I Had A Random Thought...

[Badfinger]

I worked for $2.13 per hour at Applebee's for awhile and it basically worked out that my paychecks were always less than $100 after taxes even if I worked 40 hours per week. As much as I think tipping sucks, I still think it is important here in the US to try to tip at least 15 to 20% for good service at a restaurant because those employee's livelihoods completely depend on tips.

 

"At least 15-20%" grates at my soul. You are doing the bare minimum to support someone's livelihood at 15%. I severely disliked working for tips. I worked with some people who absolutely loved it. They would also be hammy as fuck, bring up tips, and stop just short of begging for money. My idea that busting your ass, being a good server, being knowledgeable and awesome would carry me through and reward me with a better payout was almost always shot down. Their idea was that if servers were actually paid a livable wage they would be lazy and complacent. Well guess what, servers don't make any money right now and they're still lazy and complacent. My thought was that if you knew you were always leaving with a reasonable (or at least agreed upon!) paycheck for the time you worked, you could do things like focus on improving and learning about what you were serving rather than focusing on trying to squeeze quarters out of your customers. Crazy, I know!

 

I never had enough money, and I felt constantly that if you looked at what I was taking in as revenue compared to what I was being tipped, I always felt undertipped overall. It sucked. It was such a desperate time of my life, and I wasn't working shitty chain restaurants. I was at a really good gastropub that catered casually to business clientele. It seemed like a place where you assume all the servers are making a pretty good living, and you'd be wrong. The only people making out on tips were the bartenders, and for no reason whatsoever they never put me behind the bar.

 

I don't like tipping culture, but while it exists the only thing you're doing by skimping on tipping is fucking over the labor that's been put in a position where they depend on every interaction to make rent.

 

e: sorry if this seems directed at you Zeus, or anyone else in particular. It's a still-recent hot button subject for me.

[Zeusthecat]

Nah, that's fine. The unfortunate thing about tipping percentages is that 15 - 20% can be totally adequate if you are working at a relatively busy place and they give you a good 4-6 table section; but if you work at a smaller business that doesn't bring in as many customers, you would need a much higher average tip percentage to make the same amount. I was fortunate that I worked 10 hour shifts Thursday through Sunday evenings and we had a full restaurant almost every hour of every shift I worked. I averaged about $125 to $150 in tips per shift (after bartender and host tipouts) and in my last year or two when our minimum wage went up to $3.75, I actually made a pretty steady $15 per hour on average. I imagine I was in a pretty fortunate position though and many other people in the service industry probably barely manage to eek out minimum wage.

[clyde]

It's so nice when I can tell the cook what I would like to eat, they hand it to me, I pay the menu-prive and I can fill up my own water. I prefer those restaurants.

[Cordeos]

I wish the US would just ditch tipping altogether and start paying waitstaff etc the minimum wage. I don't remember getting bad service once in Korea where tipping isn't done. I have heard stories of taxi drivers in Korea chasing people down to give tips back. Plus the less math I have to do in my life the better

[Zeusthecat]

On another note, I just found myself wondering what a blue whale poop would look like and realized that I didn't even know if whales pooped at all. I've literally never heard it discussed or brought up and it seems like one of the dark mysteries of the ocean that they never talk about in ocean documentaries.

 

So I Googled it and was happy to see that yes, whales poop. But it gets more interesting than that. Whale poop is apparently super important for the environment and even has a role in keeping our air clean:

 

The nutrient rich fecal matter feeds phytoplankton (plants) which allow the plant to grow and prosper.

As the phytoplankton grows it pulls more and more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere cleaning up the environment and creating a healthier ecosystem for both land and oceanic animals.

The carbon that gets pulled from the environment stays trapped inside the phytoplankton for as long as it lives which could be for several millennium.

While whale poop has been shown to be extremely useful for maintaining our clean air and atmosphere previous human involvement has largely decreased the number of whales that inhibit our ocean today.

An unfortunate side effect caused by the whaling industry, in addition to all of the whales that have unfortunately been killed during the whaling era, is a huge loss in nutrient rich whale fecal matter to feed the phytoplankton which in turn help remove poisonous carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Assuming the whaling era didn’t exist we may have seen a huge increase in healthy air as well as a more stabilized biodiversity in the oceans atmosphere.

 

Who'd have thunk that the solution to global warming could potentially be as simple as whale shit. Lots and lots of whale shit.

[jennegatron]

One recurring theme in this conversation that really makes me sad is all the people who say they're "bad at math" and that's why they don't like tipping. You're not bad at math! You're bad at decimals maybe or mental multiplication! Mathematics is a huge, diverse field that I promise you are good at some facet of.  I'm not good at mental math either, which is why I stick to multiple of 5s & 10s when tipping, but I'm really good at math! I'm great at single variable calculus and I'm a great proof writer!

 

I think about this a lot, especially after spending the year or so after I graduated college tutoring elementary through college kids in math. You have 1 bad math teacher in school and you're convinced that you're bad at all math forever. You might be a geometry or trig whiz, but you'll never know because you carry that with you your entire life after you have a hard time memorizing your 7's in your times tables. You don't get one bad English teacher and decide you're never going to read anything ever again.

 

I got a math degree and am only any good at (slow) mental math because I had to practice times tables with 10 year olds, not because I have a Bachelors!

 

Like I get it, the way we teach math is totally broken and produces huge swaths of the population that think this about themselves. It just disappoints me because it's such a beautiful, rich, interesting field that 95% of people never even scratch the surface of because they think calculus is the end of math, and there's no more math to learn after you do that.

[Bjorn]

I wish the US would just ditch tipping altogether and start paying waitstaff etc the minimum wage.

 

I'd say that it would actually need to be at least double the minimum wage, at a minimum.  I know a few of servers who earn $25K-$50K a year, and if they were switched over to minimum wage, they'd lose the vast majority of their wage.  This is one of the challenges of figuring out what to do with tips, without them the average wage of servers would probably drop.  Which is a bad thing, being as it can be a solid low education job for a lot of people.

 

I may have told this story here before.  You can't underestimate the greed of restaurant owners and managers.  I know a guy who owned/operated multiple 4 and 5 star restaurants over the course of a couple of decades.  Awhile back, I got into an argument with him when he said he didn't think that he should be required to pay his servers at all, that in fact, they should be paying him for the privilege of having access to his customers.  The servers at his places often made easily in excess of $50K a year (these are places where the average cost per person was $100+).  He felt like he ought to have a right to a percentage of their tips, since they were collecting it from his customers.  It's essentially the same model that strip clubs use, where the women are required to pay a stage fee, or jukebox fee, or some other bullshit, for each shift they work. 

[Mangela Lansbury]

There's a local deli/restaurant here that has a weird structure. All the employees are paid a decent wage, but it varies per quarter because it's essentially profit sharing. The owners are well off, but they'll never be as rich as you'd expect someone who owns that caliber of establishment to be. The flip side of that is that all the employees are much better off than you'd expect them to be. The person behind the counter selling you cheese might make $20/hr, and the person walking you to your seat might make $13/hr. Service there is always phenomenal, too. I'd go more often if I could afford to, but it's an expensive place so I only manage to make it out there once every couple of months.

I'm not clear on what their exact structure is, so I guess if you're interested you can look up Zingerman's in Ann Arbor.

[Twig]

I thought I was good at math until calculus showed up, and then later probability and statistics, although much less so than calc.

 

Mathematical proofs really get my goat. I just cannot mentally handle them. After someone explains a single one to me multiple times in a row I will finally understand. And then promptly forget a week later. Legit, nothing makes me feel dumber than trying to understand even the simplest example of a mathematical proof. ):

 

Which is all a shame because I had to do a lot of math getting my degree (computer science).

[Cordeos]

One recurring theme in this conversation that really makes me sad is all the people who say they're "bad at math" and that's why they don't like tipping. 

 

I was mostly joking, although I do appreciate just able to give a server my card then sign the check, the tip is an extra, annoying step

 

 

I'd say that it would actually need to be at least double the minimum wage, at a minimum.  I know a few of servers who earn $25K-$50K a year, and if they were switched over to minimum wage, they'd lose the vast majority of their wage.  This is one of the challenges of figuring out what to do with tips, without them the average wage of servers would probably drop.  Which is a bad thing, being as it can be a solid low education job for a lot of people.

 

Good point, when I said minimum wage i was thinking about applebee's workers etc. Obviously wait staff at expensive restaurants would have to get higher wages. switching away from tipping would make service industry wages more honest/transparent and give a better sense of how much or how little the owners were screwing the workers. 

[jennegatron]

 was mostly joking, although I do appreciate just able to give a server my card then sign the check, the tip is an extra, annoying step

 

It's not just you who said this! There are a couple other people in this thread who expressed similar sentiments. I think about this a lot, in part because when I tell people I have a math degree they do 2 things. 1 is that they expect me to be able to mental multiply all the time, and 2 is that they tell me they're bad at math because they didn't understand algebra when they were 14 or something. (If you didn't understand algebra at 14 that's okay! You're not necessarily bad at math! You may not have done enough memorization of times tables, or you may have had a bad teacher, there are so many explanations that aren't that you are innately bad at math!)

[Badfinger]

My anger at the "bad at math" line is that it's a bullshit excuse for not tipping properly. 

 

So we're coming at this from very different directions, Jen!

[tberton]

I thought I was good at math until calculus showed up, and then later probability and statistics, although much less so than calc.

 

Mathematical proofs really get my goat. I just cannot mentally handle them. After someone explains a single one to me multiple times in a row I will finally understand. And then promptly forget a week later. Legit, nothing makes me feel dumber than trying to understand even the simplest example of a mathematical proof. ):

 

Which is all a shame because I had to do a lot of math getting my degree (computer science).

 

Oh man, it's been a while since I've done math in school, but I enjoy it recreationally and proofs are my favourite part. When so much of my time in school is spent debating the nature of truth and questioning whether you can proof anything, mathematical proofs feel really relaxing.

[Twig]

You're the reason I hate school.

[tberton]

I'm sorry Twig. I'll say this though: the proofs I encounter are things like Euclid's proof about infinite primes or the proof that Root 2 is irrational. I'm sure the more complicated stuff wouldn't appeal to me.

[Twig]

Haha I wouldn't even know how to begin on either of those. D:

 

Despite having studied both of them multiple times I'm pretty sure.

[Cordeos]

I just remembered something truly awful about tipping culture: it encourages flirtiness in waitstaff to try and get bigger tips from wealthy customers. Its so gross watching a 20something flirt with 50 year old guys just to get rent money. 

[SuperBiasedMan]

For anyone who genuinely worries about how to get 15%.

 

12.99

Divide by ten (ie. Drop a zero off the amount).

1.29

Then halve that

0.65

Multiply by three

1.95

 

And that's 15%. Hopefully that makes it clearer?

Also just estimate anyway, doesn't need to be exact as long as you don't turn €13 into 13c.

[jennegatron]

Haha I wouldn't even know how to begin on either of those. D:

 

Despite having studied both of them multiple times I'm pretty sure.

 

Proofs are all about doing 2 things: following a set structure and finding an insight that lets you crack it open.

This is what makes proofs by contradiction so satisfying. 

LETS ALL TALK ABOUT MATH ALL THE TIME EVERYONE!

 

 

@SBM - I just move the decimal over 1 place, halve it and add it to the 10%, and that works best for me.

 

12.99 -> 13.00 -> 1.30 + .65 because I know that half of 13 is 6.5 -> 1.95

[Twig]

noooooope

[tberton]

Proofs are all about doing 2 things: following a set structure and finding an insight that lets you crack it open.

This is what makes proofs by contradiction so satisfying. 

LETS ALL TALK ABOUT MATH ALL THE TIME EVERYONE!

 

 

@SBM - I just move the decimal over 1 place, halve it and add it to the 10%, and that works best for me.

 

12.99 -> 13.00 -> 1.30 + .65 because I know that half of 13 is 6.5 -> 1.95

 

Jennegatron, let's start a math thread. There's so much cool stuff to talk about!

[Twig]

I think there was a math thread but I hacked the forums and deleted it.

[jennegatron]

The most dastardly of all crimes!
(There was a math thread in the game development section for people to ask for help when vectors made no sense to them)

[Twig]

Oh vectors are fun so I didn't delete that one!!

[eot]

I'm sorry Twig. I'll say this though: the proofs I encounter are things like Euclid's proof about infinite primes or the proof that Root 2 is irrational. I'm sure the more complicated stuff wouldn't appeal to me.

I'm going to say that you probably would. Harder proofs aren't fundamentally different, they just typically involve more abstract concepts that take longer to grasp. It's satisfying once you grasp some theoretical tool that allows you to prove very powerful statements almost trivially.

 

Here's a problem I think you might like if you haven't seen it already:

Show that for any set of n > 3 points in a plane, unless all points are contained on a single line, there always exists a line that only contains two points.

 

It sounds almost trivial, but it's harder than it seems to show. There's a very elegant proof that I like though I'll give the name below but you should give it some thought before looking it up.

 

It's called the Sylvester-Gallai theorem.