tipping and piracy

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the idea around tipping? I hate it. I much prefer just to have a flat rate instead of the dance of pulling out my phone, figuring out the percentage where I don't look rude, feeling slightly judged, and then trying to weigh how good my service was, when I am not a hard customer and most service is just fine. I generally tend towards overtipping because my father works in the industry and I have done it part time, and even on a hourly wage, a tip is appreciated. So it was nice to go through this piece on dropping tipping in favor of a flat rate and the reactions from customers.

Meanwhile, restaurant workers know what’s up. People who worked in the restaurant industry wouldn’t ask us this question — what will motivate servers to do a good job? Because, inside the restaurant, we know that while the customers think their tips allow them to control the server, in fact the control is illusory. The story of the server being motivated by the customer’s power to tip, is instead a fiction created to make the customer feel important.

As someone who was of age just when Napster came out and downloading and the piracy conversation blew up, this piece focusing on crunchyroll and anime streaming profitability and phantasm non-customers was a great read. I don't know how much I agree with the bolded part.

This is something where there is often substantial confusion in discussions of copyright piracy, where they are treated as lost sales. But they are not lost sales. They are never-were-going-to-be sales. To be sure, the hypothetical perfect digital rights enforcement mechanism for that media would prevent them from getting the content without paying ... but it wouldn't generate any additional income to the creators of the original work. They would just move on to some other media.

So as far the royalties-paying operation is concerned, they are phantasms. They just don't matter, no matter how much noise they may make on some discussion forum. In this particular case, they do not offer any potential benefit to the creators of anime, and so whatever reasons they may offer as to why they bootleg instead of using legit content are of no particular relevance to the market.