Tipping is circular logic. Because some jobs traditionally receive tips, the law is written to say that employers need only pay those employees like $3 an hour base line, with the rest of their income up to minimum wage being made up of tips.

Thus, because they pay their employees less, they can charge you less for the food (supposedly). Thus, the prices in the menu are based on the assumption that you and everyone else will tip.

If no one tips, the owner has to make up the difference to minimum wage, and to do that he'll have to raise prices. So you end up paying for the tip anyway.

This circular logic breaks down at places like Outback Steakhouse, where they famously pay their hostesses and (bus boys IIRC?) less than minimum wage, but don't allow them to accept tips, then argued in court that because the "jobs" traditionally allow tips overall, they qualify as tip jobs even if it's not allowed at their stores. (Then they do forced tip share with the servers, so that the servers are forced to share their income not just amongst themselves but with the hostesses and bus boys as well.) I don't eat there any more, but if you do, be sure to tip your server in cash so they can pocket it and avoid this crap.

This is off topic, since TWC isn't the same company as TWI, but...

They keep talking about the "lack of overlap" in their markets, but that's bogus. Comcast and TWC overlap in the "negotiating with content providers" market. The larger the company, the harder they can negotiate against the cable channel providers not already owned by one of them. They might say this will yield lower prices for consumers, but you and I know that's total bullshit.

What it actually means is that they'll either drop channels that won't negotiate, and focus more on providing only channels they create, or the third-party channels they keep will need more ads - more in-show ads - and cheaper shows (reality TV) to make up the difference in revenue they lost.

I don't like the content providers either (give me a la carte or give me death!) but TWC and Comcast at two separate negotiating tables is much better for consumers than a merged monolith at one table.

Alamo food isn't really that good any more. They seriously buggered up their menu a year+ back, and basically offer just burgers and (small) pizzas now. I think the owners are more focused on their Drafthouse Films brand and being a distributor now rather than stay focused on the perfect movie experience.

It's still a good place to see a film that you can't see anywhere else, but if you're seeing a major release, even Austin has theaters with a better experience - Flix Brewhouse for one.

Why assume 2200? In my experience, more things now rely on two digit years, not less. If a bad programmer today is coding something that never deals with historical records, only future dates, what is the incentive to be diligent about using four digit years? We've already established he's not very good, and if he even thought about, it, he probably assumes he won't be working 86 years from now when someone notices his bug.

C&D Comics?

Sure, but it's so much worse now than it was then. I was trying to add old Doctor Who to my DVD queue. With each add it pops up other recommendations, but a lot of the time none of them were Doctor Who episodes!

It seems to recommend obscure crap when I'm adding a popular/cult item, and it recommends Frozen or some other recent big budget thing when I'm adding older obscure stuff. I have to think their algorithms have been messed with by their marketing and suits to push things their distribution contracts require them to, not what their users actually want.

If you are using concentrated solar thermal instead of photovoltaics, the molten slag is your battery. Use both so you get PV in the morning when your salt is cool. Winds are higher in the morning too. And of course a safe thorium reactor for baseline never hurt anybody.

Yeah, because he survived organ failure, cataracts, and four heart attacks in four months along with daily baths, shaves, and medicine for months to expel the radiation, it must be safe to just knock it down with a wrecking ball or maybe dynamite.

Wow, that high? I would have expected it to be lower.

Most senior citizens (those 65 or older) became senior citizens since 1995, when the web started taking off. Many became senior citizens after 2005, when it had mostly saturated middle-class households.

It's not so much that granny embraced the internet, it's that she embraced the internet and then aged into being "granny".

When I lived in regular Texas, Green Mountain was my 100% wind provider, and my rates only went down for the ~6 years I used them.

Austin doesn't give me a choice as I have to use the municipal service. I'm still 100% wind but angry they didn't grandfather my past record of wind power into a lower early adopter rate.

I'm 37 and use VIM for VHDL development. Most of my coworkers in their 30s use VIM or Emacs, while those in their 20s use Notepad++. This is for hardware engineers; I dunno what software uses.

While there are some libertarians that support regulation of trade speech, many seem to prefer caveat emptor. Fraud, then, would be policed not through prevention but through litigation, or (for some libertarians) not at all, and instead be a life lesson.

What would that life lesson probably be? "This libertarian utopia sucks; I want regulation back." At least that's my guess.

On the other hand, if you contracted with your neighbor to rent a patch of his land, and you ran your own antenna up there so you could get the OTA signals yourself separately from his reception, that should be A-ok. That's even true if he already had a spare antenna installed and you just rent it from him.

Dinah's The Hopper is similar to, but not exactly the same as, this service. The equipment is still owned centrally and rented to each user; it just resides in distributed houses rather than one central location, and is streamed over the user's personal bandwidth instead of a company's. That is, unless The Hopper is installed in an office.