Why? Isn't 240 zwei hundret vierzig?

Not trying to be difficult... from what little I remember of my 2 years of college German, zwei und vierzig is 42.

I don't think that changes the expectations on the waitstaff side, or the sense of obligation on the tippers' side.

The mountain that needs to be climbed here is about narrative/social norms, not real economics.

Unfortunately I think that bigger than shifting social norms will be shifting customer price expectations. If you kill tipping, expect wages to go up, even in CA, as staff expect (and perhaps legitimately require) a certain level of income, regardless of origin.

It's a little like subsidized gas. The US has been underpaying for gas for so long that I've got no idea what political martyr would try to put that cat in the bag. When a market distortion lasts so long it becomes part of the social fabric, it's real hard to just kill off.

I'd love to hear about times countries have been able to pull this off at scale.

I haven't read of a public transit system where the fares covered the costs of building and operating it. I have read that MTA (NYC), BART(SF), Amtrak, NJTransit, and other US ones definitely are in the red year after year.

It's probably super difficult to exactly quantify how much something costs, but I think it should be provable that public transit is cheaper per person than the maintaining the network of roads we have. Of course, it's also hard to quantify the worth of those roads when we have a natural disaster and public transit stops working...

I wish they'd textually labeled the countries. Maybe I'm geographically illiterate.

Any examples ?

Data Mining Guy won't put hamburgers on his CC, says insurance companies will eventually retaliate: http://www.economist.com/node/21556263

I don't get all the for-telnet arguments. Who uses telnet for this anyway? I'd bet that 90% of telnet-folk do:

  cake:~ mali$ telnet google.com 80
  Trying 74.125.235.8...
  Connected to google.com.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  GET / HTTP/1.1
  .......
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 22:25:02 GMT
  Expires: -1
  Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

At which point they go "oh cool" and go do something else. For the rest of us who use curl, wget, requests, Chrome / Firefox developer tools every day (who are we kidding, it's everyone, you liars! :P), the binary transformation would be transparent.

Hell, if you're going for pure cool-factor, how is pulling out your hex editor less cool? But in reality, you'd never do this.

For a non-standardized and obscure protocol where tooling would likely be lacking, I can see why human readability is a good idea. But we're talking about the very protocol that makes up the fabric of the internet. Seriously, why?

Give me one good reason.