As usual you can thank Jim crow and slavery for it. Back when black people stopped being ownable property they had to be paid to do jobs but since the hard working white folk in town who had businesses didn’t want to pay black people for their work they invented a system where the freed men would have a job serving the customers and it was implied that if they did a good job you’d throw them a nickel. That was the workaround to having slaves that worked for you but technically got a “wage” from “tips” for good service. It eventually became so economically viable that it became an industry standard and now everyone gets to sell their labor to a company which externalizes the cost of paying the employee to their customers. American exceptionalism baby!

Yikes man do you not hear yourself? In Germany they dont declare tips as income, and they also dont require workers to survive off tipped wages. So what the hell is your point? “In Germany we pay workers to do a job” great for you guys.

In america we have systematic wage slavery and tip based service models are the lowest class of wage slaves. They dont even get paid a minimum wage which, in america, is below poverty. They exclusively make money from gratuities that paying customers “willingly” give them for their service and the company they work for “pays” them $2/hr. Tips paid on taxes already basically didn’t exist because most servers don’t declare their tips as income. (My entire family was raised by waitresses.)

This legislation legalizes people who arent service workers declaring any income as tips and thus avoid paying taxes on it. It’s a bad idea and fundamentally misunderstands the economic pressures making a policy called “no tax on tips” generally popular.

Yeah its like the mages guild house! I wasn’t sure if the enchanting tables there were different from the rest of the game, I’m too poor to afford the candles lol that kinda sucks it costs money even at the player house. I’m broke as hell in oblivion. I keep finding new player houses right after spending my money on upgrading the last one! Frostcrag is by far the cheapest to upgrade though, I really regret not going there first :(

I was worried I might have gone too far off topic with my rant so I actually really appreciate the honest reply. I’m glad I wasn’t off base.

I just feel like the more nefarious thing to do is to silo people with bad ideas so they can reinforce each other out of sight of people who could reasonably talk them out of their spiral. Like you said, Im sure the .ml people are self selecting but there’s also an aspect of being defederated or ostracized for simply having an .ml username that makes them unable to get a reasoned debate out of people who claim to want a marketplace of ideas.

If they were truly so ideologically captured that they would kill you for saying Stalin was a bad leader they probably wouldn’t be on here defending it. They’d be doing whatever psychotic militant commune shit the patriot front is doing.

We all seem to agree that patriot front is worse than whatever .ml is doing but the fact that .ml is publicly available to be scrutinized, and there are entire pages dedicated to going in their comms explicitly to get banned for bad faith, means the size of the outrage is not commensurate with its output. Idk who on .ml is plotting a communist coup but unless that’s what they’re doing I see no reason to be planning on imprisoning anyone who defends china.

There’s real, material right wing threats in our country that have real power. Why are we on lemmy yelling at the weird kids table for playing their card game none of us care about? Like you said, even republicans who voted for this are just as much victims of propaganda as the best of us. We’d be better off pointing people towards the actual cause of our problems instead of trying to blame a fringe group for holding us back.

I’m saying we need everyone, and we can bicker about how much state intervention is too much once we no longer have to worry about concentration camps being filled with dissenters.

Thanks again for really putting thought into your reply and understanding where I’m coming from. Every time I mention .ml I’m worried that someone somewhere is gonna tag me and have me brigaded for “defending” them. I don’t care what they’re doing. I know its not nearly as destructive as what republicans have been doing and I don’t see anyone on lemmy posting trophies of the republicans they’ve caught detaining someone illegally. Let’s focus our energy on the real threats while we still have enough bodies to choke up the combine. I fear we are losing daylight fast.

Ugh the bruma mages guild recommendation took me, I kid you not, an entire week. I never got any prompt options after finding the guy hiding and assumed I had to get up enough mysticism to cast dispel on him lmao

After a week of making no progress leveling mysticism I went back and they were like yeah just go get a book or something and I’ll stop hiding

The staff you get is well worth it though, I wasn’t sure what I would use a staff for so I just went with shock and holy shit that staff is the most overpowered thing in my kit. 80 points of shock damage per hit with some 120 charges when full. I only ever take it out when I’m fighting hoardes or doing a boss-like mission because it clears rooms so fast lol

On your last point: If you haven’t heard any rumors about frostcrag spire yet I highly recommend seeking it out. Not trying to spoil anything but there might be more freedom in enchanting than is revealed in the mages guild quests. I could be wrong but its worth checking out either way.

This I think goes to show how the mainstream obsession with “tankies” as an ideological group is no different than the people screaming about “libertarians” in the 2010s

The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.

Now, also just like the libertarians of the 2010, there are like five specific people who hold inconceivable sociopolitical and economic power who ARE in fact attempting to force reforms through governments, undemocratically, to achieve these undeniably horrific outcomes because it does in fact suit their personal ideological aims.

Those people have been privately or publicly working cooperatively with Russian information warfare (or just are GRU) in order to boost the perceived popularity of their agendas.

What you’re describing, the people saying “I hate putin, but Ukraine should lay over and give up” are probably the exact targets of this effort.

Those are liberals you’re talking to. Those are the people who read all the tankie stuff and read all the nazi propaganda on twitter and came to the manufactured “centrist” conclusion that Ukraine just doesn’t really matter and the real loss is the fact that fighting continues.

It’s why donald trump, every single time he mentions it, says

there are 5,000 soldiers dying a week, on both sides: RUSSIAN and Ukrainian

It’s a deliberate attempt to frame Russia as an equal in terms of tragedy. There is no tragedy for Russia outside of the fact they’ve sent a quarter of their working age population into a meat grinder for a dying psychopaths dreams of a greater Russia under his control. Ukraine is fighting a war to maintain their sovereignty.

There’s like 500 tankies online while donald trump is in the Oval Office repeating literal Kremlin talking points to the president of Ukraine and I have to get on here and read about how insufferable it is that anon said something defensive of china. Be so for real right now.

Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report. (For example climate deniers using oil lobby reports of climate change being “unsettled science” to defend their position that the climate data you’re showing them doesn’t prove anything)

These people online are not the enemy, they are the only people willing to fight with you against the forces that control every aspect of our lives. This is lemmy for Christ’s sake. The faster we all realize that and move past the sticking points of which genocidal empire deserves more support than criticism the sooner we can be rid of the brokers who sowed all these conflicting viewpoints in the first place.

So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.

There are networks that exist exclusively to push Russian and zionist viewpoints and defend them online as if they are “common sense.” It is our job to have the knowledge and courage to shout down incorrect and malicious interpretations of the world and bring forward a more nuanced and complete understanding of history and modern politics.

Attempting to exclude them entirely just offers the inexperienced a closed system to be inculcated with those beliefs without pushback. That’s why we got where we are in the first place. It’s good when Russian bots get outed in a public forum, it shows everyone there exactly what the shit looks like so they recognize it on the next Facebook post their uncle sends them. Fostering critical thought and media literacy is step one to dismantling this prison we all currently exist within.

(I’m not arguing with anything you said, your comment just gave me this train of thought and I don’t think it would make sense out of context as its own comment)

What an interesting and yet completely unsurprising thing to learn today. Thank you for taking the time to write this up!

Thats exactly why I am using lemmy exclusively for brand awareness

The story is decent enough but holy shit the comments on that link are cancer

I don’t recommend looking at their 1930s issues

This is an all time post

Hey don’t bring my 1am dinner into this lol we’re talking about sleeping!!

:O how do they do it so perfectly

Hell yeah, we need someone to run the 7/11 overnight! /s

To stay on brand: hire someone from Europe, and then nobody has to “stay up all night” lol

I’m loving this comment section lol this was just a silly idea and here’s a really interesting conversation happening under it

A machiavellian construct :/

I think you’re agreeing with me, so let me rephrase: the sleep schedules we don’t align with could be due to a geographical misalignment in our circadian rhythm.

If you live on central time and never get tired until 4am maybe your body is telling you that your natural state would be somewhere in Hawaii. The friction comes from people generally being scattered across the world in places that don’t agree with what their body feels should be the right time to go to bed.

Does that make more sense? Go to sleep when your body tells you to, and then figure out where in the world that lines up with a “normal sleep schedule” you know what I mean?

Thats awesome lol

I feel like at this point I couldn’t even use a slide out keyboard if I had one, I do miss it though

Great, now americans need to learn about necklacing