But then you have to watch Picard 😢

The credit companies do not insure against fraud, they simply take the money out of the merchant account and put it back into yours. Now it’s the merchant who has no recourse, if they have already shipped the product. So the only difference between CC and crypto is who is typically left holding an empty bag in case of theft - the payer or the payee. Certainly not the banks!

I’d argue in terms of assigning responsibility, it seems more fair to expect you the customer to keep your digital wallet secure from thieves, than to expect the merchant to try guess every time whether the visitor to their online store happens to be using a stolen credit card.

Question: do the Japanese actually care about privacy? I know I do, but if you were to ask a Japanese person why does their country use cash, would they say “We have considered a system of payment cards and decided against it for privacy reasons” or would they just shrug and say “I dunno, I’m not in charge of payment systems, I use what I have”?

Yeah, for getting kidnapped 🤣

Street space is a public good. It is literally land, surface area to be used for something. You can’t create more of it short of demolishing all the existing buildings. Right now like 80% of the width of a Manhattan avenue is dedicated to moving and parking cars. Pedestrians and bicyclists are squeezed into tiny slithers on the sides. It’s a total shame. If you count and compare the number of people passing a given point on a 5ft busy Manhattan sidewalk to the number of passengers in private cars in the 55ft roadway next to it, it’s like a 10-fold difference in 1/10th the space.

Right now, everyone poor and rich at least has an equal access to drive on the roadway (assuming you can afford to maintain a car at all). However, midtown roads are already at full capacity all the time. There exist way more people in New York who would drive if they could, but they literally can’t fit. It takes 1-2 hours to drive into Manhattan. This is considered “typical traffic conditions”. Morning rush hour stretches into the afternoon and merges into evening rush hour.

Effectively, you are trading patience/time for the opportunity to drive in. For every one person who has the patience to wait 1 hour in gridlock, there are 2 more who do not and find alternative ways in. Even billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg took the subway to work. It was described as “populist signaling” but it was literally faster for him than taking a limo.

Rich people have a lot of money and not a lot of patience. Lots of them would have loved to be able to pay to skip the gridlock, but they couldn’t, until now. They have succeeded in taking this 80% of public space, that everyone with sufficient patience could access, and turning it into a private toll road. That’s why this is a land grab! Doesn’t matter if the fees go into a public fund - if revenue was needed it should have been raised by a progressive tax. A flat fee is the opposite of that!

The congestion charge will not even decrease the number of cars on the road. Remember how for every 1 driver there are 2 more who wish-they-were-drivers but who had more money than time? Every 1 poor driver taken off the road will be immediately replaced by 1 more private car service Suburban SUV. The rich crave travel away from us poors, in their padded armored tanks, and now they can do exactly that, as they have succeeded in having the legislature kick us off our public land.

The only thing that will reduce car traffic is shrinking the roadways. Take those 5-lane Manhattan avenues, take away one lane and convert it to protected micromobility lane. Take away another and widen the fucking sidewalks! Take away the street parking and convert it to green space with trees that survive longer than 1 year. Add loading zones for delivery drivers. Use the public street space for the benefit of the actual public!

New Yorkers who think this is another poor people tax

Oh hey, that’s me. Have never watched Fox news or read New York Post, and I believe this congestion charge is a literal land grab by the rich. AMA.

They incorrectly broke it because they were overzealous.

There was some scare in lemmy development circles recently about script injection vulnerabilities. The various apps and frontend developers “solved” the problem by peppering untrusted user input with escape sequences all over the place. User submits post? Escape title! Receive new post from a federated instance? Escape title!

Obviously if you escape the title twice and display once, it will show up weird. The problem is that the various devs haven’t agreed yet which parts of the messaging protocol are supposed to be already escaped and which are not. Ideally all user input should be stored and transmitted in raw form, and only escaped right before displaying. But due to various zealously-cautious devs we get this instead:

Central Park is not New York’s largest park. It’s the 5th.

I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.

This is like that Key and Peele sketch where they rob the bank by working in there for 20 years.

Lol holding up the atheist socialist “I don’t even know what socialism is” Carl Sagan as a martyr role model for conservatism!

We are totally gonna get DVRs back, aren’t we 🤣?

Oh yeah, the app is probably even more convenient, especially with the pre-checkin, and the hygiene too, but there is no way I’m using that tracking bundle 😂. When I was born, nobody was counting how many burgers I was eating, and I’m not going to allow that to change. It’s a shame too because they hide all the actually good deals in the app, the ones that make eating there actually affordable, so I find myself not even going to eat there anymore. I feel like a rube paying the full price. Probably better for me in the long run anyway.

I don’t see why you are being so stubborn about this. If you don’t like the numbers I gave you because “you can still go up to the counter and get a real person” it’s an easy adjustment to make that tells the same story: before kiosks = 5 people working 75% at food and 25% at register, after kiosks = 4 people working 95% at food 5% at register. The conclusion is the same - your claim that automation does not eliminate positions is simply incorrect. I thought maybe you had some insider knowledge on mandatory staffing levels, but it seems you are just bad at math. Everyone else in these comments was arguing about jobs disappearing (not me! I only wanted to show off the cool cashbox) - it must have been really confusing to see all those people upset about something which you can’t even comprehend as a problem.

You really don’t see the difference between 5 people working, spending 80% of time making food and 20% floating at register, versus 4 people working 100% making food serving the same total number of customers now that registers have been nearly entirely replaced by kiosks and apps?

How can you be sure it doesn’t eliminate positions? Is there some rule that states “every franchise must be staffed by exactly 8 people at all times”? Seems more likely to me the schedules will be adjusted until every worker is still occupied 100% of the time.

I’d personally prefer to focus on making food too, but there could be others who actually prefer manning the register.

We can keep the supermarket cashiers, we just have to demand it. Always choose the full-service line, and complain loudly if there are not enough cashiers to keep the line short, scoff at any suggestion to use the self-checkout and demand to speak to a manager and corporate. As I said elsewhere, one person can only do so much, but when a million people keep doing it the mountain will have to move. I feel personally responsible for the installation of these cashboxes by insisting to pay in cash every single time for the past several years.

Literally starving to death is more difficult nowadays than in the past, but every society is still structured around the idea that you must be doing something wrong if you are not employed. Food, housing, healthcare, all tied to employment, and the substitutes they maybe give you are designed to only barely keep you alive until you find more employment.

Yes, every job that has become obsolete in the past due to automation has been replaced with a new kind of job, many of which could not have even been imagined before. We don’t have buggy whip manufacturers, but we do have programmers. But that doesn’t mean that will continue always. Jobs that disappear now or in the near future may never get replaced. And many jobs that exist now, I’d argue, are totally bullshit already, and we don’t need more of them. We as a society need to reassess our expectations for 100% employment and better reallocate resources according to the new norms.

Instead of “smashing the robots”, may I interest you in “eating the rich” option? It looks like you have been thinking a lot of smashing, but not enough about eating. Remember your priorities!