Restaurants rely more and more on tips to make up server wages as cost of living skyrockets and workers need more and more hourly in order to survive. It sucks that businesses aren’t making the difference from their own pockets, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tip. You’re not fighting the system, you’re denying people a living wage.

I worked at a coffee shop and 40% of my wage was tips. I wouldn’t be able to afford to live otherwkse. Please tip your barista.

Tipping isn’t really a social norm as much as it is a social imperative-- the food is considerably cheaper than it should be because you’re expected to make up the cost difference in tips.

If you’re talking about standard security cameras usually the footage will get completely overwritten after afeew days unless there was an incident to prompt review of the footage-- and even then it usually gets deleted at some point. Its not like with social media data gathering where they’re collecting all that information in order to build a personal profile of everyone-- security cameras just exist to review incidents that happen in the public realm and there’s no real incentive for a public transit agency to track every single person that appears on their cameras.

There’s cameras everywhere watching the road too if you really care that much and you better believe your car model and license plate is a much more reliable form of identifying information than a blurry face on a bus security camera.

Kate is great!

I’m typing this message on GrapheneOS. My point isn’t that it’s completely impossible but rather that degoogling basically has to become your hobby in order to fully do it. It requires a level of effort that’s not practical for the average person so its unreasonable to expect everyone to do it. Also, FOSS and non-google alternatives are often not as good as the service google provides for free, like Google Maps. I use OSMAnd as my daily maps app, but its pretty finnicky and isn’t anywhere close to the smooth, polished experience of Google Maps, and its lacking some important functionality. I still use it, because I’m committed to trying to avoid Google software as much as possible, but its definitely not the best experience.

Also, a lot of institutions andemployers use the G-Suite and so its impoesible for people that have to do business with those organizations to be entirely free of google. My university uses the G-Suite and when school comes back in the fall I’ll be stuck using it again. The local school district does too.

I run a degoogled Pixel 6A with GrapheneOS and Linux on my desktop. I logged in to Google once on my phone and still haven’t logged in a single time on my desktop. I don’t use any of the gsuite apps.

I don’t think the average person should or could reasonably do this. Google is so closely ingrained in society that removing it from your life requires a significant amount of effort to make sure you can still have as much of the stuff you need to participate in society as possible. Some of that stuff just doesn’t exist now without Google.

I’m glad that the software and tools and resources exist to de-google yourself for those that want to but its just not an option for most people.

Everyone is recommending Tails but I feel like that’s a lot more intense security and privacy wise than GrapheneOS, since Tails runs in a live environment only.

It feels a lot more snappy, clean, and modern. I think most of that is because it hasn’t accumulated a lot of the bloat and feature creep that Reddit has over the years. The biggest downside, though, is that the community is much smaller and there isn’t a lot of the niche content that Reddit is so good for.