LetMeEatCake

Thanks!

One way to put some perspective on this too is with some numbers.

In 2022 every statewide democrat on the ballot got over 3m votes in Florida. In 2020 Biden got over 5m votes. Turnout craters for midterms so this is not atypical.

In 2022 dems lost the NC senate election by 120k votes, the WI senate election by 30k votes, the GA governor by 300k votes, AZ superintendent by 10k votes, WI treasurer by 10k votes, and NV governor by 10k votes... Among many other close elections. There were also absurdly close calls in the elections we won in NV, WI, and AZ all off the top of my head. Texas needs bigger numbers to get over the finish line, but we lost the governor's race by 900k in 2022 and the senate race by 215k in 2018.

Ignoring Texas and Georgia, all of those lost elections could be flipped with absolutely trivial population shifts out of Florida. I'm not going to pretend that the left is magically going to start leaving Florida in electorally strategic ways (people don't think like that!), but even just getting 500k FL voters to leave is going to see those trivial shifts start to happen organically anyway.

New York fell 89 residents short of keeping its 27th congressional district in 2020. I cannot for the life of me find the actual numbers for other seats, but Arizona would have had seat 440, California seat 441, Virginia 442, Michigan 444, and New Jersey 445. It wouldn't have required too huge of a population shift to those states to give them each an additional house seat, and if the exodus was from red states that would be a shift of red->blue in the electoral college and hopefully also the house.

... I didn't say they can't do so. I said they're allowed not to. Since it's allowed, that's what they do.

Because they're allowed not to do so. The answer is shitty yet simple.

Someone not tipping won't change that either; all that will do is stiff a worker. This needs to be fixed by changing labor laws.

That ship already sailed. Florida is fucked.

From 2002-2022, Florida has held six elections for four statewide political offices: governor, attorney general, chief financial officer, and agricultural secretary. Of the 24 combined elections, democrats won two: CFO in 2006 and agricultural secretary in 2018. Dems won two senate races in that same time frame (2006 and 2012 with incumbent Bill Nelson), and two presidential elections (2008 and 2012, with Obama).

The state has been drifting right ever since the early 2010s. That's been magnified lately.

The best outcome for democrats is they leave Florida in a mass exodus and go to other states that are close. Locking down nearby Georgia and North Carolina would be way more useful. Any gains in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would be invaluable. Further away, moving Texas left quicker would be great, and Arizona is far from locked down. Adding more house seats (and electoral votes) to blue states would be better too, since Florida is going to stay gerrymandered to reduce voter power as much as possible.

All we'll get out of Florida is heartbreak. The state is already lost and we should act with that knowledge in hand. Turn it into a republican vote sink so that conservatives leave purple states for it and have the left leave Florida for purple states.

Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.

These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it's a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it's not something that replaces or complements the tip, it's just a shitty price-adjustment.

A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.

The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as "Amazon") gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

I think there's a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

BRICS isn't an alliance or a cohesive entity. It's the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn't a geopolitical anything of any meaning.

I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They're large enough that they can make it work, assuming they're willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it's entirely within their capability.

This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.

At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said "eh, they're all teh same" and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn't vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.

I wouldn't blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.

RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.

Not a final decision. SCOTUS (via Kagan) refused to overturn a stay on a decision while legal proceedings continue. Basically just an order to keep things as-is until the case finishes working its way through the courts.

Which as I understand it is generally how things work: if there's no clear likely winner, go with the interim situation that most easily can be rectified if it is later ruled to have been wrong. In this case, if the ruling goes against Apple than they can be ordered to give money to Epic and other app-owners based on the revenue brought in from them to Apple during the appropriate period. The opposite case would require more complex estimates (how much revenue was shifted away from Apple incorrectly, in the case where Apple wins) and further it'd result in unnecessary consumer friction: users would go from A to B then back to A again.

It's smart, I don't know how people will feel about it but it's smart.

The US and China are in an escalating economic cold war. It's goes completely against US interests to invest finite resources into growing the economy of an economic rival — and ditto for the converse of China investing into growing the US economy. Especially in an aggressively competitive economic sector where relative technological advancement is king for competitive purposes.

It's convenience and efficiency. At the end of the day a single cable can provide that functionality needed for 99.9% of such devices. Getting everything on a single cable format reduces waste, simplifies people's lives, and even opens up competitive spaces. There's no need for it to be two cables.

This is speculation based on the combination of physical constraints and changing usage.

Phone batteries today are in the 10-20 watt-hours range for capacity, or at least iphones are and that's the data I found. Going from the typical ~20W fast charging rate to the full 240W capacity of USB-C EPR would allow a twelve times increase in battery capacity with no change to charge times. Are batteries going to increase in capacity by twelve times in the next 17 years? I'd be shocked if they did. The change from the iphone 1 to the iphone 14 pro max is 5.18Wh to 16.68Wh — a three times increase in 16 years.

Likewise, with data transfer, it's a matter of how human-device interaction has shifted with time. People increasingly prefer (a) automated, and (b) cloud based data storage, and (c) if they do have to move data from device 1 to device 2, they would rather do it wirelessly than with a physical connection. USB4 on USB-C is meant for 80 Gbit/s = 9.6 GB/s transfers. That's already faster than high end SSD storage can sustain today, and USB4 is a four year old standard. People on phones are going to be far more likely to be worried about their wifi transfer speeds than their physical cable transfer speeds, especially in 2040.

Then, on top of all of that... USB will continue to be updated. USB-C's limitations in 2033 will not be USB-C's limitations in 2023, just as USB-C's limitations in 2023 are not the same as USB-C's limitations at its inception in 2014. In 2014 USB's best transfer rate was 10 Gbit/s, or 1/8 what it can do today.