pigeonburger
2hr ago
I'm not sure exactly how the difference is made. It's the experience I had and most people I know had. Maybe I'm in a bubble. Maybe people went out socially more often? My local Wendy's, the closest fast food to me, seems to be surprised and unprepared whenever I decided to go there in person. They have a normal sized for a fast food restaurant dining area, but it's always empty. Even the drive through seems underutilized. The staff is mostly just fulfilling doordash/uber eats orders non-stop.
In general the cost of ingredients and food has gone down compared to wages, so I would imagine we've invented new ways of making fast food more expensive to compensate. Having everything delivered would be one.
pigeonburger
6hr ago
I think the main sin of boiling as a way of cooking is that the nutrients leach out into the water, which is then usually dumped out. It'll be fine if you poach veggies in a soup you then eat, though.
Also, how often would his father go for a burrito? Not in cases where it's logical (like when travelling, or something unexpected happened) or as a social occasion, but just "I don't feel like cooking, or I don't feel like eating what we have at home, I want a restaurant burrito"). Compared to OP himself. I dunno for him, but ordering or eating out due to simple laziness or "cravings" was something that happened on a yearly basis to my family growing up. Weekly for me. The avocado toast meme is straightforwardly true, just on work lunches over 15 years of working every day downtown, I spent as much extra over cooking my lunches as I have been able to save for my retirement. I would have had doubled my net worth that I accumulated on my own had I been smarter exclusively on work lunches, if nothing else. I am, and I assume many if not most in my generation, THAT bad with managing my expenses.
Now I find myself kicked back up to the same point my parents were at my age due to inheritance and I am desperately praying to find the strength to do better this time, but still. I'm not sure we can blame the economy for most of it. I would more likely blame the culture for creating a generation or two with an attitude to "small" expenses that basically assign them a cost of 0$ and let that balloon into giant amounts.
pigeonburger
7hr ago
I'll give quadruple amputees a pass on that one, I'm sure some can make it work, but it's probably not worth the effort compared to other things they could be doing.
pigeonburger
8hr ago
I wouldn't even dunk on frozen vegetables, I find them generally a better choice on every metric compared to out-of-season/long-distance shipped fresh vegetables, which by virtue of having to go through a long distribution chain before hitting the shelves are picked too early. Of course, in-season local vegetables are at the top of the pyramid.
pigeonburger
1d ago
I love cooking when I'm inspired. I'm inspired between once and three times a week. The rest of the time, it's a chore I would do without if I could, and too often I do.
Put yourself in the mind of a poor New Yorker. You've just acquired a bunch of fresh ingredients for cooking. Now take them back to your apartment. Your tiny, shitty apartment, with multi decade old cooking appliances, lack of cookware, and then when you finish out how to microwave the meal to completion you can serve them on your non-existent dishes and wash those non-existent dishes by hand in your sink because you don't have a working dish washer. Do we all see the problem? You have to be rich to afford a nice enough place to cook for yourself in New York. Even giving away food for free will not solve this problem.
I've lived in a large city pretty much my entire adult life so far (mercifully I'm moving out in a couple of months), one that is not unlike NYC in a lot of ways. I don't think this is that much of a real problem. Most apartments in those cities have at least a stove/oven. In most of those cities, old unkillable appliances that are decades old but still very functional are in circulation and if you know a few people you can generally get one for free (if you supply the labor of moving it) or very cheap. If not, you can get a cheap single burner resistive cooktop, I see one for 15$CAD on walmart from a brand (not a good brand, but a brand). You can probably get one cheaper in a pawn shop, or if you take a trip to chinatown and look around the stores there. The small, cramped, cluttered stores especially. Pots, pans, utensils, plates, again go to Chinatown and check the stores there. I'd bet for 10$ you can leave with a pot and a pan and at least one plate and one set of utensils. Or a dollar store will have some. If you want better quality, head to a thrift store and get a second hand one. As for doing dishes, I've lived 20 years without a dishwasher, it's fine really. My guess is that the entire set of what you need to cook a basic meal can be had for under 50$. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get all of it under 40$. A cooktop (portable if need be), one pot, one pan, a stirring spoon, a spatula, a cooking knife (doesn't need to be chef's knife), a plate, a bowl, a fork, knife and spoon.
The problem, and I agree there is a problem and it's not the availability of fresh food, is motivation management. Ultimately cooking is, most days for most people, not motivating. There's other things they would rather be doing, and if there isn't they likely have little energy left after their day to put into it. I don't want to say the poor are uniquely lazy, it's not that simple. I'm pretty lazy quite often too. But poor people live in an environment that doesn't help them be very motivated either. Some people are uniquely self-motivated; great for those people, even if they start at the very bottom of the economic ladder, they tend to be able to climb up a few rungs over their lifetime and that's great. Most people aren't like that. They need to have grown up in a good nurturing environment that kept them focused on doing annoying things even if they are annoying to do to keep doing it as an adult. If when you were young your parents (if you're lucky enough to have grown up with both of them) worked double-shifts at the depression and alcoholism factory, your chances aren't great.
None of the employees in any normal store have any reason to care about it, either, other than the threat of losing their jobs for not tackling it, which is unchanged here.
It is changed, in the owner cares, the owner hires the manager presumably putting pressure on him to care. The problem with the public sector is that especially for people who don't live next to them, these issues are so diffuse voters don't care enough to vote across ideology. Until things get very very bad, at which point the solution can end up being the equivalent of a shock treatment. So the "manager" rarely gets pressure to care.
EDIT: Someone pointed out as a response elsewhere in the thread the operators of the store still would care about profitability, then in this case yeah, disregard my comment.
Good idea or disaster waiting to happen?
I don't know if it's a disaster waiting to happen, I would venture probably funding and some glazing arcicles can paper over a failure for as long as the media feels like they should support this (as long as keeping the socialists on-side against Trump). Maybe excessively fund one or two nicer ones, potemkin grocery stores if you will, so the media can go and film reports there about what a success it is.
There are domains where the question of whether private vs public is better not fully resolved, or at least where there are significant zone of shadow, ambiguity or compromise. Healthcare, public security, etc... Grocery stores and food supply is not one of them. Grocery stores is an issue that has been thoroughly adjudicated during the Cold War and capitalism has been found to win it so overwhelmingly that within the lore it's a large contributor to the end of the Soviet Union (you know the one, the 80s story about Yelstin's visit to a random American grocery store). Food availability, distribution, accessibility across the socioeconomic spectrum has been found to be massively better in market economies compared to command economies. That market works about as efficiently as anyone could hope. If private operators are unwilling to serve a specific market, it's not because they are unwilling to take meager profits or because poor people's money is icky, it's because there are not profits to be made at all for some reason. There are grocery stores in some really horrible neighborhoods, and if it was possible to run them profitably in some other horrible neighborhoods, someone would. As you mention, they need to consider and fix why some places just aren't profitable to run a grocery store in. Throwing public money at the issue is not going to fix it.
pigeonburger
3d ago
I love a Kentucky Mule. Well, any Mule, but Kentucky the best.
pigeonburger
4d ago
I don't think that's what they are implying, they mostly see it as a way to imply white people are too lazy, and since those mean right wingers won't let them import hundreds of millions of better, hardworking brown people permanently and legally then they have to settle for bringing them illegally or temporarily. The lack of legal protections afforded to legal residents is only a feature in so far as it enables them to enlist the help of capital for this venture, they don't like it either.
Require that people who wish to submit a comment do it in person at any post office. The comment has to be recorded on-site with the government supplied equipment, as audio-video, audio only or typed in on a kiosk-mode computer. It wouldn't stop someone reading or retyping AI slop, but it'd slow it down considerably. It would also have the benefit of cutting down the activist spam by requiring a bigger time investment.
pigeonburger
7d ago
But then the question is no longer what do you think you would do if in that position. I do get empathy for those people, I just don't think it can meaninfully framed personally.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time?
The question is incoherent, and it's not just a matter of not being able to deal with hypotheticals. If I woke up tomorrow as I am now but in that time, of course my opinions and attitudes would be dramatically out of lockstep with everyone else around me. But if you're asking what I would be doing had I grown up in that situation, unless you believe in a very strong version of biological determinism mixed with very fast evolution (ie: that the "better, more moral" humans of today are the result of genetic differences that crop up over a couple of centuries or even as little as a couple of decades), then you're asking me to tell you what a person that I am not thinks.
I get the same issue when my wife asks me if I think a guy is attractive or my type. No matter how I answer that no, I'm simply not attracted to men, she'll invariably ask me "okay, but what if you were?". I cannot answer that question; I'm not this hypothetical attracted to men Pigeonburger, any answer is at best a random guess.
An espresso by itself, I agree. It's more of "I need to get this in my system quickly" thing than a truly enjoyable experience. I mean, it's good for the couple seconds it lasts and it does leave a lingering aroma on the tongue, but that's still too short for me. But espresso based drinks, on the other hand... Less water than drip coffee; a latté or cappuccino is "creamier", more "milky" than a drip coffee with milk, for the same amount of coffee solubles and overall volume, due to not having nearly as much water.
pigeonburger
8d ago
And yet, he also resorts to debinding for scanning (or "destructively" scans).
pigeonburger
9d ago
That said, I imagine we're not too far from having the image processing tech required to have something akin to Futurama where Bender (a 30th/31st century android) just flips through a book in 5 seconds like a flip book and then declares that he's read it. Taking a distorted, side-angled photo of a bent/curved page of a book and converting it to a perfect copy of the original page that is literally indistinguishable, even by an AI, from an actual proper scan of the page after it had been removed from the book seems like it will be within the realm of possibility pretty soon, if not already (depending on how literally you take the word "literally"), and once we have that, it's just a matter of having cameras with sufficiently high fidelity and framerates.
We're probably already there if we were to invest in expensive machines to do so.
I'm not sure it'd make a difference, the people who complain about the destructive scanning would pivot to complaining about so many ressources being spent that could be used for taking in more refugees being used just to feed the AI slopmachines, and what about all the water being wasted to cool all those scanners?
pigeonburger
9d ago
OP goes over this. Destroying doesn't mean they destroy the page, but scanning works best and fastest if you can get the pages very flat against a scanner. Book spines get in the way, sometimes the text get warped as the spine won't allow the page to lay fully flat against the scanner. Not to mention that you need someone (or a way more complicated machine) to manhandle all these books and spines to get the page to lay as flat as you can for scanning. Scanning a whole book of hundreds of pages that way is a job that would take someone many hours. Compare to cutting the spine, making all the pages loose and stacking them in a document feeder to feed them all one by one, perfectly flat against the scanner. It's not only the fastest, least annoying way to scan, it's the highest quality one. BUT it needs sacrificing the spine.
It doesn't help that when I hear "female" in a non-technical context I immediately picture in my head a Ferengi talking about "fe-male hu-mons".
pigeonburger
9d ago
Oh boy, from the makers of "AI is taking a pee in our Holy Drinking Water" now comes "AI is burning our Holy Books". It's the burgeoning "sanctity" moral foundation of progressives asserting itself, I'm not sure there's much of a point arguing it. Either you agree with it and feel it or you don't.
pigeonburger
9d ago
Indeed, one could just answer something like "I don't know who won the 2020 election, but I saw several legitimate concerns with the way it was run that were not properly addressed in my opinion." and it would be a statement well far of making a strong claim of fraud that I don't think Trump or his voters would object to.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Ban is a bit strong, and there could be a discussion about the topic at hand here, but come on, that sentence at the end hiding behind Hanania to claim Republicans are held to lower moral standards is just waging the culture war.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Some comments I've been seeing however suggest that Republican candidates are simply held to lower moral standards nowadays by their respective sides and it won't impact him too much despite the severity. I guess time will tell.
That pretty much reads to me as just "Let's not forget that even if my ingroup might sometimes do bad, my outgroup are always worse (or so I've heard some guy whose opinion here is irrelevant say, see? I'm not the one waging the culture war, I'm just reporting on what is being said!)"
pigeonburger
10d ago
One of my favorite RPGs series replace basically all trash fights with captcha fights: the SMT series (including Persona). Unless very overlevelled, and even then, you're not expected to auto-battle your way through any fight, and if somehow you are able to, you probably messed up by overoptimising to make it possible to do that with that specific enemies (for instance, enemies with physical vulnerabilities) and made yourself extra vulnerable to others in return. When you first enter a new dungeon/area, all fights against new enemies have to be treated as challenge fights until you figure out a reliable sequence, which will usually involve spending a scarce ressource (MP). Once you have your strategy to beat all the enemies in an area, it's a matter of balancing ressource spend and taking risk in fights with those enemies as your goal is to reach the boss with enough ressources left that you stand a chance as you probe and figure out a strategy against them.
Which, long term, saves you money!
Great lifehack!
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