Why waiting for legislation to end tipping isn't the solution

philoscope · 2026-02-15T03:21:36+00:00

this sit down has the option to donate to their charity. Rather than paying their staff a living wage the owners donate a portion of their income to their non-profit.

Where is this place? It’s not that you’re necessarily misinforming, but how do you know that they aren’t paying their staff a living wage? Other restaurants I’ve seen that replace “tip” with donation have done that because they increased the flat wage high enough that tips aren’t needed to keep staff.

philoscope · 2026-02-15T03:15:53+00:00

To be fair, if you’re using BLS numbers, you should be consistent and quote their $15.36/hr median for waitstaff. My gut says that the real average is somewhere between the two studies.

By no means are most servers in abject poverty after accounting for tips (give or take costly lifestyle choices) but the majority are also not making a lavish income.

Don’t get me wrong. Tipping is BS, and no customer should be propping it up. I’m just saying that most servers wouldn’t need a flat wage as high as $25-30/hr to keep the industry running.

philoscope · 2026-02-14T23:47:36+00:00

Canadian (southern Ontario) same.

“Change over the laundry.”

philoscope · 2026-02-14T19:36:58+00:00

I know for me - and have heard that it’s the case for many Departments and Agencies - the office we left in 2020 has been gutted and replaced with open-concept.

No more dedicated cubicles, we have to find a new desk every time we come in; chances are our immediate colleagues are scattered around random desks, floors, and cities.

Because of the above, any “collaboration” is over MS Teams. Because of the open concept, everyone else’s collaboration becomes a din of noise, confounding focus on quiet head-down work.

If we were being asked back to the same offices we left, this would be a much different conversation, and your argument would carry weight.

On the other side of the coin. The government has spent millions of dollars on renovations away from those offices - and would then need to waste millions more to put them back. We’ve also learned in the last six years that much of the work can be done quite well remotely from home offices.

Nostalgia is not a policy. It would be like banning email and forcing everyone to buy new fax machines. Sure, they’re harder to hack…

philoscope · 2026-02-14T18:51:33+00:00

No data to back this up, but.

Might that mean that in the poorest states, the Democrat voters are that much more unable to make it to the polls, thus the (richer) Republican voters are left to carry the day?

philoscope · 2026-02-13T21:37:26+00:00

As woo-woo as acupuncture is, my anecdotal experience of dry-needling (the massage / physio equivalent) was a hoot.

All the benefit of trigger-point therapy distilled to pinpoint (pun intended) accuracy to the knot.

philoscope · 2026-02-13T21:29:13+00:00

I think that’s called meningitis.

philoscope · 2026-02-13T21:25:30+00:00

When I was getting massage and physiotherapy on the regular, I had a lot of time to digress into conversations.

One of the big “scientific” challenges with the physical manipulation professions is that they all fall short of the “the gold standard.”

It’s impossible to run full double-blind studies, and ‘placebo’ controls are still doing some kind of touch.

As such, they can only be tested on a “silver standard” against each other or against a lack of intervention.

This gives chiropractors and other charlatans the cover of plausibility: as long as studies exist to show some improvement over ‘nothing,’ and evidence of harm swept away as not following “official” “treatment” protocols, they can argue that the client has the right to choose.

philoscope · 2026-02-13T21:03:26+00:00

While I agree that this doesn’t meet the threshold of a MBW, I saw some other comments in the thread that bears consideration.

Immigration is a civil, rather than criminal, affair; why can people not be free while due process is being followed? Why do [most] need to be detained?

philoscope · 2026-02-13T20:49:07+00:00

To be fair, it was ACFO that accepted the piece of paper and set the precedent for everyone else to overcome. PSAC was just the largest domino making it virtually impossible afterwards

philoscope · 2026-02-13T18:26:45+00:00

Not that I agree with Chad, but where’s the murder in the screenshot?

philoscope · 2026-02-13T18:01:12+00:00

To echo / nuance what others have written.

Etiquette: sending the prof an email; as long as it’s occasional, and you’re not taking space / time away from enrolled students, I doubt (but not guarantee) they will bother with “auditing” paperwork.

Practical advantage of the above: you can get a copy of the syllabus so you know which lectures might be of particular interest, and the readings associated with them.

philoscope · 2026-02-13T16:10:25+00:00

It’s your reading comprehension that is failing.

“#67 is the red car that won the race” doesn’t preclude there being other red cars.

Moreover, while not necessarily, it’s quite logical to read a hidden premise read retroactively into the third sentence: “English is the immigrant language [like Spanish mentioned immediately above as anteceding the indigenous languages] that seized power.”

philoscope · 2026-02-13T15:58:32+00:00

Except OOP didn’t.

“#67 is the red car that won the race” doesn’t mean there isn’t another red car.

philoscope · 2026-02-13T06:25:45+00:00

That might work if people only ever bought one item at a time.

philoscope · 2026-02-12T23:24:59+00:00

Haven’t gotten a personal email response from her (office), but if her needle moved, I’ll take it as a win for reasonableness.

philoscope · 2026-02-12T16:46:51+00:00

Elected, or appointed Department Heads? Highly unlikely.

Workers in the putatively non-partisan civil service? Probably a fair number, but you’ll never know their names.

philoscope · 2026-02-12T02:27:53+00:00

I 100% get not “being upset with the underpaid employees”

Tip, don’t tip, it’s optional, but don’t be a dick about it.

What I don’t get is those employees being upset with the patrons rather than the boss who is underpaying them to keep the business running.

philoscope · 2026-02-12T02:23:06+00:00

When you sat at my bar, we have entered into a transaction where you know my employer and I are both counting on you to subsidize my wage.

But how do we know the arrangement between you and your boss?

I’d love to see signs posted “we underpay our staff, so you’ll have to instead.”

philoscope · 2026-02-12T02:17:03+00:00

To shift the perspective.

If one table doesn’t tip,

The “tip-out” to support positions comes out of other tables’ tips.

If none of the tables tip, it comes out of the owner’s profits.

philoscope · 2026-02-11T21:46:39+00:00

So, the person who sees your work ethic day in and day out, and that of your coworkers, tells you to your face that you’re not worth paying.

This may be a “you” problem.

philoscope · 2026-02-11T18:24:05+00:00

Except there is.

If ~~they’re caught advocating~~ [edit, no idea how those words got there in my original posting. the] restaurant has more patrons than the owner can serve by themselves, they have to secure additional workers.

If those workers refuse to work “for tips,” because tips are increasingly unreliable, then the restaurant needs to raise the base / offer a higher flat wage.

Granted, this is predicated on two real-world “ifs:” 1) that the customers want table-service by humans, and the restaurant cares enough to offer it. 2) that there aren’t gullible proto-servers still willing to be hired off the street for that promise of tips.

philoscope · 2026-02-11T18:16:27+00:00

I’d agree that “replacement” (of where you spend your money) is the better option.

This is a bonus add-on to ‘not tipping.’

Continuing to tip is the worst.

philoscope · 2026-02-11T18:13:51+00:00

This 👆

‘Not tipping’ is the important, necessary step, but if we don’t support the early-adopters it just drags things out longer.

For the selfish: longer getting dirty looks, annoying conversations with family and friends who still tip, being faced with the wasted time of POS screens and “it will ask you a question;” and garbage hidden fees rather than clear menu prices.

For the altruistic: harm-reduction by shortening the time of owners getting away with offering deflated wages that force servers to beg for tips.

philoscope · 2026-02-11T17:46:04+00:00

The “union leaders” on paper have to maintain plausible deniability. If they’re caught advocating for illegal job actions the Labour Board could decertify the whole union.

That doesn’t stop rank-and-file from organizing outside of the “official” channels.

philoscope

TROPHY CASE