Was thinking the same thing.
Whenever I visit California from Aus, I think I've entered a 2nd world country with the state of public infrastructure.

I live in Aus and haven’t seen it. Restaurants will usually have a tip option on the eftpos machine but it is very optional and if it was mandatory, they would loose repeat business.
And there is nowhere else I’ve seen tipping.

Minimum casual wage is now almost $32/hr ($21USD)
Since COVID though cost of living has skyrocketed, so I do feel for the restaurants.

I'm still writing new software in .Net8 Winforms.
Now get off my lawn!

18% of Black 12th graders read at a "Proficient" level. It’s about the same for mathematics.
That’s shocking. What’s going on USA?

It’s like seeing service dogs in the USA, which aren’t service dogs, just rich people who want to take their dogs on holidays.

We run a medium size business and I’ve not seen a cheque in the last 5 years and prob 2 in the last 10.
Australia has a national system called BPAY and now PayID and will formally end the use of cheques by 2030.
USA has a much more fragmented financial system making change much slower and more painful.

Yeah, I'm always surprised at the amount of TDS on /.
It certainly felt more conservative 20 years ago.

This is advantage of getting old.
Anyone I’d be interested in are either retired or dead.

Their share price is still double what it was last year.
Ellison could wring a buck out of roadkill.

Chinese can deliver finished electronic assemblies for less than we can buy the parts. It a combo of scale and funny money the west can’t compete with.

It’s a circle.Communism and Fascism tend to be meet at the extremes. A ruling elite over powerless subjects.

I know /. Is full of hard core Atheist and leftists, but go study NDEs.
There is enough evidence to show the real us is a spiritual being interfacing with a human body.
AI might emulate this spiritual essence, but it will never be one.

EdgeRouter which I use has a web interface for control. Their Unifi range uses proprietary controller, which is most of the switch and wireless stuff. We have about 40 unifi products on our work network, and their control plane is awesome.

I run Ubiquiti Edge router at home and pfSense at work. Both are rock solid.

I was watching I think diary of a CEO who has a guy on studying this stuff for a long time.
He said the cause is primarily women delaying having their first child or marriage.
He said we need to promote family first then career.
If a woman builds a career in her 20s, She actually becomes much more selective about men by 30, but a small pool of available men so may never partner thus much less likely to have kids.
He said statistically, the chance of a 30yr woman having any children is 50%, regardless of country.