That's disgusting! WTF America?!

And there's an option to LOWER it? Is anybody actually talking about doing that?

In Australia the minimum wage is almost $16/hr, or US$16.50. It increases most years, not sure if it's tied to CPI.

Yes, we don't have as big of a tipping culture, although when we do tip it's for good service, not because it's expected. It seems to me that tips are an excuse to pay your workers shit, and a lot of jobs don't get tips but still get the crappy pay.

Yes some videos won't play unless they can load the ads (ie Flash required). These ones won't play on the iPad/iPhone either.

Safari users on OS X should get the ClickToPlugin extension - http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/

It includes an HTML 5 video player, and will play most Youtube videos (say 95%+) without even loading Flash. It will just request the same H.264 video that gets served to iPads etc and uses the native hardware decoder.

Means you can watch Youtube with about 1% CPU usage instead of your fans spinning up because Flash is doing it in software.

Anytime you really do need to use Flash, just click the placeholder to load the plugin.

It's hardly "terrifying" when I have no idea what either of those unlabelled axes are supposed to represent.

Just showing something getting bigger over time is not really useful information.