This is not an argument for illegal occupation and expansion into West Bank. Israel should follow international law and agreements they themselves signed.
I was really disappointment how many people were talking about this like something the agent did automatically, on its own. They were trying to explain it by all the internet hit pieces and edgelord content from Reddit that it allegedly trained on, talking about how we influence LLMs, and overall taking everything at face value.
I’m appalled by this uncritical thinking. Openclaw agents are controlled by some initial input and then can be corrected via messages, as they go. For me this is a clear case of the human behind the slop that gives it instructions to write such an article (and then “apologise”).
We will be producing them even less. I fear for the future graduates, hell even for school children, who are now uncontrollably using ChatGPT for their homework. Next level brainrot
The actual scam is that restaurants can and do pay wait staff below minimum wage (like 2-3$), because it’s explicitly allowed, with expectation that the rest comes from tips. So not tipping in USA may in some cases be an asshole move.
Tipping is one of those Moloch coordination problems where if everyone would suddenly decide to make the world better at the same time, it would be, but if only a few people try to make the world better, it gets worse and they're assholes.
It's really not a binary situation where you'd ever see $2 wages with no tips though. If less people tip then the effective real minimum wage will gradually increase to compensate - either because laws are updated or because the restaurant has to compete with other better paying job opportunities. Sure some waiters may get upset when someone doesn't tip, but that is just that - them getting upset - and not the client being an asshole.
This will hurt people in the moment, people who sometimes are few dollars away from not making rent or buying enough food.
And as other commenter correctly pointed out, by the federal law of hour wage plus tips is below federal minimum wage, the restaurant must pay extra to reach the minimum wage. So if we assume that restaurants actually follow this law, wait staff will be kept at poverty wage 7.25/hr.
They legally cannot. If the average wage per hours including tips is under the Federal minimum wage in a pay period, the company must top up so that the wage per hour is the Federal minimum wage.
Well wage theft in the US dwarfs all other forms of theft combined.
But also actually demanding those wages if you dont get enough tip money is a great way for them to get fired. And if they are that poor to work in those conditions they will have a hard time scraping the money to go to court to get an unlawful dismissal case.
But servers are the only industry where they demand we the consumer take care of the problem because they're unwilling to do so themselves:
"Hard time scraping the money to go to court"? You don't go to court, you go to the DOL with your documentation.
"If you don't tip I have to pay/pay taxes to serve you" - no, you don't. The IRS assumes that you get a certain amount of tips. If you document that you got less, then guess what, they tax you on that.
Know why servers don't like to do that? Because the IRS assumption is that the average tip is 8%. What proportion of a server's customers do we think don't tip versus those who tip more than 8%?
"I'll get fired". Sure. That's a risk, I admit, and easy for me to say "You need to risk something". Inertia is a powerful thing. How many servers getting fired for fighting wage theft is enough to make a restaurant start to have problems?
You can't be serious. We're discussing a class of people making sub-minimum wages, barely scraping by to afford rent and groceries (much less any childcare or medical expenses), and your suggestion is "lobby to change that" or "just get a different job"?
As someone who has previously worked for that wage and finally did "get a different job," there was no "just" about it. I had the support of well-off family who were willing to significantly contribute to my education and living situation, and it still took years of hard toil (all while being nearly destitute) before ever achieving anything resembling financial stability. That was not (and likely never will be) an option for 90-95% of the people I worked with in the food-service industry. There is absolutely no justification (beyond abject greed) for that type of poverty wage, and it's the responsibility of everyone in our society to prevent that type of exploitation of the vulnerable, precisely because they cannot afford to "lobby to change that" and often can't "get a different job" outside of the same industry.
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