If I was given that tipping option.. I'd have pulled a 180 pirouette that would have made the most highly trained and graceful ballerina blush like a school girl... and headed right back out that door!
I prefer to select my own fights; in this case, a single person can instigate action. Done it a few times, while others were mesmerized, and it usually worked! :)
Yep me too. I'm always bucking the system.. can't help it! It's wired into my DNA. That's why this whole thing is so mind numbingly painful! Currently tapping out a post on masking mandates.
Same here. Once put to it, my mind keeps spinning until it manages to contsruct a useful cognitive model. Somehow, it combines synthetic and analytical thinking both in the inductive and the deductive paths. It likes to re-invent the wheel and the new wheel is either identical with the one in use or better. I usually deduce by exlusion (even God cannot create mountains without valleys), kind of like Occam's Razor. Used to be a chess player (among a lot of other things like a 2nd-Division soccer player, a factory worker etc.) and at one point, I was able to think 15-20 moves ahead, but I quit, because it made me feel that everything is predestined. The habit, however, helps me count moves that the AI is able to make, because the objective is clear: checkmate humanity.
Last year, I believe, there was already a collection of 283 ways the muzzles harmed their wearers, while offering no benefits whatsoever. I know, you are going into a lot more details, which I hardly ever do. I am looking forward to your post(s)!
I've appreciated some of George Carlin's political satire, but I've also been suspicious of him, or perhaps rather the way he proved useful to the same powers he seemed to mock. Just like I'm suspicious of any public figure or celebrity who's promoted as anti-establishment by the establishment, like corporate media, manufacturing mock freedom of speech in which the exception proves the rule. Even as s/he, too, like any other upper class collaborator, gets richer at our expense, laughing all the way to the bank by getting us to laugh, cynically, powerlessly, at what becomes taken for granted as the way things are. Comedy Central represents the corporate consolidation of such self-defeating, self-destructive humor. Carlin's occasional if not frequent contempt for working class people, caricatured in Archie Bunker or Joe Sixpack terms, and women in particular, reduced to misogynist stereotypes, only served to underscore this cooptation by controlled opposition.
I can't recall exactly when tip jars and their like started showing up more in the exchange relations of the unfree market. I'd wager that roughly coincided with galloping de-industrialization of the manufacturing base for the economy from automation and layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. and corresponding reduction of labor to service industries. By now, with endemic stagnation and decline of wages (as productivity has increased and the resulting lionshare of wealth has been stolen by upper classes), the precarious conditions of labor in the gig economy, and every atomized individual a self-entrpreneur desperately selling themselves and scraping together what crumbs they can in an 'informal' if not underground economy, tipping has become (ab)normalized as one means of survival, even while popular perceptions persist that it's lagniappe.
The great masses of us here in the U$, Inc. and across the world are working class commoners to kleptocrats who all the more profit and are empowered by our compliance with their divide-and-rule ruses. A primary one, too often forgotten as the (enforced) status quo of the market uber alles, is the basic buyer-selller division personalized in relations between employees and customers, whereby the employee serves as a front, and target, onto which customers may (mis)direct inevitable dissatisfactions from their own exploitation, as by inflation, price gouging, bait-and-switch wheeling and dealing, and generally shoddy merchandise as well as service following upon downsized, 'streamlined' bizzness operations. Employers, especially within corporate chains of command beyond what little remains of small businesses, remain unaccountably indifferent behind telemarketing scripts, online algorithms, and the typical 80/20 rule of all such bureaucratic buffers and runarounds.
In short, we can get entrapped in assigned market roles across 'service' counters and exchange relations which are antagonistic, forgetting our common oppression and interchangeability of positions, and how this is largely determined by control from owners of the economy. It too often proves easier to make an enemy of another across from us to the advantage of the generals behind the front lines of c(r)apitalism's class war.
We can be led as customers to forget, for instance, that tips cover for substandard, nonliving wages of wage slaves desperately driven to depend on tips, which in turn are also stolen like wages by employers deploying exploitative schemes like pooled tips off which they skim. And in turn we can grow ever more resentful in our commodification as labor of customers who embody the same indifference, if not contempt, of employers to our plight. This and more by design of such Taylorized or scientific management as industrial psychology.
What remains imperative, as always, is to build the class consciousness, resistance and solidarity which is necessary to escape any and all of our respective prison cells within the unfree market.
Remember, when AT&T was broken up? That was about the last time the legislation moved against a monopoly, although I suspect that simply new elements forced themselves on the gravy train.
By 2008, the taxpayer was forced to bail out banks that were "too big to fail," meaning that the FDIC "insurance" couldn't have covered the losses (if all banks failed, the FDIC could pay 50 cents after every $100), plus those banks belonged to the same interest that owns the Fed. Stealing from the taxpayer was nothing new after the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It was another step in the redistribution of wealth and the controlled demolition of the USD.
Today, I believe, only eight corporation control much of the global food supply. In the US, just about everything is a cartel or a monopoly, no matter how trashy the products/services are, which foreshadows the upcoming global monopoly over those lives, who will be temporarily allowed to live. (I keep wondering how they are planning to select the "elite" gene pool.)
I think, based on your level of knowledge and sophistication, you could easily start your substack, too!
I grew up in the all-embracing arms of Ma Bell. Ahhh, the simpler days of land lines and rotary phones, of services (and service charges) that any tool-user could comprehend. Now I'm forever lost in machnery using me.
Short of research into AT&T and its history, and following up your opening suspicions, I think of how monopoly can morph into other, even more effective means of control over people. The breakup of Standard Oil only increased the wealth and power of John D. and the Rockefeller dynasty, for example.
The problems of monopoly and their alleged solutions have developed within an overall history of increasing power of the corporate state, and the conversion of society to the corporatism, collectivism, which Mussolini defined as the essence of fascism. The global private-public partnerships of today, central to the agenda of the Great Reset as with the fusion of Big Brother Tech and national security and surveillance operations of governments or the Pharmafia and international public health networks, are among the advance front of a technofascist march that especially got underway post-WW2, especially under the hegemony of American empire and the MIC.
One thing I recall about the breakup of Ma Bell is that it was during the 1980's, early years of what became the neoliberal era, particularly via policies of so-called deregulation to get big government off our backs, as stylized by Reagan's "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." (Notice how this implicitly targeted the social welfare state for 'deregulation', or rather destruction.)
Apparently, it was conveniently forgotten that monopolies like AT&T in the first place were maintained thanks to government regulations, just so new regulatory conditions, like 'reforms' of 'deregulation', could reconstitute ownership and control of the economy, similar to the Rockefeller gang making a killing with the breakup of Standard Oil.
So the political-economic terrain is changed to accomodate corporate control in the interlocking oligarchy, especially thanks to 'deregulation' of financial capital, which comes to characterize oligopoly like that of the 5 or 6 behemoths which preside over mass media after passage of the Telecommunications Act under Clinton, as Carlin notes, or as you note, the big bizznesses which determine basic survival resources like food (much in fulfillment of Kissinger's infamous words over controlling people through this means - and experimenting with all sorts of Frankenfoods, patenting (synthetic) life from GMO's to vaxxes, upon test subjects). Additionally, it changed to accommodate technological advancements like cellular and cable, and later digital, interconnectivity enabling intensified commoditifcation of living and incorporation of the consuming public into purposes of elites.
Its libertarian ideology notwithstanding, especially afer the 2008 collapse and bailouts, neoliberalism has been all about big government when it comes to funding more than ever, including with trillions in dark money at the disposal of the 1%, the Pentagod and shadow state of alphabet agencies like the CIA,, NSA, DHS, NIH...on and on. A monstrous police state, now international, over general populations via 'globalization', necessary to support neoliberalism's increasing inequality of wealth and resources and disposession of people from control over our lives.
Or as NYTimes propagandist Thomas Friedman laid down: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas… And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
So yeah, there's monopoly, and then there's Monopoly.
So the easy way out is pay cash. The tills here at the supermarkets like to add the option to tip to some charity or other these days and the only option to pay cash is fast becoming the 'manned' counters rather than the automatic ones. The good news is that out of the supermarkets, which are also taking copious film footage of you walking around their stores, cash is still taken willingly albeit sometimes surprisingly.
I have also been surprised that the cameras at checkouts are not even hidden anymore.
Cash is being phased out, but especially in rural places like mine, there would be an uproar, if it was not accepted, because many people are making money in the black economy.
Well, I pay cash for almost everything...always have.... and as far as TIPS...remember, it stands for To Insure Proper Service..... my husband tips over and always...I don't...he gets uncomfortable.....I remind him that TIPS are earned.... if they come to my table once after bringing my food I am not going to tip high as if they came over filling drinks, bringing desserts, etc... he needs to learn to tip properly so that it doesn't ruin it for the rest of us AND it doesn't make it a guaranteed thing.... also, we need to stop caring what others thing and stop comparing and doing what the herd is doing..... and to your point...if you pay cash, then you are in control of the tip...if any..... it supposed o be earned.....
I have always felt sorry for the poor devils working for fast-food places, although I stopped having an occasional snack in those places decades ago. It must have felt subhuman having to wear a muzzle in addition to putting up with the heat and the congestion.
Most, if not all, of these places are franchises, where families are working together, but Domino's seems to need a new worker every week or two. I guess, even family members cannot put up with the heat.
Still, in the system in Vancouver, apparently, cash is not accepted. Can I go to a store, where "tips" are not extorted? I surely can, but my impression is that "non-tipping" stores must have also raised their prices to include the range of the "tips" others charge...
Extortion is the right word. I recently had this experience: placed an order for a Domino's pizza online, chose customer pickup, drove to the restaurant to pick it up and paid with a credit card. The employee tells me I didn't finish filling out the receipt, so I asked him what he meant- he tells me that I didn't fill out the tip portion. I said "no tip" I was the one who drove there to pick it up- so what am I tipping him for? I asked some of my friends afterward who told me that yes, this is a "thing".
Inflation is kept in check through taxation. That is the only function of the income tax.
Not exactly. At the moment, the country is experiencing controlled demolition through inflation, which has been openly going on for a while:
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/the-final-stage-to-a-one-world-government
Ah...yes. I should have said “traditionally”. Even now though taxation still creates artificial demand for the dollar that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
I paid exact change at a dive through window yesterday and the teller was surprised.
If I was given that tipping option.. I'd have pulled a 180 pirouette that would have made the most highly trained and graceful ballerina blush like a school girl... and headed right back out that door!
I prefer to select my own fights; in this case, a single person can instigate action. Done it a few times, while others were mesmerized, and it usually worked! :)
Yep me too. I'm always bucking the system.. can't help it! It's wired into my DNA. That's why this whole thing is so mind numbingly painful! Currently tapping out a post on masking mandates.
Same here. Once put to it, my mind keeps spinning until it manages to contsruct a useful cognitive model. Somehow, it combines synthetic and analytical thinking both in the inductive and the deductive paths. It likes to re-invent the wheel and the new wheel is either identical with the one in use or better. I usually deduce by exlusion (even God cannot create mountains without valleys), kind of like Occam's Razor. Used to be a chess player (among a lot of other things like a 2nd-Division soccer player, a factory worker etc.) and at one point, I was able to think 15-20 moves ahead, but I quit, because it made me feel that everything is predestined. The habit, however, helps me count moves that the AI is able to make, because the objective is clear: checkmate humanity.
Last year, I believe, there was already a collection of 283 ways the muzzles harmed their wearers, while offering no benefits whatsoever. I know, you are going into a lot more details, which I hardly ever do. I am looking forward to your post(s)!
I've appreciated some of George Carlin's political satire, but I've also been suspicious of him, or perhaps rather the way he proved useful to the same powers he seemed to mock. Just like I'm suspicious of any public figure or celebrity who's promoted as anti-establishment by the establishment, like corporate media, manufacturing mock freedom of speech in which the exception proves the rule. Even as s/he, too, like any other upper class collaborator, gets richer at our expense, laughing all the way to the bank by getting us to laugh, cynically, powerlessly, at what becomes taken for granted as the way things are. Comedy Central represents the corporate consolidation of such self-defeating, self-destructive humor. Carlin's occasional if not frequent contempt for working class people, caricatured in Archie Bunker or Joe Sixpack terms, and women in particular, reduced to misogynist stereotypes, only served to underscore this cooptation by controlled opposition.
You just inspired me to write this morning's article!
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/paid-agents-or-simple-morons
I can't recall exactly when tip jars and their like started showing up more in the exchange relations of the unfree market. I'd wager that roughly coincided with galloping de-industrialization of the manufacturing base for the economy from automation and layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. and corresponding reduction of labor to service industries. By now, with endemic stagnation and decline of wages (as productivity has increased and the resulting lionshare of wealth has been stolen by upper classes), the precarious conditions of labor in the gig economy, and every atomized individual a self-entrpreneur desperately selling themselves and scraping together what crumbs they can in an 'informal' if not underground economy, tipping has become (ab)normalized as one means of survival, even while popular perceptions persist that it's lagniappe.
The great masses of us here in the U$, Inc. and across the world are working class commoners to kleptocrats who all the more profit and are empowered by our compliance with their divide-and-rule ruses. A primary one, too often forgotten as the (enforced) status quo of the market uber alles, is the basic buyer-selller division personalized in relations between employees and customers, whereby the employee serves as a front, and target, onto which customers may (mis)direct inevitable dissatisfactions from their own exploitation, as by inflation, price gouging, bait-and-switch wheeling and dealing, and generally shoddy merchandise as well as service following upon downsized, 'streamlined' bizzness operations. Employers, especially within corporate chains of command beyond what little remains of small businesses, remain unaccountably indifferent behind telemarketing scripts, online algorithms, and the typical 80/20 rule of all such bureaucratic buffers and runarounds.
In short, we can get entrapped in assigned market roles across 'service' counters and exchange relations which are antagonistic, forgetting our common oppression and interchangeability of positions, and how this is largely determined by control from owners of the economy. It too often proves easier to make an enemy of another across from us to the advantage of the generals behind the front lines of c(r)apitalism's class war.
We can be led as customers to forget, for instance, that tips cover for substandard, nonliving wages of wage slaves desperately driven to depend on tips, which in turn are also stolen like wages by employers deploying exploitative schemes like pooled tips off which they skim. And in turn we can grow ever more resentful in our commodification as labor of customers who embody the same indifference, if not contempt, of employers to our plight. This and more by design of such Taylorized or scientific management as industrial psychology.
What remains imperative, as always, is to build the class consciousness, resistance and solidarity which is necessary to escape any and all of our respective prison cells within the unfree market.
Remember, when AT&T was broken up? That was about the last time the legislation moved against a monopoly, although I suspect that simply new elements forced themselves on the gravy train.
By 2008, the taxpayer was forced to bail out banks that were "too big to fail," meaning that the FDIC "insurance" couldn't have covered the losses (if all banks failed, the FDIC could pay 50 cents after every $100), plus those banks belonged to the same interest that owns the Fed. Stealing from the taxpayer was nothing new after the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It was another step in the redistribution of wealth and the controlled demolition of the USD.
Today, I believe, only eight corporation control much of the global food supply. In the US, just about everything is a cartel or a monopoly, no matter how trashy the products/services are, which foreshadows the upcoming global monopoly over those lives, who will be temporarily allowed to live. (I keep wondering how they are planning to select the "elite" gene pool.)
I think, based on your level of knowledge and sophistication, you could easily start your substack, too!
I grew up in the all-embracing arms of Ma Bell. Ahhh, the simpler days of land lines and rotary phones, of services (and service charges) that any tool-user could comprehend. Now I'm forever lost in machnery using me.
Short of research into AT&T and its history, and following up your opening suspicions, I think of how monopoly can morph into other, even more effective means of control over people. The breakup of Standard Oil only increased the wealth and power of John D. and the Rockefeller dynasty, for example.
The problems of monopoly and their alleged solutions have developed within an overall history of increasing power of the corporate state, and the conversion of society to the corporatism, collectivism, which Mussolini defined as the essence of fascism. The global private-public partnerships of today, central to the agenda of the Great Reset as with the fusion of Big Brother Tech and national security and surveillance operations of governments or the Pharmafia and international public health networks, are among the advance front of a technofascist march that especially got underway post-WW2, especially under the hegemony of American empire and the MIC.
One thing I recall about the breakup of Ma Bell is that it was during the 1980's, early years of what became the neoliberal era, particularly via policies of so-called deregulation to get big government off our backs, as stylized by Reagan's "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." (Notice how this implicitly targeted the social welfare state for 'deregulation', or rather destruction.)
Apparently, it was conveniently forgotten that monopolies like AT&T in the first place were maintained thanks to government regulations, just so new regulatory conditions, like 'reforms' of 'deregulation', could reconstitute ownership and control of the economy, similar to the Rockefeller gang making a killing with the breakup of Standard Oil.
So the political-economic terrain is changed to accomodate corporate control in the interlocking oligarchy, especially thanks to 'deregulation' of financial capital, which comes to characterize oligopoly like that of the 5 or 6 behemoths which preside over mass media after passage of the Telecommunications Act under Clinton, as Carlin notes, or as you note, the big bizznesses which determine basic survival resources like food (much in fulfillment of Kissinger's infamous words over controlling people through this means - and experimenting with all sorts of Frankenfoods, patenting (synthetic) life from GMO's to vaxxes, upon test subjects). Additionally, it changed to accommodate technological advancements like cellular and cable, and later digital, interconnectivity enabling intensified commoditifcation of living and incorporation of the consuming public into purposes of elites.
Its libertarian ideology notwithstanding, especially afer the 2008 collapse and bailouts, neoliberalism has been all about big government when it comes to funding more than ever, including with trillions in dark money at the disposal of the 1%, the Pentagod and shadow state of alphabet agencies like the CIA,, NSA, DHS, NIH...on and on. A monstrous police state, now international, over general populations via 'globalization', necessary to support neoliberalism's increasing inequality of wealth and resources and disposession of people from control over our lives.
Or as NYTimes propagandist Thomas Friedman laid down: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas… And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
So yeah, there's monopoly, and then there's Monopoly.
So the easy way out is pay cash. The tills here at the supermarkets like to add the option to tip to some charity or other these days and the only option to pay cash is fast becoming the 'manned' counters rather than the automatic ones. The good news is that out of the supermarkets, which are also taking copious film footage of you walking around their stores, cash is still taken willingly albeit sometimes surprisingly.
I have also been surprised that the cameras at checkouts are not even hidden anymore.
Cash is being phased out, but especially in rural places like mine, there would be an uproar, if it was not accepted, because many people are making money in the black economy.
Well, I pay cash for almost everything...always have.... and as far as TIPS...remember, it stands for To Insure Proper Service..... my husband tips over and always...I don't...he gets uncomfortable.....I remind him that TIPS are earned.... if they come to my table once after bringing my food I am not going to tip high as if they came over filling drinks, bringing desserts, etc... he needs to learn to tip properly so that it doesn't ruin it for the rest of us AND it doesn't make it a guaranteed thing.... also, we need to stop caring what others thing and stop comparing and doing what the herd is doing..... and to your point...if you pay cash, then you are in control of the tip...if any..... it supposed o be earned.....
I have always felt sorry for the poor devils working for fast-food places, although I stopped having an occasional snack in those places decades ago. It must have felt subhuman having to wear a muzzle in addition to putting up with the heat and the congestion.
Most, if not all, of these places are franchises, where families are working together, but Domino's seems to need a new worker every week or two. I guess, even family members cannot put up with the heat.
There was a restaurant franchise* here (Auckland) that went against the masking and vaccination rules. They were hounded by the woke in response.
But as you I won't buy at their crappy restaurants, I don't want to die from their poisons.
* I can't remember which one but one of the big ones
Yes, tips must be earned.
Yes, non-conformism must be maintained.
Still, in the system in Vancouver, apparently, cash is not accepted. Can I go to a store, where "tips" are not extorted? I surely can, but my impression is that "non-tipping" stores must have also raised their prices to include the range of the "tips" others charge...
Extortion is the right word. I recently had this experience: placed an order for a Domino's pizza online, chose customer pickup, drove to the restaurant to pick it up and paid with a credit card. The employee tells me I didn't finish filling out the receipt, so I asked him what he meant- he tells me that I didn't fill out the tip portion. I said "no tip" I was the one who drove there to pick it up- so what am I tipping him for? I asked some of my friends afterward who told me that yes, this is a "thing".