A Curious Little Blog

When I was growing up, swimming pools typically had a high diving board and a low diving board.  Swimming pools today only have a low diving board and a lower diving board -- lawsuits have made high dives too costly to insure .  I lived in a neighbourhood where we had a pool and a very popular waterslide.  The neighbourhood association had to increase the number of lifeguards to run the waterslide to three:  one at the top of the slide to tell kids when to go, one at the bottom, and one at the bottom of the stairs to check that kids met the minimum height restriction.  Obviously, this was expensive, because these lifeguards were unable to keep an eye on the rest of the pool while the slide was open, so there had to be at least 5 lifeguards on duty to operate the slide.  Even with all that, there was discussion every year about shutting down the slide, because it was basically uninsurable. What does this have to do with laws?  It relates to the idea, ...

Thomas Aquinas asked:  what is the point of laws?  We know bad people will ignore them, and good people won't want to do those things anyway, so what good do laws do?  His answer was that laws help in the marginal cases -- people who might do bad things, but who are deterred by laws. It is important to keep in mind that laws do not work perfectly, as Aquinas noted.  While some will change their behaviour to obey the law, others will never have wanted to do what the law forbids in the first place, and still others will continue their behaviour even if it violates a new law.  Another group of people will attempt to continue their behaviour within the bounds of the law by looking for loopholes, exceptions, and work-arounds.  That will lead to calls for more laws to close the loopholes. More laws come at a cost.  There is an administrative cost, of course, but there is an equally important civic cost:  we expect people to obey the law, and to obey...

A recent article draws attention to several high-end restaurants that have eliminated tipping, and suggests that this might become a trend.  If so, I say good riddance. I'm glad to have the restaurant increase its prices and eliminate tips.  It's not the money; it's having to figure out how much to leave.  Not the arithmatic, of course, but the psychological burden of deciding how much a person deserves for bringing me food.  The whole server-servee relationship is awkward in America , where no one wants to be a servant and all but the very wealthy feel uncomfortable being served. The practice of tipping goes back to actual servants, whom masters offered additional incentives for difficult tasks or rewards for a job well done.  Americans originally didn't like the implied master-servant relationship when tipping was introduced from Europe, and the practice was fought on several levels:  some private citizens formed an Anti-Tipping League, while a numbe...