Despite what I said in my post below, I’m always a bit shocked when I read comments that people make about low-wage workers, such as Dan in the comments section of this story.

(There is no reliable way to link to comments on Slate any longer. Another brilliant UI/UX “innovation.” The “share” button appears to allow it, but doesn’t actually function in any of the four browsers on two different OSes in which I tested it.)

So here’s a screenshot of one of his odious comments:

Not only is nearly everything in the comment casuistic or utterly fallacious, it is contemptible in that it presumes that social arrangements have to be this way.

They do not.

I’ve spent many years studying and learning about other economic arrangements throughout human history. Not that all of them were superior, but the market system as we think of it now is an anomaly. Pretending that society must be ordered just as it is now is completely ahistorical and is in no way supported by any evidence at all.

It is a convenient fantasy used to justify inequality and theft of labor from people like Jannette Navarro.

The universal basic income is the best solution to all this, by the way. As long as it’s not allowed to be hijacked by libertarians to destroy Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security.

And Dan is a putz scumbag.

One of the reasons I’ve only been lukewarm on fighting for higher wages in industries like fast food and manufacturing is it’s like fighting over who gets to sit on the sun deck on a sinking ship.

That is, those jobs are all going to go away. It would help people now, and that’s why I care at all. But it won’t help them for long, and the higher wages go in those fields the faster those jobs will disappear forever.

In 30-40 years, 95% of fast food jobs will be kaput.

"I Forgot You Were Here." Guardians of the Galaxy, Storytelling, & Associated Face Punches.

I can’t understand this. So many women are already the audience of these films. So many more would go if they weren’t belittled. Even in general, more moviegoers are women than men.

It’s bad business, and that’s what makes it puzzling. But business as I’ve noted is not just about profits, it’s also about power. This is another good example of that truth.

We made this tonight. It was very good.

We used chicken bouillon because it’s what we had on hand and we are not vegetarians. Also used onions instead of shallots.

One of the best new recipes we’ve tried lately.

One of the things that strikes me about the police having the vast arsenals of military-grade weaponry is that it is pretty unlikely that they have that much training on how to use it correctly or perhaps at all.

It’s just there to intimidate and to look impressive, and to satisfy authoritarian fantasies.

As a nation we have decided that the police have a job that is so dangerous (it isn’t) that they can do anything they want. It’s actually funny in a way, because all their violence and body armor and tanks just show that they are a bunch of wimps. Does a real man panic and put seven bullets in a boy because he doesn’t immediate respond to the officer’s command? Of course not.

Since I first wrote a draft of this post, there has been a whole spate of articles pointing out that the military actually has a better ops manual for how to treat protesters. That is perfectly correct. The Ferguson police are militarized, but only for show. They are not well-trained and certainly not well-intentioned.