Oy gevalt!  That again?  It&#x27;s the modern version of counting angels on a pin.<p>Uber said, &quot;drivers get this percent from the fee, Uber gets this much&quot;.  Uber claimed &quot;tip&#x27;s included&quot;.  Modern philosophers claimed this makes a difference because the law prohibits taking a cut of tips.<p>But there is no difference!  Any allocation of the fee can be rephrased as being &quot;with&quot; or &quot;without&#x27; a tip in such a way that the money flows are all the same.  There is no &quot;fact of the matter&quot; as to what part of the fee is a tip!  Any phrasing can be correct!<p>Let&#x27;s say Uber took 25%.  You can say that the fee breaks down as:<p>1) 25% to Uber, 50% driver payment, 25% driver tip<p>2) 25% to Uber, 75% driver payment, no tip<p>3) 25% driver payment, 75% tip to driver, which Uber takes a 1&#x2F;3 cut off (illegal).<p>If the law treats observationally equivalent situations differently because of how they&#x27;re labeled, that law is meaningless, and basically just taxing you on angel pinheads.  (I call the property of passing this test &quot;nominal invariance&quot;.)<p>(The exception of course is when a customer gives a cash tip on top of the fee directly to the driver.  But Uber definitely doesn&#x27;t take a cut of that!