And importantly people who are wealthy don’t actually spend their own money. They take out credit secured by their assets, for example stocks and so on, and then spend what they want from that credit. As long as the line goes up or at least not far down they are good to go. That said, if their assets lose too much value too quickly they can end up absolutely ruined because the bank will call them on their asset. This was a real risk with the purchase of twitter by Musky Taint, he had a stake in Tesla and when the value of Tesla dropped he almost reached a point where he would have had to sell off stock for cash which would have dropped the value of the stock further, leading to a crash in the stock. The same applies to his other assets, SpaceX and so on, they are all a house of cards which hold the value of the others up.

On top of all of this much of the value of those companies is built from government grants, loans, and contracts. SpaceX has secured contracts which bolster the stock value because they are safe bets, even if no money has changed hands. Tesla had cheaper cars than they should have due to grants from federal and state programs for electric cars.

If you want an example of living off the government teat Musky Taint is a clear winner.

Correct, there is a meaningful difference between jobs with more or less time required to reach a high degree of competence, no argument there. The major issue is labeling something as low skill. Working in customer service requires skills around managing angry customers, managing time, following up issues, using complex ordering systems, handling payments and issues with payments, and all sorts of similar stuff. The emotional labour of working in direct customer service is high skill and high difficulty. Just because there is not a university degree in handling those situations doesn’t mean it is low skill, it is just not a skill we recognise and pay for.

The issue from my end is why do we ask whether a job is skilled or unskilled when thinking about pay rates? If a job needs to be done then someone should be paid to do it. If we label is as low skill we are justifying paying them less. This is wrong in a bunch ofbeays and ends up hurting lots of people.

I am reminded of the intelligence and genetics debate. People can talk all day about how you would design a study to tease out the difference between two populations in terms of intelligence while controlling for all other factors and how to reduce bias and so on, but the question keeps coming up. Why do we want this answer? What benefit would ranking the races for intelligence have? What societal changes would be informed by this research? In my opinion the question is not a good one, we should instead be looking more at how to support the development of any child to have their innate intelligence come to full growth without interference from things like stress and poverty. Knowing that people from one group or another have a theoretically slightly higher or lower ceiling won’t help actually improve outcomes for people, it will just help racists sound legitimate, and in the same way ranking the jobs will just help capitalists pay people less for the same work.

No disrespect meant, but the term unskilled in actually part of corporate propaganda. If someone who starts working there today is not as good at it as someone who has worked there for 2 years then there are skills which take time to acquire and thus it is a skilled job. Unskilled labour is an invention of capitalists who want to pay as little as possible and will use whatever weasle words they can to convince other workers that either they are better than the unskilled or that they themselves are unskilled and replaceable.

In Australia you would be looking at minimum wage under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020. Under this award you can be one of three types of employee, a full time worker, a part time worker, or casual.

A full time employee is defined as

An employee who is engaged to work an average of 38 ordinary hours per week over a period of no more than 4 weeks is a full-time employee.

A part time employee is defined as

A part-time employee is an employee who: (a) is engaged to work at least 8 and fewer than 38 ordinary hours per week (or, if the employer operates a roster, an average of at least 8 and fewer than 38 hours per week over the roster cycle); and (b) has reasonably predictable hours of work.

If you don’t meet either of those you are a casual employee, which means less guarantees and protections but a higher pay rate.

If you are a casual you get paid 25% more than full time and have a maximum of 38 hours in a week, averaged over 4 weeks, and a maximum of 12 hours on any day.

A casual employee must also be engaged for at least 2 hours per instance of work, so you can’t have single hour shifts here and there, it must be 2 hours minimum.

If a casual works over 38 hours in a week they are to be paid overtime rates, and breaks are still required for casual workers with penalties (increased pay rates) for situations where breaks are not possible.

The base rate is $26.44 Australian so $18.69 USD. The casual will earn 25% more per hour, so $33.05 AUD or $23.37 USD. This is the minimum for a casual server at a restaurant or similar venue. The casual does not get leave or similar but gets paid more, the part or full time workers get leave and regular hours with the lower pay rate.

We don’t do tipping here. The very rate occasion someone does it is generally seen as showy and a little gross. We sometimes have a tip jar at the counter which is split between all staff on a shift, but usually people only drop a bit of change in there and most people pay by card anyway.

You absolutely can’t live here and buy a house on that income. You can survive on it if you are living with other people, but living on your own is not really an option at that pay rate. Also we don’t have to pay for medical insurance here, we have Medicare which is actually really good, and we also don’t have to pay for school for kids, the fees are optional and you can say no. It isn’t perfect, there are tonnes of issues, but it is better than the US system of paying as little as possible and relying on the kindness of strangers and social obligation to keep people alive.

If someone serves me food and my food needs to cost a little more for them to be able to actually live a dignified life I am happy to pay that. Instead corporations find every way of cheating workers out of the fruits of their labour to increase profit. Nobody should live in poverty and without dignity, working or not, and no work is below respect, excluding exploitation of others. I personally think they should be paid more than they are by a significant margin, maybe 50% more, maybe more than that. If we raise the floor we raise everyone above them and live in a society without abject poverty, win win in my book.

There are other suggestions, but I would recommend a different approach. Use a standard epub and something like KoReader or Librera FD. If she wants to read a bible she probably has a strong preference about which one. Using a bible app will lock her to whichever that app supports, but using an epub allows her to use the correct version for her.

It also allows her to build skills using her religious text which can transfer to other books. Lots of people enjoy books beyond their central text but still around it, think study guides, history, religious studies, and so on, but also books completely unrelated. Being as she is having trouble with malware you could solve multiple problems in one go and also give her some fun, interesting books alongside things that scratch the religious itch while building skills and reducing the chance of scamming and malware.

First, great username, absolutely love it. Second, from what I understand the two share way more than not and are both functional, just with slightly different use cases. Two cool projects, two slightly different views, but not mutually exclusive.

You’ve been on the internet too long, as have we all.

Broadly speaking laws should centre around enabling people to make choices in an informed and safe manner.

If a product is not what it says it is then people can’t mame that choice properly, so laws around quality control and labeling are a must.

Advertising often clouds decisions and frequently reaches audiences outside the target market, driving consumption by kids etc, so none of that please.

Tax should be significant on these items, but not high enough to leave illegal supply competitive or even cheap by comparison. Otherwise you get an increase in gang activity like we have had from raising our tobacco prices over the last 20 years.

I still wear mine every day. I have a wonderful mask from an Australian company which is Marino wool and very comfortable. It has replaceable filters and a head strap so it doesn’t pull on my ears. My clients have never seen my face and I have worked with some for more than 2 years. I do it mostly because I have some health issues that covid would not help, I work with immune compromised people, and my partner could really do well to not get sicker. I was wearing a mask in 2019 due to bushfires and I’ve not stopped since, I don’t see myself stopping any time soon.

Yeah, sadly I have to agree, a fee won’t do anything on its own. This would require a mix of features working together. Each makes botting a bit more painful and a bit less effective, but putting them all together makes it not worthwhile.

Also, we don’t need to make a space perfect, just better than other places. You don’t need to be faster than the bear to escape, just faster than the slowest member of your group.

Ooh, I really like that idea! You are putting money in as a sort of deposit, but after a period of time it has served its purpose and the money can be returned. If I have to be active for say 3 months and also a certain amount of activity to get my deposit returned then burning the account after would be a pain in the arse and I would not bother. Having an account in good standing could also be a soft filter. Users could only show content from validated users and thus filter out all the bot junk, but if they wanted their comments and posts to show up they would go through the process.

I hate to use the example, but one of the worst places on the internet actually found a solution for this a long time ago. $10. By having a small, but meaningful, fee for the account people couldn’t have unlimited accounts and there was a cost to getting banned. If you are posting bot slop you will be banned quickly and lose your $10. If you are not being bot like and also not breaking tonnes of other rules many times then you will not be banned and can keep your account.

This works well enough most of the time. Getting a new account after your previous one has been banned can be done fairly quickly but that $10 adds up quickly and can fund the cost of reviewing and potentially banning bad actors. It doesn’t solve the problem in full, but another thing you can add is region gating. In your profile you set where you are going to be dialling in from, including which VPN providers and so on. This means you have a fairly specific pattern of behaviour that is white listed in advance. Now if your account is compromised and starts logging in from other places it can be blocked quickly, and also potentially the login attempts can be blocked and a password reset process initiated.

Another option would be to require a invite only process and have those you invite reflect on you. For example, if someone invites a friend and that friend invites not accounts then both people are impacted. If someone invites 9 good people and 1 abused account their ratio is 0.9, if they drop below some value then they lose invite privileges. If you consistently invite crappy people or abusive bots you get banned, but if it happens only occasionally then you lose your invite rights for a while. Those parameters are all tunable but should help to get things operating more smoothly.

Also, having invite periods but closing invites most of the time can also kill off many bots. People using bots are lazy, they don’t want to wait for months posting stuff and pretending to be a person to then use the accounts to post 3 junk things and then have the whole set banned. They want a large network of accounts they can throw away as needed. Make it slow, expensive, and consequential. Make botting 50 accounts cost $500 and also be a waste of time and the bots will stop coming.

I totally thought that would be about Blender, the 3d modeling application. Instead I found true joy. Thank you.

Did you ever watch Dragonball Z? All the scenes where Goku or Gohan are training to get stronger, building their bodies to be powerful? Piccolo wearing insanely heavy gear to improve his speed?

You don’t need to do sports to train your body. You are giving your body the opportunity to learn how to be strong, to learn endurance. You can’t do that without practicing those things, using your strength, pushing your endurance.

That said, I have found working with kids to be very helpful. I work with a particular young kid who absolutely loves being lifted and thrown about. I use him as my weight training and it is a whole lot of fun, not to mention rewarding making his day more fun. Maybe there is something you can find that is similar?

I mean, yes, they are clearly individually bad, people making bad choices because they do not value the life of a dog above any risk to themselves or even fairly minor inconvenience.

At the same time, this is a bad job. Not a bad job to have, a bad job for society to make. There should not be cops. Cops are way to mixed as a profession.

Investigators of crimes? That is a reasonable job.

Dispute resolution specialists? Sure.

Someone to step between people having a domestic altercation? Yes, of course.

But just like you wouldn’t want an emergency room doctor to also be a mortician you shouldn’t want the traffic enforcement person to be the one to deal with a mental health crisis. The role has grown too large and cannot reasonably be performed well. It needs to be divided.

I think it is important to recognise that cops do way too many things which are very different. A reasonable job has rationally related responsibilities. For example, a technical support worker may also do some account admin work because the cause of a problem may be related to billing, a hairdresser may take payments, a bartender may assess the inebriation of a customer and cut them off. Cops?

The do parking enforcement. They arrest people who are drunk and disorderly. They execute search warrants. They do traffic enforcement. They attend domestic disputes. They record and process allegations of sexual assault. They do paperwork for insurance claims. They separate protestors and counter protestors. They take in lost property. They shoot dogs.

If your hair dresser had this many responsibilities you would think they would have multiple degrees and a big support team, or you would assume they would be incompetent in all of them.

A person who does mental crisis support uses very different tools to someone doing traffic enforcement. They are in many ways incompatible skills and those roles should not be mixed at all. The idea that the solution to cops being shit at their jobs is to increase training is insane.

Cops should be reduced to a single, well defined role. Most of their job should be broken into other roles and handled by people specialised in those specific things. A mental health crisis should have a mental health professional involved. A drunk altercation should have an officer of the peace who attends, deescalates, separates, and documents everything. A parking inspector would do just that, no more, no less. An investigator for SA would be a specialist in the topic, have strong mental health and trauma awareness, and not be a total creep. And I think we can just not have a person who’s job involves shooting dogs.

If you took all those jobs and separated them out being a cop would be a much more simple thing. It would also be much easier to have a fairly good understanding of the law because you wouldn’t have spent time learning about how to wrestle people to the ground, treat everyone as a threat, and shoot dogs, so yoh would have plenty of time to learn about law. Maybe you could even afford to have a uni degree in law and community services.

I am an explainer of things. I love working with kids and helping explain the world to them, with a special interest in the places where the answer is that we don’t know. I absolutely adore taking a question or comment and finding the full exploration which can bloom from that moment of curiosity. I do this on Lemmy too, and before that Reddit. Sometimes someone will post an article and it will be way too complex or not really answer any real questions and I will go ahead and explain it in much more simple English with analogies and simplifications which don’t lose the important details.

If you want you can dig into my comment history and find it, but my favourite complement ever is someone who said I took a kegstand on the font of knowledge. If absolutely jives with my excitement and joy at learning while also being way less serious and stodgy about science and knowledge.

I hated the above Avatar movie but I loved TLoK. She is such an awesome character and has tonnes of growth and development, along with the fantastic lgbt end of the series. It was definitely a little difficult in the first few episodes but a big part of that was the transition from a rural setting to a city setting decades later, so it went from the backwater technology level to the cutting edge near a century later.

When you get it wrong, which you will, just correct and move on. Make a separate acknowledgement that you will make mistakes but your intention is to get it right. Make those two separate things, don’t make the moment of you getting it wrong the time you affirm your intent, keep them separated and they will both be more effective.

Also, ask them if they would like to go clothes shopping, in person or online, and support them in trying things that they have not yet been comfortable trying.

Being supportive isn’t about perfection. It is about effort. Your effort shows your care and consideration which in turn show your love and regard. Be there, be involved as is wanted, and be willing to accept making a mistake as you learn together. That is worth more than any amount of perfection that cannot be provided. Remember, the effort is the display of love, messing it up is something that happens along the way, keep trying and things will work out.

It serves more than one purpose for me, so the calculation is a little different. My freezer has about $1200 of meat in it. If the temperature in there gets up over freezing the meat will start thawing and become damaged or spoiled. Saving that meat from being spoiled would save me spending that $1200 all over again.

The solar panel means that even if the whole power system is out for multiple days I should be able to keep my freezer below zero and keep my meat frozen. Last year we had snow, for the first time here since the early 90s, and it took down power lines on the other side of town. People there were without power for as much as 4 days, which obviously would be enough to heat my meat back up and ruin it, so it isn’t a ridiculous possibility.

Also, I intend to make something larger over time on a trailer which I can move from house to house as I move, being a renter. I want independent power and learning a little with this system is a good stepping stone to building out my own system with much more custom parts, especially including a larger battery system, inverter, and more panels. I plan to run as much as possible from the DC to skip inverter losses, so using cheap modules to pull from the 24-48V system I build to do USB C ports with 100W+ output gives a lot of options, along with using smaller dedicated inverters for required loads like a kettle.

The coolest thing is the fully DC power supplies for a PC. You can run directly from a battery and solar system with just 12V, 5V, 3.3V, and a few little bits and bobs. Very fun stuff.