• 3 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Tipping culture in the U.S. is fucked. Who does it benefit most? The employers who are able to underpay their workers. (Even minimum wage these days is horrifically low.)

    The companies are able to externalize the wages they should be paying to their customers, who really pay huge portions of the employees’ “wage”. (E.g. I’m a gig worker doing deliveries, and more than HALF my pay comes from tips.)

    If you don’t tip or tip very low, you’re using the employer’s negligence as an excuse not to pay the service workers a living wage. For this reason, when considering engaging with the service industry, you should assume you will pay a healthy tip, unless the service worker truly and massively drops the ball. If you can’t afford a healthy (20%) tip, then you can’t actually afford the service.








  • Even when you CAN do this, it’s usually because the employees are either kind enough or inattentive enough to let you do this. And if you are clearly unhoused or poor, your chances of being able to do this are much, much lower than if you can fit in in a middle class white area. (Restaurants with predominantly poor clientele or many homeless people nearby tend to be much stricter about this.)







  • I believe both of these questions have been thoroughly answered by the scientific community.

    You’re right that meat is more nutrient dense than plants. But if we were to replace meat production with crop production for human consumption at scale, we would be averaging far more (I think on the order of 10x) human calories per acre.

    When you replace a beef farm with vegan food production, you’re not just planting crops on the beef farm. Each of those cows eats for years–crops that humans generally wouldn’t eat grown on other farms specifically as livestock feed. You need much, much more land and resources to produce 100 calories of meat than you do to produce 100 calories of vegetables.



  • Factory farming IS killing for pleasure.

    Livestock animals are killed for their meat. Something close to 80 billion mostly chickens, pigs, and cows, all of whom have been shown in lab experiments to be surprisingly aware, intelligent, and social. The vast majority of these animals also spend most of their lives in a living hell.

    Why are they killed? It is not because it is nutritionally necessary to do so. It would be vastly more efficient to use land and resources to grow crops for human consumption than for livestock and their feed. Doing so would vastly increase the amount of available food supply, drastically reduce emissions, and reduce the suffering of hundreds of billions of living, feeling creatures (trillions over just the next 15-20 years).

    They are killed because humans have a gustatory and cultural preference to eat meat. Although meat is often healthy, western diets especially often over-include it, and meat is not nutritionally essential for health.

    I am not advocating for literally all human beings to become vegetarian or vegan with no exceptions ever. In fact, the use of some amount of livestock is necessary for maximally sustainable food systems. However, we could drastically (something around 95% globally, maybe more) reduce the amount of meat we consume and ensure that livestock are treated humanely, and it would be objectively better in the long run for humanity and for the planet.