Hybrids are the only choice for the vast majority of the country that doesn't have the needed infrastructure to support EVs. If you never leave your urban enclave, then sure, EVs are great. But hybrids are perfect for _right now_, even if EVs are the future.
The Toyota hybrid engine is also rock solid and has been for more than a decade. They don't have a reason to abandon that right now when the industry is highly unstable and government funding for infrastructure that isn't Tesla's is being cut left and right.
I live in rural VT, 600 person town in national forest. Tons of us have EVs because you don’t have to drive down the mountain for gas and they drive great in the snow and mud.
This wasn't a case of the estates of dead authors trying to hold onto rights. Working authors were actively being harmed by the activities of the IA through the CDL. Working authors were met with refusals to meet to discuss this issue.
I don't think that characterization of Kahle is unfair at all. His position was unreasonable, determined to be illegal, and damaging to people who depend on copyright to license their work.
How was the CDL hurting working authors? A library bought the book, paying the publisher and the author. The IA scanned the book for digital lending, this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out.
I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?
The ruling discusses this starting on page 33. The gist is that they set up a non-transformative service that is substantially equivalent to competing ebook services and CDLs, but unlike those it is not paying the customary price to publishers.
It also discusses that there is a very good reason why digital libraries don't typically get to have perpetual rights to a work at the retail (or used) price for a print book. Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks. The ruling points out that publishers originally sold ebooks to libraries at the same pricing as print books, but abandoned the practice because they discovered that it was not financially sustainable.
And that's ultimately where the harm comes in. The IA is trying to create a loophole that subverts the income stream of all the people who work on a book by offering derivative works - which are never fair use; fair use is for transformative works - without paying the market's customary price for acquiring rights to create and distribute derivative works.
(As an aside, when I see authors speaking for themselves on these sorts of issues they will typically point out that editors and typesetters and cover artists and all the other folks who work on a book also deserve to get paid. It seems to only be people who are tokenizing authors for rhetorical purposes who want fixate on authors specifically and erase the value-adding contributions of "the publishers".)
> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks.
As someone who understands the ruling and why IA lost completely, I still hate this argument, because it gets the history backwards. When first sale was put into (case)law, ebooks didn't exist. First sale doesn't exist because "oh, well, the book wears out eventually". It exists because you have an ownership interest in that copy of the book and copyright law has to respect your physical ownership of that property. Once you have sold a copy, your rights as a copyright owner are exhausted.
With digital distribution, the law decided that, no, there is no rights exhaustion whatsoever. And this is mainly because the technology was made after the law was horrifically unbalanced (or re-balanced) in favor of large publishers. CDL absolutely has no leg to stand on in the courts, but it is the sort of thing that would make sense as the legal basis for a new rights exhaustion regime that was properly legislated in Congress.
> As an aside, when I see authors speaking for themselves on these sorts of issues they will typically point out that editors and typesetters and cover artists and all the other folks who work on a book also deserve to get paid. It seems to only be people who are tokenizing authors for rhetorical purposes who want fixate on authors specifically and erase the value-adding contributions of "the publishers".
I've talked about the habit of copyright reformists / abolitionists ignoring the "creative working class" in the past. The headline artist on a work is most likely to be able to survive off non-royalty income because they have social capital that the creative working class does not. On the other hand, publishing firms don't give a shit about the creative working class either! A lot of media companies are run by people who think generative AI is going to let them eliminate entire classes of creative labor and replace it with ChatGPT prompts.
I'm not entirely sure referencing the opinions of headline artists helps either. In contrast to (but not negating) what you've said, I've heard authors complain endlessly about publishers, too. Things like, oh, we don't want to fund the third book in your trilogy, but we also aren't going to let you trip the rights reversion clause in your contract, so you just can't finish the story. Shit like that. Publishers' valuations are based at least in part on their total IP catalog, so a work they don't want to touch anymore is worth more to them dead than alive.
"the law decided that, no, there is no rights exhaustion whatsoever"
Ultimately, the law will either have to change to be fairer and recognize the buyer's investment or digital copying (piracy) will overwhelm it. It's not if but when (technology almost makes that axiomatic).
This will not happen immediately but as US influence in the world declines other fairer paradigms will emerge. As we've seen already, probably about one third of the planet's population pays little heed of copyright law, or it does so in name only—and that number will only increase with time (and as copying tech improves even further).
The US and Western countries have a choice, be fairer and less greedy or suffer the consequences.
This whole thing is backwards. Selling books began in a time when there was inherent value in distributing books, meaning there was no other way to read a book than to purchase or borrow a physical copy.
The money followed the value.
The value of distribution is no longer there. We are trying to push yarn up a chimney.
I like living in a world where authors make a living by writing books, but if the inherent value isn't there then it's all fake, fake fake.
This is the same predicament we've been in for years with other forms of media, but those with big corp backing have managed to synthesize value through various forms of sabotage like DRM or linking their software to a remote server somehow. We've come to accept it because there's value in dodging all of the nonsense.
Consumers will always be the barometer for fairness; if they perceive value, they will pay for it. But all the controversy is about fairness for the authors and publishers. If authors can figure out some money-making scheme then great, but let's not concern ourselves with "fairness" for the author because that went out the window a long time ago. This is all just a big money grabbing game at this point. (And what they really mean is fairness for popular authors anyway.)
Maybe the future will look different. We need authors, we need editors, but do we need publishers? Probably not. Maybe a trend will form where groups or individuals commission a work from an author, taking the place of the publisher on a more ad hoc basis. Or maybe concepts like Patreon will evolve to better compensate authors. I don't know exactly what it will look like, but I do know that targeting groups like the Internet Archive is nothing more than a delay tactic.
Thank you for your comment, I agree with everything you've said. I come to the matter as a consumer so my emphases come from that perspective but I'd suggest there's very little difference in our views.
You may be able to gauge this from my earlier post where I've advocated that creators should receive fair recompense for their work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41455357. (I've written on this topic many times over the years and I've always advocated creators should receive fair and reasonable dues.)
I agree with you about it all being backwards. Unfortunately, it's a fact that wasn't helped by opportunistic creators such as Hugo in the 1880s as I pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456596. That said, times were different back then and despite my criticism of Hugo et al they had a valid case. Same can be said of Gilbert & Sullivan and the pirating of their operettas (see 'background'): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance.
What happened in 1886 at Berne was overshoot albeit an understandable one. The trouble is that once in place international law is essentially entrenched forever, revising it is is nigh on impossible. Unfortunately—but understandably—rights holders aren't going to give ground without a struggle. This I reckon is the crux of the problem and it's primarily the publishers who refuse to give ground—not so much content creators.
The issues are many and they range across a vast field—from how much does a creator owe back to society from it having nurtured and educated him/her through to publishers being bloody-minded over protecting orphaned works, through to DRM, through to equity/arguments over access to information which has educational implications—thus ultimately it's of strategic importance at a national level (China's lax IP laws have helped it enormously, the US and Western nations ought to take note).
As I see it, content creators and consumers need to join forces to arrive at a mutually satisfactory agreement and I see little room for both Big Tech and existing authoritarian publishers in such an arrangement. (And I agree with you, 'consumers will always be the barometer for fairness; if they perceive value, they will pay for it'.)
I'd add that both parties ought to encourage and foster this symbiotic relationship ASAP, as at best both will benefit, at worst it'll be the least destructive option.
What I fear most is that copying tech will become so easy that any sense a human can experience will be able to be copied. Very soon one will be able to capture just about everything one sees, reads or does with great ease, copying by default will become the norm. This could easily become very destructive and not benefit anyone, creators, users and society will all be worse off.
Copyright, IP and patents are very complex matters that just can't be left to hip pocket arguments and or gut reactions over property rights and it's time the debate matured to reflect this. That won't be easy given that money is involved.
Like you I don't know how it will end up but it's clear that things could go horribly wrong if sense doesn't prevail. Let's hope it does.
This is my first time hearing of the 1886 Berne Convention, very interesting. And the United States did not join until 1989.
> What I fear most is that copying tech will become so easy that any sense a human can experience will be able to be copied.
For many people and mediums this is already the case. What bothers me most is that this normalizes outlaw behavior. That is usually an indication that the law is wrong, but in the meantime it erodes our collective morals.
> It exists because you have an ownership interest in that copy of the book and copyright law has to respect your physical ownership of that property.
Right, copyright law needs to respect your ownership of that physical property. That bound collection of paper. That stamped piece of vinyl. That reel of magnetic tape. That plastic disc. The copyright protects the ideas and creative stuff on that medium, but not the actual medium itself. You don't actually own any of the ideas that medium contains, but you do own the actual medium.
But what property do you actually own when you "buy" a digitally distributed work? What is the "that" in this case? A collection of bits that are indistinguishable from every other copy of the file? Isn't that what is actually copyrighted, and not the "that"?
Speaking purely in the realm of Law, and what arguments will get past a court, "buying" a digitally distributed work does not confer any ownership. At the bare minimum, what is actually being purchased when you buy a digitally distributed work is a combination of a license and a service. They transmit the work to you, and you have a license to copy that transmission and store it indefinitely, for your own use. There is no "that" being sold, you are making all the copies yourself, so you need permission to make those copies. And permission cannot be resold.
In the law, a "license" is just permission from a copyright holder to do something. There are no standard terms like there is with a "sale", because licenses are usually tied to a contract[0]. And contracts can have really arbitrary provisions[3]. For example, fair use says you don't need permission from a copyright holder in order to review a game. But if that game is only available digitally, the copyright owner solely dictates the terms upon which the game is sold, through contracts and licensing. And that contract could absolutely just say "you agree not to review the game in exchange for permission to copy the game to your hard drive and RAM[4]", in which case there is no fair use anymore. In fact, Oracle already did this[1].
The law has no counter to this because, for the vast majority of copyright case law history, nobody needed permission to purchase a physical copy of a creative work[5]. Physical media has very well established consumer rights that were codified back when copyright law wasn't nearly as blatant a power grab. Digital is very recent, and copyright law has gotten significantly stricter. It's often said that "the law needs to catch up to technology", but that usually gets said in the context of "I thought of this cool little excuse to not get permission[2] but the court won't agree". Where technology really outflanks the law is in inventing new ways to strip consumers of their rights, by turning things that didn't need permission into things that now do.
[0] US law only. In other countries licenses are treated as separate from contracts, but this is mainly something plaintiff lawyers have to remember when drafting complaints, since "doing something without permission" is copyright infringement but "getting permission, but not fulfilling your end of the bargain" is breach of contract here.
[3] The only real restriction on contracts being that you can't literally sell yourself into chattel slavery. BTW, in unrelated news, never upload your brain into a computer if you happen to like the 13th Amendment.
[4] DON'T GET ME STARTED ON MAI SYSTEMS CORP VS PEAK COMPUTER INC
I agree with pretty much everything you said here. However, I'm kind of hoping my comment would draw out more on this idea.
> Speaking purely in the realm of Law
Let's argue this from the basis of expanding the ideas of copyright to something newer and better for this digital age. As mentioned, these days we're really just buying licenses. How do we better define property rights with this new(ish) concept of ownership to help individuals continue to have useful rights while not just suggesting copyright overall is now meaningless and creators no longer have any protections? Do we codify some basic rights of ownership around what a license is, what it means, and how one transfers ownership of it?
Good question. While I personally would not consider "suggesting copyright overall is now meaningless" to be a failure[0], there's no way in hell anything that might even remotely harm industry revenue would ever make it through Congress, European Parliament, and/or the Japanese Diet; much less survive challenges in the court or WTO. So the only reforms I can actually suggest are marginal things like this.
Anyway.
First you need to legally define the kinds of licenses we care about. There's a bunch of very good reasons why permission can't be sold, so we want to make it clear that we're only talking about things that function like a sale. That is, one-time purchases of works that are downloaded to a device and whose license grants fall within normal use of that work. This is the sort of thing that needs to be drafted water-tight because the industry absolutely will search for excuses to not comply with the law.
Second, we need to define how a transfer can be done and who needs to honor it. This has per-work and per-service considerations, especially in games[1], which have anticheat and toxic player removal. There are times where a copyright owner has a legitimate interest in taking away the thing you bought because you are ruining the experience for everyone else. So we need carveouts for our carveouts, both of which need to be carefully drafted to not interfere with anticheat.
And this is only considering digital-to-digital first sale. That's easy to do because the systems already exist to revoke and delete your ownership over digital copies of works; you just aren't allowed to use them for first sale purposes. We're ultimately just dictating that certain kinds of DRM license files have a legal mechanism to transfer between owners.
Physical-to-digital schemes like the IA's Controlled Digital Lending pose an additional problem: there's nothing to physically enforce the destruction or disabling of the physical copy when you convert it to a digital one and lend it. The book doesn't refuse to open because someone has it open in Adobe Editions. Everything is done on the honor system and there's massive incentives to cheat CDL. The discovery on the IA lawsuit showed that they basically had never complied with their own legal theory. They had partner libraries who were counting copies of books as digitally loanable without actually taking them out of circulation, and when IA had discovered this on their own, they never did anything to take that library out of the system.
An actually legal CDL regime would need infrastructure to support itself. I'm talking legally qualified DRM banks that could lock up or burn books in exchange for DRM limited files that accurately represented the time in which the physical side of the book was inaccessible. That's... still extremely complicated. Actually, screw CDL. If we're talking about amending the law, there is a far easier way to go about fixing the problem with ebook lending: Book Communism!
Compulsory licensing is a scheme in which the government sets the price of a specific kind of copyright license. If you pay that amount of money to the copyright owner, you automatically have that permission, they can't say no. Naturally, copyright owners would liken this to theft, but they thought your dad's VCR was a home-invading rapist[2], so I don't consider their opinions on the subject to be meaningful. The idea is actually pretty straightforward: having a government-set license price makes licensing a lot more straightforward. Creative work owners can't make silly demands of users or withhold shit because their """strategy""" that quarter was to keep something off the market or sell exclusivity[3].
The specific imbalance that IA tried to fix with CDL is that libraries, being public services run by local governments, do not have negotiating leverage for favorable ebook lending terms with major publishers. "Just lend out physical books digitally" fixes the problem for libraries but the infrastructure needed to make this not unfair to authors or publishers is silly. Why can't we just have the federal government say, OK, we'll sell licenses in which any library can pay $X to the owner of a given book and then digitally lend it out Y times or for Z days? The Copyright Office or some administrative judge can determine fair values for X, Y, and Z.
[0] For one thing, if you are a small artist, you effectively do not have copyright protection because the enforcement costs for a single infringer greatly exceed your total revenues. Copyright is already a failed system.
[1] For example, if reselling whole accounts is legal, then I can buy hundreds of accounts, play the game I want to cheat in on each one, and switch accounts whenever I get banned.
If reselling individual licenses is legal, then after I get banned, I can resell the license - which continues to remain valid - and get my money back so I can repurchase the game on a new account with a fake identity.
[3] A related wrinkle in the CDL story is that publishers really, really hate libraries. Not because they let people read books for free - in fact, library circulation is actually really good advertising for sequels that won't hit libraries right away. The problem is that libraries are run by book fans, so they're going to recommend books they like, not what the publisher needs to sell that month.
I've always liked the idea of moving to compulsory licensing for patents so we can have things like day-1 generic drugs and an end to IP-squatting, so am definitely interested in further exploring similar mechanisms for copyright. What would it mean for the government to set prices? Works of similar classification may have a wide array of quality and utility, and thus suggest different pricing. Compulsory licensing for patents would not require government pricing, since they could instead mandate a percentage of profits be assigned to the pattentee.
I am skeptical of government bodies having the agility to appropriately respond to market needs in a timely and equitable fashion, since they've done such a bad job with the rules in every other area. This is not to say that it can't or shouldn't be done, but definitely deserves careful consideration. What mechanisms do you imagine might keep such a system functioning healthily?
> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks.
While physical books might indeed wear out, I think they wear out way slower than what current library e-book licenses might suggest (apparently two years or 26 lends seems to be popular in the US? – my library has tons of books older than two years, and back from when they used to stamp the return date in the back, quite a few books had hit 26 lends without falling apart yet).
Also, physical books can be rebound/repaired. The binding is usually the point of failure, and even smaller libraries often have rebinding equipment. I worked in libraries for over a decade and I could probably count on one hand how many books (as opposed to CDs/DVDs/other materials) that were weeded due to condition versus because they simply weren't used or contained out of date/wrong information.
IANAL but I don't think the work is legally a derivative any more than a JPEG of the Mona Lisa is. In US law those are the same for copyright. MS Word vs PDF shouldn't matter so neither should this.
The ruling's section on transformativeness explains the distinction. Note that "derivative works" under US copyright law works differently from how it gets defined in typical open source licenses.
My understanding is that, for the purposes of determining fair use, a derivative work is substantially the same thing but in a different format. Transformative work must involve significant additional creative contribution "Changing the medium of a work is a derivative use rather than a transformative one." They cite previous case law that holds repackaging a print book as an e-book as a "paradigmatic example of a derivative work." The law also offers some paradigmatic examples of transformative work, such as criticism, commentary and scholarship.
Based on all of that, I would guess that, for the purposes of copyright law, a JPEG of a painting is absolutely a derivative work and not a transformative one.
The only way an ebook of a novel is not derivative in the same way a JPEG is not derivative of the Mona Lisa is if we are talking about the author's original handwritten version that just came up for auction
>The ruling discusses this starting on page 33. The gist is that they set up a non-transformative service that is substantially equivalent to competing ebook services and CDLs, but unlike those it is not paying the customary price to publishers.
The question was "how is this hurting authors" and your reply is to carry water for publishers?
as lousy and inefficient a system as the one we mainly have is, as a theoretical rule in this system authors get some share of the money that goes to publishers.
> However, the Internet Archive expanded its library project during the covid-19 pandemic. It launched the National Emergency Library, allowing an unlimited number of people to access the same copies of ebooks. That’s when the publishers banded together to file the lawsuit, targeting both online libraries.
The digital copy could be checked out by many people at the same time.
If you read the original ruling, IA lost control of the physical book so they weren't actually doing CDL.
This is why this case was so frustrating. In order to challenge long standing thought, you need to build an airtight case. Lapses like the above and then steering users to buying used copies from BWB shows IA was not ready for a case.
Copying text out of the PDF from my phone is not fun! The gist is that since the CDL isn't okay then they don't really need to deal with NEL as it's predicated on the legality of the CDL (pages 15-16).
The NEL gets a couple of sentences, the bulk of the ruling is about the CDL
Yes! The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the prior 2023 ruling against IA, the case stemming from the IA's National Emergency Library (NEL) initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed users to access digitized books without the usual lending caps.
This prompted the lawsuit from several major publishers, who argued that this violated copyright law.
The appeals court rejected the IA's argument that its activities fell under the "fair use" doctrine, specifically noting that the IA digital library acted as a substitute for original books, depriving publishers and authors of revenue.
While the court acknowledged that the Internet Archive's activities were non-commercial in nature, it still concluded that the wide availability of digitized books due to unregulated replication harmed the market for the original works.
This decision has significant implications for the IA’s future operations, potentially limiting its ability to continue its broad digitization efforts without publisher consent.
The ruling reinforces the legal rights of publishers and authors to control the reproduction and distribution of their works, even in digital formats.
The Internet Archive has few remaining legal options, with the Supreme Court being one of its last possible avenues for appeal.
Meanwhile, the organization faces additional lawsuits related to its music digitization efforts, those litigations are ongoing.
The ruling today highlights a broader conflict between the rights of creators and the push for wider public access to information, with the court siding firmly with the former. The case sets a strong precedent for how copyright law is applied to digital libraries in the U.S. moving forward.
Because other libraries have licensing agreements that benefit authors on a different basis than "you sold one book to one library".
You may argue that that shouldn't be the paradigm, but one library unilaterally changing it denies the authors their say on the change, either through licensing or legislation.
With physical books the library doesn't need to pay anything to lend it; with digital books it has to pay for every view. Why is it so? Shouldn't the buyers of digital books have the same rights, i.e. the right to re-sell or lend it?
As for authors, nothing changes here: libraries lent their physical books without paying before.
AFAIK the IA does not operate outside the US. The notion that every entity needs to either follow foreign laws or make sure people from other jurisdictions cannot acces their services is absurd.
You don't like it, but that doesn't make it absurd. It is how every country in the world operates with sites coming into their borders.
The IA doesn't geofilter it's availability, and therefore it is subject to the laws of the country it does any substantive distribution to, same as every other website in the entire world.
Although at least in the local library that I'm familiar with, wear is nowhere near as severe as what e-book lending licenses might suggest. From a quick search in the US those often seem restricted to two years or twenty-six lends. The former condition seems totally ridiculous (my library has tons of books older than two years) and even the latter seems questionable – from back when they used to stamp the return dates into the books [1], quite a few books had managed 26 lendings without falling apart yet.
[1] My favourite library branch in my town is, while associated with the city library system, partly volunteer-run and was consequently the last to computerise its lending system, and therefore kept on using the classic system until I think somewhere around 2010 or so, whereas the rest of the city library had already switched in the 90s.
> one library unilaterally changing it denies the authors their say on the change
I mean, sure, but ~270 congressmen declaring it would also change it, and it would be viewed as legitimate. Quite probably against the same level of protest.
The amount of say the authors have doesn't actually seem to impact legitimacy much. That only seems to vary with the amount of power the person declaring the change has.
You'll also have to ask what's the difference between Google Drive (or any other online file store) and IA here though. I've found plenty of complete copyright works on Google Drive.
Do IA respond to removal requests? Did IA staff upload that film?
For that, Google Books took works still in copyright and made copies for commercial purposes, they somehow were allowed.
The difference with Kim Dotcom is possibly that he sold (!) more movies through his activities.
>What's the difference between the IA and Kim Dotcom at that point?
None. They have, for a long time now, become a good place for outright piracy - both for downloaders and uploaders. It's nice to have such easy access to perfect DVDrips of GTA: SA v1.0 US, but... definitely NOT legal.
> this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out
Even if that were the case I don’t think it’s acceptable.
Physical used goods have limitations on transfer rate. If you want a used book you have to go to the store. Or have it shipped across the country.
I adamantly oppose a global digital pool with instantaneous transfers. In that world you never need to sell more than peak concurrent users. If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.
The same argument applies to “used” digital movies and games. It’s nonsense.
This is kind of a stretch, the Internet Archives book lending program under the CDL was not like a free Amazon. Reading software is limited and not great. Check out their website for details.
IMHO, people who could afford the book are unlikely to have the patience to work through this process. Indeed, downloading from a pirate site would offer a lot more flexibility for the reader.
> If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.
That is precisely the agreement that existing libraries have with publishers now. The digital copy that they buy to lend out comes with restrictions on how many copies can be lent at a time, and also costs a lot more than just buying one copy of the book.
The word “lending” doesn’t even make sense with digital goods. Nothing tangible is being lent or borrowed. Another perfect copy is being allowed to be made. Ironically it might not even be the same copy! Someone “borrowing” a digital good might download a copy of a new version or in a different language.
> The idea is to impose the restrictions of physical goods onto the digital one.
You know how some people think rent control is a good idea but then every economist explain how it’s actually bad? That’s how I feel about “impose the restrictions of physical goods onto digital”. It’s a terrible idea that has terrible ramification if you follow things to their logical conclusion.
> Your idea is to eliminate the very concept of a library where ebooks are concerned.
Yeah that’s totally fine. The metaphor of an ebook library is bad and illogical.
If you wanted to write digital-first copyright laws you wouldn’t invent a faux library. There’s better solutions out there.
> You know how some people think rent control is a good idea but then every economist explain how it’s actually bad? That’s how I feel about “impose the restrictions of physical goods onto digital”. It’s a terrible idea that has terrible ramification if you follow things to their logical conclusion.
We're only talking about applying that to lending, which otherwise wouldn't exist, so I don't see the issue. And more importantly it's applying the rights you get with physical books. ...Come to think of it, what restrictions are being added that don't already exist in our current broken state of digital copyright?
> You know how some people think rent control is a good idea but then every economist explain how it’s actually bad? That’s how I feel about “impose the restrictions of physical goods onto digital”. It’s a terrible idea that has terrible ramification if you follow things to their logical conclusion.
Do you have a specific grievance with respect to imposing lending restrictions on ebooks to mimic their physical counterparts?
Your analogy alone is strained and doesn't serve this topic well.
> Yeah that’s totally fine.The metaphor of an ebook library is bad and illogical.
I contend that the information contained in the books and not the format they're stored in are what matters. People checkout books from libraries to read their contents, not to sniff the paper they're printed on.
> If you wanted to write digital-first copyright laws you wouldn’t invent a faux library. There’s better solutions out there.
Do tell of these better solutions that don't require waiting several decades for all the pre-Internet baby boomer octogenarian lawmakers and judges to die off from old age.
> Yeah that’s totally fine. The metaphor of an ebook library is bad and illogical.
E-book lending is pretty much the only accessible option for people with sensory impairments. I think they're a larger portion of the population than writers, so why do writers' monetary interests overwrite accessibility concerns? Plenty of books aren't available in large print or audio versions; e-books are a great way for us to read those books. Big text is best text.
So people with perfect vision and hearing should be able to check out materials from a library and people with impairments shouldn't? That's also against the law.
So you're against the existence of libraries at all? Since they provide free access to the fruits of someone else's labor? That is at least an honest position. I won't pretend to have any respect for it, but at least it's consistent.
> So people with perfect vision and hearing should be able to check out materials from a library and people with impairments shouldn't? That's also against the law.
People with impairments can also check materials out from the library. The existence of a library for some things does not mandate a library for all things.
> So you're against the existence of libraries at all?
I think that first sale doctrine strikes a great balance for physical goods. If you buy a hammer you can later sell that hammer. Or you can give it away. Or you can setup a little library where people can borrow it either for free or a small fee. Over time the hammer will degrade and some people might prefer a new hammer. The rate at which a hammer can exchange hands is severely limited by space and time. I live in Seattle and can not easily borrow a hammer from a friend in New York or London.
Digital goods are a different beast. Copies can be made instantly, perfectly, and effectively for free. There is no such thing as "borrowing" an e-book. There is only being allowed to make a perfect copy or not. Digital goods are not bound by space or time. A global library with infinite, instantaneous transfer of rights would limit sales to peak concurrent user count. This would obliterate economic incentives for producing new content which would be, imho, a catastrophic net loss for society.
Physical good and digital goods are extremely different. They can and should have different rules. Trying to force them under a single umbrella is sub-optimal for both.
If I were King my changes to copyright law would be related to duration. I'd shorten it from life+70 years to something like ~30 years with the ability to extend it an additional ~20 years with an increasing per-year fee. And possibly add some form of "use it or lose it" after just ~10 years. Or something along those lines. I am not King so I've not fully thought this through. However as someone who makes and sells proprietary entertainment software I have thought through the ramifications of global digital libraries with instant and infinite transferability.
It puzzles me to hear of these "degradation" arguments, as if it isn't common to find perfectly readable books over 100 years old in antique shops.
"Degradation" is the conception publishers want to think of applying to their goods. Because they want an income stream worthy of items that perish in a matter of years, not decades or centuries.
I generally agree, but I'm not sure that your example works : it smells of survivorship bias (or whatever is the equivalent name for objects rather than people?)
Books do not biodegrade in a timeline we'll ever see in our lives unless there's water damage. Which is relatively rare.
It is very much not uncommon to see books several decades old in libraries. And I suppose it is survivorship bias in the most literal sense, but that's because there's so many survivors. It's practically the rule.
Don't they ? I have books printed in the last half of the 20th century where I'm starting to get worried about the yellowing of the pages (and the seemingly degrading structural integrity of the pages).
I've heard it was something about acidic paper (with it also being a plague of cheap printing, while being much less of an issue of expensive printing techniques).
> If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.
We have an enormous surplus of content creators and most of the content is not very good. I don't see why we need to structure our economic system such that people must be able to making a living churning out mediocre scifi/romance/mystery novels. If they can, great, but I don't think that's the goal we should be aiming for with copyright. There would still be plenty of novels turned out every year even if copyright did not exist.
> In that world you never need to sell more than peak concurrent users.
That sounds good to me, and I doubt it's really much more than the number of sales now. Many/most people would still buy their own copy anyway, just as they do today when a new book comes out.
Copyright law as structured today is destroying more art than saving it; the number of out-of-print but copyrighted works that are vanishing from human knowledge is astronomical.
> I doubt it's really much more than the number of sales now
Yikes. I can not possibly disrespectfully disagree more with everything you said.
Baldur's Gate 3 has sold about 15 million copies. It's peak concurrent user count on Steam is 875,343. A difference of about 20x that will continue to grow as BG3 will sell meaningful copies over the next 10 years.
Limiting sales to peak CCU is categorically insane. And deeply illogical.
And yes I am talking about a video game because the copyright laws for books and games are the same. I would expect the CCU/sales ratio for most successful books to be even larger than that of games which have a much more hyped launch day.
The people that would borrow the game from the library to play it might at best pirate it if they couldn’t get it from the library. Maybe they’d pay a few bucks tops rather than $60-80. Library game borrowers are not big game buyers in the first place.
Games can and do already get around this anyway via software, if you want to argue the laws should work differently for them then I’m open to that, but I also don’t think games matter enough on a societal scale that we should tolerate current copyright laws in order to protect video game studios over the long tail of disappearing orphaned works.
If your goal is to prevent orphaned works there's much better and more targeted changes that could be made to the law! Don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
> Library game borrowers are not big game buyers in the first place.
That's because today there is effectively no such thing as digital game borrowing. If there were then there would be a platform that seamlessly grants and revokes licenses on application startup/shutdown.
People just want things cheaply. Why pay $60 for a game when AmezarakGamesStore lets you play for just $5? People used to buy used discs from GameStop for $55 instead of buying a new copy for $60. Consumers don't care. They justifiably just want to spend the minimum amount of money necessary!
IA did not charge nor did they get revenue from their users in other ways. They did have a system to handle borrowing and make it cumbersome to read stuff. That is an important distinction.
You're arguing against a principle that applies to physical libraries (Who also have films btw)...so are physical libraries also nonsense?
Libraries do not serve the interest of publishers (and let's just focus on publishers because if we're being real here, publishers are the ones who stand to lose money - "think of the authors" is just a distraction)... i digress, Libraries exist as a benefit to society, they aren't supposed to neatly fit into absolutist capitalist ideals.
Also you are allowed to lend your book out to anybody in earth at any time you want. You have bought the book, its yours you can do with it what you want. Burn it, read it, use it as toiletpaper. You arent allowed to republish the book however and earn money on it. Or give it away for free. So the real question here is: what is the definition of publishing. Is the IA publishing?
>Libraries exist as a benefit to society, they aren't supposed to neatly fit into absolutist capitalist ideals.
Libraries fit perfectly fine in the absolutist capitalist ideals (because they exist as a benefit to society), it is itellectual property that are not.
No. I'm focusing on all media - books, tv, movies, games, etc. It's one set of copyright laws.
> so are physical libraries also nonsense?
Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers. Physical libraries with the limitations of physical transfer strike are a reasonable balance. A global digital pool with instantaneous and unlimited transfer of non-degradable goods does not strike a reasonable balance.
> Physical libraries with the limitations of physical transfer strike are a reasonable balance. A global digital pool with instantaneous and unlimited transfer of non-degradable goods does not strike a reasonable balance.
That's a more interesting argument. I think it's valid, abstractly at least.
> Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers
Originally sought to, perhaps. However copyright has devolved into almost entirely serving the interests of the transferred owner who are overwhelmingly huge publishers.
It makes sense to me that a digital library poses an existential threat to the business model of those large publishers who have gradually moved away from obtaining or encouraging the creation of new original works (the original intention of copyright) to reselling and repackaging existing content over and over again. This is why things like DRM exist, not to prevent piracy, but one one many mechanisms serving this strategy by controlling how ordinary consumers can consume what they "bought", when, where, on what, for how long... so many types of restrictions all serving to extract the maximum economic return for each original piece of work they own - A library completely undermines that strategy, because it necessarily removes most of those mechanisms to function.
The constitution explicitly states that copyright exists "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". It's not meant to be about serving the financial interests of content owners except insofar as that also benefits society.
What's missing is a requirement that any digitally published works must also be made available as physical media. Content owners can't keep their media out of public libraries by only publishing digitally. Otherwise, libraries need to be able to lend digital works
> Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers.
Not at all. Creators have no ihnerent rights that need to be balanced. Copyright is only granted with the argument that encouraging creation benefits society. That is the only argument for its existence.
This was a case about whether you can do the same things with digital books that you can do with physical ones: re-sell or lend. As I understand, the court decided that you cannot.
This is a theater that has waitstaff that take orders and bring food and drinks to your seat as you watch the show.
Don't want to tip, even though it's baked into the wage calculation? That's fine. The author is just pointing out that market forces means that folks aren't going to stay in those jobs.
In which case, the movie theater may have to switch their wage calculations to actually pay these people for the work they're doing. The up-front price for tickets might need to increase, but that's preferable to the weird layers of hidden fees in the current system.
Using tips as a substitute for paying a living wage needs to be eliminated everywhere, but I especially don't blame people for not realizing that a movie theater of all places is playing that game.
You say upfront pricing would be preferable but consumers show over and over they pick based on the advertised price. This is true in dining, flights, hotels etc.
I'm not saying upfront pricing would survive in a free-for-all laissez-faire economy, I'm saying that it ought to be required because it is better for consumers.
They pick based on the advertised price because hidden fees and culturally-mandated tips exploit weaknesses in our psychology, not because customers actually like to spend more than they'd planned on.
In Ontario, Canada we did away with the lower tier minimum wage. Everyone, including servers, bartenders, etc, make at least $16.55/hr. Tips, if any, add on to that. It makes it so much easier to look at the price tag and know what something costs, and not to tip when it doesn’t feel like anything exceptional happened.
But my favourite thing: it gives weight back to tips. They mean something again.
Great - tips there should be optional, but that's now not part of the discussion. California's progressive laws rarely reflect the rest of the country, especially Texas.
Shoud've clarified - I couldn't reply to the 3rd reply due to HN's limitations, but it was related to the "California" reply without making mention of it. This has nothing to do with Canada.
This seems more like an argument for mandating up-front pricing, than against up-front pricing. That way nobody can “defect” and gain business by obscuring prices.
This isn't about high-end bartending or wait staff in high-end restaurants. Most people in the service industry don't work there, and most places can't support that level of pay, so your point is moot in general application, but still accurate.
Well the debate aside it seems like the culture is moving away from tipping. Younger generations don't seem to do it. So it seems that legislatures are going to have to start accounting for this in their min wage requirements
Sure, but until such things transpire we have an ethical obligation to tip and tip well, right? Like, if you admit there is a problem, it seems pretty bad to just focus on the root causes without addressing immediate needs.
If you are about to run someone over in your car, you dont just say "well, the speed limit shouldn't be this high anyway.."
I agree you’re not under an ethical obligation to be abused, but to use a company’s services where all parties expect you to tip, and then you don’t that’s unethical as well. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.
People can expect whatever they want, but there is no actual obligation to tip. It's not a matter of wanting my cake and eating it too, it's a matter of rejecting the premise that what should be a way of expressing appreciation is being subverted by employers to underhandedly supplement wages.
If the tipping is actually mandatory, then build it into the price to begin with. That way, perhaps tipping can go back to being an actual expression of thanks.
It's not that simple. If I go to a restaurant and order at the counter tipping is typically considered to be entirely optional, in spite of the fact that the PoS system would like you to think it isn't.
Then there's the whole spectrum of space in between. What about order-at-counter but the food is brought to you when it's ready, but you then clean up after yourself? What about a buffet, where you pay at a counter, serve yourself, but someone comes and cleans up your plates?
An alternative heuristic that I've heard is that if you pay in advance than tipping is optional, while if you pay at the end it's required, but that doesn't cover Doordash.
There are clear cut cases where tipping is required, and a whole fuzzy mess in between. And that fuzzy mess gets fuzzier and messier each year as companies intentionally blur the line.
I receive service everywhere I go, from the people who clean floors and bathrooms to the people who make food to the people who stock shelves, and even do engineering drawings for me.
Sure, in situations where tipping is factored into the wage, if you use a service you should tip. I get around that by mostly avoiding such services.
But the situation here isn't a clear-cut case like a sit-down restaurant where tipping is expected. If I were handed a receipt like the one in the article for my family's tickets and food, it wouldn't occur to me for a second that the barkeep in the room next door was relying on me tipping on this popcorn purchase in order to make a decent wage on this kids movie night.
It is a clear cut situation though: at Alamo drafthouse you order just like a restaurant, and a server will even greet you and get drink orders before the movie begins. It is full table service throughout the movie, where you order by writing on slips of paper. You get a bill at the end for your meal.
But, in general, this shouldn't even be the point. You should always assume that leaving a tip for someone in a position to receive it is a worthwhile gesture that means a significant amount!
I don't even know how this is so contentious to people honestly. Why make such a point about not doing something nice and relatively small? Your gonna spend $15 bucks on an IPA anyway, why not just help someone out too? Are you worried the bartender is going to get paid too much?
This is a pretty privileged take. Not everyone who can afford to buy Subway for lunch can afford to pay 15% more for it.
Tipping has become contentious lately because it's been asserting itself as an opt-out part of every Square checkout flow, even in situations where we never used to tip like fast casual order-at-the-counter. In the era of Uber we're also frequently asked to pick a tip before we even receive the service, which feels more like extortion than "something nice". Tipping is becoming more and more contentious because tipping is changing, and the version you describe is quickly becoming the minority case.
This is why I advocate getting the waiter's venmo/squarecash and tipping them electronically.
This attacks the custom of tipping directly: It prevents the management from being able to use tips in their scheme to pay workers less, and absolves the customer of the requirement to hurt the worker if they want to fight against tipping culture.
in canada wages have grown but tips have just grown too, so there is seemingly a stronger cultural connection and its not simply fiscal. even if everyone waiting tables was paid a 100k salary, they can't just "put away" the tip jars. im not sure how the insanity stops, maybe inflation will stop it
> Using tips as a substitute for paying a living wage needs to be eliminated everywhere, but I especially don't blame people for not realizing that a movie theater of all places is playing that game.
Many bartenders and servers, especially in high end restaurants would actively be against this policy. Mostly because these folks can earn $300-500 a night, and moving to some low wage salary would never compete with this.
The argument isn't to take someone who earns $400 per night and leave them a $100 per night salary and no tips it's to take someone who earns a total of $400 per night and change that to be a $400 per night salary instead of a small salary with lots of tips. That is to say the debate isn't about how much is being paid but how it's being paid.
One of the real world problem that gets run into is, even for a large portion of people that want this, when one restaurant list $50 prices and expects $10 in tip and the other charges $60 and expects no tip people still go to the one listing $50 more often.
The same is true for stores listing prices including taxes. It simply won't be the most common method in the US unless it's a regulated requirement for every store to do. There is no way every store is just going to opt into it all at once when they know not opting into it will get them more customers than the ones that do. This doesn't mean people prefer needing to calculate tax every time they look at a price it just means it's not a naturally correcting set of incentives.
bollocks. most bartenders or servers would not be opposed.
top 10% of restaurants are making TONS of cash and the servers are raking it in, sure, but even working in Loudoun Co. VA -- the overall richest county in America, btw -- my salary was easily less than half of what I pulled as a network engineer.
the single mother of 2 working in Applebee's in shit-tier Indiana is struggling because of tips -- they need to go. restaurants in Europe, or Asia, or the Middle East didn't stop existing without tips.
Paying tips to a bar tender or waiter isn’t some sort of social anomaly. It’s customary. Whether that custom is wrong or not can be debated, but while it’s customary, it’s reasonable for people to expect customers to follow the custom. Going to a restaurant and tipping $2 is the sort of stuff that gets your food spit in and is reserved only for the absolute worst service - it’s worse than tipping nothing. That’s the custom, wrong or not. Trying to change a societal custom by screwing over the worker is wrong, it’s just punishing the person who can least afford your social stand against how the business pays its workers.
"Customary" works both ways. If it's "customary", then we should probably also accept that the custom doesn't involve tipping as much as the article author thinks bartenders deserve if people generally don't tip as much as the article author thinks bartenders deserve.
And a former state labor official of all people should be blaming the employers for not paying a proper wage (and proposing regulation to solve that) rather than the customers for not making uncustomarily large tips to make up for them.
(Also, in most of the world it isn't customary to tip bartenders)
Ok, but sit back and ask yourself (if you’re in the US, which is the context being discussed and what they do in another society isn’t particularly relevant), do you tip at restaurants and bars? Almost everyone would agree they do.
The situation here is it’s a restaurant and bar that shows movies.
I wouldn’t expect to tip on the ticket prices, but it is surprising to expect to not tip full service waiters and bartenders.
I will be willing to wager $2 that the same people at a bar would tip their bartender as is customary in the US. The context mixture of theatre with bar is likely the cause of the anomalous behavior. And the authors point is: if you don’t want to tip your bartender at the theatre, then expect there won’t be a bartender at your theatre as they will work at a bar, where you would tip them.
> And the authors point is: if you don’t want to tip your bartender at the theatre, then expect there won’t be a bartender at your theatre as they will work at a bar, where you would tip them.
Or maybe, just maybe, the venue selling the drinks at substantial markup could pay them properly rather than trying to extend the custom of staff wages being dependent upon the charity of customers to a venue where customers generally don't feel like tipping. You'd think a government official in a labor department of all people would get the idea that employers paying living wages should be the rule rather than the exception.
Tipping customs often vary according to venue, range of products served and how they're served (sometimes in nuanced ways that are baffling to outsiders). Honestly, I have no idea whether it's considered customary to tip at that sort of bar at that sort of venue in that state, but a complaint about making less than a dollar per hour at a supposedly busy event is a data point against.
I would note in a labor market labor has the option to work for the employer who maximizes the employees benefit. As you note the author is in a labor department and they meticulously detail all the reasons no one would want to work for this theatre. They use this as an explanation for why companies are complaining they can’t hire - because they aren’t competitive and make a hostile work environment. Instead, employees are exercising their at will employment rights and going to employers that offer reasonable work environments.
Which I think you’re agreeing with their point. The employer could fix the situation but instead just barrel ahead oblivious to the reasons their people are quitting. It wasn’t the managers, it wasn’t even the customers even though the customers weren’t awesome. It was the owners.
And who created the odd mix? The movie theater company.
So instead of losing all of their staff, they should simply pay to retain them and post a "no tipping" policy upon entry.
It really is easy, but too people on HN will contort themselves into knots to avoid having any company have any accountability at all in any decision making.
Does the same logic apply regarding which products are purchased or boycotted for a societal improvement?
As a consumer, I make specific choices. If I am marketed a price, that should be inclusive. The change starts with my choices, since managers clearly are against setting high enough wages.
You can certainly not tip your servers at bars and restaurants, no one forces you to. You can be a one person protest. But you won’t change anything other than how little the server takes home. The business won’t even observe your principled stand, and they’re the one whose behavior you have to change. The only observer will be the worker who just doesn’t get paid for their labor.
This is a depressing way to blame all the victims here and have no hope of making anything better.
It's like hospital owners openly saying they know nurses won't strike even if they don't get treated fairly because their patients will die and the nurses, as caregivers, won't let that happen.
The apathy toward a system that not just supports that kind of thing but very actively encourages and rewards it is brutal to watch.
Some restaurants have started applying mandatory tips. I think the right way out is to reward such places with your business. It makes sense for everyone. The servers get paid proportional to the volume of business, which they can impact positively through excellent service and upselling/cross selling, without having to grovel for the money. The patrons aren’t put in the position of deciding the tip amount, and if they are unhappy about service they can take it up with management and/or not return.
Sure. That’s called “paying a living wage”, it was always an option.
Just advertise the prices with the fees included.
That’s the rub, restaurant owners want to advertise one price and then actually charge a bunch more once they know people are committed. And that’s something that the US is really bad about in general - sales tax is handled similarly poorly.
If food is spit on, I hope it can be proven and then restaurant can be permanently closed. Both the owner losing for not paying enough and the workers losing job for not doing properly.
This is where state should enforce capitalism by killing those badly behaving businesses.
Right - as long as you never return or go to a restaurant where you’re known by one of the staff as “that person.” Customers reputations often precede them more than they realize.
> Going to a restaurant and tipping $2 is the sort of stuff that gets your food spit in and is reserved only for the absolute worst service
Huh, I wonder how this works in restaurants attended by lots of foreigners. I knew America had a "tipping culture" and that 10-20% was customary, but I didn't know how bad not tipping was until this comment. Many clueless tourists probably know even less than I did.
Yeah the folks I know in the hospitality industry don’t like serving people from Asia and Europe for this reason. Right or wrong they view it as not worth the time and effort as the tipping rates are often considerably lower than Americans.
Likewise I’ve noticed when I travel internationally Americans get a great deal of service and attention because unlike the local population because it’s likely they will tip.
I've always tipped the customary amount but using the logic "it screws over the worker so it's wrong" feels like a bad litmus test for whether trying to change a societal custom is actually right or wrong. By this logic there would be no right way to try to end things like the custom of folks pumping your gas by pumping it yourself instead (funnily enough, still several states this is actually illegal) because it would screw over the gas pump employee. That doesn't mean it's right to not tip at a food joint in the US, it just means there's more to something being right or wrong than whether a worker is the main one affected.
To me, I don't think there is any way to change the custom beyond regulation. The incentives just feel too misaligned. The crowd of customers leans towards going to the place with the lower list prices, intentional or not. The restaurants will never collectively decide on their own accord to go against that flow themselves. The servers are never going to collectively force the restaurants to make that decision. Each option requires "everyone just decide to forever on operate this new way which forces no-tipping alignment all together" and that's just never going to realistically happen. Customers aren't going to form a long lasting collective which convinces the servers to press the business nor are they going to form a long lasting collective to boycott businesses directly. Businesses aren't going to care about anything but never optionally baking in higher prices on the menu since it's giving customers away to competition. What each group actually wants as a majority is irrelevant for something as minor as this. The only way it happens is if the majority are for it being regulated as such, which can happen with representatives deciding how the collective of restaurants need to behave.
tl;dr: I tip because not tipping isn't going to result in change, not because the only way to enact change is to make sure a worker is in no way ever affected during the change.
Yeah, personally I think the tipping culture is wrong and I don’t like people to feel they have to grovel for my pittance. It feels gross to wield that power over people. If they give bad service they should simply be fired, rather than having to earn that on each and every exchange. Some restaurants have started including tips without optionality. This feels right - it scales with the business volume. By making the business more successful, cross selling upselling and creating loyal customers, the wait staff wins. Probably the way to change things is to seek these restaurants out and make their business model successful rather than screwing over folks who are just trying to get by.
The concrete example (with photo) that he gave of a bad tip was this:
> On Christmas Day a family bought over $100 worth of tickets and food two days after Christmas.
I don't know how this family received their food, but it almost certainly wasn't at the bar from the bartender. Maybe it was delivered to them inside the theater as another commenter suggests, but it's just as possible that they got the food at the counter.
Further, the photo doesn't give any indication of how much money was spent on tickets vs food, which would be entirely expected to impact the tip calculation. If they bought $95 in tickets and one kid got some popcorn, a $2 tip is downright generous!
Yes, fair enough. However taken at face value, their point is if you don’t tip full service workers like waiters and bar tenders when they’re working at the theatre, expect they will quit to work at the restaurant or bar where you will tip them. Maybe they’re fluffing their article for clicks, but assuming they’re not, this is a pretty reasonable take. If they are, and it was as you posit it might be, well, shame on them.
My point was if you imagine yourself ordering $100 in food at a full service restaurant with reasonable service, do you imagine yourself not tipping? I think most Americans can’t imagine that. It’s customary.
No, I agree with your last point. I think the system sucks, but it's not fair to hurt the victims even more.
That said, I still think this movie theater is particularly shady on the tipping spectrum. The article calls out a family's food purchase and a kids' movie night as examples of bad tipping and implicitly criticizes the non-tippers, but it seems likely to me that the people involved had no clue that there was someone in the building relying on their tips that day.
The theater is guilty for blurring the line between tipping- and non-tipping locations, the patrons are just reacting as expected to the lack of clarity.
Absolutely I agree with you. And ultimately the article was about why everyone quit working at the theatre. It is entirely the theatres fault, and one way they caused their own situation was by not making the custom clear to the customer. If for instance tickets and food etc are billed together, it is tricky to know that you’re supposed to tip for the food but not the tickets and everything gets blurred. One solution is to make sure waiters and bar tenders bill their services independently.
Overall, I think the business model they have doesn’t work for labor, and they suffer the consequences by being unable to hire. To their point, it’s not about workers being lazy, it’s about the business owner making a work environment that’s untenable but expecting people to be grateful for the opportunity. The tipping was only one issue, amongst a lot of others, but it’s also the one that would have cost the owners nothing to resolve by simply clearing the ambiguity.
Since tipping is expected even in the states with no separate tipped minimum wages, the only way this would happen is if the government prohibited people from giving money to other people.
There is no government involvement in tipping, it is a social custom. And I don’t think the government can or should do anything about it.
> Federal law requires the same minimum wage, regardless of tipped or not tipped.
And if you believe that actually happens I’ve got a bridge in London to sell you.
Every person I’ve ever met who has ever lived on tips has been hosed on this. Employers will just adjust your hours to make the math work out rather than paying you more money. There’s a reason wage theft is a $50 billion dollar a year grift (though that’s not limited to just tipped employees).
Meh I hate tipping culture as much as the next person but you really can’t run, for instance a dive bar, and pay the bartender $15 an hour. The foot traffic doesn’t bring in nearly enough most of the time. The end result would just be far fewer food and drink places which I wouldn’t like.
That's the whole point though. If the types of restaurants that you like can't make enough money to offer jobs that workers would accept then those restaurants shouldn't exist. They can be replaced with more profitable businesses that more people will enjoy.
I’d like a lot of restaurants to exist though, I don’t want being able to find workers to be the limiting factor and have 4 choices for food instead of 40. Plus it lets a lot of business owners start up their own businesses and support a lot of workers.
Sure, I want a lot of restaurants, but I don't want them to exist due to them exploiting or underpaying their workers. A business is not entitled to workers, so if they cannot afford to pay enough to find workers, the business has failed. C'est la vie.
I for one, do not see paying someone close to minimum wage in return for 40hr/wk of their time as 'supporting' workers. You want to really support workers? Pay them appropriately and provide them a good workplace.
If they are offered more than enough money to be willing to stay and there's not a more profitable business waiting to replace it, then what exactly is the problem?
in the context of the minimum wage discussion, the problem is when the labor is willing but not allowed to work, ends up unemployed instead, and the store sits vacant.
And how is that related to businesses that cannot afford to pay their staff enough to keep them?
We're not discussing minimum wage here. If we were I'd point out that minimum wage should at a minimum be the amount where letting the store remain vacant is equally preferable. However to ensure alignment I consider it better to put it higher to the point where people earning minimum wage aren't a burden on society (I mean a store with as much value to society as a vacant one doesn't really deserve to exist, you're just shifting the problem there, don't ever let industry do that for you).
>And how is that related to businesses that cannot afford to pay their staff enough to keep them?
It was more of an addendum on the types of business that shouldnt exist, and business turnover in general. I agree that if a business cant make enough to attract talent, it makes sense that that it should fail (all other factors neglected).
I dont think that logic really follows. The cost to the consumer foot traffic is the same if it is tip or wage.
If customers are willing to pay the price + tip to have a equivalent $15/hr salary, they should be willing to do so with just the price, e.g. $5 beers vs $4 beers +$1 tip.
Im sure there are some cultural issues around changing the norm in the US, but it works out mathematically, and there is evidence from all around the world where tipping is not the norm.
If they can't bring in enough foot-traffic that they can pay a bartender $15 an hour, then how is tipping going to make up the difference? There's also not enough foot traffic to make that work
I'm not following. If the bartender is making enough not to quit, the money is there.
The accounting sleight of hand where they seem to pay less for the food and drink but actually don't because they must add a tip doesn't change how much income is going into the establishment.
The “enough not to quit” could be much lower than $15, like $7/hour. You can’t advertise $7 and get workers but you can dangle potential tips in front of them. The whole thing is weird game theory.
Dive bars are like carnivals, then, and can only exist if they extract consumer surplus.
I reckon there is a reason carnivals no longer thrive with the advent of public parks. Perhaps similar capitalistic creative destruction would occur for dive bars if the incentives were changed.
> The author is just pointing out that market forces means that folks aren't going to stay in those jobs.
Fun fact: that's the *business'* problem. As a customer, if you don't pay your staff, which means your business has shitty service, I'm just not going to come back.
Why should that matter? Let's say you run software consulting. And most of the price goes to labour. Would that not mean that sales tax should only be applied to part going to business itself?
> The author is just pointing out that market forces means that folks aren't going to stay in those jobs.
Not tipping is effectively using those same market forces to fix the disaster that tipping has become. If folks aren't going to stay in jobs because they don't make enough money from tips, then that will pressure employers to pay people better.
> then that will pressure employers to pay people better
When taken to the logical end, this is true… but who ends up getting hurt the most during the transition? The workers you ultimately want to help. I can’t see that as a good alternative.
Then that's the sad reality. We've used tips as a bandaid for low wages for too long, and now ripping the bandaid off is going to hurt. But the alternative is that the wound festers and potentially gets even worse because it's buried deep under a bandaid.
Don’t deign to even remotely justify this tipping nonsense. People should know upfront how much they need to pay with no guilt tripping funny business. It also irks me to no end how entitled someone bringing your food out to you can be. Everyone works, no one else begs and shames people for extra money.
ERP systems like Netsuite may or may not be good, but a huge portion of the bad experiences most users have with them has to do with configuration rather than the system itself.
There's an argument to be made that great systems can't be misconfigured, but the "everything and the kitchen sink" attitudes most of these business back-end systems are built with isn't really conducive to opinionated expertise driving product design.
I had this experience with Salesforce. People without any actual software creation/maintenance or system administration experience having administrator rights in Salesforce ends up being a mess and a nightmare. Data hygiene ends up terrible, because you can add any fields you want anywhere, you end up with fields named customer, customerid, customername, customer_name, cust, custid, with none of them being canonical, or validated, of different types. And people end up having put a bunch of data in a field named "cutsomer", with a misspelling that everyone just accepts.
I'm not a big fan of Salesforce in general (did they add, uh, XREF support in validators yet? Sorry, I'm forgetting the terms) but I do think it gets a bad rap mainly because a bunch of non-technical people are often tasked with setting it up and there's no discipline in it's configuration or use. It can be made to work reasonably well, but it rarely gets to that point.
No, the feds refusing to prosecute doesn’t make it legal. Federal crimes are crimes everywhere, even in states that don’t have the same crime on their statute books.
Their online selection was enormous ~2010 when they still had the DVD business, and crucially all of the movie studies still thought online was a fad and were happy to cut deals to stream their entire catalogs for pennies. Netflix was unbelievable back then and felt like it had every movie in existence. Over the years all of that back catalog has been clawed back and Netflix morphed into more of a showcase for their own content. But for a few golden years it was amazing to go in and like/dislike a bunch of stuff to see it just start recommending and streaming tons of classic films I always wanted to see.
As of last year when I finally quit, the DVD catalogue was still great, but service was so slow that it costs less to rent movies to stream individually.
I think you're misreading Musk's reputation outside of tech circles. If they're aware of him at all, he's more or less viewed as a Bond villain at this point.
The internal transfers is much broader than just SWE to PM, as well. UX designers, technical writers, QA testers, etc. Anyone working on a dev team might start picking up PM responsibilities and make that transition at some point.
That particular definition of racism has been in use for at least 25 years. You might recall it as a key plot point from the first season of MTV's reality show, The Real World, for instance.
Well, even if you agree that the term "racism" has somehow been redefined to mean "prejudice + power", it's awfully hard to _still_ argue that feminists don't have more power than just about anybody in academia, the press, entertainment industry and most business as well.
>it's awfully hard to _still_ argue that feminists don't have more power than just about anybody in academia, the press, entertainment industry and most business as well.
It's definitely not. What's the ratio of male to female CEOs in fortune 500 companies (it's around 20 to 1). What's the ratio of male to female members of congress? (~4 to 1). How many Presidents were women? Supreme Court Justices?
It definitely has been around a while. It's important to note that the "power" is not the power the individual holds, but rather "institutional" power that a person holds simply by virtue of being of a particular collective. For instance, if you are a hiring manager at a repair shop and you decide "this Asian must be good at math, so he won't be interested in working on cars" that's racist and you hold demonstrable power. That's not the same thing as institutional power, since that definition of racism would allow a black hiring manager to discriminate against that candidate on the basis of the black collective holding less institutional power than the Asian collective.
If one is simply racist or not racist because of what collective their a member of, it negates individual agency and dehumanizes everyone.
This leaves us with some possibilities:
One, racism is an immoral act committed by an individual, and the individual's conduct is the principal determining factor.
Two, we can just blame it all on the patriarchy at which point racism as a concept is pointless.
Three, you could claim that only white people have moral agency, which even white nationalists would disavow.
Four, something between one and two, which is probably what the left prefers. And the moral of Jeong case is that it leads to a blatant double standard based on your political stance that is worse about undermining the notion of racism than #2.
The Toyota hybrid engine is also rock solid and has been for more than a decade. They don't have a reason to abandon that right now when the industry is highly unstable and government funding for infrastructure that isn't Tesla's is being cut left and right.