Unfortunately that's not the reality in full service restaurants in the US, where I live. Servers are reliant on tips to live. The practice is pervasive. I don't know of a single non-tipped full service restaurant in my city.

I hope so. I hope something like this makes it to a ballot in my state.

Servers shouldn't be special, obviously. The obligatory tipping system we have is an complete dumpster fire. But this is taking employees who currently make $30/hr in tips and changing their minimum wage from $2/hr to $7/hr. It's not going to change anything. How could it? Would you give up a $30/hr job to take a $7/hr job on principle? Unless you're independently wealthy, you couldn't even if you wanted to.

Tipping is "not required" the way that not cheating on an SO is "not required". No, you're not going to get arrested for it, but that doesn't make it okay.

Reminder that a "living wage", and what most servers make, is at least 3x minimum wage, so tipping is still going to be required.

That's the worst part. The fact they keep doing it means it probably works. I just don't understand how.

They even ambush me every time I go to the grocery store. And they've doubled my bill since I signed up. Why bother marketing when you can raise rates whenever you want? They could save so much money by not mailing every day and hiring people to hunt me

Doesn't that ultimately punish not the company, but anyone who lent money or sold material to the company? Usually assets would be liquidated to pay off creditors but if all the assets go to employees creditors don't get paid. This really hurts all the small businesses who sold supplies or materials to the company and haven't been paid for them yet.

And of course, this all ignores the fact that for most companies most of their valuation is in their intellectual property, mainly their brand identity and recognition. And for manufacturing company's, even most of the tangible assets are going to be things like factory buildings and equipment. Those things are all highly specialized so it's very difficult to get someone else to come in and use that space to the same level of productivity. That will result in major damage to the local economy when a huge source of tax revenue and jobs suddenly disappears.

I'm not saying all this because I think companies should get away with whatever they want. Not at all. I just want to give some context for why these "obvious solutions" aren't being used. It's not that the entire world is in some conspiracy. Many of these problems are legitimately very difficult to solve.

where is the money going to come from if they can't sell anything?

I just got a 2018 Honda Odyssey and it's great. It has the touch screen, but also has physical buttons for almost all of the climate and radio stuff. That's how it should be IMO. Just give us both!

Honestly I would be perfectly happy with the service like this, even if I had to manually input what groceries I need. It's still an incredibly complex problem though. AI is probably better suited for it than anything else since you can have iterative conversations with latest generation AIs. That is, if I tell it I need cereal, it looks at my purchase history and guesses what type of cereal I want this week, and adds it to my list, I can then tell it no, actually I want shredded mini wheats.

So it would probably have to be a combination of a very large database and information gathering system with a predictive engine and a large language model as the user interface.

This is surprisingly difficult problem because different people are okay with different brand substitutions. Some people may want the cheapest butter regardless of brand, while others may only buy brand name.

For example my wife is okay with generic chex from some grocery stores but not others, but only likes brand names Cheerios. Walmart, Aldi, and Meijer generic cheese is interchangable, but brand name and Kroger brand cheese isn't acceptable.

Making a software system that can deal with all this is really hard. AI is probably the best bet, but it needs to be able to handle all this complexity to be useable, which is a lot of up front work

They could be, and probably should be repurposed

But also, brand new chrome books are ~$80

By the time you collect, clean, repair, and reimage the older computers, it may well be cheaper to just buy Chromebooks.

I hate seeing anything useful going to the trash but the economics aren't great in this case

You know that's not actually going to happen though. Maybe one in a hundred will get intercepted and saved at best.

I think there's some ability to distinguish as anything intentionally discarded due to spillage or damage should be accounted for directly, as opposed to only showing up at inventory

Obviously it is impossible to separate out honest mistakes, intentional theft, and disgruntled employee semi-intentional shrink. If you ask the company, 500% of shrink is theft by organized crime rings and the general public should definitely be spending taxpayer dollars on police enforcement and jail time for pretty thieves. So I would assume most of it is actually accidental check out mistakes and employees "accidentally" checking things out wrong.

Indeed. It would be interesting to run the same analysis for censorship of pro Israel content and compare the differences between the two, though the data would likely still be noisy and inconclusive.

But the stadium will bring so much economic benefit to the city! Well get at least 4 new fast food restaurants hiring only minimum wage workers, and a small boost in hotel revenue!

Transit won't bring any return on investment. Only poor people use transit and they don't have any money. And if someone who has a car does use transit that's hurting the economy! Think of the poor gas station owners and car dealers!

/S /S /S /S /S

In my city you can't diy electric without a license if you intend to sell soon. It's a reasonable precaution to prevent shoddy flips. I assume plumbing works the same way. Just installing a toilet might be fine though, it's pretty straightforward.

Yeah, but that would 100% get abused politically to remove justices that don't align with whoever is issuing clearances. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but recent history has shown that trusting politicians to not abuse the system isn't a good long term solution

It kinda does do that, just indirectly. Even if the university can't profit directly off of athletics, a successful sports season increases application rates and donations. Basically it boosts the brand recognition and brand identity of the school.

It's still painful to me that the class size at my engineering school basically doubled the year after the university won some basketball championship. I don't want to believe that people, and especially engineers, are that influence-able but the numbers don't lie