This is why school, and educating oneself outside of school, are so important. Averages are matters of convenience and classification. An average will always fall within the parameters we set for it based on the type of average we perform and the data we consider and then any modifications or adjustments we apply etc.
for example- if we consider earnings- if we were to use the average earnings in an industry full of contractors, a salaried employee might make $40,000 a year and a contractor might get $70,000 for the same job- but a contractor does not get benefits, a contractor does not have certain taxes withheld. So at the end of a year the take home pay for a contractor may be higher or lower than a salary employee despite them earning $70k vs $40k- but if there are 100,000 workers in that field and 80,000 are contractors- the average salary will be listed higher than $40k but no salaried employees will make that much and contractors may take home much more or much less than $40k.

Let’s keep things in a place where tips are nice. Tips are supposed to make you feel good. Sometimes your partner might do something nice for you or maybe that “special thing you like in bed,” but does that mean you should expect it? If they do it once when you do something sweet that really touches them do they have to do it every time? Don’t expect it. Tips are nice but the job pays what the job pays. Appreciate tips but don’t expect them or think everyone who doesn’t tip is a jerk or didn’t like you.

You’re no better than someone that doesn’t tip- possibly worse. So guests should put themselves in the servers shoes and be understanding and compassionate to circumstances as well as give grace that there could be things they don’t know about that impact their service and tip as able and accordingly to the services- but a lot of service workers and supporters need to chill and also be more understanding and
Give some grace to customers. You don’t know their life story. That kid on the date could be stretching all he has just to take this girl to burger shack and is counting every penny and sweating wether after this date he’ll eat again this week but he is in love. That old couple looking fancy could be a fixed income pair going through rough times.

Pun intended- more food for thought- do you shop on Amazon? Go to Walmart? The dollar store? Guess what? A lot of or most of these “penny pinching” places so many people love or feel economically compelled to shop at? They are directly responsible for taking jobs and lowering wages in multiple sectors. You buy that thing you want on Amazon because it’s $10 cheaper or whatever than the local store- but that guy could say: “if you can’t afford to shop local you can’t afford to buy that..” because you cut out his markup- effectively his “tips” because if he sells at Amazon prices he can’t afford to live on his paycheck right? So how are you any better? You can claim as a service worker that you only go out if you can tip and always tip- but so what? There are other ways that you skimp where you can instead of paying higher prices to working people so they can have a decent wage.

Outside of circumstances like the above I don’t support expecting tips or being sour when people don’t give tips. I don’t support statements like “if you can’t afford to tip you can’t afford to eat out.” No. They totally can. They did. They just didn’t tip. And the thing is.. duh. Maybe they can just barely afford it. Maybe this is this persons luxury. You don’t know their life. Someone not leaving a tip at some flap jack shack like an Applebees- hell- no offense but someone who’s idea of a “night out” or a “treat” is mid to low priced chain dining- they probably make about as much or less than the server. So this “boo hoo I cant live on my Pay check and these fat cats should tip…” buster, a lot of those fat cats have it as bad or worse than you do financially.

Doing your job does not generally warrant a tip. Doing the bare minimums or the exact things they pay you a check to do to the basic standards range expected doesn’t warrant a tip inherently generally. I do not think you should ever be required to tip poor service- though in fairness you do need to think a bit- your food taking forever to get to your table is likely not the waiters fault. Your order being wrong may or may not be their fault, and slow or forgetful service- well… if the place is packed or there are things going on then you must consider that for the circumstances and what they are juggling that seemingly poor service may actually be excellent and show a lot of extra effort. Ultimately though tipping should be discretional if at all.

lol. To do so would be the antithesis of cowardice, it is not in the nature of the coward to do so. But I dig your energy on this one.

This would preserve and protect close community binds while discouraging both impure thoughts and deeds with strangers. Since you would only know gender and sexuality through introductions by people mutually close enough to know those things about both people being introduced, no strangers would actually know. Is this two men with beards holding hands or two women with beards or a man and a woman? You don’t know. So even if you preserve common religious fundamentalist beliefs about homosexuality- the entire concept becomes unenforceable and a non issue in the community as it is only really known for sure to your god(s) and the persons involved and can be between them to settle up on it.

Do something about climate change or don’t. If you don’t, don’t whine about other people taking it seriously. If you take it seriously just remember that you can do so much and after that you’re just wasting your life bearing a dead horse. No sense in getting depressed over it. Do what you can handle and then let the rest sort itself out. That’s all you can do. Be aware of your own and your species mortality and use that as a reason to live; then live as long as you’re gonna and take the long nap and anything after that isn’t your problem. If you did your best you have to put the rest to faith. You can leave a legacy but you don’t get to control what happens to it after a certain point.

Climate change almost certainly won’t be good for you if you are alive today. Probably won’t be good for your kids and the next generation or two at least. Maybe won’t be good for the next 10 or 100 generations. But- will it be bad for the human race or the planet on the whole in the long run? We don’t know. Mass climate based extinction of humans and cultural and other shifts may end up being the thing that propels us to a utopian society without violence or blah blah- or closer to it. It might be that it resets us back to primitive living and ultimately benefits the other species of earth and maybe us too. Or maybe it is the start to humanity across many worlds and potentially our species being able to survive the colapse of the magnetic field or the sun going nova one day. Who knows? We are taking about lengths of time and systems so complex and unpredictable that they are almost unfathomable to the human mind.

So live your life. Perhaps be mindful of your time here and prudent about your choices and their impacts or potential impacts on others and the future, but certainly don’t let the fact that you, effectively everyone you know or ever meet, and ultimately the human species and the planet earth will someday not be here or be totally unrecognizable to you- don’t let that stop you from being alive and enjoying the time you have here and being productive. Human civilization changes. The human species changes. The planet and creatures and ecosystems change. Neanderthals went extinct too. Guess who “replaced them”? Dinosaurs are believed to be the dominant organisms for millions of years. Giant bugs and giant mushroom forests and all manner of things once existed that don’t because they couldn’t survive as they were and went extinct or became very different. Bad for them but often good for the new life and new worlds that set the way for.

If you tell a child they have 8 hours at Disney World what do you think they are better off doing, sitting on a bench crying or stressing out all day about how they only have a few hours left to have fun- to the point they ruin their entire time there or waste much of it worrying about how it ends; or to go enjoy it and be so absorbed in the experience that they don’t even realize when it is tule to go? Surely they can be mindful of their limited time and use it wisely- maybe not stand in line for 4 hours for one ride unless they absolutely feel they can’t miss it- but maybe pick the things that they want to accomplish most or the plan that allows them to accomplish the maximum amount of things while they have time, then when it is time to go, well- wether your parents drag you away or the park closes or is destroyed by the 10,000 degree heat- when the time is up it is up.

.. texter? Stabbed or shot? Blown up by terrorists? Die from preventable health issues which are the most common cause of death? Die in a preventable war or terrorist action? Have a heart attack or aneurysm? Tomorrow isn’t promised to you wether you are 8 or 80 years old. I don’t know how you die- well, I don’t know how all of you die- but I know you die, except.. you know who you are. Everyone else though- will die. Don’t get your panties in a twist. If WW3 kicks off tomorrow you could die in an air raid or nuke strike at any moment- is that going to be the overshadowing thing that prevents you from living life and doing what you can with the time you have? I do not understand How people allow their fear or aprehensión of their own mortality take away what life they have.

So climate change is real. It is a big deal, it is something we believe we play a part in and have good evidence to support that as well as good evidence of how we can mitigate our impacts, but it’s nothing to get depressed or lose your head over. You’re gonna die. Good odds of you’re reading this you’ll be dead before the human race faced climate based extinction. With or without climate change your kids will likely die, they may or may not live 10-50 years longer on average before they die, but they’ll die too. And their kids. And at some point most likely every single human being will be dead, or might be 100 or 10000000+ years from now but guess what? By the time it happens you and likely everyone you’ve even known or will know will also be dead long before then. And if you aren’t dead by then? Well- you’d be dead after, which- everyone does tend to die, cause of death? Age? Does it matter if you are killed by climate change related preventable causes or hit by a drunk driver or..

That’s scary to most people. Not knowing. I have faith that we will figure it out and if we don’t that those left will figure it out. Human beings have survived some bad stuff as individuals and as a species. We find ways to live in some of the most inhospitable places on earth. It tends not to be super pleasant but those who live there- to them it’s just life. Just a regular day. You accept it or you reject reality. Same as always. Same as 1,000 or 10,000 years ago when we knew even less about the world and everything was scary and unknown and people died all the time of stupid and mysterious crap or lack of basic resources and knowledge. That sounds really sucky and I don’t want to live in that world or to force others to- but people lived in that world and thrived in it and even had good days and told jokes and fell in love and possibly enjoyed life despite it all.

Or who knows. Who knows what that would look like? Like so many things, the scariest thing about climate change is no one really knows. That’s a point many like to use to defuse the tension or discredit predictions. “They said this 20 years ago and it didn’t happen..” “they don’t know..” “they were wrong about XYZ so they could be wrong here..” I mean, yeah. Sort of. They’re guessing in part. Educated guesses but we don’t KNOW a lot of this stuff. That’s how science works. We make best guesses and refine them as we go. Sometimes you’re very wrong and sometimes you’re kinda wrong and sometimes you’re dead on. They don’t know and that means it could be not so bad or a fluke but it also means it could be much worse and more critical than we think. We don’t know the danger, we don’t know the exact steps to fix it, we don’t know if it can be “fixed” even and we don’t know what a world looks like if things go badly in the climate change game. We have educated guesses and theories.

The message there isn’t that climate change is “no big deal,” hardly. We are talking about a world that we may not recognize and if it survives, a human civilization we won’t recognize and either one we probably wouldn’t especially like if we were alive to experience it or a transition to it, even more so compared to how we live today. We may see a reversion to a primal age of survival and brutality or we may see a world where a few hundred thousand or million humans or less live technologically advanced lives in small area made habitable only through technology and adaptation.

Change is an inevitable part of life. And here’s the flip side of the coin- who says climate change is a “bad” thing? Oh sure, the predicted changes would not be fun for a lot of people. Mass deaths, starvations, changes to the face of the globe. Well- that’s never happened on human history. Or- well- it has. The prevailing theory is the “ice age” brought about cultural shifts and migrations and created many new groups and cultures around the globe which subsequently led to the world we have today.
The Black Death, covid 19, wars and famines and floods and earth quakes and volcanic eruptions- new land masses are and have historically been created, lakes appear and dry up, rivers change course. Animals and plants and ecosystems and climates change.

So maybe it is too late to stop some change, but there is most likely other changes that can be prevented, and it isn’t likely too late for the human race to survive or anything like that.
Well- almost certainly the human race ends at some point. If you believe in science the earths magnetic field could conk out in as little as 1,000 years or less and then we most likely all die. Before or after that any number of things could cause mass extinction. If you aren’t big on science, numerous holy books speak of end of days events such as ragnarok, rapture, Armageddon in which human life generally is said to cease on this earth. So like most all thing presumed and observed in the material universe- the ride stops someday kids. Everyone dies and species tend to evolve to be unrecognizable or go extinct given enough time.

The old and new testaments actually specify several places for where humans and angels or spirits go after death that aren’t quite paradise (heaven) or some “bad place” like “hell” but can be for people meeting specific conditions or are not inherently a punishment or reward etc. these other places often aren’t well described either.
next- the Bible states that for most of these places people go until “judgment.” Meaning they aren’t inherently an eternal resting place so much as where you go until a time of judgment- possibly referring to the events to take place at Armageddon or the “end of days” etc. in the events of the end of days as described in scripture, what happens after is curiously missing or vague. It doesn’t actually say what becomes of hell or so many other loose ends. It basically says things get real crazy and everything ends up where it is meant to be and the world we know is destroyed. So I mean- yeah man. It’s a lot of speculation and make believe and pop culture.