Waiters and waitresses and other food service staff not only get paid a "minimum" wage (another US-ism), but an actual living wage. (Ok, as much as *ANY* wage in a big city is a living wage). There is an award, perhaps modified locally, and then loadings for evenings and weekends.

So yeah, tips aren't needed. I would probably have left spare change on the table when I used to pay cash.

Now, how its happening is that most electronic ordering systems are imported from the US. They DO have the tip button enabled - and most most business have thought "why the fire-truck not?".

Staff at a restaurant nearby even press the "No tip" button reflexively, while entering the amounts of the EFTPOS terminal.

The US is the home to many good and great things. And many terrible things. Two US imports need to FOAD from Australian culture - Halloween and Tipping. Three, the the missing letter 'u' should be restored ... four, the 'ise" ending on words. Ok, five .... Starbucks - Six!, no more than six ... stealing stuff from New Zealand. We haven't done that in a while and I'm scared we are getting rusty.

(I'm off to get a Flat White, while wearing Uggs, while listening to Split Enz and reading about Phar Lap).

The Outback Steakhouse is Australian in the same way McDonalds is Scottish.

I think you're late to the party.

IIRC, it was Egypt that said they would go to war if any of the other countries attempted to dam or restrict the Nile. That was in the 80s.

Basically holding the other countries in the Nile basin at the end of a gun.

But yes, the wars of water will make the petro-wars seem tame in comparison.

(Imagine the images of Luke on Tatooine, tending to a water harvester, .... but now on earth, that's the future).

Kindle, I mean Calibre, of course for managing and sideloading my own documents onto my Kindle.

Amazon have been changing lots behind the scenes lately. Last model or two paperwhites are harder to get DRM-free versions of files out of (no personal backup). The Colorsoft doesn't play as nice with products such as Kindle.

And they've been adding restrictions on how you can sideload books over the years too.

So no, it's not a consumer friendly move. It is only (and would only ever be) a move that helps Amazon.

These types of people know two things:
- How to use Excel
- That if anyone finds out what they do in Excel really is, and how easily it could be programmed as a report from real data, they would be out of a job.

Instead they get titles like "Chief Financial Officer", "Controller" and "Senior Accountant".

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Sinclair, U. I'd probably change that to "communicate" instead of understand.

Big MEGAcorps should really know better.

IT may not be their bread and butter, but goddam it, these sized corps have resources. They can take the code base for LibreOffice or whatever Open Sourced tool they have and mandate THAT as the corporate standard.

They can even run their own cloud. That's pretty well how AWS started ... spare capacity.

10 person mum and dad store? Nah, I'm going to cut some slack and say "buy one of these pre-canned products".

The MEGACorps can then have their own sub-company to do the IT bit, outsourcing where necessary, but maintaining the tools. So long as they give the source to the parent company, that is ok by GPL.

They can pull updates and patches where necessary but still keep the control.

And that is what the MEGA IT CORPS have. Control. Control means $$$$ (or whatever currency you like). Airbus have taken a bite out of the poisoned apple, spat it out, tried the other poisoned apple and are now chewing on the worst bits of both.

(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)

This is true.

And, the MS guy is missing the point. We don't want AI out of Windows.

What we do want is an Operating System that:
- Is secure,
- Lets us do what WE (the user) wants
- Doesn't spy on us, and
- Gets the heck out of the way,
- Is configurable and respects our configuration decisions,
- Obeys out instructions.

There are a few that do that. These seem to be close cousins
There is one that almost does that. This is not too far related to the above, you can see the heritage.
There is one that used to come close to that. But hasn't for more than 15 years. This is Windows.

IF (and only if) we want AI, we'll seek it out.

Doesn't have to just be Polar Caps.

Plenty of glaciers are losing their ice/water mass too. Seen photos from 50 years ago of a mountain village that was touching a glacier. That's retreated about 600 meters. (Summer to summer low points). Took 30 years for the first 200 meters. And 20 for next 400 meters.

Now we MIGHT be in a cycle, as some has proposed. But I am damn sure that the human contributions to global warming are dwarfing that.

I've been a very, very regular visitor for the last 12 years and I am just astounded in the change, even in my own photos.

I would pay good money for a completely dumb TV. No google anything. No smarts. Adjust the colour, the volume, the inputs source and get out of my way.

Markets tend to a Monopoly. They only tend to 2 ~ 3 choices because once hitting a monopoly, restrictions tend to be a bit onerous.

And in comfortable duopolies, the CEOs probably went to the same school or university and thus the collusion does not need to be stated, but just UNDERSTOOD.

A well funded outsider, pushing for systematic change in a different market is a rarity.

Close. But no banana.

I once thought like you did. Then I thought : if you canâ(TM)t beat em, join em. So I got an MBA. A good MBA recognises value, profit being a good measure. But not the only measure.

No, the real problem is the Blackrocks, the Vangaurd investment funds, etc. The ones that probably have your pension savings. They have an incredible thirst. Growth or profits. Preferably both. Dollars or die.

Well, if you'd just managed to study "Veteran and Vintage Vehicles" at the Academy, like you were supposed to, this wouldn't have happened.

C'mon K9.

Copyright is broken.

That doesn't mean it isn't useful, but it needs a total and utter re-think.

From treatment of abandon-ware, to geo-pricing, to excessive terms and lack of registration. And probably a bunch of others.

Sadly, if such a rethink ever came to pass, it would be dominated by monied interests. Common sense would leave the conversation at the moment the first bundle of cash was passed around the table.

So, they will add in two new team members to a working party every week. Only one of which has even heard of electricity.

In response to the lack of progress, the managers will make the customers train the newbies. And they will all need to work stupid hours while accomplishing nothing.

Repeat next week with three or 4 new members, but two from two weeks ago have quit (and are now marketing themselves as having vast industry experience). Meh.