Flash is rubbish and I hope it is soon wiped from the internet. But in the meantime, there are many sites that still use it and I'd like the option to have it...
That story is so sordid. The guy telling it is obviously a total dickhead, but I was also struck, if you take it at face value, by the idea of the waitress "demanding" that a tip be left in real money. That kind of shows how fucked up the whole culture around tipping is in some parts of the world (the US in this case, I'm assuming). Tips are supposed to be voluntary, ffs.
Tips are not voluntary in the US and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Wait staff get paid well below minimum wage on the assumption that they're getting tips. Not paying a tip is like stealing.
Reed John wrote: Tips are not voluntary in the US and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
This is true. But this:
Wait staff get paid well below minimum wage on the assumption that they're getting tips.
ought to be illegal. What's the fucking point of having a minimum wage if you don;t actually oblige employers to operate by it. What is it a fucking guideline? It's a law. It's designed to protect workers. The US justice system should arrest and prosecute everybody who owns a restaurant in the entire country, starting with the massive multinationals who own chains (like Pepsi with Pizza Hut, and so on). It's a fucking disgrace.
Seriously, rant aside, how is it possible that employers can simply ignore the minimum wage?
They don't ignore it, they just include (assumed) tips in it. And the Justice Department won't go after them because, among other things, the IRS does exactly the same thing when it comes to assessing taxable income. It's part of the relevant Federal labour law, too. Some states ban the practice (California's by far the most important), but most don't.
I agree it's a fucking disgrace, but it's sanctioned from on high.
As Rusty Foster of Today in Tabs put it: "Heads of a number of other exchanges and Bitcoin businesses issued a painfully ironic statement regarding the 'tragic violation of the trust' by Mt. Gox, which, let me reiterate, dealt in a distributed crypto-currency that is explicitly designed to be trust-free."
You're much more in touch with these things than me, so please post it when someone says "The government or banks should step in to help regulate this and ensure people aren't being ripped off, or lose all their bitcoins."
Ginger Yellow wrote: They don't ignore it, they just include (assumed) tips in it. And the Justice Department won't go after them because, among other things, the IRS does exactly the same thing when it comes to assessing taxable income. It's part of the relevant Federal labour law, too. Some states ban the practice (California's by far the most important), but most don't.
I agree it's a fucking disgrace, but it's sanctioned from on high.
Exactly. There's nothing illegal about it. The minimum wage is officially lower for jobs that get regular tips. Which is why customers should never feel like it's optional.
I hated being a waiter, but I did it for a while in grad school. Our wage was $2 something at a time the regular minimum wage was around $5, I think. I was told that if for any given week, my average with tips plus wages didn't add up to the minimum wage, that they were obligated to pay me more so that it did. This never happened. With tips, I usually ended up getting around $8 or $9 per hour (not a ton, but this was 1998, at an Uno's, and I wasn't a great waiter). Most tips were in cash, so we could cheat a bit on how much of the tips we declared so we could rip off the IRS a bit too. We weren't encouraged to be too aggressive about that and I wasn't.
The greatest frustration was doing "side work." In a restaurant, as the day or evening wears on after the busiest time, managers will "cut" staff according to a prespecified order, meaning they're told their shift is over. The idea is to always have just enough staff to handle the crowd so the restaurant doesn't pay people to sit around and the people that are there are making decent tips for their time. But, at least where I worked, the shift wasn't over when you stopped waiting on tables. Everyone was assigned certain "side work" tasks, including rolling up the silverwear into napkins, refilling and/or "marrying" the ketchup, etc, etc. Everyone desperately tried to make that go as quickly as possible because during the time you were doing sidework, you weren't getting tips and therefore were working for less than minimum wage. They could do that because it still averaged out over the week to more than minimum wage, but it sucked. They should have been paying somebody else a real wage to do all of that.
A lot of people actually like working in bars and restaurants. I'll never understand that. I'm glad some people do, but I don't know how.
I quite liked it, but I saw 30 approaching quickly and knew I didn't want to be dragging my ass home at 3 eh-em when I had a wife and small kids. Otherwise, it's a pretty good life when you're young and single.
I just couldnt deal with the constant interaction with the public in a situation where the slightest misstep could lead to a cascade of events making them all hate me and hate the restaurant. At least there wasn't any yelp in those days. As an introvert, dealing with people drains me and stresses me out. For the same reasons, I could never be a nurse or a doctor.
I would have been better suited to washing dishes. But few restaurants hire English-speaking legal US citizens as dishwashers.
You don't think the suicide of a CEO could reflect on the underlying business, especially one that's been rocked very recently with high profile failures?
Put another way, if two or three local Knut banks went bankrupt over the course of a couple of weeks, and then the CEO of Gringotts killed herself, I might be concerned about the security of my holdings.
It strikes me that it has been a lot easier to set up a bitcoin exchange than it is to run a secure bitcoin exchange safe from hackers.
You are conflating the issue with banks versus the currency itself a little, WOM, though with a virtual currency I can understand why you might put a little more stock in the security of holdings.
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