Don't Tread On Me

Call It What It Is

Sometimes we have to look carefully for the subtle signs of evil. In this particular case evil may seem like too strong a word, but the situation points to a trend; the end result of which is evil. Keep that in mind as you read on.

I do all the bookkeeping in my business and home, so the goddess just drops receipts on my desk and I take it from there. My wife is as frugal as they come so I seldom ever question her spending. One particular receipt got me to thinking, and then it made me angry. Not at the goddess, but at the restaurant where she dined with colleagues.

The initial check amount was for $19.21. The next line item read: " + Included Gratuity: $3.46" Then there was a line below that: "+ Additional Tip __________", then a line to write the total.

WHAT?!?!

My wife left the additional tip line empty, and paid the total of $22.67. Now here is what I would have done:

I would have called the waiter or waitress over. Not the "server." A server is a computer CPU that handles internet traffic. If you are offended by the terms waiter or waitress, take your sorry politically fashionable ass out of here. Let's continue.

I would have called the waiter over and said, "You just lost some money. You're employer decided to insult me by taking choice away from me. I almost always leave a five dollar tip for anything between $10 - $25 dollars. After that it's $5 + 15%. If the service is really good I make it %20."

Not only does it insult a thinking person to not give them their rightful choice, it insult them to use this Orwellian newspeak. To call that $3.48 a gratuity is asinine. A gratuity is something freely given without obligation. It is used as a synonym for tip. The moment it ceases to be voluntary, it becomes an add on fee.

Worse than that, it serves a more insidious purpose. It kills incentive. Why should the waiter be concerned with how well he handles your order, or pays attention to your needs, or trying to be pleasant. He's got a guaranteed add on.

I've had waitresses so good that they got a tip equal to half the check. Not only were they on top of everything, but they were practically entertaining as well. Talent deserves to be rewarded. But maybe two or three times in my life I can recall leaving a dollar or some coins. After having to remind the guy 3 times that I needed a refill on my drink and getting frustrated watching him flirt with his coworker at the kitchen door.

I would not work as a waiter in a restaurant that had an "Included Gratuity" policy. And if somebody tried to get one established, I would raise some hell in the meeting. I would tell the substandard waiters, "Look, if you aren't satisfied with amount of tips you're getting, then maybe you need to improve your service or work on your charm skills, but don't cause me to lose money due to the resentment you create with the clientele."

The same thing goes for pooling tips. If I owned the restaurant, I would want waiters who try hard to make customers love the atmosphere of my place. Good waiters deserve to keep all the tips they earn and to tip their bussers according to their quality of work. Pooling tips tells the good waiters there is no reason to work harder than "slacker Sally" or "Inept Earl." Conversely, the bad waiters have no need to stop and ask themselves, "Hey, how come Frank and Julie are always getting almost double the tips I do?"

I worked for tips as a sportfishing deckhand. I was 19, but in retrospect I can recall times when I let my pride and attitude cost me anywhere from $80 to $160 in a single day. But it only happened a couple of times.

So the next time you see that line on a restaurant check: "Included Gratuity" or some such nonsense, speak up. Tell the waitress what it cost her to have her little bit of "secured income." And if they start copping an attitude, you can really blow their mind by saying, "Look, I'm profit and you're overhead."

Frugality

I take care of the bookkeeping in my own business and in my household. The reason may shock some of you. My wife is extremely tight with money, not ridiculously so, mind you, but let's just say that she has never made an impulse buy in her life. She's the one who taught me to be more careful at spending, but it's just not in my nature as it is in her. Let me illustrate.

When my wife's maternal grandmother fell deathly ill, the family needed to rush to Nashville from Tampa. My wife's dad didn't have any cash on hand, so my wife lent him $500 to take the family up there. You see, this was back when there were no ATMs. My wife was only 13 at the time, and the money was part of her stash of $1,600 earned from babysitting.

She is not, however, a ridiculous miser. When we do need to buy something, it has to really good quality or even the best. "You get what you pay for." The point is; I don't have to worry about her spending any money. I keep track of all the spending because I need to be constantly reminded of the necessity of staying on budget. If you don't monitor carefully where your money is going, you can get into trouble. Which explains a lot about that inane disaster called government (public) education,

An Iraqi Perspective

There is no better refutation of the assnugget liberals than to hear from the formerly oppressed Iraqi people.

You need to go read this and then meditate on this quote:

"For those who have had to defend it, liberty has a flavor that the protected will never know."

Go read this now.

What If?

Hopefully, the best minds in government are at the Pentagon and CIA, constantly reviewing SIGINT* and HUMINT** and constantly asking themselves, “What if . . . .”

I think about this a lot, because of an upcoming election and the fear of “What if there really are enough morons to elect Dean?”

You see, I hate the fact that Bush is spending worse than a drunken sailor. I hate his pandering to the center and moderate Left. I would love to have nothing to fear in seeing exit poles that show that Dean won because angry conservatives went to the polls and voted for Libertarians or Constitution party candidates in a split that was worse than what happened in 1992 with Ross Perot. I want to be able to write a letter to the RNC saying, “See, you damned idiots! Dean appealed to his tinfoil asshat base and they came out in droves. You decided to piss-off your base of supporters in favor of non-passionate, non-committed, middle-of-the-road know-nothings, and you lost!”

But I can’t do that. There is a very real and very deadly war going on right now. Which brings up the next “what if . . . .”

Shhhh! Don't Tell Anybody!

Quite honestly, before I read what I'm about to share with you, I had not a qualm in the world about going to the grocery store and buying some beef real soon. For two especially good reasons.

First, as soon as the news about Molly Ivans, oops, er, that Mad Cow up in Washington came out, I knew that the price of beef was going to fall. Second, A cow clear that far away from North Georgia is not going get shipped to a slaughter house in my State when Texas and Florida are so much closer, just to name two examples. Never mind Georgia is full of beef cattle. I was already snickering about the dumb-masses of people who would immediately react by swearing off any beef.

But Jay Bryant at Townhall.com gives me more reason to guffaw at the stupidity of the majority of Americans. Bryant writes:

"Crats?"

As if the story wasn't funny enough by itself, Emperor Misha has to add commentary like this:

(drink alert!)

...have become so daring they have even infiltrated military barracks and bitten at least two heavily armed combat soldiers - one in the ear and the other on the lip, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported.

The rodents have grown so large that soldiers are calling them the Hebrew equivalent of "crats" due to their increasing similarity to the stray cats, Maariv reported.

Misha: Over here, we call them Democrats.

Thermodynamics

The Imperial Curmudgeon undertook an analysis (dated 12/30/03) of my post on The Imperial Firearms Advisor's post. I'm not that great at expediting links so if I made a mistake on this issue, pardon me.

I take issue with this part of Professor Poretto's post:

Unfortunately, the foundation of Will's argument, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, doesn't say what he thinks it does. (Trust a former astrophysicist to be picky about such things.) It applies solely to the aggregate entropy of a closed system. [UPDATE: I believe that is a bullshit argument because it is an attempt to get around the problem of increasing order. I discuss it in the comment section below. - Will] It dictates nothing for an open system -- a system capable of importing net non-heat energy from "outside" and expelling heat and wastes to "outside." Zones within a closed system may exhibit decreasing entropy for indefinitely long periods of time; else, life could not maintain itself at all. Moving from theory to practice, laboratory researchers have demonstrated the spontaneous formation of amino acids in primordial-Earth conditions, so there's no real objection to the evolutionary thesis on the basis of practical implausibility.