You haven’t seen the latest movie. There are apparently many tribes of Minions, including some that were in America in the late 20s to early 30s.

Yeah, probably, although I think anyone with a vague idea of an overarching plot would have made me happier.

TLJ was actually the most misogynistic of all of the Star Wars movies.

Curious to know why you feel that way. I’ve heard chuds complain that it was too feminist, but I’ve never heard anyone claim it was misogynistic.

Yeah after the big bad is killed, they fight some unnamed guards.

Yeah, I didn’t care. Snoke was a boring Palpatine knock-off (I mean, they literally retconned him to be his clone), and killing him off unceremoniously was the only interesting choice Johnson made that wasn’t undone by the end of the movie. And the guard fight is incredible. Aside from Darth Maul fight (which, admittedly, may be the best in the franchise), the fight scenes in the prequels have so many backflips and somersaults, overlaid with gratuitous CGI and green screen, that they felt like special effects instead of fight choreography. Fighting those 5 gaurds had more weight and higher stakes than Obi-Wan battling a CGI Grievous or jumping over green screen lava with anakin.

I mean, there is a lot of good stuff in there, and I genuinely love Rian Johnson. I think the Knives Out movies are the best thing to happen to the mystery genre in decades, and Poker Face is the second best. And honestly, most of my problems with TLJ are because of Johnson made interesting choices, which is better than Abrahams making a shot-for-shot remake of A New Hope or whatever the hell he was trying to do with Rise of Skywalker.

Seriously? There was a whole movement to reshoot the movie because the, “SJWs,” had ruined Star Wars. They claimed they, “destroyed,” Luke’s character because that wanted to, “empower,” Rey. They were furious that Poe was getting reprimanded by women, and that Hodo wore a dress. They even bullied the lady who played Rose Tico off of Instagram for being a woman of color in Star Wars.

I didn’t even like talking my problems with the movie because I didn’t want to be lumped in with the Groypers and incels. I kept seeing reviews and comments talking about how this completely turned Star Wars on it’s head and I kept thinking, “no it fucking didn’t, they chickened out and reestablished the status quo at the last second,” but I kept my mouth shut for years.

Edit: This smug little weirdo makes for a good case study of the right-wing grievance culture around the movie. Just be sure to watch with an ad blocker so you don’t give him any revenue.

The fuck are you talking about? I’m not complaining about Rey being too powerful or Luke being too grumpy, I’m not bitching about Rose existing, and I’m actually defending Hodo instead of throwing a fit that a woman in a dress was in a position of authority. I’ve also got 2 paragraphs about structural issues and thematic failures that I’ve never heard anyone mention. Maybe some right-winger brought up one of the same plot holes, but anyone with half a brain would ask why they didn’t pull that light-speed maneuver against the Death Star.

The Last Jedi sucks, but not for the reasons right-wing chuds complained about. The premise of the entire chase rests on a bunch of Macguffin’s (they can suddenly track ships through hyperspace, fuel is an issue for the first time ever, no one can escape except when they can), the Canto Bight sequence is pointless and contrived, the light-speed kamikaze blows a plot hole in basically every other movie, and Poe should have been executed for mutiny.

Structurally, I get what Johnson was doing; everyone complained that The Force Awakens was a beat for beat retelling of A New Hope, so he basically inverted the plot structure of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a fun idea, but his desire to end on a Hoth sequence ruined what could have been a perfect ending. I was having problems with that movie, but after Snoke gets murdered, Rey and Ben have one of the best lightsaber fights in Star Wars history, and Ben asks her to join him, I was expecting the credits to roll, and I was ready to leave on one of the greatest cliffhangers in movie history. But then there’s another 30 minutes of movie, and while the Luke stuff is cool, it mostly just drags on.

It’s also clear that Johnson wasn’t just inverting plot structure, but Star Wars norms. Everything that is established is questioned and turned on it’s head. The problem is, by the end of the film, it’s all thrown out and the status quo is hastily reestablished with little justification. What’s the lesson from Canto Bight and DJ? “Rebellion? Empire? Two sides of the same coin for the weapons dealers. The real battle is between the haves and have-nots.” How does the movie end? “Get on the princess’ space ship, we’re not done fighting the Empire!” The entire Rey/Luke/Ben aspect of the film? “Light? Dark? Jedi? Sith? They’re just artificial constructs. Let them die. Burn the temple.” How does the movie end? “Don’t worry, Rey didn’t join the Dark Side and she’s got all the magic Jedi books!”

Anyway, there’s also a lot of stuff I like (the Rey/Luke scenes are excellent), and it’s bad in an interesting way, which makes it better than the rest of the trilogy by default. I guess this is more of a small essay than a hot take, but TL;DR: chuds think The Last Jedi sucks because of wokeness, but it actually suckes for lot of structural, thematic, and plot weaknesses.

Ok, well, most restaurants have notoriously small margins (3-5%) with tipping. So, setting aside what you think should and shouldn’t be, what is an actual solution? Eliminate tipping and raise prices? Restructure the agricultural pipeline to lower costs? Cap commercial real estate prices to reduce rental overhead? Because as it stands now, you can’t eliminate tipping without getting the money somewhere, and it’s not in the restaurants profits.

If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don’t really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you’re right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it’s important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.

All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let’s say you go to your local bakery; you’ve never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they’ll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he’s required to make up the difference anyway. At first it’s great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren’t earning enough tips, ane he’s making up the differences. That’s when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they’re overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.

Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I’d have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.

Yeah, I haven’t seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour still isn’t a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, “Fight for Fifteen,” was outdated and needed to be the, “Fight for Twenty,” and we’ve had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.

If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren’t enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.

It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista’s jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they’re all getting a living wage, and your tip isn’t a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.

Just gonna add a source to back this up:

The no-tipping policy lasted just six months at Chang’s Momofuku Nishi. Claus Meyer, a Noma co-founder, announced in February that he was ending the no-tipping policy at his own New York restaurant, Agern, after two years, citing slow business as a result of the higher menu prices. Gabe Stulman reversed course at his restaurant, Fedora, after four months without tips, telling Eater that guests were ordering less food than they had before.

People are dumb. Even if they should know they’re saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it’s bad.

Sure, but you could say the same of Luigi Mangione and that isn’t slowing anyone down.

I mean, I would say you shouldn’t make him your hero either. Even if you think what he did was heroic, lone gunman assassins usually don’t turn out to be very stable, well adjusted people. Hell, Ted Kacynski has some good points about post-Industrial life, but that doesn’t mean he should be your hero.

I might suggest that if Glenn had ended up on MSNBC rather than the gutter for FOX News washouts, he’d be denouncing Snowden today rather than praising him.

Very possible, and nearly as disappointing. My point isn’t that he changed or became worse, just that I projected more of my ideals onto him than he actually shared.

I don’t think you can criticize Snowden because the guy who interviewed him ended up becoming a crank.

To be clear, I’m not. I’m saying that he has some views and beliefs that may lead him to disappoint you in the future. He mostly doesn’t comment much on politics outside of the surveillance state, but he has described himself as a libertarian, and said that he believes social security is a scam that needs to die. It seems clear that he is anti-authoritarian, but it’s very possible that, if he ever became more vocal about American politics, you’d learn a lot about him that would disappoint you.

What Snowden did was objectively good, and he did so at great personal cost, but you should be cautious about making any living person your hero. His politics seem to lean closer to libertarian nut-job than anything else, and it’s very possible he will disappoint you in the future. Case in point, Glen Greenwald broke the Snowden leaks, and I considered him one of my heros for a time,.but these days he sounds more like Tucker Carlson than anyone else. The point is, admire heroic actions, but don’t make people your heroes.

Honestly, Vader’s probably the best one up there, even before his face turn at the end of Jedi. When he finds out his son is alive, the first thing he does is seek him out and try to get him to join the family business. Sure, they have a tense conversation which doesn’t end…great, but at least he’s trying to reach out. Compare that to Worf, who seems to genuinely hate his kid and spends the better part of two shows pawning him off on other people, and it’s not even close.

Restaurant margins are notoriously thin. The average restaurant makes around a 3% to 5% profit margin. There are very few restaurants in America that could just triple their staffing costs and not raise prices.

Yeah, this is unfortunately why tipping culture can’t be phased out by individual restaurateurs trying to create change. Consumers would rather pay $20 for a meal and tip $4 than pay $22 upfront and not tip. I imagine it’s the same psychological principle that makes people think paying $99.99 is significantly better than $100. The only solution is eliminating the tipped minimum wage all together so that everyone gets the same minimum wage (also, increase the minimum wage at least 200% while you’re at it).

That being said, it’s not just the customers. Whenever a state is about to eliminate the tipped wage, the National Restaurant Association (yes, another evil NRA) spends millions trying to kill it. It happened here in MA a few years ago; they convinced both servers and customers to vote down a referendum to eliminate the tipped minimum wage, even though both of those groups were just subsidizing the restaurant owners.

They didn’t intend for that contingent to actually drive, but they paved the path and all :shocked Pikachu: when he grabbed the wheel.

Yeah, more or less. I don’t think the Republican elites ever disagreed with the racist resentment politics they’d been peddling, but they intended them to be a means to enact tax breaks for the wealthy and wage wars. They never expected the base to elect someone who made racism the focus.

I still hold that he gets absolutely nowhere without Putin’s help.

Not sure I agree. Russian interference certainly helped, but the economic conditions in the country are ripe for fascism. He might have won without foriegn interference, and if he didn’t, we might be facing a more popular, more competent fascist right now.

I take your point, but Trump is the culmination of 40 years of austerity, wealth inequality, and dog whistling. To extend the visual metaphor, we first noticed the ship listing during Trump, but we’d been taking on water since Reagan.

Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions.

This is an extremely debatable assertion that scientists and philosophers will still be debating long after you and I are dead, but empirically, the evidence is pointing towards, “No, your consciousness is just a byproduct of that lump of meat in your skull.” Phineas Gage, for example, discovered that a huge portion of what made him, him was actually his left-frontal lobe.

We could argue about conciousness, the soul, and the ship of theses for hours, and it would all still be opinion, but what is not opinion is this; your consciousness is being run on meat hardware, physical damage to or a chemical imbalance in that hardware will effect your consciousness, and it is constantly running processes, even when in sleep mode, until it is permanently shutdown. Based on that information, I would not let anyone disintegrate my brain, even if fhey reassembled it perfectly.