At this point I think anyone important in Russia is staying on the ground floor at all times! Bungalows only!

Serving staff have to declare and pay income taxes on their tips. If they don’t, they’re guilty of tax evasion and could get huge problems down the road.

I have a friend who did a bunch of work for cash and the CRA came after him for unpaid taxes. I would never want to go through that.

Plenty of that out there already, see the supplements category.

What removal of efficacy requirements does in reality is open the door to a lot more off label use.

You really want Doug Ford to decide what and who can be eligible for what treatments, only to have it overturned by the next premier?

No, the total opposite. I think the government regulation of medicine should be limited to ensuring a drug’s safety, but not efficacy. This was the regime we had decades ago that gave us some of the most useful medications we still have, such as NSAIDs, antibiotics, and many vaccines.

Let me, an individual, decide (along with my doctor) which drugs I should or shouldn’t be taking.

No, but it is tied to politics. What treatments Canadians have access to is determined by unaccountable appointed bureaucrats at the ministries of health.

As an example, GLP-1 is only available to Canadians who are diagnosed with diabetes. It is not available for general weight loss.

In the US anyone can decide they want to take the drug and just go to one of the websites that advertise all over the place and get a prescription with no issues.

In Canada, if your current weight does not put you at risk but you would still prefer to lose some weight, you’ll have to convince your doctor who may refuse you.

Yep. And then everyone dies from the water shortages and the world population consists of a handful of billionaires surrounded by a vast dystopian landscape of data centres running AI for them… to do what, exactly? No one knows. But they want it!

No, they were dishonest even when Bill Gates was first negotiating with IBM to develop PC-DOS for the IBM PC. They made a deal and then turned around and bought 86-DOD/QDOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000.

SCP later successfully sued Microsoft for concealing their relationship with IBM which allowed them to buy QDOS far more cheaply than otherwise.

Tips are optional. People tip anywhere from 0-100%, with most tips in the 15-35% range. A person who regularly tips 0-10% will see their prices go up if they’re forced to pay 15% more on every meal.

But my broader point doesn’t address the “what if society wakes up tomorrow and bans tipping for the entire country?” scenario. That’s a fantasy scenario.

The issue I’m raising is the question “what if one restaurant owner decides to eliminate tipping at their restaurant and just charge 15% more, passing all that money over to the employees?” The answer is that this has been tried before and the restaurants did not survive. People saw the higher prices and switched to a restaurant with lower menu prices, even if they tip 15% or more anyway.

You might say this is irrational, and it is, from an economic standpoint. But people in a tipping culture do prefer it that way. The fact that a tip is optional but customary makes them feel like they are in control, and of course they are, given that people decide how much they want to tip.

Any difference in behaviour between North Americans (who do tip) and foreigners (who don’t) is by definition economically irrational behaviour, because economics predicts that a rational consumer would seek to pay as little as possible. The actual behaviour may be rational from a social perspective (social pressures, signalling, etc) but it is economically irrational to pay more than required.

Tipping in this way functions no differently from hidden fees in that consumers do not accurately take them into account when purchasing, even when the information is publicly available and widely known. That foreigners do not tip is a cultural (irrational) difference, not a calculated difference. In some sense it’s no different than other cultural differences that annoy locals, such as public spitting or littering.

As for broader trends in terms of how often people eat out, those tend to be economically rational. People don’t tend to go deeply into debt to continue eating out when they can’t afford it, though there is likely a small percentage of exceptions. In general though, the existence of tipping means people eat out less often than they otherwise would.

I’m not counting on anything. If you read my other comments in this thread, it’s clear that I’m not defending tipping. I hate tipping. But I have to pour cold water on this all too common claim that one restaurant owner by themself can end tipping at their restaurant and survive as a business. It’s been tried before and failed numerous times.

About the best they can do is make tipping mandatory by putting an automatic 35% gratuity on the bill. But this is something only high end restaurants have gotten away with. Restaurants for budget conscious people (i.e normal people rather than rich people) cannot survive with anything like this.

The same story would apply for simply raising prices. People will see the restaurant as too expensive for what it offers and stop going.

If anything the total expected price for a meal will come down because servers will be paid the fair market rate for their labour and not the current guilt trip percentages

This claim needs a lot of support. Are you aware that 42% of all restaurants in Canada are already losing money paying the low wages as it is? To support your claim, you’d have to show how paying fair market wages, eliminating tipping, and charging more for meals would translate into higher sales.

I’d also like to point out that not everyone tips the same percentage. Some tip a lot, some less, some not at all. Those who tip a lot are in effect subsidizing the meals of those who cannot or will not tip as much. For people who cannot afford to tip at all, a move to a non-tipping system would represent an absolute increase in the cost of their meal.

Honestly, it’s not even worth talking to you. You’re intent on interpreting everything I say in the most uncharitable way possible in order to elevate the toxicity of the discussion and win points for your imagined side, rather than learn anything.

The saddest thing is how common people like you are on lemmy. My block list grows ever longer…

We’re talking about irrational behaviour by customers and you’re surprised that it happens? Why do you think entire industries routinely use hidden fees that dramatically raise the final price above the advertised price?

Because it works! You may not like it, I certainly don’t like it, but I can’t dispute it because it does in fact work.

Well they’re doing it wrong then. Most TNG episodes were written by freelance writers, not by the show’s main writing staff. The freelance writers sold scripts to the show and the main writing staff would polish them up for production.

A freelance writer could spend years playing around with ideas before finishing a script to send in. The show didn’t care, they had plenty of other spec scripts to choose from.

Not that notable. He got therapy for recurring nightmares and PTSD after his assimilation by the Borg. Dealing with his trauma was the central theme of s4e2 Family. It was some of Patrick Stewart’s best acting in the whole series, right up there with s5e25 The Inner Light.

What the show didn’t do was make his trauma and recovery an ongoing part of the series. That’s not because they wanted him to get over it, it’s because of the episodic nature of the show. For syndication to work, they needed most episodes to be self contained. This dramatically enhanced the show’s rewatchability, as should be the case for all great syndicated shows.

Yes, I’m aware that high end restaurants can afford to pay their staff more and actually do so rather often. But those restaurants are unaffordable for most people to eat at outside of special occasions.

If restaurants were forced to pay a living wage then only the high end restaurants would survive, then everyone would be complaining that restaurants are only open for rich people.

Are you aware of any restaurants that pay an actual living wage? For Toronto (and the GTA), that’s $27.20 per hour, or nearly $10 above minimum wage. For restaurants that already operate on razor thin margins, that’s impossible.

I’m talking about west of the Atlantic, not Europe.

And I’m not defending the practice of tipping. I hate tipping. But what I hate even more are smug people who think it’s so easy to get rid of tipping.

Everyone in the west knows about tipping. No one is being misled. There have been many attempts to run restaurants with higher prices but no tipping. They always go out of business.

Restaurants are basically always operating on a razor thin margin.

I see them open and close every year in my city. Restaurants coming and going like a revolving door. The commercial landlords stay the same though.