The whole of football needs to sort out its wages situation, no other industry in the world can survive with such a high percentage of their outgoings going on pay. If all the teams slashed the pay of players to more realistic levels what would happen? The players strike OK replace them with people who will play for the money offered. I suspect even the most diehard fan would have little sympathy for these overpaid pampered leeches of their hard earned cash. If less money was paid to the players then more money could actually be spent on the clubs and we wouldn’t have the pathetic situation of clubs starting the season x number of points behind everyone else as a punishment for getting into financial difficulties. During the 2007/08 season the wages bill of the premiership alone broke the £1 Billion mark, that is 1.48 Trillion Dollars which is higher than the GDP of most countries and that was just 20 clubs. When you have wage bills of this level is it any wonder you end up with players having no connection with the fans anymore, for some the honour of playing for their country just seems to be an extra bonus to the bank balance. I don’t know about you but I think the level of pay to people that don’t actually produce anything is obscene. When you hear of the big 4 clubs setting unofficial pay limits of £100,000 a WEEK it is beyond a joke. In the NFL they have a wage cap and any team found breaching it can be heavily fined or even lose their franchise, in 2008 the cap was just over £78 million pounds per team and look how many players there are in a NFL team. So next time you hand over your hard earned cash to watch a football match just think how much of that ticket price is caused by the greed of these pampered performers who are there to entertain you, not you being there to pay their wages. If only we could remind some of the players of this then maybe they wouldn’t appear to hold the fans in such contempt.
‘Britain’s sexiest teacher’ to be disciplined over lingerie photos
Posted by: vladd, in Current Affairs, Education, Mediahttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7974446.stm
Now this woman won a competition on national television and was voted Britains sexiest teacher, which I feel is far tackier than her having a career on the side as a model. Lets be honest here, these pictures are nothing special, they are not pornographic, they don’t involve pupils, they have no effect on her teaching abilities, in fact given she is a PE teacher it could be argued they show the benefits of exercise on the body 
. I find it sad not that a parent felt the need to complain, but they felt the need to complain anonymously. How do we know it was a parent who complained?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7965058.stm
Now this joke, not that funny, is just a play on words it probably dates back to the days of Ghandi. Is it racist? Was the reaction of A Mr Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadhan Foundation – an organisation which exists to enhance a better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West -over the top? He even managed to puff himself into such a rage that he accused Sir David of being out of touch with reality in portraying Pakistanis as cloakroom attendants.
‘He should have known better,’ he said. ‘Many top jobs in this country are held by British Muslims. He needs to be careful about what he says. He need to learn about the wealth of jobs held by Muslims.’
Now did anyone mention muslims? did anyone complain to the radio station? No. Was this an example of people trying to make news out of a regretable lack of judgement? More than likely.
The Great House Husbands Lie:
Posted by: vladd, in UncategorizedThe great house husbands lie: Men go mad if they don’t go out to work, one mother insists
By Sandra Parsons
19th February 2009
Not since he let slip that he had slept with ‘no more than 30′ women has Nick ‘Calamity’ Clegg made quite such a silly remark.
In an article published this week, the Liberal Democrat leader has suggested that the recession offers men a chance to reinvent themselves.
With breathtaking stupidity, he has compared it to World War II in terms of the opportunity offered: just as women then discovered the heady power of independence and earning money, men now, he says, should seize redundancy with a merry heart and become house husbands.
As a househusband myself I find this woman’s drivel insulting. I took voluntary redundancy almost a year ago, and now my wife works earning twice as much as I did. So for me to stay at home makes economic sense, I don’t feel emasculated by this fact, in fact I always said that the one who earnt more should work while the other one looked after the kids. To clump househusbands in with the sort of woman who hires a nanny to look after the kids while she goes shopping and plays tennis is just a further insult. She seems to be saying the only people fit to stay at home and bring up children are women, and I thought we were past such sexist rubbish. I enjoy the time I spend with my children and quite a few men have said to me they wish they could have done the same, I find that it is mainly women that make snide or sarcastic comments when they discover what I do. Lets be honest here given the choice between men who stay at home and raise children, and a non job like a journalist, who would society miss more if we weren’t there?
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Why do Home Secretaries turn into such monsters?
Posted by: vladd, in UncategorizedThis power grab is made possible because the people are frightened
Monday, 3 November 2008
After the defeat in the Lords over 42 days, my anxiety is that Jacqui Smith will push through other draconian laws to prove she is undefeated by namby-pamby, bleeding-heart softies. She already tried to push secret inquests under the command of a special appointee (not an independent coroner), keeping out family members and lawyers. That Stalinist idea went the way of 42 days.
But it ain’t over. ID cards are coming; Smith’s "emergency bill" is worse than anything passed to contain IRA violence. Her proposed national database will hold information on all Britons and residents including their mobile phone calls, texts and internet communication.
Simpletons believe this is only intended to control bad Muslims. Let them remember how fast Gordon Brown used the anti-terrorist legislation against Iceland after the collapse of banks in that country, and that today perfectly legitimate protests are almost impossible in Parliament Square, a right our nationals wrested for themselves through centuries. Smith has even done a Sarah Palin, accusing opponents in parliament of taking national security "lightly".
Methinks there is a ghostly vampire in our Home Office. It swishes in when a freshly appointed Home Secretary arrives bringing milk-and-honey ideals and sincere public service promises. The fiend sinks its teeth into the incumbent and the smiles on the minister freeze. First comes terror, then all too soon the new boss becomes an agent of horror.
Jacqui Smith is the latest in a long line of the hard-bitten. As Simon Jenkins asked last week: "Is Jacqui Smith a pocket dictator? Is there no drop of liberalism in her veins, no concept of personal freedom, no fear of the repressive state? Or is she just another Home Secretary?" Yes, No, No, No and Yes have to be the answers to these questions. And a woman too, the first ever.
While male political hacks can’t keep their eyes off her cleavage, many female commentators wonder what happened to her heart. Now all Home Secretaries and their junior ministers turn hard. Some, like Michael Howard, start off that way and get more cold-blooded in office. His nemesis Ann Widdecombe said that Howard had "something of the night" about him. So did she, once she entered the Home Office.
The exceptions were the uniquely humane and liberal Roy Jenkins and possibly jolly Willy Whitelaw, who retained some decent values. Look at the others – in particular the New Labour bunch – and you get the shivers. Jack Straw was a good man and he did good things for a while. He believed in more effective legislation to ensure equality for those discriminated against, and delivered. He set up the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, brought in the Human Rights Act, changed the culture of the Home Office.
I was in an advisory group invited by Straw to improve legislation. At long last we had someone fair and just in charge of this difficult department. Then, he became a reactionary, outdoing Howard on immigration and asylum.
David Blunkett wanted to be a liberal – to grant amnesty to economic migrants, reform the police, better protect gay Britons and victims of violence. But it took him no time to become a lock-’em-up bully. John Reid was a thug when he got the job and merely got more scarily thuggish. Charles Clarke, who now appears so reasonable and thoughtful, wanted 90 days – 90! – without trial, restrictions on free assembly, and control orders, sometimes necessary, but not when used indiscriminately.
This power grab is made possible because the people are frightened. Home Secretaries, the police and security services all use fear to make us compliant so we surrender what we should not. As the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald says: "Freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state."
But hark now. Smith appears to be finding remnants of honour within herself. She has ordered the Attorney General to look into the allegations of torture made by an inmate in Guantanamo Bay. Binyam Mohammed, a British resident, claims he was tortured by an M15 officer as well as by US, Arab, Afghan and Pakistani interrogators. Charges against the prisoner have been dropped by the Americans but they will not free him – some suspect because they do not want to release the evidence of sanctioned brutality used to get information.
David Miliband wants to collude with the US to keep these secrets; Smith cannot. Astonishing. I am still not sure it isn’t a wishful dream. Dracula’s sting is not fatal after all. Does this mean that Smith will no longer champion illiberal, draconian laws to contain the citizenry? Let’s hope so – and pray for the recovering authoritarian.
Big Brother database threatens to ‘break the back of freedom’
Posted by: vladd, in Uncategorized
By Robert Verkaik, law editor
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Government plans to build a giant database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit were last night dealt a major blow after the man in charge of prosecuting terrorism in England and Wales warned of the dangers posed by a "Big Brother" security state.
Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), told ministers not to "break the back of freedom" by creating irreversible powers that could be misused to spy on individual citizens and so threaten Britain’s hard-won democracy.
Sir Ken’s intervention in the debate over the controversial new database is the latest and most serious among a growing number of senior public figures from across the political spectrum who have raised concerns about the potential misuse of information collected in the name of national security.
Last week, Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, the Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism laws, described the "raw idea" for handing over millions of pieces of private information to the state as "awful".
Under the proposal, internet service providers and telecoms companies would surrender phone and internet records to the Home Office, which would store them for at least 12 months so that police and security services could access them.
But Sir Ken, giving the Crown Prosecution Service lecture in London, said: "We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state.
"Technology gives the state enormous powers of access to knowledge and information about each of us, and the ability to collect and store it at will. Of course, modern technology is of critical importance to the struggle against serious crime. Used wisely, it can protect us."
But he added that "we need to understand that it is in the nature of state power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible. They will be with us forever. And they, in turn, will be built upon. So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear".
Sir Ken, who steps down as DPP next month, also described how in 2004 he had resisted pressure from Tony Blair to make it easier to prosecute terrorism suspects by lowering the standard of proof in such cases.
He said: "In all the debates that have raged back and forth, Britain has been absolutely right to hold fast to this course. We would do well not to insult ourselves and all of our institutions and our processes of law in the face of these medieval delusions. As I say, the response to terror is multi-layered. But it should not include surrender."
His concerns are shared by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, who has said that the creation of the database is a "step too far" for the British way of life. Liberty, the human rights group, has also called for a halt to the plans. Gareth Crossman, the policy director at Liberty, said: "There are huge dangers in the central collection of vast amounts of intimate information about everyone. The bigger the data haul, the greater the temptation to treat innocent habits as suspicious behaviour."
Ken Macdonald: We must not degrade our liberties in the name of defending them
Posted by: vladd, in Uncategorized
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state.
We need to understand that it is in the nature of state power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible. They will be with us forever. And they in turn will be built upon. We should imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear.
Of course our country faces very significant risks. And I have enormous admiration for all those who work with such energy and verve to combat those risks. The prosecutors in my Counter Terrorism Division have similarly distinguished themselves. Their efforts have been absolutely grounded in due process and pursued with full respect for our historical norms and for our liberal constitution.
This has worked. Our conviction rate is in excess of 90 per cent – unmatched in the fair trial world. We have a guilty plea rate of over 40 per cent. So we have been absolutely right to resist special courts, vetted judges and all the other paraphernalia of paranoia.
Of course, you can have the Guantanamo model. You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats. Or you can say, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions, not degrade them.
It is difficult to see who will maintain a cool head if governments do not. Or who will protect our constitution if governments unwittingly disarm it.
The response to terror is, of course, multi-layered. It has to be that way. But on the streets of our country, violent lawbreaking is dealt with as crime. It is confronted in accordance with our constitution.
In all the debates, Britain has been absolutely right to hold fast to this course. We would do well not to insult ourselves and our processes of law in the face of these medieval delusions.
As I say, the response to terror is multi-layered. But it should not include surrender.
Sir Ken Macdonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, was giving the inaugural CPS lecture last night
Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones
Posted by: vladd, in UncategorizedFrom The Sunday Times
October 19, 2008
David Leppard
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.
Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.
A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.
The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.
The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.
The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.
The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.
Contingency planning for such a move is already thought to be under way at Vodafone, where 72% of its 18.5m UK customers use pay-as-you-go.
The office of Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said it anticipated that a compulsory mobile phone register would be unveiled as part of a law which ministers would announce next year.
“With regards to the database that would contain details of all mobile users, including pay-as-you-go, we would expect that this information would be included in the database proposed in the draft Communications Data Bill,” a spokeswoman said.
Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said he understood that several mobile phone firms had discussed the proposed database in talks with government officials.
As The Sunday Times revealed earlier this month, GCHQ has already been provided with up to £1 billion to work on the pilot stage of the Big Brother database, which will see thousands of “black boxes” installed on communications lines provided by Vodafone and BT as part of a pilot interception programme.
The proposals have sparked a fierce backlash inside Whitehall. Senior officials in the Home Office have privately warned that the database scheme is impractical, disproportionate and potentially unlawful. The revolt last week forced Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, to delay announcing plans for the database until next year.
Why Tip?
Posted by: vladd, in UncategorizedBy PAUL WACHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12tipping-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Published: October 9, 2008
ONE DAY IN November 2006, Jay Porter, the owner of a small restaurant in San Diego called the Linkery, scheduled a staff meeting. Less than two years old, the casual farm-to-table restaurant in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of North Park had already won praise from national magazines. Nonetheless, Porter was troubled. The staff was squabbling, mainly over money: waiters were angling for better shifts and tables, and the kitchen workers didn’t feel they were getting a fair share of the profits. The bickering was typical of the restaurant business, but Porter, who is 38, had no previous industry experience. He had been a computer consultant, one who made good money but derived few other satisfactions from his job.
When he opened the Linkery, Porter said, he hoped his employees would become as emotionally invested in the venture as he was, sharing a sense of purpose and joy in their work. Now that vision seemed hopelessly naïve. “Here I was, winging it as an owner, running into these frustrations, which all boiled down to money,” Porter told me this summer. “I felt there had to be a better way.” After much thought, Porter arrived at a possible solution, which he presented to his staff on that November afternoon. “How do you feel about eliminating tipping?” he asked them.
Porter’s question strikes at the very heart of the American dining experience. Each year, according to the economist Ofer Azar, diners hand over some $42 billion in tips at the nation’s full-service restaurants, which employ 2.6 million waiters, most of whom rely on tips for the bulk of their incomes. While anxieties surrounding tipping abound — Is 15 percent enough? 20? And who is this “captain” on the bill? — studies show that Americans overwhelmingly prefer this discretionary system to a set service charge, which is common in Europe and many other parts of the world. Indeed, at the few restaurants in this country that have adopted a fixed gratuity, diners often leave additional tips.
Tipping, its defenders say, improves service by rewarding good waiters and punishing bad ones. But that’s not what Porter saw when he looked out on his dining floor. In his brief experience, working for tips encouraged selfishness rather than teamwork. Moreover, good service was not always rewarded with a big tip, nor bad service with a poor one. “No other profession works like this,” Porter told me, “and I don’t see why the restaurant business should either.” At his restaurant, Porter and his staff agreed, it no longer would. The Linkery would be more than just a restaurant; it would become perhaps the nation’s only anti-tipping laboratory.
THERE WAS A time, not so long ago in this country, when the Linkery’s no-tipping policy would not have stood out. Tipping was imported from Europe, and when it arrived in America, it met with impassioned and organized opposition. While the precise origin of tipping is uncertain, it is commonly traced to Tudor England, according to “Tipping,” Kerry Segrave’s history of the custom. By the 17th century, it was expected that overnight guests to private homes would provide sums of money, known as vails, to the host’s servants. Soon after, customers began tipping in London coffeehouses and other commercial establishments. One frequented by Samuel Johnson had a bowl printed with the words “To Insure Promptitude,” and some speculate that “tip” is an acronym for this phrase.
Tipping began as an aristocratic practice, a sprinkle of change for social inferiors, and it quickly spread among the upper classes of Europe. Yet even at its outset, tipping engendered feelings of anxiety and resentment. In the mid-1800s, after leaving the Bell Inn of Gloucester, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle complained: “The dirty scrub of a waiter grumbled about his allowance, which I reckoned liberal. I added sixpence to it, and [he] produced a bow which I was near rewarding with a kick.”
After the Civil War, wealthy Americans began traveling to Europe in significant numbers, and they brought the tip home with them to demonstrate their worldliness. But the United States, unlike Europe, had no aristocratic tradition, and as tipping spread — like “evil insects and weeds,” The New York Times claimed in 1897 — many thought it was antithetical to American democratic ideals. “Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape,” William Scott wrote in his 1916 anti-tipping screed, “The Itching Palm.” One periodical of the same era deplored tipping for creating a class of workers who relied on “fawning for favors.”
Opposition to tipping was not limited to the media. In 1904, the Anti-Tipping Society of America sprang up in Georgia, and its 100,000 members signed pledges not to tip anyone for a year. Leagues of traveling salesmen opposed the tip, as did most labor unions. In 1909, Washington became the first of six states to pass an anti-tipping law. But tipping persisted. The new laws rarely were enforced, and when they were, they did not hold up in court. By 1926, every anti-tipping law had been repealed.
Ultimately, even those who in principle opposed the practice found themselves unable to stiff their servers. Samuel Gompers, who was president of the American Federation of Labor and a leading figure of the anti-tipping movement, admitted that he “followed the usual custom of giving tips.”
Meanwhile, Europe was rethinking its devotion to the custom. The 1943 Catering Wages Act in Britain established a minimum wage for service employees that helped decrease their reliance on tips. And in 1955, France passed a law requiring its restaurants to add a service charge (“service compris”) to each bill, a practice that has become the norm for most of the continent. By then, the anti-tipping movement had all but vanished in the United States. Its last great champion, the social scientist Leo Crespi, died in July of this year. Sixty years earlier, Crespi published a scholarly study of tipping and called for the formation of a National Anti-Tipping League of diners. But the call went unanswered — even by Crespi, who never dined out.
WORD OF THE Linkery’s anti-tipping policy quickly spread through the local restaurant community. Ken Cassinelli, who owns a nearby Italian restaurant, was appalled. It had taken him 30 years of waiting on tables to set aside enough money to open Apertivo. Tips built his restaurant. “The Linkery is a big sham,” he told me. “All Porter is doing is taking money away from his waiters.”
Notwithstanding the vitriol, Cassinelli may have a point.
Typically, waiters receive an hourly wage — as little as $2.13 in some states, though California law mandates at least $8 — plus tips, some of which they may pass on, or “tip out,” to their support staff. The laws of California and several other states prohibit redirecting tips to restaurant workers who traditionally don’t receive them — owners, managers and members of the kitchen staff. (Earlier this year, a California judge ordered Starbucks to pay its baristas $105 million for tips the company diverted to supervisors.) But a service charge is free of such constraints. It’s also fully taxed, while waiters, on average, fail to report what the I.R.S. says is at least 40 percent of their tips.
Porter considered raising the prices of each item on the menu and simply increasing the wages of his employees. But that would have penalized the restaurant’s many takeout diners. Also, he figured many potential diners would look at the prices and — not factoring in what they spend on tips — compare them unfavorably with those of his competitors. So Porter instead proposed a service fee of 18 percent, to be pooled and split roughly 3 to 1 between the restaurant’s front of the house and its kitchen. In his pitch to his staff, he employed the same arguments Alice Waters had nearly two decades before. The owner of arguably the nation’s most celebrated restaurant — Chez Panisse in Berkeley — Waters wrote her board: “At our restaurant the quality of the food and the skill and taste of the cooks are at least as central to our success as the quality of the service. Unfortunately, traditional tipping has created great disparities in earning between the serving staff and the cooking and support staff.” By introducing a service charge — currently 17 percent — Waters was able to increase income to the kitchen.
A few other high-end restaurants have followed Waters’s example, including Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, the French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in Manhattan (the latter two are owned by Thomas Keller). None of these restaurants, however, including Waters’s, forbid additional tips. “Some people still tip, and the waiters get to keep that money,” said Mike Kossa-Rienzi, general manager of Chez Panisse.
But Porter, like the anti-tippers of yore, was persuaded tipping itself was pernicious. “If you have a fixed gratuity, but people are still tipping, then you’re back to Square 1 in terms of the money dynamic,” he says.
If he could, he would have raised everyone’s wages, but there wasn’t enough revenue. The restaurant was already paying 65 percent of its employees’ health-insurance premiums, and Porter was working on a scheme to give long-term employees ownership stakes in the business. Still, he worried that his staff might not be receptive to his proposal. Michael McGuan, Porter’s general manager, expected at least half of the restaurant’s eight servers to quit. But only one did, and Porter has had little trouble hiring additional waiters. Cassinelli says that’s because most of them, like their boss, have little restaurant experience. While that’s true of a few of Porter’s hires, most of the Linkery’s servers have waited on tables for years. They have simply drawn different lessons from their experiences.
Cassinelli prided himself on earning big tips. “I could always upsell my tables’ liquor and desserts,” he said, using the industry term for swaying diners to order more than they normally would, driving up the bill and hence the tip. There are other tricks at waiters’ disposal. Studies demonstrate that waiters can increase their tips by introducing themselves by name, squatting alongside tables, touching diners and drawing smiley faces on the backs of checks. While Cassinelli isn’t necessarily an advocate of such ploys, he says that waiters only excel at their jobs when they have the proper economic incentives.
But Chelsea Boyd told me that eliminating tipping had made her work as a waiter at the Linkery more meaningful than any other restaurant job she has had in the previous 10 years. “For the first time, I get to concentrate on the job, and I’m looking at the guests without seeing dollar signs or worried about what anyone else is making,” she says. Under the old system, waiters earned between $25 and $35 an hour, much of which was untaxed. “Now, waiters make about $25 an hour, which is fully taxed,” Boyd says.
Renee Lorion, a former waitress at the Linkery who now works in publishing in New York, liked the new anti-tipping policy too. “As servers, we all took a pay cut, but we knew it was for the general health of the restaurant,” she told me. “What made it work is that Jay was very transparent about the restaurant’s finances.”
Obviously, the kitchen appreciates the new policy. “Earning three or four extra bucks an hour makes a difference,” Matthew Somerville, a cook, says. “In most restaurants, there’s not a close relationship between the front and the kitchen. But here you don’t have that tension, where waiters are trying to accommodate customers’ special requests, while the cooks doing the extra work don’t see any of the tips.”
Today, Porter’s employees appear almost as fervent in their opposition to tipping as their boss. But winning over his staff was only half the battle.
WHEN I CANVASSED restaurant owners across the country, most said that customer opposition precludes any significant move away from tipping. “I like the idea of a service charge, and I’ve thought about having one,” says Hakan Swahn, the owner of Aquavit, a restaurant in New York that serves Scandinavian cuisine and has branches in Stockholm and Tokyo. Because tipping is negligible in Sweden and frowned upon in Japan, at these outposts the cost of service is factored into the bill. But that’s not possible at his Manhattan flagship, Swahn told me. “The customers would protest.”
Eighty percent of Americans say they prefer tipping to paying a service fee, according to Zagat Survey. They do so, Leo Crespi’s surveys first demonstrated, primarily because they believe tipping provides an incentive for good service. But there is little correlation, in fact— less than 2 percent, according to Michael Lynn, a Cornell professor of consumer behavior and marketing.
Economists have struggled to explain tipping. Why tip at all, since the bill is presented at the end of a meal and can’t retroactively improve service? And certainly there’s no reason to tip at a restaurant you will never revisit. “Using a rational and selfish agent to explain tipping, one reaches the conclusion that the agent should never tip if he does not intend to visit the establishment again,” Ofer Azar, the economist, writes. “Yet this prediction is sharply violated in practice: most people tip even when they do not intend to ever come back.”
The single most important factor in determining the amount of a tip is the size of the bill. Diners generally tip the same percentage no matter the quality of the service and no matter the setting. They do so, Lynn says, largely because it’s expected and diners fear social disapproval. “It is embarrassing to have another person wait on you,” the psychologist Ernest Dichter told a magazine reporter in 1960. “The need to pay, psychologically, for the guilt involved in the unequal relationship is so strong that very few are able to ignore it.” Ego needs also play a part, especially when it comes to overtipping, according to the Israeli social psychologist Boas Shamir.
These psychological factors also go a long way in explaining the steady rise of the average tip in the United States from 10 percent in the early 20th century to 18.9 percent today, with little regional variation. “To overtip is to appear an ass: to undertip is to appear an even greater ass,” Benjamin Franklin reportedly noted during his stint in Paris, and his quandary continues to vex American diners.
But not at the Linkery. Porter and his staff have found that most diners accept the no-tipping policy, which is explained on the restaurant’s Web site and menu as well as upon the presentation of the check. This doesn’t surprise Lynn, who says he believes consumer preferences for tipping are not as strong as Zagat Survey suggests. In a less-cited 1987 Gallup telephone survey, only 34 percent of American respondents said a 15-to-18 percent service charge was unreasonable. In Lynn’s own 2004 Internet survey, 44 percent of American respondents said they would prefer to have waiters paid higher wages instead of tips, while only 22 percent disagreed. “Given that consumers’ preferences appear to be weak and are unlikely to have strong effects on patronage behavior, they need not dictate tipping policies,” Lynn concludes.
That has already proved true at the antipodes of American dining — the fast-food restaurant and the private club — where tipping is not usually allowed. And with few objections, many full-service restaurants include service charges for groups of six or more diners. They do so because tip size is inversely proportional to the number of diners. One 1973 study at an Ohio restaurant revealed that individual diners tipped 19 percent on average, while groups of six left 13.5 percent. “[T]o the extent that many people contribute to a check, the responsibility of each to the waiter may be psychologically divided among the people present,” the researchers concluded.
Despite such precedents, every so often diners at the Linkery take offense. “I’ll go over to the table and ask if there is a problem with the service,” McGuan, the general manager, says. “If there is, then I offer to remove the service charge. Almost always, the customers’ issue isn’t about the service but about not being able to handle their loss of control.”
Porter says that he doesn’t mind losing these diners. But most restaurant owners are not as nonchalant. Last June, after the Linkery moved, its old space was taken over by the Sea Rocket Bistro, which focuses on local sustainable seafood. Management thought it would be a good idea to retain Porter’s no-tipping policy, since the restaurant was courting the same customers. But that proved difficult. “It became a strain to explain the policy to first-time customers,” Elena Rivellino, the Bistro’s general manager, says. “We had some people complain that an 18 percent gratuity was too high, and others said they’d like to tip more.”
In his one concession to big tippers, Porter offers them the option of donating money to charity. The Linkery’s charity of the month is printed on the menu, and in two years more than $10,000 has been raised for various causes. “But it’s funny what usually happens when a diner asks why they can’t tip more,” McGuan says. “We tell them we’re comfortable with what we charge for service, and they’re free to donate to our charity of the month. Most don’t.”
Rivellino said that as a new restaurant struggling to fill its tables, the Sea Rocket Bistro couldn’t afford to turn down additional revenue, especially if doing so might offend diners. The restaurant dropped its service charge in a matter of weeks.
OVER DINNER ONE night, Porter told me that he didn’t expect his war against tipping to spread beyond his restaurant. “You might be able to get rid of tipping if you raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon,” he said. We were sitting in the back garden of one of Porter’s favorite San Diego restaurants, Starlite, and I found myself nodding in agreement. Tipping had bested greater foes than Porter.
And yet Porter never tires of defending his position. “At the end of a nice meal, the last thing anyone wants to do is think about math and social mores,” he said. Again, I nodded. But at dinner’s end, when the waiter returned with my credit card, I did some quick mental arithmetic and left 20 percent.
Secret papers reveal Tony Blair’s F1 tobacco deal
Posted by: vladd, in UncategorizedFrom The Sunday Times
October 12, 2008
Jonathan Oliver and Isabel Oakeshott
Tony Blair personally ordered an exemption for motor racing from a tobacco sponsorship ban after Labour received a secret £1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss.
New documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show he demanded a change of policy after a meeting with Ecclestone on October 16, 1997, and his officials went on to obfuscate the truth.
The affair was the first sleaze scandal of the new Labour era, and Blair went on television to defend his reputation, saying he was a “pretty straight kind of guy”.
The new documents show clearly that the prime minister personally demanded a change of policy in the days that followed the meeting with Ecclestone. The following month the Department of Health announced a special exemption for F1 from a previously universal ban on tobacco sponsorship.
A Whitehall memo written on October 31, 1997, states: “The prime minister has made clear his wish to see a permanent exclusion for Formula One from the scope of the tobacco advertising ban.”
The documents also show how mandarins tried to protect Blair over the sequence of events, encouraging him to mislead MPs about what had happened.
At the height of the scandal, Tory MP John Maples put down a written parliamentary question asking when Blair informed Frank Dobson, the health secretary, of his plans to exempt F1 from the proposed ban.
A confidential briefing note to the Cabinet Office outlining possible responses to the question reveals that the true date was October 16. It reveals that Blair ordered Jonathan Powell to ring Tessa Jowell, then public health minister, to discuss the issue that evening.
However, the briefing note suggests Blair should name October 29 as the date, to be consistent with his previous public claims that the decision was not taken until two to three weeks after the crucial meeting with Ecclestone.
“The draft reply is strictly true in terms of the final decision . . . but critics could argue that the answer was disingenuous in that the prime minister’s views had been clearly conveyed by the telephone call on October 16,” the document says.
The documents also show Downing Street set out to mislead the public, via the media, about the PM’s personal role in the affair.
A briefing note for Alastair Campbell offers guidance “to dispel the notion that the F1 approach was dictated by the PM alone, after meeting Ecclestone”.
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