circuitfarmer

Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes

You’re still thinking of a pattern – but there is a conflation between cardinal numbers and proportion/percentage. An hour and a half is 150% of one hour.

But no, that doesn’t happen with imperial systems, because there just aren’t really patterns to that level.

I’m not sure that’s actually true. I’m not a lawyer but I suspect it would take more than an internet comment saying “I did it.”

Also, the elephant in the remains in the room: discussing piracy is not piracy.

You could simply learn to cook instead of whining about tipping.

Well I guess the whole restaurant industry doesn’t need to exist then.

Reductio ad absurdum.

Let’s see what Lemmy thinks.

Show me on the doll where the free market hurt you.

What advantage does this hold versus the company paying a living wage in the first place?

Great argument.

I’m not sure what isn’t getting across here.

Customers subsidize wages with tipping. The amount is ultimately arbitrary and allows business owners to avoid costs.

The actual cost of the wages is not arbitrary and should be put up by the business first.

Yes, but one way is on the company first and one isn’t. Would prices go up if these places were paying living wages? Most likely. Many businesses would be insolvent because their business model was simply never designed to pay a living wage to employees. Others could remain solvent, but probably not if they continue to take so much off the top at higher positions.

And that’s exactly it: the market never self-corrects if we throw arbitrary money in excess of listed prices to solve was is ultimately an issue of business solvency and ethics. There is no economic theory that would support such an idea in any industry, but here we are.

The sheer number of businesses out of the space might even drive down rents. That’s the kind of thing I mean by “other actions”. But things cannot continue as they are.

None of this is even to mention the sheer number of people in the service industry who are also on government assistance programs. They have to be – none of the blame is on them. But my tax dollars go to that, plus I am expected to pay extra to subsidize their wages with tips. I effectively subsidize them twice while someone reaps the rewards on their yacht. All I’m saying is the yacht people should be taking the risks first. That’s part of being a business owner.

The whole damn system exists to place the burden of a living wage on the customer while the company paying peanuts can claim no wrongdoing. And the really sad part is: it has worked.

Edit: and there are many, many businesses that wouldn’t be in business if they actually had to pay competitive wages on their own. The invisible hand can fix nothing if tipping culture says to throw more and more arbitrary amounts of money at people to subsidize their wages yourself. At some point (I’d argue we’re past it already), the band-aid needs to get ripped off. Only then will we see self-correction. The almost immediate loss of many businesses will likely trigger other actions. It’s already a no-win scenario.

One thing to keep in mind that may be relevant: copies of non-digital things are different than digital copies.

Digital (meant here as bit-for-bit) copies are effectively impossible with analog media. If I copy a book (the whole book, its layout, etc., and not just the linguistic content), it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.

If it sounds like an infinite money glitch on the digital side, that’s because it is. The only catch is that people have to own equipment to interpret the bits. Realistically, any form of digital media is just a record of how to set the bits on their own hardware.

Crucially: if people could resell those perfect digital copies, then there would be no market for the company which created it originally. It all comes down to the fact that companies no longer have to worry about generational differences between copies, and as a result, they’re already using this “infinite money glitch” and just paying for distribution. That market goes away if people can resell digital copies, because they can also just make new copies on their own.