Yes, you’re comparing COVID lows with today’s returns. That’s perfect. Not that I give a damn about franchise returns. I just don’t eat there.

I was not in so-much as saying that they are simply increasing due to COVID's stagnant for a few years. The increase in gross profit is a 9% rate of increase year-over-year for 10 years. The trend increase has been going on for nearly 15 years for McDonalds with a slight decline during 2008. Their increase trend from COVID as an example from 2021 to 2022 was 'only' 4.98% and after it picked up to 10.26% from 2022 to 2023.

Do you have any idea what “gross” means? You’re literally including the increase to wages in your argument.

Alright so let's talk about their net profit. Their net profit over the last 12 months is $8.6B compared to $5.1B in 2018, $7.5B in 2021.

Their net profit, like with their gross profit has a clear upward trend. Wages haven't hurt McDonalds growth and they certainly, once again, aren't close to struggling or in-fact at risk of not meeting investor's expectation of ROI growth.

Your argument is full of false assumptions when the empirical evidence is clear. You're basically saying "wage increases means McDonalds is making less money and therefore prices need to increase" without any regards to supplier pricing, sales volumes, organizational efficiency or in regards any other operational factors.

It is an ignorant and frankly terrible argument and is nothing more than a wild ass guess on your part.

Fast food was affordable because they paid sweat shop wages. That’s not the case anymore.

McDonalds gross profits are $14.68B over the last 12 months with over 9% year-over-year growth.

They aren't struggling and other than covid (which just held steady for a few years at $10B), the trend has been going up, not down, not stagnant for many years.

Remember that's gross profits. If wages were hitting them hard, then we'd see the trend decrease but that isn't what happened or is happening.

I think what really kicked this off is that restaurants started putting surcharges on bills by directly passes specific legal requirement costs directly to the customers without increasing their menu prices. For example, now that servers get some health benefits in SF, they'll have a surcharge that says something like "SF Mandate" or "SF Health Surcharge".

This would also cover stuff like to go order surcharges where some places are charging more for takeout sort of like Doordash or Grubhub do, except of course, you're picking it up yourself.

I do wonder how/if places with some more traditional surcharges are going to comply now. For example pizza places charging delivery fees.

Places will still be able to get away with "X% gratuity added to bill for Y seats (though I've seen some places do it for any number of people, including 1)" because that's optional, even if they put it on your bill because you've always been able to make them remove it.

It is like on most people's cell phone bills in the US. You'll see stuff like "FCC surcharge" which is the company passing their FCC regulatory fees directly to the customer without changing their advertised prices for a plan, E911 fees for 911 services, various taxes levied on the company but not the consumer are also passed to the customer.

The purpose is to have restaurants take these fees/taxes/whatever and make them build those costs of doing business directly into their advertised pricing on their menus. Companies don't like this because they can advertise cheaper prices and psychologically the customer doesn't usually think or even know about the extra surcharges, companies can set those surprise charges to whatever they want (they aren't regulated) and they do not have to really compete with those prices wherever they advertise (menus, flyers, etc.) thus driving them down for the consumer.

I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you're using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are 'wordpress security' applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don't know a whole lot about what you're doing.

There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you're webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the 'stories' as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.

Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.

Here's a nice list of FOSS CMS' (which includes Wordpress of course).

Just to be clear, if you're in the US, you 100% have copyright protection as soon as you put pen to paper.

Yeah except that he ruled based on a previous ruling that the CFPB was improperly funded by Congress because it wasn't constitutional. This time it was properly funded so that no longer applies (basically ruling the way that the CFPB is funded -- via the Federal Reserve (they used to do some of the stuff that the CFPB now does) per the Dodd-Frank Act that Congress instead of being part of the normal annual budget is unconstitutional).

Seems like an easy target for SCOTUS to kick the lawsuit back down to the circuit court and tell the court that it was erroneous in its ruling. But the SCOTUS isn't really predictable anymore, so who knows.

The restaurant owner arguments are all super weak as usual.

"Menu prices will rise!"

No shit, but everyone was already paying the prices but now you can't just surprise patrons with the increase.

"There will be pullback. People will lose jobs and hours!"

Doubtful but even if true, that means that they knew they were lying to customers and clawing extra charges that they wouldn't know about already.

"'They' are thinking restaurants will absorb the costs"

Not exactly but they will have to compete with pricing as it should be.

They're just trying to get away with playing the same game Telcos have gotten away with for far too many decades.

Yes but in California they have been unenforceable for almost everyone for many years.

Google Cloud definitely backs up data. Specifically I said

after an account is deleted.

The surprise here being that those backups are gone (or unrecoverable) immediately after the account is deleted.

Actually, it highlights the importance of a proper distributed backup strategy and disaster recovery plan.

Uh, yeah, that's why I said

it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure

The same can probably happen on AWS, Azure, any data center really

Sure, if you colocate in another datacenter and it isn't your own, they aren't backing your data up without some sort of other agreement and configuration. I'm not sure about AWS but Azure actually has offline geographically separate backup options.

Other than the crazy horoscope stuff, a job wanting you to sign an NDA and a Non-Compete likely know they are a shitty place to work and won't to keep you there so you can't go somewhere else and also not able to tell anyone how shitty it is. They probably already know Non-Competes in California have been unenforceable for a long time but they don't want you to know that.

And the crazy part is that it sounds like Google didn't have backups of this data after the account was deleted. The only reason they were able to restore the data was because UniSuper had a backup on another provider.

This should make anyone really think hard about the situation before using Google's cloud. Sure, it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure but I'm surprised Google themselves do not keep backups for awhile after an account is deleted.

The officer's excuse is that he only had the training he had to rely on. Putting his knee into the 7 year old's back and trying to scare the shit out of him saying that he's going to get familiar with the juvenile system, etc. etc. Being an overall piece of absolute shit and he's just essentially cowardly blaming his training.

If you need training on how not to be human garbage to a 7 year old then you surely shouldn't be an officer. That officer needs some serious psychological help.

Even though costs of AAA games have gone up for some games (certainly not all) because of the size of teams/labor hours, so have the volume of sales. Publishers have made more and more profit while the average price of AAA games had stayed about the same for a long time.

Games selling in the hundreds of thousands was considered really good decades ago but now those are in the tens of millions.

Publishers aren't having problems with profitability, so much so that they've been buying up large swaths of development houses and IPs and then dismantling them when they have a single flop.

EA's gross profit in 2010 was $1.6B, in 2014 was $3.03B and in the past 12 months have been $5.8B right now according to macrotrends.

But the current trends are unsustainable

The current trend in profitability is increasing, not decreasing. It isn't a minor trend or minor increases either.

Major publisher profitability has vastly increased in spite of stagnant game prices. They don't have to increase prices to increase growth. It is simply that the market allows the increase of the price with more profitability and so they do.

Even though costs of AAA games have gone up for some games (certainly not all) because of the size of teams/labor hours, so have the volume of sales. Publishers have made more and more profit while the average price of AAA games had stayed about the same for a long time.

Games selling in the hundreds of thousands was considered really good decades ago but now those are in the tens of millions.

Publishers aren't having problems with profitability, so much so that they've been buying up large swaths of development houses and IPs and then dismantling them when they have a single flop.

EA's gross profit in 2010 was $1.6B, in 2014 was $3.03B and in the past 12 months have been $5.8B right now according to macrotrends.

But the current trends are unsustainable

The current trend in profitability is increasing, not decreasing. It isn't a minor trend or minor increases either.

Major publisher profitability has vastly increased in spite of stagnant game prices. They don't have to increase prices to increase growth. It is simply that the market allows the increase of the price with more profitability and so they do.

It was a small group of people circa 2003. They added to the Dress and Appearance AFI as 'mutilation' and specifically called it tongue splitting.

All kinds of people go into the military for various reasons. Many to get out of some way of life back home regardless of how they feel about the military and US policies you know? They can get college paid for, cut ties with whatever or whoever, get a place to live, get meals taken care of, get money in their pocket and maybe learn a trade. Obviously, there's a lot of cons there too but some people see it as their best way 'out' of something.

Back then OIF/OEF was just kicking off and everyone was all 'Never Forget' so the AF had so many people they actually started taking volunteers for people to leave early and then started forcing people out (called Force Reduction), which is crazy with the shear amount of deployments going on but the AF also had too many NCOs as well. So yeah. Shit show as usual.

I was trying to find the old Level 3 blog post but didn't because I believe they basically said that Comcast needed to upgrade its infrastructure and never did. Netflix was the cashcow they saw to essentially make them pay for it. As a Comcast customer, I see it as charging the customer twice -- first for the Internet service for the content and again because Netflix is going to pass that extra cost onto you (and everyone else who isn't a Comcast customer).

You're right on about CDNs and edge / egress/ingress PoPs. It also keeps it cheaper for the likes of Netflix/Amazon/etc. in the long run with the benefits of adding more availability.

I found this wikipedia article about backbones and peering but it really isn't that great but in the results it also came up with this pretty good presentation from Carnegi Mellon. I was only going to browser a few of the slides but the information isn't really all that much and the illustrations are good. I think Prof. Nace did an excellent job here. Much better than I would have.

The problem historically isn't that streaming services are paying for fast lanes but that they have to pay not to be throttled below normal traffic. In other words, they have to pay more to be treated like other traffic.

Even crazier is remember that there are actual peering agreements between folks like cogentco, Level 3, comcast, Hurricane Electric, AT&T, etc. What comcast did that caused the spotlight was to bypass their peering agreement with Level 3 and went direct to their end customer (netflix) and told them they'd specifically throttle them if they didn't pay a premium which also undermined Level3's peering agreement with Comcast.

Peering agreements are basically like "I'll route your traffic, if you route my traffic" and that's how the Internet works.

yes AKA tongue bifurcation.