This is what is really dangerous about the right-wing right now. The savvier fascists have figured out that support for Israel is a bipartisan loser, so they’re staking an anti-Israel position, and some of them (Tucker Carlson, for example) are starting to integrate their antisemitic dog whistles into it.

The left-wing should counter with any anti-zionist, anti-colonial position that explicitly rejects antisemitism, but unfortunately, the defacto left-wing party is the Democrats, who have essentially staked out the same pro-Israel middle east policy as the neocons. Right now, Trump’s support for Israel is keeping the right pro-Israel for now, but when he’s gone (and his health makes that appear imminent), the right may outflank the Democrats on Israel, leaving us to choose between antisemitism and genocide. I would guess that’s what Vance is doing here.

Ok, well, most restaurants have notoriously small margins (3-5%) with tipping. So, setting aside what you think should and shouldn’t be, what is an actual solution? Eliminate tipping and raise prices? Restructure the agricultural pipeline to lower costs? Cap commercial real estate prices to reduce rental overhead? Because as it stands now, you can’t eliminate tipping without getting the money somewhere, and it’s not in the restaurants profits.

If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don’t really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you’re right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it’s important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.

All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let’s say you go to your local bakery; you’ve never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they’ll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he’s required to make up the difference anyway. At first it’s great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren’t earning enough tips, ane he’s making up the differences. That’s when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they’re overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.

Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I’d have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.

Yeah, I haven’t seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour still isn’t a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, “Fight for Fifteen,” was outdated and needed to be the, “Fight for Twenty,” and we’ve had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.

If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren’t enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.

It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista’s jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they’re all getting a living wage, and your tip isn’t a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.

Just gonna add a source to back this up:

The no-tipping policy lasted just six months at Chang’s Momofuku Nishi. Claus Meyer, a Noma co-founder, announced in February that he was ending the no-tipping policy at his own New York restaurant, Agern, after two years, citing slow business as a result of the higher menu prices. Gabe Stulman reversed course at his restaurant, Fedora, after four months without tips, telling Eater that guests were ordering less food than they had before.

People are dumb. Even if they should know they’re saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it’s bad.

Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions.

This is an extremely debatable assertion that scientists and philosophers will still be debating long after you and I are dead, but empirically, the evidence is pointing towards, “No, your consciousness is just a byproduct of that lump of meat in your skull.” Phineas Gage, for example, discovered that a huge portion of what made him, him was actually his left-frontal lobe.

We could argue about conciousness, the soul, and the ship of theses for hours, and it would all still be opinion, but what is not opinion is this; your consciousness is being run on meat hardware, physical damage to or a chemical imbalance in that hardware will effect your consciousness, and it is constantly running processes, even when in sleep mode, until it is permanently shutdown. Based on that information, I would not let anyone disintegrate my brain, even if fhey reassembled it perfectly.

Never bought into the whole, “sleep is the same thing,” argument. There’s no period during which your brain functions cease during sleep. They slow during non-REM sleep, then reach near waking levels once you enter REM, but they never end. That’s not remotely like having your entire body disassembled at molecular level and rebuilt somewhere else. One is essentially like a computer that’s screen has gone idle while it performs background tasks. The other is like transferring all of your files to a new computer and then throwing the original into a woodchipper.

Read the room, Yahoo Scout.

Tell that to Minneapolis.

Just do something, even if it’s a terrible idea.

Example: I need to put up this shelf. I’ll get my tools. But first I need to find the right position, measure, make sure it’s level, line up the guide holes…well, before I pick the position, I should check for studs. Where’s the stud finder? Oh, I need a pencil too. And those magic sponges. Do I need to buy more of those? HOLY SHIT, IT’S BEEN TWO HOURS AND I’VE DONE NOTHING?

Drills hole in wall.

Ok. Now there’s a big hole in the wall. I need to resolve that before my wife comes home in an hour. That’s motivating. Let’s see if i can cover that with a shelf.

Do you mean DS9? I’m pretty sure Voyager had regular shuttles and the Delta Flyer.

This car is dressed like it’s got a sitcom on UPN.

Yeah, they learned that capitulation isn’t profitable when they fired Jimmy Kimmel and everyone canceled their Disney+ subscription. From then on, they decided to stand up for free speech until their dying breath (or until the cost/benefit shifts and the harassment from the FCC costs them more than the blowback from collaborating with the regime).

I don’t think I could eat a whole house.

Roaches infest your home and spread diseases. Butterflies live outside and spread pollen.

“Here’s a graph that shows that, on average, real wages have gone up more than inflation!”

“Well my wages haven’t gone up, and now I can’t afford groceries.”

“Did you even look at the graph?”

We’ll see. The only cure foe scapegoating, far-right populism is genuine economic populism. I’m optimistic that, if we excise enough of the third-way rot from the party, the remaining Democratic hacks will see which way the wind is blowing and fall in line behind an actual progressive vision.

A) This person is very clearly not saying they are the same, and even provided you a visual guide explaining the difference.

B) “Fixing the economy,” always means stabilizing the stock market and lowering the deficit, but never improving the material conditions of the working class. Obama stabilized the stock market by bailing out the banks who created the financial crisis, not the homeowners facing foreclosure. Biden curbed inflation with supply-side measures instead of price control. Even Clinton responded to the H.W. Bush recession by gutting welfare and deregulating Wall Street (hell, repealing Glass-Steagall is one of the main reasons we got the financial crisis in the first place).

The Democratic Socialists are fielding a lot of viable challenges against Democrats this year, both in open seats and against incumbents. Mamdani is the very famous example, but there were a lot of DSA victories in city council races across the country, and there’s also a primary challenge for Rep. Richie Torres.

He’s not DSA affiliated, but Graham Platner just pushed centrist Janet Mills out of the Democratic primary race, allowing him to challenge Republican Susan Collins. Progressive Analilia Mejia also defeated AIPAC centrist Tom Malinowski in her primary and went on to win the special election to represent New Jersey’s 11th district. It’s still early, but this is could be a real reckoning for the centrist liberals that have ruled the party for the last 3 decades.