hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Many Americans who don't work due to just having money have a full time housekeeper who does some cooking, but a personal chef would be for billionaires only. Maybe the lower cost of labor in Russia changes things over there.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Define 'upper class'. The US has plenty of full time housekeepers but only literal billionaires have personal chefs.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
We should certainly not be subsidizing the undeserving poor, that is to say, those who could work but just don’t want to.
Is thé welfare population mostly those people? IIRC it’s mostly thé working poor.
The question of whether poor person bad behavior is encouraged by the welfare system actually mostly centers around the extent to which welfare eligibility rules drive down the marriage rate among the poor. We should probably fix that, but the fix doesn’t look like ‘just cut welfare spending’.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
I would hazard a guess it’s because they’re known as particularly unhealthy and easy to identify.
I don’t share the particular fixation, you can get very fat off a diet of mostly rice, fruit, meat, flour, and oil. Go to southern Louisiana and you will see people who do this.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
It’s worth noting that the labor market for the urban poor in the Roman Empire was just appallingly bad, and it’s not an implausible story that Christianity spread in part because believers were able to better network getting each other jobs and buffer periods of unemployment.
If you’ve ever belonged to a church, that pattern looks familiar.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Your math doesn’t math? Twelve is not 96, and 96 is 3 meals/day for one person for one month, not four people.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
A Cajun diet is cheap, I spend less per person than food stamps allots. But a big chunk of the food stamps target population can’t cook, may face some additional frictions(lack of consistent kitchen access for the poorest is a real thing), and or just refuses to eat healthy from scratch meals. Yes fixing these problems would be good but nobody really knows how to do that.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
SNAP exists to prevent childhood malnutrition, which if you are an IQ believer is way more expensive down the line than food stamps. It may not be the most cost effective way of achieving this goal, but it does work- there is basically no involuntary childhood malnutrition in the USA nowadays.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
The system is being gamed mostly through common law marriages not being claimed. The law doesn’t automatically combine finances if you aren’t married- two working adults, one of which is eligible for food stamps.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
No? While I agree that he used a lot of words, this is the motte, and there was plenty of content for those words. Conservatives think that there is a transcendent moral order and are more upset at food stamps mostly benefit those who violate it than any of its incidental effects.
Now I would disagree with him that the motte is a hub of classical conservatism- lots of right libertarians, lots of nrx adjacent, lots of rationalists who are above all deeply frustrated with democrat party academese lunacy more than with GOP proleslop populism. But it was a coherent point about food stamps.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Exactly my point; private charity in a society as wealthy as the US is more than capable of preventing people from literally starving to death.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The US army purchases brand name products packaged in black and white boxes with no logos, solely the name of the product, and receives a slight discount(from, I'm sure, a marked up price) for doing so.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The poor wouldn't starve even if foodstamps was abolished; they might eat shitty diets, but even the literal homeless do not starve, and you kinda need a kitchen to make use of foodstamps.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Has hellofresh ever been profitable? AIUI none of those mealkitbox services have been.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
In practice the only way to do this is with block grants through a rum millet system; you know that the fat violent addicts have to be given access to the hall of mirrors.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Correct, people don't know how to cook, but you're way overrating how good of a cook most women were in 1950 or whenever. When America was much poorer a high percentage of the population just ate unappetizing food. If you were stuck eating whatever you and your wife could throw together, you ate it regardless of quality.
As a society, we've decided that noone should have to eat unappetizing but cheap food. School lunches don't serve those weird rectangular pizzas anymore. Workplace and college cafeterias have professional chefs. Those box services have no stigma(and also no profit); hellofresh and factor and the like come off as responsible coded in a way that TV dinners used to be seen as an occasional extravagance that was only acceptable if you had kids to feed and a lot of overtime or something. The lower middle class does not eat rice and beans at home(or vegetables of any kind); they eat fast food, frozen dinners, pizza, etc- just like the welfare dependent poor. 'Having to eat bland food' is the lot of the world's poor historically, but it's an indignity that, in America, is reserved solely for prisoners.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I mean, couldn't Trump get RFK to remove the prescription gate?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Spanish regularly pronounces the letters 'th' as 't'.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
See also 'litterboxes in schools'.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It's probably not new there, it's just a random fad resurgence.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Again, thé superbowl commercials are a much bigger deal for all that.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
There are real, actual differences between how self described liberals and conservatives, but not republicans and democrats, raise their children. Corporal punishment in the home, censorship, etc are all more common among one than the other. Likewise there’s differences in rates of visiting elderly (grand)parents, in rates of religious change(both conversion and apostasy), in length of courtship before marriage, etc. I don’t think I need to spell out how they run.
Now, notably that isn’t a Republican/democrat difference, or even really a red tribe/blue tribe difference- thé red tribe is better modeled as ‘the set of people who think conservatism is high status’ than as ‘the set of people who are conservative’, and republicans are just ‘people who prefer Trump to the optimates’. But ‘conservatives’ are a real thing.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
To be even more fair, she may well be selling her whole cart at 50% to spend the money on drugs.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
$800/mo seems like a lot to spend on groceries for three people.
An executive chef earns near six figures or lower six figures, $80-$120k ish. But executive chefs don't personally cook, they oversee line cooks who do the cooking and do the training, menu, and quality control side of managing a kitchen. Doubling that to account for executive chef level responsibility and line cook level work is probably generous but in the right order of magnitude. Private chefs exist, you can hire one for your next party, but the business model assumes an occasional extravagance for entertaining, not one regular client.
I suspect that the merely wealthy either like cooking(possibly as a status symbol) or go to restaurants, or have their housekeepers do enough low level cooking to not worry about it.
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