hark

He said "I'm not running for office. But if I were[...]". If he can entertain what-ifs then so can I, especially when it's the what-if he brought up himself and I'm speaking directly about that what-if.

He's saying some nice words, but I don't have the confidence that Hunter would actually deliver on those words. I can see the democratic party deceptively changing their messaging to be anti-establishment while still carrying out the will of the establishment through their actions. In fact, they already did that reluctantly when Barack "Hope and Change" Obama jumped onto the scene and carried the zeitgeist. He said many nice things that meshed well with the popular sentiment, but in the end just largely did what the establishment wanted, counter to that popular sentiment. Then the party completely shut down that rhetoric when they doubled down on Hillary "Her Turn" Clinton after. It shows just how stubborn the party is in wanting to keep the status quo that they couldn't even keep the messaging of hope and change going.

The most concerning part is when he said that people want to be led. This is the kind of thinking that makes politicians feel justified in overriding what people want. Politicians are civil servants, not leaders, they should be carrying out the will of the people. This tells me he may listen to what people want, but ultimately he will make decisions based on what he'd prefer as "leader".

That's true, but after that point the capacity is there and it will be harder to constrain supply in this way after that. After China establishes a major memory player, I assume they wouldn't want to fall behind after that point either.

I'm sure they'll try to ban Chinese memory for "national security reasons" but the differences here are that memory is much easier to smuggle in, and even if not, them flooding other markets would free up more supply of other manufacturers enough that we should see major price drops anyway. They recently tried banning imports of foreign-made routers and that didn't seem to actually work out.

I hope China floods the market with cheap RAM and absolutely destroys these scumbag memory companies.

This "top democrat" should be ousted too.

The internet is experiencing a sloppy death.

The tipping system is precisely what has built this shit show. Remove tipping and make ALL restaurants post the honest prices on the menu. If the restaurant industry has to rely on price tricks to sustain itself then it's not really sustainable. Tell me, if tipping is so essential to the industry, how do other countries manage to have restaurants without tipping?

At first you seem to be downplaying feeling of social pressure by saying you don't see the need to legislate it away, but then you go on to state that the pressure is part of an exploitation scheme. You could claim that blackmail is mere social pressure and that there is no need to legislate it away, yet there are laws against blackmail.

In the last paragraph, you state that eliminating tipping would hurt those industries because they would have to increase prices, but the prices are already increased through the use of tipping and social pressure. Eliminating tipping simply makes pays more consistent so that one employee isn't greatly out-earning their coworker just because they're a pretty young white woman.

What's really short sighted is not seeing how tipping develops into a bribery culture. We've already seen companies happily turning on the tipping option for the payment processor in situations where people used to never tip. Today you bribe your waiter to not shit in your food and berate you. Eventually you'll have to bribe government workers to expedite (i.e. bother at all with) your paperwork. Gotta hustle and get that bag above all else, right?

Ignoring that possibility, it's not like it's a just practice in any way. Tipping amount is largely detached from level of service and factors such as attractiveness, race, how the person is feeling that day, etc make a greater impact.

Most transactions are handled by card, it would be quite easy to enforce. At a minimum, payment processors could be legislated to not have the option for tipping. Banning the tipped minimum wage has already been done in a number of states and so they make minimum wage + tips, with that tip not actually being any more optional.

This could be solved by banning all tipping, then all restaurants would have to display the honest price upfront.