Not really. It’s weird. You kinda have to be familiar with the ranch that raises the beef, and the ones that don’t use a ton of chemicals also don’t advertise to the public. It’s basically only available to small town folks who are “in the know” and boutique restaurants. This has been my experience, anyway. One of my exes comes from a cattle rancher family, so my sample size is tiny. Other people may have other experiences.
It depends on where it comes from in the US. You’re spot on when it comes to basically anything sold in a grocery store. But we have some great cattle that produces great beef. You have to go to high end butchers for it though. Or buy it directly from the ranchers and butcher it yourself.
I spent years installing hardwood floors. Now when I see them, all I can see are the flaws. It’s maddening.
Because you didn’t quote the whole thing.
Republicans, and apparently some Democrats, are still obsessed with limiting noncitizen voting, which is already illegal and exceedingly rare.
Murder is far more common than noncitizen voting, but I think we can agree that it would be a ridiculous waste of Congressional time to keep passing bills to make murder illegal.
You’ve also missed the point of the article, and really the point of the SAVE Act itself.
But the bill will no doubt make it more difficult for millions of people to vote, particularly some 69 million married women who have taken their spouse’s name and do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.
There are not 69 million noncitizens voting in elections. So even if you think we need a new law to crack down on noncitizen voting, the damage it causes far outweighs the problem it solves.
Holy shit man, so much. So so so much. Honestly I’m surprised I survived childhood.
We used to free climb cliffs. One of my step brothers took a pretty bad fall, about 60 feet down. He cartwheeled and banged against the cliff face, then landed in a sitting position. His right arm was torn open from armpit to elbow, and the bones were sticking out. Compound break. We had to walk him though about 2 miles of desert to get back to civilization and get help. He survived with no other major injuries, but that was a close one.
I used to go camping out in the desert by myself as a kid. From like 10 to 14 years old. I’d take a bow and arrows with me and just stay out there for a few days with my parents thinking I was spending a few days at a friends house. So much shit could’ve gone wrong, and sometimes it almost did.
Then there’s the normal kid shit like playing with fire and chemicals, almost blowing ourselves up or burning everything else down.
People wonder why I never had kids and all I can do is think about all the shit I got up to as a kid. I don’t need that kind of stress.
It’s not something I can always tell “instantly”, but lack of curiosity. I can overlook a lot of flaws, being a very flawed person myself, but someone who isn’t curious about the world around them is an absolute waste of time, and no amount of physical beauty can make up for it.
In middle school, one of my teachers rolled in the TV/VCR cart, popped in a tape, and left the room. It was homemade porn. He was fired, then later arrested on charges of statutory rape of a student. On my first day at that school (the first day it was even open), a kid got stabbed and another went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning and drug overdose. Also, one of the nighttime janitors stole a bunch of computers (Apple II-e’s and c’s) to try to sell them and got arrested. Another kid with long hair got his hair caught in a drill press in shop class, and it was pretty gory. It was unofficially known as “the last Indian scalped in Arizona”. That place was wild. It was shut down years ago due to lack of funding I think. It was on the rez, if that helps explain things.
In high school (not on the rez), we had standard stuff. At least one teacher that I know of was having sex with students, but I don’t think she ever got busted. Had a riot over the Rodney King stuff. School shootings weren’t in vogue yet, thankfully. We had one kid who all the teachers liked, straight A student, etc. He carjacked some lady at gunpoint one weekend, and the wheel came off while he was speeding away. The car flipped and he died. Oh, and my art teacher tried out for American Gladiators, but dislocated his shoulder during tryouts. Not really a scandal, but we all thought it was funny.
The servers in the local resurant here have a small tablet and can just look this up on the fly. No need to memorize anything. Not quite sure about the allergens, but that could easily be solved with software.
I can see how this could be a required skillset for a waiter in a super high-class restaurant where it would add to the prestige and professionalism, but in a average restuarant I’m totally fine with the waiter having a look at the tablet before answering a question about the menu.
At this point you could just have a tablet at the table and let the customer look it up themselves. In the mean time, for restaurants that don’t provide tablets to their waiters (which is most of them), this is a skill they need.
I guess being annoying is a skill. But I absolutly fucking hate when people do that. The job is to take the order, not suggest one.
Again, outside of super-fancy restaurants, I’d think that’s actually quite inappropriate.
This is specifically a waiters job. I love that you think you’ve never been sold anything at a restaurant. Those waiters did a good job.
The entire fake-friendly act with a fake-smile is a very annoying American thing. Your job is to take the order and bring the food. After that I really don’t want to hear anything else but “Enjoy your meal” and “Was everything alright?”. Talkative waiters are the worst.
Hate it all you want. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s part of the job for American waiters. They don’t have the luxury of not having to be friendly.
Mechanics don’t qualify as unskilled either, since they require education and certification. They fall under “skilled trades”. My brother is a mechanic (a master tech), and he’s done probably 10+ years of schooling, and has more certifications than I can recall. He’s one of like 3 people across 4 counties that is qualified to do everything he does.
But yeah, I don’t like the term “unskilled labor” in any context, even if it’s technically accurate in some cases. It feels dismissive, and many of the jobs it’s used to describe are the backbone of a functioning society. Honestly, I think we need to just do away with the value judgment terms like “skilled” versus “unskilled”, which only perpetuate the division of the working class.
What if we categorized all labor on a tier system with no implied superiority of one tier over another, just clarity on pathways to move from one tier to the next? Here’s a rough idea:
Tier 1: Specialized Service & Essential Labor
Tier 2: Technical & Trade-Based Roles
Tier 3: Associate Professional & Supervisory Roles
Tier 4: Degree-Dependent Professions
Tier 5: Highly Specialized & Advanced Credential Roles
A lot of places won’t even hire wait staff without prior waiting experience, so “entry level” still doesn’t cover it very well.
Maybe “specialized service work” or something.
There’s a lot more to it than “carrying a lot of plate at once”.
First, you have to memorize the menu backwards and forwards. Not just the items, but also the ingredients and the cooking techniques. A customer is allergic to everything in the nightshade family. Do you know what you can’t offer them? Better learn it. Someone has never eaten smoked chicken and is concerned with the pink color of the meat. You better know how to explain the smoking process and how it affects meat color. What is the temperature difference between medium and medium-rare? Are your oysters local? What’s in rice pilaf? Why is it called “she-crab soup” (it’s not why you think)? You have to know all of this and about a million other things, and be able to recall it on the spot without hesitation and with full confidence, every time someone asks.
Second, you have to be a salesman. You need to be able to know how to convince people to buy something that they may not have considered buying when they walked through the door, and you have to know that they will not only thank you for it in the end, but financially reward you for it.
Third, you have to be cool under pressure. You might think you are, but until you’ve worked a dinner rush, you have no fucking idea. It is non-stop, go go go, and you need to time everything just right. You’ll also be talked down to by customers, yelled at by cooks, burned by hot plates, sexually harassed by both customers and coworkers, while fielding complaints and mistakes, and you have to do all of this while looking like you’re having the time of your life. A sour expression or a snarky comment will get you pulled from the floor, and if you’re waiting tables in the US, there goes about 20% of this weeks income.
Fourth, you need to be able to get along with everyone, or at least be such a convincing liar that Ted Bundy would be impressed with your sociopathic people skills. I am not kidding. You have to be able to ingratiate yourself like family with the drunk college bro table just as well as the black church group table. If you aren’t a social chameleon, you need not apply.
I could go on and on, but I hope you get the idea. Waiting tables is not easy, it’s not “unskilled”, and it takes a very specific personality type to do it well. The job has a high turnover rate because most people can’t do it.
Both. It’s actually funny. Someone posted that image of alternatives to things like Reddit and Whatsapp and Google, etc, and it had Lemmy on it. I was at the point where I was getting sick of Reddit and had one account banned already. I joined Lemmy, and a few days later my other account got banned for up voting a comment that was just the gif of Luigi (the Nintendo character) smoking a cigarette. I had already decided I liked Lemmy more at that point, so whatever. The one thing that sucks is that I had my own little sub with a couple thousand members where I posted my writing, and people seemed to like it. I enjoyed sharing my stories with all those weirdos, and now I can’t.
I don’t know, but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue the way “cold turkey” does.
“Quitting cold turkey” - I never actually thought about this one, but apparently it’s directly related to addiction (which seems kind of obvious now that I do think about it). When you quit an addiction abruptly, you sometimes get that cold goosebump skin like a cold turkey.
The Wikipedia entry on that one is a fun read. I’ve heard most of these possible origins before, but nobody is actually sure of the true origin of the phrase. It’s kind of frustrating, but also pretty neat that we still use a phrase long after we forgot where it came from.
“Bless your heart” is such a sneaky Southern saying.
Interesting. I always thought it was because the rain was so heavy it drove all the strays to seek shelter, so people noticed a lot more cats and dogs in front of their homes. I think a grade school teacher told me that when I was a kid. I like the dead animal version better.
Moving abroad (I’m American). It was something I’d been planning for a few years anyway, and I’m super glad I got the ball rolling when I did. I’ve lived abroad before and loved it, and plan to make it permanent this time, which is a little intimidating, but also exciting.
They won’t stop unless someone makes them stop. That’s how movements like this work, every single time. They never wind down on their own. They have to constantly keep increasing the cruelty and extremism, or else their base will see weakness and abandon them. However bad you think it is now, it’s only going to get worse, unless someone puts an end to it. Historically, there are only a few ways a fascist movement has ever been stopped, and none of them are pretty.