Wealth Redistribution at the Micro level
This was posted on an internal email alias at my work. I wanted to see what people's reactions here were. For me, it made my day!
'Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read "Vote Obama, I need the money." I laughed.'Once in the restaurant my server had on a "Obama 08" tie, again I laughed as he had given away his political preference--just imagine the coincidence.
When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need--the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.
At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient needed money more.
I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.
--
Envy was once considered to be one of the deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice. --Thomas Sowell
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References -
are among the many things funnier than this joke.
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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)are there people who are so insecure that they can't deal with someone wearing an Obama or McCain button or tie? And who are so much of a d&^k that instead of going somewhere else to eat (if it bothers then that much) they instead stiff the server? I've seen kindergartners with more maturity.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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)There are indeed people who want to take out petty revenge against a hapless shmoe with a political pin, button or tie that they don't agree with.
And the 'joke' this diary is based on is older than John McCain, by the way.
Speaking of which:
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/world_exclusive_cindy_mccain_caught_cheating_on_sen_john_mccain_with_other_man/celebrity/65736
The old fossil may be having marital problems. Wonder if he wants back in the tiger cage at this point?
Tied forever to sarah palin? Losing to a guy whose middle name is hussein?
Gotta hurt.
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| parent ). . .it was in a detective story written by Isaac Asimov, and it was a smug liberal deciding to teach a conservative waiter a lesson and regaling his friends with it later. . .only to be told he was being a jerk by said friends.
On the other hand, dropping a quiet word to the waiter's manager to the effect of "if I wanted to be exposed to political campaigning while dining, I could have eaten at home in front of the TV. I might do that next time" should lead to the desired punitive effect on the offending waiter, regardless of what candidate he or she was annoying the patrons with. Of course, if the manager had been doing his job in the first place, that tie wouldn't have been there five minutes after the waiter's shift began.
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)It's just dumb to have your waitstaff wearing any sort of political paraphernalia.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )
--I blame it all on the Internet
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)The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer
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| parent )A guy who can pony up for a lunch which pulls a $10 tip probably has better things to do with his time than "teach" some waiter about economic policy 'cuz he doesn't like his button.
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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)I just coughed up $24 for an extra-large two topping Round Table pizza--which will probably be good for three meals for me over the weekend--and felt positively sinful at the expense involved. If I was coughing up $70 before tip for a lunch, I'd probably be hostile to any little punk of a waiter who insisted on waving his politics in my face while I was trying to enjoy my meal, too.
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| parent )seriously, make something with some fresh vegetables in it, living on pizza is not the way to go.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )living on pizza is exactly the way to go!
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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| parent )that's when all the bad habits start catching up to you.
I love pizza, and I have it occasionally, but if you live on a high fat/high salt diet, you'll regret it. I have too many friends who are starting to suffer the effects of overindulging earlier in life.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent ). . .Round Table is nice, but I miss Casa Bianca--not to mention Tommy burgers. Oregon, sad to say, isn't quite civilized in certain important departments.
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| parent )I've found a rival for Casa Bianca here in Brooklyn. Di Fara is pizza crack.
But I've always been fond of Round Table and am confident that I could, in fact, live and die on it.
Do miss Tommy's and In-n-Out, though Five Guys here up and down the east coast is really good.
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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| parent )... but Five Guys is the sh!t. I hardly ever get it, because when I eat there once, I find myself back there the next day, and the day after, and ... . Let's just say I was not blessed with the virtue of temperance.
--Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
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| parent )It's an excellent balanced meal. Example from our pizzeria.
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| parent )At least as far as I learned in the US this month. 10% on tips.
It would be interesting to see what you could get for a $100 lunch.
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| parent )c'mon people, don't tell me you're still tippin 15%?!
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| parent )Frankly, I object to the creeping increase in tipping and tip amounts. I remember when 10% was an acceptable tip, now it's 20% or I'm some kind of cheapskate.
It seems that everyone's got his hand out these days -- delivery guys, repair men, etc. The other day there was a discussion on my football site about whether we should tip the cable/satellite TV guy. Don't these people get a salary? Why are they always in my pocket?
--Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
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| parent )if you return to the US, mark yourself as a generous person who helps support people in the service industry.
These people have lousy healthcare and very active social lives. They need 20%.
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| parent )Um, on another note - do you want to become like us? Really?
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| parent )but only on the pre-tax amount!
It agitates my Scottish genes when they try to slip that one past me.
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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| parent )1) Yes.
2) Because median salaries haven't really kept up with inflation over the past decade -- and the salaries of folks in the bottom fifth have fallen significantly behind.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )- Login or register to post comments
| parent )You're right, just checked.
Thats quite a bit, compared to elsewhere. I was quite surprised to see this, not expecting a tipping culture there, too. Now that I've seen everything duplicated in the US from our culture - from the caste system to backsheesh, this reinforces my view that humans are the same all over the world.
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| parent )The Japanese don't tip at all -- in fact, they'll run after you to return a tip if you leave one.
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| parent )- Login or register to post comments
| parent )Any opportunity to stiff the working guy and give money to an unproductive sector of society.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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)for people here who haven't waited tables:
Source.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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)Not for others..like Oregon.
Another thing about how tips work...the IRS is also onto the busboys, the hostess/host, the dishwasher..or anyone else who might get tips. They, too, have to declare..and how do they know? Because the server keeps track in their own tip book, so as to show why they aren't making the amount the IRS thinks they should, based on that CC formula I mentioned in another post.
After my waitress career as a college student ended I was in charge of the tip reporting (among many other things) for the business. And it was complicated...and unfair to the servers who actually declared more than some others...because the collective tip rate of the restaurants (six of them) wasn't acceptable to the IRS. I developed a daily tip report sheet and accounting that individualised the servers' take...if a server was above the "allocation" (the minimum assumed by the IRS) they weren't dinged, if they fell below, they were...in fact when the IRS came to visit us to see how we were doing, they were shocked to see the daily forms and asked if they could have some of them, because they were surprised to see a business that didn't penalise all the employees for the few and how detailed they were (tip outs to the kitchen, etc, signed by the tipee)...I could go on about how the IRS has it's claws around servers down to the dishwasher...
Not every restaurant has a high tipping clientele...
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| parent )I was expecting some actual useful tips after that lead-in. You know, coconut bra or no coconut bra, how to identify the check payer early so you can spike their drink, how to handle stairs in those skates....
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )The Tips for New Waiters sites were so boring I fell asleep and almost had to go back to work. Here's the only useful one I found:
As a waiter, telling people that you're a vegetarian often creates an awkward situation and a few people even appear to be insulted by it.
Wounded by an asparagus spear? Telling them you're a Scientologist could have an even worse effect.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )Actually, there's nothing wrong with giving money to panhandlers, particularly if you are with certain die-hard righties at the time. It can drive them nuts. (The righties, not the bums.)
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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)be beaten with sticks.
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| parent )What do I win? How about "it takes a pig to root out an ACORN"? No? OK, I'll have more shortly. I'm here all week. Try the veal.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )have exactly no sense of humor. I believe that these two terms are pretty much mutually exclusive.
--Me: We! -- Ali
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)But they're not very funny. A very funny man named Hilaire Belloc, who wrote a good deal of children's verse, beautifully illustrated by Edward Gorey once said:
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| parent )-o-
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )Fricking classic.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )Link.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )It's unfair to judge the merit of an SNL skit by how bad its movie version turned out to be. Unless we're talking about "Night at the Roxbury," which pretty much sucks all around.
--Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
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| parent )...once you show me Dennis Miller is funny. Wait a minute, he used to be funny, then something happened, and...poof...it's gone. Strange, huh?
--Me: We! -- Ali
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| parent )At least compared to what else there is on the AM dial in the AM. His sidekick and token lib, comedy writer David Weiss ("Sal" on the show because he looks a little like Salman Rushdie) can be funny, too. It's certainly not hours and hours of constant laffs, but what is? And there's nothing comparable from your side - certainly not Rhandy Rhodes.
I'm not trying to get you to listen to it, just saying it's to me the best of what's out there.
Some Miller quotes:
That field goal attempt was so far to the left it nearly decapitated Lyndon LaRouche.
Sure, the lion is king of the jungle but airdrop him into Antarctica, & he's just a penguin's bitch.
The average American's day planner has fewer holes in it than Ray Charles's dart board.
The radical right is so homophobic that they're blaming global warming on the AIDS quilt.
Elected office holds more perks than Elvis' nightstand.
Parenting is the most important job on the planet next to keeping Gary Busey off the nation's highways.
OK, I said funny. not hilarious, just funny.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )I love penguin jokes.
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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| parent )TARGET is more ADJECTIVE than REFERENCE.
TARGET VERBs more NOUN than REFERENCE.
I don't know how a comic manages to build a career on a variation of "yo momma so fat" jokes like Dennis Miller did.
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| parent )but he does tend to have the most success with that formula. Your nomination for funny liberal comic is who, again?
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )merry-go-round before, but...
I doubt Miller is a conservative at all, past skin deep. My sense is that after SNL he caught a whiff of success of the angry contrarian sort, and decided to niche-market himself as a brainy Limbaugh.
I'd say it's about 100% an act. Whether he actually believes the act now is beside the point.
He pseudo-famously said he liked george w bush and just wanted to go easy on him, give him a break as it were. Now, suddenly, it turns out that -- according to gwb's former supporters --- gwb wasn't actually a conservative! What does that make miller? Another washed up former SNL guy in search of a job? A real conservative? Really, really, lame?
Yeah it's just entertainment, but miller wasn't all that funny 18 years ago, and he's pretty much doing the same schtick now, just wearing a different mask.
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| parent )but then again, I was 15.
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| parent )good comedians... Larry the Cable Guy, Sarah the Governor, and Joe the Plumber are all pretty dang funny after a few beers.
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| parent )Link. Warning: occasional mild profanity.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )Okay, not performance, but Doonesbury is art.
Other than that, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )Here they are celebrating the Obama win.
Colbert can still be pretty funny; Stewart is getting near his use-by date, at least imo. Neither is funny when they lapse into pure politics, like with Colbert's Nader interview.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )and gleefully disregarded.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )I'm sure I heard it 30 years ago.
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)It's always the servers (waitresses and waiters,etc.) that get the short end of the stick when some jacka$$ is trying to make some point.
Used to be those charming, quaint folks who would do me the utmost favour of giving me some card with a piece of scripture on it as my "tip"..with great fanfare to boot!
Now, at least symbolically, some free market dipwad is screwing with a server's bread and butter to "teach" them something.
I hope the "teacher" tries to go back that restaurant, they'll learn their own lesson. Be a jacka$$ to the server and they will remember you and tell their fellow servers, too. I'd not drink that beverage or expect your food hot.
As a liberal, if a server was wearing a McCain button...I'd still tip them..and not be such a codswallopingly big jerk either.
Tips aren't "freebies"...the IRS is allover that. Even to having formulas of the percentages of CC tips vs. cash tips...servers are audited often. More than you might realise.
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)Is probably less inclined to want to redistribute your money.
Get it?
--Envy was once considered to be one of the deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice. --Thomas Sowell
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| parent )So I sez, "Buddy, I could give you this tip and you'd have the money and maybe you'd be happy right now. But since I see that you're a McCain supporter, I'm going to take the tip I was going to give you and put it in the stock market instead. By injecting that money into the economy, I will help create jobs and spur the economy and that benefit will eventually trickle down to you. You don't have to thank me. I'm just doing my part."
Can't take credit for this joke though. SNL did the almost exact same bit 25 years ago.
--Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
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| parent )But the guy is still a jacka$$..
It's real easy to pick on servers...and the smug dipward can drive away comforted in the knowledge" that he has only reinforced to the Obama supporting server that people like him (the GOP) are self-centered creeps who must be driven from office.
But, hey!...it's getting high fives online.
And I can tell you that a McCain button wearing waiter would also pee in your soda if you (the general you) pulled some "lesson" like that on them. Unless of course he was one of those over 200K a year servers....
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| parent )Well, had the a$$hat in question wanted to make his point in a way that resembled reality, he would've tipped 14.55% instead of 15%.
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| parent )to favor supply-side economics. The jack**s emailer could teach him a lesson by withholding his tip #1 because the restaurant's boss is the one who gets to decide how much to pay the waiter, and #2 so that the customer has more money to spend on the restaurant next time.
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| parent )http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=homeless+waiter+tip+redistribution&btnG=Search
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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)I think the first thing I thought was "Wow, I hope you arent planning on going back there any time in the next few years". It's never a good idea to mess with people whos job involves handling your food in any place thats out of your direct eyesight.
The second thing I thought was "What kind of place allows their waiters to wear clothing with political messages on?" Most bars and restaurants I've been to are very careful about because they dont want to risk provoking any arguments with their customers. So, I basically assumed it was just one of those email stories that get passed around, urban myths for election season.
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| parent )But I never bothered to check.
I'm emailing him about it now to see if he actually did it.
--Envy was once considered to be one of the deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice. --Thomas Sowell
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| parent )