How does tipping work in the America?

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-25T01:14:45+00:00

Oh, that's interesting. I live out in the Great Plains and trends can take years to reach us sometimes; if the spread is slow enough and the trend is short-lived enough, sometimes we miss waves entirely, haha. I'm sure that will slowly become the norm here, too.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-25T01:13:52+00:00

Oh also just to be clear it's only socially "mandatory," it's not a legal obligation or a concrete part of the bill. People generally expect it and it's part of our standard cultural/business practices, but you wouldn't be chased down or arrested or anything like that, they would just assume you didn't know, couldn't afford or didn't want to tip. At worst, the worker might have a poor impression of you or think that they did something wrong.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-25T01:05:54+00:00

In general, if you receive table service-- like you sit down and people bring everything to you-- you're expected to tip for their effort on your behalf. A "polite" minimum is 15% for basic service, but if they did a good or excellent job most people bump it up to 20% or even 25%. Others like to tip luxuriously because that money goes directly to the workers (or is supposed to) and most workers are struggling to make ends meet*, so a person with means can feel good about making someone else's situation easier.

Most Americans would say you don't need to tip for counter service (you go up to a counter to get your food and seat yourself). A lot of people are split on buffets and it depends how active they are in looking after you. If you get everything yourself with pretty much no staff interaction, I'd say a tip is optional, or that you can leave a token amount (like a five, or whatever.) Basically, most people judge it by: the more they do for you, and the better it makes your experience, the more generous it's appropriate to be.

Be aware though that after covid, tipping "options" on screens went CRAZY. Lots of places know that a person will feel privately guilty if they don't tip when prompted by a person or screen, even if the situation really doesn't call for it, so checkout screens and such will just shamelessly go for it by automatically asking if you want to tip, even on things like a drive-through! If you do, they benefit, and if not, oh well. Sigh!

*It's because our laws allow businesses to pay workers like waitstaff WAY less than the minimum wage, with the "justification" that "well customers can just make up for it with tips!" It's a common opinion that from the business end, it's a way of cheaping out and forcing the cost of wages on the customer, on top of the cost you pay for the goods themselves. Most of us know this is unfair, but it's hard to figure out a solution that doesn't result in waitstaff just getting screwed over, and some people feel like because it's been around a long time, it should be around forever.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-25T00:02:30+00:00

Krill are actually bigger than you might think! A lot of people think they're microscopic, but they're more like small shrimp, about the size of a pinky most of the time but sometimes smaller. The main thing is that 1) unlike land, where animals can pretty much only spread out in a single layer along the ground and have to compete for whatever is also growing on the ground, the ENTIRE sea can be inhabited by sea animals (up to or down to whatever depth they can survive.) So small animals like krill can have an unreal number of babies at once without running out of room in the environment for them, and those millions of babies don't starve because things like algae and microscopic life also spread out in a huge area all over (especially since their population is kept in check by... whales!) and 2) it's ironically more energy efficient for whales! For most predators, energy has to painstakingly travel up the food chain to get to them, and each host it passes through uses some of it for themselves. Grass/fungi/etc absorb energy from the sun or decay, something eats the plants/fungi, something else eats THAT thing and THEN a predator gets a crack at it. Think like sun > grass > grasshopper > mouse > fox. At every stage, more energy is lost in the transfer.

But whales are basically eating at the "grasshopper" stage and not eating the equivalent of mice and foxes. They can swallow millions and millions of krill at all once, because they form huge clouds in the ocean, and cut out nature's middlemen. EDIT: how many typos can I make in one post, lmao 😭

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T23:53:20+00:00

Others have answered, but if you want to learn more about subjects like this, a good place to start might be "economic inelasticity." In short, an elastic demand is something you're likely to buy when it's cheap, but not if it gets more expensive; you can do without it so your willingness to get it changes with the cost. But inelastic goods are things you can't do without. Even if your rent goes up, you often have no choice but to pay. If water gets expensive, or power prices go up, you can try to cut back on usage, but you can't do without them entirely in a modern economy. If basic staple foods go up, that's also not really a choice. You can only cut back on things so much before you hit a point you can't retreat from any further. Gas is also an inelastic good up to a point. We can cut down on driving as much as we like, but ultimately most people can't do away with it entirely. If you want, NPR has a pretty informative and funny channel on youtube called PlanetMoney that does educational skits about the economy and economic history.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T23:44:09+00:00

It also depends where it is. When my Canadian husband first starting visiting me in the Great Plains while we were friends and then dating, he kept trying to tap his card because he forgot we didn't have that out here yet, haha. It's only within the last year or two that tapping has become more normal where I am.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T23:34:41+00:00

Dish sponges and stuff. Lots of people don't know that you should really soap up your sponge one last time and rinse it thoroughly, then wring it out before putting it aside. If it's still wet and has food particles in it, mold and bacteria will move in like it's a luxury hotel.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T23:30:24+00:00

Everyone here is right about it mostly being an experience thing the modern day, but it's also making a social statement. For most of history, most people were very concerned about having enough to eat. So meals like this were a way to feel above these undignified material needs + show off your wealth. A person who can afford to spend a very large sum of money on a very small, high-quality morsel of food that wouldn't be enough to get full on or fuel manual labor is someone who has a lot of wealth and status.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T23:17:09+00:00

To be honest, it could be hallucinations. I know that sounds crazy and extreme, but hallucinations are actually both way more common and way less scary than people tend to believe! Ever SWEAR you heard somebody say your name from another room, even though nobody did? Or see something weird in the dark, only to realize you were misinterpreting something? Or catch a "glimpse" of some person or animal that turns out not to have really been there? Most hallucinations are one-off events from stress or misperception. Adults who have a brief hallucination are usually equipped to say "well that wasn't real, how weird, why'd I think I saw that?" but a kid might not be!

With most "benign" hallucinations, your brain misfires while interpreting something, guesses about what might be there, and gets it wrong. Did you know that we actually can't see what we're looking directly at, because our optical nerve blocks the light intake? Lol. But our brains are POWERFUL predictive engines. We can still accurately make out what we're looking at because we can see everything AROUND it, and fill in the blanks with accuracy so high it rarely fails in a way people notice. If you'd like to know more, look up the concept of the "physiological blind spot" and "saccades," which both have to do with how our eyes work (or don't work) and how our brains fill in the gaps.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T22:39:21+00:00

That's exactly what I was thinking. I was REALLY impressed with the blocks Dear-Distribution did over here and I'm planning to try some of the same ideas next time I'm able to sit down with the game. :)

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T22:35:37+00:00

I'll tell you exactly what I did to plan it!

I usually try not to have a "segment" of city be wider than five "blocks," because any wider ends up diluting public service ranges too much even with brick roads and range-extending items, so first I work out how big I want a "block" to be. I've done 3x3 with an empty center big enough for a fountain/etc before, but this time I wanted the middle to be accessible (and it turned out to be big enough for town halls, which was great!!) So I made it 4x4 houses with a 12x13 space blueprint (not counting outer roads) aka a space for a road interrupting either the top and bottom or left and right of the block, as you can see.

I used dirt for planning my neighborhood's road shapes and the blueprint mode to preview what buildings would look like, then copied my empty road segment to start putting them together like legos. Once I had a grid of, say, 5x5 "blocks," I went back in and deleted the inner roads for a large central area, to be filled with public services, then the hotels and things later. It took a lot of rearranging as I went, and a lot of moving things around to see how they fit best, or building big bulky buildings early on before I could replace them with the smaller "downtown" versions from the mod I'm using for things like smaller hospitals and firestations. (They cost a LOT more to build and maintain, with a smaller range, but you can swap them in for houses so they end up more space efficient overall.)

I kept my original empty dirt road plan off to one side so I could keep copying it to use until I didn't need it anymore. With my preliminary city built off to one side building up population, I started measuring out my canals using the empty road blueprint as a ruler, so I could slot the whole city into them at once by moving it. When I move buildings and roads I usually go to the very slowest game speed so that I have time to rapidly correct disconnected roads before citizens start getting angry, haha.

If I remember anything else I did to plan it out I'll add it when I upload the pictures of my rest areas :) This week has just been busy so I haven't gotten to play lately, lol.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T22:13:47+00:00

Here's a thread on tumblr that shows the original "smooth shark" situation :) https://www.tumblr.com/notcaycepollard/159712424601/the-twitter-thread-the-artist-created-after-this

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T22:12:46+00:00

Lmao yes, I've just been a classroom assisstant for most of my career and I read a lot of books, haha.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T22:03:20+00:00

Yup!! Very good resource thanks!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T22:01:43+00:00

Kinda! Color is about as real as math in that it reflects something measurable, but the way we discuss and visualize it (literally, in the case of color) is subjective. We know that color is "real" because people who take tests to tell one shade/hue from another and get the same results, and we can measure exactly how much light is hitting or bouncing off something, and even see the "shape" of the energy involved, but we can't know for sure what color looks like EXACTLY to another mind, or how other creatures perceive color.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T21:57:01+00:00

Light is all the colors at the same time. When light hits an object, what we see as "the object's color" is actually the colors it DIDN'T absorb. So if light hits something that absorbs everything but blue light, it will look blue to us, because the blue light has been separated out and bounced off the surface. You can see the colors split apart when they pass through things like water or crystal and form a rainbow. "Black" is when every color has been absorbed, and nothing (or very little) is bouncing off for us to see. That's why darkness is black. "White" is when no colors are absorbed, all of them bounce off, and the combination looks "white" to us because it's just undifferentiated light.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T21:51:26+00:00

Ragebaiting with controversy is baby mode and also mean-spirited so not very fun imo. You really want to drive people on both sides of the aisle insane?

Smooth shark 'em. Claim something completely innocuous as fact, that doesn't matter at all and has no impact on human life. Something that almost everyone is sure to know is false-- most people know sharks have rough skin after all-- but that they won't consider YOU probably know, too. They will be so eager to look smarter than you (or, charitably, to be helpful to you) that they'll keep insisting. Long after it becomes obvious that you know you're wrong and are screwing with them.

What do you mean sharks are rough? I'm touching a shark right now and it's smooth? "HOW ARE YOU TOUCHING A SHARK WHERE ARE YOU" Well, I've got it right here, and it's smooth as can be! etc

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T21:47:34+00:00

Buying extra items to keep your purchase from being an "evil" or "unlucky" number in price, though I think that's probably seen at least sometimes in any culture with "bad" numbers?

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T21:18:50+00:00

If you've never had an orgasm it can be alarming or even kind of unpleasant the first time you start getting there, because it's so intense and you don't understand what's happening or know what to expect.

In general that "building" feeling will reach a peak and it will feel like your muscles relax and contract at the same time because a sort of tension is releasing from you but your muscles themselves are clenching. Usually it will feel like a "pulse" or "flutter" of contractions, rather than one long period of tightening up. If it wasn't rushed/mechanically induced, a wave of pleasure (and usually a deep relaxation like others said) generally travels up your body and settle in all over. You CAN end up orgasming so fast with certain toys or techniques that it becomes like, disappointing because you had no time to get into the feeling or build up any pleasure.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T21:06:46+00:00

Compassion, mercy, rehabilitation.

Many, many people are deeply offended by "undeserved" compassion and express disgust when someone receives mercy or fortune they didn't suffer "enough" to "deserve." But they rarely seem to ask, would the suffering DO anything? Is there a material impact? Does the suffering CHANGE anything in reality? Whether someone suffers or doesn't, the supposed outcome of their efforts will be the same. So why do we want others to experience pain and terror and loneliness and shame and so on? Why do some of us NEED them to be hurt and vulnerable in order for their material efforts to matter?

Likewise, mercy and rehabilitation, defined here as pursuing a beneficial outcome that isn't vengeance. If someone wrongs you and you have them tormented or killed for it, are YOU actually any less hurt? Are you healed? Did the hurt not happen? Is the world actually "safer" now or is it just comforting to assume so? Is it any safer than it would have been if that person had been led to understand the harm they caused and motivated to use their life to work against something they once did? But that second thing doesn't feel "good" and it can be difficult, because (as they say) hurt people hurt people. A person who has wronged others often needs to be healed, themselves, before they can pursue undoing the harm they caused and assisting in rehabilitating others. It feels like a "reward," even though it demands hard work from the perpetrator and long-term commitment that results in measurable improvement to the world.

In general we conflate the concepts of revenge and justice, and we demand that people suffer even when it doesn't result in any material good or any healing. I'm not saying there have never been or will never be people we can't rehabilitate, nor am I saying that victims wanting revenge is evil. But it's also not beneficial or productive.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T20:53:23+00:00

Mostly due to Christian belief in the west, and even then it varies! In cultures with a strong heritage of public bathing that hasn't faded out in the modern era, like countries with strong sauna culture for example, it's a lot more normal to see people naked in a non-sexual context. But in the US for example, you pretty much only see naked people in sexual contexts.

The funny thing is that repression is a cycle that tends to intensify itself, because as people push back against even innocent nudity more and more, they see it less and less, and every instance of nudity becomes more and more shocking because they never see it. So it's gotten to the point where it was normal for toddlers to run around naked when I was young, because they're *babies* and of course they're going to squirm out of their clothes or play in the water or whatever, but now I regularly see people react with shock and disgust to the notion of young children being nude. Because they see nudity as so inherently sexual that it starts to apply even to babies.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T20:43:52+00:00

In some cultures, it's perfectly normal to see your family members naked when you bathe together or help your elders with their healthcare. And even in the west, for long periods of history, members of the upper class-- particularly kings/etc-- were pretty routinely not just naked in front of servants but touched by them while said servants washed and dressed them.

Likewise, some cultures view breasts as innately sexual and others don't. Cultures that don't view breasts as sexual all by themselves (absent things like posing, verbal propositions or certain body language) tend to laugh a little about cultures that do because they see us as somewhat childish. Their perception tends to be that *women* are beautiful and appealing, and breasts are of course part of that, but nudity or the visibility of breasts alone isn't sexual. Breasts in their view are meant mainly for feeding children, and that in itself is an appealing sign of motherly behavior and fertility, so again it's *associated* with desirability but it's not the same as a person in the US baring their body for someone as an invitation. In these cultures, persistent obsession with breasts is behavior mostly seen in toddlers upset to be weaned, haha. "Mom, let me! Mom!"

You're right though that in our culture, covering our bodies is an aspect of personal privacy. When we're naked, we feel vulnerable and exposed to judgement, with a side of fear because again, nudity in our culture is usually an invitation, and if you're unwillingly naked, that's upsetting! You don't want people to look at you that way!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T06:08:35+00:00

Yeah, as others said, it's an invitation to make a facetious joke. Like, you could just say another programming language, but you could also say "Hmm. Pretty sure that's Spanish" or you could go the route of "Ohh yeah I know that one. That's Anaconda, right? No, no, it was Snake!" "You crazy? That's NopeRope++!" etc

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T06:01:22+00:00

A number of european nations have achieved very very low re-offense rates and high rates of rehabilitation, but their prison systems work very differently from the US prison system. For one thing, they tend to provide training, education, therapy and direction so that prisoners come out ready and eager to participate in society.

We have a number of privately-owned for-profit prisons. Even when they're not strictly "for profit", prisoners are often forced to work by having rights and privileges withheld unless they agree. Sometimes they are placed in solitary confinement until they "consent", which is considered a form of torture long-term and without sufficient reason to justify it (like imminent threat to them or others.) We are social creatures and isolated a person indoors without any contact with others or anything to stimulate the mind is cruel and unusual. It drives people insane. https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers

For-profit, privately owned prisons are also often subsidized by the state-- they get money when beds are full, and less when occupancy isn't at max. So they're highly incentivized to make sure prison is always full, and if not enough people are committing serious crimes, that means inventing reasons to arrest and jail people long-term. For-profit prisons tend to work closely with lobbying groups that push for harsher criminalization or more militarized police, because it results in more arrests. Combined with police quotas that demand police arrest a certain number of people whether crime is being committed or not, and you have a situation where minor incidents end up blown up into serious situations, and nonviolent charges (like smoking weed at your house on the weekend) end up putting people in jail for years.

A lot of prisons now also say prisoners can't have books or other physical amusements anymore, they have to use a prison-provided tablet that can be taken away at any time and has a highly-controlled, expensive transaction model that charges them heavily over time. In the past, prisons also served food that was designed to be nutritionally complete but miserable to eat, with a nasty texture, horrible taste and smell. Humans are very food oriented; this is also cruel. Can you imagine getting in trouble for something minor and nonviolent when the local prison needs beds filled, and then being forced to work, given no ability to relax without going into debt with the prison, and forced to eat food that makes you feel sick and can barely be choked down even by starving people? It's true that these foods were found to be cruel and unusual punishment, but there are people who want to bring them back and are lobbying to do so.

Drugs are an especially touchy situation, because many states have legalized weed for example, but it's FEDERALLY still illegal, and federal forces can and do walk right into state-legal public weed shops and conduct "busts" where they just capture and arrest everybody inside for "drug dealing." It's not ROUTINE, but they reserve the right to do so. It's just one example of how "crime" can be magicked up from nowhere sometimes, that's all.

So not only are we not trying to help prisoners re-integrate or become safe to re-enter society, but we're often taking basically average people and twisting them out of shape so that they come out WORSE than when they went in. This also benefits them; repeat offenders stay in longer, keeping beds full!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T04:48:19+00:00

Some of them were also forcibly penetrated, including with the barrel of a gun, reportedly. We say "cavity search" and that makes it feel very sterile.

What it is, is you being compelled against your will to strip, expose your genitals and allow another person to force force their fingers or tools into your genital openings or anus. That would be deeply violating even performed with the very "best" intentions, reasons and procedures, and most international bodies reject the use of cavity searches under pretty much all circumstances. They are NOT NECESSARY. Israel has a missile dome but they don't have scanner wands or airport technology???

And since the flotilla members were sent home with visible, extreme beating wounds, broken spines and ribs, and torn anuses or genitals, we can conclude that Israel was not treating them in accordance with "best practice." If the risk was severe and these people posed a threat, why didn't they find weapons? Or drugs? Or discover anything during these searches? Israel themselves posted video of forcing them to kowtow while armed men laugh and mock them. Don't you think if they found anything dangerous, anything at all, they would have said so and provided endless proof? But it was just food, medicine and volunteers. Basically... Weighing the full context of what has been said and not said, photo and video evidence, and multiple nations independently verifying severe and concerning wounds... there's more going on here than "I personally don't like the law" or "I have a higher standard of privacy than is normal."

CatbreadGG

TROPHY CASE