Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by amok » Tue Oct 18, 2011 4:35 am

Seth wrote:
MrJonno wrote:Is anyone thinks customer service skills determine how well a waitress does as opposed to how attractive that person is then they are sadly mistaken.
How would you know? I doubt you've ever waited tables or done more than eat Cheetos and drink soda in your mommy's basement.
An attractive but unfriendly waitress will earn far more than any bloke regardless of charm
Like I said, how would you know? Go have another Twinkie.
Anyway arent tips put into a pool and shared equally (including the cooks)?. Most restaurants I've been to do that?
Nope, not in the US, by and large. Nor should they be, because the customer is paying the server. The cooks and bussers get minimum wage (at least) because they don't work for tips. Only the servers work mostly for tips.

But in many restaurants servers are expected to "tip out" the cooks and bussers, usually about 3 or 4 percent of their collected tips. It's also good etiquette to do so, because if you (as a server) don't take care of the bussers and cooks, they can totally fuck your life up by (for example) bussing your tables last and screwing your orders up in subtle ways, like hammering out 10 orders all at the same time so you end up having to serve cold food. It's a very complex dance and the intrapersonal dynamics among the staff are quite important.
I waited tables all through college, and we tipped out more than three/four per cent (it was more like 20 per cent), but the idea stands. It was very much worth it, but not really in the way Seth explains. I never once had a fear that the bussers/cooks would screw me over, but I appreciated their good work in the same way the customers appreciated my efforts.

I've often thought that if for some unforeseen reason I lose my job, I'd be very much OK with finding a wait job. It was hard work, but I liked it and made good money. And I'm not particularly attractive. Dead average, by any reasonable standards.
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by charlou » Tue Oct 18, 2011 5:15 am

Personality and wit can be very attractive, by any reasonable standards. ;)
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by MrJonno » Tue Oct 18, 2011 9:42 am

http://libertyinexile.com/2011/06/20/sc ... f-tipping/

Lots of interesting stuff on tips in the link above didnt realise there was a such a difference between European and US tipping. Here in thae UK minimum wage doesnt take into account tips, there is no law allowing staff to even keep tips.

Often a restuarant will have an optional service charge (which you may need to actively say you don't want to pay) and you may need to read the small print on the bill to see if its included. If tipping is allowed its often (normally?) shared among all staff.

Tipping is bollocks anyway, someone either provides decent service and should be paid a decent wage or they don't (and should be fired)
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Coito ergo sum » Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:55 am

MrJonno wrote:http://libertyinexile.com/2011/06/20/sc ... f-tipping/

Lots of interesting stuff on tips in the link above didnt realise there was a such a difference between European and US tipping. Here in thae UK minimum wage doesnt take into account tips, there is no law allowing staff to even keep tips.

Often a restuarant will have an optional service charge (which you may need to actively say you don't want to pay) and you may need to read the small print on the bill to see if its included. If tipping is allowed its often (normally?) shared among all staff.

Tipping is bollocks anyway, someone either provides decent service and should be paid a decent wage or they don't (and should be fired)
What's the minimum wage in Europe? In the US tipped waiters/waitresses generally make at least double minimum wage.

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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Gawdzilla Sama » Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:56 am

Lots of people in the US go out for dinner on Thanksgiving Day. They expect to be served by people who would rather be home than working on a holiday.
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Coito ergo sum » Tue Oct 18, 2011 12:03 pm

PordFrefect wrote:
Seth wrote:
If you're an incompetent putz, you're doomed to the lifestyle of incompetent putzes unless you can overcome your incompetence. That's just how it is. Nobody else owes you any other lifestyle, and you certainly have no right to take from others to provide the lifestyle to which you'd like to become accustomed. Might suck to be you, but that's what you get for being an incompetent, selfish, inadequate putz.

So, change your life or resign yourself to it.
That's inspiring. Have you thought about writing a self-help book? I think you may be the next Tony Robbins.
Well, frankly, while Seth and I agree on little, it's not a bad saying - another way to think about it is "get busy livin' - or get busy dyin." - Andy Dufresne (Shawshank Redemption).

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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Coito ergo sum » Tue Oct 18, 2011 12:08 pm

Seth wrote:
Zombie Gawdzilla wrote:
Seth wrote:
Zombie Gawdzilla wrote:The reason Seeth never cites his sources for things like the "18%" above is because he makes this shit up as he goes along. Don't let him.
Yeah, right. Go ask the IRS how much they require employers of servers to withhold from tips.
See? No citation.
Do your own fucking homework.
In all fairness, if you make the assertion, you ought to have the back-up. What is offered without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. If he hasn't found your back-up, then if you wish to support your assertion it's for you to do so. "Do the research/homework" is one of the most annoying statements made on internet discussion forums. It can be uttered by anyone after making absurd claims, and if you use that nonsense then you can't complain when someone else uses it in return and you'd have no business asking for someone else to back up their arguments in the first place - just go and do their homework/research - the answer is out there somewhere...

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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by MrJonno » Tue Oct 18, 2011 12:30 pm

Coito ergo sum wrote:
MrJonno wrote:http://libertyinexile.com/2011/06/20/sc ... f-tipping/

Lots of interesting stuff on tips in the link above didnt realise there was a such a difference between European and US tipping. Here in thae UK minimum wage doesnt take into account tips, there is no law allowing staff to even keep tips.

Often a restuarant will have an optional service charge (which you may need to actively say you don't want to pay) and you may need to read the small print on the bill to see if its included. If tipping is allowed its often (normally?) shared among all staff.

Tipping is bollocks anyway, someone either provides decent service and should be paid a decent wage or they don't (and should be fired)
What's the minimum wage in Europe? In the US tipped waiters/waitresses generally make at least double minimum wage.

£6.08 - the main rate for workers aged 21 and over
£4.98 - the 18-20 rate
£3.68 - the 16-17 rate for workers above school leaving age but under 18
£2.60 - the apprentice rate, for apprentices under 19 or 19 or over and in the first year of their apprenticeship

$1.6 : 1

I would consider serving in a restaurant as a at least a semi-skilled job and expect base wages to be above this (its highly competitive to even get such a job)
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Coito ergo sum » Tue Oct 18, 2011 12:41 pm

MrJonno wrote:
Coito ergo sum wrote:
MrJonno wrote:http://libertyinexile.com/2011/06/20/sc ... f-tipping/

Lots of interesting stuff on tips in the link above didnt realise there was a such a difference between European and US tipping. Here in thae UK minimum wage doesnt take into account tips, there is no law allowing staff to even keep tips.

Often a restuarant will have an optional service charge (which you may need to actively say you don't want to pay) and you may need to read the small print on the bill to see if its included. If tipping is allowed its often (normally?) shared among all staff.

Tipping is bollocks anyway, someone either provides decent service and should be paid a decent wage or they don't (and should be fired)
What's the minimum wage in Europe? In the US tipped waiters/waitresses generally make at least double minimum wage.

£6.08 - the main rate for workers aged 21 and over
£4.98 - the 18-20 rate
£3.68 - the 16-17 rate for workers above school leaving age but under 18
£2.60 - the apprentice rate, for apprentices under 19 or 19 or over and in the first year of their apprenticeship

$1.6 : 1

I would consider serving in a restaurant as a at least a semi-skilled job and expect base wages to be above this (its highly competitive to even get such a job)
It's $7.31 here in Florida, so, that sounds about the same, depending on cost of living. $15 an hour, though, or $25,000 would be considered fairly low for a waitress or waiter here. I doubt if you polled waiters and waitresses if they would rather get $7.31 or even $10 an hour or 6.08 pounds guaranteed, but they would get no tips, I would bet that they would take the tips. Seems like the servers over by you are getting the short end of the stick.

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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Hermit » Tue Oct 18, 2011 1:22 pm

Zombie Gawdzilla wrote:
charlou wrote:
Zombie Gawdzilla wrote:You folks should read the "Cult of the Boss" in the November Playboy. Just sayin'.
Might have to get a copy of that ..

Edit ... actually not sure I can here ... Can you paraphrase what it's about, please, zilla.
Look for "PB 2011-11" in NSFW. It's the last two images in the OP.
Interesting opinion piece. I don't know why people keep looking at me with doubt in their eyes when I tell them that Playboy articles interest me more than the airbrushed pics.
THE CULT OF THE BOSS
WHAT IS THERE TO ADMIRE ABOUT BUSINESSMEN?
BY JOHN SUMMERS

Conservatives invoke Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek in their defense of the free market. Liberals invoke John Maynard Keynes for his defense of government intervention. Only in Thorstein Veblen, however, may a sane person hope to understand the carnival of mendacity that has sent America spiralling into the abyss.

Veblen, nearly forgotten today, grew up in a gilded cage disfigured, like our own, by robber barons, predatory monopolies, financial panics, lockouts, strikes and mass unemployment. Then, as now, a priestly class of economists rationalized such phenomena while the people, overwhelmed by a swell of ignorance and greed, emulated the pecuniary values of business. A long agricultural crisis devastated the country. Politicians intoned assurances that these were temporary abnormalities in a Sound System, just as our own Depression is cast as a trial of faith, a crisis of confidence.

Veblen smashed this big lie by attacking the superstition of “natural law.” Classical economists, thus indebted, had portrayed capitalism as a reflection of timeless truths and eternal laws. Veblen treated economics as Darwinian cultural science. He found conflict, force and fraud persisting in a society supposedly harmonized by contracts, laws and peaceful rules of rational exchange. His economics tried to explain why capitalism did not fall apart from sheer sleaziness. “The great American game, they say, is poker,” he wrote in 1923’s Absentee Ownership, his book that most illuminates our own era. “Just why real estate should not come in for honorable mention in that way is not to be explained offhand.”

Although Veblen armed his contemporaries with irreversible insights into the monstrous nature of consumer capitalism, life among the late-Victorian class condemned him to the immiseration that is often the fate of original minds in America.

He was born on the Wisconsin frontier in 1857 to Norwegian immigrants and reared on a farm in Minnesota. At Carleton College he married Ellen Rolfe, a niece of the schools president. He embarked on graduate study at Johns Hopkins and the Yale, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1884. But as he disbelieved in supernaturalism, he disqualified himself from teaching philosophy in any God-fearing college or university. The next seven years he passed reading, unneeded and unemployed on farms owned by his father and father-in-law. Eventually he found work teaching economics as a low-level instructor at the University if Chicago, where in 1899, he wrote his first and most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Nobody has attacked the strategic imperative of consumer capitalism – confusing personal worth with the accumulation and display of commodities – with a more vicious erudition than Veblen in this great book. Most of its admirers, however, misunderstood his intentions. His students complained of his mumbling through interminable lectures and refusing to give examinations. He gazes silently out of the window while his students waited for him to speak. Even this indiscretion Veblen’s colleagues might have forgiven had he not also seduced their wives. Irregular relations with Laura Trigg, the wife of a colleague, got him fired from Chicago when Ellen supplied school officials with a dossier of hi infidelities. He moved to Stanford, where he was fired again, also for reasons of moral unfitness. Dismissed or refused at Cornell, Harvard and the University of Missouri, he took revenge by writing The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. (1918). The subtitle he preferred was “A Study in Total Depravity.”

Veblen wrote prodigiously after leaving Missouri and won a share of notoriety and influence as an editor in New York. But the Roaring Twenties left him a defeated man. During his last years he lived alone, unemployed and impoverished, in a small cabin in the hills surrounding Palo Alto, California. He survived on the strength of donations from admirers. “After all,” said President Calvin Coolidge, “the chief business of the American people is business.” And the people had joined the businessmen in an extravagancy of frenzied greed, the end of which Veblen knew was coming. He died on August 5, 1929, less than three months before the Great Crash. Shortly after, he resurfaced as a prophet without honor, a “masterless man” who suffered from “woman trouble,” as John Dos Passos wrote.

The conspicuous inattention given today to Veblen’s criticism of business can’t conceal his broad relevance. The corporation, he said, burst into the 19th century as nothing more creative than a collective credit transaction; it was an institution mobilized by the business class for the purpose of seizing control of the industrial process from the workers, farmers and engineers.

Business enterprise was “a competitive endeavor to realize the largest net gain in terms of price.” The point was to manipulate markets, to maximize profits, using chicanery and prevarication against consumers. “Its end and aim is not productive work,” he wrote, “but profitable business; and its corporate activities are not in the nature of workmanship but of salesmanship.” Joseph Schumpeter famously said business entrepreneurs practiced “creative destruction.” Veblen said they were just destructive.

Even Karl Marx, who marvelled at the productive capacities of modern capitalism, turned businessmen into heroes. Veblen called them saboteurs in pursuit of “the right to get something for nothing.” Their network of credits, liabilities, collateral and other make-believe schemes of capitalization operated on the medieval principle of force and fraud.

Business-as-usual extracted a continuing surcharge on the underlying population’s “instinct of workmanship.” Industry made useful things for human needs. Business made money.

Veblen’s distinction between industry and business reads like an advanced memorandum on the follies of “growth” as the tonic for our malaise. Against the barrage of pecuniary language directed our way by consultants, management theorists, self-help gurus, venture capitalists, financial journalists and other vested interests, he said America’s enormous productive capacity suffered from a corporate form designed to make money, whatever the cost, while denying workers a chance at meaningful participation. Business’s destruction of farming, handcrafts and small-scale production, combined with its plunder of natural resources, has left us – just as Veblen warned – with ancestral memories of craftsmanship, and a food fetish. The best we can hope for, while our politicians wrangle over the businessman’s debt and securities, is to return to the same stupefying jobs we once held and to pay for the privilege of turning ourselves into brands. Liberals, meanwhile, make new idols of rapacious businessmen such as Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett, and evangelical Christians make common cause with their natural enemies – libertarians – in the Tea Party. America, left and right, remains in thrall to what Veblen called the “business metaphysic.” The market is not an impersonal, fallible mechanism for distributing resources. It’s a source of spiritual values, and it’s never wrong. The invisible hand distributes virtue and honor along with wealth. God wants you to be rich. But rich or poor, you have what you deserve. Such is their message in this time of despair. Which proves that orthodoxy in the service of business, and business armed with religious purpose, cannot be killed by ideas alone.

John Summers is editor of The Baffler

From Playboy, November 2011, pp 131-132, American edition
I do prefer Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, though.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould

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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by MrJonno » Tue Oct 18, 2011 2:09 pm

It's $7.31 here in Florida, so, that sounds about the same, depending on cost of living. $15 an hour, though, or $25,000 would be considered fairly low for a waitress or waiter here. I doubt if you polled waiters and waitresses if they would rather get $7.31 or even $10 an hour or 6.08 pounds guaranteed, but they would get no tips, I would bet that they would take the tips. Seems like the servers over by you are getting the short end of the stick.
Depends on how much service charges go to the servers (something the customer can't know unless the restaurant puts down as policy which a few do). Servers either do a crap job and should be sacked or do a decent one not convinced there is really much in the middle. Through bare in mind even part time staff get 20 days holiday (pro rata if part time)

Bar staff are never tipped here, hairdressers are. Always important when you go abroad to check the local cultural norms as I didnt know you tipped bar staff when you are in the US
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by charlou » Tue Oct 18, 2011 2:25 pm

Here's a question ... Are the meals cheaper at restaurants where the staff work for tips? Here, restaurant staff wages are part of the cost of dining out, and there's no obligation to tip them as well.
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by MrJonno » Tue Oct 18, 2011 2:44 pm

charlou wrote:Here's a question ... Are the meals cheaper at restaurants where the staff work for tips? Here, restaurant staff wages are part of the cost of dining out, and there's no obligation to tip them as well.
Most things are cheaper in the US than in the UK with the exception of healthcare and Mars Bars
Service charges are optional but some restaurants tend to add them to the bill and its up to you to cross them out
If you don't have a service charge you usually pay a tip anyway
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Gawdzilla Sama » Wed Oct 19, 2011 12:23 pm

Vincent JG wrote:
Herman Cain recently criticized the Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying, "Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself."

At Tuesday night's CNN debate, Cain stood by his comments -- to loud cheers from the audience.

"I still stand by my statement," he said.

"They might be frustrated with Wall Street and the bankers, but they're directing their anger at the wrong place," he added. "Wall Street didn't put in failed economic policies. Wall Street didn't spend a trillion dollars that didn't do any good. Wall Street isn't going around the country trying to sell another $450 billion. They ought to be over in front of the White House taking out their frustration."

In response, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) criticized Cain for blaming the people who have been hurt by the financial crisis through no fault of their own.

"I think Mr. Cain has blamed the victims," he said. "There's a lot of people that are victims of this business cycle. We can't blame the victims. But we also have to point -- I'd go to Washington as well as Wall Street, but I'd go over to the Federal Reserve. They create the financial bubbles."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/1 ... 18798.html

So there you have, if you're unemployed its your own fault, but uh, you should also blame the White House; its Obama's fault too.
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Re: Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

Post by Coito ergo sum » Wed Oct 19, 2011 1:24 pm

charlou wrote:Here's a question ... Are the meals cheaper at restaurants where the staff work for tips? Here, restaurant staff wages are part of the cost of dining out, and there's no obligation to tip them as well.
I'm not sure, as I've not eaten in Australia.

But, wouldn't the better question be - do servers, by and large, get more money in their pocket where there are no tips, or where tipping is the custom?

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