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INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

It’s cheap if your workplace pays for it

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Eatertainment venues are more than destinations for date nights and office parties; far more than the rudimentary arcades and bowling alleys of eras past: Resting on three axes of pleasure (food, drink, and play), they offer a seamless, satisfying, and bonafide human “experience.” Sims and Smash Park operations director Kristin Kroeger, for example, emphasized to me that Smash Park’s true appeal lies not just in pickleball but in the brand’s combined activities, full bar, “scratch-made kitchen,” and premise of social interaction, all of which alchemize into a single “legendary experience.”

Source: What’s Fueling the Success of New-Wave Eatertainment? – Eater Twin Cities

In short, they want you to suffer FOMO if you’re not there when your friends are. Minneapolis is having a bit of a boom in these venues, with the unspoken addition that landlords absolutely love them:

  • Long lease times.
  • Humongous venue sizes. Smash Park in Roseville is 30K square feet. Puttshack in Southdale Center is 25K square feet. Puttery in Minneapolis is 70K square feet
  • A lot of them require parking, helping support mandatory parking minimums. Landlords would love to bring them back after they were abolished.

A lot of these venues are also 18+ or 21+. Children are not allowed. Considering the current political environment, in a couple years there will be no children to speak of so it’ll be a moot problem… until these venues can’t hire young employees:

The labor force is expected to increase by 8.9 million, or 5.5 percent, from 2020 to 2030. The labor force of people ages 16 to 24 is projected to shrink by 7.5 percent from 2020 to 2030. Among people age 75 years and older, the labor force is expected to grow by 96.5 percent over the next decade.

Number of people 75 and older in the labor force is expected to grow 96.5 percent by 2030

All in all. they qualify as Big Business. We know US economic policy hates small businesses— although holding small business as the best of capitalism is a mistake.

Eatertainment wants to replicate the experience of you hanging out with your friends at someone’s place, drinking and eating and playing games. But you get to pay for it.

Gotta block ’em all

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Robb Knight, a software developer who found that Perplexity was circumventing robots.txt to scrape websites it wasn’t supposed to, told 404 Media there are many cases where it’s hard to tell what a user agent does or who operates it. “What’s happening to people, including me, is copy-pasting lists of agents without verifying every agent is a real one,” he said. Knight added that the Wall Street Journal and many News Corp-owned websites are currently blocking a bot called “Perplexity-ai,” which may or may not even exist (Perplexity’s crawler is called “PerplexityBot.”)

Source: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)

The solution we used on this here blargh is simple: We blocked everyone on robots.txt:


User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Crawl-delay: 360

We also like to have a terminal window to look at what’s currently hitting the server and we block bots liberally. We’ve already blocked ahrefs.com and perplexitybot for being assholes without rate limits. Does this mean this here blargh will be that much harder to find? Yeah, but we don’t particularly care about it.

So much thinking to be done ugh

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So. The fucken orange idiot won the election:

  • Department of Education: To be closed, or as close to that as possible.
  • Abortion: Likely to be made illegal via FDA prohibition of abortion drugs and Comstock Act.
  • Kakistocrats taking over government functions. See who is getting picked to the orange idiot’s cabinet.
  • Immigration: Paths are going to get completely blocked off. And they’re talking about getting rid of Jus soli and switching to Jus sanguinis. Also, deporting millions of people. Doesn’t matter if you’re citizen, resident, or illegal. If you’re not white, you’re going.
  • Economy: Accelerationists are going to take over and they fully plan to crash the economy to achieve their societal aims.
  • Whatever it is they decide to fuck up next. Go read about Project 2025 to find out. You’re not going to like it.

For the past week we’ve been considering our options and we don’t have a lot of leeway— our savings were considerably sapped by large purchases for family and my own period of unemployment from August to October. We have just enough to get out with a large bag and that is dependent on us being able to afford to get out.

I don’t want to start over yet again, for the nth time in our lives. We have much to consider in the next month. Then comes the execution of whatever plans we come up with.

While we grapple with my personal facts, a whole lot of magaots are now realizing how badly they’re about to get fucked by the person they voted for. They’ll cry and they’ll moan and they’ll want for rescue but… what’s done is done. Fuck their feelings.

That was the big thing. Now for the usual things:

  • bartendJerb: Slowly picking up now that the weather has turned colder. It’s not nearly as cold as it should be. No idea how well the cocktails I came up with are selling, no one tells me numbers of any sort. I don’t think anyone knows numbers of any sort anyways.
  • mgbarJerb: It’s picking up steam and a lot of our staff still haven’t gotten it through their heads we are a high-volume craft cocktail and they need to fucken move. We don’t have the staffing levels they have at Bar La Grassa, much less that level of service.
  • Reading: Re-reading Meehan’s Bartender Manual to understand better what the fuck it is they want us to do at mgbarJerb.

I’ve mostly cut out twitter out of my social posting as most of those circles have moved over to bluesky, with twitter itself cratering even further down that it was before; still keep a browser window open to the site but it’s mostly for reading, not for posting. Been pruning a lot of my RSS feeds to cut out a lot of stuff we don’t follow anymore. Also! we rejiggered MariaDB on this server and hopefully OOM-killer will leave it alone from now on.

We also wanted to build a new server to replace our aging storage server hardware but… it depends on what we decide to do given the economy situation around this here parts.

The last bit we need to do is figure out a way to get us to sleep at a decent hour. We’ve been going to sleep with the first light of the sun and… we’ve missed out on overtime at work due to us not being awake to actually take the shifts. This post is one of those actions we’re taking since it’s keeping us awake past the usual sleep window.

We are fucked

/ from outside / , , , ,

We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.

Source: No one’s ready for this – The Verge

Years ago I remember reading a story about a technology that lets you remember everything as it truly happened, no as you remember it happening. The main character realized most of his adult life he had been the one to fuck up. Another one I remember is The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsys by Arthur C. Clarke.

Until we develop a technology like it, any visual media cannot be granted any authoritative display of fact. In a few months (hopefully years) the same will happen to video.

Computer illiteracy is just another symptom of mass disability

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The unhappy truth is the complexity of our technological environment has exceeded the cognitive grasp of most humans. We now have an unsustainable mismatch between “middle-class” work and the cognitive talents of a large percentage of Americans.

Source: Gordon’s Notes: Mass disability measured: in 2016 40% of OECD workers could not manage basic technology tasks

This is something we experienced at helpdeskJerb (a school). Most of the upper management had worked there for decades and had seen the technological environment go from zero tech to full-on academic infrastructure.

… And the vast majority of them could not handle it. About the most they can do is interact via email. Instant messaging? CRM? ERP? Completely out of their abilities. Which meant they need assistants to translate and handle things coming from the system/environment into something they could manage via email… bypassing the system entirely. It’s fine for them, but then someone has to enter the information into the system. During my time there we found this usually doesn’t happen, so there’s a lot of institutional memory that is lost when people leave the school.

That’s the management. Noticed the same thing happening with new students: A fair number of them were completely unable to navigate the school’s intranet and course management systems, requiring extra attention from counselors and assistants to get them signed up for what they wanted to study.

For all that modernity provides, it doesn’t help when you’re disabled. And now with the incoming US administration, they would rather you just die.

it’s okay to just be a manager. It’s fine and we mean it

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But leadership, oh baby, that’s what everyone wants to do. Managing is mundane and leadership is exciting. A manager handles trivialities, like hiring and firing. A leader has the privilege of serving as a shining moral beacon, soothing the trouble, reading the psychodynamic eddies (read: vibes) in the organization. At its best, it is a genuinely noble endeavor, not carried out by whoever happens to be at the top of an organizational chart, but whoever has the capacity to encourage other people to be their best selves at a given moment. The most inspiring person in my life yesterday was not anyone that gives talks about how amazing their own skills are, but the seven year old in the house next door who was drilling table tennis so determinedly that I guiltily got some piano practice in.

Source: Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug — Ludicity

We’ve worked for chefs and GMs who will say they’re not leaders. They’re just making sure the things that need doing are done and that they’re done properly and in a timely manner. And we’ve worked for leaders who will abuse and belittle everyone in the payroll because they’re inferior and unfit to even be considered for full-time work anymore; then they’re surprised when people leave or ragequit.

Looking at you, bistroBoss, you sack of shite.

The long slow painful backroad to renewed sentience

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It’s been a busy week over here:

  • bartendJerb: I was non-ceremoniously put in charge of the winter drinks menu. The previous-previous bar manager neglected to leave his builds behind so… we got to come up with new ones. We think there are two good cocktails, two decent cocktails, and one iffy cocktail. But they’re done and mostly ready for launch barring ingredient availability. Yellow chartreuse is not cheap.
  • mgbarJerb: It is having new-restaurant issues that we personally thought would not happen at all given it is a corporate rim enterprise with many other venues all over the United States. And yet we keep having logistics issues all over the damn place. Also, la barra fue diseñada con las nalgas (designed with the ass cheeks. Pencil held between them). But hopefully we’ll be able to implement changes that will make life easier for our barbacks and our servers.
  • bistroJerb: Gossip says they’re looking for another bar manager. It will be their fifth of this year— just this year. That’s in addition to the slow season coming up for them. The temperature dropped a solid 35 °F from yesterday. The joint is supposed to be featured on a tv show one of these days and bistroBoss is hanging all of his hopes on the business picking up for the business because of it.

All in all it has been busy and we are making money after taking a li’l menty break hiatus over the summer. Our big expense has been going out to eat and drink but we are currently in the process of reconstructing our kitchen space so we can actually cook at volume. The lack of counter space once again comes in to haunt us in our tiny little galley kitchen but… it is much better than the lame tiny space we used to live before.

Slowly we regain the ability to concentrate and think. We lost that for a long, long time. We fucked up a lot of things during that time.

Going to try and do these reports to myself more often. They help to keep track of dates and events.

Looking at you, KDE/Plasma

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The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?

Source: Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software

Joel’s post is almost 25 years old. Sonos learned this lesson this year cos their management was too stupid to realize what they were doing. Also, some people in the comments are wondering why CEO asked Lead Counsel to investigate the debacle.

That’s called fiduciary duty. CEO knows he fucked up hard enough by ignoring the growing issues that any number of shareholders could have sued the company and/or its officials (in a personal capacity), and those shareholders would have had a great shot at winning said suit.

Now if only FOSS developers would learn the lesson too.

Meses como esclavo para que ni las gracias te den

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Con los años, los mejores restaurantes se adaptan más a las demandas de los jóvenes, pero advierten que la exigencia no puede bajar: “Quien quiere formarse en la excelencia lo hace libremente”.

Source: El infierno de los becarios de los estrella Michelin: 14 horas, sin cobrar y a vivir en pisos ‘patera’

La industria restaurantera en Europa esta cayendo en un precipicio de su propia creación. A donde va el dinero que cuestan menus de €400? Por mas caro que cueste la renta, los insumos, la labor, de ahi queda ganancia. Si Noma, en un pais nordico con una red social avanzada, no pudo con los gastos, que esperanza hay para los demas? Eso sin contar el incremento en costo de vida que mucha gente joven esta sufriendo.

De restaurantes en Estados Unidos ni se hable. Aqui la industria completa depende de labor migrante por lo regular indocumentada, cosa de la cual malos jefes se aprovechan. Yo he sido stagiaire pero por lo regular suele ser un dia, dos a lo mucho, con posible contratacion por parte del restaurante.

Scoffier invento un buen sistema para aquel entonces, pero ya es hora de cambiar.

No need for a wooden coffin even

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If we all want to retire, how much do we need? How much does a person need? How much do they have, and how much money would government, or an employer or somebody else, need to fill the gap? Most people you know who are making minimum wages need about half a million dollars at age 62-63 to be able to retire. Say your annual salary is about $50,000. The rule of thumb is that you should have about eight to 10 times your annual salary at the time you want to retire in your mid-60s, in order to supplement Social Security, and you won’t see a big change in your living standard. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to travel around the world or walk the Great Wall with somebody carrying your suitcase, but you will be able to maintain your living standard.

Source: Why You Will Never Retire

We don’t know anyone that makes over 100K a year. Perhaps the owners of the businesses we’ve worked at, but that’s unlikely. Unless we migrate to some other country or become rich, we guess our retirement plan should be to go north as far as possible and then just walk until we can walk no more.

Ah shit here we go again

/ rucksack / , ,

That’s ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of. His Pinboard.in support forum has been quiescent for years. I’ll be researching my micro blog options and I’ll write about what I come up with on tech.kateva.org.

Source: Gordon’s Notes: The End Times have come for the Pinboard.in bookmarking service

So much for the man gloating about buying out del.icio.us. He doesn’t even need to sell the service. He can be “the founder” with just one or two full-time people working under him to make the service viable for the next 10 years and beyond.

On the linked Hacker News thread there are some alternatives worth looking into, most of them self-hosted.

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