Ingesting lead can and will kill you, and it will impair your cognitive functioning in the meantime. Lead was banned from automobile gasoline in 1975, but it was too late. There are small amounts of lead in the air and water, almost everywhere, that will remain for centuries and that were not there before cars,

This case involved charges of fraud made against Trump’s company by the State of New York. This was a civil case, not a criminal case. The consequences were not supposed to be criminal.

The defamation lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll were also civil cases. She was not charging Trump with the crime of raping her many years ago; She was suing him (twice) for lying about whether he raped her many years ago. (She won both times.)

I think I get where you are coming from, though. When a person is rich enough to pay the fine, and also shameless enough to revel in the infamy of being found liable in a civil dispute, it can seem like that person doesn’t end up suffering any significant consequence for their actions at all.

$355M is a lot of money. Add in the $83M owed to Carroll and these recent fines top $400M, which is an estimated amount of Trump’s liquid assets. Trump is now likely running out of cash-on-hand, which could explain his recent takeover of the Republican National Committee – the GOP’s fundraising (and fund-spending) organization.

Criminal consequences come from criminal cases. Trump has invested most of his legal defense against the criminal cases he is facing. Pending criminal cases involving Trump include:

1.) A RICO (“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations”) case charged by the State of Georgia, against Trump and several others who allegedly conspired to steal the state’s 16 electoral votes, including by having the President call (Republican) Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and ask him to “find 11,780 votes” for him. Four people in that case have already accepted a plea deal. This case is currently delayed by a motion to disqualify the DA because she had a romantic relationship with a lawyer her office hired to help prosecute the case.

2.) A federal case against Trump for retaining classified documents. A year or so ago, it was found that former President Trump and former VP Mike Pence had kept classified documents after they left office, and that when Joe Biden left the office of VP in 2017, he also kept some classified documents. Both Pence and Biden complied with federal investigation and surrendered the documents immediately when asked. Unlike Pence and Biden, Trump did not comply with federal investigation, and instead took action to conceal the classified documents in his possession. This case is being heard in a Florida courtroom, because Trump was storing these stolen national secrets in a spare bathroom at Mar-A-Lago. The judge is a Trump appointee, and has demonstrated a tendency to rule in Trumps favor whenever she can, but if she shows too much bias she may get taken off the case.

3.) A federal case against Trump for his involvement in the insurrectionist attempt to disrupt the electoral vote count in congress on January 6, 2021. Trump has been indicted on four charges in this case: “conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.” Trump’s defense has been that he has “absolute immunity” for any actions he took while serving as President. This claim of immunity has been denied and appealed multiple times. Trump has now asked the SCOTUS to hear his appeal, but they haven’t said if they will yet. Until they do, that case is on hold, but there’s no one else to appeal to higher than them. If SCOTUS chooses not to hear Trump’s immunity appeal, the lower court’s denial of it will stand and the case will go forward.

The insurrection took place on January 6, 2021, which was three years ago.

Over 700 people have plead guilty or been convicted for crimes they committed at the capitol that day. Others have not yet been apprehended or gone to trial, and some others have not been identified. https://apnews.com/article/capitol-riot-jan-6-criminal-cases-anniversary-bf436efe760751b1356f937e55bedaa5

Trump has also been charged for his actions three years ago, but has delayed the trial with repeated appeals all the way up to SCOTUS. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4468789-trump-special-counsel-jack-smith-supreme-court-jan-6-trial/

I don’t know what Brazil has to do with January 6. In the United States – as in many countries with “decent legal system” – a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Anything less than proving Trump guilty beyond a reasonable doubt will be taken as a complete victory for him, and very possibly catapult him to re-election in November.

“People’s definition of good is also different.” That’s exactly what makes working as a server a difficult job.

Take you, for example. It sounds like you don’t like to be bothered when you’re dining out. An excellent server might be likely to recognize that and leave you alone after the first or second visit – as well as get your order right and bring your bill promptly. Even if not, there’s nothing wrong with politely asking to be left alone, but you can’t expect your server to read your mind. Some people do like to be bothered. Some people value the experience of being served while dining out to be as important as the food or the ambience. People have different definitions of good.

In your “first” part, I hear you talking about resentment toward feeling obliged to tip servers when they give poor service. I understand and agree, to an extent. Paying servers minimum wage (or more) would not necessarily improve the service, however, and could possibly allow it to become worse. The amount you leave as a tip – if anything at all – is still completely up to you. That’s a big part of tipping culture as well.

As for your “second,” and your “third,” I’m talking about tipping culture at sit-down restaurants in the United States.

Because you are able to conceptualize tipping as a “a mechanism to justify suppressing wages” does not mean that’s the only way to conceptualize it. Do you really believe that raising server pay to minimum wage (or more) would end tipping culture in the U.S.? I do not believe that at all. Because there really is a culture to it, even it is merely a custom to folks like you.

We can stop its spread – we can refuse to tip at places that never expected a tip before. But tipping at fancy sit-down restaurants is ingrained in American culture. It would take generations of social engineering to breed it out. There are people who like to be able to tip for good service, wealthy American people who will seek it out. Even if it became the norm not to tip at restaurants, I bet tipping would been seen as a status symbol at the fancier ones.

And what about the “excellent server” I talked about earlier, who makes more money in tips than anyone else on the shift? To you, maybe that person is akin to some sort of prostitute, to be asking for extra money in exchange for personal consideration, when already making almost as much as “ffs EMT personnel”? Seriously though, no matter how much you raise that server’s wage, they’re still not going to be making anywhere near as much as they did working those big-money shifts for big tips. All else being even, they’re not going to choose to work those crappy hours anymore either, so the restaurant no longer has its best staff working its most demanding shifts.

Anyway, it didn’t really seem like you were punching down. It did sort of seem like you failed to address some of the points I tried to make about tipping culture in the US, and instead provided information about your personal preferences and bad experiences dining out at full-service restaurants. That, and pushing the single-problem-single-solution minimum-wage idea, again without really addressing any of the possible collateral consequences I tried to suggest in the original post.

Tipping is more than just a custom; there really is a culture to it. If you’re tipping only because you know the server makes less than minimum wage from the restaurant (or that greedy restaurant owners are completely to blame for this injustice), I think you may be misunderstanding an aspect of this culture.

Working in a restaurant is as hard a retail job as there is, and working as a server is often the hardest job in the restaurant. Being a truly good server requires a rare mix of people skills, math skills, memory, and a thick skin. So why do people choose to take the hardest job there is in the whole restaurant, when it pays less than all the other jobs?

Most servers end up getting paid better than the people doing other jobs in the restaurant. In most restaurants, servers make more than minimum wage. At the end of their shifts, most servers in turn tip-out the front-of-the-house employees, such as hosts and bussers, who often do only make minimum wage.

A truly excellent server may be the highest-paid employee for an entire shift – that certainly includes the manager and anyone else on salary, and it may even include the owner, when you add in labor and upkeep costs.

In order to make all that money, however, this server has to work at all the times that everyone else is out having fun – Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday morning. This server must put up with drunks, picky eaters and other narcissists, as well as seating errors and kitchen mistakes, all with a smile, for six or eight or ten hours straight. This server, who earns more than anyone else on the shift, is working harder than anyone else on the shift.

This is the other aspect that I wanted to address. Tipping culture is what gives that excellent server the opportunity to earn a better wage, more appropriate to the effort and expertise they devote to the job.

I’m sure this all sounds very capitalist, because it is. This may not be the most capitalism-friendly forum, I know, but I’m not trying to make any larger argument here.

I’m just saying that to me, it seems like this should be a “don’t hate the players” (owners, managers, servers, rich/drunk people who like to leave big tips) “hate the game” (tipping culture). And even if you do hate tipping culture, it couldn’t hurt to consider how it works for the people who don’t hate it.

Removed by mod

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

Trump became a god to that entire swath of willfully ignorant racist Americans, way back when he first attacked sitting President Obama for not being an American citizen.

Trump used the same tactic against Obama that he always uses. The same tactic he perfected in all his ridiculously public feuds with people like Rosie O’Donnell. It’s simple: The more audacious the accusation, the more press coverage it gets. The bigger the lie, the more it gets repeated.

In a certain way, I still think of the entire MAGA movement as payback for America electing a Black man to be President in 2008. And I’m still shocked to think even before 2008, there must have always been that much anger and hate and fear there, among my fellow Americans. But the hate was quieter before Trump, and easier not to see unless you were looking for it.

But that’s why I think Trump is so much more dangerous than DeSantis, or any other wannabe strongman autocrat). Trump’s already tapped into all that pent-up American hate years ago, and Trump’s completely owned it ever since. As demonstrated countless times already, he controls that hate and can use it to make his followers do or say literally anything.