Well, if you tip because you care enough about the person on the other side, you might want to try and come up with a way to leave them a tip somehow so that there is no risk it’s taken away from them, assuming that you can. Put $5 under the rug and let them know, or something.

If you can’t, you can’t, and I’m hardly going to criticize you for not wanting to catch an airborne infectious disease.

I was pretty miffed in the UK (years ago) when it came out that lots of companies (there it was mainly restaurants) were just keeping the tip money when people payed by card and filled-in a tip amount, so I very much made an effort to as much as possible make sure the actual people got the tip directly - even if I stood out from the crowd by doing it - as I don’t see the point in tipping the company.

When I tip the driver in a delivery I literally just give them cash when they deliver (and only if they actually arrive with some promptness, not if they come half an hour late with a cold pizza).

It’s a habit I got into when living in the UK because there, like in the US, lots of companies just take the “tip” money and keep it if you tip whilst paying with card.

Granted, I like to pay stuff with cash, both for privacy reasons and because it has actually been shown that people in average spend less if they pay in cash (something to do with the feeling of giving something physical away), so I almost always have some cash to pay and tip.

Even for incandescent technology, the efficiency actually goes up with wattage, whilst for LEDs it’s roughly the same (if I remember correctly, it mostly decays with temperature), so even for incandescent the gains in switching to LEDs actually fall as the original lamp wattage goes up.

Further, given the consumption of lighhouse lamps it makes sense that they had already been switched earlier from incandescent or similar, to the same kind of tech as street lights (i.e. some kind of high power fluorescent), which is a more efficient tech.

Last but not least there is one fluorescent technology (I’m not sure anymore if it’s sodium vapor or if it is mercury vapor) that is (or at least it was a few years ago) more efficient than LED technology, but only really works well for very large lights (again, I roughly remember something like 1000W - so stuff like stadium illumination). At least in terms of consumption there is no point in changing from that to LED technology as it would be a step back.

So it makes sense that for some lighthouse lights they’re not even replacing the lights with LEDs whilst when they do replace them the gains percentage-wise are a lot less than one would get from replacing one’s 80W incandescent light bulbs with the equivalent modern LEDs (which would be maybe 12 - 15W).

I have this wonderful memory back when I lived in the The Netherlands and worked near Amsterdam of people outside in an open shopping area, sitting down on a table and eating patates (big chunky chips) and a starling on the ground looking at them and seemingly giving them a long speech.

I always imagine it was some “poor me” speech on how he had 8 starving young ones at home and would they thrown a patate his way.

For some reason in that place starlings were much comfortable around humans thanwhat I’ve seen elsewhere, and like sparrows would be going around on the ground looking for scraps.

The opposite of Racist is not a Racist with an opposite list of “good” and bad “races”, it’s somebody who thinks it’s not race that makes people be “good” or “bad”.

You’re pressuming that was about you rather than me making the counter-point to the posture you were supporting.

It’s funny that you repeatedly demanded me to point an exact statement and yet when faced with an equal demand, it was fine for you to “infer” meaning, though that was previously not fine for me to do.

It’s called a double standard.

Curiously and having in good faith taken that original riposte of yours (before you repeated it again, in slogan-like fashion) about me having unfairly infered something about your statement, I actually apologized for that since I had indeed presumed too much.

Well, at least it’s well beyond doubt (certainly you exhausted the original benefit of the doubt) to me that you are not making points in good faith and what drives you in this exchange is something else than a desire for an open and fair discussion, so you do you an I’ll do me.

Please tell me where in my comment I said that you said "anyone were bad people because of their ‘geographical area of birth’”.

It wasn’t a very long comment I made so it shouldn’t be hard to find it, unless I said no such thing.

Yeah, you’re right on that point: you’re dividing people into behavioural groups using “English speaking world” as identity tag rather than a race.

So the prejudice you voiced was using “geographical area of birth defined by language spoken” to presume unrelated characteristics of people, rather race.

It was indeed incorrect and unfair of my part to accuse you of voicing prejudice by race when the prejudice you voiced was by “geographical area of birth”.

Racism is seeing race as what makes people “goodies” or “badies”. The “good” races and “bad” races in your thinking being different from those of mid and early XXth century racism in Western nations is wholly irrelevant for asserting that thinking like that is being a Racist.

The opposite of Racist is not a Racist with an opposite list of “good” and bad “races”, it’s somebody who thinks it’s not race that makes people be “good” or “bad”.

It’s pretty telling that your entire defense of somebody else assigning race as cause of certain behaviours is to say that indeed for certain races, race is the cause of that behaviour and presume that the denial of that by others is due to the specific race which was said to be “badies”.

If you’re obcessed with the race of the people involved, you’re probably a racist.

Describing Fascism as something that only victimizes a specific ethnicity - Jews, curiously forgetting other Nazi-victimized ethnicities like Roma, not to mention non-ethnic groups such as those with disabilities - is also a long running hasbara strategy of Zionists to portray themselves as impossible to be Fascists, all the while behaving as such to quite an extreme level, something extra poignant right now when they’re in the middle of committing Genocide.

Even if all that was just the product of naivety of the author rather than something else, to limit one’s description of Fascism to only Nazis is an insult to people who lived under other Fascist dictatorships, something which just so happens to include me - just because the dictator in my homeland “only” had censorship, a secret police, political prisioners, forced labour of the natives in the “colonies” in Africa and kept the country incredibly poor except for the 9 families of the Regime, doesn’t mean that shit wasn’t Fascism because he was “equal opportunity” when it came to the ethnicity of the people he oppressed and exploited.

(PS: Also, thinking that it’s the race of a person that makes them behave one way or another is the very dictionary definition of racism. It’s quite irrelevant which race you think are “goodies” and which are “badies” - it’s the thinking that it’s the race that makes people “goodies” or “badies” that’s racism)

The simplest explanation for somebody only seing the race angle of Fascism, only the Nazis and only a specific ethnicity they victimized when there is at least one other that they equally victimized (the Roma) is racism.

Not to be defending Fascists, but those you describe are the Nazi style ones.

Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece too had Fascist dictatorships and those pretty much did not care about Jews or minorities and whilst they were all autoritarian and happy to use state violence for oppression and suppression of dissidents, the only ones who did anything close to systematical murder were the ones in Spain in their early days and their targets were mainly those they deemed “Communists”.

By comparison Zionists are more murderous than all of those 4, though not as much as the Nazis, and consider and treat a whole different ethnic group as “human animals” than the Nazis did.

In fact the use of specific ethnicities for Fascism in that table is a pretty good indication that the author(s) are deeply racist with a very specific slant on who their “good” ethnicities and “bad” ethnicities are: even without going into the whole Israel thing, just look at Modi in India to see Fascism in action whithout the perpetrators being White or the victims Jews.

This very special take on Fascism brought to you by Zionists-R-Us.

(Remember, boys and girls, people from the Jewish ethnicity couldn’t possibly be Fascists).

The Z-axis being “patience” or maybe “energy” does explain a lot.

Maybe “aluding” is because the solution is both eluding and alluring at the same time, so one keeps following its syren song but when you get to where you think the solution is, it’s not there.

Certainly it matches the feeling I got with some of the development problems I’ve faced.

Well, until very recently anybody who was not born with a desire for milk and sucking tits didn’t last long enough to reproduce.

So a bit of a tit obcession is understandable.

That’s actually a proper non-joky perfectly valid and scientific way to justify listing a covered area in square meters rather than volume.

I doubt that’s the actual geometry they used and the surface whose area they list, but none the less it’s still well spotted.

Obviously it works up to minus and plus infinity on one of the axes, possibly the Z-axis, though that’s not guaranteed (maybe it’s a longitudinal or latitudinal moisture remover?)

And what a great funeral pire it will be.

Just add left arm, right arm to it or, if you’re a guy nose and dick.

Certainly, especially the male version, it would make the visual act of counting far more funny to watch.

I think I’m starting to warm up to the whole base 12 idea…

There are no common denominators in base 12 that you can’t use in base 84, and the latter also has 7 as a common denominator.

I, for one, vote for changing our base to 84.

There are only 10 ways of doing things: the right way and the wrong way. (Programming joke)