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This is NOT about cooking at home or historical influences on cuisines; it's about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture.

White people are nearly 50% more likely than people of color (POC) to own a business in the state of Oregon. Ownership builds wealth in ways that employment does not. The racial wealth and small business lending gaps in the US are pronounced, which allows white folks to open new businesses more easily. These white-owned businesses hamper the ability for POC to run successful businesses of their own (cooking their own cuisines) by either consuming market share with their attempt at authenticity or by modifying foods to market to white palates. Their success further perpetuates the problems stated above. It's a cyclical pattern that will require intentional behavior change to break. If you've come here in anger, please read at least a couple of these articles before continuing to the list on the next tab below.

In the meat of the spreadsheet at the "Restaurants List" tab, we have

"Many people have asked for us to list alternatives owned by people of color (POC), so we have updated the list to include the nearest (in cuisine and distance) POC-owned restaurant to each of the appropriative restaurants. If you look at these two lists and you have visited more of the red than the green, please ask yourself why.

Note that the backgrounds of the people of color who own the listed restaurants do not necessarily match the cuisine they serve. We could have limited the list to only people selling their own cuisine, but we made the decision not to in order to make a point. If this seems like hypocrisy from the standards set for white-owned restaurants, you haven't understood why white appropriation is a problem.

White business owners wield economic and ""cultural capital"" advantages over POC business owners, so they are ""punching down"" by appropriating cuisines from people who are disadvantaged in comparison. A Vietnamese person opening a Japanese restaurant does not have the same impact as a non-Hispanic white person opening a Mexican restaurant. Healthy cultural exchange can and does occur when the playing field is relatively even, but appropriation is a demonstration of power that perpetuates inequities.

I think this double standard speaks for itself despite the rationalizing of the last paragraph. But is it real or a clever hoax?

I'm not doing this up as a proper story right at the moment because I'm not feeling especially professional and I prefer to be when talking about site business as a staff member. That said, this needs some attention.

A combination of personal issues and burnout have caused staffing on the site to drop annoyingly low. Here's the current shortfalls in staffing:

• Half a dozen or so Editors. We could use ten. Preferably folks not on a GMT or east coast time daylight hours schedule.
• Two perl coders. NCommander is still around doing systems and infrastructure but it's just me and paulej72 writing perl for the site currently. We realistically need four to six.
• Two board members. We need a bare minimum of three to prevent tie votes.
• Zero treasurers. The two board members have been covering this but we need someone who's good with finances and can keep track of everything officially.
• Zero artsy types. All UI design choices and graphics are currently done by us code monkeys, this is far from ideal.
• Zero wiki admins. We usually have to figure out who even has emergency backup access to it when something needs administratively done.

Again, this is not an official call to arms. This is me being annoyed at the state of things and venting. Board and treasurer decisions will be made by the board and it's not even my place to ask for recruits, so I'm not. That said, if you want to volunteer for any staff position, we're always open.

Best way to get in touch is to contact us on IRC (look over to the left) but don't expect an immediate response because we're often busy doing Life Stuff. Email works as well. themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org or any other staff member will get you forwarded to someone happy to help you on your way to exploitation.

Guys, I lurve arguing with you lot dearly but when I look at my message box and it says I have 35 messages from comment replies after taking a two hour nap, that's just too many to bother with. Anything over 20 and I'm probably just going to skip replying to any of them. My apologies.

Mayor Catherine Pugh vetoed legislation Friday that would have raised the minimum wage in Baltimore [state of Maryland, US] to $15 by 2022, leaving the measure's future in question.

The council — which next meets on April 3 — would need 12 of its 15 members to vote to overturn the veto. On Friday, the 12-member coalition that originally backed the higher wage began to disband.

Councilman Edward Reisinger of South Baltimore said although he voted to pass the bill, he would not support a veto override. Over the next seven years, the Pugh administration estimated the bill would cost the city $116 million, including the expense of paying city workers a higher minimum wage.

Reisinger said the cost is especially concerning given the city's outstanding fiscal challenges: a $20 million deficit, a $130 million schools budget shortfall and new spending obligations associated with the U.S. Department of Justice's police consent decree.

"The mayor has some very persuasive arguments," Reisinger said. "Baltimore City doesn't have a money tree."

Pugh also was concerned that requiring employers in the city to pay a higher minimum wage could send them fleeing to surrounding jurisdictions. That would worsen unemployment in the city and make it harder for low-skilled workers and ex-offenders to get jobs, she said.

She emphasized that Baltimore's minimum wage is increasing along side the rate statewide. The rate in Maryland will rise to $9.25 on July 1 and $10.10 a year later.

So here we have all the usual ugly concerns about minimum wage laws on display. It encourages employers to move, it makes more poor people unemployed, and it significant drives up costs for employers who don't or can't move (here, the City of Baltimore - $116 million in additional cost on top of a budget of $2.64 billion).

Lots of hedge fund managers and silicon valley billionaires have decided they've been fucking up the country so bad that they need to prepare for it all to go to shit. Every time you hear about a rich guy buying property in NZ, its because they are doomsday prepping.

Those assholes ought to be working on the problem of helping to build new institutions to replace those being torn down by the social isolation and paranoia that their creations are inducing. Instead they are running off to the other side of the planet.

For all of the shit he did, Carnegie built 3,000 public libraries. What has Thiel ever done? Create the fucking eye-of-sauron Palantir, try to stake freedom of the press for a personal vendetta, and oh yeah, help president fugazi dishonor the leading symbol of freedom and democracy on the planet.

Fuck that guy.

While it's probably accurate as concerns Thiel's intentions, there is this blaming as well. So what new institutions need to be built? And why do we want rich people doing that, if they're causing so many problems in the first place?

Let's Godwin this argument a little. So let's say you're a Jew and you have all these crazy Nazis in your society howling about how you're causing all these problems. Even if you wholly agree, what sense would it make in sticking around after they get power? The responsible Jew will be treated exactly like the irresponsible one every time there's a problem and someone needs to be blamed. And with a group as incompetent as crazy Nazis, you know there's going to be plenty of problems, real and imagined, needing plenty of scapegoats, unfortunately for the Jews, it's going to be the Jews.

The universal smart move here is to run before the crazies start killing Jews indiscriminately. There's no reason for Jews or society to even care what Nazis claim responsible Jewish behavior is. It's just propaganda spin.

Same goes for the rich. For example, when the crazies took over and created the USSR, they started blaming all their problems on scapegoats like Kulaks, counter-revolutionaries, etc. Anyone who had been even moderately well-off before the revolution was now the enemy and blamed for everything that went wrong. If you were lucky, that just meant a little prison time and permanent pariah status.

Too many people have learned from the past. When the people in power speak of the problems that the rich as a group didn't cause (for example, someone got rich off of the wars of the past couple of decades, but it wasn't every rich person!) and the responsibilities they're sure that they can't shoulder (you need to make a bunch of vaguely defined, but no doubt enormously expensive "new institutions" to fix the problems you didn't cause), then why shouldn't they eye the escape routes?

I think this sort of ruthless, ideological scapegoating is precisely why US politics is so divisive today. It's a bunch of crazy, bad faith actors who are so far out there that a sane person wouldn't want to compromise with them on anything.

Found a story about my... well not my home town but the town you have to go to from my home town for anything besides gas, beer, or religion. Turns out Nick Cage's rental car broke down there and he had a thing or two to say about the place. See, that's what I mean when I say to folks who only see what my views on politics and other big shat are, you don't know me at all.

This kind of shit is just another day in a red state. If someone comes up and says you owe them something that you don't, you laugh and punch them in the face but if you see someone in actual need, you help your fellow man because it's the right thing to do and because you might need a hand too some time. In a place where most everybody grows up poor and having to work their ass off to get by, you help each other because it's just what you do. Nick could have broke down a half mile from where he did over by the meth dealers and he still would have gotten the same reception.

If there was any sort of "we're all in this together" feeling, it would help, but there isn't.

There isn't such a feeling because we aren't all in this together.

Why does US labor have to take a haircut while the 1% get lots more money?

Because you're competing with several billion people who will work for a lot less while the capital of those rich people does not. There's no reason to expect this to be fair. But at the same time, it's not unfair to expect you to adapt to the situation rather than make it worse.

For example, let's say you're the only plumber in a town. You are a paragon of virtue and don't abuse your effective monopoly position and offer prices comparable to neighboring towns which do have more than one plumber.

Then one day, five new plumbers move in and immediately start offering lower and lower prices. It's not fair to you. Nobody else in town has this sort of competition going on. You are losing wealth relative to everyone else who isn't a plumber through no fault of your own. Income inequality increases as a result with six poor plumbers.

At this point, you have a number of choices, all of them bad to some degree. For example, you can attempt to tough it out to be one of the last ones standing, knowing that you'll still have a greatly reduced market share and profit as a result. You can move to a new town and be a plumber there. Or you can abandon plumbing as a career altogether. Maybe you'll try to take a chance and create a new plumbing service that the other plumbers can't match (maybe it'll pay off, maybe it won't)..

There are all ways you could attempt to better your situation. But you could also choose to make the situation worse such as developing a drinking habit. I believe this is going on at a vast scale in the developed world. There's all this entitled talk about how the rich people owe us a good salary and such. Well, they owe the Indians and the Chinese good salaries too. And good salaries there are much less than good salaries in the developed world.

Bottom line is that developed world labor has to be able to offer something that developing world labor can't offer (and it can be as simple as access to a nice market, though the developing world has nice markets too) or it won't get the work for the pay that is desired. Developed world labor just doesn't have pricing power and won't get it until there is near parity with the developing world (which is improving at a good rate) or until some remarkable advantage is created (I'm not seeing the remarkable advantages in the long run).

You want what rich people have, but you don't have leverage to get it. You're not going to make your situation any better by making it harder for rich people to give you what you want.

I know a lot of you are disappointed I didn't go ahead and finish the debate on the MIT petition story. Tough.

Most days it's fun smacking down the willfully ignorant but sometimes outside forces conspire to make me too tired to bother. I just delete all the messages, pop open a beer, and watch some TV.

This was one of those times and you're just going to have to live with it.