Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "More Perfect Union" channel.

  1. Good luck canceling your newspaper subscription. I had one for a while and even though I was able to sign up online, I had to call them in order to cancel. I have no idea how that isn't an ADA violation.
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  2. Mine detects the 3rd party cartridge and complains about, but prints anyways. I only have it because I got it for free from somebody that was replacing it. I'll be replacing it with a color laser printer from a reputable brand like Brother when I've got the money though. I do so little printing that by the time I need to print, the ink tends to be low or the nozzle clogged anyways.
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  3. That's the usual problem. Just look at how quickly the squad got corrupted. They talked a good game, but every time that they could have withheld their votes to negotiate for something that the people needed, they gave up their leverage.
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  4. Most of the folks that did this are dead or at least retired.
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  5.  @GenerationX1984  Would it have been more acceptable if it was $5 worth of gas to get to work?
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  6. People are still doing the work. There's not much difference between tipping for a person to take down the order and tipping just for the food preparation.Tipping at a self-order kiosk isn't any more ridiculous than tipping at most fastfood joints.
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  7. Possibly, but the people who most need to see this won't actually watch it and if they do, they'll just go back to not caring. The problem would have been solved decades ago if the profit motive for destroying the environment had been addressed. If they were required to clean up after themselves the way that many others are, it would have changed while the necessary measures weren't particularly onerous.
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  8. It's not about whether they deserve it or not, the pay often does not cover the cost of living without the tips. Tips are generally a situation of the employer handing off responsibility for paying the workers directly to random strangers that are not required to tip employees.
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  9.  @northernhemisphere4906  Dr. Luke and Max Martin alone are responsible for the lion's share of the hits over the last couple decades and a properly functioning music industry would have far more people originating hit music. It's part of why most music today sounds the same as the rest of the music. Even 20 years ago there was a decent chance that you'd know that two songs were by different artists without being familiar with their work in a way that's difficult now.
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  10. What's worse is that often times they would sequence the transactions so that rather than one transaction hitting the overdraft, multiple ones would. Even before one of my credit unions went overdraft free, there was a lower fee of a few dollars for them just transferring the money from savings to checking. It still sucked, but it was a lot cheaper than getting hit with a fee from both sides when the check bounced. (That ought to have been criminal, why should somebody pay two banks for one bounced check?)
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  11. AOC was working class, and look at how well she's done. (Here's a hint, she's been an absolute joke)
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  12.  @johnroberts3824  I'm pretty sure that's the point. Getting these people in is one thing, keeping them from getting corrupted before they achieve significant change is a bigger issue.
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  13. It's particularly weird because negative signs aren't normally used for that sort of thing. It's more common for them to use parentheses to indicate that it's negative or to have all the numbers be positive, just debits or credits as appropriate. A financial statement may have negative numbers, but not typically in most other financial documents. Using a minus sign and then putting it far from the number it reflects is either incompetence or fraud.
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  14. Tip inflation is a real thing. It's good for waitstaff,but sucks for most other folks Few people want to think that they're cheap, so there's a ratcheting effect. It used to be that 15% was considered a good tip and there'd be guides like rounding taxi far up to the next dollar. Some of those rules, like rounding in that fashion, were always going to go away eventually. But, the peer pressure that comes from the minimum wage not keeping up is real and will continue until the issue is resolved.
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  15.  @kuroryuken  One of the nice things about now is that most banks have apps that can be used to check the balance so that that doesn't happen. 9 years ago, there's a decent chance that that wasn't an option or that the website was further behind where your actual balance was.
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  16.  @rusticfightr  A large article can take weeks or even months of investigation to reveal. The Watergate Scandal would never have taken Nixon down, if Woodward and Bernstein weren't professional journalists that had sources to leak the information to tell them to keep digging or to have people to ask for information from. A rando with a camera and a laptop just isn't going to be able to do that with enough regularity to make any difference. Journalism tends to be pretty boring most of the time, they'll sit in on press briefings all year in case something happens. And normally, nothing much happens, but if they're not there that one day that something does happen, then they've wasted all that time. And, there is no way of handing out press credentials for such small briefing rooms to replicate that if media outlets aren't pooling their resources to choose which correspondents to send.
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  17. It's somewhat better these days as the transactions usually go through more quickly and it's easier to get the current balance. Personally, I have an additional checking account with my local credit union for things that I think may take longer to go through. It makes it a lot easier to know how much money in my checking account is actually available, I simply transfer the necessary funds to the other debit card account and eventually the money goes away, but I clearly know the money is spoken for.
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  18. Or you can just close the account and open one at a credit union, assuming you've got an account there. Just having a bunch of people closing their accounts would probably achieve the same basic goal, just without having to lobby corrupt politiburo officials.
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  19. Around here, we're down to one citywide paper, a couple smaller neighborhood ones and the local TV stations to cover the local news. If something isn't big enough to warrant the national press to take interest, it doesn't get covered without those local outlets. And, I'm fortunate that there's even that many options. Many other areas are down to one or no options. There used to be a second citywide paper and when it converted to an online only outlet the remaining paper made a significant shift to the right.
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  20. As long as tipping is essential to these workers making a decent wage, the standard tip will be a necessary evil.
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  21. Usually when I see that on receipts, you're not expected to tip more.
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  22. Why should we do that for the elderly when the elderly haven't ensured that the young et our medical treatment? It should be about getting everybody the treatment they need, not just the old because of things they vaguely may have done in the past.
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  23. There are various different ways that they can be set up, around here we don't get checks, but if they do have leftovers, it winds up offsetting against any future rate increases. We have public utilities covering electricity, gas and water service and for the most part it works out quite well. The things we don't have like public internet access are a hot mess though and far more expensive than can be justified compared with what it costs in other countries. Even if you account for the rural parts of the region.
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  24.  @whysocurious7366  Yes and they have really strange values in some way. Any sort of extreme view is one that ought to be reconsidered. They're poor because of the policies that they support.
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  25.  @kennethmoses4900  We could put the maintenance of the lines up to competitive bidding and pair that with stiff penalties for failing to perform. It's the model that Hong Kong uses for their subway system. The government built the system and a private company handles the actual running of it and maintenance. There are stiff penalties for even minor outages and roughly 95% of trips end within a few minutes of when the time table says they should.
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  26. It's pretty much a given that if it passes and gets in front of them that they'll find a way of screwing things up even worse than it currently is. I mean, they take bribes openly, why are they going to turn their backs on the wishes of their bribers?
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  27.  @007kingifrit  That works for the internet, but only because of how the system works. Power companies route power from whatever facilities are generating it to the customer. It can be extremely expensive to build new generation capacity.
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  28.  @nobodyimportant2470  The way it's currently done makes more sense. The electric company buys power from other companies if they are short, which means that areas that can generate more power can sell the surplus to other areas. As long as you're not in Texas, in which case, you're basically screwed if they don't have enough because they aren't connected to anybody else.
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  29. The same reason that Rupert Murdoch was allowed to own a media conglomerate, corruption.
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  30. In the US, it depends where you are, around here the city owns the electric company and while rates have been going up a lot, it's mostly to fund modernization efforts and deal with the dams that are being torn down to help rehabilitate the fisheries.
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  31. There are different models, but a lot of that has to do with the way the privatization is handled. There commonly aren't a lot of restrictions or tools put into place to ensure that price gouging doesn't result.
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  32.  @imonbanerjee2997  That's a major issue. The delivery fee may or may not be used to pay for delivery drivers. I personally think that that should be regarded as fraud to call it a delivery fee and not use it to fund the drivers, but that's not currently how that works.
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  33.  @gregorymalchuk272  This isn't a large enough portion of the US for that to be a risk and with the exception of Texas and Hawaii the rest of the states have some sort of connection to a power grid outside their area where they can buy electricity if they aren't generating enough. Plus, from what I can tell, the residents aren't getting the service that they paid for as it is.
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  34.  @ThisIsATireFire  Yes, although they have been in the process of decommissioning some of them to help with the salmon. But, the state does commonly export electricity to other states.
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  35.  @Ravi-qg1so  The issue there is that it depends on the service. If it's UPS, Fed Ex or USPS, then why is anybody tipping them? They make more than I do and it's literally their job to deliver things. OTOH, if it's something like door dash or the like, then what we really need are laws protecting the drivers. A bit of tipping isn't going to change the exploitative nature of the business model.
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  36.  @Nicksonian  Yep, that's not to say that they don't ever get a scoop, but the system depended upon there being many reporters at many different outlets competing to get their story out first. They didn't have the option of just waiting for somebody else to publish an article on before commenting on it or drawing conclusions from multiple news sources.
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  37. Yep, hasn't it been known for decades that oil companies were funding scientists that were skeptical of man made climate change? And isn't it old news that the scientific consensus is that it is happening, the main question is how fast and how bad is it going to get along with what can be done about it.
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  38. 20 years ago, they were already being merged into a handful of media outlets. Even if they had embraced the internet, having all the news coming from a handful of corporations with more interest in cutting costs than exposing their own misdeeds would have been a massive problem.
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  39. It wasn't just them, the official excuse was that larger charges were probably more important. But, regardless, it had the effect of changing what might have only been one or two overdrafts into potentially several times more.
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  40. This is WI, a bunch of my relatives there are Democrats and a bunch of them are Republicans. She doesn't need all of the votes, she just needs enough of the votes to win the race and then actually follow through on whatever promises she makes to win.
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  41.  @danhedman8435  They're not. They can either transfer money from a different account, which is what my credit unions do, or they can refuse to honor the request for money. With computer technology being where it is, there's no reason why they can't transfer the money for you. (Although whether or not they should gets a tad complicated as there's many reasons why a charge to an account may not be a valid one)
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  42. Both of my credit unions have ended overdraft fees. One of them did away with them completely and the other did away with them in most situations. Personally, even before that I switched to a two checking account system to avoid having that problem. If I have to write a check or have payments that won't have the money removed immediately, I'll do that out of the second account. I'll transfer the necessary money and I don't have to worry about things bouncing or having to keep track of it. I'll start with some reasonably about of money to ensure that I have something there even after everything clears. It works great, although finding a credit union or bank that doesn't charge the fees is probably a better choice.
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  43. You can blame the Democrats for failing to offer more. How many more election cycles are they going to run on being better than the GOP and then get into office and screw the voters over?
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  44.  @riot-van5986  IKR, often times the Blue candidates are just as corrupt and out of touch as the Red candidates. Don't just vote for the ones that are pushing for the people, hold their feet to the fire if they do win.
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  45. Them and the careless.
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  46. Kamala and the Democrats have failed miserably at giving people a reason to vote for them is why. People voted for Obama on the promise of hope and change, and he screwed the people over massively. I'm surprised that anybody is still willing to vote Democrat after that fraud and then the 3 rigged Presidential elections in a row that followed.
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  47.  @AmandaComeauCreates  Not likely, I'm just surprised that we've had two assassination attempts on Trump and none on any of the SCOTUS justices.
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  48. This has been a thing for much longer, it's just now the case where ordinary customers are being subjected to it without necessarily understanding it. As early as the '80s you had expensive computers that came with physical modules that were only unlocked via a payment and visit from a support tech to enable the modules. For decades MS has been writing full featured OSes and then removing a bunch of features for the cheaper versions. Which isn't a particular problem, but it does cost them more money to create those cheap versions than the expensive ones.
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  49. This whole streaming service thing is why I switched back to physical media that I stream over my local network using Jellyfin. Once I got used to how the interface wants my files named and organized, it's a vastly superior experience. Everything on there is something that I might want to watch. It has no interest in keeping me trapped, so the stuff I want is easier to find. I can have it give me the list in whatever order I like, including random, and it tells me what time it's going to be done, if I watch it without stopping midway through. But, the best thing, is that nothing on their changes or disappears unless I want it to and I can have the DVD bonus features right there with the film. It all winds up costing less than a subscription if you use a cheaper streaming box and stream the content from your computer. I think within a year, you're already saving money over any of the Streaming services, depending upon where you buy the discs and how many.
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  50. Yes, I was expecting this to be a bit more revolutionary. Tips have been on top of minimum wage here in Washington for quite a while, but the same basic BS tipping culture exists. Nothing short of banning tips from being considered a portion of wages is going to end the issues.
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