I mean, yeah, I get the sentiment. But continuing to fight amongst ourselves and excluding potential intraclass members from the fight before we fight the ruling class is truly a self defeating tactic.
Look at the trump movement. There are so many potential comrades. His entire lie that got people on bird was “fighting the elite.” Too many people fell for that that could truly be on our side if we tried.
I dunno. I harbor those same feelings, so I’m not trying to high road you, but we were talking about class solidarity, I just feel like we need to extend that to the rest of the people in our class that we’ve been artificially pitted against and manipulated into fighting.
Yeah, what an insane framing for this story. One person is swayed and acts: “ISIS IS THE MOST TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED TERROR GROUP IN THE WORLD AND THEYRE GONNA TURN YOUR NEIGHBOR AGAINST THE JOYS OF CAPITALISM! THEIR TENDRILS OF TERROR HAVE TAPPED INTO TELEPHONES AND TELEVISIONS ACROSS THIS COUNTRY AND HAVE CERTAINLY TALKED TO YOUR CHILD ONLINE! YOU SHOULD BE TERRIFIED AND TITILLATED!”
We were using Google maps, driving in a production van. We were talking about the song “Gasolina” by daddy yankee. The person whose phone it was did not speak Spanish. Moments later we were being served suggestions to stop at “estaciones de gasolina”
In my experience, plenty of local shops delivered. And when Uber eats came about, they had to fire their own delivery people because so many would check Uber eats first. Not to mention the restaurants get less on the food, when small, locally owned restaurants are already surviving on razor thin margins.
So the idea for these services is basically “I don’t want to go to my local restaurant to pick up food, so I’m going to financially hurt them so a middleman can profit by forcing them to deliver to me (which plenty were doing already).”
My point is it’s such a uniquely stupid, uniquely American concept that hurts everyone involved, and makes a ton of money for one large company—who completely inserted themselves into it unnecessarily.
If the argument is whether or not there should be a moral dilemma when ordering from them, I say yes. We can’t absolve ourselves of our laziness on this one, I don’t think.
And the likening it to insurance companies was strictly for the purpose of a meaningless middleman who changed the structure of the system they exist in, in order to profit unnecessarily. I tried to make it clear the likeness stopped there, but maybe I wasn’t.
ETA: you also can’t discount the factor of newer restaurants trying to open, who now don’t even have the foothold of existing in-house delivery in order to wrest some of their own profits back from fuckin uber. For those previously existing businesses, of course some of their established customers would still use their delivery, but UE bit off a huge chunk of their business. But newer places? Forget it. They don’t stand a chance. It’s just a leech company looking at smaller businesses’ profits and saying, “hey, by name recognition alone, we could take a bunch of that by making an app and not even hiring employees but forcing people to use their own vehicles so we don’t have to pay for any of that shit.”
I a, bothered by the ratio of what I pay extra for third party services as compared to what the delivery person receives. You can’t possibly drive the price up further
The solution already existed. It’s called restaurants delivering their own food. But Ubereats shoehorned their way into the equation to be an unnecessary middleman in order to profit. Exploiting a whole new group of people in the process.
I absolutely share the moral dilemma with the concept of third party delivery. They’re just as useless as health insurance companies, so if you see the problem with the latter, you can def see the problem with the former. (Not to say they’re on the same scale or have similar histories or have equal amounts of blood on their hands, just that they’re similar in structure in a system that work(s)/(ed) fine without them.)
My cat has asthma. She also had a stroke around the same time we were trying to solve her asthma. Needless to say it was a stressful, stressful time. Not to mention expensive. I mean, how long has this been going on? And does that length of time coincide with a new apartment? Mold could be an issue, for sure. Fluticqsone is what ended up working for my cat, so I don’t have any med advice. But I will say when we were struggling to figure out the issue/meds that would work, they were trying to get me to pull the trigger on an airway wash, CT scan, and a whole list of other shit—totaling about $8k. But I had literally just spent $12k keeping her alive after the stroke. So, just saying. $1500 is still relatively cheap for ongoing medical issues. I hope you solve it quickly, I saw some other good advice here like the air purifier and switching litter, so you still have a lot of non-medical options.
Also food. Get them on a whole food diet (like Primal, small Batch, answers), completely eliminating kibble and lower grade wet foods that rely on fillers. Food is the best medicine, and it’s much cheaper than continuing vet visits. So that would be my best advice.
My cat does the cheek hold too! It’s so damn cute. The soft paw face grab, then she rubs herself on my chin and then grooms my beard all while purring louder than a lawnmower. All those idiots who say cats don’t care about you just don’t know cats at all. Or they’re just really shitty cat owners
Actually appears to be real. First posted six years ago.