some light questions

[cellio]

I learned today that there is a full-service gas station on my way to/from work. I didn't know we had any of those locally. It's been years (probably decades); what is the conventional tip?

As I pulled up to an intersction (all-way stop), someone from the cross street was backing through the intersection. After backing into the space in front of my car, he immediately popped into drive and went through the intersection. Whose turn was that, the cross-street or mine? :-)

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Why does Hebrew have two words for "open" that differ only (apparently) in what objects they take? It's peh-kuf-chet when talking about eyes and ears, and peh-taf-chet for anything else.

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I think there's an option for making entries not show up on friends' pages. It used to be called backdating, not sure what it's called now.

Is the verb tied to the idea of perception? Which one is used for opening the mind/heart?

[cellio]

The dictionary I consulted only mentioned eyes and ears in that case; I wondered about mind and heart too.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

There is no tip for full service at a gas station. You can pay one (10%, maybe), but I've never heard of anyone doing so.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I never saw tipping while I was growing up in an area that offered full-service. I'm sure they would not refuse the money, but.. well, never actually thought about it before.

[cellio]

Thanks.

[talvinamarich.livejournal.com]

Some posts use "filters". I do very occasionally. That's like a different friends list, of sorts. "I want only X, Y, and Z to see my chicken soup recipes", so you make a filter called "Chicken Soup" and decide who is on that list.

I once used it because a friend's email host (a university!) went belly-up and I HAD to contact him. The funny thing: he answered a post locked to him and him only faster than he ever answered any of my emails. :P

[cellio]

These are posts that I can see if I go to the journal but not via my friends list, so it's not being caused by filtering. Someone else suggested back-dating; that's not obviously the case in the most-recent post in this category, but it's possible. (I know I've seen three or four other cases of this in the last couple weeks, but can't remember whose posts they were now.)

[dr4b]

Dude. You should see how Japanese has two main words for "open" and I totally can't figure out how to use a bunch of them (but one seems to have to do with pulling something open like a drawer, and one seems to have to do with opening by uncovering or revealing).

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Ugh, yeah, I still can't figure out the difference between aku and hiraku. And there's a whole passle of uncovering and revealing verbs...

[cjsherwood.livejournal.com]

Conventional TIP?

Erm. Nothing, I would imagine. They are doing their job, especially here in NJ where there is only full-serve; self-serve is against the law. Seriously.

I can't imagine tipping someone for filling my gas tank. Even tipping the guy who now knows me, remembers my car and that I always fill up with cash, at the gas station up near PresbyChurch has never occurred to me, though if I keep going there maybe a card at Christmas would be in order.

YMMV, of course.

[cellio]

In NJ I would definitely agree -- if there's no option, you just pay the posted price. Same for resataurants that assess a standard "tip" for large parties; if you didn't give me the option to leave less than 15% for deficient service, I'm probably not going to leave my usual 20% for decent service either. (I realize that at some level this penalizes the servers for their employer's policy.)

Outside of NJ, the reason I asked is that I see no rhyme or reason to the things that do or do not conventionally involve tips. My newspaper carrier is just doing his job, too, as is my hypothetical barber, but both of these are jobs where it's conventional for customers to tip. But you don't tip the UPS guy, plumber, or physician's assistant. I know that waiters' jobs are specifically structured around the idea of tips (and employers are exempt from minimum wage because of it, or at least used to be), but none of the rest of these jobs are, so far as I know, structured that way. The difference isn't "personal attention" (e.g. the barber, or a taxi driver), because the newspaper carrier also gets a tip and that's an assembly-line-type job. (Mine is an adult, by the way, so this also isn't about being extra-kind to kids.) So far I have not been able to detect a pattern.

I have a very vague recollection of my father tipping gas-station attendants when I was a child. It was always "keep the change", though, and I have no idea how much was involved. Of course, gas cost 25 cents a gallon back then, so it wouldn't have been large.

[jducoeur]

I see no rhyme or reason to the things that do or do not conventionally involve tips.

There's no reason to believe there *is* a rhyme or reason to it. Tips drive many economists batty, precisely because they rarely make sense from an economics POV. Far as I can tell, they're basically cultural artifacts, and are pretty arbitrary...

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

A1: Nothing.

A2: From the context, I get the impression that Other Guy was entering the intersection from your right. If he had been going forward, and you both arrived at the intersection at the same time, he would have had the right of way. I don't know (a) if his being in reverse changes anything or (b) if the basic regulation differs between MA where I learned it asnd PA where you are.

A3: Duh?

A4: Why? 'Cause it does. It can be argued that everything is an idiom: in Hebrew the notion of "open" is simply semantically different from "open-eyes/ears". Many Native American languages have separate genders for flat things, round things, tall skinny things, things that move, live animals, dead things, dangerous things, invisible things, and on and on. Some of these may be combined in odd ways: this is discussed in a recent popular book entitled (something like) "Women, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things". The point is that languages often represent very different ways of looking at the world.

[cigfran-cg.livejournal.com]

That's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (no "Other") by George Lakoff. The idea is not that women and fire are necessarily dangerous things, but that all three items share a grammatical category in a particular language.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it. Thanks.

You're entirely correct that grammatical genders (which, indeed, need not have anything at all to do with biological gender) often appear to be quite arbitrary, and all we can really do with the particular gender in Dyirbal that includes these categories is to describe it; it's futile to try to explain it, as it is to explain why (as Twain famously noted) in German, a table is feminine but a maiden is neuter.

Nevertheless, I think that at some level -- which may turn out to be simply morphological; I don't speak Dyirbal! -- I think one can argue that the Dyirbal-thinking mind sees some sort of connection between these categories, and it's intriguing to speculate as to what that is.

[cellio]

Yeah, Other Guy entered the intersection from my right, and then went through. There was someone on that same street but facing the correct direction. So I wondered whether he should go next (he's on the right) or I should because his street just had a turn, even if that didn't help him. This doesn't keep me up nights or anything; I just wondered how other people would answer. (Yes, "person on right wins ties" is the rule here in PA too.)

Thanks for the language info.

[woodwindy.livejournal.com]

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Yes, and it makes me crazy. I note that at least one of your previous respondents has sort of missed the point about locked/filtered posts, if I understand you correctly -- you're talking about unlocked posts that you can see if you visit the person's LJ directly, but that don't show up on your friends page, right?

I have noticed that there are two people on my f-list who seem particularly prone to that phenomenon, but like you I haven't been able to find any other pattern to it.

[cellio]

you're talking about unlocked posts that you can see if you visit the person's LJ directly, but that don't show up on your friends page, right?

Correct.

I have noticed that there are two people on my f-list who seem particularly prone to that phenomenon, but like you I haven't been able to find any other pattern to it.

That's possibly the beginnings of a pattern, at least. If the affected users are all on the same flaky cluster, for example, that could do it. I haven't seen enough instances yet to have any user-specific patterns -- it's been one here, one there, and I haven't noticed it being the same people (yet). I'll be on the lookout for that now.

[jducoeur]

Having been digging into LJ's architecture lately, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's a cross-cluster problem. From at least the 1000-foot view, I don't seen anything that really maintains referential integrity between clusters (indeed, it would be pretty hard to do). So it's easy to imagine some flakiness causing, eg, an update message getting lost when crossing cluster lines. I assume that they guard against that, but catching every possible case in a formal and guaranteed way is pretty hard.

(As I contemplate trying to scale CommYou up, this is one of my major considerations. My CIO is of the opinion that I should just throw money at the problem when we get to that point, and spend a million bucks on an Oracle rack, rather than try to play fancy multi-cluster games. Terrifying idea, but he may have a point. If the monetization strategy works at all, we should have enough income to pull it off when it becomes a severe issue...)

[multislackerkim.livejournal.com]

They only have full-serve gas stations in Jersey, and when I asked a buddy what I should have tipped, he made fun of me. Full serve rocks.

[cellio]

Yeah, I wouldn't expect to tip in NJ because it's mandatory.

This station is across the street from a bigger one, so their prices are usually the same (unless someone's being a little slow to react). So I'll be happy to pull into the one with service now that I know!

Hebrew verbs

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

The two verbs פקח פתח are unrelated (ignoring for the moment some Kabbalistic connection that can be made). פתח (Patach) is the usual opening verb. פקח (pakach) usually means other things, and I would classify opening of one's eyes or ears as a side/unusual meaning. That root usually relates to things being either:
*1* especially clever (several mishnayot point out how to be tricky using this word. For example, two nazirites who agree to be nazirites and bring sacrifices for a nazirite other than themselves (basically one says he'll do that and the other says 'me too') should bring the sacrifices for each other if they are clever)
or *2* free of handicap (by comparison to those with some handicap. See mishnayot at the end of Yevamot regarding two siblings, one of whom is deaf and one of whom is 'pikeach'-not deaf).

Re: Hebrew verbs

[cellio]

Thanks for the information! I didn't realize that "to open" wasn't the primary meaning of פקח.

the tipping point

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

I often fill up at a they-pump-for-you station. I usually don't tip. In talking with the employees, only a small minority of people tip. Apparently, the station is full service because insurance rates are lower if they don't let the users pump their own gas and the station is small enough that the single attendant can keep up with the flow of customers.

When I was younger, my parents would tip if the station was really "full service". If they checked the tires, oil, wipers, etc., my parents would tip. If such places existed any more, so would I. Basically, if they go above and beyond "just doing their job", I'd call it tip-worthy.

(An aside: why do the people who serve coffee to go think that they deserve tips? That'd be like tipping at McDonald's or the deli counter of the grocery store.)

Re: the tipping point

[cellio]

The attendant at this station washed my windows and offered to check the oil, for what that's worth.

An aside: why do the people who serve coffee to go think that they deserve tips?

I suspect that most of them don't think they deserve tips but rather figure they might get lucky. I don't get that one either. Maybe they're modelling on bartenders, who do sometimes get tips? But the bartenders put on more of a show, or at least the good ones do, in my miniscule experience.

[annaeisenkopf.livejournal.com]

Usually full serve costs more per gallon. It won't be on the outside sign but would be on the pumps. Check on that first, just so you know. Gas attendants are paid minimum wage and do not require tipping. It can be nice though if hey give the extra services that go along with it like washing your windows and checking your fluids.

[cellio]

Freakishly, the price on the pump (or at least on my receipt) was lower than the one on the sign. But I wouldn't have thought to check the pump, so thanks for the (err) tip.

This one did wash the windows and offer to check the oil. If I'd popped the hood for him he might have checked other things too; since I had an oil change a couple months ago I didn't take him up on it.