It is a bit confusing.

Minecraft is a digital simulation of a physical (albeit blocky) world.

If we treat minecraft as a physical world (one simulated, but that’s beside the point), we can claim that it’s a (simulated) physical simulation.

He may very well be the personality to cause the Epstein files be released.

No! You’re forgetting! It is Charlie who is the true martyr! \crocodile tears *

• Someone, somewhere, for some fucking reason

The original Utopia of More is a dystopia in today’s standards.

Of course I (re-checked) the criteria on my own before commenting, and it stands.

Evidence of receipt of lesser nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence

There are a bunch of international prises other than the Olympics. By the way, Oscars and Pulitzers aren’t inherently international - they’re made by the american film (newspaper) industry for that same industry. Awards juries are 90+% American, as are the awardees.

Anyway, more realistic would be to look at the International math olympiad, for example. There are about 10k contestants anually, and just under 50% recieve prizes. There are similar competitions for pretty much any school subject.

Then there’s sport. There are a bunch of sports, with each having a multitude of international competitions. The ATP Open for tennis, the FIFA/UEFA championships, for soccer, various regates for yachting especially - you name it.

And these are just of the top of my head, and the second level of prestige (after Nobels and Oscars). Saying there’s at least 20 international competitions per sport on average is an understatement.

All in all, for point one, aboit 5% of the population fit the bill, even discounting stuff like the France-Germany typists’ association anual speed typing competition, which just might fit the bill as well.

Evidence of your membership in associations in the field which demand outstanding achievement of their members

There’s Mensa, an international association - a special achievement required to join: IQ over 130. It has 150k members.

Similarily, there are: International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, World Federation of Neurology, European Mathematical Society - you name it.

Evidence of published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media

Not even that’s that hard. Every school shooter fits the bill.

Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel.

Be a member of a society in (2) and you will.

Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance to the field

Another point for fittig the bill of (1), basically, since an award is, by definition, a recognition and evidence of achievment.

Evidence of your authorship of scholarly articles in professional or major trade publications or other major media

Work for a year at a university or a subset of (2), and it’ll happen.

Evidence that your work has been displayed at artistic exhibitions or showcases

This one’s for the more artsy types. There are literally millions of galleries and museums. Getting an exhibition also isn’t that impossible.

Evidence of your performance of a leading or critical role in distinguished organizations

Basically, have an important-sounding title of a (2)

Evidence that you command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field

So, be a CEO.

Evidence of your commercial successes in the performing arts

Be Taylor Swift, Rammstein, or any number of more “fringe” artists.

<hr>

To sum up, my point is: No, you don’t need to have an Oscar, Nobel or Olympic medal to qualify. Nor do you need to be Einstein.

Here’s someone who fits most criteria as an example:

Meet Andriei Ogushlow. He’s a polish CEO. He studied at and got a PhD in political science. He wrote 8 scolarly articles published in intenrational journals. In his free time he does photography, and had 15 exhibitions, of which 4 were in museums. He’s a member of Mensa and the European Accounting Association. While doing his MBA, he earned a bronze medal in the A4SIC competition.

He’d like US citizenship to be able to make his company have a strong and stable presence in the US.

(That’s 5 out of 10).

He’s not Einstein. But he fits the bill more than “good enough”.

“A category for Einstein” is still a bit of a high sell.

That’s like saying your mom’s like Hitler because he was a human.

JS is just a janky hotfix.

As it was, HTML was all sites had. When these were called “ugly”, CSS was invented for style and presentation stuff. When the need for advanced interactivity (not doable on Internet speeds of 20-30 years ago), someone just said “fuck it, do whatever you want” and added scripting to browsers.

The real solution came in the form of HTML5. You no longer needed, and I can’t stress this enough, Flash to play a video in-browser. For other things as well.

Well, HTML5 is over 15 years old by now. And maybe the time has come to bring in new functionality into either HTML, CSS or a new, third component of web sites (maybe even JS itself?)

Stuff like menus. There’s no need for then to be limited by the half-assed workaround known as CSS pseudoclasses or for every website to have its own JS implementation.

Stuff like basic math stuff. HTML has had forms since forever. Letting it do some more, like counting down, accessing its equivalent of the Date and Math classes, and tallying up a shopping cart on a webshop seems like a better fix than a bunch of frameworks.

Just make a standardized “framework” built directly into the browser - it’d speed up development, lower complexity, reduce bloat and increase performance. And that’s just the stuff off the top of my head.

Source code is the code devs write.

For compiled languages like C, only the compiled machine code is made available to the user.

JS is interpreted, meaning it doesn’t get compiled, but an interpreter interprets source code directly during runtime.

Obfuscsted code, while not technically unaltered source code is still source code. Key word being unaltered. It isn’t source code due to the virtue of not being straight from the source (i.e. because it’s altered).

However, obfuscated code is basically source code. The only things to obfuscate are variable and function names, and perhaps some pre-compile order of operations optimizations. The core syntax and structure of the program has to remain “visible”, because otherwise the interpreter couldn’t run the code.

Analyzing obfuscated code is much closer to analyzing source code than reverse-engineering compiled binaries.

It may not be human-readable. But other programs systems can analyze (as they can even compiled code), but more importantly - they can alter it in a trivial manner. Because it’s source code with basically names censored out. Which makes evaluating the code only a bit harder than if it were truly “closed-source”.

That’s why website source code is basically almostsource-available.

A reminder, in the past, large pages downloaded all stuff at once. In contrast, with dynamic imports the first load is much much faster. And that matters most. And any changes in dynamic content would just require the dynamic data to be downloaded.

Unfortunately, you’re very mistaken.

In the past, pages needed to download any stuff they want to display to the user. Now, here’s the kicker: that hasn’t changed!

Pages today are loaded more dinamically and sensibly. First basic stuff (text), then styles, then scripts, then media.

However, it’s not Angular, React Bootstrap or any other framework doing the fetching. It’s the browser. Frameworks don’t change that. What they do, instead, is add additional megabytes of (mostly) bloat to download every day or week (depending on the timeout).

Any web page gets HTML loaded first, since the dawn of the Web. That’s the page itself. Even IE did that. At first, browsers loaded sequentially, but then they figured out it’s better UX to load CSS first, then the rest. Media probably takes precedence to frameworks as well (because thet’s what the user actually sees).

Browsers are smart enough to cache images themselves. No framework can do it even if it wanted to because of sandboxing. It’s the browser’s job.

What frameworks do is make devs’ lives easier. At the cost of performance for the user.

That cost is multiple-fold: first the framework has to load. In order to do that, it takes bandwidth, which may or may not be a steeply-priced commodity depending on your ISO contract. Loading also takes time, i.e. waiting, i.e. bad UX.

Other than that, the framework beeds to run. That uses CPU cycles, which wastes power and lowers battery life. It’s also less efficient than the browser doing it because it’s a higher level of abstraction than letting the browser do it on its own.

With phones being as trigger-happy about killing “unused” apps, all the frameworks in use by various websites need to spin up from being killed as often as every few minutes. A less extreme amount of “rebooting” the framework happens when low-powered PCs run oit of RAM and a frameworked site is chosen by the browser to be “frozen”.

What a framework does is, basically, fill a hole in HTML and CSS - it adds functionality needed for a website which is otherwise unattainable. Stuff like cart, checkout, some complex display styles, etc.

All of this stuff is fully doable server-side. Mind you, login is so doable it didn’t even slip onto my little list. It’s just simpler to do it all client-side for the programmer (as opposed to making forms and HTML requests that much more often, together with the tiny UX addition of not needing to wait for the bac(-and-forth to finish.

Which itself isn’t really a problem. In fact, the “white flashes” are more common on framework sites than not.

When a browser loads any site, it loads HTML first. That’s “the site”. The rest is just icing on the cake. First is CSS, then media and JS (these two are havily browser dependent as far as load priority goes).

Now comes the difference between “classic”, “js-enhanced” and “fully js-based” sites.

A classic site loads fast. First HTML. The browser fetches the CSS soon enough, not even bothering to show the “raw HTML” for a few hundered miliseconds if the CSS loads fast enough. So the user doesn’t even see the “white flash” most of the time, since networks today are fast enough.

As the user moves through different pages of the site, the CSS was cached - any HTML page wishing to use the same CSS won’t even need to wait for it to load again!

Then there’s the js-enhanced site. It’s like the classic site, but with some fancy code to make it potentially infinitely more powerful. Stuff like responsive UI’s and the ability to do fancy math one would exoect of a traditional desktop/native app. Having JS saves having to run every little thing needing some consideration to the server when the browser can do it. It’s actually a privacy benefit, since a lot less things need to leave the user’s device. It can even mend its HTML, its internal structure and its backbone to suit its needs. That’s how powerful JS is.

But, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. The frameworked-to-hell site. Initially, its HTML is pretty much empty. It’s less of like ordering a car and more of building a house. When you “buy the car” (visit the site), it has to get made right in front of your eyes. Fun the first few times, but otherwise very impractical.

A frameworked site also loads slower by default - the browser gets HTML first, then CSS. Since there’s no media there yet, it goes for the JS. Hell, some leave even CSS out of the empty shell of the page when you first enter so you really get blasted by the browser’s default (usually white, although today theme-based) CSS stylesheet. Only once the JS loads the framework can the foundation of the site (HTML) start being built.

Once that’s been built, it has CSS, and you no longer see the white sea of nothing.

As you move through pages of the site, each is being built in-browser, on-demand. Imagine the car turning into a funhouse where whenever you enter a new room, the bell rings. An employee has to hear it and react quickly! They have to bring the Buld-A-Room kit quickly and deploy it, lest you leave before that happens!

Not only is that slow and asinine, it’s just plain inefficient. There’s no need for it in 99% of cases. It slows stuff down, creates needless bandwidth, wastes needless data and wastes energy.

There’s another aspect to frameworked sites’ inefficiency I’d like to touch.

It’s the fact that they’re less “dynamic” and more “quicksand”.

They change. A lot. Frameworks get updates, and using multiple isn’t even unheard of. Devs push updates left and right, which are expected to be visible and deployed faster than the D-Day landings.

Which in practice means that max resource age is set very low. Days, maybe even hours. Which means, instead of having the huge little 15 MB on-average framework fetched once a week or month, it’s more like 4 to dozens of times per week. Multiply by each site’s preferred framework and version, and add to that their own, custom code which also takes up some (albeit usually less-than-frameork) space.

That can easily cross into gigabytes a month. Gigabytes wasted.

Sure, in today’s 4K HDR multimedia days that’s a few minutes of video, but it isn’t 0 minutes of nothing.

My phone also reliably lasts a day without charge. It’s not about my battery being bad, but about power being wasted. Do you think it normal that checking battery use, Chrome used 64% according to the abdroid settings?

You bet I tried out Firefox the very same day. Googling for some optimizations led me down a privacy rabbit-hole. Today I use Firefox, and battery use fell from 64% to 24%. A 40% decrease! I still can’t believe it myself!

I admit, I tend to use my phone less and less so my current 24% may not be the best metric, but even before when I did, the average was somewhere between 25% and 30%.

There’s a middle-ground in all of this.

Where the Web is today is anything but.

The old days, while not as golden they might seem to me are also not as brown as you paint them out to be.

Swiss Cheese FTW!

As a web dev, and primarily user, I like my phone having some juice left in it.

The largest battery hog on my phone is the browser. I can’t help wonder why.

I’d much rather wait a second or two rather than have my phone initialize some js framework 50 times per day.

Dynamic HTML can be done - and is - server-side. Of course, not using a framework is harder, and all the current ones are client-side.

Saying making unbloated pages is impossible to do right just makes it seem like you’re ill informed.

On that note - “Closed-source” JS doesn’t really exist (at least client-side) - all JS is source-availiable in-browser - some may obfuscate, but it isn’t a privacy concern.

The problem is that my phone does something it doesn’t have to.

Having my phone fetch potentially 50 MB (usually 5-15) for each new website is a battery hog. And on a slow connection - to quote your words, “great UX”.

The alternative is a few KB for the HTML, CSS and a small amount of tailor-made JS.

A few KB’s which load a hundered times faster, don’t waste exorbitant amounts of computing power - while in essence losing nothing over your alternative.

“Old pages with minima style” is a non-sequitur. Need I remind you, CSS is a thing. In fact, it may be more reliable than JS, since it isn’t turing-complete, it’s much simpler for browser interpreters to not fuck it up. Also, not nearly the vulnerability vector JS is.

And your message for me and people like me, wanting websites not to outsource their power-hogging frameworks to my poor phone?

Go build your own browser.

What a joke.

You can’t modify the DOM.

But _some most dynamicity can stay - sites can be built freely server-side, and even some “dynamic” functionality like menus can be made using css pseudoclasses.

Sure, you won’t have a Google Docs or Gmail webapp, but 90% of stuff doesn’t actually need one.

A basic website doesn’t require js.

A webshop, for example, does for the part around adding to cart and checkout - but it doesn’t for merely browsing.

They don’t. Not really.

America is nothing economically without its trading partners. And that goes for every country, not just the US.

Accepting what the US does is a stupid idea on any country’s part because Trump’s tariffs have nothing to do with “normal trading”. If anything, they’re abnormal.

And they should be treated as such. Laughed off. Ridiculed. And most certantly not appeased. This entire situation isn’t unlike the Hitler Sudetenland stuff.

Whatever Mr. President says Mr. President gets. Not really a good foreign policy move. It was percisely the US who set up penalties for countries “restricting trade”. Why should other countries not hold the US to the rules?

Both import and export tariffs are barriers to trade. Since Mr President’s childish demands are appeased, soon enough, those countries appeasing will start “reciprocal” tariffs on Mr President’s percieved enemies. Why? Because it’s Mr President’s next logical step.

Now, short of all countries that decided on appeasig the US make a sharp U-turn, what’s done is done.

But, should they decide on such a course of action, they’d isolate America on the world market, which would dissuade Trump from keeping his mercantilism up.

The alternstive is isolating themselves from others, together with America.

According to Israel, the only credible authority on anything and everything, you are Antisemitic Hamas.

Expect a live missile on your local hospital’s doorstep for your crimes against semitism.

Calories are interchangeable like this percisely because a calorie is a unit of energy.

This “energy” we speak of is in stored as chemical potential energy of molecules.

When the human body digests foods, it breaks down molecules to build new ones through chemical reactions. Some such reactions release energy, while others require outside energy to happen. Some molecules are, likewise good stores of energy for the body because they take part in reactions that release energy.

But, at the end of the day, energy is energy. Another type of chemical reactions that release energy is burning. It just so hapoens to be much faster and easier to create and control than the work an ingestive tract does.

The only difference is that burning converts things into a slightly different set of molecules than digestion would (with burning releasing all energy and digestion leavinf some untapped), so energy released by burning isn’t 100% on par to the energy extractable to a human digesting it.

That being said, the difference between the “theoretical” energy (burning) and usable energy (ingestion) isn’t too important. You may put in the 1500 calories on the label, but you won’t utilize all of them. However, taking into account the fact that whenever energy is measured, it’s measured by burning we stay consistent. We may not be 100% percise, but we’re at least consistently wrong. And the amount of unavailiable energy is incredibly small - humans are actually more efficient than machines from an “energy efficiency” standpoint. Given the fact that each person has a different metabolism (and metabolism changes regularily throughout the day, year and with age), neither does trying to be 100% percise make sense, since your values for today will be different from your values for tomorrow.

About losing weight: Weight is lost when energy is taken in, and gained when it used.

Since a human uses about 2000 calories a day, 1500 was discovered as the best middle ground between starving and not gaining weight altogether.

It really doesn’t matter where the calories come from because the only important thing for tracking weight is net energy, gained or lost. 100 calories “trapped” in sugar is the same as 100 calories “trapped in fat”. With the human body being as efficient at sucking out energy out of stuff, the only real difference is in how long the process takes - energy in sugars is practically instantly availiable, while energy in protein takes some time to be extracted.

A net gain or loss of 200 calories is the same, wether it’s through sugars or proteins. But, for the body, it’s all the same. If it has a sufficit of energy it’ll store it (and you’ll have a net weight gain). If it has a deficit, it’ll seem you’ve lost weight, as that energy went into something other than your body’s reserves.

I don’t think individuals should have to pay - even with their private data

Agree.

[…] and that means companies shouldn’t either.

Disagree.

Whn a person pirates, they usually do it for a) themselves, b) their family or c) a close friend. Some might share on a larger basis.

And other than that, they also usually use it for a) educational or b) entertainment purposes.

For companies, it’s alsmost always d) On a larger basis and c) commercially.

As most licences and contracts differentiate the two uses, so should the law.

The fact that I can download a book online and read it (sneakily, and technically illegally) doesn’t mean that if I became an AI LLC I could download it, along with thousands of others, to then sell as my AI’s “knowledge”.

Making that an AI’s knowledge is “storing in a retrieval system” and commercial use isn’t a free use criterion.

The true problem with (common law) copyright is the fact that it can be bought and sold. Or rather, the author doesn’t own it - the publisher does. Which goes against the initial idea of the author getting dividends from their works.

Look, I get it. But I’m also burned out.

Noone forces you to use krita.

Krita’s devs specifically? No. I respect devs by default. I don’t doubt many of Krita’s devs love what they develop. I also use Krita. I don’t have it installed because I don’t need it.

The problem that I keep running into is my (Plasma) defaults being changed for (some) reason. Krita usually gets the defsult for photos. Rhythmbox for audio and MPV for video. I prefer using Pix for photos and VLC for AV.

Noone forces you to use krita.

Plasma, kind of - does.

99% of people do not want a photo editor to be their defsult app for opeing photos. Some artists? Sure. But me? No.

Again, it’s nor a Krita thing specifically - Plasma fucks with my defaults. It’s a Plasma/KDE thing. Krita is just the unfortunate app to have become Plasma’s senseless-default victm.

If it doesn’t fit your workflow or if you think developers are deliberately sabotaging your work

Oh, Krita fits my workflow quite well. Personally am in the process of switxhing to it from GIMP. I know I wrote up a huge wall of mostly garbled text in a passionate rage, but reading just the first part of my rant should’ve made that clear.

I use krita frequently and never met your bug so it’s not as recreatable as you think.

Of course you didn’t. Because who in their right mind enters “0” as the target resolution? That’s right - on one! Except for me, apparently. It’s a stupid bug. One which doesn’t mean anything. It opens no attack surface. It doesn’t cause random crashes. It doesn’t interfere with anyone’s work.

However, you clearly haven’t read my essay. Which is fine with me. It isn’t quality reading material by any sensible metric. But, were you to have read it and tried to recreate the bug, you probably would’ve succeeded.

With that out of the way, my main point was how no - devs (especially KDE, and very transparently so) don’t value your feedback as much as one might think.

Which is - understandable.

As you said, many keep FOSS software alive in their free time for nothing other than the moral gratification. Which is much more than merely commendable. And please, do not try to tell me I don’t respect that when I do.

Where would devs be if they only replied to stupid questions from new users? That’s right - in a tech support hub!

Which is obviously a waste of their time. The fact they don’t do that isn’t anything negative.

The problem, as always is - documentation. My little beef with KDE’s crash wizard is but one example of this deeply-rooted problem.

As is seen in our (both mine and your) example, reading is hard. Writing - harder still. Were I able to read and fully comprehend the ill-fated link on the KDE wizard’s “fuck you” page, you probably wouldn’t be rading this. But alas, I am a human whose reading comprehension skills aren’t top-notch.

Another, equally deeply rooted problem in FOSS is lack of general design thinking and logic. Am I calling KDE devs stupid? Of course not! But any UI (including the KDE crash wizard) should have a few eyes to assess it first. Then research on a batch of test users should be done. And then feedback from the general user population should be listened to. Is that a hard ask? Yes. Step 2 is expensive and as such out of reach of most FOSS projects, and not even Big Tech bothers with step 3.

But am I wrong in calling the KDE modal annoying and badly designed (“stupid”) even, when it has already wasted my time in the same way on 15 occasions? Maybe not. I am angry and it may have been irrational. But I feel my perspective is at least understandable even if the wording isn’t.

In the end, users can’t live without developers and developing user-facing applications makes little sense without users. I’m not in the Linux community because I don’t like FOSS, Linux or KDE. I’m percisely here to support them. However, sometimes issues arrise, and having a good community to help with fixing issues (because the devs can’t (obviously) handle all that load themselves) is good.

Having a community where the answer to a simple, begginer question is basically “bother the devs, they have a Matrix”, “it’s probably your fault” isn’t an answer. It’s a fuck you. And once they find out they’ve been mislead (not even intentionally perhaps), they might go back to Big tech.

Saying to me that I don’t support FOSS, that I don’t like it and that I can go back to Big Tech (when I haven’t been there for over 4 years now), is an even bigger one.

I like FOSS. Saying I don’t respect them wben I truly do is an insult. I merely don’t understand some of their decisions. Probably due to a lack of context and knowledge, which is on me.

But does giving a rant about, what are tiny problems in the running of a huge machine known as My Computer, spurred on by someone’s unhelpful advice, given in hopes of starting a discussion and the wholly implausible odds of the issue at hand given as an example being fixed due to it call flr the reply “Go to Big Tech, there’s clearly no room for you here”?

I’d hope not.

Are you sure it’s not a you problem? Or isn’t it a you problem? Go read the docs.

Have you contacted the devs? Reporting a bug would be helpful.

Sorry to be so rude, but you really hit a nerve. It isn’t even your fault.

Anyway, rant time:

KDE and bug reports. They always come to you like "Hey, bug reports are so really importsnt to us! And we’ll guide you through it. Here’s our lovely oh-so-helpful wizard!

Except it ain’t lovely. Nor helpful. The only thing it does is pop up whenever a KDE app has an aneurysm and asks you for a backtrace. And then… backtrace is declsred useless.

Why even bother people with the stupid popup if in 90% of cases it’s declared as useless. Why not do the backtrace silently and then annoy the user only once you declare the bug “useful”.

Last instance of this: I was using my KDE desktop. For some reason, Plasma seems to really hate me, because I need to fix default apps every few weeks. For some reason, jpegs and pngs open in Krita by default.

So, wanting to close Krita, becuse I don’t need an entire editor to look at a photo, with tools taking up 25% of the screen, when it asked me about the import resolution, I pressed 0. Krita proceeded to crash and open the report bug dialog.

Not having seen the KDE report wizard for quite some time, I felt inclined to go fill out the report. Got through the first few pages just fine. Then came the backtrace. Sure, do it. I’d like whoever debugs this not snooping through a data dump containing god knows what, but sure. Then it gets called useless. AFTER you’ve taken 30-ish seconds of my life on preliminary questions.

Look, if you’re gonna ask people for input and discard said input if something unrelated happens, at least ask after the something unrelated decided it’s not gonna be yeeted away. No need for the “Oh, wait, we don’t really need this, it’ll take too much time to play detective” after the user already passed three screens of interrogation.

Anyway, the point is:

KDE clearly doesn’t care about bug reports. Because if they did, the guide on installing backtrace-enabled packages once the inevitable verdict of “useless” wouldn’t be a wiki page with the generaal message of “find backtrace-enabled packages, you buffoon” when you could point to them.

Another problem with this is: when a bug happens without backtraceable packages, how is the user supposed to recreate it if they don’t know how?

And besides, my bug is very recreateable. Open an image in Krita (preferably from Dolphin, after Plasma mangled the defaults, again and again). When prompted for some integer, enter “0”. Instead of a generic error message, see the entire app sink into oblivion.

Anyway, if anyone feels like reporting the totally useless report with totally unrecreateable conditions, feel free. I won’t. Just too much work, for it to be discarded just like that by some wizard no one even thought through.

And why would I contact the devs? Or rather, where could I do that? They’re worse than government agencies, for god’s sake. The right person or place just doesn’t exist. Wherever you go to or ask, it’s someone else’s responsibility or your fault. And the wizard, that true single point of contact - refuses any contact just as consistently.

So tell people to call the devs. Tell them it’s their fault. Tell them to make a bug report. Say it just might help not just you, but someone else when all hell will freeze over before anything like that becomes even a remote possibility.

Talk about adding insult to injury.

Being government-run, the store will obviously have:

• a poor selection of products leaving you with no choice
• ugly packaging meaning only the poors will go there
• long waiting lists for entry
• yearly, quarterly and monthly subscriptions, all required and renewed seperately, taking hours in a queue and three trips to the social services hq each to renew
• quotas on all items, groups of items and time limited - whenever one is passed the rest don’t matter
• no added value like delivery or good customer service
• no market research or innovation
• no incentive to do better or improve service
• an active loss of money due to bueraucratic ineficiencies

(Likewise, also spined it (almost) as much as possible.)

Paid luches are nice. But if I get the choice between $10.000 yearly more or paid lunches, obviously i’d go for the cash. It’s supposed to be a bonus (i.e. free), and not a way to cut corners and undermine your employees.

Maybe it does do the company some good in terms of retention, but counting on “I’ll save $6k if I spend $4k on lunches per person on average by cutting pay for new hires” is not a good strategy. Same for ping pong tables, horseraces, pizza parties and whatever else.

An interesting way to misspell “subscription”