Thank you.

I’m seeing a 14-year gap between the time they initially met and the time they married. The first three of those years would have been criminal, but I haven’t actually seen anything saying the relationship commenced within that time period.

This is untrue. Margins for restaurants

We aren’t talking about restaurants. We are talking about delivery services.

I did. I’m a blacksmith. I found a niche where customers are appreciative of labor, and I fill that niche. The two seasons I relied on DD for flexible income are well in the past.

You don’t have to convince me. I agree with you. These services are profoundly scummy and exploitative. They are almost as greedy as employers have become with your time.

They make money… When a customer tips. The tip is, effectively, the only money they actually make. It’s not how it should be, but it is how it actually is.

When every customer tips well, and nobody introduces delays to slow your hustle, it’s a fairly lucrative job. When customers think tips are “optional” and stores don’t actually start working on an order until you arrive, it’s a shit job.

It’s pretty much the same for our employed waitstaff. Your tips are paid out to you on the day you earn them. Your base wages are paid out weekly or biweekly. You keep 100% of your tips, but your employer is required to withhold income taxes from your base pay. If you make enough in tips, withholding is all of your base pay. You receive a pay stub where nearly 100% of your pay has been withheld and sent to the IRS for income taxes. Tips are, effectively, the only money you actually take home.

A client is the person a contractor works for. The only client involved is the service itself, as the driver is a contractor.

The person making the purchase is a customer, not a client.

Ideally, you would be right. The customer should not be involved in the business relationship between the driver and the service. However, this is quite obviously not an ideal situation.

With employed waitstaff, tips are, technically, a bonus. A waitress who does not receive enough tips to put herself over minimum wage is entitled to extra pay to reach that point. Legally, this waitress is “adequately” compensated for her time, regardless of tips.

Unlike employed waitstaff, there is no provision to ensure this driver is compensated for their labor. There is no provision to ensure they are reimbursed for their actual expenses. The driver is often asked to subsidize certain customers, by accepting compensation that is less than minimum wage, and even at less than actual cost. They are often asked to pay to work.

Employees are protected by labor laws. When a group of employees decides to demand better pay, their collective action is explicitly protected.

When contractors do the same, their collective action violates anti-trust laws. They are guilty of collusion and price fixing.

The services have found a legal loophole to evade minimum wage and labor protections, and they are using it to exploit drivers.

The customer benefits from this. The customer is complicit in the exploitation. Ignorance does not negate their complicity.

(You should also know that if you do tip well, the services reduce their base pay further, effectively capturing part of your tip to the driver. They are exploiting you, too.)

Again, nobody should be using these services. They are bad for everyone. The only ethical way to use them is to tip sufficiently to ensure the driver’s pay exceeds minimum wage.

This. And at best, they can get about 6 orders per hour. That’s about 12-24 miles on their odometer, which is $3-6 worth of gasoline in city traffic. At best, they net $6 to $9/hr before tips.

They can afford it. But the make more when they completely shaft both the customer and the driver.

Correct me if I’m wrong but the job is basically:

You’re wrong, but it’s understandable. The key point you’re getting wrong is: You make money from a job.

The pay for most of the assignments you get from DD or UE is usually not enough to cover fuel, let alone maintenance on your vehicle. Certainly less than minimum wage for your time. Which is legal for them to do, because you are a contractor, paid per job and not per hour. If the customer doesn’t tip, you are earning less than minimum wage at best. In many cases, you’re actually paying to work, but you’re forced to take these unprofitable orders just to maintain your rating and keep getting assignments. (In my area, drivers call this “eating shit”)

At best, you can take about 6 assignments an hour. To net minimum wage, you need at least three of them to tip well. When a restaurant doesn’t bother to start preparing the order until you arrive, the time you waste waiting is 2-3 orders. If any of the remaining orders that hour don’t tip, you’re below minimum wage.

It is a shitty, exploitative service that nobody should be using. If you are going to use it, be aware that the service is taking everything you’re paying, and completely shafting your driver.

Firing squads aren’t forced. They ask for volunteers. And for this guy, they’ll probably have to hold a lottery.

Still, this is just another distraction from the dumpster fire that is the 47th presidency.

por que no los dos?

Of course they do. In Landman, where Michelob Ultra is prominently placed, the booze companies sponsor Billy Bob Thornton’s character as he says “I quit drinking, I’ll stick with beer.”

When told that drinking beer is still drinking, he replies “It’s a Michelob Ultra, there’s more alcohol in orange juice.”

That is the beer manufacturers telling the public that they don’t have to stop drinking beer when they “quit drinking”.

Recovering alcoholics caution that non-alcoholic beer is a major path to relapse, yet every manufacturer produces and markets a non-alcoholic version, designed and intended to keep people within the manufacturer’s sphere of influence, where they will receive marketing opportunities for real beer and other alcoholic products.

Manufacturers offer direct incentives to drinkers.

I realize these are traditional marketing techniques and not algorithmic targeting. However, these do indicate they are targeting recovering alcoholics.

They also sponsor drinking apps. They partner with retailers and social media companies to identify and directly target consumers. Retailers print custom coupons for specific customers based on their partnerships with alcohol producers. These are all algorithmic targeting.

Ramaswamy views the LGBTQ community as a cult and trans identity as a mental illness. He has called for prohibiting gender affirming care to minors. He says: “Ohio has barred men from competing with women in women’s sports, and the Supreme Court has now held that it’s constitutional.” He misgenders every trans person he mentions, and makes no effort to hide his disgust.

With Acton, the only potentially offensive thing I have found is one, singular statement, where she says she does not support “boys playing in girls’ sports”.

There is a medical condition called “aphasia”, where a speaker mentally reaches for a word, and grabs the wrong one. People with the condition use words that don’t match their intended meaning. As a parent of a trans kid, I have struggled to make my vocabulary match my intended meaning. Knowing and supporting my child fully, my mind still occasionally reaches for their dead name and gender when I go looking for the right word. Not with any malice, not with any disapproval or disappointment. Just the words I had been using subconsciously for their entire life have become the wrong words, and sometimes my conscious isn’t quick enough with the ones carrying my intended meaning.

I have every reason believe Ramaswamy’s use of “men” is an intentional slur. The man’s entire worldview revolves around the idea of denigrating and insulting LGBTQ in general and trans in particular. He takes great pride in expressing his hatefulness and bigotry at every opportunity.

I think Acton’s use of the word “boys” is more comparable to aphasia. Her (uneducated) concern seems to be ensuring fairness in girls sports. She may not be an overt ally, but she’s done very little to make me think she might be an enemy.

Frankly, the supposed anti-trans sentiment arising from this one statement seems more like GOP propaganda than legitimate concern.

Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s the GOP candidate for governor of Ohio.

Amy Acton is the Democratic candidate.

Every real estate agent, every mortgage broker, could see the fraud in the housing market long by 2003, but either didn’t recognize it as fraud at the time, or didn’t care. They were all making money hand over fist to prop it up.

Zero down payment, 110% LTV mortgages, seller-paid closing costs, buyer is receiving a $3000 check at closing? ARM set to triple their rate in a year? Completely absurd, but the agent is only getting paid if the deal closes. The mortgage broker is only getting paid if the deal closes. The lender is only getting paid if the deal closes. The seller is only getting paid if the deal closes. Everyone needed this deal to close, so they did what it took to close the deal.

Lenders were offering “Continuing Education” credits that RE agents needed for their licenses. That “continuing education” consisted of seminars coaching agents to encourage these deals.

By 2003, buyers were underwater with their mortgages as soon as they signed them. Yet it took 5 more years for the bubble to actually burst.

The circular financing ponzi scheme behind AI will survive until someone can’t service debt. What happens then is either the collapse of the whole scheme, or the government declaring them “too big to fail” and allowing them to reorganize into a single corporate entity.

I’m seeing nothing but upside to this plan…

Booze makers aren’t using predictive algorithms to hook people that are trying to quit.

The hell they aren’t. That’s called “Marketing”. You’re describing “Marketing”.

Accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt.

Trump is trying to rewrite history so that Nixon’s acts are considered normal presidential behavior instead of criminal corruption.

Privacy.com lets you create virtual debit cards you can use for subscription services. Makes it easy to cancel subscriptions, as you can simply revoke the virtual card tied to the service without having to change payment methods on everything else.