Not sure why it wouldn't open for you, but it opens fine in Chrome on Mac. I thought it would be some ridiculous 50 page legalese but it's actually only 1.5 pages long. it's basically a license similar to what you'd see on a Github repo.
But why PDF at all? Is there a reason to put the online license in a PDF? Or any other places, like the restaurant menus? is there anybody who wants/needs to print the license or the restaurant menu?
> Or any other places, like the restaurant menus? is there anybody who wants/needs to print the license or the restaurant menu?
Web devs are expensive, sadly, and not everyone has the patience to figure out the DIY platforms (Square, SquareSpace, Wix, etc.). It got a bit better during the pandemic when takeout took off. But generally restaurants need to print menus anyway, so it's just easier to upload that design as a PDF than to redo it for the web with labor they don't have, or paying for it with margins they don't have...
Or rather, they just take their Word menu and "save as PDF". Although they could also "save as HTML" and replace the same file, right? But then the Word formatting would get messy because it wasn't thought for a web page, so here we are.
I really hate those restaurants that only have QR codes on the table for menus. A restaurant is for eating and talking, not for messing around with my phone.
I avoid those now. During Covid there was a slight point (though it was pretty soon proven that surface transmission was so minor a factor not to warrant such actions). But now we should just go back to normal menus.
Heh. I went to a sushi restaurant recently and sat down to an iPad menu. After ordering a few rolls and confirming the order, it was delivered by a robot[0].
After finishing the plates, I returned them to the robot which carried them away. I scanned a QR code on the table which allowed me to pay for everything from my phone.
Curiously, I was presented with options to tip 18%, 20%, 30%, or other. I thought about it and tipped accordingly to the effort the waitress put into my experience.
Shortly after, the manager came to me (essentially the first point of human interaction) and asked if there was anything wrong that caused me to tip 0%.
So yes, I too really hate the direction restaurants are heading in.
I'm curious who would get the tip in this scenario. The sushi chef? Ok, I guess. The restaurant owner? I'm going with 0%. The robot? Maybe if it can pass a Turing test.
The social contract is currently approximately 'when I interact with human wait staff I am expected to add some cash to what the bill says on it' This is evident from, for example, the drive-thru example. There is no waiter / waitress, you just get your stuff and keep rolling. A tip jar is sometimes available but is rarely expected. If I never interact with a human and the restaurant expects a tip I think they should tweak their presentation to more closely adhere to that social contract.
In actual fact I wish we could stop dancing around the fluffy idea of when to tip and when not to tip and just expect restaurant owners to pay their staff and include that in the price charged for the goods. It's super annoying having to think about this stuff all the time.
Except that in most areas, tips are legally required to go end workers (not management or ownership) and in jobs where tips are allowed, end workers make more than in service jobs where tips are not allowed on average. We're talking about America, I don't know why you would expect restaurant owners to pay workers a dime over the market clearing price. The chances service employees get employer provided health insurance is very low.
I don't know your financial situation and noone is forcing you to tip. But if you make, say, more than 3 times what the people servicing you make, and you choose not to tip, I think that's quite selfish.
...Wages are also legally required to go to end workers.
I'm suggesting employers pay their employees. This isn't a radical concept and works just fine everywhere else. They already do this everywhere other than restaurants. If they aren't paying employees enough, that's a problem. You don't solve that problem by adding an optional tax on customers that is kinda-sorta-not totally required. All that does is ensure that in a certain percentage of cases employees get paid zero percent of the invisible tax. I'm just saying make the tax visible and required and stop this weird dance we do in america.
Only in the past few years has it been remotely expected that you'd have to tip someone who didn't actually take your order at a table and then walk your food out from the kitchen.
We've all been tricked into tipping in situations where, honestly, the management should be paying better. And yeah, I know that means that the cost of things will be higher on say the menu, but the real cost of a $20 dinner should be $24, why not just pay the $24 up front and raise the base wages to what they should be.
I'm pretty sure this is only an American lunacy too.
Yeah but if you are in America where higher minimum wages or public healthcare are not happening anytime soon, maybe you should tip the hourly workers if you can afford it?
I think people just don't want to be confronted with the idea that the people servicing them make a pittance. It brings up uncomfortable feelings to have to decide how much a service employee "ought" to be paid, each time you eat at a restaurant.
> What an iconoclast, refusing to tip hourly workers...
If everyone refused to tip, wages and prices would adjust.
(Tipping isn't even that old in the American culture. Perhaps a hundred years or so. And its introduction was seen as thoroughly unAmerican, and more in-line with those supposedly obedient Europeans groveling for handouts from their social superiors, instead of a proper American transaction amongst equals.)
Those hourly workers are getting screwed by an employer who won't pay them what they're worth. It isn't my responsibility to feel shame and make up for their circumstances with an arbitrary tithe.
We have those in Singapore as well, but you are not expected to tip.
(Tipping in a Japanese restaurant is weird anyway. People don't do that in Japan, and they don't do it in any of the authentic Japanese places I've been to.)
IPad ordering is fairly common here. I like it, very efficient.
There's a sushi place around here that does iPad ordering, but they deliver your food on the customary conveyor belt, not via robot.
I don't mind this when it's done well. I'm going to have to mess with something to find out what food the restaurant sells and my phone is about as good an option as any. It can allow easier menu changes, inclusion of specials, and the like.
In practice, however most restaurants seem to go for a PDF of their previous menu design formatted for printing on a paper many times the size of my phone. That's a bad experience and restaurants that do it deserve to lose business over it. I'm reminded of about a decade long period not long ago when a restaurant website was more likely to have animations and music than the hours and menu.
Menus on phones blow. It's a pain in the ass to fussily scroll around on a dinky screen and try to remember what has scrolled away that you were interested in, instead of being able to glance across a page.
I sympathize with the PITA of changing printed menus, but that's part of what you pay for. If I go out, I'm not paying for a lunch-counter experience.
E-paper menus would be a pretty good compromise, if they could be made practical.
Sometimes now this is because of supply problems that make a single, consistent menu embarrassing to the business: nobody wants to have to say, "I'm sorry; we're out of salmon and eggplant, and we haven't had coconut milk for a week. Can I offer the three of you something else?" An electronic menu can be changed immediately and at practically no cost.
An electronic menu can also have prices that change every hour based on how busy the place is or even have prices based on demographic information gleaned from the user's phone.
I see your point but I've been told so many times "sorry sir we're out of salmon and eggplant" and nobody seemed to care except me regretting the salmon and eggplant. So, not sure it's a real world argument.
i actually prefer it. I've never been to one here in Austin that doesn't have a paper menu if you ask tho. I much prefer handling my filthy, but personally contaminated phone, to menus that a ton of other people have handled after rubbing their eyes and noses.
I kind of understand it for restaurant menus. Both "real" restaurant and takeway places need to print actual menus and/or flyers, and it's just easier to create a PDF document and upload it to your website than it is to reformat the document to be useful as web page in many cases if you are not well versed in this. Since PDF readers in browsers got decent, this isn't too much of an issue anymore anyway, IMHO.
So organizations that publish documents can store it for legal purposes. A pdf has useful metadata that a text document does not, and can be easily authenticated. If there's a dispute everyone in the legal process understands what a pdf file is.
You can save web pages as easily as you can save PDFs. You can also edit PDF files with common office tools. The only thing PDF works for is ensuring the rendered copy looks exactly the same everywhere and to add a signature but I don't see the value in those two options for this use case; if anything, this institution should let the user agrnt decide how the text is remdered best and we don't know their public key to validate their signature.
Are you distinguishing between a PDF that downloads by default (rather than using an in-browser preview)? Because I’m that case, you could download the license page just the same.
> Are you distinguishing between a PDF that downloads by default (rather than using an in-browser preview)? Because I’m that case, you could download the license page just the same.
The metadata on the license page does not offer the same guarantees as the metadata in the PDF.
The PDF can even be signed; the license page cannot.
My guess? They use an agency to service their website and made the license in PDF so the org can change it without incurring additional cost of an update.
Orgs place a lot of value on control. A TXT, even if better, would be a hard sell. Especially in a 501(c), where optics matter and they are targeting a demographic that usually prefers PDFs.
Which is exactly why I'm not complaining that I cannot open it. I'm complaining that the experience sucks - if you have a mobile phone you know what I mean. Unless you go with a computer in the restaurants, of course.
