Tipping Culture, Trump Sued, & Tasmanian Tigers Come Back
October 22, 2024
Hello, readers – happy Tuesday! Today, we’ll be talking about tipping, BRICS, Moldova elections, diplomacy, a lawsuit, a Supreme Court decision, and bringing animals back from extinction.
Here’s some good news: A 5-year-old bull terrier who was found tied up during Hurricane Milton and rescued by local police reunited with the trooper who saved him during a (very cute) recent visit. Also, the new hearing aid features for the AirPods Pro 2 will launch next week with iOS 18.1.
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
A Tipping Point For Tipping Culture?
Tipping, according to lots of people, is getting out of control. With those iPad cash registers, more and more places are asking for tips, which many consumers are not happy with. But on the other side of that coin, many tipped workers are forced to deal with inconsistent incomes. The federal minimum wage for workers who earn tips has sat at just $2.13 per hour since 1991, while the minimum wage for non-tipped workers sits at $7.25. Businesses are technically supposed to make up the difference between those wage levels when tipped workers make less than $7.25, but they often conveniently forget to do so – between 2010 and 2019, U.S. Labor Department investigations have found that businesses owed tipped workers $113.9 million in back wages.
Now, Arizona and Massachusetts are looking to shift the tipped-worker paradigm by bringing their wages closer to the federal minimum. In Arizona, tipped workers are paid $3 below the minimum wage (which changes based on inflation), but the new measure would see them receive 75% of the state minimum as long as their pay with tips is $2 above that tipped worker minimum. In Massachusetts, tipped workers’ wages would increase by set increments until they match the minimum wage in January 2029.
Building A BRICS Bridge
Russia is hosting BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – at a summit this week, as the group of growing economies look to consolidate their power. In total, those countries are home to 50% of humanity and create over 35% of global economic output. This year, their summit will also be attended by Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.
“This summit is about Putin punching back,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, adding that Putin wants to claim that his country’s war with Ukraine is “the spearhead of destroying the old world order and helping to build a new one,” and that “BRICs is the most potent and representative structure of this new world order.”
While talks surrounding a shared BRICS currency fell through at last year’s summit (Putin did not attend), this year the countries are focusing on a more achievable goal – the establishment of a BRICS payment system (to be named BRICS Bridge) to help the allies trade with each other more easily in the face of Western sanctions. That would be especially useful right now for Russia, which has to find increasingly opaque ways to keep money flowing into its borders.
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Moldova Goes For Membership
- Moldovans have decided – by the narrowest of margins – to enshrine their country’s bid to join the E.U. into their constitution. With 99% of ballots counted on Monday, 50.4% of voters supported a referendum to set the country on a path to E.U. membership, pulling the former Soviet country out of Russia’s orbit and towards Brussels. In the same election, President Maia Sandu failed to secure a second term in office and will have to participate in a second round of voting on November 3.
- On Sunday night, when it looked like the E.U. membership referendum was going to fail, Sandu made a speech accusing foreign powers of “using the most disgraceful means to keep our nation trapped in uncertainty and instability.” Her claims mirror investigations by CNN showing that exiled Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor was attempting to pay voters to vote against the referendum. She added that Moldovan authorities have “clear evidence that these criminal groups aimed to buy 300,000 votes – a fraud of unprecedented scale.”
I-C We’re Friends Again
- Ahead of the BRICS summit, China and India reached an agreement to resolve some differences on their shared border. Since 2020, the two countries have had a strained relationship after 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers were killed in a clash on their shared border deep in the western Himalayas. Following that clash, both sides stopped patrolling the remote section of their borders to avoid an all-out conflict, but also shifted troops and equipment to the area in case another flare-up occurred.
- It looks like Beijing and New Delhi didn’t want things to be awkward when they met in person at the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan, though, so they patched things up the day before the meeting. Now, India and China will patrol different points along the border on a set schedule to avoid conflict. Well, they can at least pretend to be friends now.
More Mixed Nuts
- Fethullah Gulen, Turkish cleric once blamed for failed coup attempt, dies at 83 (CNN)
- South Korea summons Russian envoy to protest North Korea troop dispatch (Reuters)
- New President Subianto swears in Indonesia’s largest Cabinet since 1966, with 109 members (AP)
- Yulia Navalnaya: After Putin, I’ll run to be Russia’s president (Politico)
Middle East Mixed Nuts
- Scoop: Israel gave the White House its demands for ending the war in Lebanon (Axios)
- Lebanon assesses the damage after Israel strikes Hezbollah-linked banks (NPR)
- Hospitals under fire as Israeli forces deepen operations in northern Gaza (Reuters)
- Network of Israeli citizens arrested after spying for Iran, police say (Guardian)
The Plaintiffs Five
- The five people called the Central Park Five (who now call themselves the Exonerated Five) have filed a lawsuit against former President Trump. The group is accusing Trump of defamation after comments he made in the September 10 debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
- Trump said of the Exonerated Five, “They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.” The complaint said Trump’s statements are “demonstrably false.”
SCOTUS Saves Some Jobs
- Yesterday, the Supreme Court left in place a decision from almost a century ago that declared that presidents cannot fire members of a multi-member independent agency, except in cases of bad behavior. That’s likely to be a bit comforting for those concerned about the upcoming presidential election.
- The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is a multi-member commission that is designed to protect the public from injuries and deaths caused by consumer products, and the Consumers’ Research is an organization that…well, researches consumer products. The latter sued after the CPSC denied a set of their Freedom of Information Act requests and argued that CPSC’s insulation from presidential supervision is unconstitutional.
More Nuts In America
- Jury selection begins for trial of man charged in NYC subway chokehold death (AP)
- McDonald’s didn’t give Trump permission to serve fries. It didn’t need to (CNN)
- 2 Navy aviators are declared dead after a fighter jet crashed in Washington state (ABC)
- House panel finds Trump assassination event “preventable” in interim report (CBS)
- How an off-duty lifeguard found a missing 17-year-old in the ocean (CNN)
Some Grrrrreat News
- Baggy jeans and flip phones are back in, and so are… Tasmanian tigers? According to biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, researchers have reconstructed 99.9% of the extinct Tasmanian tiger’s (or thylacine) genome, with just 45 genetic sequencing gaps left. That means the company is “getting closer every day to being able to place the thylacine back into the ecosystem,” according to Andrew Pask, a member of Colossal’s Scientific Advisory Board.
- “We are really pushing forward the frontier of de-extinction technologies,” said Pask, “from innovative ways of finding the regions of the genome driving evolution to novel methods to determine gene function. We are in the best place ever to rebuild this species using the most thorough genome resources and the best informed experiments to determine function.”
- Their research has been boosted by leveraging a complete, skinned Tasmanian tiger head which is preserved in ethanol. They’ve used the key genetic information from that head and other sources to edit the genes of a small marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart, which is the thylacine’s closest living relative. The last thylacine died in a zoo in Tasmania in 1936, but maybe the species will be back before its 100-year extinction anniversary?
More Loose Nuts
- Tiger Woods’ new tech golf league brings big screens to the green in January (The Verge)
- Becky Sauerbrunn and over 100 women’s soccer players protest FIFA deal with Saudi oil giant Aramco (AP)
- ‘Blade Runner 2049’ Producers Sue Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery, Alleging Copyright Infringement (Variety)
- Cooper Hefner Plots $100M Playboy Acquisition (Exclusive) (Hollywood Reporter)
- Throne’s toilet camera takes pictures of your poop (TechCrunch)
