Greg

Migrant. Language lover. Lover of cities and public transport. Reader of French mysteries. 大阪人。🇯🇵🇺🇦 Build More Homes.

[expedtadam 🏳️‍🌈 @expedtadam]

Dandenong is the most linguistically diverse suburb in Australia.

Full breakdown and more!: https://t.co/nYu0rlD4OK

[🦉Schtang 🦉🐵🙈🙉🙊 @Schtang]

@Socceroos Funny how every time Australia succeeds on the world stage, the team looks a lot like modern Australia, diverse, multicultural and built by generations of migrants. #socceroos #auspol

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

After the Civil War, American restaurants found a legal way to hire freed Black workers for almost nothing. The trick was called tipping. Six states tried to ban it. All six failed. The system it created still controls how servers get paid in 43 American states.

Tipping came from Europe, not America. Wealthy Americans started bringing the custom back from their travels in the 1880s, and early Americans hated it. By 1904, 100,000 people had signed a pledge never to tip anyone again. Between 1909 and 1915, six states passed laws making tipping a criminal offense. In South Carolina, accepting one meant jail time. William Scott's 1916 book, The Itching Palm, called it "democracy's deadly foe."

Every anti-tipping law was gone by 1926. The reason traces back to the end of the Civil War, about sixty years earlier. Restaurant and railroad employers had built their business around a simple system: hire freed Black workers, pay them next to nothing, and point to customer tips as the income instead. George Pullman ran a major national passenger rail business and started hiring formerly enslaved men as porters in 1868. He paid them $27.50 a month in 1916 while they regularly worked 400-hour months, less than a dollar a day for shifts that ran 13 hours. Tips were everything.

Congress let it stand. When the first federal minimum wage was created in 1938, restaurant workers were left out entirely. They were added in 1966, but with a built-in loophole: employers could pay servers below the standard minimum as long as customer tips covered the gap. That lower rate settled at $2.13 an hour in 1991. Congress locked it there in 1996 and has not moved it in the 30 years since.

In Japan, tipping is considered an insult. In most of Europe, servers earn full wages and menu prices reflect it. In 43 American states today, restaurants are legally required to pay only $2.13 an hour and leave the rest to whoever walks in. The standard tip has gone from 10% in the 1950s to 20% today, with most screens now suggesting 25 to 28%. The sign in this photo demands 40%. The math behind it has not changed since 1868.

[Henrik Dahl @SociologenHD]

One of the causes of political instability across Europe is rarely discussed: Class.

Take my own country, Denmark.

The entire left wing is prepared to fight tooth and nail to preserve the state grant given to university students. It is one of the most generous schemes in the world: roughly €1,000 per month, with no repayment obligation.

A student who completes a five-year degree receives around €60,000 from the state.

The interesting part is that many economic studies have found that this benefit has a regressive social profile.

In plain English: relatively poor taxpayers subsidise the education of people who are very likely to end up with above-average lifetime incomes. Money flows from the poorer part of society to the future upper-middle class.

This points to a broader problem.

Across much of Europe, the traditional workers' parties have gradually been captured by the academic middle class. As a result, they increasingly prioritise issues that matter to university graduates: climate activism, identity politics, and expansive immigration policies.

The working class often has different priorities.

When workers abandon these parties, their former leaders rarely ask whether they themselves have changed. Instead, they look elsewhere for explanations.

When one of Europe's old workers' parties loses its next election, the excuses will be familiar.

- Misinformation.

- Manipulation.

- Ignorance.

- "The algorithms".

Anything but the possibility that the party no longer represents the people it was created to represent.

Perhaps the real mystery is not why the working class is leaving.

Perhaps the real mystery is why anyone is still surprised.

[Jarrett Walker @humantransit]

Fue solo al estudiar francés y español cuando aprendí a valorar el subjuntivo. Es el marcador gramatical de la incertidumbre. Shakespeare lo utilizaba, pero en el inglés moderno se ha marchitado; por eso, todo lo que se dice en inglés suena más seguro de lo que realmente es.

[Andrew Donnellan @ajdlinux]

if Argentina proceeds with "non-human corporations", other governments should deprive Argentine corporations of legal personhood in their domestic law

[Andy Boenau @Boenau]

19% of people aged 20-24 don’t have a driver’s license.
30-40% of people over 85 don’t have a driver’s license.

Planning and designing places that force everyone to be dependent on cars is cruel.

���️ Everywhere, USA

[Greg @GregRyanOsaka]

Yes!

[Eric Alper 🎧 @ThatEricAlper]

Bright idea: Lightswitches that show what they are for.

[Carol Kirkby @CarolKirkby1]

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard.... our first female Prime Minister, has voiced her disgust! Julia was subjected to the same vile attacks "15 years ago" yes "15 years ago". I'll never forget Tony Abbott & Lib females next to the sign "DITCH THE WITCH" & "BOB BROWNS BITCH"! 🤢

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Most modern billionaires are just so tacky. Go endow a library. Fund research and get your name on a cancer center. Sponsor an eccentric polymath who’s obsessed with marble. Build a museum. Fund public parks. Back climate research. Create something that outlives your ego.

[Topher Field @TopherField]

I'm going to say this carefully because this is a tremendously serious issue and every individual circumstance must be respected regardless of what the 'averages' are.

In fact if anything its the exceptions to the 'expected' that require the most support, because they are usually met with the least understanding.

This image is how The Age have framed a new campaign to highlight female suicide as a result of domestic abuse.

I'm all in favour of raising awareness of this issue, I've seen with my own eyes women being pushed to breaking point by husbands who abused them, sometimes physically but often not, often the abuse was psychological, financial, controlling behavious, gaslighting... women can be abused in far more ways than just physical.

This issue is real and serious and im not against The Age using their reach to highlight it.

But what is ALSO real and serious is that men are 3x more likely to take their own lives on average, and a LOT of those are due to... abuse from their wives or ex wives, again often not physical (although it can be), but usually psychological, emotional, financial... and often with the use of children as leverage.

In particular there is a direct link between the weaponisation of police and family courts against fathers to remove them from their own children's lives, and male suicide.

Uncomfortable yet? I hope you are.

Because if we should care about abuse driven female suicide (and we should) then we should also care about abuse driven male suicide, and if that upsets you then perhaps you need to reflect on your double standard.

Yes abuse in one direction often looks very different to abuse in the other, but in a world where laws are being written about things like 'coercive control' within intimate relationships we can no longer ignore the weaponisation of the state and the family courts against fathers, nor can we ignore the terrible death toll that follows.

I welcome The Age raising the issue on behalf of women, we definitely need to have this conversation, be aware, be ready to support women to help them out of terrible situations, and to hold abusers accountable.

I'm 100% in agreement with all of that.

But given the statistics on suicide, I'm therefore 300% in support of extending the same care, support, and awareness to the inverse issue, especially given that the abuse of fathers is so often done with the aid of the state and on the taxpayer's dime.

But what are the chances of The Age being willing to have THAT conversation?

[Clinton @614clinton]

I forgot to post my D-Day joke yesterday, so here it is! 😂

An old veteran was looking through his bag for his passport. The woman on passport control asked him, “Have you visited France before?”

“Yes,” replied the old man.

Sarcastically she responded, “Well surely you should know to have your passport ready,” to which he answered, “I didn't have to show it last time.”

“Impossible!!” she barked.

The old man looked her straight in the eye and said, "Last time, when I landed on D-Day in 1944, I couldn't find a dadgum Frenchman to give it to.”

[Yuta Aoki @ThatYuta]

I kind of want to write a thin and conscious Japanese textbook with modern sentence examples that you can use as a quick grammar reference guide.

[Dan Fangirl 🤓 @ChristyDanFan]

Pay attention. The things we take for granted like medicines on the PBS, Pauline Hanson wants us to pay full price for those. Those medicines we take for granted that keep some of us alive.

[Craig @craig_halsall]

Best to double-check the King's Birthday guest list to avoid a big freeze 👑❄️🚍
#TransportVictoria #PTV #VictoriaBusPlan

[MelbourneOnTransit @MelbOnTransit]

Note that a Saturday timetable can mean a ~1pm finish on some bus routes. More detail here: https://t.co/JiMrmTJLPE

[Molly @mollyfleck]

You have to take 100 years to build it, though.

[Jenko @7_jenkinson]

If you've bought an investment property in the last couple of years forget about the quick kill with CGT discounts, get a good tenant, give them a long-term lease and enjoy the grandfathered negative gearing.

[Aaron Smith @aaronsmith]

Imagine paying your mortgage for a full year, then having interest applied as if you'd never paid a cent.

That's HECS today.

That's the deal we hand young Australians. It's wrong and unfair.

[Greg @GregRyanOsaka]

@nikicaga You missed Japan.