I’ll share my experience regarding to a few choices quotes from the article.

Working as a senior quality and performance officer in a local council in the UK involved ‘pretending things are great to senior managers, and generally “feeding the beast” with meaningless numbers that give the illusion of control,’

My most recent job involved a bunch of auditing, mainly inventory. When you are tasked with finding errors and flaws, but are treated negatively when you present your findings, how does that make you value your work?

Management was relatively good at this job, but in my former one, I was treated poorly for sitting how we were operating wasnt working either as accurately or efficiently at it could. We were doing more work to deliver an inferior product. How to I feel I’m doing my best there?

Employed by a digital consultancy for a pharmaceutical company’s marketing department, he called his work ‘pure, unadulterated bullshit’, which ‘serves no purpose’.

I’ve been in various roles supporting pharma research for near 20 years now with a few companies in the data side of things. I mainly email results to people who only talk to me when there’s a problem. That’s somewhat fine, because I’m an introvert, but it doesn’t build a bond between me and the people I’m supporting, and if we only speak when you’re annoyed at me for sending you bad news when I’m just the messenger, or even more so if I find something more qualified people missed, it makes me feel like crap.

In my previous role, I would compile test results for lab inspections and get calls 6 or 12 months or more after sending the results from angry lab managers demanding I speak to their auditor about why they failed it to explain things they didn’t understand. Way to prove my work want even important enough to flip through when you got it.

Empirical data suggested that, in fact, relatively few people appear to consider their jobs as useless – leading to pushback against the real-life applicability of Graeber’s concept.

None of my jobs, from the one I have, well, had, my job lost the bid to renew our contract, to the ones I had as a kid were useless. People generally don’t pay for things they don’t need. But some people definitely made me feel useless about the work I did for them. When I was a teen in food service, people needed to eat, both quickly and safely, and I wanted them to have a nice night out. But most people won’t make you feel good for having that job. Now I turn stuff in to people I never see it great from it get to learn what happens from things I find, if the company makes changes based on my data, or if it just gets deleted. I’ll never know.

‘I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting,’ he said. ‘The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point.’

Looking at jobs now, I feel the bar is very high in minimum qualifications and mandatory skills for roles that I feel I would have been able to successfully do years ago in my career that I don’t even begin to “qualify” to do now.

Jobs way harder than the just few I have are offering less than I made 10 years ago at places that treated me poorly back then.

I’ve been hired where they demanded I know skills X, Y, and Z, but the only thing they ever asked me to do was some intermediate X, some noob Y, and no Z ever came up because the boss doesn’t understand half of it anyway and showing them how actually using Z can save time and money, but switching stuff over to that would take too much time or whatever.

I’ve always loved my jobs in the sense of what the duties were, or else I wouldn’t do it, but seldom have I felt value in my job in the sense of doing that for the people I was doing it for.

Very valid points. I forgot WordPad existed and I use Notepad way more than I’ve ever used WordPad. But many people still havent really used computers much in depth beyond specific things they’ve been shown.

I know I could just use Google Docs or throw LibreOffice in there, but many people now in retirement age have still managed to dodge learning much about computers.

If you deliver a new computer that can’t type a letter, send an email, and play YouTube out of the box, that seems like a fail. And I feel many that won’t know what do do without something like WordPad also may not have an Internet connection, nor should they have to if they just need a presentable looking doc.

To be fair, that policy has worked for numerous people through history! 😓

Doesn’t have to this time though!

Agreed. If there’s evidence you did something, there’s only yourself to blame. I don’t care if it’s Trump, Hunter, the Sacklers, whoever. Own up to what you did. And if you’re ok with someone hurting people or try to cover it up, you aren’t really any better

For all the cries about it being political persecution, I haven’t seen anyone prove any of the evidence being used against him is false. Courts don’t take up cases without merit. The actual abuse going on is a minority of politicians trying to suppress the will of the American people.

These crybabies won’t do anything to start a civil war. They’re spread too far apart, they don’t have enough of their own resources, and if somehow they were able to break off some piece of the country, who is going to be trade or political partners with a cesspool that is still surrounded by a super power and it’s friendly neighbors? This isn’t the 1770s or the 1860s. They have no powerful support abroad. This isn’t a group of people with plans. Just a bunch of scammers pulling a long con on rubes.

Ignore them. Let them eat themselves. Let them keep telling us who they really are. From watching the debates, half of them seem tired of this BS themselves.

I don’t totally blame them because money is needed for research. But if pricing control is done across the board, nobody in particular is being targeted. It doesn’t seem anticompetitive if they are all subject to the same rules. Society needs medicine, but it needs to be affordable. Is it really a cure if people can’t afford it?

A single payer system seems the only way to leverage prices to a point where they are available to everyone. There will be bullying by business, but it’s what we need. If they slow walk something, another company can beat them to it. Let them be merciless to themselves.

That’s really what I look forward to most is an infinite flavor palette. My family hunts, do we’ve tried quite a number of things over the year. An endless availability of passable antelope or cougar meat that didn’t hurt living things would be amazing to me.

I haven’t had the chance to try fake fish yet.

Maybe they should go for something a little more exotic, say ostrich or crocodile. Close to flavors people know, but they’d go into with a more open mind. Maybe too novel though to be a lasting success though. I’ll leave that to the marketing people.

To get right to the meat of the article:

New School Foods’ process starts by creating a biopolymer gel. This homogeneous hydrogel is placed in contact with a freezing surface and the gel is directionally frozen, resulting in the formation of thousands of directionally aligned, microscopic ice crystals traveling away from the freezing source.

Once the gel is fully frozen, the ice is removed, leaving behind empty channels. These channels act as a scaffold; the channels are filled with proteins and other ingredients (color, flavors, fats) to form the muscle fibers.

This was pretty close to my guess from looking at the pic of the the raw product. It looked like if you’d flatten out a swirled soft serve ice cream cone. The lattice structure should create a nice flakey texture.

Flavor is always the hard part, but I’m not looking for 1:1 replacement there. Actual recipes can always help shape the flavor to your palette. Salmon is pretty distinct, so maybe a generic white fish may work better.

There are always negative comments about it being processed food, but I still think the ecological benefits will outweigh that. Adapting our cooking can offset the near term nutritional issues. Use less meat, real or synthetic. We might not be able to keep our current habits if we want things to improve. We can start compromising now, or sacrifice later. That’s my feeling about it at least.

I hear you, but Joe is kinda boring as a president. What has he done even remotely worth hurting him for? If we were hypothetically saying “oh I’m dying, I’m going to get Reagan and GB for what they guy away with in the Iran Contra,” maaaaybe, but the only guy I can think of that has it coming any less than Joe is Carter.

I can’t imagine being 75 and deciding that the best use of my final years is to try to assassinate a moderate president. Even if you do feel the country is going to hell, you’ve got a decade left tops.

He let himself give into selfishness and anger instead of spending time with all that family, sitting on a patio chair with his dog and an icy Arnold Palmer waving to neighbors, and enjoying old man hobbies. What a frickin tragedy…

I want to know about serious issues with this country, but screw extremist media big time. News isn’t entertainment. It needs to be real or this crap happens.

Very true, I should have specified places we’d generally consider world powers. If we’re doing apples to apples comparisons between the US and Niger or Honduras, the battle would already be lost.

Too many people seem to want to “win” at any cost. What they feel they’re winning, I couldn’t begin to guess. The rich jerks are still going to be rich, the poor ones poor, and you all get to live in a fascist hell hole.

And it’s not like that type isn’t known for turning on their own team too, so in the end, almost everyone loses. What percentage benefited from any of these authoritarian regimes? If it was ever over 10% is be pretty surprised. It’s a pyramid scheme that takes lives.

Serious question, would Jan 6 be allowed to happen anywhere else?

I’m glad people, even if only private citizens so far, have been charged and convicted, even if it’s just a slap on the wrist. I’m hoping very much that at least some officials are held responsible as well. We can’t expect any leader, any public servant, any police officer, or even any citizen to redirect the law if we don’t hold people equally accountable.

We also need to announce to the world that we won’t tolerate certain behavior. We can’t go around acting terrible and get upset when all of a sudden someone decides to partner with Russia or China instead. If we want to be a respected partner with other countries, we have to respect ourselves and hold everyone accountable equally.

Leftist critics of other leftists always sound so unhappy. The world will not wake up magically in a leftist utopia tomorrow (no one could agree on what that would be anyway) because about a third or so of the population would rather die than see things change. Progress happens no matter what, but a lot of people have to be brought forward kicking and screaming.

A lot of progress made in the last few decades is being violently taken back by an unprecedentedly authoritarian right around the world. People are losing rights they may have had their whole lives. Priorities are going to shift as things change in the world.

But you don’t have to look far too see people haven’t stopped with anti-advertising and anti-consumerism. How many communities in All are about privacy, reducing waste, FOSS, anti-capitalism, pro-labor, etc? Everyone all month has been mad at Google for wantng to prevent adblocking on YouTube and the Web. You will find no shortage if people hating on Nestle, Unilever, or oil companies.

The last few years have been dominated by people taking back rights won by feminists, LGBT, voters, and evironmentalists. Most people in there 30s and younger have grown up with a worldview offering little hope. That is a very large group of people with bigger problems than ads and discretionary spending.

Advertising catering to Product X will make your life feel better even if it really isn’t better is going to at times be hard to resist. People are allowed to forget their problems for a little while though. If Matel sells some more Barbies to parents enjoying a pro-feminist message that are given to kids without mandatory gender equality playtime guidelines, people will still be fine. Right now there may be bigger fish to fry, while the world still has fish.

Didn’t go into this intending to vent so much. It just seems so many leftists btag other leftists as much as the auth right does anymore. Be proud of what ever accomplished and work on keeping those victories while still working on new ones, even if they’re small or don’t go far enough.

I’ve been using this one since 2016.