Officers are trained that way because:

That falls outside the business transaction we're talking about here. You chose to come in at a certain wage; how much the company profits from your work does not enter into it.

But "great service" is "take the order, bring it out, disappear until I want to pay the check and then stick around to receive my credit card". Don't pry into my business, don't stick around and chat - we're not friends - don't ask me "how things are" while I'm eating, etc. And don't drop off a bill and assume I need…

Umm, wait, so because we all *wink-wink*, *nudge-nudge*, and touch our noses like it's The Sting, that makes it okay?

I appreciate your timely response!

It depends where you live. Tips are lower in the midwest because the food is worse, the service is less well-trained, and it's a lot cheaper to live there. But the authors of these tipping articles usually live coastally, where tipping is higher.

See, people like you - for whom eating out is supposed to be like a day spa, where the experience of being waited on and calling the shots is more important than eating a meal - are the people who are ruining it for me, who just wants to have great food and conversation with friends and not be bothered by a bunch of…

Somebody did work on your behalf, with a pre-existing agreement that you would remunerate them for it (nobody forced you into the restaurant and you know how this works.)

You don't seem to have any idea what the topic is, it looks like.

I never said women don't like sex, and I'm absolutely not "blaming" women for anything.

You're not making any fucking sense at all. How does that "refer us to straight relationships"? Gay men and women are men and women, and their relative libidos wouldn't be related to their orientation.

I'm the one who raised the topic as a rebuttal to the notion that male sexuality is never stigmatized, so yes, it's on topic because I raised the topic. I do actually get to introduce new evidence into the topic, believe it or not.

But just about everybody's "actual experience" is that men have a stronger libido than women. That's commensurate with the abundant scientific evidence that demonstrates a stronger sex drive in men than in women, in aggregate; commensurate with evidence that demonstrates that female-female couples are having sex the…

But what's your actual scientific evidence for that view? Doesn't it stand to reason to conclude that if women actually did want it as much as men, they'd be as frequently stupid about it?

I still don't understand your point. I said it referring to gay men, which is why we're talking about gay men. And no, we're not talking about "hetero dynamics", whatever the hell that's supposed to be; we're talking about the abundant scientific evidence that men value sex, in aggregate, far more than women do.

Gay men are still men.

Yes, but the rate of the decline in frequency is interesting - it's steepest for female-female couples, shallowest for male-male couples, and in the middle for female-male couples. Yes, a decline in sexual frequency over the course of a relationship happens to everybody. Nobody's disputing that, just like we're not…

Men are shamed for different reasons, but it's just absurd to say that men aren't ever shamed for their sexual choices. Anthony Weiner? David Vitter? Elliot Spitzer? Larry Craig? Mark Sanford? Bill Clinton? Is there a female equivalent of any of the above? Shouldn't that inform our view about the relative degree of…

I just don't get the part where "hot woman that anyone would want to have sex with" or "fashionable clothes" are prerequisites for casual sex with, like, any normal single guy you're acquainted with. Yeah, I really don't think she would have nearly as much trouble finding casual sex with someone she knows as a man…

Gay men are shamed both for their sexual orientation and for their sexual activity, so it's not accurate to say that men aren't shamed for having sex. (I agree that men who have sex with women, provided they're not paying money for it, don't accrue much social shame; but it's undeniable that men experience shame as a…