cat /proc/claus | java

The past two weeks I was in a trip to the US. It’s a bit strange going to the US as a tourist, when you have a very active online life on western websites. At the same time, nothing is really unexpected, AND you see many surprises here and there.

One of the things that caught me by surprise in the US trip was the “tipping” culture. There, you are supposed to add 15% to 20% of the value of a service as “tips” to your server. This is often paid in restaurants, taxi rides, services, et cetera. The servers, in turn, are expected to earn the larger part of their income as tips, to the point where their “official” income is reduced according to the ammount of tips they receive.

While tipping is not compulsory in paper, in practice you HAVE to do it. I had a friend being insulted by a cab driver because he didn’t tip him, and I heard a story of a guy who was kicked out of a nightclub for not tipping the waitress. My girlfriend’s friends, who were working there in their summer holidays, told me that in their restaurants the servers were reluctant to take tables where foreigners were seated, knowing that many of them didn’t know about the U.S. tipping culture.

I personally didn’t like it one bit. Tipping, in my mind, was a way to thank someone for a job well done. You would pay a little more than requested as to say “here, you deserve it”. However, as it becomes required, it loses that meaning. Actually, it becomes even worse, since you give that money you’re not theoretically “required” to give… or else.

Also, as Juliana puts it, it is a way for employers to show artifically lower prices, by skimping on the payment of their employees. They shift the struggle for higher earnings from employees expecting rises from their employers, to employees
expecting higher tips from their customers. They tried to do that in Brazil once, some years ago. Restaurants started asking a fixed 10% gratuity in their bills. People started complaining, and it was decided that this was a technique for artificially rising the stated prices, and now most don’t do this anymore, or, if they do, it is clearly stated that the “10%” is optional.

Well, all I know is that I felt ankward adding the tips every time I went out to eat anything in the US. Together with the “invisible taxes” (sales taxes are almost never added to the listed prices in the US, another (minor) gripe of mine during that trip), the real price of eating out was usually about 30% more expensive than the listed price.

This news from the Asahi shinbun, kinda blew my mind. Apparently, an year ago a girl commited Suicide in Hokkaido due to extreme bullying in school. The point, here, is that the girl was 6 years old.

Yes, it is some horrible news, yes it is shocking. Yup, that’s a pity. But this is not what I wanted to talk about.

I always had this idea that the concept of death was one that developed later in one’s mental development. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but children up to a certain age were not supposed to be able to understand the concept of death because they lacked some abstracts constructs needed for this concept.

I wish I had paid more attention to my Piaget now.

So I wonder how this 6 year old could have killed herself - maybe she was mimicking something she saw in the adult world? Maybe I’m wrong about the age when the concept of death develops?

Any insights?

Ah, BTW, sorry, but the news link above is only in japanese. I tried googling for an english link without success.

Recently my mother posted about hurting people without noticing. This week, I did just that thing. An action that I thought would be a minor offence became the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

Whee. Way to start the week.

After the rain was gone, even the summerclouds had left that hot afternoon. Something was amiss. But in such a bright, fine day, you cannot be disturbed by such such small things.

Nature has small treasures that for a while can seem like the biggest thing in the whole world. It is strange to feel, though, that after the rain is gone, it can wash away even pleasant clouds in the distant horizon.

Every friday, I have these classes where the teacher grabs many newspaper articles about different subjects, and then comment on them. Yesterday he was reading one that mentioned that Japan is the country with the highest percentage of people over 65 years in its population, and also the country with the lowest percentage of people under 15 years.

Then he noticed that in both “Top 5″ tables were also Germany and Italy. His commentary was inevitable “the countries that lost the war”.

Now, a very interesting discussion could follow about wether the two facts are connected or not, and to what degree. But that wasn’t what came to my mind at the moment.

If you stay for any length of time in Japan, you’ll come across people who use the “japan is the country that lost the war” as an excuse to a series of things, positive, negative or trivial. For these people, “Country which lost the war” is sometimes admitted with a kind of “damn we were caught” shame, or with a grim pride, but nonetheless consideret to be part of their japanese identity, as if the second world war was something which affected them as directly as it affected Togo (the effective chief of state of japan during WWII). And thus, something that has influence in almost all aspects of contemporary Japan.

On the other hand, it seems to be exactly the opposite in current Germany. Althought I hadn’t experienced it first hand, it seems to be common knowledge that the easiest way to anger a german is to draw lines between german and nazis, or between germany and the third Reich. Nazi propaganda and denial of the holocaust are censored and outlawed there (iirc). In short, is as if the germans want to put a stone over their past, and say to all the world that current germany and WWII germany are two absolutely different countries, which happen to share nothing but their geographical location. (This is the image that I have).

Now, a very interesting discussion could follow about these two instances, why the two countries have such different attitudes toward their past, and which one is more appropriate (if either). But that’s not where my thought flowed to next.

What about Italy? I mean, whenever I think about second world war’s axis powers, Germany or Japan spring immediately to mind, with mussolini coming as a distant third. And while the first two countries have obvious past issues, does Italy have any WWII axis power issues? I can’t remember hearing of any, and in fact the reverse link Italy -> WWII Axis seems unlikely to come up spontaneously. Why is it so?

I tried looking a little into wikipedia, but besides lots of US and USSR bashing, couldn’t find much. Interesting. I wonder if someone raised in the EU would have a different point of view.