craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

Getting cheap prison labor to work at your agribusiness, reframed as the milk of human kindness. I'm sure the inmates all sit down to a huge home cooked Italian meal every afternoon, just before they take their siesta.

"libations"

"coffee service"

global elite needs well trained servants

You are free.

hm

might as well put these here:

thrillist writer argues that the current wave of mason jar restaurants (sorry) are doomed. rising labor costs, absurd imitation and competition:

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/american-restaurant-industry-bubble-burst

(yeah idk maybe)

fast casual nu-cafeteria style places are pioneering a new job role: some chatty motherfucker to bother you because you can't just be patient when you see a line snaking out the fucking door

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/dining/restaurant-employees-fast-casual.html?_r=0

is there anything, like any single institution or concept or sphere of activity, that isn't showing signs of rot and collapse at this point?

spurs back five son

i think you hit submit before finishing that haiku

frankly i wanted the sentence committed to print and timestamped before the inevitable entropy set in there too

i read all three parts of that thrillist epic the other day and it was kinda interesting but it described so many boom/bust business scenarios of the past. this country is just a boom/bust kinda country. something takes off, others follow, and then oversaturation, and then the inevitable. there is only so much money that people can spend in pittsburgh on gourmet tacos.

the crazy reminder in that whole thing was that even really successful restaurants make very little money in comparison to other businesses. the margins are demented and the fact that people pour millions into places that are open for 2 or 3 years...i don't know how people do it.

the casual/take-out counter thing of the future that they talk about makes a lot of sense too. high volume. you can actually make a decent living doing it. as anyone who owns a busy lunch counter or diner will tell you. and you can still make good food. so much less stress. why did all these people decide that they had to build empires? ego demons.

restaurant business is always on the verge of a bust. I thought that was what they taught you one like the 1st day of restaurant school. "look to your left, look to your right. two of you will be out of business next year." but glad that guy got a shitload of words out of it.

kicking it off with a story about how the brave, inventive, caring entrepreneur looks at all his employees and sees nothing but negative equity - that's some classy, inventive genius right there. maybe the next time this unique, compassionate, inquisitive "guy who sells food other people make" will invent a kind of high velocity waterproof pizza, and he'll never have to work again?

the whole article is just "paying workers costs money". its like a trend piece based on some dude's friend of a friend who doesn't want to admit its his own fault he failed.

this is taking authenticity to new heights. made out of authentic Japanese afros!

TOKYO FRO
Tasty curls of crispy organic potatoes (with or without homegrown vegetable-fed) drizzled with a Japanese tomato sauce. Hip-hop is the most popular music of Japanese youth and has made the afro Tokyo's most popular hairstyle; to have Japanese hair fluffed into an afro costs over a thousand dollars at a trendy hair salon. The Tokyo Fro is made out of Japanese afros prepared in a way that is nutritious and delicious. Sustainability Fact: Five Trillion tons of protein-rich human hair are swept up off salon floors go to waste each year.
8

http://www.miyassushi.com/menu

does this go on that appropriation thread?...

JAPAFRICAN QUEEN
Eggplant, okra, goat cheese, apricots, avocado, pickled radish, chives, and Ethiopian berbere spice mix. 5 pieces
11

they call their desserts "happy endings". i don't know what thread that goes on.

wait do you eat hair often

A nation of people with pica and trichophagia

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/world/europe/france-small-farming-organic.html

If I had started a family or settled down with a partner sans kids, I'd totally be down for something like that, preferably on the coast.

this is a pretty great look at that: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240149/

just gonna not click on that but assume its that russell crowe movie where he plays hugh grant playing richard harris

that reminds me of this movie. wish i had it on dvd. so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOVgsOXJg_I

darragh it's a french movie from about 10 years ago about a parisian who tries her hand at farming. it's v good despite the premise!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/repair-cafe.html

If you’ve ever despaired of getting your vacuum cleaner fixed or thought that your broken lamp was a lost cause, there’s hope. A worldwide movement is trying to reform our throwaway approach to possessions.

The movement’s foundation is the Repair Cafe, a local meeting place that brings together people with broken items and repair coaches, or volunteers, with the expertise to fix them.

There used to be vacuum and general appliance repair and rebuild shops in my neighborhood, they closed. But I'm sure volunteers will be as good.

I've been to these repair cafes, and things do get fixed. Almost took my portable CD player in, thinking it probably had a bad belt, but when I tried it in anticipation of opening it up to verify a bad belt I found that it worked. Maybe it was just a bad power connection when it stopped working a couple years ago.

my friends have a bread maker machine and opened it up to replace a belt over the weekend

There used to be vacuum and general appliance repair and rebuild shops in my neighborhood, they closed. But I'm sure volunteers will be as good.

― slathered in cream and covered with stickers (silby), Wednesday, January 18, 2017 8:01 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i live in a neighborhood where there are still a ton of these little shops. it's nice. i hope they stick around for a while. my previous neighborhood had a few of them too but you could tell they were struggling

I liked to ogle the professional-looking gas ranges in the window of the appliance shop. RIP

there is a typewriter store here in town. their sign still has "adders" on it. and they ain't talking about snakes.

Behold "The Adder":
http://www.officemuseum.com/IMagesWWW/Adder_UK_1.jpg

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/310635/teres-cache-the-most-singular-and-sleek-coin-exper

or you could just throw your coins on the ground or into the nearest tip jar

but that wouldn't be a seamless coin experience

Is there a thread for linking terrible ideas on kickstarter/indiegogo? There are so many.

maybe Yancey can start one.

"Teres accommodates coins of various shapes and sizes from all around the world. "

so good

Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy - Richard E. Ocejo

How educated and culturally savvy young people are transforming traditionally low-status manual labor jobs into elite taste-making occupations

In today’s new economy—in which “good” jobs are typically knowledge or technology based—many well-educated and culturally savvy young men are instead choosing to pursue traditionally low-status manual labor occupations as careers. Masters of Craft looks at the renaissance of four such trades: bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering.

In this in-depth and engaging book, Richard Ocejo takes you into the lives and workplaces of these people to examine how they are transforming these once-undesirable jobs into “cool” and highly specialized upscale occupational niches—and in the process complicating our notions about upward and downward mobility through work. He shows how they find meaning in these jobs by enacting a set of “cultural repertoires,” which include technical skills based on a renewed sense of craft and craftsmanship and an ability to understand and communicate that knowledge to others, resulting in a new form of elite taste-making. Ocejo describes the paths people take to these jobs, how they learn their chosen trades, how they imbue their work practices with craftsmanship, and how they teach a sense of taste to their consumers.

Focusing on cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole-animal butcher shop workers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Masters of Craft provides new insights into the stratification of taste, gentrification, and the evolving labor market in today’s postindustrial city.

Were butchers ever really "low-status" jobs? Not counting Jurgis on the slaughterhouse assembly line, wasn't it always kind of a skilled and, comparatively, well-compensated occupation? Barbers, too, for that matter - not like they rolled in dough and ran the town but it's kind of a solid sole-proprietor mom-and-pop gig, secure a decent little livelihood, people did not cross to the other side of the street and hide their children's eyes when they saw a barber coming. Feel like there's a sloppy flattening-out of any social classes below those occupied by lawyers and tech entrepreneurs.

another book idea stolen from ILX

The romanticization of the blue-collar job

"bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering."

"how they are transforming these once-undesirable jobs into “cool”..."

not exactly making coal mining sexy. maybe nobody ever truly desired a job in a butcher shop but the rest are pretty normal occupations.

in other words, i agree with doctor casino. undesirable to dweebs who would have gone white collar ten years ago.

wait, are there hipster shoe shine stands in brooklyn? there must be.

coal mining has been devalued, romanticized, tokenized, and objectified in nearly every way by this point

are there hipsters who run around on the street with those little boxes and say "shine yer shoes, mister?" if not, there is work to be done.

kinda the best gig if you like being outdoors. plus, you could sell weed.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9a/76/61/9a76613f9c8374f78b9a55430f2f569b--cheap-designer-shoes-designer-shoes-online.jpg