Wikipedia relies on people reading it and realising “Wait, that’s wrong…” to fix inaccuracies.

Recently some PR company was caught taking money to whitewash the Wikipedia pages of their clients. The more people that are looking at the pages, the more likely it is that someone will realise they are being manipulated maliciously.

Now, I’m not one of those “muh free market” morons, but I also think that not every potentially-abusable business practice immediately deserves government regulation against it. By and large it seems that most customers really don’t care that much about this (myself included). The ability for customers to choose where they shop has regulatory power which I think a lot of people fail to recognise. If a behaviour is really repulsive, then customers will just not shop there, which provides a strong negative incentive against the behaviour in question, without any state intervention or enforcement resources required.

An example of this working in practice is the practice of restaurants attempting to introduce tipping in Australia (where it is not customary to tip). Whenever a restaurant frequented by locals tries to force them to tip or makes it awkward to not tip, there is an immediate and strong negative reaction to it from the customers which usually causes the restaurant to give up on the idea.

They can track what people are buying just as well without needing to know who is buying what. If all they cared about was making sure they are stocking items that are popular with customers, they could just monitor how many of the item were scanned at the checkout counters.

When you give your phone number to the store, it serves three functions:

1. The rewards scheme encourages loyalty. Once you have spent hundreds at the store, they give you a minor discount on something small, which saves you only a little bit of money. You only need to decide to patronise this store one time over their competitors for this bribe to be worth it.
2. By learning your shopping habits, they can offer you personalised advertisements to encourage you to buy certain products. For example, a grocery store chain which has a location near where I live has learned that I always buy a certain brand of cheese, and so occasionally they will try to tempt me with something like a 50 cent discount on that cheese, or they will send me a message saying “Hey do you still want (the cheese brand)? We have it in stock!”
3. Some people, when putting things into their basket or shopping cart, will see the large, advertised discounted price and think “this item is reasonably priced”, but then they forget to put their phone number in when checking out and are thus charged the inflated price. The store pockets the difference as customers are unlikely to notice or complain about it. Most people do not closely monitor the price of items as they are being scanned. They only look at the total price at the end before tapping their card.

Wait until we have six or seven votes on these comments and maybe then we can see

I cannot. You can only realise it’s been used after it has already happened. I can try to think of a sentence all day but I will not come up with one because it can only come naturally.

I don’t get what the annoyance is with “6-7”. I’ve been using it for years and it just means “approximately” or “thereabouts”.

A strictly logical clock for a 24-hour day would have 0 at the top with 1 on the right and 23 on the left. And it would be only ever set to UTC.

Hours are Monday to Friday 00:00 to 23:59. Responsibilities include learning tricks and doing typical lively human activities like Fortnite dances and TikTok challenges. Benefits package includes comprehensive health care, dental, vision, etc. Company-provided room and board for life. No retirement options though.

Sea World is like if aliens confined a human to an office cubicle and called it “City World”

Funny how UBI is typically considered a left-wing policy in the US, yet the only place in the country that actually has a UBI is traditionally considered pretty conservative.

Alaska has a thing called the Alaska Permanent Fund which was funded with an initial investment of oil and mining revenue. It pays out around $100 a month which is not really something to live on but definitely helps for struggling Alaskans.

I think a viable model for UBIs on a national scale would probably involve something similar. Perhaps a one-shot tax on the mega-rich to get the initial funding and then it’s used to run a state-owned investment portfolio which invests in various sectors of the economy and then pays out the profits to the citizens.

I cooked up my own VPN and I still get blocked sometimes because it’s a data centre IP. For example, Wikipedia blocked the whole /30 range.

I took a screenshot of this page

(Screenshot removed because it takes forever to load and is not interesting enough to waste bandwidth on)

I am connected to a 4K monitor and this picture is also at 3775 × 2119. The total file size:

12.1 MB

I have never had a screenshot exceeding 40 MB. That is humongous.

I’m not opposed to Canonical’s monetisation model. I think charging for extra updates and packages is fine as a way to make money. But I can understand why people don’t want advertising in their operating system, though I personally think that a simple line of text showing up on my terminal following a flood of package-fetching and script-running results is tolerable.

There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, “0”, {}, and “”.

I am an American. When someone works the schedule indicated, I and my fellow countrymen would call it 40 hours a week, but a European would count it as 35 hours a week.

In Europe they don’t count their lunch breaks as hours worked. That’s why the number is lower. If counted the European way then 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday is actually 35 hours a week.

If counted by European standards, the US has a 35-hour work week. Americans are counting their five one-hour lunch breaks to arrive at the “office worker” schedule of 40 hours a week, 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday with a lunch break at 12:00 to 13:00

Americans count their lunch breaks as hours worked. The typical “office worker” schedule is 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday with a one hour lunch break from 12:00 to 13:00. This is 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week, but if you are not counting lunch breaks then it is 35 hours a week of actual “work”.

Or this comment is made by a European who wants to just diss Americans without realising this situation is largely the same in both places… 😇

Edit: Since there appears to be some confusion here, if a worker had a working schedule of 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday with a one hour lunch break from 12:00 to 13:00, and you asked a European and an American how many hours a week this person works, the American would say 40 but the European would say 35.

Classic Europeans on the Internet trying to make fun of [bad thing that happens in the US] without realising it also happens in Europe

Germany:

If you work between 6 to 9 hours a day, you are entitled to a 30-minute break after no later than 6 hours. If you work more than 9 hours a day, the break is extended to 45 minutes. Labour law prohibits taking the break at the end of the day’s work in order to leave earlier.

France:

As soon as your daily working time reaches 6 hours immediately, you must have a break of at least 20 minutes consecutive

The break is granted:

• Either immediately after 6 hours of work[, or]
• before this 6-hour period is completed

United Kingdom:

Employers can say when employees take rest breaks during work time as long as:

• the break is taken in one go somewhere in the middle of the day (not at the beginning or end)
• workers are allowed to spend it away from their desk or workstation (ie away from where they actually work)

American states set their own labour laws, but the ones of the state where I live (Oregon) are actually far more generous than comparable ones in Europe. I am entitled by law during an eight-hour working day to one 30-minute lunch break (not paid) and two additional 10-minute breaks (counts as time worked and is paid). Meaning I get 50 minutes of breaks in a day and the employer has to pay me during 20 minutes of those breaks. My employment contract actually gives me a 1-hour lunch break in addition to the two 10-minute breaks, which isn’t required by law but is not uncommon.