Great. We just finally got teams where it isn't complete dogshit and now this!
It's awesome that we funnel tons of money to tech companies instead of raising federal government scientist salaries to be competitive enough to just retain the expertise for ourselves!
Academic societies can have whatever ideologies they wish. Go present at a conference that doesn't have an ideology you don't have. That's true freedom. This is the same thing as Trump complaining about being banned from twitter. It's anti-capitalism and anti-freedom.
Can an academic society in the USA today have an ideology explicitly presented as "the advancement and preservation of the white race"? No? Then your whole argument falls apart.
Can you give me one example where such a society was allowed? Because I can give you plenty of examples where white ethnic activism was explicitly prohibited and people were kicked out of university for engaging in it.
The white suprematists found it more effective not to explicitly state their ideological goals.
There are plenty of academic legal societies very interested in “states’ rights”, “returning to the constitution”, “memorializing the Confederacy”, etc. I don’t see a important distinction between an explicit statement and dog-whistle so thinly veiled that everyone knows what it stands for.
> I don’t see a important distinction between an explicit statement and dog-whistle so thinly veiled that everyone knows what it stands for.
That’s an interesting statement.
I’ve personally attended a memorial ceremony hosted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy where a Black woman spoke for an hour about the conditions under which Blacks, both enslaved and free, existed in the Confederacy. She was a UDC member, which means that she was a thoroughly documented descendant of a Confederate soldier. In her case, that was a man who was offered his freedom in exchange for military service.
You say “everyone knows it stands for”, but my experience says that a more truthful statement would be “most people believe they know what it stands for”.
Yes. Imagine complaining about not being able to sit at a particular lunch counter, or getting the seat on the bus you want. I mean, dude, there are other seats and better places to eat. Why are you eating at diners anyway?
We have always made a distinction between things that are not the fault of the individual (skin color, gender, ethnicity) and things that are (speech and actions). Which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
As usual, this stops the conversation cold, because it doesn't fit anyone's narrative. Free speech advocates want to claim that the marketplace of ideas will lead people to good ideas, while people for restricting speech want to claim that it's possible to restrict speech without going full-on totalitarian dystopia. The case of religion shows quite starkly that both narratives completely fail to describe a central example with great historical and current relevance.
Free speech is a good idea for game-theoretic reasons. That's it. Free speech lets people fight it out with only the occasional riot and attempted overthrow of the republic. That's better than the alternative.
This one is in flux, I suspect. In the past, people were born into their religion, and today, at least in the west, it is becoming more common for people to choose their religion. So I guess this is the exception that proves the rule.
When people with the wrong opinions (on who knows what, frankly, the list keeps changing) get banned from banking systems the very same people will be in the thread defending the sanctions and censorship action.
“Just build your own bank.”
“Just build your own currency.”
It's like the tech tree from the Civ games in reverse.
To develop 'Social Network' or 'Digital Currencies', you need 'Server Farm', 'Internet', and 'Power Grid', and to have those you need everything from 'Intercontintental Data Cables' to 'Semiconductor Manufacturing', and way back to extraction and refining of raw materials..
They do it to regular people every day, I was banned countless times from websites when I was a stupid kid, and more than a few times as an adult. No one cares until it happens to famous racists. I wonder why.
At some point, the black market reaches a critical mass where the thing you're taxing might as well be banned. >>>
This doesn't make sense, because you're still getting taxes on the white market merch. Even if black market merch dominates, its different from prohibition where you get no taxes.
I dont think that will be an issue in your lifetime, unless you are in an area prone to storm surge. In which case your elevation is ALREADY a problem.
> "Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails, and we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future -- even from one year to the next -- once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed," Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist and one of the study's co-authors from the British Antarctic Survey, said in the release.
The actual number is 25 inches, and most consensus suggests collapse over centuries.
There is some concern that a bracing portion of the glacier may collapse soon, which would take Thwaites from 4 to 6% of contribution to sea level rise.
This is the biggest part of life that people just don't get and has always bothered me.
I can't stand people that are always-positive and nice all the time. I know they are lying and holding stuff back --- but what? I'd rather be friends with someone honest than nice. At least I know what they are thinking, and thus actually know them. Some people would rather just go through life in a mask and insist everyone else wear one too -- something I generally refuse to do.
It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.
While I wouldnt have tipped this person, you still tip during regular 'bad service' (like slowness or burnt food or whatever), because even though things didnt meet your expectations doesn't mean you should take advantage of the fact that the state makes it legal to pay servers only $2 an hour. The prices of your shit meal were lower because of this, so you should at least make up the difference to a minimum livable wage, which is the cost it would've been if the state wasnt retrograde.
Unless of course you think people who are bad servers don't deserve to make minimum wage.
>>Unless of course you think people who are bad servers don't deserve to make minimum wage.
I think that it shouldn't be the customers responsibility to even know what the server is making, and logically it shouldn't be their responsibility to make sure they are paid X or Y. You come in, order food, pay for the food, leave. The business owner should be responsible to keep their employees compensated well enough that they don't want to leave.
But like I said in another comment - the situation in US is a result of literally decades of social conditioning, where the population has been told by business owners that it's their(customers) responsibility to make sure that service workers are compensated well enough to not be in poverty, and it's your personal responsibility to tip or the person will starve.
It's gotten to the point where people make this argument in absolute earnest, and truly believe what they say, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. It really is a marvel of social engineering, and a boon for American businesses I'm sure.
>>because even though things didnt meet your expectations doesn't mean you should take advantage of the fact that the state makes it legal to pay servers only $2 an hour
That actually furthers my point above - the side taking advantage of $2 minimum wage is the employer, not the customer.
>> Unless of course you think people who are bad servers don't deserve to make minimum wage.
> It's gotten to the point where people make this argument in absolute earnest
Because the way the pay works at the moment is the way the pay works at the moment, and we tip based on that. The fact that people believe the pay _shouldn't_ work that way is no excuse for not tipping your wait staff at all _today_.
> That actually furthers my point above - the side taking advantage of $2 minimum wage is the employer, not the customer.
Not really, at least not in most cases. If tips went away and the employer paid more, the prices of the meals would go up to compensate. The restaurant owners aren't making more money because of the current system; most of them aren't making a large profit. The owners aren't paying sub-minimum wage because they want to pocket the difference; they're doing it because to do otherwise would drive them out of business (because their competition is also doing it). You need to change the rules for everyone in order for almost anyone to do better.
Youre just bucking the responsibility thats put on you. It sucks the state makes it that way, but youre only hurting other people. If you disagree with tipping then dont go to a restaraunt in a state that requires it. Your self righteous arguments fall on deaf ears of people who work for tips and have to put up with jerks like you.
There are so many instances where the government allows people to be exploited here in America. If youre taking advantage of that and exploiting them -- you are a part of the problem -- it is that simple.
Why does the state make it that restaurants don't pay waiters enough? There is no obligation to only pay the minimum wage. Some countries in Europe don't even have a minimum wage at all and there's still no tipping culture like the USA. It really is just something that's considered normal in the US and bizarre everywhere else.
> Unless of course you think people who are bad servers don't deserve to make minimum wage.
Why should the responsibility of paying a bonus (a tip) to the server fall on the customer? Why shouldn't the business be held responsible for paying them the bonus? As someone from Europe, I find it difficult to wrap my head around the fact that it is somehow customer's responsibility to pay them a bonus/tip even if there has been a bad service. In my mind it should clearly be the responsibility of the business to pay them what they deserve.
Those are very solid arguments for not allowing businesses to pay less than minimum wage, or for (as an individual) not visiting places that allow businesses to pay less than minimum wage. They aren’t terribly relevant to the situation where you just ate somewhere that does pay less than minimum wage.
> They aren’t terribly relevant to the situation where you just ate somewhere that does pay less than minimum wage.
Sorry for being obstuse but I still don't understand. How as a customer I would know whether the place where I ate at is paying less than minimum wage or not?
As mentioned above though, as the company has to cover a lack of tips Uptoinimum wage, they won't be paid under minimum (at least that's what I'm taking from this).
> The prices of your shit meal were lower because of this
Can one really claim that when, in the same breath, one also claims tips are near-mandatory?
What this situation actually means is that the business entices you in with a low price in the menu, but that price is only tangentially related to the amount I end up paying when it comes time to pay. The thing that is "lower" is not the amount of money that leaves my wallet at the end of the meal, and I am never told up front what that total will be. This is actually true of most transactions in the US, because taxes also work in a similar fashion.
Elsewhere, the norms are different. In some places, when, as a customer, you see a price for goods and services, that is exactly the amount of money you pay; it is the responsibility of whoever is setting the price to set it at an appropriate level so they can appropriately compensate whatever third parties they need to compensate. In other places, the norm might be to haggle; but even there you know what the agreed total will be before you receive the goods or services.
That said, the US approach is actually not entirely an unfamiliar experience to Europeans: budget airlines operate on the same principle of "quote low price up front then the customer pays way more at the end for things that are technically but not really optional" here - and we hate those just as much.
If the waitstaff was payed more and tips were removed from the equation, the meal would cost more. It doesn't wind up costing you more to tip than is the system was changed; unless you tip very well (in which case, you might be one of those people that would tip even if the system was changed).
I just don't think that's true. Food in the UK(in restaurants) is just as cheap if not cheaper than in US and tipping is entirely optional, plus minimum wage and employee protections are a lot higher. So I don't think the low wage necessarily correlates to cheap meal prices
I'd be inclined to agree, if the the tips didn't factor into the minimum wage calculation - so that in the medium-term, higher average tips ddidn't just lead to lower pay from the employer.
Of course this is coming from an European, so the whole tipping culture is foreign to me.
Incredible amount of goods or services I consume pay $2/hour, if they are lucky. Bangladesh, India, take your pick. I certainly take advatage fo that. Why should I pay more?
It's not my job to fix laws and it's not my job to make sure a person has a good wage.
it's not really the point, but there's no reason to think your meal was cheaper because of the low wages. if you're the restaurant owner, if your labor costs suddenly went down, why would you lower your prices?
I have no doubt at all that, if owners suddenly had to pay waitstaff more, the prices of meals would go up. Because the owners need to make money too, and most of them have pretty thin margins.
It's pretty easy to point to a lack of government investment in renewables and incentives to get rid of fossil fuels. The US has had a leader for more than half those years that was pro-oil and anti-renewables.
Imagine a 1 trillion dollar investment into renewables in 2003 instead of the Iraq war. Imagine a carbon cap tax in 2008.
Additionally, technology has increased in that time. Its quite reasonable that the first few decades of development won't see very commercially viable products -- they are new and in development. Renewables becoming better than fossil fuels for many tasks will happen eventually and would be like flipping a switch. At that point, it just takes the government printing money and spending it on something that matters for a change.
It's awesome that we funnel tons of money to tech companies instead of raising federal government scientist salaries to be competitive enough to just retain the expertise for ourselves!