The hard thing will be to tell if they are actually afraid.

Sounds to me that you haven’t been to either Europe or the US or both.

That sounds too American to me.

By that definition, pretty much everyone is part of some problem, which makes the statement a tautology, like saying that all men are human, or all the fish need water to survive.

So, good job on contributing nothing.

Because they didn’t load absolutely anything.

I guess most people here are too young to remember that even drivers were loaded at a per program basis, e.g. you would need to configure each game you played to use specific video and audio hardware. Nowadays that doesn’t happen.

A dishwasher also “boots up” instantly, and they come with WiFi now! The point is that they are not comparable.

Modern phones shouldn’t need the same level of bloat as modern computers, so your Linux argument fails there as well.

I see. You haven’t any working understanding of computers or logics. That explains a lot.

People like you are so detached from the actual complexity of modern interfaces like USB, you don’t even know that there was a time we couldn’t even plug in a mouse without having to restart the whole computer, or that there were six different video interfaces incompatible with each other, etc.

This fake ass “things were faster before” is laughable. Yeah, go ahead and display a 32-bit color image in DOS while playing a sound file. Oh, it doesn’t have a complex compositor and a window manager? It cannot handle multitasking? It doesn’t even load your sound card drivers outside of an application? No shit.

Sure, let’s compare a single user, 16 bit, text only OS, with Windows.

Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed.

Again, apples and oranges.

I/O drivers were stored as part of the ROM in both Apple and Commodore. That’s your ancient equivalent to BIOS and kernel. But they loaded essentially nothing, and didn’t need to handle a myriad of different devices and interfaces. The whole thing took a few kilobytes of storage, and obviously, wouldn’t handle anything that wasn’t very specifically supported.

A modern Linux kernel would also boot in a couple seconds if we were to strip every single driver from it but the handful needed to handle a monitor, an input device, storage, etc. The moment you plugged in a mouse, it wouldn’t work, and without an UI or even an interpreter, it would be useless. And I can assure you, it is way faster to load zsh in a modern computer, than any BASIC interpreter on an Apple II.

It’s easy to “boot up instantly” when not even the OS is loaded.

Modern BIOS load also instantly. Care to explain what you can do with that?

Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.

So, no, they didn’t “instantly boot”.

Models aren’t retrained from zero. They can be fine tuned or they could even have added a routine to handle specific cases like this.

For example, Claude used to have a routine that would call external tools embedded in the app to parse structured data and transform it. Not sure about how it does it now.

That never happened. There was never a time when worker rights were won at no cost for workers themselves.

Families were against child labor laws because they would be losing important streams of revenue. As a result, it took several decades to finally regulate the practice. In the meantime, children were exploited and died, wages were kept low because supply of children workers was always high, and mining and industrial companies thrived up to the peak of the gilded age and the subsequent Great Depression.

Yes, by all means, stay out of the place if you can’t respect how it works and have to shit on the poor worker to feel morally superior, like an absolute smeghead.

No worries about this, I will.

I hope one day you understand that your arguments could be used to justify any kind of ongoing labor abuse. But anyway, when the industry finally dies in the US, I won’t be sad about it.

The irony of calling me “toxic” when you block anyone calling you out.

You really think one cannot be scammed if they agree to a price beforehand? Regardless of surge pricing, or the fact that, in many cities, Uber is more expensive than regular cabs?

The other is service quality - never heard of a cab you can call with an app where it shows you how far it is and how long you have. At least where I live, you have to call for one and just hope they show up.

Again, sorry that you live in a country where cabs suck ass and aren’t properly regulated I guess.

In any case the second you guys leave that goes back to normal, you’ve “fixed” nothing.

If you guys decide to go back to your savage ways, sure.

The service industry is dying in the US anyway. It’s pretty much all chains serving the same frozen food bought from a handful of suppliers. Americans eat out less than ever, and it’s not only because tipping, although you lot sure love to complain about it while doing nothing to fix it.

So if you would like to continue to alienate the few captive customers that the country still has, i.e. tourists, please, by all means, do it.

Any difference in behaviour between North Americans (who do tip) and foreigners (who don’t) is by definition economically irrational behaviour

The difference between foreigners and Americans isn’t relevant, since the benchmark is maximizing value.

because economics predicts that a rational consumer would seek to pay as little as possible

Good thing I said that the article was about foreigners not tipping while in the US, which by your own definition is not irrational behavior, quite the opposite.

In some sense it’s no different than other cultural differences that annoy locals, such as public spitting or littering.

Nice examples. I wouldn’t put “refusing to participate in a custom exclusive to the US that has historically been weaponized to keep wages as low as possible”, at the same level as spitting or littering, but that’s just me I guess.

Let’s say that I refuse to go to a restaurant staffed exclusively by 14 year olds, because I don’t like child labor, would that annoy you too?

In general though, the existence of tipping means people eat out less often than they otherwise would.

Right. That’s what I said in my previous message: people take tipping into account before going out, especially when they are economically constrained.

It honestly feels like either you didn’t really read my comment, or a LLM wrote your response.

What the fuck kind of analogy is that.

Children died in the mines by the hundreds. Those who got out had their lifespans slashed by decades because of the harmful stuff they inhaled on a daily basis. And your argument is that there wasn’t anything better than that?

Sure, change the system. But as it stands now, this is the system, and unless you’re able to time machine back to before the world cup visitors got here in time to change it, then this is the system you’re visiting and you need to adapt. Just as I would need to adapt to your culture if I went wherever you live or I’d be the asshole, same goes here.

I find extremely amusing that if I were to choose not to partake of a custom that even you find controversial, I would be the asshole here.

The article says that some businesses are adding a 20% service surcharge. It seems to me that “the system” could very well be fixed, they just chose not to until they were forced to do so.

You are welcome, I guess.

We’re talking about irrational behaviour by customers

No, we are not. The article is about foreigners in the US not tipping, which is not irrational behaviour, at all.

Why do you think entire industries routinely use hidden fees that dramatically raise the final price above the advertised price?

Because some governments, especially the US government, would rather punish their citizens than the companies scamming them.

Regardless, anyone in the US who is economically conscious enough to choose to eat out or not depending on prices, would inevitably take tipping into consideration, and anyone who isn’t, wouldn’t. The alternative would be people who cannot afford eating out not tipping, equally screwing over service workers, so your point is moot.

Tipping is culture now.