Loras

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I. Intro

I don’t tip, and neither should you.

Fundamentally, paying employees is the responsibility of employers. It is not the direct responsibility of consumers. When you buy movie tickets, you pay the price of the ticket and go in. When you buy a toothbrush, you pay the price and get the product. For some reason, when you eat at a restaurant, you are asked to give the restaurant extra money. As time marches on, tipping culture is expanding beyond restaurants to coffee shops and other places with much less customer service (the usual reason given in defense of tipping). Requests for tips have expanded to self-service establishments and even self-checkout machines. One must ask, “what is it that a tip is even for?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/your-money/tipping-self-checkout-inflation.html

(yeah this little practice is destroying our society)

II. Tipping Subsidizes Businesses, Not Employees

In the intro, I described tipping as giving extra money to the restaurant, not to the employee. This is because tips often don’t end up in the pockets of employees, for both legal and illegal reasons.

A. Often, Tips Don’t Legally Have to go to Employees

In the United States, all employees must make minimum wage. At the time of writing, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and several states have higher minimum wage.

There is a separate tipped minimum wage. This is the wage that employers must pay employees regardless of how much they make in tips. If they don’t make enough with tips plus the tipped minimum wage to reach the regular minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference.

At the time of writing, 25 states have tipped minimum wages lower than $4 per hour. 16 have the federal minimum of $2.13 per hour.

For example, in Alabama, where both minimum wages are at the federal minimum, a server working one hour and earning no tips receives $7.25 from their employer. The next hour, they receive $5 in tips. The server still earns $7.25 for the hour, with the employer’s contribution greatly reduced.

Some jurisdictions have taken the admirable step of legally requiring employers to pay their employees the full value of their tips in addition to the regular state minimum wage. Which brings us to…

B. Even When Employees are Entitled to Tips, They Often Don’t Get Them

Employees are legally entitled to their tips, either when tips put the employee above the tipped minimum wage, or when their state mandates that tips do not reduce an employer’s required compensation for the employee. However, even when legally mandated, employees often don’t get their tips.

Tips are irregular by nature. Not only do customers tip inconsistent amounts from week to week, but in many establishments, employees are supposed to “split” their tips with back-of-the-house workers, who are often not directly tipped by the customer. Inconsistent customer behavior and opaque tip-sharing formulas make it extremely tempting for employers to steal tips that their employees have earned.

(employers be like, I'll take that thank you very much)

A 2008 study by the National Employment Law project found that 12% of tipped workers surveyed had experienced tip theft during the previous work week.

III. Tipping is a highly discriminatory practice

Tipping culture discriminates based on where you work (low wage workers in grocery or hardware stores don’t get tipped like restaurant workers), what you do at work (servers and baristas are tipped more than cooks and janitors) and, most egregiously, looks.

Tipping makes your pay largely defendant on the whims of customers. Needless to say, this has consequences. People who are already typically disadvantaged by society face discrimination in tipped wages.

Black servers in the United States saw their tipped wages decline more severely than white servers during the pandemic. Who could have seen this coming?

(Reminder that restaurants used to routinely look like this not that long ago)

And let’s not forget the plight of our female friends struggling in the bust department. It’s common knowledge that servers with bigger breasts get bigger tips (and conversely, servers with smaller breasts get smaller tips). Mythbusters even went so far as to test it (sadly true).

(Usually, the Mythbusters test things that involve explosions, not discrimination. Maybe because the discrimination myth they tested turned out to be a real bummer?)

The culture of tipping makes the service industry just one more place where people are punished or rewarded based on the immutable traits of how they look. If your pay at an office job was based on how pretty your boss thought you looked, it would be an outrage. Why is the tipped wage for servers any different?

IV. Thesis: Tipping is class warfare perpetuated by the rich against the poor.

Let me tell you a story from my childhood. On military bases, there is a low cost grocery store called a commissary. It’s run by the federal government through the defense commissary agency. The point is to sell products near or at cost because military service members, particularly low ranking enlisted ones, are paid a mere pittance. If they have families, it is often difficult to make ends meet.

We lived in unsafe military housing, with water that from time to time, ran brown out of the faucet. We shopped at at the commissary, and at the checkout line, there was a large sign displayed: Baggers worked for tips. Forget tipped minimum wage. If you didn’t tip, they didn’t get paid.

We were poor, that’s why we shopped at the commissary. And yet, every time there was a song and dance where we, who had little money were pitted against the retired veterans who bagged for free, hoping to supplement their too small pension. It was all artificial. The government could have paid both of us more, but instead chose to pit the poor against the poor to distract from the fact that the government wasn’t paying us.

Most situations are not that extreme. In restaurant environments, workers typically will make minimum wage no matter what, but the underlying principle is still there. When servers are underpaid, they blame customers, rather than the boss. Their rage is directed away from the person who can actually solve the problem by providing consistent working hours and a predictable, fair wage. Instead, servers blame people who could only provide a one time cash injection.

V. We are moving in the wrong direction

On July 4, 2025, the president signed a budget bill that eliminated federal income tax on certain tipped income. The new rules are, in a nutshell:

Taxpayers must work in “occupations that are listed by the IRS as customarily and regularly receiving tips”

“Qualified tips” are voluntary cash or charged tips received from customers or through tip sharing.

Maximum annual deduction is $25,000 ($50,000 for joint filers); for self-employed, deduction may not exceed individual’s net income (without regard to this deduction) from the trade or business in which the tips were earned.

Deduction phases out for taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income over $150,000 ($300,000 for joint filers).

And they are not as helpful as you might think:

A. This won’t help the poorest tipped workers.

Those who make less than the standard deduction won’t benefit. This is a tax deduction. Not a tax credit. As the Forbes breaks down, this will help the richest tipped employees. When you think of who benefits, think less of servers at greasy diners and more casino Blackjack dealers.

Congress could have acted to help substantially more people by raising the minimum wage, which it has not done since 2009, when it was raised to a meager $7.25 / hour. If they wanted specifically to help tipped workers, they could have raised the tipped minimum wage, or eliminated it so that they always had to receive the regular minimum wage in addition to tips. The federal tipped minimum wage has been $2.13 for close to three decades.

B. These rules further divide working people.

We make already distinctions between certain kinds of income for taxation purposes. For example, making money in the stock market (i.e.) capital gains, is taxed at a lower rate than wages (i.e.) “ordinary income.” With this, we send the message that we want people working less and investing more. It’s an insulting message when so many Americans don’t have a basic emergency fund. With what money are they supposed to invest? This logic carries forward to not taxing tips.

These new rules tell people their work is more valuable if they work in traditionally tipped customer service industries. Lots of hardworking people in this country need a break, but will find themselves proportionally paying more of the tax burden because servers and other tipped individuals will pay less taxes. Think EMTs, Nurses, Teachers, Sanitation Workers, and Firefighters. These people do mission critical work for our society, but will now pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, not just compared to day traders and investors, but also bartenders and servers. This reform leaves out in the cold mission critical individuals, further divides working people against each other, and violates a basic principle of equity.

C. It’s bad economic policy

Economists also worry that people will scramble to reconfigure their income to rely more on tips. There are plenty of opportunities for people in traditionally tipped professions to shift money over, either when the collect it from the customer or when they report it to the IRS (if they report it at all) from wages to tips. It will be very difficult to verify that “tips” are actually tips. This will increase the cost of the policy, and deprive the federal government of tax dollars to do its work. The resulting increased borrowing will be responsibility of young people to repay one day in the future.

D. Logically, it falls flat on its face

Remind me again, what is a tip? Ignore for a second the previously referenced self checkout machines that ask for a tip. If it’s compensation for a job well done, it is wage, and should be taxed the same way we tax the wages of doctors, teachers, or firefighters. That’s how I think of it. But because it’s not truly compulsory (although enforced by heavy societal pressure) it is rather a gift. But this isn’t a good reason to not to tax it. Gifts are taxed. Remember when Oprah gave all those people new cars? Yeah, they had to pay taxes on those.

(You get a car! You get a car! You also get a $7,000 tax bill. I actually don't think that's so objectionable. Taxes are how we fund society after all. Besides, these were nice cars. The recipients could easily sell them, pay the gift tax, and buy a more modest, but still good car with the proceeds.)

VI. Conclusion

When you tax something, you will get less of it. Conversely, eliminating taxes on something, means, all else being equal, you will get more of it. If the words above these have convinced you that tipping is bad (or perhaps you already believed it), then exempting certain tips from federal taxes will only make tipping culture more prominent, and the hunt for tips more aggressive. Our saving grace is that like most things congress does, this tax exemption was temporary. It is set to expire at the end of tax year 2028. This means that assuming congress does nothing (a reasonable assumption), the next president will have to deal with some angry workers outraged that they have to pay taxes on their income like other working people.

It’s easy to see how this behavior hurts working people and enriches oligarchs. So what can we do about it?

First, when presented with the option to tip, don’t. This includes all situations, not just in restaurants. We must starve the beast. It will be painful at first, but if people stop expecting tips, they will start to demand better compensation from their employers.

Second, when the no taxes on tips provision is up for renewal, call your congressman, and tell them you want tips to be taxed again.

Third, if you are a tipped employee, demand better. Collaborate with your fellow workers to demand better treatment from your boss. Dare I even say it? Unionize.

Does motive matter in ethics? If you do the "right" thing for the wrong reason, is it still right? If you do the "wrong" thing for the "right" reasons, is it still "wrong"? Put your thinking cap on your gulliver, my droogies. Today, we're examining Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange as a case study in ethics, as well highlighting a major flaw in Christianity (a noble pastime if there ever was one).

Part I: The Plot of A Clockwork Orange

I'll include only what's needed for the analysis here. It's still a book worth reading.

The book can roughly be into three parts. The first third is Alex committing horrible, violent crimes so we understand who he is and why he gets treated the way he does later in the book. After a rape and burglary goes bad, the woman he raped dies, and he is incarcerated for murder.

The next third documents Alex's time in prison, including his volunteering and selection for a clinical trial called "the Ludovico Technique." It a fictional form of aversion therapy that involves Alex watching violent and pornographic films while being injected with drugs to make him nauseous. The technique is a "success." When he leaves the program he becomes violently ill when he gets horny or tries to engage in violence. Admittedly, he was previously a rapist, but this procedure closes off even the possibility of consensual sex. Alex is now also incapable of being violent, this includes an inability to use violence in self defense. Because of the background music that was used in the films, he can't even listen to classical music any more, which used to one of his greatest joys.

(To make sure he watches the film, his eyelids are pried open, with scientists administrating eye drops. It's the definition of a captive audience.)

The last third follows his journey back in the free world. Mostly, it involves him being down on his luck. People are cruel to him, and many of the people he brutalized before going to prison, now seeing his defenseless state, exact revenge on him, beating him senselessly. Many readers feel sympathy for Alex at this point. He's no longer the monster he once was. He literally cannot be. One of the last scenes of the book is him being locked in a room, subjected to the blasting of classical music. To save himself the agony of his conditioning, he autodefenestrates (jumps out the window) in an attempt to kill himself.

The music was still pouring in all brass and drums and the violins miles up through the wall. The window in the room where I had laid down was open. I ittied to it and viddied a fair drop to the autos and buses and walking chellovecks below. I creeched out to the world: ‘Goodbye, goodbye, may Bog forgive you for a ruined life.’ Then I got on to the sill, the music blasting away to my left, and I shut my glazzies and felt the cold wind on my litso, then I jumped.

-A Clockwork Orange: Part 3, Chapter 5

Yes yes. I know left out many important plot points and symbolic details. The entire book is worth reading, and it's not that long either.

Part II: What A Clockwork Orange is Interpreted to Mean

Now that we have essential plot elements laid out, we can ask. Is Alex is now good? Most interpretations of the book at this point conclude that Alex is neither good nor evil. Take for example, an analysis by Thomas C. Foster, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan-Flint. In his 2003 book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, he states

When his capacity to choose is taken away, evil is replaced not with goodness but with a hollow simulacrum of goodness. Because he still wants to choose evil, he is in no way reformed. In acquiring the desired behavior through the “Ludovico Technique,” . . . society has not only failed to correct Alex but has committed a far worse crime against him by taking away his free will, which for Burgess is the hallmark of the human being.

Morality requires choice. We don't condemn hurricanes for their evil nature. Hurricanes are amoral, as hurricanes have no agency. People are understandably uncomfortable about thinking of human beings as being without free will. It would seem to undermine a core assumption on which society is built. And yet...

Part III: What Burgess Doesn't Get - The Problem of Free Will

For starters, it probably doesn't exist.

Perhaps the believers and the nonbelievers can be one day united in their skepticism of free will. For nonbelievers, there are deterministic arguments. But don't think that let's believers off of the hook.

Many Christians believe in an omniscient god. This appears to be directly incompatible with free will. I figured this out when I was about twelve or thirteen. If god knows I will choose A, then do I have free will to choose B? Not if god is omniscient.

(If "god's plan" is a real thing, then you can kiss free will goodbye)

Part IV: "Good" Things for "Bad" Reasons

So let's take a step back from that for a second and assume, for the sake of argument, that free will exists. Who actually has it in a meaningful sense. Believers? Or nonbelievers?

Many Christians believe that actions on this earth determine your eternal place in heaven or hell, and that your placement there depends on doing various "good works."

(I know it's a theological debate between protestants, who believe in Sola Fide, or faith alone as a ticket to heaven, and Catholics, who believe it requires faith and good works.)

As a further side note, the requirement of faith itself has troubling implications. You don't control your faith. If I asked you to change your religious beliefs, right now, you couldn't' do it. In many respects, your beliefs can better be described as something that happens to you, rather than something you choose.

So assuming there is, in fact, free will, and ignoring the troubling implications of a faith requirement, let's talk about the good works component. Let's say you have a believing Catholic who wants to go to heaven. They are as convinced of heaven and hell and the truth of the bible as they are of gravity. They volunteer to feed the homeless. Did they do so in any meaningful way?

Let's put this another way. Imagine I approach you with a shovel in my hand. I credibly threaten to beat you senseless unless you feed the homeless. You comply. Did you do good by feeding the homeless? Is it even possible to know? If you help other people for a a selfish reason, how should that be morally judged?

These two situations are not so different. If you truly believe in the fire and brimstone, there are only two key differences separating the above scenarios. One is the depth of punishment and reward. Christian hell is a far greater punishment than being beaten with a shovel. The other is immanency. Being sent to hell won't happen immediately, but the catholic still believes it will happen. It seems to me that the punishment being delayed does not actually change the moral calculus. Whether punishment and reward are served immediately or in fifty years, the people in the above scenarios are still acting pro-socaily for selfish reasons. In this way, such a person, like Alex, has become a Clockwork Orange. Organic on the outside, mechanical on the inside, and stripped of any meaningful choice.

The book itself seems to recognize the tension between being a christian and being a person with free will.

‘Choice,’ rumbled a rich deep goloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. ‘He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.’

‘He will be your true Christian,’ Dr Brodsky was creeching out, ‘ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the very heart at the thought even of killing a fly.’ And that was right, brothers, because when he said that I thought of killing a fly and felt just that tiny bit sick, but I pushed the sickness and pain back by thinking of the fly being fed with bits of sugar and looked after like a bleeding pet and all that cal.

-A Clockwork Orange, Part 2, Chapter 7

Ironically, this means that atheists, who will be more likely than Christians to deny the existence of free will, are more likely to actually have it in any meaningful way. Should free will exist, the only people who are able to make meaningful choices are those who believe that life is unhindered by any cosmic balancing scales, or those that are willing tot defy god.

Part V: "Bad" things for "Good Reasons"

The bible is a mess of a book, and much of it justifies and supports slavery. Many people in the American antebellum south believed slavery was a righteous thing, permitted by god. Liberating slaves would be wrong, as it would be stealing. It is in this moral conundrum Mark Twain places his titular character in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, believing it is dictated by his religion, writes a letter revealing the location of Jim, a runaway slave. But he hasn't sent it yet, he first reflects.

I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31

Huck is willing to suffer eternal damnation, in a very literal sense, to help his friend. He believes he is doing the "wrong" thing, and is willing to do it anyway. What if Huck didn't believe it was wrong to protect Jim? Does that change the morality of his choice? Is Huck's good deed greater because he's willing to suffer enormous consequences for it? Is it less of a good deed because he believes he's doing the wrong thing?

(When in doubt, rely on the power of friendship)

Few people today would believe that freeing slaves is a wrong act, regardless of what the bible says. So to drive the message home, let's take a more controversial example.

Inhabit, once again, the world of religion, the dogma of heaven and hell. If you could kill somebody, and know they would go straight to heaven, should you do it? Let's say you already knew you were going to hell. What would you have to lose, spiritually speaking?

The Mormons make a particularly interesting example for this. They are a denomination that rejects the doctrine of original sin, meaning children are sinless when they enter the world. They also believe that children can't sin until the "age of accountability," which modern practice sets at eight years old.

For all men must repent and be baptized, and not only men, but women, and children who have arrived at the years of accountability.

-Doctrine and Covenants, Section 18 verse 42

And I also beheld that all children who die before they arrive at the years of accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven.

-Doctrine and Covenants, section 137 verse 10

One can imagine a mormon zealot serially killing as many children as possible under eight years old in order to secure them a place in heaven. After all, it's all downhill after eight. They may very well fall prey to temptation. From this perspective, it's best to give them a speedy trip to the afterlife. If you truly believed the same mormon doctrine as them, could you condemn them?

Part VI: Recap

Let's examine our characters again, and ask if any of them are truly good.

Alex: Does the "right" thing, given literally no choice in the matter

Catholic Zealot: Does the "right" thing, but is given no meaningful choice in the matter. They believe that failure to do do the "right" thing will be met with eternal torment, so their actions are selfishly motivated.

Huckleberry Finn: Does what he believes is the "wrong" thing, but for selfless reasons, and is willing to go to hell.

Mormon Zealot: Does the wrong thing, for selfless reasons. Willing to endure hell so others can make it to heaven.

Obviously, killing kids to send them to heaven should get you sent to an insane asylum. I feel I've waded in the waters of delusion land long enough that it may be helpful at this point to remind the reader that there is no god. There is no heaven. And the is no hell. And yet...

If you take the Clockwork Orange perspective, that being good requires moral choice, you need one of two things. You need to believe there is no god with any moral care what happens here, or you need to be willing to defy god. To cower at god's might, to do what god says to save your own skin, can not be considered moral. It is, at best, as our friend Thomas Foster puts it, merely a "simulacrum of goodness."

Part VII: Sacrifice-Off

I'm not the first to note that even according to the bible, Jesus's sacrifice doesn't seem so special. Crucifixion definitely seems painful (if you ever see me up on a cross, please mercy kill me), but Jesus was not alone. Crucifixion was not an uncommon method of execution in Roman times. Allegedly, Jesus rose from the grave after thee days, making it so he didn't even give up his life. Afterward, he went to heaven. In the grand scheme of things, even the most immense torture for a finite period pales in comparison to infinite reward.

Now let's take our Mormon zealot. They believe with 100% certainty that they are going to hell. They are willing to take infinite punishment to defy god's will and save as many souls as possible.

Jesus never believed he was going to hell. He didn't even believe he was going to stay dead. Who, in this case, is willing to sacrifice more? If mormon theology was true, could you condemn the zealot? Who would be more deserving of the title "Messiah?"

Part VIII: Conclusion

There's even more symbolism to talk about in A Clockwork Orange, and even a case to be made for Alex as a warped Christ figure (which Foster makes in his book). It will have to wait for another time.

A Clockwork Orange, in it's most mainstream interpretations, is about the value of free will. A reader is supposed to be horrified by the crimes Alex commits and subsequently even more horrified at the loss of his free will. I'd like to remind the christians that if free will is real and it is so important, you are not meaningfully using it. They've castrated themselves, letting their own judgment atrophy, all to adopt the appearance of good. At some point, you will have to use your own brain to figure out what what is right and wrong. As we've learned today, religion cannot teach ethics. It can only teach compliance.

It's funny, because who would ever want to fuck a short guy, am I right? /s

Forgive me internet, for I have sinned.

Reality TV is a blight upon society, and we all know it. Yet I have fallen victim to watching the madness unfold. It's like watching a car crash, I can't turn away.

So let he/she/they who doesn't watch Kardashians, or Love Island, or The Bachelor, or any other form trash content that exists solely to appeal to our basest, most vile instincts throw the first stone

With that being said, let's talk about UDY.

Part 1: Introduction

If you believe their Youtube Banner, UDY stands for Underrated, Distinct, and Young. The channel has been going for nine years now, so we will see if they ever stop calling themselves young, or pulling juvenile pranks. For several years now, they have gained views and sponsors by performing "loyalty tests." This is where they take someone's girlfriend or boyfriend, and lure them under false pretenses to a location with hidden cameras, usually a luxury house that the team has rented. At that location there will be a "decoy" whose job is to get the mark to cheat on their partner. There may be all sorts of supporting actors playing friends, employees, photographers, or whoever may be needed to make the decoy seem credible and attractive.

UDY's strategy targeting men usually involves having women act very sexually aggressive, openly suggesting dates / hookups. Basically, can a man resist a woman throwing themselves at him?

The strategy targeting women is to have a man appear extremely wealthy (this makes renting a luxury house all the more essential). He throws around lots of money (fake money) to appear like a gazillionaire. Basically, can women resist an easy ticket to the good life with a handsome man and becoming a trophy wife?

The choice of strategy between the two sexes falls pretty neatly into unfortunate stereotypes. It seems to work well enough for their channel, as they have plenty of vidoes of people failing the test. I don't read too much into it though. Just like with all reality TV, I assume a heavy bias in target selection, editing, and publication. Cheating is the result they want, after all, who wants to watch a video a person not cheating on their partner, with no dramatic confrontation?

Part II: This Was A Bad Idea From The Start

Relationships require trust, and if you don't trust your partner, now it's just a bad relationship. One can make the argument that UDY is doing a service by doing these tests for suspicious couples, because they almost always break up in the end. Ending bad relationships is a net positive, but I'm not going to give them the credit.

These tests are impossible to truly pass. If the mark cheats, they fail. If the mark doesn't cheat, it means the didn't cheat this time. What about next time? Distrust cannot be fixed by a single test. Trust in a relationship is established over time. If you wanted to know if there are any pink elephants on earth, you would have your answer if you found even a single one. However, even finding a million grey elephants would not answer your question with certainty. With a large, randomized sample, you can show things statistically that you can't guarantee with certainty. However, attempting to do so with a sample size of one is scientific malpractice. It leaves the door wide open for comments like this.

So if you catch your partner cheating, you are heartbroken. Sometimes there's even an on camera confrontation which makes for juicy content. If they don't cheat, you are burdened not only with your suspicions that they are disloyal, but also the guilt of lying to and manipulating your partner.

Part III: Their Execution is Laughable

UDY's primary skills appear to be renting expensive houses, and hidden camera work. The other aspects of the operation are not nearly as smooth. Honestly, their blunders are some of the best parts for me, and I'll share a couple of my favorites here.

For sure the most outrageous screwup, one that they don't even acknowledged, was the fake law degree. For one test, the had they decoy play a successful lawyer, and put him in a very expensive house. Maybe my closeness with the law makes me particularly sensitive to this, but come on. Is that not the fakest diploma you've ever seen?

Look at it closely. It's so wrong I don't even know where to begin. I've never seen that embossed cap and scroll icon on the bottom before. It's missing tons of signatures, such as those of the president of the university and the governor. Also, the U.S. doesn't give out bachelor of laws degrees anymore. The law degree given to new lawyers at American universities today is the juris doctor, or J.D.

You don't have to be an expert in what degrees should look like to know that this is an obvious fake. The pièce de résistance is that we don't even know from where this degree purports to originate. There are 5 UC schools that grant law degrees. Alphabetically, they are, Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, LA, and UC College of the Law SF, formerly Hastings. Where exactly did he get his degree? The diploma doesn't say, which is the most obvious giveaway in the world. In short, I wouldn't be caught dead touching this piece of trash. It's like they didn't even try.

If somebody competent was running this operation, they would keep this obvious red flag as far away from the mark as possible. Which means you know that the crew at UDY placed it front and center. They conspicuously and suspiciously left it on the floor of the entryway, and even broke the glass to draw attention to it. Their actor even makes a comment in front of the mark to highlight the broken frame, "Four years of hard work down the drain." Law school is only three years.

Or who could forget the time they were supposed to be following their decoy, only to end up following the wrong car?

(I could go on, but you get the point)

Part IV: Crime?

For one harebrained scheme, they wanted to find out if a girl was actually broke, or if she had money and was just choosing not to pay back her friend. So they decided to do something perfectly reasonable. They lured her (and her car) to the target spot, sent her away (on foot), set up "No Parking" signs and arranged to have a confrontation between her and a tow truck driver WHILE HER CAR IS ON THE TOW HOOK. The theory is, if she can pay money to the tow truck driver to not have her car towed, she can pay back her friend some of the money.

Is it legal to put up fake "no parking" signs and start to tow a girl's car under that pretense? I'm not sure, ask a licensed attorney in your area before you try anything this stupid.

Pictured Above: Sergio doing what I can only assume can best be described as making life very difficult for his attorney.

Part V: The Enablers

So obviously, the viewers are partly to blame. The content machine will starve without eyeballs upon which it can feast. In my defense, I use adblock and sponsorblock (automatically skipping sponsor segments). This lessens my contribution. If you decide to watch content like this, I suggest you also use those browser extensions.

Then there are the sponsors who pay money for promotion in the videos. I'd like to single out Morgan and Morgan for public shaming.

Morgan and Morgan describes themselves as "America's Largest Personal Injury Law Firm." They have offices in all 50 states + D.C. and employ over a thousand lawyers.

I really hope saying this does not cost me a job down the line.

For one video, UDY made gave the decoy a backstory about how he was injurers at work, and was given a multimillon dollar settlement to better integrate with the M&M sponsorship.

Dear Morgan & Morgan. I know that client acquisition for personal injury cases is incredibly important, both to the firm and to those who are injured. I also know it can be a bit unsavory. The term "ambulance chaser" is used as a pejorative for a reason. I think sponsoring youtubers is pretty clever. Just don't choose UDY. These are the kind of people who impersonate lawyers (badly), are willing to commit crimes for a video (See Sergio's quote in the above screenshot, he's willing to tow a car even though he thinks it's illegal), and who have built their entire channel on exploits that harm us all. UDY makes society worse off. Please don't help them.

There are also feeble minded, insecure boyfriends and girlfriends who nominate their partners for these tests, and collude with the UDY team to allow them to be carried out. May you be single for the rest of your days.

Part VI: The Victims

The victims are the people being tested. Sure, they are more sympathetic when they don't cheat. But even when they do, it doesn't justify this.

Victim's privacy is given the bare minimum, and sometimes not even that. Standard protocol is to put an emoji over the victim's face, one that changes to convey emotion needed for the story.

(Yeah dude, that's an understatement)

We do know their partner's name, as well the the general area where the tests take place (Los Angeles area). Often times the test includes details about what kind of job the mark has, and that is incorporated into the test (e.g. a model comes over for a fake modeling shoot). Personal details, like where the mark is from, are sometimes left in. It doesn't seem unlikely to me that somebody could recognize the partner who initiated the test, the figure out who the mark is.

Names appear not to be kept confidential even in the event that the mark fails the test. In the most recent video, we hear the mark introduce herself, so it's clearly not a fake name.

All of this culminates, usually in a confrontation scene. Whether the partner confronts a cheater or the mark confronts the fact that they've been gaslit for this test, it's usually not pretty. Anybody who's had cameras shoved in their face knows that it can be very disorienting. UDY doesn't care. The drama is the point. They film whether you want them to or not.

(This was taken after the mark went outside to get away from the cameras and repeatedly requested to talk without cameras present)

Part VII: Conclusion

Imagine taking some of the most advanced technology mankind has ever created: tiny cameras and microphones, advanced computers for editing, and and the internet for distributing, and using it all to blow up relationships for the amusement of the masses. It is a cynical, heartless creation, and we are all worse off for its existence.

For me, UDY's relationship testing is a true low point in prank / reality TV.

“Come on, Frankie,” the man said to one of his friends in the group, and a short, scrunty fellow detached himself and came into the bar with us.

He was the type of fellow I can’t stand. I’m five feet ten in my stocking feet, and when I am with little men I stoop over a bit and slouch my hips, one up and one down, so I’ll look shorter, and I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow.

For a minute I had a wild hope we might pair off according to size, which would line me up with the man who had spoken to us in the first place, and he cleared a good six feet, but he went ahead with Doreen and didn’t give me a second look. I tried to pretend I didn’t see Frankie dogging along at my elbow and sat close by Doreen at the table.

This is a small update to my prior post on the wikipedia rabbithole of self immolation.

The Wikipedia page on self immolation has grown slightly larger. On Feb. 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell became the second person to self immolate in protest of the war in Gaza.

My heart goes out to the family and loved ones of this man. He was just 25. He felt he could "no longer be complicit in genocide." The Genocide case against Israel is currently ongoing within the United Nations Intentional Court of Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v.Israel(Genocide_Convention)

I have only one point to add to the general discourse surrounding his death. It's quite possible this man signed his death warrant years earlier, when he became a member of the U.S. Air Force. Joining the military requires you substitute your own ethics, reasoning, and judgment for that the government. Be skeptical of such organizations and don't join unless you are completely convinced that your values are and will remained aligned. And even then...

When strong willed people join organizations that demand conformity, like the military, they will try to kill you. Their first choice is to kill your spirit, to break you down and build you back up into their idea of a servicemember. To destroy who you were before. If that doesn't work. You may find the cognitive dissonance so all consuming that you would rather die than continue. It's not like you can just quit the military before your term is up. That's one way to end up in prison.

If the Wright Brothers could see the state of commercial aviation today, they never would have invented the airplane. Prove me wrong.

Obviously I'm exaggerating. But there are serious flaws with American air travel that high speed rail all the more essential.

The TSA: at best, they slow you down, make you take off your shoes, unpack and repack your laptop, and generally be a nuisance. Then there's the times that they want to pat you down. I cringed at the sight of their screens, after I passed through the full body scanner, which showed an anomaly in my genital area. They patted me down last time I flew. It's billions of dollars totally wasted.

2. Planing and Deplaning: I never understood why a perk of spending more money for your ticket was to board the plane earlier. I don't give a shit if I'm the first person on or the last person. The plane will not take off until everybody has boarded. Boarding first means you have more time to sit in those cramped airplane seats. It is notoriously slow to file in and out of an airplane, and needlessly so.

People like CPG Grey love to overcomplicate things, theorizing optimal mathematical algorithms for boarding when true solutions are right in front of our faces.

So how can boarding actually be made better? Goddamn it, do it like trains. No mathematical formula for boarding would beat these two suggestions. 1) Stop assigning seats ahead of time. You claim your seat by sitting in it. 2) Have multiple doors for boarding. Shoving hundreds of people in through a single door has always been madness. Trains can board and deboard masses in seconds. It's long past time for planes to do the same.

3. The Idiocy of airline pricing: I'm not even talking about all the extra fees associated with flying. Everybody knows how annoying that is. What I'm talking about is a pricing model that would make an economist's head spin. What I'm talking about is this.

See this? This is a google price graph (Generated Feb. 21) of the cost to fly from New York to San Francisco on June 1. Why does the price dip? You have to be a psychic to play the airline pricing game. Price go up, price go down. Buy the Dip! Oops. you missed it, you have to pay more now. I don't like this. I want straightforward incentives to help me know when to buy. Amtrak for contrast, prices tickets lower, and raises prices as tickets are sold. I can buy a train ticket not worrying that I'm wasting money by not waiting for the dip.

So intrepid consumers try to save cash. They notice something weird. Sometimes, it is literally cheaper to buy a ticket to a far away place with a layover in a closer place than just to buy a ticket to the nearer place directly. It confounds common sense and is not how the world is supposed to work, according to economics. Don't believe me? Here's an example. (Prices checked on Feb. 21st)

On July 1st Delta flight 528 from Los Angeles to Atlanta costs $249. Or does it?

If you want to fly from Los Angeles to Fort Meyers FL, with a layover in Atlanta, it costs $144. Same airline. Same day. And same fucking flight. The first leg of the journey is provided by our old friend Delta flight 528.

So enterprising travelers start skiplagging. (cough cough search https://skiplagged.com/) They simply exit the airport at the layover airport, getting the correct price for a flight which was clearly mispriced. Surely, airline CEO's see this, and immediately fix their obtuse, opaque, and incredibly frustrating pricing system. Surely, airlines don't want to have a system in place which rewards people for buying seats they don't need, depriving travelers who do need them. Right?

But if you guessed they were going to be giant dicks about it, bonus points for you. Because we live in the worst timeline, they have decided to contractually enforce this insanity. It is a violation of the terms of service for most major airlines to skiplag. Take a look at this gem from Delta.

"Delta prohibits ticketing practices intended to circumvent the published fare that Delta intends to offer for your true itinerary. These practices include:.. 3) Hidden City/Point Beyond Ticketing - The purchase or usage of a fare from a point before the passenger's actual origin or to a point beyond the passenger's actual destination."

Imagine going to law school, thinking you're going to make the world a better place, only to sell out to commercial airlines and have to write shit like this to make the world a worse place.

(I hope the lawyers got paid a lot of money). I'm calling on congress to enact legislation to prohibit airlines from punishing customers for skiplagging.

We would not accept these shenanigans anywhere else. Can you imagine if at the grocery store, buying 10 oranges was cheaper than buying 5, but buying 11 was more expensive again? Can you imagine if to get into the store, you were required to wait in line while security guards with a better retirement plan than you made you take off your shoes, and funneled you in, one by one, through a single entrance, and assigned you a part of the store rather than let you pick where you started shopping? Nobody would accept this. Air travel can and be should be better. Much Better.

In Conclusion:

There is a lot wrong with the world. Most of it is out of our control. These are the facts that break the spirits and imaginations of many former children who succumb to cynical adulthood.

However, this should not take away from the fact that there are real problems we can actually do something about. Take your pessimism and, don't just try, but actually make the world a better place. Here's the first step.

There is a national shortage of blood. Go donate.

The trademark on the phrase "Taco Tuesday" is officially surrendered.

Silicon valley is where the future is invented. This is not always a good thing.

It's practically ground zero for surveillance capitalism, and the center of all sorts of products that are bad for us yet we can't put down. (Facebook, etc.).

With that being said, let's check out the airports. San Francisco's airport has a BART station that runs right into the center of the city. Fantastic. The Oakland Airport has a peoplemover that delivers you to three different BART lines and an Amtrak station. Excellent.

San Jose's airport has no rail transit to the airport, and thanks to the lunatics on the San Jose city council, they won't have it for a very long time.

Instead, they intend to spend half a billion dollars on autonomous "Personal rapid transit." It means dedicated path for tiny driverless, vehicles to operate on.

The capacity will be tiny. Flying with a Utah sized family? Forget it. You will have to take more than one pod. Americans are so averse to sharing public spaces with others that they will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on not yet existing technologies just to have to avoid seeing a stranger on a train, or even more scandalously, a bus.

Los Angeles and San Diego are the 2nd and 8th largest cites in the United States respectively. They are approx. 120 miles apart. It is one of the strongest city pair candidates for rail service in the entire nation. It is currently faster to drive than take a train, even if you need to go from city center to city center (due to track closures).

In spite of all this, there is still demand. Amtrak lists 3 trains (down from 10 normally). 2 of which are filled, and the other is 90% full. I just hope they get there on time. That may may too hopeful. This is all within the last 24 hours.

So I was watching an Adam Something video (highly recommended channel).

It started as normal, based content. He talked about declining purchasing power among American consumers. He talked about the people left behind by global trade. And then I saw this graph.

I was stunned. I must have looked at the graph for ten whole seconds before I could do anything. If any picture truly is worth a thousand words, this may be it. It is a damning indictment of the nation. Perfectly livable, functional countries survive with far less retail space than us. Germany has 1/10th per capita, and people there still seem able to buy things.

Here is the original source:

Spread that image everywhere. Why are malls failing in the U.S.? We built too much commercial space for our people to support them. Why are businesses leaving downtown San Francisco? There aren't enough people who live there to support them. This was previously propped up by commuters who took BART to their jobs in the city, bringing in lots of consumers to SF. The pandemic and work from home changed that.

If you ask PR people who represent the corporations who's stores are leaving SF, they will blame drugs. They will blame crime. But the truth is, they would tolerate it all if it was profitable. Money is the real concern.

We have too much retail space and not enough homes. The conversions won't be easy, but they must be done. Our lives depend on it. Not doing so will drain municipal budgets of funding to provide key services like social work and transportation. Not having enough housing will inflate housing costs far beyond what people can pay, leaving them homeless. Yes, people will die. Their death certificates won't list "urban planning warped to serve the god of consumerism" but it should.

Is America one giant alter to consumerism?

Everything needs an account. It seems to even buy one thing off of a website, you need an account. Wanna read a free news article? Make an account. Forget that it is more than possible to take my shipping address and cc info without me handing over my email address for you to send me spam for the next ten years, at which point I will finally get around to unsubscribing from their crap. I have so many online accounts I have lost track of them, digitally littering my presence all across the interwebs. And so many websites are convinced they need to be Fort Knox. If you are my bank, I want you to zealously guard my account. Require a strong password, require a password reset if my password shows up in a data breach (PSA, don't reuse passwords).

But the accounts with the most stringent security controls are not the ones that actually matter. Dear goodreads, please do not be such a pain in the ass. If I want to use a lazy password for a website that does not even have my credit card, let me do so. My bank isn't so password paranoid (and there lies the problem)

Additionally, accounts keep getting harder to delete. If you can't cancel your account the same way you opened it, you're doing something wrong. Patreon for example, has no account deletion option in their account settings. You need this help article to figure out how to do it.

In my ignorant and uniformed opinion, it should be the law that companies must let you delete accounts just as easily and with the same methods as you can sign up for one (that goes for cable companies too).

And you're damned if you ever try to good in the world too. Make one donation to a political cause. Volunteer for one candidate you believe in. I promise, no good deed goes unpunished. Your email will be harassed for eons, and it will be passed around for ages. Yes, winning elections is important, but maybe don't pass around my email to every single member of your party running in my district to beg me for donations as if my $3 is the key to stopping fascism.

Just so we're clear: the obsession with account creation and inbox spam is not for your benefit. It is not to better inform you. It exists to enrich corporations. They have data showing these tactics boost revenue. Hillary Clinton's 2016 email fundraising director, Amanda Litman, (who overall I quite like) admitted how this works. Why do corporations send so many emails? Because they tested it and it works.

In summary, the internet is a beautiful thing, but to get to it one must wade through the swamp of ever more obnoxious and ever present advertising, on the pages you visit, and in your inbox afterward. It has been made so my by #1 professional enemy: marketing people.

This is the first step in fighting back.

How is it that all these years later, homework still feels like this?

Once upon a time, America was the global champion of passenger rail. In school, we learned about the creation of the transcontinental railroad, which connected our enormous country from east to west. When it comes to trains (and many other things) America has fallen from grace.

Let's take a case study: The Pacific Surfliner

(Regrettably, the above is not a GIF of the Pacific Surfliner)

The Pacific Surfliner runs on the LOSSAN corridor and connects Southern California coastal cities. It connects Los Angeles (America's second biggest city) and San Diego (America's 8th biggest city), and extends as far as San Luis Obispo. It is currently (although at this rate, will not remain) Amtrak's second busiest passenger rail corridor (the first being the northeast corridor, which connects the east coast metropolises, including NYC).

The LOSSAN corridor is the name of the rail corridor, and although Amtrak runs trains, they are not the only game in town. Passenger service is also provided by local transit agencies and freight still is transported on those tracks by private companies. The rails themselves are largely owned by Union Pacific and BSNF. This makes coordinating to make changes to the rails challenging, particularly because private rail companies in the U.S. are notorious for being stubbornly short-sighted.

This is a problem because the Lossan Corridor is in a precarious spot. Much of it in Southern Orange County and Northern San Diego County is on cliff bluffs, subject to debris falling on the tracks and coastal erosion of the terrain supporting the tracks themselves. It's a time bomb. And it already went off.

On September 30, 2022, passenger rail along portions of the LOSSAN corridor between SD and LA were suspended to make emergency track repairs and do coastal stabilization work. The repairs took much longer than expected and full service resumed April 17, 2023.

Ten days later (April 27) yet another landslide closed down sections of the track. The subsequent train cancellations forced me to change my travel plans and take a very expensive raideshare even though I had already bought my rail ticket. And people wonder why Americans don't often take public transit.

Which brings us to today. The Pacific Surfliner has, once again, suspended direct rail service between San Diego and Los Angeles. Passengers needing to travel between LA and San Diego can ride the rails, get off the rails, get on an Amtrak bus, get off the bus, and get on the rails again to their destination.

If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, the current operations of the Pacific Surfliner is insanity. The pattern repeats. Landslides in South Orange county force a suspension of rail service between Oceanside and Irvine, severing a key transit corridor for both people and goods. We clean up the area and open up the tracks, only for another environmental issue to suspend service again. Repeat ad nauseam.

By my estimate, out of the last 8 months (October 2022 through May 2023) the surfliner has had full service for just 15 days (April 27 - 26 and May 27 - 31). Half a month out of eight months is 6.25%, and the tracks are just closing again today, who knows for how long.

Here's what we can do to fix it.

Move the tracks away from the coast where it is so dangerous. Local NIMBYS in Orange County will complain that the construction will give their dog insomnia or that living closer to a rail line will expose them to 5G radiation or something like that. They need to be ignored. We cannot allow a few rich people to block societal progress for the rest of us, particularity if we truly believe in the ideals of economic mobility (think about the dichotomy of who chooses to ride transit and who relies on it) and reducing our climate impact.

Build California High Speed Rail. Make it fast, make it shiny, and extend it all the way to San Diego, on dedicated right of way that does not require the cooperation of selfish corporations.

At the same time, an obstructionist, anti transit, anti investment party holds the house of representatives at the federal level, California faces a historic budget defect, and myriad local transit agencies are facing a fiscal cliff (BART being in especially perilous circumstances), competing for already limited transit dollars.

Here's a small clarification.

I'm not your lawyer. I'm not anyone's lawyer. My username on this website is aspirational. I like to ride bikes, and I will one day be a lawyer.

Regardless, do not get your legal advice from strangers on the internet. Even if I was a lawyer, reading this blog would not constitute an attorney client relationship.