Category: The Dish

Reality Check

Democratic Senate

Sam Wang presents his “Senate polling snapshot for this year so far”:

The graph shows a history, over time, of the probability of Democrats/Independents getting 50 or more votes in an election based on today’s opinion polls. On Election Eve, opinion polls closely track final outcomes. Therefore, consider this a snapshot of Campaign 2014.

John Sides’ new forecast, which takes fundamentals into account, calculates an 86 percent chance of Republicans taking the Senate. Why this is higher than other models:

Our forecast in states like Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana gives the GOP a much better chance than many observers do. These races are toss-ups according to the Cook Political Report, for example. The reason is that our model is very confident of a GOP win in all three campaigns, and the polls do not give us enough reason to question this for now.  At the same time, the Democrats have strong candidates in these races, so it is possible that the prediction could shift in their favor. However, absent a clear trend toward the Democrats in the polls, our forecast will continue to favor the GOP in these races.

By contrast, the Upshot’s Senate model currently only gives the GOP a 51% chance of overtaking the chamber. But Harry Enten warns that a lot of seats are within the GOP’s grasp:

[I]f Republicans sweep those nine close races (plus South Dakota), the GOP would pick up 10 seats, controlling 55 in the new Senate. If Republicans lost all of them (including Georgia, Kentucky and Arkansas), they’d pick up only two seats — holding 47. In other words, the final outcome for the Senate could be anything from a minor Republican gain to a GOP romp. At the moment, the state of play seems manageable from a Democratic perspective, but the party’s position is perilous. A tiny shift could tip the canoe and spill a lot of Democrats overboard.

Cillizza examines the limits of these calculations:

Models are, by their nature, data driven.  (That’s why models tend to get better the closer the election gets. There’s just more raw material — poll numbers, fundraising numbers etc. — to mine.) Because of that reality, models tend to favor elements of races that can be easily quantified (presidential approval, GDP growth, fundraising) and diminish less easily quantifiable factors like candidate quality and the sort of campaigns being run on the ground.

Sides and his team use three data points aimed at ensuring the Election Lab model takes those candidate/campaign factors into account: 1) polling in the race 2) fundraising by the candidates 3)  experience in elected office.  Historically, all three have functioned as solid predictors of success or failure.

And yet, those three data points alone can miss other realities that do help to decide elections.

De Profundis

AIDS project

Many readers have responded to my essay yesterday on the plague and gay history. And I touched on some of its themes in this excerpt from my long conversation with Matthew Vines. Specifically the impact of AIDS on the first two gay weddings I attended:

 

A reader remembers as well:

Twenty years ago when I was diagnosed, I thought I had three years – at most – to live.  And here I am, healthy as a horse.  And it gets better … I am married to a man I love, and my über Catholic parents love him.  If anyone told me any of this was possible 20 years ago, I would not have believed them. Thanks for refreshing my memory and reminding me how far we’ve come.

Another writes:

Missing from your essay is the profound grief – in all its stages – that we plague survivors still feel today. I watched “The Normal Heart” with tears streaming down my cheeks because nearly all these young, vibrant men were struck down in the most hideous fashion and disappeared forever in less than 15 years. As few of us have children, they were OUR family and we grieve their passing as any family that has lost a son or a brother.

I appreciate that a blogger isn’t allowed to be a blubbering mess but for me the loss is intensely felt 20 years on, as retirement looms. These aggressive young men would be today’s activists for LGBT seniors fighting the institutional homophobia rampant in retirement homes, forcing greying gays to engage the world. Instead, our lost generation’s voice is silent and the already diminished survivors are even more alone and isolated.

Another:

You may not remember me. We met sitting at the Duplex Diner in 2000. You knew my now deceased partner Clay, who died in 1997. I was one of those who survived, fought back Meth addiction (am still going to meetings daily) emerging out of my personal abyss and climbing that mountain.

Clay was one of four men I dated who subsequently died. Another reader:

I have welled up with tears, pride, and love while reading this. I’m 49 and have been out for 25 years and I can say, here’s my story. I can send this article to my large Southern Baptist family in Texas and present to them a proud record, a context in which they can place this life of mine; the one they never quite understood. History does this.

Maybe this is overstating it, but I feel our history has begun only now. That is to say, the perspective from which we view this history is beginning to settle at a healthy distance.

Another HIV positive reader:

So your post has me somewhat weeping at work.  Thank you, but I should remember not to read essays like that in my office.  This is my first time writing you, but there is a minor personal perspective I want to add to your history.

Although I can map much of my life to the history you wrote, I did not actually feel a part of the gay community until recent years.  I was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1992, when I was 18 and still completely closeted.  I got it from sex with one of the other closeted guys I had met in cruisy parks and other places in those pre-Internet days.

Even once I started to gradually come out a year later, the majority of my friends remained straight men and women.  The one or two gay friends I had at any given time were like me.  Although we would “visit” the gay bars in the gayborhoods for a night every few weeks, most of the time we would hang out with our straight friends.  For many years, I was always the only one of my friends that was HIV positive.  And they loved me and supported me as my immune system gradually plummeted.  Thankfully, I have never had someone I know die of the disease.

So I cannot necessarily call it survivor’s guilt that led me to addiction and seeking oblivion once it became clear that I was going to live.  I relate to the depression and questioning “what now,” once simple survival was no longer the primary concern.  I relate to the experience of shame and pain when I would read “DDF” and “Clean” in dating profiles.  I had not expected to live to be 25, but at that age my immune system had rebounded, I had a job with health benefits that gave me access to those life-saving medications, and I was spiraling into the slow suicide of addiction.

Luckily, I found recovery.  My first time feeling a part of the gay community was in predominantly gay 12-step groups.  From there, I experienced the camaraderie and empowerment of playing for a predominantly gay sports team against “straight” teams.  I started a new career, and although it is not the focus of that career, I have donated significant time and money to LGBT rights, marriage equality, and to helping those with HIV gain access to health care and other services.   As the gay community has “healed” and strengthened itself, I have done the same, and come to feel a part of the community as a result..

Another:

Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for this piece. I’ve been a committed Dishhead for over seven years but only came out this March at age 31. You and your work helped get me there by viscerally impressing on me all of pain and sacrifice by my predecessors that made my coming out a virtual non-event. (My boss at my corporate law firm gave me a tight, motherly hug and congratulated me. I teared up realizing that I could be out at work without fear of reprisal.)

I’m of that limbo generation that came of age after Stonewall, gay ghettos and the onset of the AIDS crisis, but before the mainstream equality movement. Even in liberal Seattle, to be an openly gay teenager in the late ’90s would have been a lonely, frightening thing indeed, and I didn’t have the courage. It took me ten years of adulthood to shed the vestigial fear of rejection and stigma that had been inculcated into me, and four months after coming out I still haven’t absorbed the liberating indifference with which the community around me greeted my outness.

This isn’t the same world in which I grew up – when Ellen’s homosexuality was splashed across the cover of People and men holding hands in public made us gawk and giggle. In 1996, I acutely remember my mother agreeing with the crackpot GOP candidate for Washington state governor that homosexuality was a mental disorder. Now, she keeps asking when I’ll bring a boy home to meet her.

Another:

I just retired from teaching at a Catholic High school in Ft Lauderdale, Florida. At my retirement party, I said one or two sentences about how much I appreciated the people in my high school for giving me their love through the years since 1984. Then one more sentence. I said that when I went out to Wilton Manors on occasion, and when I saw the rare man I had known or said hi to in the eighties, I often went up to hug him. Because most of those men are long since dead.

You know what, Andrew? I received comments the next day from some of my most intimate colleagues. They worried that I had said too much in front of my bosses, in front of my school’s chaplain.

Every word you wrote this afternoon, then, is true. It hurts me when I hear friends still living somewhere else in time than in the land of today. But your words here make it clear that I have millions of fellow travelers who have gone through much the same thing.

We’re not alone.

The Debtpocalypse Gets Delayed, Slightly

Federal Debt

Yesterday, the CBO put out a new budget projection (pdf). Lori Montgomery summarizes:

For the 10-year period beginning in 2010, the estimated cost of Medicare and Medicaid — the government health programs for the elderly and the poor — has dropped by $1.23 trillion, according to revised CBO projections. In its latest look at the nation’s long-term finances, released Tuesday, CBO predicts that the savings will grow by 2039  to 1.5 percent of the economy — or, in today’s dollars, roughly $250 billion a year. That’s real money by any measure. But it’s not enough to brighten the CBO’s otherwise gloomy forecast for the next 25 years.

Besides the improved Medicare and Medicaid numbers, Andrew Smith finds “not much good news here”:

Under current law according to the CBO, debt will rise from 74 percent of GDP in 2014 to 80 percent of GDP by 2025, 108 percent by 2040, 147 percent by 2060, and 212 percent by 2085. These almost apocalyptic projections don’t even fully account for the scale of our predicament, as current law is held down by budgeting distortions, some benign and some gimmicky, like tax breaks that are projected to expire even though they’ll more than likely be extended and unrealistic cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates. As soon as 2039, the CBO anticipates a deficit of 6.4 percent of GDP.

Among William G. Gale’s take-aways:

The magnitude of the changes in policy needed to ensure that the debt-GDP ratio in 2039 returns to its historical average over the last 40 years – around 39 percent – depends on when corrective policies are initiated.

If policies were initiated next year, then it would take a cut in non-interest spending or an increase in taxes or a combination equal to 2.6 percent of GDP on an annual basis – about $465 billion in today’s economy. If we wait until 2020, it would require annual cuts of 3.5 percent of GDP. Twenty-five years may seem like a long time from now, but the longer we wait, the larger the changes will need to be.

Vinik sees the report as confirmation that taxes must go up:

We could make severe cuts to Medicare and Social Security. But that would undo decades of success in reducing the poverty rates for seniors. We could make severe cuts elsewhere. But all other federal spending outside of interest payments—from the military to food stamps to agricultural subsidies—is projected to decline to a smaller share of GDP than at any point since the late 1930s. There is little room to cut there without causing serious damage.

That leaves one other option: higher revenues. Not just slightly higher revenues, but a lot higher.

But Pethokoukis argues the “the CBO report clearly states we cannot just tax our way out of this problem.”

[E]ven though revenue will rise 6 percentage points over historical levels, spending will rise by 16 points over historical levels. Record tax revenue, but also record spending. As I said, there’s your trouble.

Margot Sanger-Katz emphasizes the uncertainty of future Medicare costs:

C.B.O. points out that it can’t pinpoint the cause of the recent slowdown or its durability, which is why it’s not changing its fundamental view of where Medicare spending is heading over the very long term. “How long the slowdown might persist is highly uncertain,” the report says.

That’s probably smart. Even economists who are most enthusiastic about the recent numbers still aren’t sure whether the trend is here to stay.

Louise Sheiner and Brendan Mochoruk also address the inherent uncertainty of these calculations:

A key question for economists and policymakers is how to think about this uncertainty: how should recognizing how little we know about the future affect our policy choices today? Some analysts believe that we should take action now to insulate us against the risk of larger-than-expected budget imbalances in the future. Others—particularly those who are very hopeful about future health cost growth—prefer “watchful waiting.”

Arabs Care About Gaza This Week

GazaTweets

“Has the Palestinian issue really lost its centrality to Arab identity or did it retain the latent power to galvanize Arab attention?” Marc Lynch asks. To try and answer that question, he took a look at Twitter trends:

Syria (in blue), which in 2012 and early 2013 consistently generated millions of tweets per month in Arabic, shows a relatively low level flat line. The shocking developments in Iraq (in green) galvanized attention in mid-June, and Iraq continues to attract more attention now than does Syria. But Gaza, after being virtually ignored for a long time, surges to dominate everything else once the conflict begins. Score one for the “latent relevance” hypothesis.

That doesn’t mean that nothing has changed, of course. Arab publics remain intensely divided and frustrated, while Arab regimes remain intensely repressive and more fearful than ever of popular mobilization. Sectarianism remains rampantly virulent, and the regional campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood can’t help but affect public sentiment toward Hamas (especially in Egypt). The Gulf states and their media seem to be replaying 2006, when they tried to buy Israel time to finish off Hezbollah.

But one of the lessons of 2006 was the limitations of such efforts: Hezbollah garnered widespread, intense Arab support for its struggle against Israel despite the Arab media’s coverage and the sectarianism generated by Iraq’s civil war. The solidarity generated by the killing of innocent fellow Arabs by Israel tends to overwhelm political divisions, even among those who blamed Hezbollah then or blame Hamas today for the war.

“Public Health Nativism”

Anti-Immigration Activists Protest Arrival Of Unaccompanied Central American Children To Housing Facility

The largely unsubstantiated concern that the Central American migrant children are carrying infectious diseases is fast becoming a trope among Republican lawmakers. It was given an airing on the O’Reilly show last night. “The fact that this rumor is circulating at all,” Jesse Singal comments, “can still tell us some interesting things about the way human beings are wired to view outsiders”:

Erin Buckels, a researcher at the University of Manitoba who has studied this issue, explained in in an email that both her work and a great deal of prior research has “demonstrated a strong and automatic tendency to dehumanize outgroup members, even when we have no prior experience with those groups.” Notions of pollution and infection loom large here: We often “view outsiders with disgust — partly due to the risks of infectious disease that outsiders carried in our evolutionary past — and this causes a conservative shift in our thoughts and attitudes.” So unfamiliar people “are seen as closer to animals than humans, and therefore pose a danger to our bodies (and even our souls).”

This is basically a universal human impulse — every time you read a horrific story about a young couple being murdered for a relationship that stretches across sectarian or class or caste lines, that’s part of what’s going on. In certain contexts, people just can’t stand the notion of being “infected” by outsiders — and infection can mean anything from “them” crossing “our” border to members of an undesirable class having sexual relationships with “our” daughters — to the point where they will kill people to prevent that infection from occurring.

But Samuel Kleiner is blunter, calling the claim another example of America’s long, ugly tradition of “public health nativism”:

Doctors have debunked claims of diseased-ridden children: The migrants tend to be middle class with updated vaccines. By engaging in this right-wing fear-mongering, the aforementioned elected officials—and many others—are earning their ignominious place in a long, ugly history in American nativism that demonizes immigrants under the guise of public-health concerns.

With each wave of immigration, nativists have made public-health excuses for keeping out migrants. In the 1830s, cholera was described as an “Irish disease,” and in the late 1800s Tuberculosis was portrayed as a “Jewish disease.” In 1891, Congress banned any immigrant “suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Even at Ellis Island, a site we celebrate as America’s front door for the “tired and weary,” medical inspections were a weapon aimed at immigrants who traveled on second and third class and were commonly used to quarantine and turn back unwanted immigrants.

And then as recently as 1993, the HIV ban was instigated to prevent gays and Haitians from entering the country. It took almost twenty years to repeal and replace it.

(Photo: An anti-immigration activist stands next to a Pinar County Sheriff’s deputy during a protest along Mt. Lemmon Road in Oracle, Arizona in anticipation of buses carrying illegal immigrants on July 15, 2014.  About 300 protesters lined the road waiting for a busload of illegal immigrants who are to be housed at a facility in Oracle. By Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images.)

An Era Of Government Failure

We’re living through it:

government failure

Ingraham and Hamburger unpack Paul Light’s study:

Two factors complicate the failure rate under Obama. The first is that many of the missteps under Obama had their roots in the Bush administration. That administration “could have fixed the information technology systems that led to the healthcare.gov and veterans breakdowns, but didn’t. They could have fixed the civil service system that led to the problems in the Secret Service and the General Services Administration, but didn’t. And of course they could have fixed some of the policy problems that led to the 2008 financial collapse and the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion, but didn’t.”

The other factor is the level of fierce Congressional opposition Obama has faced in office.

Light writes that political polarization is “a grand contributor” to the rise in government failure. But he notes that Democratic contributions mostly take the form of neglect and omission – they ignored “the slow decimation of government capacity, and refused to embrace the need for bold thinking on how to improve its performance.”

Republican contributions to government failure, on the other hand, have been “very deliberate.”

On the same general topic, Leonhardt gleans insights from Peter Schuck’s Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better. One part of the solution:

Rigorous evaluation, randomized trials and social impact bonds will never stir the political passion that calls for universal health insurance or lower taxes do. If anything, measurement and accountability are destined to provoke more opposition – from interest groups that have something to lose – than support. (This opposition often takes the form of, “Measurement is hard,” as if that were a reason to skip it.)

But in a divided country, where Congress only rarely passes far-reaching legislation, a more effective government may be the best way for both sides to get more of what they want: a government that is limited enough to protect individual freedom and ambitious enough to improve people’s lives.

Update from a reader:

Honestly, what the fuck is that study supposed to mean? The government failed “2-3” times per year under Bush and Obama? If there was ever a study that meant nothing, that was entirely dependent on starting assumptions, this is it. You could quite easily say the government failed zero times, because we maintain the constitutional form and have not fallen into Somalia-style anarchy; or you could say it failed hundreds of thousands of times a year, because, e.g,, the passport office fucked up my application.

A quick glance at his methodology shows the study is really looking at popular media characterizations of stories they claim represent government failure, but even then, it’s subjective to the point of meaninglessness.

Forced To Marry At 15

Naimeh Doostdar highlights a troubling trend in Iran:

According to research conducted by [the advocacy group Justice for Iran], which covers 2006-2007 and 2013-2014, the rate of marriage for girls below 15 years of age is on the rise. Statistics published by Iran’s National Organization for Civil Registration reveal that, between March and December 2013, more than five percent of married females were below the age of 15. The same figures reveal that, among the registered marriages in Iran, more than one third of women were below the age of 19.

But these are official figures only, provided for registered marriages. There are strong indicators that the actual numbers for underage marriage are higher, especially because the statistics released by the government do not include those marriages entered into by young women aged between 18 and 19.

Why is underage marriage on the rise in Iran? There are a number of reasons:

tradition and religious culture are two major factors. Some families believe an early marriage can protect them: their daughters will not have the opportunity to be led astray, bringing shame and dishonor to the family. In other cases, poverty plays a role: a daughter is simply sold off for money because her family cannot afford to feed her.

In parts of Iran, some believe that children must be sacrificed to forced marriages in order to maintain tribal bonds. Among some of these communities, there’s a traditional belief that a girl should not menstruate while still living in her father’s house. In bigger cities, these traditions manifest themselves differently. One family marries off a young girl because she has been reading a romantic novel, while another girl is forced into early marriage because she has been caught talking to her boyfriend on the phone.

Girls living in urban areas tend to reject the idea of underage marriage—but it seems that the official view is somewhat different. Some prominent public figures—among them former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—have tried to normalize or even promote underage marriage, viewing it as somehow beneficial to society. In 2009, when the average age of marriage rose to 24 for women and 26 for men, Ahmadinejad made his views known: “I believe that the right age of marriage for women is 16, 17 or 18, when girls have just blossomed.”

So Pew Me

Some readers follow my lead in taking the political typology quiz from the Pew Research Center:

That Pew test is pretty funny; apparently thinking that government isn’t evil, that environmental protection is important, that the government should help the poor, whether pewit is possible to be moral without God, that “homosexuality” (quite a different thing even from marriage equality!) is “acceptable,” and that immigrants “help American society” all make one a member of the “New Left.” I suspect that according to this test, Plato and Aristotle would be members of the “New Left” too!

I answered truthfully in all cases, refusing to “psychoanalyze” the quiz so as to make it make me show up as a conservative. I suspect that if the quiz had bothered to ask my opinions about what we should actually do about many of these problems, or about my opinions about abortion, I would no longer be a “New Leftie.” Yes, being anything but a frothing, racist, jingoistic, consumerist Rick Perry-style conservative stereotype apparently disqualifies one from being called a conservative.

One thing it has, however, made clear to me, is the enduringly exceptional character of the abortion question. I would be a pretty reliable liberal voter, if not for my profound moral reservations of the current liberal status quo on the abortion question. Oh, and I’m a “millennial.”

Another reader:

Whenever I take these kinds of quizzes I’m always thinking “yes, but …” – though the Political Typology Quiz you took has some questions that have me thinking WTF? Take this one for example:

Business corporations make too much profit or Most corporations make a fair and reasonable amount of profit

I’m like, my issue isn’t how much profit a company makes, I want them to make a lot of profit, my issue is how that profit is divided up between the employees, shareholders and the executives that manage the company.  So how the heck do I answer that question?

There were other questions I had issues with as well.  My issue isn’t that we shouldn’t be active in world affairs; it’s how we are active in world affairs and having an understanding of our limits in that regard.  On immigration, I think it makes us stronger, but I’d like to cut down on the uneducated low-skill immigrants and concentrate on ramping up our ability to brain-drain the rest of the world.

I scored a solid liberal, which isn’t surprising, though I think if the test was more nuanced I’d drift more towards the center.  They also didn’t ask about guns.  I’m sure that would have dragged me to the right.

Another:

I took it. Told me I was a “solid liberal” who probably voted mostly Democrat and loved Obama. Neither of which is true.

I never voted strictly Dem when I was living in the US. I was a reluctant Obama voter in 2008 and grew to loathe him and most of his policies, so much that I didn’t vote in 2012. His re-election (not that Americans had a choice really) was the push that decided me on giving up my US citizenship when I take Canadian citizenship (hopefully before the summer is over). Even here, where I am a card-carrying Liberal, I don’t support them provincially, and I’m a bit chagrined to say I even lean a bit Wildrose at times and occasionally think Mulcair would make a good PM.

It was a stupid quiz. Over half the questions should have had a “neither” choice or more accurately “it’s not that simple – unless you don’t use your brain for thinking much” option. But it was typical American, where everything is black/white.

Bah humbug.

Why Undertipping Makes You A Real Jackass, Ctd

Like Mr Pink:

Readers continue the thread:

I hope Dishheads aren’t overlooking the fact that institutionalized tipping constitutes a progressive – yes, progressive! – anti-jackass tax of sorts. Conspicuous consumption compels many of those who can best afford to subside service industry jobs to do so. Those who can’t, won’t, and let’s be honest: everyone goes into restaurants knowing what’s expected. Anyone who says they’re being lied to about bottom line prices is simply too proud to admit they’re being cheap.

Academics can argue until they’re blue in the face about the theoretical benefits of eliminating tipping, and perhaps higher-class restaurants where published academics like to dine wouldn’t be impacted as those staffs tend to be well-trained, experienced, and highly professional. But would you really eat at greasy spoons and dive bars where everyone was stuck working for the same wage regardless of performance? I sure as hell wouldn’t, and no one should underestimate the good vibes that come with knowing you’ve given a big tip to someone who truly deserved one, doubly so when you’re pinching your own pennies.

Another focuses on the issue of fudging income:

As one reader mentioned, many tipped workers under-report their tips, allowing them tax-free income. (I’ve always mildly resented how easy it is for the waiters I know to do this, but since none of them are getting rich waiting tables I don’t get too agitated about it.) However, there’s a real downside for the under-reporters that many of them (especially young people) rarely appreciate:

When they apply for a loan it is hard for them to prove adequate income, and when it comes time to collect Social Security retirement income they will show lower lifetime earnings and receive a smaller check as a result. In the big scheme of things I suspect most tip earners would be better off getting paid a regular minimum wage, perhaps with modest tips allowed as per the European approach.

Another refines an earlier point:

Your labor lawyer reader wrote, “The employer has to cover the difference to whatever the local minimum wage is, so any raises to minimum wage are also raises for tipped workers (e.g. once Seattle’s minimum wage reaches $15 per hour, employers will have to make sure their tipped employees leave with $15/per hour).” Point of fact: the state of Washington’s state minimum wage – higher than the national – does not include a tip credit. So a server makes regular minimum wage, plus tips.

Another has more on state laws:

There are a few states, including California, where tipped employees are subject to the same minimum wage laws as everyone else. When you go out to eat in these states, the social expectations in terms of tipping are exactly the same as everywhere else. I’m sure most people aren’t even aware that the law is different. So in this instance, yes, the restaurant is paying its servers more, but it does nothing to relieve customers of the additional 15- to 20-percent cost. (In fact, it may be more expensive to tip here in California because, as you pointed out, higher labor costs may lead to higher-priced menu items and we calculate tips as a percentage of those more expensive items.)

Another channels Mr White:

I will leave it to others to hash out the micro- and macro-economic pros and cons of tipping. I just want to give a little recognition to the waitresses – and it is almost always waitresses – slinging coffee, eggs, and pancakes on the breakfast shift in every town in the U.S. Working the breakfast shift is a hard, physically grueling job. But, because breakfast is cheap, breakfast servers are unlikely to make much in tips – even if people are tipping 15 percent. A good breakfast waitress can get the whole day started right. So, tip generously.