Seriously, fuck tipping, it doesn’t improve service. I’ll pay for the $15 wage in my food, and I will see that cost on the menu. Done.

Yep, in all of California the state minimum wage of $10.50 per hour applies to tipped employees. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t tip because of this. After all, $10.50 per hour is still <$22,000 per year and (most of) California is expensive to live in. $15/hr is > $10.50/hr, but still just over $30,000 a year, so I…

A) Tourists who forget that DC has different server pay than their town

Further, I found the “tipping culture leads to sexual harassment” argument hard to understand. If you get rid of tipping culture completely, then all server/bartenders will make the same (not great) hourly rate. Many server/bartenders (especially in DC) make really good hourly wages ($30-40/hr) because of tipping…

There’s nothing about this that caps wages. Several cities on the West Coast don’t allow servers to be paid a discounted wage, and people still tip there. 

It’s odd that businesses only seem to ever want to negotiate the cost of labor down as far as possible. They don’t do that shit with utilities.

Agreed. If you can’t afford to pay your employees, you can’t afford to run your business. 

Good. As someone said one time, if you can’t run a business without exploiting your workers by paying them poverty level wages, then you don’t deserve to have a business. Either figure out a business model that allows you pay a fair and decent wage or fucking pack it in and make room for someone who can. 

Good point, and many of these huge tech companies do. But those really are “drop in the bucket” programs. Great for the kids that are born near the corporate headquarters of Google or Apple, but not so much for anywhere else.

This is where human judgment is most important. A hard brake may or may not useful in scenarios involving sudden lane change of the car in front of you:

Thank you for the balanced, non biased assessment.

It almost stops. It’s a low speed collision that should not cause any harm to the passengers.

Yes, I know what the studies say, and I remember the Jez pieces about it. I still think it sounds awful and like you’re incapable of speaking in complete sentences. Also, it seems to be just as common among men, especially the younger you go so I don’t think the generalization that it is a feminine speech pattern/tic…

I think we should all evaluate others based on their interactions in elementary school. It is the only real assessment of someone’s character.

I think sociopaths assume that all other people are like them.

Some people ...don’t torture their Sims?

Not only that, but my favorite conversation from a cabbie after showing up 30 minutes LATE was
“Where you headed?”
Me: “East side.”
Cabbie: “How far?”
Me: “All the way to the other end of town.”
Cabbie: “I don’t go that far, I’ll take you half way unless you want to pay for a return fare.”
Me: “(Step out of vehicle) No…

It is especially ironic that SF had THE WORST CAB INDUSTRY IN THE COUNTRY, and it was where Uber and Lyft were invented.

The medallions are sold at auction, so the market sets the price, not the city. Some people speculated that the price of medallions would always rise, and paid more than they were worth considering the current income they could make from them, hoping a rise in the price of fares and the value of the medallion would…

So very much this.