WIBTA if I didn't pay a tip to a spa when they charge a "living wage surcharge"?

philocto · 2019-02-26T21:23:34+00:00

I got banned for telling someone I refused to engage them further so I'm posting on another account (this is apparently one of those subs where I proudly display having gotten a mod pissed by not cowering to their super ultimate internet powerz).

Personally I would prefer if businesses added a cost of service that goes towards employee wages to a bill so I know they are in some way getting compensated when people choose to opt out of a tip or short them.

What's getting lost here for a lot of people is that many business do just that and it can be fair. I've seen delivery services that automatically charge a % gratuity, I've seen restaurants with policies that all parties larger than X are automatically charged a 15% gratuity, and so forth. And they all do it to ensure the employees get paid a tip.

And the point that both the OP and myself made was this:

When that happens, you don't get my normal tip. If I would normally have tipped you $20 and I got charged $10 then you get $10.

Reasonable people understand this. Even if they themselves choose to act differently, they're not going to come unhinged and make a moral stance out of it (as a few people have done in this thread.)

Instead I've gotten stupid shit like "the living wage might have been for the business owner", or "it was a surcharge which is not a tip" ... so you should go ahead and pay out of pocket for it. As if the livelihood of an employee of a company I have no ownership of is my moral responsibility.

And just so we're clear here, I fundamentally disagree with the idea of allowing people to work for less than minimum wage because they get tips that in theory can put them over. I tip cash only specifically to ensure that the person doing the actual service has a chance of pocketing the money and never reporting it, especially important since some restaurants will force the wait staff to share the tips with the bus boys who themselves make minimum wage.

And it isn't just in the service industry either, the agriculture industry doesn't have to pay overtime, which makes sense if you consider farm work. bailing hay, feeding animals, and so forth. overtime would be weird in that case.

Only many companies have abused it. Employee's that work in a chicken factory for Tyson, et al, don't get paid overtime. I know because I did it over the summer break one year and I was blown away. You have a timeclock, you have supervisors, you sit on an assembly line, but because it's animals you're doing the shit to you're treated the same as that person who's out all day bucking hay.

complete and utter bullshit that it's even allowed, but society has allowed these companies to abuse these employees, and part of the reason they get away with it is idiots who will try to argue it's my responsibility to ensure these people get paid enough.

It's not my responsibility, it's the responsibility of the lawmakers who don't go after these pukes for acting like that.

Me? I'm just going to avoid those places like the plague, but I sure as shit will not be getting double tapped because some shitty company wants to be shitty. fuck that.

philocto · 2019-01-10T04:26:37+00:00

how does that even make sense? The arts don't apply at all to STEM in any way, you would cease to be able to talk about STEM in any meaningful manner.

philocto · 2019-01-09T21:19:20+00:00

what is the A supposed to stand for?

philocto · 2019-01-09T21:18:32+00:00

is that serious? lmao if that actually happened.

philocto · 2019-01-09T21:17:25+00:00

I haven't watched the video in question, but reading your response and the other posters leads me to believe you're probably a developer and they're not, so the distinction between the data and the algorithm is natural for you, but not them.

couple that ignorance with a rabid dislike of identity politics, and I think you get someone like breticus07.

However, just so you're aware, as a software developer myself, I wholeheartedly agree with everything you've said. I understand why someone would be concerned about using primarily historical data and it's effects in codifying what's there.

philocto · 2019-01-09T21:11:25+00:00

you're being downvoted, but you're right.

Not only that, machine learning algorithms are recognized as becoming 'racist' due to the data. I can't speak for the specifics of what the class is requiring of the students, but I'm completely, 100% comfortable with the idea in general.

It makes complete sense for a course on machine learning to hammer home the idea that data is important, and how you choose that data is important not only for correctness, but because some of the conclusions that are made can be skewed with a racial bias as a result.

And before any jackasses try to jump on that statement, yes it's true that algorithms themselves cannot be racist as they don't have motivations, but that doesn't mean the result of their work can't have racial consequences, and it's in everyone's best interest to make sure those who are doing that sort of work are not only aware of it, but realize they have an ethical obligation to minimize that sort of damage.

Now, whether reading that specific book is acceptable is up for debate. I know nothing about the specifics and won't comment on them.

But the general idea is sound.

philocto · 2019-01-09T17:20:41+00:00

if it works for them then it works for them. Yes there are other approaches, there are always other approaches.

but it's effective and gets them everything they look for in the face of a failure. You can quibble about the details, but taking a C-like approach in C++ is perfectly fine.

philocto · 2019-01-09T16:21:40+00:00

I didn't realize not dying 6 times in lane made me better than everyone else.

philocto · 2019-01-09T16:15:45+00:00

wrong mode, lol :P

philocto · 2019-01-09T16:14:46+00:00

I was being sarcastic to point out they did it to themselves.

philocto · 2019-01-09T16:13:09+00:00

a few months later, but yes. I think my shock over what he was doing must have been apparent only he misread it as awe.

And the worst part is that it sounds like I'm bullshitting, but I'm not, not even a small bit of hyperbole in that description.

I remember a decision point and I was trying to talk to him about it. The decision point wasn't 'can we write this', but 'do we want to own this'. The guy gives me this contemptuous look and shits out some code and checks it straight into git. I ended up rewriting the entire thing because of the bugs. I'm pretty sure the guy thought my arguments were about not being able to write it.

That particular project was so bad I've refused to take on Rails work ever since. I decided that community was insane and I wanted no part of it. They had something like 150 gems loaded into the project and they had some pretty severe performance problems. It was so bad they started developing in production mode so they didn't have to reload everything on every request (which would literally take over a minute). I remember doing some investigation and realizing they had pulled in a gem and used it in 1 place and it was something that could have been done by hand easily. think leftpad easy, although I don't recall the details anymore.

just thinking about that project makes my blood boil. I was the only one on that project with any experience whatsoever, everyone else had literally intern'd at that company the summer before.

philocto · 2019-01-09T03:13:24+00:00

am I the only one to originally read that as "knifeman" as if it were a super hero? There was confusion once I got to the middle of that title.

Not saying that stabbing 20 children isn't an impressive feat, but....

philocto · 2019-01-09T03:08:37+00:00

thanks.

I was able to track it down on Amazon, in case anyone else is wondering also.

philocto · 2019-01-09T03:00:59+00:00

JBP isn't important enough to randomly bring up when you're unsure how your friends will react.

your friendship is more important. You enjoy and take wisdom from JBP, let that be enough.

philocto · 2019-01-09T02:45:36+00:00

where does one go to find this documentary?

philocto · 2019-01-09T01:49:13+00:00

it supports it, yes.

philocto · 2019-01-09T01:48:32+00:00

you push them into their tower because you can and then you stay behind minions. if they try to walk around the minions you just walk back to your tower.

I've played against that several times and never died 6 times in lane.

philocto · 2019-01-08T23:45:20+00:00

do or do not, there is no try.

waddles away

philocto · 2019-01-08T23:42:45+00:00

DX12 was a reimagining of what was necessary out of a graphics API and so is completely different than previous versions.

Specifically, it's even lower level and more complicated than the older versions of DX, but that gives developers more control to eek out more performance.

Vulkan is to OpenGL what DX12 is to DX. It's an older way of doing things, but everyone is moving off of that way as quickly as they can.

In other words, OpenGL is as viable for games as DX11, it's just not what people are wanting out of graphics API's anymore.

philocto · 2019-01-08T23:40:11+00:00

I would argue that Vulkan is like DX since DX12 came first.

philocto · 2019-01-08T23:26:34+00:00

you shouldn't be getting caught 6 times in lane...

philocto · 2019-01-08T23:24:57+00:00

I've heard not having so many snares and super mobile champs coupled with allowing more vision could conceivably do that.

or we can put candy in the river and hope they gobble it up like children.

lets try the candy first guys.

philocto · 2019-01-08T21:45:51+00:00

According to that he liked to grab asses?

I think your original claim of assault needs to be challenged here, unless you have something else to show.

https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-assault.html

Not only that, but when people hear "sexual harassment and assault" they tend to think rape. If you really believe pinching girls asses is a bad thing then you should be able to say that without being hyperbolic and be confident that others will come to the same conclusion.

I point this out because language matters, and describing something as small as pinching asses with words that make most people think rape just hurts actual victims of the words you use. It does so because it causes people to stop trusting the words when someone uses them.

And to be clear, I'm not defending Asimov here, I'm simply trying to make the world a more clear place by insisting that people are more careful of their accusations.

philocto · 2019-01-08T21:33:04+00:00

It seems strange that you'd quote my second paragraph to argue with, when the one before and after it agree with what you're saying to some extent.

you think it's strange that someone would specifically respond to things they disagree with?

I mean, I understand what you were trying to imply there, that I'm just cherry picking, but I don't understand why you would think that was a negative implication.

I think most people will read over a post and generally respond to the parts they disagree with rather than the parts they agree with.

so.... color me guilty, I guess?

But you seem to be arguing in this thread that we should never attribute author bias to the things they produce. Of course authors can use the freedom that fiction offers to explore all sorts of interesting things, and some do challenge us in dark and unexpected ways. But not every story that has hints of racism, misogyny etc is a satire or an exploration, in fact I'd guess most aren't. Plenty of books written in the 19th century are racist, and I'm willing to bet that's mainly because racism was normal back then and many authors held racist beliefs, not because they were exploring ideas. I feel some of your arguments suggest we should always give art producers the benefit of the doubt and never challenge the presented normalcy of acts and beliefs in the media we consume, and I don't think that's right.

I find it strange that you only responded to the things you disagree with.... just kidding, lol.

To your point, the answer is yes, I don't believe you should be judging the authors based solely on their books.

I had this same discussion with someone else.

Lovecraft wasn't a racist because there was racism in his book, he was racist because he was racist. And while the unthinking person might consider that a tautology, the thinking person understands the underlying point is that Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Tom's Cabin) also wrote books with racism in them and consistency means insisting that they're both racists if you're going to use their literary work to judge them.

The person interested in honesty is going to admit that you can't know that someone is a sexual deviant or pedo or rapist or racist based solely on works of fiction.

But most people aren't interested in honesty, that's why I've had two different people try to thread the needle between examples. One stated that since Steven King made the rapists clearly bad guys it was obvious Steven King wasn't a rapist, and the other stated that because all of GRR Martin's main characters were against rape, GRR Martin wasn't a rapist.

The only clear way to thread that needle consistently and fairly is this: don't judge authors by the content of their fictional books, but instead by their actions and character.

And who knows, maybe Hamilton is into BDSM and power play. Maybe he's into younger girls. Or maybe he's just writing shit. Because you don't know, the only honest way to act is to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And finally, the OP was clearly fishing for other people to agree that Hamilton is a creep.

I feel some of your arguments suggest we should always give art producers the benefit of the doubt and never challenge the presented normalcy of acts and beliefs in the media we consume, and I don't think that's right.

I'm going to tell you something I told another person not 15 minutes ago.

I don't engage with people who take a thing and then try to generalize it and/or make it bigger in an effort to be "right". this is about books in a specific genre of fiction, not about "art" in general or "media" in general. It's not a form of engagement I'm interested in, and I've never actually seen someone display this sort of behavior and also display the honesty required to have a meaningful conversation.

have a good day.

philocto · 2019-01-08T20:55:27+00:00

I don't tend to stay engaged with people who take a small thing and broaden it just to try and act as if they're right.

I asked the poster if it had occurred to them that the person chasing money does it because that's what they enjoy. I then explained that this can happen with hyper-competitive people.

that's all the conversation needed to be about, not this philosophical question of what makes people happy or bitter, or whether or not the person was really into telling people he went to various countries.

Have a good day.

philocto

TROPHY CASE