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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6753 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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I wish more upper middle class people had high school jobs. It would solve some stuff.

I worked in a grocery story in high school. I know what food stamps are like. No one is trying to figure out how much Selenium they are getting. They are buying the worst shit. Apparently, 10% of SNAP benefits go to sweetened beverages. To me that seems like an underestimate.

You can see the dividers. On this line, cookies, some cereal, a microwave dinner, and dr. pepper. On the other line, a bottle of jack. Ring them up separately please. Mom, can I have a food stamp for a donut?

I've seen it. This is the reality.

Anyone who ever worked at a grocery store knows there's another program called WIC (Women, infants, and children) that only allows stuff like whole milk and grape juice. I still have no idea why our food stamps aren't more like that. But even that wouldn't solve the massive fraud where convenience stores will give you 50 cents on the dollar for your food stamps. Nevertheless it would be a start.

At a bare minimum, can we please just ban soda with food stamps? How is anyone other than a Coca-Cola lobbyist in favor of this shit?

i work in a warehouse not in a grocery store sadly.

I know that many poor people have absurd habits, though my bubble issue was that since I was known in the warehouse as "the guy who studied nutrition in college" the guys in the warehouse ask me for advice on how to eat on a warehouse workers salary.

My bubble is Gym bros warehouse workers and upper class rationalists which uhhh defintely hurt my perception of "normal poor people" since the gym bros and warehouse workers were my "normal people"

My fellow forklift-american, have you ever written up details of your bulking diet? I've just been eating the same meat, starch, brassica meal in some combination for the last 20 years. Tuna salad for lunch, granola and yogurt for breakfast.

Could use some shaking up and probably a lot of optimization

Sure thing.

The cheapest healthy food generally is in the "1 pound bags of dry stuff" isle. Lentils, Black beans, dried barley ect. Dried oats seeds and nuts are also really cheap per calorie. (except for like macademia nuts)

The basic theory is you copy dr greger's daily dozen adding 2 servings of Canned fish, (Mackerel, Salmon Sardines, Herring, Oysters, anchovies, trout being the best, though as far as price goes Mackerel/salmon/sardines are far cheaper than the others) and adding other foods to meet the calorie goals

5 servings of vegetables, 1 cruciferous 2 Dark leafy green (for some reason broccoli counts for either leafy/Cruciferous) and 2 other (peppers onions carrots ect) Serving size = 1/2 cup cooked for each type

4 servings of beans (1/4 cup dried = 1 serving) Including 1 serving of split peas (choline)

3 servings of whole grains (sources seem to differ on if you should count potatoes as a grain) serving size = 1 slice of bread, 1/2 a bagel or 1/4 cup dried grain, 1/2cup oats)

4 servings of fruit including 1 serving of berries serving size= 1/2cup berries 1 medium fruit (2 kiwis)

3 serving of seeds/nuts (serving size = 1 ounce) 2 of Sunflower seeds and/or Almonds for Vitamin E, then 1 of peanuts or walnuts or pine nuts for Omega 6s

3 servings of Flax or Chia seeds (serving size = 1 tablespoon ground, this is 2 ounces if you use a scale)

2 servings of fish (serving size = 1 small tin or in a normal size can 1/5th of the can, I usually round up to half a can a day)

1 serving of calcium rich food (Milk, Almond milk, unncessary with chia seeds)

in general more beans is probably best if you're lacking in calories as they are cheap and have decent protein.

Is tuna officially off the list for some reason?

I basically don't eat beans except the occasional lentil dish. Or fruit aside from raisins, most of the year (fairly short growing season for it here). Most of it seemed to just be sugar?

Is tuna officially off the list for some reason?

Mercury content. The other fish on the list are smaller and don't accumulate as much mercury.

It would solve some stuff.

They no longer pay enough to be worth their time- bigger ticket items got much more expensive (cars), and smaller-ticket items becoming much cheaper (entertainment and sex porn) at the same time.

The problem with that is that it's also good for society in general for them to work, and be properly rewarded for working with things they actually want; if you don't have that, the child-to-adult pipeline breaks down and... well, if you want to see the results of that, look out the window.

I suppose the car issue is a bit more complicated. I’m not so sure that cars are that much more expensive on average since back in the days, but either way the much more important aspect is that a combination of important social factors are disincentivizing teenage car use: car insurance rates becoming rather high for young men, the erosion of third places in social life, a general decline in community activity and the decline of malls in particular etc.

Also meritocratic competition for upper-middle class teens and young adults is far more intense than it was back in the day. Given that you don't need the money, working in a McJob when your competition are polishing their Ivy League applications with extracurriculars/building a list of public GitHub commits/using unpaid internships to network into cool jobs is loser behaviour.

If there was an expectation among elite colleges and suchlike that a well-rounded upper-middle class upbringing included paid work then this would be different, but I don't think it ever was. Paid holiday jobs were common for upper-middle class kids in my social circle back in the day because it was worth it - the amount you could earn in a McJob was a lot more than the amount of pocket money it was socially acceptable for an upper-middle class family to give a teenager. But the ones who spent their summers travelling weren't seeing as doing anything wrong, just as regrettably broke once they got to University.

It seems that sometime, somewhere society arrived at the unstated consensus that high schoolers and college students who perform low-wage jobs part-time or on a seasonal basis are the sort of people who grow up to do the same sort of jobs full-time.

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