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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I'm not sure the value of this as a top level comment, but I'll write it because it struck me as odd. I live in California. I stopped by Grocery Outlet today after work to pick an ingredient up for dinner and some bleach for cleaning. I walk up to the checkout line with my $10 worth of groceries, and in front of me are two groups. The first group currently checking out are a couple, both guant, face sores, interesting clothing/jewelry/tattoo choices, and are buying food and water. I presume they are either living on the street or out of their vehicle and do drugs pretty consistently. They have a whole load of groceries and what caught my attention was the lady who requested the cashier to separate the mushroom mind focus and energy https://lairdsuperfood.com/products/focus-and-memory-mushrooms bags of snacks she was purchasing because if they weren't EBT eligible she would pay for them on her own. Luckily as I was to find out, they were, and she went on to make a separate purchase of those with her handy card.

Next up in the grocery line, we have a black lady, also buying significant amounts of groceries, and frankly she was a good 300 pounds #healthyatanysize. Luckily she had her handy card too.

Now I make decent money, but I sure feel like a shmuck when I'm the only one paying for my food in the grocery store line. Not sure what to add to this, I see the proposals to shrink EBT just to the essentials, only for people to be shocked as that would require people to make their food like me! Maybe this is what I get for living in California, but frankly, I think EBT and systems like it are just as prevalent elsewhere. It just strikes me as odd that I'm a professional, in a good industry, and I would question spending $50 for a couple of tiny packets of specialty mushroom superfood, but two methheads get to have it as they wish. Maybe I'm out of touch with the plights of the poor, but idk, doesn't seem half bad, I've car camped in the past before.

To be fair with the lady with the kid behind me, I did not stick around long enough to see if she too had her handy card with her, but I feel somewhat saddened that I am missing out on this club.

It reminds me in college, I had some hippy friends, they showed me the beauty of the college food kitchen. Just walk in, grab food, no worries. Oh yeah and btw since you're in a full college courseload, and your income is below the poverty threshold, despite being a dependent, you can apply to EBT, unemployment benefits, free health insurance, etc. Idk, I didn't partake, despite having years of less than stellar income and a strict budget. Maybe I should have? Is that just like any other tax loophole? What's the difference between saving money via that, and wash selling bitcoin shares to offset other investment income or other such schemes which I don't necessarily disagree with morally.

The other thing I think of when I roll this over in my head, is the stratification of grocery stores as a class separator. The last few years my closest store has been Ralphs. For those of you who don't know, Ralphs is slightly more high-end than Grocery Outlet which is more bottom of the barrel. Shoppers of Ralphs are probably not going to encounter EBT users at the same rates in areas with many grocery stores. Think Target vs. Walmart. The effect I feel like this has is for those contributing more to the tax pool, they encounter the absurdity of the purchasers less, and therefore the blob of money dedicated to it is further from the mind.

Every government program expands until it all is essentially 70% fraud by most people’s understanding of what the program was suppose to fix.

Wait until you hear about military disability payments. Those have essentially become a pension scheme for military personal who are perfectly healthy. Programs like that are virtually impossible to get rid of because which politician wants to fight the motte of taking care of disabled veterans. They have expanded to basically anyone who was in the military even if it was a desks job or a chef and if you don’t sign up for disability you’re basically turning down part of your compensation. If we want higher military pay we should vote for it.

I think things like this expand because the most morality lacking person figures out how to hack the system and then it slowly spreads to people less evil until even the good people hack the system because 70% are doing it so it’s just normalized.

I’ve met 25 year old girls with EBT cards. EBT was never meant for them. Or the drug users or probably 75% of current recipients. It’s meant for the person who can’t find a job because the largest employer in town shutdown, the single mom whose husband became an alcoholic and left her, the person with a health issue etc.

Every government program expands until it all is essentially 70% fraud by most people’s understanding of what the program was suppose to fix.

Technophiles like to talk about guaranteed minimum income when the robots inevitably take all our jobs. I wonder if the process won't be more gradual. Disability and unemployment schemes expanding until they encompass basically everyone. The more people who lie in order to access the schemes, the less taboo there is for everyone else.

The only thing that seems to be stopping it is the status hit that people take from being unemployed. As much as I criticise building an identity around work, at least those people tend not to cheat the welfare system.

Disability and unemployment schemes expanding until they encompass basically everyone.

Richard Hanania pointed out that, according to certain Supreme Court rulings, a majority of Americans could already be considered disabled. And this isn't me doing the "haha Americans are fat" thing: the Court was categorising any American who requires the use of glasses as disabled (i.e. 160 million Americans, or 57% of the population at the time of the ruling). And that's in addition to all those who are amputees, wheelchair-bound etc.

Being disabled per the ADA is a low bar because it doesn't get you much, just the right to a reasonable accommodation. There's a huge jump from that to being disabled as far as per the Social Security Administration, which if you're over 50 means you physically can't do any job you've done in the past 20 years (or have the skills to do) and if you're under 50 means you can't work, period. They're also different in that under the ADA the cost is trivial and born by the employer, whereas under Social Security the cost is substantial and is born by the Federal government. Few people under 50 qualify as disabled, even among those who think they're disabled.

the Court was categorising any American who requires the use of glasses as disabled

The article appears to say the opposite of that.

In subsequent years, what [the ADA's definition of disability] meant would be fought out in court. Unlike what happened in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, however, the judicial branch behaved somewhat reasonably. The case of Sutton v. United Air Lines, Inc. was decided by the Supreme Court in 1999. A pair of twin sisters both applied to be pilots, but were told that they did not meet the standard of having uncorrected 20/100 vision or better. They sued, saying that they were being discriminated against. The Supreme Court ruled that the sisters were not actually disabled, because they had a condition that could be corrected—in this case by using glasses or contact lenses.

Crucially for its decision, the Court pointed to a Congressional finding included in the ADA that approximately 43 million Americans suffered from a disability. If the justices adopted the definition of disability urged by the plaintiffs in Sutton, it would include, among others, everyone who needed glasses. That would mean that over 160 million Americans were disabled. The original Congressional finding, however, arguably put a much smaller numerical limit on how many people were protected under the ADA.

Though Congress then effectively overruled that decision.

Later on:

Unfortunately, Congress did not like the decisions in Sutton and Toyota, and overrode them in The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008. In determining who is disabled, the law now says institutions cannot consider mitigating measures that one might take. So this counts not only people who are in wheelchairs, but also alcoholics, sufferers of just about any recognized mental condition, and yes, those who need glasses. Congress even struck from the record the finding of 43 million Americans being disabled in 1990, on the grounds that it was too limiting. No numerical benchmark was set, which meant that Congress was implicitly endorsing the Supreme Court’s counterfactual in Sutton in which a majority of the country might be considered disabled.

I misspoke, it would be more accurate to say that Congress considers a majority of Americans disabled.

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