#also this recipe needs 4 fucking eggs who can spare that many eggs!!!

[catfishofoldin99colours]

'easy chocolate cake recipe!' and the ingredients list is more than 10 things

[pinelife3]

Businesses I Worry About

When thinking of get rich quick schemes, good ideas might include:

Dropshipping 

Chill hop radio streams on YouTube (there has to be some money to be made, right?)

Automating the set-up of Wordpress sites (actually cool themes, basic pages, get rid of shitty blog post format so a business can use it, etc.) and charge ~$20/site

ATM skimmers 

Buy the domain www.jetstor.com and make it look exactly like JetStar’s site. Sell fake plane tickets. Use elaborate VPNs and darkweb security stuff to avoid detection. Once the scam ceases to be profitable repeat with virgon.com and any other business where a user might mistype the website’s URL. I’d suggest this scam works best for businesses with a ‘u’, ‘i’ and/or ‘o’ in the name as these three letters sit beside each other on the keyboard (facilitating fat-fingered typos) and also people tend to pay less attention to vowels 

Not high at the top of anyone’s list: opening a restaurant.

You may not think this wandering through Chinatown, perhaps on account of the the hand-written BYO WINE ONLY signs or perhaps because of the waiters killing fish in the alleys*, but the choice to open a restaurant is indicative of the kind of pure human energy which has nothing to do with wanting to get rich. 

(*I swear they do this at New Kum Den - when someone chooses one of the depressed barramundi from the tank, they fish it out, put it in a bucket and then sneak off to kill it in the alley so the kitchen doesn’t get all fish’d up.)

Just think of everything that could go wrong:

Ruinous upfront and ongoing costs

Unfair reviews

Unreliable twenty-something staff

Think about how much chairs and plates and mops and cutesy pot plants and signs cost. How many tea towels do you need? How many forks? Think about how hard it must be to find a full staff of people you trust. Think about opening for the first day and no one buying anything. Same deal on the second day. Your vegetables start to go bad in the fridge. Did you make a mistake?

This is basically my opinion on restaurants: they are risky investments, shouldered by the courageous so that the whole community has places to go where they can eat delicious ramen or dumplings or fried chicken with blue cheese sauce. With that in mind, why would anyone risk it all to open the establishment pictured below?

Falafel Place opened on Smith Street around 6 months ago. As you can see, it is not stylish - that’s why they called it Falafel Place rather than Palace. It already looks tired and it just opened. It doesn’t beckon. It doesn’t repel. It just exists (for now).

The Smith Street area is already home to many kebab/Lebanese cheap eats joints:

The only angle I can see that Falafel Place may have is that they specialise in vegetarian food (i.e. no kebabs here - only falafel, tabbouleh, etc.) but there’s nothing to recommend this place beyond being vego-friendly.

Something about this place has really gotten under my skin. None of the kebab joints (with a possible exception of Lamb on Brunswick) I’ve highlighted above is especially creative or adventurous in what they’ve opened. I don’t feel a glow of human courage and pride emanating from those businesses - but they do have one thing going for them (beyond the meat): the baked-in grease in the walls, the ravaged staff who have become canny to the ways of the local drunks (getting your kebab is like a hostage negotiation - you’ll have to hand over the cash before you get your food). There’s just something grotty but dependable about the local kebab joints. Like the raw onions in a kebab, it brings a tear to your eye. Not so with Falafel Place. I feel so much pity for the owners. Why would you risk so much money (Smith St rent can’t be cheap - how much fucking falafel will you need to sell to make ends meet?) on a place which looks so disinterested - disinterested in falafel and disinterested in selling us falafel. Do you people even like falafel? Nothing about this place suggests even a passing interest in falafel. Falafel PLACE?! 

INTERVIEWER: Excuse me Mr. Proprietor, could you tell us something about what inspired you to open this establishment?

PROPRIETOR: Huh?

INTERVIEWER: Could you spare some time to -

PROPRIETOR: Are you talking to me?

INTERVIEWER: Yes, aren’t you the genius behind this fine falafel restaurant?

PROPRIETOR: Ah yeah.

INTERVIEWER: So, could you tell us a bit about what inspired you to open such a -

PROPRIETOR: Look lady, falafel just spawns here. Every morning we come into the office and find all our desk drawers full of falafel.

INTERVIEWER: You mean you don’t lovingly cook this using a recipe your great-grandmother left you in her will?

PROPRIETOR: No we don’t cook it. We’re accountants. We just sell falafel out of the office reception so it doesn’t attract ants where we’re trying to work.

INTERVIEWER: But why not just eat it yourselves - I don’t understand.

PROPRIETOR: Eat the falafel? I can’t stand the stuff. So dry. It’s awful.

INTERVIEWER: I have to say this is one of the more candid interviews I’ve conducted for Made Up Falafel Magazine. Could you explain the thinking process behind the name?

PROPRIETOR: Falafel Place? Well, yeah we didn’t want to lay it on too thick with superlatives or -

INTERVIEWER: Or even a name which wasn’t a statement of fact.

PROPRIETOR: Look, this is a place where there is falafel. Buy it or not - I really don’t care.

Meanwhile... not too much further along Smith Street, is another newish business: Sen Storm, a Veitnamese fusion restaurant. This premises used to be occupied by a New Orleans po boy joint which seemed to be perpetually closed. A few months ago, I saw that they were re-tiling the shopfront - like so, I think it actually looks really nice:

(It’s closed in this pic - it normally looks a bit more welcoming)

Maybe it’s because I was dimly aware of the failure of the po boy place, but I am very stressed for Sen Storm. Every time I walk past, I look in to see if they have enough customers. Are the staff busy? Are people eating there? Is it being enjoyed? I desperately want the people of Sen Storm to have made a good investment. I can feel the care radiating out of this place - they want it to be nice, they want people to enjoy it. They’re trying something new. Vietnamese food is typically pretty cheap in Melbourne: $12 bowls of pho, $4 banh mi on Victoria Street. Sen Storm is edging their way into fancier restaurant prices ($25 mains, nice cocktails) - there are not many other places in Melbourne doing nice napkin Vietnamese.

I read this interesting article on why noodles are cheap compared to pasta - it has a lot to do with our biases relating to the hierarchy of cuisines:

The other issue in all of this, is us, the dining public. What prices are we willing to pay for pad Thai, ramen or a plate of dumplings? All the chefs interviewed acknowledged a cultural hierarchy that makes noodles cheap and pasta expensive.

"Why would people pay $30 for cacio e pepe, which is really just pasta, black pepper and cheese, but they won't pay more than $10 for three amazingly made har gau or xiao long bao, which probably require a whole lot more skill than making pasta?" asks Dan Hong.

Narada Kudinar, co-owner of Sydney's Yan, sees this play out in his Chinese-style smokehouse.

"We get people who walk into the restaurant, after Googling we are the top-rated Asian restaurant in the area and walking out after seeing the menu prices."

Mr Bayad feels the same frustration running his inner-Sydney Filipino restaurant.

"Customers frequently come in claiming they ate the same food for 43 cents at a street market in the Philippines.

"I deal with that fairly often here and it's an old conversation — I'm just sick of it. The production [of food] here is completely different."

It's an expectation rooted in mainstream experiences of Asian food — from chicken chow mein in suburban Chinese takeaway restaurants with the lucky cat figurines to $1 pad Thai on Bangkok streets.

Even those with Asian heritage can hold the same prejudices. "The easy stereotypes are very ingrained — the idea of yum cha being a 'hangover food' and Chinese being a 'quick, cheap option' — that is ingrained in me as well," says Dr Lee.

^^ This graph is from an Atlantic article from a few years ago which also looks at our biases around food, like why we will pay more for Japanese and French food than Chinese or Thai. Anyway, I do believe tastes and expectations are changing, but the point I’m trying to make is that Sen Storm is part of a new wave - they’re taking a risk and they care.

After months of anxiously peering into Sen Storm, wondering what it was like, I finally went with Matt. We ordered:

Duck curry: orange duck leg curry with egg noodles

Pepper venison: venison seasoned with Vietnamese mountain pepper served with parsnip puree and chilli chutney

Nice, right? I did photograph the food but my pictures were awful (my proud tradition of producing vomitous food photographs continues) but you can see a bit of the venison in the pic below and a corner of the curry as well. Both were very tasty and it felt like a surprising meal. Again, they’re trying something new.

I can understand why the people at Sen Storm took the risk - they had an idea, something to share, and they opened a restaurant which is still not bustling but is slowly accumulating positive reviews and will hopefully grow into a successful business. But if restaurants are risky investments - does it make sense to gamble on something you care about? Is Sen Storm more likely to do better than Falafel Place because the Sen Stormians are passionate? Maybe - but the margin by which Sen Storm has to do better is huge because building something special has cost them a lot more. Falafel Place is built on a foundation of plastic takeout containers. 

In short, I am still worried about Sen Storm.

[theliterateape]

American Shithole #4 — What Treasures Await Within The Failure Box?

By Eric Wilson

All eyes may be on the Rob Porter debacle this week (or now the school shooting in Florida), but buried deep within the latest budget proposal is another hatchet job on our country’s defenseless and beleaguered poor. This administration is looking to slash 129 billion dollars in funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), in order to support tax cuts for the filthy rich. In a now struggling and continuous effort to one-up themselves, next week Trump conservatives, for no apparent reason, plan to throw one random adorable deaf child off a cliff.

What’s really going on here — besides the wholesale redistribution of value from the needy to the ruling class — is the old conservative classic, the shaming of the poor. Trump and Co. want to bring the shame back to the safety net programs that they can’t outright kill — in this case, by cutting assistance in half, taking power away from the individual, and replacing the ease and independence afforded by the EBT card, with what they call “America’s Harvest Box.”

I’ll give evil republicans one thing, they sure know how to name the beast. Hell, Citizens United sounds more like a well-meaning U2 album, than the death to democracy it represents. This latest proposal is no different. Slice this turd pizza any way you like, this reverse wealth redistribution is a failure box, born of cruelty, dressed in shame and bound by greed. We can expect nothing less from an administration that so embodies failure as its defining characteristic.

"Under the proposal, households receiving $90 or more per month in SNAP benefits will receive a portion of their benefits in the form of a USDA Foods package, which would include items such as shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and canned meat, poultry or fish," the budget reads.

I can hear the breakfast banter already:

“Mom, can I have more shelf-stable milk?”

“Now Timmy, you know you have already had your governmentally allotted granules of dehydrated, dairy product! You know the billionaire class needs every cent the rest of us can spare, for really important reasons, like they want it. Now help your sister open the meat.

“Aww, mom! But I need strength in my bones for the Trump Parade!

Well, now that the Trump Parade is every second Thursday of the month, I guess you’re right, son!”

Ugh. Billionaires clawing at the bones of the disenfranchised, scraping for specks of flesh along the fracture lines. Vampiric lords of the undead, sucking the last of the marrow out of a deeply-flawed economic construct that’s now collapsing under the weight of its own coddled indifference.  

Also, the “portion” of redistributed benefits mentioned above, in most cases will amount to more than half the SNAP allowance, but let’s not quibble over numbers — when it’s the intent of the proposal that is of most concern.

The intent is to throw a monkey wrench into a fragile safety-net policy, strip it of value once it is effectively destabilized, and reintroduce public shame to an already stigmatized process — the last straight up out of spite. There will be no delivery; it’s not even funded in the proposal. If this proposal were to somehow be implemented, poor Americans will be forced to stand in line outside of some public facility every month, where their value will be scrutinized, and their integrity questioned — just so they can pick up a fucking box of shame.     

So prepare to tighten your belts, my fellow impoverished Americans. Even with the recent tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy, apparently billionaire yachts aren’t going to buy themselves. Hell hath no fury like a plutocrat denied their eleventeenth floating water penis. Besides, you know who really has it all too easy in America?

Hungry children.

Hungry children who apparently haven’t yet experienced enough soul-crushing shame in their lives, according to republicans. Sure, gone are the days of the soup lines and the embarrassment of government food stamps at the checkout line, but this administration is going to bring the humiliation of failure back!

In the form of a box — filled with a few dollars’ worth of bulk pasta and broken promises.

American Shithole was able to secure a few quotes from various proponents of America’s Failure Box.

“What we do is propose that for folks who are on food stamps, part — not all, part — of their benefits come in the actual sort of, and I don't want to steal somebody's copyright, but a Blue Apron-type program where you actually receive the food instead of receive the cash,” Office of Management and budget director Mick Mulvaney said.

“USDA America’s Harvest Box is a bold, innovative approach to providing nutritious food to people who need assistance feeding themselves and their families — and all of it is home grown by American farmers and producers," Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement. "It maintains the same level of food value as SNAP participants currently receive, provides states flexibility in administering the program, and is responsible to the taxpayers.”

“What we also want to do,” Mulvaney continued, “is provide an avenue for regular folks, like me and you, to better be able to ridicule recipients of government assistance, the way we used to be able to do — that’s where the box comes in.”

“We’ve been floating around the idea of fluorescent paint for the boxes,” Perdue continued, “in an effort to draw attention to Americans that just can’t seem to take responsibility for themselves.”

“And just in case neighbors can’t identify citizens requiring scorn by the brightly painted boxes,” Mulvaney assured reporters, “we have introduced legislation that requires SNAP beneficiaries to paint their houses in the same colors as the boxes to avoid public confusion as to who to discriminate against.”

Don’t put anything past this administration. Nothing is truly satirical; nothing is truly farcical these days.

So, what will the contents of this failure box really look like, I wonder? I mean, beyond the delicious, shelf-stable, dehydrated milk — which I imagine to be the equivalent of a chalky Tang to the freshly-squeezed orange juice of the world. Some of us remember Tang.

Not to be left out of the loop, our crack investigative team has uncovered these items to be featured in America’s Failure Box — a food crisis solution for hungry Americans put forth by generous billionaires.

1.      A single caviar egg. (enjoy the decadence!)

2.      Table scraps from the 2018 Bilderberg Group retreat.

3.      Soylent Orange: orange-flavored presidential all-purpose protein paste. (coming soon!)

4.      Mystery Sack! ™

5.      Fun house mirror sectional for when you wish to look full.

6.      Mystery Sack Zero! ™

7.      Edible 8" x 10" glossies of Trump Steaks.

8.      Paula Dean recipes for Failure Box packaging materials.

These days, as with all machinations of this presidency, I am no longer surprised by brazen, naked greed. I am surprised at how much of it we are willing to suffer through, that is indeed surprising.

Anyway, I’m not the only detractor as you might imagine, according to a Business Insider report, the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit working to end hunger in the US, blasted the proposal, along with many, many other agencies following suit.

The new boxes will be "a Rube-Goldberg designed system of commodity distribution via food boxes that will be administratively costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to failure, and that will return the country to Depression-era anti-hunger approaches," said the group in a statement.

A thought that I imagine would give the Koch brothers wicked, east coast, libertarian boners.

The question most often on my mind again, is how much of this we’re going to take? Because these dirty bastards aren’t going to stop until there is nothing left to steal.