The tickets were $75 each, and this was two decades ago.

Then getting the clothes, the flowers, some people rent transportation.

Once I’m asleep I won’t care how comfortable I am. If you can fall asleep quickly enough, it doesn’t matter.

Eh, less fun than a regular dance. Too much money and time spent on pageantry.

It is exactly what people in the minority will say. I, as someone often finding myself in the minority, say it often and early. Just because more people agree on something doesn’t mean they get to force the rest of us to go along with them.

Same shit, different spread. So they’re twisting the facts to support a different kind of authoritarianism, instead of white supremacy. That’s not much better.

More like lemon-lime-pomelo, but WDIY.

You can’t import yuzu fruits or plants. All the yuzu in the US is descended from the 100 original plants imported before it was made illegal.

But really, I want soft cheeses…

The plant itself is, you can get foods made with it.

WTF, no. Democracies can be authoritarian. If they abridge rights or compel individuals to action, that’s authoritarianism. Doesn’t matter it 51 people out of a hundred think they can boss the the other 49 because they voted on it.

So you heard someone use a white supremacist talking point, and now you’re ignorantly repeating it under the banner of asking if it has merit?

It does not. Repeating this line as you’ve done here is what the white supremacist who fed it to you wants you to do, as it appears to give legitimacy white supremacy. It does not. It is a false claim.

Yes, when we talk about human rights we mean as distinct from legal rights. No law can grant or take away a human right, it is inherent to the human condition.

You’ve shown that you understand the distinction but I’ll point out as well that moral right is a third, distinct thing.

Owning others is NOT a human right. It is a violation thereof.

No. Protecting human rights is not authoritarian.

You know the captchas are training the AI, right?

Not at all, I thought you were singling out tipped positions from other sales.

All sales positions reward charisma and effort; and depend on who walks through the door. Why is this a problem with tipped positions specifically?

Sure. How it’s better for the waitress: We make more money than we ever would under a flat wage, obviously. We also get rewarded proportionate to the work we do; busy, stressful weekend shifts pay more than calm weekday lunches, allowing us to tailor our work-life balance to suit our needs.

How it’s better for employers: Lower labor costs are a benefit of themselves, of course, but they also allow greater flexibility in scheduling, something essential in an industry where the amount of business varies so significantly from day to day and month to month. And since the number one factor affecting tips is the subtotal of the check, servers are incentivized to sell more, driving up revenue.

How it’s better for patons: The tipping system encourages attentiveness and better service; not so much in individual interactions (studies show that people tip what they’re gonna tip, regardless of service) but rather by keeping restaurants with attentive, professional servers busy and keeping those servers in the industry. We all saw the dip in quality post-lockdown when the most talented and experienced cadre of servers left for other industries, right?

Unlike a wage system, tipping also puts more power in the hands of the consumer. As a “pay what you think is fair” system, it gives immediate recourse to patrons who feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Why it’s better for society: It allows the worker to sell her labor directly to the consumer without the capital class acting as a middleman and taking a cut. We all know that if prices were raised 20% across the board servers wouldn’t see even half of that as a wage increase. The tipping system sidesteps around corporate greed by creating a direct financial transaction between consumer and producer of labor.

In short, we have this one industry that’s figured out how to pay a living wage. It’s not a system that was designed, it evolved over time, and it’s very efficient; because if it wasn’t, it would collapse on its own. Obviously as a waitress myself I’m personally invested in this system, but I also think that it’s wrongheaded to take the system that, again, organically pays a living wage and tear it down because it doesn’t conform to a preconceived notion of what an employment relationship should look like.

Jackets are lined.

Sort of like Zeno’s Paradox? You never get old because when you’re sixty, people say, oh sixty’s not that old, seventy is old and when you’re seventy, people say seventy is the new fifty and when you’re eighty people say eighty’s nothing, people are living past a hundred all the time these days…? Something like that?

Yes, about everything except tipping.

I’ve been a lot of things and done a lot of jobs, but I’ve been waiting tables full-time for over a decade now. And it seems like that’s a valid place to come from to talk about manners in public, pink collar work, working-class economics, the training gap, gender roles in the workplace, and addictive personality types.

But for some reason, people just don’t wanna hear it when I explain why and how tipping is a better system for all involved than a set wage would be.