It’s hard to know what’s the new information here. Altman’s history has been reported on exhaustively.
Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments, non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners, saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But as long as they have the money, we have to dance to their tune.
We really really need a way for our society to be more equitable and hold these people responsible.
I feel betrayed that these laws are enacted without capping or preventing the practice of tipping. I doubt that tipping could be banned constitutionally due to past supreme court precedents but we really should re-evaluate and try to get rid of this practice. Why does a certain class of workers get this benefit that perpetuates race and age discrimination (white and young employees get tipped a lot more).
Wouldn’t a blanket ban on “asking for tips” be an infringement on a person’s freedom of speech? It’s essentially just asking for some money, which surely anyone is free to do
It depends if you mean the individual asking, or if they're asking because of company policies.
We ban businesses from having signs that are too tall or too bright, from doing door to door soliciting, making phone calls without consent, and a pile of other behaviors that could all be labeled as "speech", but which people find extremely irritating.
The difference is temporal: tip is for a "past" already rendered product or service. Sbf, Holmes, et al, it's about a promise for "future" services, which have a risk associated of no delivery or render. When you've already eaten your burger there was no risk of uncertain delivery. The causal relationship is reversed
True generally, but it gets murkier all the time. Just last week I ate at a traditional restaurant that stated up front that there is a 15% service charge on all checks. This was in a city that has a very high minimum wage even for tipped employees. More traditionally, parties of a certain size at a restaurant always are charged a fixed gratuity.
Then there’re the square terminals that are normalizing up-front tipping for everything, not even just food service anymore. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has tipped up front for something and the service wound up being terrible. So there are three examples of tipping towards the future.
There’s another future component to tipping: in many places there is regulation that states if the tips don’t make up the prevailing normal minimum wage, the employer must pay the difference in salary. I’ve personally never seen this happen and I worked for tips for about 7 years.
That could be tricky. When I live, a cold burrito in a refrigerator cabinet is considered to be groceries, and is untaxed. Heat up that burrito, and it's a taxable meal. Also, some non-profit organizations aren't taxed on purchases, so the sticker price is the final price for them.
You can't pre-calculate the final taxed price using the local tax algorithms as they are today. They number can't be known until the transaction takes place.
if that is the case then the rules are too complicated and need simplifying. that is not automatically an argument to not have a rule to list the full price, but it could also be an argument to remove or change other rules that make things more complicated. the lawmakers here need to weigh the pros and cons for each.
For a given class of goods Europe generally has one VAT rate for the whole country.
In the US the sales tax for a given in-person sale is the state sales tax, plus possibly county sales tax, city sales tax, and sometimes even special tax district sales tax.
For remote sales, it is similar except the tax is computed using the buyer's location rather than the seller's location.
They can do that but that costs money so they never will. We worship the dollar like its a god above gods. No way we're going to willingly do something that costs the rich a dime more than absolutely necessary.
VAT is deductible if the buyer is a VAT registered business. The amount of VAT is still printed on the receipt by law, so you can still know how much you pay.
Companies already manage seperate ads in the EU for language, currency and price discrimination reasons, it's really not a huge bother.
So customers cannot deduct VAT from their personal taxes...
I also doubt that separate ads per township are common in EU. For example, in Los Angeles the city is made from several separate townships with different sales taxes, two shops on the same street may have different taxes because one can be in LA and another in Santa Monica.
Em.. no, the advertised price usually says "latte 4.50" but at the register it gets mysteriously padded with sales tax, tip tax, foo tax and bar tax, so you have to pay 6.50.
Nobody thinks anything is getting "padded" with sales tax other than Europeans who have never heard of the practice before and can't get over the fact that ~5% (the median US sales tax is 5.1%) wasn't disclosed as if that is making their breakfast unaffordable.
You're never required to tip so the "advertised price" and the price at the register are identical. You choosing to leave $2 on top of that doesn't change anything, even if it's only done through social pressure.
Which bit do you not understand? End point taxes are not ubiquitos, and at least other countires have decent laws so people can see what they actually pay.
> You're never required to tip so the "advertised price" and the price at the register are identical. You choosing to leave $2 on top of that doesn't change anything, even if it's only done through social pressure.
Taxes and tips aren't the same thing. Their $2 example is something you are required to pay.
Silly attempt at shrugging off legitimate complaints notwithstanding, at least use an average sales tax when you do.
Now it just comes across as you saying that half the country is above 5%, which would’ve been a more honest statement as it seems considering few states however around 5% combined sales tax: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/2023-sales-tax-rate...
Revoke the alcohol license if there are tip jars present, if its mentioned on receipts, the point of sale system, or if staff brings it up
Other discretionary things can be revoked too. Easements, performances, outdoor dining. This is entirely easy.
Have random audits to see how often payments match the receipts
Have a consumer protection agency launch random lawsuits and distribute funds to patrons
Encourage staff to mention that everyone is paid a full wage and have similar disclaimers on the menu and receipt, just like they put shellfish and undercooked disclaimers on the menu and in some places have to state it verbally
Create liability so that any private lawyer can try to sue everyone just like was done to create California’s cancer disclaimer, they can function alongside the consumer protection agency
Make it illegal for point of sale systems to push tipping for certain merchant codes, merchants have to snitch on the POS provider and vice versa when anyone questions why the system is guilt tripping them into a tip
Everyone is a node within a network, graph theory, you can control behavior by regulating the intermediary, the nodes will flip their behavior in a distributed fashion. Think about everything that way and you can find how to control all facets of life under any governance system.
When the town clerk is processing your building permit they can't ask for a tip. Well, they can and do in some cultures, with the understanding that you'll get better service! But it's illegal in the US.
So it's not too difficult to imagine that it can be done.
One option is to ban a business from asking soliciting tips, or regulation on payment processors who do business in Chicago to remove the tip line. It's possible but it would see a lawsuit for restriction of speech. IANL but that may not be enough of a defense, since the customer is still free to give a tip (speak with money) but the business would not be allowed to solicit gratuity's.
This is true, but two things mitigate it. The first is that if you're the one paying the bill, it's pretty easy to do so in a way that nobody you're with can tell how much, or if, you tip. The other thing is that the social consequences aren't that large.
To be transparent, if I saw someone not tip when they took the bill I’d say something. I’ve heard of people looking explicitly at tips when evaluating dates, because it’s perceived as a (vague) proxy for empathy. I’ve also seen workers complain to the customer over not tipping, so you can totally be “outed” by them too.
I’m against tipping like a lot of this thread, but it’s a standard practice in the US. Being the one non-tipper is not changing the system, you’re just hurting the service worker.
In San Francisco..yeah. At least when I lived there the general mentality of servers was a littlw militant. Not tipping a bartender by mistake had one almost come across the bar at me. If I were not tipping in a major city, I would hustle out before the server noticed.
Attractiveness isn’t a protected class, and gender in this case goes opposite the direction people usually complain about. If you want moral sympathy for a cause, it’s helpful to pick a subset of the intersection between your cause and the morality that will be most impactful.
What good is wealth if you are living in a boring old town with nothing to do? Also this would obviously not be true if you have a family because kids are a money sink.
Some people like boring towns and what you consider things to do may not be of interest to others.
For example I have many friends in large metropolitan areas whose lives revolve around eating and going out. On the other hand I much prefer going on hikes to going out to dinner and bars. Also if I want a more cultured experience I have enough money to hop on a plane and go anywhere I want. Overall the smaller town with the lower cost of living works very well for me.
Fellow "boring old town" member here. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Far away from me are the trivialities and concerns of concrete monoliths. I much prefer being able to walk outside on my own, and see open fields and forests where ever I turn.
Maybe I'm not an exception, but there are more than a few people who don't need much in life. A wood cabin in the mountains with 802.11 and solar power is all I need.
There are many perks to living outside of the city. You can have twice the house for 1/3 the cost. It's much quieter. There are hobbies and activities that are only available outside of the city. Of course, if you are single, it's a terrible idea, but for married people or those in committed relationships, there are a lot of pluses to consider.
As an example, a friend lives in a 5 bed, 4 bath house and hour and a half out of the city. He has a woodshop, a workshop, fire pit, fireplace, man cave, 4 car garage, loves dirt biking, off-roading, cycling, fishing, flying his racing drone,and can play his drums as loud as he wants. He is also only an hour and a half from the city if he wants to go in for the day or weekend. He would be in a 2 bed, 1.5 bath condo if he lived in the city and wouldn't be able to do any of his hobbies; maybe the cycling.
In my boring little town, a tourism town, we have a high-ranked ski hill within 40min of city centre, other options including heliskiing with a couple hours, world-class golf (and spa) with 20min of city centre and several other equally great ones within a couples hours drive, an enormous lake running a few hundred kilometres in length within 10min of city centre, world-class backcountry hiking in nearly every direction, a x-c ski area that regularly hosts world cups, awesome mountain biking, some amazing motorcycle highways, fantastic wineries and fruit farms, endless fresh vegetables, etc. International airport is 40min away. We even get some good performing arts acts. Lower Mainland is 4.5hr to downtown core. Population < 60K.
Not really seeing a downside to this place. Different strokes for different folks.
Boring old towns often come with cheap space, something that's impossible to find in big cities. With space comes infinite possibilities. Set up a 1/4 acre farm and see how much can be automated. That'll suck all the free time out of a day.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they talked to absolutely no one local (Pakistani or Muslim) before they published this. The threshold before people pay zakat is like $300 so fluctuations in silver price has very low effect. Do you think someone with $300 in savings is giving donations?
Government only deducts the zakat from the checking account. I am from Pakistan and very few people(basically salaried employees for corps/govt which is a very small portion of population) have bank accounts and the main use is to just withdraw the salary immediately every month. People who are on the threshold of $300 lifetime savings have almost negligible chance of owning a bank account.So I am going to call BS on this paper. There are so many problems with the data in this paper that I can't even. Also quite racist to say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and the proof for this is nada. They are using metrics for terrorist attacks in Pakistan (most of which used to happen indiscriminately in public places in metros where most people with bank accounts live). Do you really think that people living in metros are bankrolling indiscriminate terrorist attacks against themselves?
There is a cottage industry within academia for this kind of sophistry around terrorism.
I studied IR at a uni with a fairly good research reputation, one of the hot projects (funded to the tune of 7 figures) at the time (some time ago now) was the physical identification of terrorists i.e. by various body measurements...I am 100% serious. And this guy was not an idiot, in the conventional sense at least, PHd in Biology from Oxbridge, "genius", who (at the time) was talked about in breathless tones of wonder by the science departments (and ridiculed everywhere else).
Every few years a scientist will say: "Terrorism isn't solved...but I have a formula"...stop, we know why terrorism occurs but it isn't as simple as your calculus homework.
And I agree, it is totally unfounded to suggest that charities are funding terrorism (or that people who would give to charities and somehow be unaware of that fact, if it was the case).
I think it may be possible to get some signal from body measurements. Skin color, sex organs, teeth health (wealth proxy), scars/injuries (been in fights before?), maybe you could find some marker of chronic stress.
But yeah it's going to be pretty poor and not really actionable.
You have also misunderstood slightly. It wasn't stuff like scars, or things correlated to wealth (or race...much good that would do in Northern Ireland or the Basque...I take it you don't know much about terrorism). It was purely body measurements iirc.
I mean, he is predicting whether someone is a terrorist... based on physical measurements. It's pretty much the definition of prejudice. What could he otherwise be doing?
These are great. Imagine the kind of laws politicians would make up based on these facts.
Start by regulating the maximum length of spelling bee words, then let every japanese car be audited for motorcycle homicidal AI. And do something for the honey bee.
> quite racist to say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and the proof for this is nada
The more commonly accepted fact is that Muslim terrorist organizations have laundered most of their money through Muslim charities (or at least have done so in the past).
As you state, this doesn't necessarily imply the opposite: that most Muslim charities fund terrorism. But it doesn't not say that either. In any case, this seems more like a lapse in logic to me than overt racism.
I appreciate you are pointing out the logical fallacy. Thou I’ll point out that their money is laundered through is different from their money comes from.
"Most X's are also Y's" does not imply "Most Y's are also X's." We would need additional information about the X and Y populations to make this stronger claim.
However, making this claim incorrectly is one of the more common logical fallacies. Given that, it seems more appropriate to attribute the error to logical fallacy than to specific racist intent, again, unless we have more information about the authors with which to make this stronger claim.
>Do you really think that people living in metros are bankrolling indiscriminate terrorist attacks against themselves?
That’s not necessarily contradictory. A different example is drug related gang violence. Money from drugs can be traced and consequential and resulting in gang violence, but obviously a given gangster isn’t going to fund a shootout targeting her or him, but obviously other targets, but in the end in aggregate can result in violence for all gangsters (and many bystanders).
The paper pretty robustly shows charitable giving is correlated with the price of silver.
That intuitively doesn’t contradict the idea that most people don’t change their giving based on the price of silver. If only the rich do they can still move the needle.
This looks like a nice idea even if it seems hard to monetize. How does this differ from Scott's Cheap flights? Do you mention how 'cheap' this is compared to the past. One feature I have found lagging in most travel websites are the "deals" don't mention how often they have been this cheap.
Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments, non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners, saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But as long as they have the money, we have to dance to their tune.
We really really need a way for our society to be more equitable and hold these people responsible.