Tipping and sexual harassment during the pandemic

I have railed before against the practice of tipping because it seems like a relic of a feudal age and reinforces the power differential between the tipper and the tippee. In the US, restaurant and other hospitality workers can be paid far less than the minimum wage, as low as $2.13 per hour, using the argument that they augment that absurd wage with tips. I have argued that it would be better to pay them a living wage, pass the cost on to the customer through higher prices, and abolish tipping altogether. But some customers want to retain tipping for the very reason that I dislike it, because it gives them power over the person serving them, enabling them to reward and punish.
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Are we in danger of creating a loony singularity?

I read this report that the QAnon people and the antivaxxers are finding common cause, as a result of QAnon advocates targeting the anti-vaxxer social media pages to gain a wider audience.

QAnon rhetoric has been seeping into anti-vax pages all over social media in recent months. Devoted adherents of the conspiracy theory have weathered tech giants’ sweeping crackdowns by infiltrating other communities that exist on the platforms, then poisoning them with disinformation. This has transformed the large ecosystem of anti-vax communities online into radicalization pipelines for QAnon.

“The purpose of vaccination is to literally slaughter the population and dumb everyone down and render them helpless,” Larry Cook, the creator of “Stop Mandatory Vaccination,” warned in his final Facebook Live video. “It is a global plan to literally enslave every human on the planet.”

Over Cook’s right shoulder was an image of the American flag atop the QAnon slogan, #WWG1WGA. Over his left was the letter Q, decorated in stars and stripes. Comments poured in from viewers thanking him for “awakening” them to the “truth.”

So now we have two groups that are immune to science and reason seeming to come together. What happens if other groups that also have crackpot beliefs, such as those who think that it was massive fraud in the election that caused Trump’s loss, climate change deniers, and those who are awaiting the second coming of Jesus and hoping for a war in the Middle East to fulfill that prophecy, also join forces with them?

Will that result in some kind of critical loony mass that tears apart the fabric of reality and creates a loony singularity that sucks in everything and everyone?

The Swiss cheese metaphor for covid-19 precautions

Now that Trump is a lame duck, the. Centers for Disease Control seems to have become more activist and not looking over its shoulder to see if he approves of their recommendations. In the light of record hospitalizations, they have issued the four basic preventative measures that all of us can take, including for the first time asking people to wear masks at all times whenever they leave their homes, moving away from Trump’s ambivalent attitudes to mask-wearing and moving closer to Joe Biden’s stance on it.

* Wear a mask.
* Wash your hands.
* Avoid crowds.
* Stay 6 feet from people who don’t live with you.

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s incredulity over the Trump lawsuit

In a 5-3 vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday threw out yet another Trump legal challenge to the election. Such actions by courts around the country have become so routine as to be hardly worth noting, though if one is counting, there have been 46 such losses by Trump and his allies.

What I want to highlight is the incredulous tone of the majority opinion issued by justice Brian Hagedorn of both the merits of the challenge and the asked for remedy.

The Wisconsin Voters Alliance and a group of Wisconsin voters bring a petition for an original action raising a variety of questions about the operation of the November 3, 2020 presidential election. Some of these legal issues may, under other circumstances, be subject to further judicial consideration. But the real stunner here is the sought-after remedy. We are invited to invalidate the entire presidential election in Wisconsin by declaring it “null”—yes, the whole thing. And there’s more. We should, we are told, enjoin the Wisconsin Elections Commission from certifying the election so that Wisconsin’s presidential electors can be chosen by the legislature instead, and then compel the Governor to certify those electors. At least no one can accuse the petitioners of timidity.

Such a move would appear to be unprecedented in American history. One might expect that this solemn request would be paired with evidence of serious errors tied to a substantial and demonstrated set of illegal votes. Instead, the evidentiary support rests almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.

This petition falls far short of the kind of compelling evidence and legal support we would undoubtedly need to countenance the court-ordered disenfranchisement of every Wisconsin voter. The petition does not even justify the exercise of our original jurisdiction.
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Comparing the Biden and Obama administrations

Comparing the Biden and Obama administrations

It was inevitable that people would compare the Biden administration to Obama’s to address the question as to whether the Biden presidency was merely going to be a third Obama term. While there are undoubtedly going to be great similarities (they are both solid members of the Democratic Party establishment after all), one way to measure the degree of closeness is to compare appointees made so far. Ryan Grim has made such a careful person-by-person comparison and concludes that although Biden is no progressive, his choices are more progressive than Obama’s, and that he has created a bit more distance from the Robert-Rubin/Goldman Sachs/Wall Street wing of the Democratic party.
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Now you have to leave your horse at home when you fly

Service dogs aid many people, not just those with sight deficiencies, and as such are allowed into many areas that do not allow animals. But recently there has been an increase in the numbers of people who say they need the presence of emotional support animals that are not service dogs to overcome their anxieties, such as when they fly. This has resulted in airlines being faced with having to make ad hoc decisions as to whether to allow them or not.

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Are the monoliths part of a marketing scheme?

The appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the triangular steel monoliths that began in one site in Utah and spread to other places and initially seemed like it was people just having fun has taken a slightly darker turn in California where another one had been erected on top of a mountain.

A group of young men claiming to be Christians have posted a video of themselves tearing down a mysterious monolith that had appeared atop a California mountain and replacing it with a cross.

The monolith had been built near the town of Atascadero and sparked huge interest after the appearance of a similar silvery metal-faced monolith that had been discovered in the deserts of Utah.
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Fun times at the Michigan hearings

In case you were not aware, Rudy Giuliani is still pushing to overturn the Michigan results and there were hearings in the Republican-controlled state legislature for four hours on Wednesday where he brought in witnesses who alleged widespread fraud. One of them was someone named Melissa Carone who said that she worked as a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, the company that manufactured the voting machines and that has been accused by Trump lawyers of working in cahoots with Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013) and the CIA to electronically switch Trump votes to Biden votes as part of their plan to turn the world Communist. Or something like that. It is hard to keep up.
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