (I’m not really smart enough to have an opinion), it was just a lot of hastle for something I didn’t understand the upside of yet.

Been wrestling with my first all Linux (Debian) box. It’s a bit of a learning curve but there’s this weird headspace it frees up. It does what I tell it. There’s no random software that shows up. There’s nothing I can’t nuke. No surveys on my favorite BBQ dish in my Taskbar (true story). It’s so godamn nice. It’s the opposite of a black box.

Im getting another (3rd) box specifically to slowly replace my current desktop. Ill be fooling around with WINE and whatnot for the software I need for work, probably setting up a small windows partition for when I absolutely need it. But all in all I’ll be 90% penguin by years end.

I thought the mechanics in Witcher 3 were clunky, the fighting was a bit repetitive, and I don’t really like fantasy… and that game is still one of my all time favorites.