hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult.
That's very similar macros to the Cajun dietary staple(rice and gravy is slightly more nutritious, but it's close enough for government work). If you go to southern Louisiana you will see many very fat people whose diet consists largely of rice covered in stock and roux with some meat, which costs approximately as much as rice flavoured with butter and has a very similar nutrient profile.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Two of those cases are yes, waste/misuse. I would call the obese person on foodstamps a borderline example; I've already said elsewhere in the thread that the benefit amount should be reduced for adults, but it's not like you can(legally)redirect foodstamp spending to something else if it's more than you need.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
based his research on data that differentiated religious giving from non-religious giving, and included religious giving in his calculation.
Does religious giving change the calculus much? The salvation army is technically a church. Planned parenthood is technically a charity but seems to do very little actual charity and lots of advocacy. I'd suspect that the 'only nonreligious charities should count as charitable giving' thing is mostly to make liberals look good; plenty of churches have charitable arms, and plenty of liberal charities don't do very much actual helping the poor. It probably evens out in the wash.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Use random appointments to congress. Most people aren't deranged ideologues; deranged in other ways, yes, but not particularly ideological. We can replace our problems with different ones.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Didn't the Qing make a law that reporting a crime to the police, where the accused was found not guilty, would be punished more severely than the actual crime, so as to discourage undue involvement of the legal system in people's affairs? Or am I remembering wrong?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The senate has a different dynamic driven by very, very long terms of service. Eventually, yes, they'll yeet the filibuster in a fit of partisan shitflinging- but there just hasn't been enough turnover. I suspect the democrat optimates will come to regret it, but eh, it's gonna go.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
? My understanding is that the lumberjack-type gay men, while outnumbered, are not the same thing as AGP transgenders.
There's several takes on what exactly AGP are, but the lumberjack-type bearded gays are not one of them. I'm personally partial to the idea that they're mostly newish, a product of endocrine disruptors, and historical examples of AGP like Elegabalus are severe mental illness, with things like the hijras and other third genders being something totally different. But there's another school of thought which merges the phenomena.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
What cases are you discussing, specifically?
Now, to be clear- I am perfectly willing to admit that there is lots of waste, fraud, and misuse involved in food stamps. I also totally understand being irritated about food stamps recipients eating better than you do. I simply follow-up with the acknowledgement that childhood malnutrition is a problem that causes IQ decline(much more expensive than some Dino nuggets and the like) and that as inefficient as it is, food stamps does address the problem as well as can be done.
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
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.
hydroacetylene
20hr 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
20hr ago
Define 'upper class'. The US has plenty of full time housekeepers but only literal billionaires have personal chefs.
hydroacetylene
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
Well yes, it skews up the percentage of income religious people donate. I'm not convinced it changes the calculus of what percent of donations are actually used for charity.
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