#not simply “free” of the dollar but ethically and safely. Some of these people have DRM for their mods. It's insane.

[glassgrasslunchtime]

beginner’s guide to getting into non-fate type-moon works

Hello, hello, hello! With all the buzz about the Tsukihime Remake, I thought that now would be the perfect time to help people get into other fantastic Type-Moon works that, perhaps, have flown under many radars on account of not making billions of dollars like FGO.

Therefore, this post will list every single non-Fate Type-Moon work that I can think of, a few bullet points as to why you might like them, a more complete summary, and then detail how to find them. If you could read this post and walk away with even one more interest, then my work is a success, and I would be delighted.

A note before we get started: Where possible, I will provide links to buy these directly from Type-Moon. However, for most of these, that’s just not possible. Piracy, it has been said, is a matter of access. If Type-Moon will not provide any way to access this media legitimately, better to experience it illegitimately than not at all, I think. If Type-Moon deigns to make it accessible, that is the preferred way, and I will refrain from encouraging piracy; where they do not, I say there is no moral or ethical dilemma there.

I have checked every download myself, and they all came up clean. That doesn’t necessarily mean there are no viruses, it could be that Malwarebytes couldn’t find them. It should be safe, but exercise appropriate caution.

Oh, and if I’ve accidentally given bad or dangerous advice, feel free to yell at me and I’ll change it if necessary.

(21/08/25: Updated a couple of links, revised some phrasing in the April Witch section)

(23/12/18): Removed instructions on pirating Mahoyo in favour of official release, added link to the Tsukiweb Tsukihime browser port, added section on Melty Blood Type Lumina

Without further ado:

MAHOUTSUKAI NO YORU

Do you enjoy stories about modern day witches?

Do you enjoy period pieces about the tail end of the 1980s?

Do you like inventive monster design based on classic nursery rhymes?

Do you wanna see some of the best visuals in any Type-Moon work?

Do you want to see (a remake of) Nasu’s first novel?

Would you relate to a bad-tempered teenage witch?

Do you enjoy Suffering because many questions were left unanswered to make room for two sequels that vanished into the ether?

Then Mahoutsukai no Yoru (Mahoyo for short) is absolutely the Visual Novel for you!

Mahoutsukai no Yoru (officially anglicized as “Witch on the Holy Night” but more literally translating to “Magician’s Night”) stars Aoko Aozaki, a temperamental newbie magus with a mean streak; her mentor and best... friend...?, an icy, traditionalist witch named Alice Kuonji; and a painfully naive country boy named Soujuurou Shizuki who is endearingly oblivious and thoroughly sweet and nearly gets himself killed multiple times due to not understanding how things like “the big city” “modern technology” and “windows” work.

And they were roommates. Oh my god, they were roommates.

The story begins with Aoko and Alice living together in a “haunted” mansion on the hill overlooking Misaki Town. For the past nearly two years, Alice has been teaching Aoko (who had quite suddenly been selected as her family’s heir over her sister, who had been heir apparent up to then) magecraft. In this time they’ve formed a fascinating bond in spite of (or because of?) their clashing personalities and occasional homicide attempts. Meanwhile, Soujuurou, living on his own, has just arrived in the city from his tiny mountain town with no electricity or modern convenience at all, and is having some difficulties fitting in due to the insurmountable culture clash. Aoko... does not get along with him. At all. Firstly because she had to go to school on a day off to show him around on only a couple hours’ sleep, and then because he was simply too oblivious and sweet-tempered to notice how mad at him she was because of that.

Anyway, things happen. First, a couple of chapters of sweet slice-of-life. And then Aoko and Alice are discovered by an ordinary person while destroying the familiars of a rogue magus. The unknown person escapes before they can be identified and the witches conclude that, to keep their secrets as magi, that person will have to die. Meanwhile, Soujuurou, while out late at night, happened across what he believes to be a murder - two young girls mysteriously burning a man to death in the park...

Mahoyo is... really, truly incredible. The writing is well-done (especially the character dynamics), the atmosphere is strong, the slice of life is delightful and the action is cool... and the presentation is magnificent. I don’t think I can get across in words just how incredible it is, so please do give it a chance yourself.

The official English localization can be purchased for PS4 or Nintendo Switch on their respective digital storefronts, or on Steam at https://store.steampowered.com/app/2052410/WITCH_ON_THE_HOLY_NIGHT/

KARA NO KYOUKAI

Do you enjoy stories about mystical detective work?

Do you enjoy stories that are heavy on the buddhist and taoist symbolism?

do you enjoy stories with a lot of odd and interesting philosophy and psychology?

Do you enjoy stories examining the innermost natures of human beings and how souls are constructed?

Would you enjoy a story about what it means to live, the value of death, and the importance of compassion and reaching out?

Do you enjoy stories about fundamentally messed-up people and one normal dude struggling to get by?

Do you think Nasu’s loose grasp on how psychoactive drugs like weed actually work is really funny?

Do you want to watch some genuinely fantastic animation?

Do you think fancy-looking magic eyes are cool as hell?

Would you relate to a woman struggling to figure out her identity in the wake of a long coma and the death of her other self?

Then you should absolutely check out Kara no Kyoukai (”Rakkyo” for short)!

Kara no Kyoukai (meaning “Boundary of the Void”) takes place in the run-down and rusty Mifune City, and stars Shiki Ryougi, a yakuza princess with a catlike personality and terrifying supernatural powers, Touko Aozaki, a capricious, spiteful, duplicitous magus with extraordinary talent and skill, and Mikiya Kokutou, the aforementioned normal dude; they form a sort of supernatural detective agency called Garan no Dou. Together, they fight crime well, mostly they go broke a lot because Touko won’t stop impulse-buying useless crap on Dark Amazon.

I’m not shitting you, "Dark Amazon” is literally something Nasu has called it. Despite the name, I can’t imagine it’s less ethical than Light Amazon...

Anyway, in between going broke, they investigate and put an end to supernatural phenomena, especially dangerous people with mystic powers. The first movie/novel, for instance, is about Garan no Dou investigating a series of suicides who all jumped off the same building despite having no other relation, and whose death was mysteriously foretold by their ghosts, hovering above the building since even before they jumped. 

It’s a lot of fun. It’s also animated by Ufotable, an animation studio whose work I’m sure Fate fans are quite familiar with! If you’re not, then allow to tell you that Ufotable’s work is among the best of the best. Good, good, good stuff. 

If you’re coming from FGO, you’re probably at least a little familiar with Shiki, since she’s, y’know, in that game.

Be aware of explicit subject matter such as graphic violence, incest, and sexual assault.

I’ve heard the fanmade translations of the novels are not very good, but have no real frame of reference myself, so I cannot recommend for or against them. The anime adaptation, however, I can absolutely vouch for the quality of, minor flaws and the entire sixth movie notwithstanding. There’s also a manga adaptation, but having read only the first chapter, I can’t speak for its quality (and the scanlation seemed pretty bad) but it does seem to have some fun nods to Mahoyo and also Shiki wearing leather pants.

Rakkyo is strange, baffling, maddening, and absolutely beautiful. It’s a dark, twisted, and wonderful experience.

... as a side note, release order and chronological order are not the same. Watch in release order. I mean, it’s not like Type-Moon published it in that order by accident! Release order is the experience the story was designed for! Well, there are people who will probably get more out of the experience watching it in chronological, but unless you’re absolutely certain you’re one of those people, my recommendation is firmly release order.

 If you want to watch Kara No Kyoukai, then you can find it on Crunchyroll at https://www.crunchyroll.com/the-garden-of-sinners

If you want to read the manga, it can be found at https://mangadex.org/title/6d4e768d-d68a-449f-8983-f7acbc160d9c

If you want to read the novels, then they can be found at https://emptyboundaries.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/kara-no-kyokai-translations-2/

TSUKIHIME

Do you enjoy stories about vampires?

Do you enjoy a story that despite its heavy death thematics is more of a Memento Vivere than a Memento Mori?

Do you enjoy stories about vampires?

Do you enjoy stories with heavy themes of personal identity where almost every character is desperately trying to rebuild their sense of identity after a tragic backstory and/or maintain their identity in spite of their fundamental nature?

Do you enjoy watching the viewpoint character repeatedly spiral in and out of complete insanity?

Do you enjoy stories about vampires?

Do you enjoy stories about a person’s whole life being upended and revealed as nothing but lies?

Would you relate to a lazy, unambitious teenage boy with an incredibly fragile and easily-influenced sense of identity?

Do you enjoy Suffering because most of the sequels and spin-offs were put on hold or cancelled until the remake comes out, and the remake was announced in 2008 and still doesn’t have a release date? NEVER MIND, SUMMER 2021 BABY

Do you enjoy Suffering because the remake will only contain 2/5ths of the original VNs routes to begin with, and no word on when the remaining three and the promised new sixth route will arrive?

Then Tsukihime might just be up your alley. Your bloodstained, corpse-filled, dead-end back alley. 

Tsukihime (literally translating to “Moon Princess”) is about Shiki Tohno, a high school boy who for eight years has been cursed with a horrifying and self-destructive power. But really, he’s a normal kid - loves his foster family, goes to school each day, sits at the back of the class, hangs out with his one friend. Normal stuff, right? And then his dad (his real dad who disinherited him, not the foster dad) dies, and his little sister, the heir, calls him back to his childhood home. And one dissasociative fugue later, he’s a murderer - followed a woman to her apartment, used his powers to cut her apart. The next morning, as he’s walking to school and contemplating turning himself in, he finds that same woman waiting for him at the gates. Overnight, his life goes from pleasant to a waking nightmare, and his home, Misaki Town (Souya City in the remake), seems as if to transform from a slow, sunny place into a dark, surreal, den of monsters.

Also, if you do decide to give Tsukihime a chance, there’s something I’d like you to know: The five story routes are divided into “Near Side” and “Far Side” which are very different experiences. Unless my memory is very wrong, the VN forces you to do the Arcueid route, a Near Side route, first, but if you don’t like it, please try either the Akiha or Hisui route before you drop it entirely - as Far Side routes, they are extremely different experiences (and personally, I think they’re leagues better).

Also, if for one reason or another you cannot read the VN but still want to give it a shot, read the manga instead! They have their own individual virtues - the manga follows the Arc route (with details from the Akiha route mixed in) and is more of a complete story than any one route, but much less of a complete story than the full five, with multiple important characters left by the wayside out of necessity. It’s also, on the whole, more visually intense and appealing, with one especially notable example being the final battle’s overhaul; also, it shows a certain villain’s backstory in greater, heartbreaking detail. On the other hand, it adds a couple plot holes (but also fills in at least one of the VN’s plot holes that I can think of, mind you), and the scanlation drops massively in quality partway through. I strongly recommend the VN over the manga, but it’s a perfectly sufficient alternative (or if you have the time and patience, you could read both. Both is good.). Do not watch the anime. Do not watch the anime. If you must know why: it’s the most absurdly flaccid adaptation I’ve ever seen; the artstyle is ugly, the animation is limp, the plot follows more or less the right beats but rearranges or alters them in ways that make the story incomprehensible. It’s garbage.

Be aware of explicit subject matter like graphic violence, incest, and sexual assault. Some of which is shown in a first-person perspective due to the aforementioned spiraling in and out of complete insanity and certain other factors. (some of it is avoidable depending on player choices. Usually reasonably obvious ones)

Tsukihime is a wild ride, to say the least, and let me tell you, it’s a damn good one. Sure, it was made with a budget of two paperclips and a half-eaten pork bun, is incredibly rough around the edges, and almost completely devoid of polish, but that’s part of the charm - this is Type-Moon’s first VN! This is Type-Moon at their most heartful and raw! It’s an experience unlike anything else, and I can only hope you all will enjoy it as much as I do.

Indeed, despite the upcoming remake, I fully recommend checking out the original. The remake promises to make many changes (and not include 3/5ths of the story), and it may be fully worthwhile to know what the original was like. It’s the sort of thing I get a lot out of, anyway. And hey - maybe you’ll find you love the original and the remake separately, and wouldn’t it be grand to find two new loves? Or maybe you won’t like the original, but you’ll appreciate the remake more for knowing that. Or you won’t like either, which, hey, at least you tried something new, isn’t that something? But on the whole, I really am sure you’ll probably like one or the other.

Probably the best way to play the VN is Loïc France‘s incredible browser port fan project, available at https://holofield.fr/tsukiweb/title (make sure to fiddle with the settings to your preference! Particularly, try out the three different soundtracks to find the one you like best.)

If you’d prefer the original, instructions on how to install the VN can be found at https://pastebin.com/8P1uQGG1 

If you want to read the manga, then it can be found at https://mangadex.org/title/477800d5-bae8-4adb-b422-23e6cfa7ec87

Alternately, a higher-quality version of the manga in Japanese can be read entirely legally at https://web-ace.jp/tmca/contents/2000013/

I will not be helping you watch the anime. Figure it out yourself, you masochist.

Details on playing the Remake will be added once the official localization releases.

FURTHER READING

If you enjoyed Tsukihime, good news! There’s some more! Nothing new since 2015, but, like, take what you can get, right? This got a bit long, so it goes at the very bottom of the post.

DECORATION DISORDER DISCONNECTION

Do you enjoy stories about demons and deals with the devil?

Do you enjoy supernatural mystery stories?

Do you like stories about people working for mysterious, untrustworthy benefactors?

Do you enjoy baseball-playing villains with effective tragic backstories?

Would you relate to a broke, mentally-ill, disabled college drop-out?

Do you enjoy Suffering because the three-volume light novel series has been stalled on Vol. 2 for more than a decade?

In that case, perhaps Decoration Disorder Disconnection is the thing for you!

Decoration Disorder Disconnection is the story of a mysterious, supernatural disease that preys on the neglected, abused, and forgotten - the people who’ve slipped through the cracks in society - and causes them to turn into monsters with superpowers based on their idiosyncracies and untreated mental illnesses (People with mental illnesses that are being treated or at least have a healthy environment and people who care about them are not affected). Arika Ishizue, a young man with a missing arm, a strange kind of amnesia, and a pathological inability to feel threatened, is regularly roped by his rich employer into investigating the people the public call “Demon-possessed” so that the real demons can feast on the affliction that mutated them.

DDD might sound a bit insensitive to the mentally ill, but as such a person myself, I found it a very good story (I saw it more as a critique of the way Japan treats mental illness than an attack on the mentally ill, anyway) and I absolutely think you should give it a look. 

Unfortunately, the only English fan translation, from the second chapter onwards, passed through Russian instead of being directly translated from Japanese, which can seriously be a detriment to the enjoyability of the novels.

Be aware of explicit subject matter like graphic violence.

DDD is an engaging story about a colourful cast of characters painted with a strange and decaying urban veneer. It’s a fascinating novel, and I hope you all love it.

If you want to read it, DDD can be found at https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/2637-DDD

ANGEL NOTES

Do you enjoy bleak post-apocalyptic stories about some schmuck trying to earn his daily bread?

Do you enjoy stories about a dead-inside sniper and his chipper roommate who is also an angel who is also an all-powerful alien entity?

Do you enjoy settings where the people of Earth have struggled and obtained hard-fought victories against a legion of alien lovecraftian terrors that ultimately cannot be stopped?

Would you relate to a grizzled and depressed man just trying to make ends meet?

Do you enjoy Suffering because the official content consists of one fairly short story, two pages in an art-book, and a two-second cameo, and there’s almost no fan content either?

Then please, go ahead and read Angel Notes (technically, it’s actually called “notes.” but many people -  especially the older cohort of the English-language fanbase - just call it Angel Notes)

Angel Notes is the story of the last surviving pure human on a dead Earth and his freeloader roommate who, it turns out, is the resurrected consciousness of a monster he killed. It’s the story of a weary man and an ingenue full of hope and love - Godo, a tired, depressive gun-for-hire struggling to survive in an apocalyptic wasteland far too harsh for human life and in a society designed by and for superhumans descended from living weapons, and V/V, an angelic alien born from the death of an all-powerful lovecraftian monstrosity who came into the world a blank slate knowing only love for the living things she was meant to destroy. It’s the story of how they live, as well as...

There’s barely any of Angel Notes to read, even. It won’t take you very long at all. Please read Angel Notes. It’s really good. It’s a very sweet little story. And I love those two and I need there to be more fans of them.

If you want to read it, Angel Notes can be found at https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/73-Angel-Notes-Translation-by-Evospace or at https://archive.org/details/manga_Angel_Notes/mode/2up

MAHOUTSUKAI NO HAKO - STARLIT MARMALADE

Would you enjoy a story about a bunch of high school girls hanging out that takes an abrupt and incredibly sharp swerve into the supernatural?

Do you enjoy stories about an inexorably optimistic (and absolutely oblivious) idiot walking up to an abusive friendship and just wedging herself in between the abuser and victim despite neither wanting her around?

Do you like casts that consist primarily of different strains of lovable moron?

Do you like cute lesbian couples consisting of one lonely tsundere and one unstoppable ball of cheerfulness?

Do you like seemingly innocent, humorous, small-scale stories that have baffling connections to the setting’s deep lore (such as one major character turning out to secretly be a living weapon created by the 27th most dangerous vampire on the planet)?

Would you relate to a dour young woman who hates marching to the beat of anyone else’s drum, lives in the shadow of her hugely popular and successful elder sister, wants to be left alone, and is just completely surrounded by a bunch of energetic and relentlessly positive people?

Do you enjoy Suffering because Vol. 2 hasn’t been translated? Or, if you understand Japanese, because it was supposed to be a three volume series but there’s been no sign of Vol. 3 since the release of Vol. 2 in 2013?

Just a quick note before we start: Hibiki and Chikagi, those two girls at the front, with the orange and green hair? They were created as the mascots of Type-Moon’s now-defunct mobile site, “Mahoutsukai No Hako” (meaning “Magician’s Box,” and referring to Cafe Ahnenerbe, the interdimensional crossroads where the protagonists work part-time). The idea, as I understand it, was that they (and to a lesser extent their co-stars Keitai-san and Sunao Sugata)  would be the face, to some degree, of all of Type-Moon’s mobile-phone-related stuff.

... Those of you coming here from FGO can start laughing now.

For a while, Mahoutsukai No Hako consisted of random fluff, basically. The cast had a few hijinks, hosted variety shows starring various Type-Moon voice actors, starred in a special episode of Carnival Phantasm, and so on.

And then Starlit Marmalade wrote their backstory.

Starlit Marmalade is mainly about Chikagi Katsuragi and Hibiki Hibino, a pair of apparently pretty ordinary high school students. Chikagi, a solitary, caustic person with only one friend (and not a good friend, either, a heavily abusive friend who only cares about Chikagi as a tool to get to her sister Chidori), suddenly finds herself set upon by Hibiki Hibino, who, for reasons as clear as mud, has decided she absolutely has to be Chikagi’s friend, wants nothing more than to make Chikagi smile, and who proves to be a special kind of bull-headed where it’s hard to tell if she’s extremely perceptive as to what people need as opposed to what they say they want, or just completely incapable of listening to what people tell her.

Meanwhile, students at their school have been disappearing under mysterious circumstances...

Starlit Marmalade is... one hell of an anomaly. It’s a very, very silly and sweet story, but because it takes itself just the right amount of seriously - not seriously enough that it comes off as unaware of how silly its being, but serious enough that the silly things come off as, for lack of a better word, “real” - it manages to get away with having some surprising tonal twists and lore connections It’s pretty delightful. I’d certainly recommend checking it out.

... oh, by the way, apparently Sunao - an character who makes her debut toward the end of Vol. 1 - appears in one Fate/Extra drama CD as the Nameless Archer’s master and dies in battle against Leo Harway. What the hell?

Anyway, a translation/summary of the first drama CD can be found at https://heavens-feel.com/starlitmarmaladevol1disc1translation.html 

the manga can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/e850e497-2d50-40cc-a0da-186e3857e33a

FIRE GIRL

Have you ever wondered what the result of the author of Fate/Requiem doing something ~kind of~ similar to an isekai (except instead of reincarnation it’s more like... spelunking but with an alternate dimension instead of a cave, I guess?) would be?

Do you enjoy parallel universes that have the same name as a popular hazelnut spread for some reason?

Do you think Wasei-Eigo related mixups are hilarious? Because there’s a real big one involving the word ‘trans’ in the second volume.

Would you relate to a mildly narcoleptic, apathetic, over-imaginative teenage girl?

Do you like stories about both literal and figurative exploration of the unknown and pushing boundaries?

Do you enjoy Suffering because the English translation only goes up to near the end of the second of three volumes?

For the Japanese-fluent, I don’t know, there might not be Suffering involved this time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Fire Girl is about a high school girl named Homura Hinooka, who joins a kinda shady club at her school dedicated to exploring and studying a mysterious alternate universe called “Nutella,” which can only be reached by people between the ages of 9 and 19 (limited further by law to those in the last few viable years). 

This so-called “Imaginary Earth,” which operates on rules that are occasionally suspiciously video-gamey, presents numerous mysteries of physics and history: despite being far, far larger than Earth, Nutella’s environment is still Earth-like; magic is a legitimate possibility there, utilized not only by human explorers but even some select specimens of the wildlife; humans who travel there may find themselve metamorphosized into demihuman forms like elves, demons, or slutty cat-boys (to be clear, the only thing added there was the ‘cat’ part. ‘Slutty’ and ‘boy’ were already part of Saho’s character); and most mysteriously, although numerous ancient ruins have been found, not a single other trace of sentient life has been found.

By the way, you might think the ‘tella’ in ‘Nutella’ is an Engrish-ization of ‘terra,’ but the rings around the planet are referred to as ‘The Bagel,’ so maybe Meteo is just being funny.

I can’t give a complete opinion on Fire Girl, owing to my incomplete experience, but I really did enjoy the time I had with it.

If you want to read it yourself, it can be found at https://firegirlthetranslation.wordpress.com/

TSUKI NO SANGO

Do you like stories about stories?

Do you like soft-Sci-Fi renditions of classic fairy tales?

Do you like the tale of Princess Kaguya?

Would you like to read a story about a dying earth, and the importance of love and patience and the inevitable victory of emotion over reason?

Do you like stories about machines becoming human, even when it costs them their wellbeing?

Would you relate to an emotionally crippled princess, who is being pressured to marry but really just wants to do her own thing?

Or, would you relate to an emotionally dead young man with auditory dyslexia, whose only wish is to be left alone?

Tsuki no Sango (”Coral of the Moon”) is a loose adaptation of the folktale of Princess Kaguya, designed as a quote-unquote “Tsukihime 3000.” It is the story of three people, in total: the protagonist, known only as the “Storyteller Girl”; her ancestor, known only as the “Girl of the Moon”; and the person that the Girl of the Moon loved, referred to as the “Man of Earth.”

Some 1000 years from the present day, in a decaying world where the spirit of humanity has been all but extinguished, and people are barely husks of their former selves with only scraps of drive and emotion, the Storyteller Girl lives as princess of an island of fifty people. Many people come to her island seeking her hand in marriage, for one reason or another (such as the Prince of Arishima, who believes her island is “the hope of humanity,” being less affected by the decline of man than the rest of the world). The Storyteller Girl, having no understanding of love, seeks to have her suitors define it for her, by presenting them with impossible tasks. She believes that, should someone somehow succeed, and then be willing to trade such an impossibly valuable thing for her hand, it will prove the measure of love. Naturally, no one has yet succeeded.

One day, a tiny, machine-like merchant riding a strange flying craft appears. Being a merchant, he wants to trade goods - more specifically, he would like the princess to write down the story of her distant ancestor, who legend says came from the moon.

The novel can be found at https://kisalnarchive.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/tsuki-no-sango/

The manga can be found at https://mangadex.org/title/a0880b76-9d26-40b6-94a0-740fe31ead50

CANAAN

Do you enjoy depictions of synesthesia that I’m pretty certain are wildly inaccurate?

Do you enjoy adorable fluff about a hardened mercenary and a bubbly photojournalist?

Do you like cool gunfights and other such action movie spectacle?

Do you like comic-book-y pseudo-science mutants?

Are you one of the, like, five English-speakers who read 428: Shibuya Scramble? Because this is a sequel to that.

Would you relate to a troubled, bull-headed, serious mercenary who lacks a strong sense of self and is on a quest for revenge?

... Yeah, does Canaan even count? Nasu and Takeuchi did do the writing and designs, but it’s a sequel to a visual novel (which I can’t tell you anything about... it’s on my backlog, though) that is definitely not a Type-Moon work. But it’s specifically a sequel to a scenario from that visual novel which was written by Nasu, so... Anyway, here it is.

... also, it’s been a while since I watched it, so sorry if I’m not covering it as well as I should be.

Canaan is about a woman named Canaan and her quest for vengeance against the person who killed her mentor Siam - a terrorist named Alphard, who was once another orphan taken in by Siam before Canaan. Alphard’s organization, Snake, possesses a deadly bioweapon capable of causing horrific mutations (or just death), the Ua Virus. Canaan battles Snake across Shanghai, both in the name of finally killing Alphard, and in the name of...

It’s also about a girl named Maria Oosawa, an aspiring photojournalist, and Canaan’s only friend. She’s in Shanghai to cover a big anti-terrorism conference, and very quickly gets wrapped up in the whole affair with Snake. Canaan prioritizes her safety over everything else, and will stop at nothing to protect her. 

At the end of the day, Canaan and Maria’s relationship is probably the anime’s main draw, because they really are adorable, and in-between the action sequences, there’s a lot of just them hanging out and being cute and in love. It’s pretty great.

Canaan can be viewed at your preferred anime piracy site, if you have one. If you don’t, then I happen to use 9anime,me, but cannot vouch for its safety. Be sure to take appropriate measures, such as adblockers.

ROOM OF THE APRIL WITCH

A short one-shot published as Type-Moon’s annual April Fools joke in 2011.

“Shigatsu no Majou no Heya” (”The April Witch’s Room” or “Room of the April Witch”) is the story of April, an immortal witch with the power to grant any wish. Having suffered for her powers, April long ago retreated into her sanctuary, and sealed it away so that no one could ever enter and hurt her again.

But, she was still human, and she still desired human contact. So, one day out of every year, she unlocked the door. Over the many hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, a great many people arrived, with a great many purposes. Some sought to help April, some to hurt her. Some came only to make a wish for themselves, some came for no reason at all. None ever came a second time. Except...

Can be read at https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/308-Room-of-the-April-Witch?p=27884&viewfull=1#post27884 or at https://bimyou.blogspot.com/2011/04/room-of-april-witch-type-moon.html

CLOWICK CANAAN-VAIL

Published in the same anthology as Angel Notes, Clowick Canaan-Vail tells the story of an android courier named Gabriel, who lives in a barren, apocalyptic world that has long since lost the capacity to repair a machine like her, and how she spends the last five days of her life.

Can be read at https://imgur.com/gallery/ZcbYG

TSUKIHIME FURTHER READING

Plus Disc

Basically a collection of little extra stuff. If you just want to follow the storyline, you only really need to worry about the Alliance of Illusionary Eyes sidestory, which introduces a new character and has some nice character moments for Shiki in the climax.

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/1Z1ibay0 

Kagetsu Tohya

A direct sequel... of sorts... to Tsukihime. Kagetsu Tohya (roughly translating to “Ten Nights of the Singing Moon”) is a dream of one endlessly repeating day, Shiki seeks to learn what happened to him and how he can return to his real life - in between a whole lot of cute, fluffy slice of life. Since it’s all a dream, not much actually happens per se - it can basically be summed up as “Shiki gets a familiar” (it’s still a very nice story, mind you) - but there’s some good character stuff (although on the other hand, there’s also a lot of parts where characters are flattened and exaggerated for comedic purposes), lots of fun fluff and comedy, and the sidestories are pretty good - Dawn is a sad little story following a (formerly) unnamed background extra from Tsukihime (and is also the first published work by the author of Overlord!), Red Demon God gives some nice backstory and expands on the Nanaya clan as well as posthumously developing the character of Kiri Nanaya, Crimson Moon does the same for Roa and Brunestud, A Story For The Evening is an extended epilogue to Tsukihime’s Akiha route, and Drinking Dreaming Moon is just magnificent and ought to be required reading for any Tsukihime fan.

... you may want to use a guide. The path to the ending is otherwise a bit of a labyrinth. I think the download I’m linking comes with a flowchart? Although, the game has a built-in help function, and I’d recommend making use of it first. If the help function doesn’t work, and the flowchart isn’t getting you anywhere, here’s a step-by-step walkthrough.

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/DNRx6RC3 

Melty Blood

A fighting game, (in)famous for being played in bathrooms, parking lots, gazebos, and other unlikely locales around the world. As you might be able to tell from the frankly ludicrous dedication of its fanbase, it’s a pretty damn good fighting game, too. As a side note, many of those fans are getting rather sick of the bathroom jokes, so it may be best to refrain from them in future.

Melty Blood’s VN-like story mode takes place the summer after Tsukihime, when an Egyptian alchemist named Sion Eltnam Atlasia comes to town searching for and hoping to put an end to her ancestor, a terrifying vampire poised to wipe out the whole city - naturally, Shiki lends a hand.

Incidentally, while the game’s route map only shows five endings, some of those ending squares can be reached in multiple ways, and actually have entirely different endings for the occasion.

There’s a manga adaptation you can read, if you prefer. Like the Tsukihime manga, it mixes the routes a little while primarily following the “main” route. It also has a sequel manga, ”Act 2,″ adapting the joke endings.

Anyway, unless you’re really keen to see the gameplay in its rawest state, don’t worry about playing Melty Blood, because:

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/BxPtZwQs 

The manga can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/36999805-52e9-451f-94de-ca50e8e7e873

Melty Blood Re-Act

Everything that was in Melty Blood with a new coat of polish, plus a new story, featuring a mysterious villain creating living Jungian Shadows from some of the cast and hypnotizing some of the others.

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/8QCU3Ayt 

Melty Blood Act Cadenza

Most of this is retelling previous stuff. Don’t worry too much about Act Cadenza. 

The only story progression is White Len contracting Shiki Nanaya, one of the phantoms she created, as her Master, creating a bizarre perpetual motion machine of Master/Familiar bonds

Installation instructions can be found at https://pastebin.com/ucChcXGS 

Melty Blood Actress Again

Ever get that feeling of deja vu? It seems some mysterious enemy is somehow causing the events of the previous summer to repeat themselves - naturally, Shiki and Sion and a miscellany of others head out to get to the bottom of this. 

Also, Sion’s Swedish paladin wife comes back from the dead after cameoing in Sion’s evil alternate self’s super move in every previous game!

Also also it’s just a really good fighting game. If you want to get into Melty as a fighting game rather than as part of Tsukihime’s story, this is the one you’re going to want to get. That said, I would, in that case, have to recommend taking a look at the fanmade “Community Edition,” which is the usual standard for online play on account of having rollback. That said, it’s technically piracy, so as there’s a legitimate alternative, I’m going to leave you to find it for yourself.

One thing that’s worth noting is that the official localization is... uh, wonky. For example, translating one of Aoko’s lines as referring to “my little sister” (something Aoko doesn’t have) when it was actually “the little sister” (I.E. what people who only know Akiha through Shiki keep calling her). I’d recommend taking a look at Mirror Moon’s unfinished fan translation, but I’m not sure if it’s compatible with the Steam version. I think it’s compatible with the Community Edition, though.

Actress Again can be purchased on Steam at https://store.steampowered.com/app/411370/Melty_Blood_Actress_Again_Current_Code/

Carnival Phantasm

Comedic fluff consisting primarily of short, standalone comedy sketches. Crossover with Fate/Stay Night. HibiChika are in one episode.

Carnival Phantasm can be viewed at your preferred anime piracy site, if you have one. If you don’t, then I happen to use 9anime,me, but cannot vouch for its safety. Be sure to take appropriate measures, such as adblockers.

Take Moon and Ahnenerbe No Nichijou

More comedic fluff. 

Many segments in Carnival Phantasm were adapted from Take Moon. 

Ahnenerbe no Nichijou (”Daily Life at Ahnenerbe,” roughly) revolves around the main heroines of Tsukihime, Fate/Stay Night, and Kara No Kyoukai hanging out in the titular cafe and getting involved in humorous shenanigans, often involving their respective extended casts. Also, HibiChika are in it sometimes.

Take Moon can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/c728b682-514e-4490-b099-a43eb9077b40

Ahnenerbe no Nichijou can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/b4101937-158d-496d-95c7-03c540032ed5

Melty Blood X

A comedic spin-off manga that acts as a sequel of sorts to Actress Again. Sion’s attempts to improve her living conditions go extremely awry and nearly get everyone killed.

can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/daf449f6-9f05-480e-858d-4597c9908a1e

Koha-Ace

A super-deformed comedy manga starring Kohaku and Akiha. Mostly consists of self-deprecating shots at Type-Moon.

Long-lasting compared to the rest, bafflingly.

Is actually the source of multiple Servants in FGO - most notably Okita and Nobunaga, who were originally joke characters created specifically for this manga (Okita, in particular, being a recolour of Kohaku). Fate/Red Line is actually an adaptation of Koha-Ace’s one semi-serious storyline, with the rest of the nonsensical comedy and all Tsukihime elements removed.

Can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/223f03db-b8fa-4087-8dfe-9bb04efecd3b

Melty Blood Back Alley Alliance Nightmare

A somewhat bipolar half-comedic half-serious manga acting as a sequel of sorts to Actress Again. Sion and her friends attempt to visit the beach, only for her to get abruptly thrown into a Fate/Grand Order crossover where she is repeatedly forced to experience the lives of her alternate timeline counterparts, who never meet happy ends, while also being harassed by the ghost of Olga Marie Animusphere.

There’s also a subplot about Lev trying to escape from Hell The Great Cats Garden (which is probably a worse place to be anyway).

... a fairly large chunk of the manga has been rendered nonsensical thanks to the Fate Worlds/Tsukihime Worlds retcon. What? No, I’m not still bitter about that shitty goddamn retcon.

He said, bitterly.

can be read at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16jgRv-WneCDBF324U_MFsuguPFTt2J0S (thank you @shadouko​ for the updated link)

Hana no Miyako!

A lighthearted spin-off manga taking place five years after Tsukihime. Hana no Miyako! (Something like “Miyako of the Flowers!” or “Flowery Miyako!” I think) features the misadventures of Shiki Tohno’s foster sister Miyako Arima as she attempts to make it through high school without getting into too much trouble. And fails. A lot. At least she gets a girlfriend very-close-friend-who-is-also-a-girl-but-not-her-girlfriend-she-swears out of it

Also for some reason one of the most major antagonists is the daughter of Caster and Kuzuki from Fate/Stay Night. She’s very in love with Miyako. It would be cute if she had any sense of boundaries.

Got cancelled halfway through. The author continued it as a doujin work with Type-Moon’s approval, but hasn’t released a new chapter in literal years. Hope you enjoy Suffering.

Can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/9a07cfcf-858f-4e4d-befe-34522a896e46

Melty Blood Type Lumina

The newest iteration of Melty Blood, updated to the Remake’s setting. A sort of out-of-continuity prequel with a pared-back cast, some cool additions like the Remake’s new midboss Vlov Arkhangel, and some less-than-welcome guests. In addition to the standard arcade ladders, it also has a story mode, added in a later update, but I haven’t checked it out yet because I’m still too blown away that they managed to make me actually angry that one of my favourite literary characters ever is playable in a fighting game I like to go back to it.

Can be purchased for PS4 or Nintendo Switch on their respective digital storefronts, or on Steam at https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372280/MELTY_BLOOD_TYPE_LUMINA/

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 11, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On the twentieth anniversary of the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, the weather was eerily similar to the bright, clear blue sky of what has come to be known as 9/11. George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who, on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.

Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”

Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know.”

“On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”

Today’s commemorations of that tragic day almost a generation ago seemed to celebrate exactly what Bush did: the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.

That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.

It is this America we commemorate today.

But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy today’s events commemorated. Those people, concentrated in the Republican Party, worried that permitting all Americans to have a say in their government would lead to “socialism”: minorities and women would demand government programs paid for with tax dollars collected from hardworking people—usually, white men. They wanted to slash taxes and government regulations, giving individuals the “freedom” to do as they wished.

In 1986, they had begun to talk about purifying the vote; when the Democrats in 1993 passed the so-called Motor Voter law permitting people to register to vote at certain government offices, they claimed that Democrats were buying votes. The next year, Republicans began to claim that Democrats won elections through fraud, and in 1998, the Florida legislature passed a voter ID law that led to a purge of as many as 100,000 voters from the system before the election of 2000, resulting in what the United States Commission on Civil Rights called “an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement,” particularly of African American voters.

It was that election that put George W. Bush in the White House, despite his losing the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by more than a half a million votes.

Bush had run on the promise he would be “a uniter, not a divider,” but as soon as he took office, he advanced the worldview of those who distrusted democracy. He slashed government programs and in June pushed a $1.3 trillion cut through Congress. These measures increased the deficit without spurring the economy, and voters were beginning to sour on a presidency that had been precarious since its controversial beginnings.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hours before the planes hit the Twin Towers, a New York Times editorial announced: “There is a whiff of panic in the air.”

And then the planes hit.

“In our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment,” Bush said. America had seemed to drift since the Cold War had ended twelve years before, but now the country was in a new death struggle, against an even more implacable foe. To defeat the nation’s enemies, America must defend free enterprise and Christianity at all costs.

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced.

Immediately, the administration focused on strengthening business. It shored up the airline industry and, at the advice of oil industry executives, deregulated the oil industry and increased drilling. By the end of the year, Congress had appropriated more than $350 billion for the military and homeland security, but that money would not go to established state and local organizations; it would go to new federal programs run by administration loyalists. Bush’s proposed $2.13 trillion 2003 budget increased military spending by $48 billion while slashing highway funding, environmental initiatives, job training, and other domestic spending. It would throw the budget $401 billion in the red. Republicans attacked any opposition as an attack on “the homeland.”

The military response to the attacks also turned ideological quickly. As soon as he heard about the attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked his aides to see if there was enough evidence to “hit” Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as well as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In fact, Saddam had not been involved in the attack on America: the al-Qaeda terrorists of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.

Rumsfeld was trying to fit the events of 911 into the worldview of the so-called neocons who had come together in 1997 to complain that President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy was “incoherent” and to demand that the U.S. take international preeminence in the wake of the Cold War. They demanded significantly increased defense spending and American-backed “regime change” in countries that did not have “political and economic freedom.” They wanted to see a world order “friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

After 9/11, Bush launched rocket attacks on the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda, successfully overthrowing it before the end of the year. But then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America's image. In 2002, it announced that the U.S. would no longer simply try to contain our enemies as President Harry S. Truman had planned, or to fund their opponents as President Ronald Reagan had done, but to strike nations suspected of planning attacks on the U.S. preemptively: the so-called Bush Doctrine. In 2003, after setting up a pro-American government in Afghanistan, the administration invaded Iraq.

By 2004, the administration was so deeply entrenched in its own ideology that a senior adviser to Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—were in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The 9/11 attacks enabled Republicans to tar those who questioned the administration's economic or foreign policies as un-American: either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Surely, such people should not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a series of Supreme Court decisions. In 2010, the court opened the floodgates of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013, it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021, it said that election laws that affected different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional.

And now we grapple with the logical extension of that argument as a former Republican president claims he won the 2020 election because, all evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.

Today, former president Bush called out the similarities between today’s domestic terrorists who attacked our Capitol to overthrow our government on January 6 and the terrorists of 9/11. “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home, “he said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

In doing so, we can take guidance from the passengers on Flight 93, who demonstrated as profoundly as it is possible to do what confronting such an ideology means. While we cannot know for certain what happened on that plane on that fateful day, investigators believe that before the passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, throwing themselves between the terrorists and our government, and downed the plane, they all took a vote.

---

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/11/politics/transcript-george-w-bush-speech-09-11-2021/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20050205041635/http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=project_for_the_new_american_century

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[beeblebrox-be-damned]

Silohouette (Part 1: Fertilization)

Dark!Bucky Barnes x Reader

I didn’t intend to start another series so soon after Drive Him Crazy, but here we are. As always, suggestions and ideas are adored.

TW: Stalking

“Got any change?”

You jumped a bit in your seat, glancing up at the man standing beside you. “Sorry, what’d you say?” The bar wasn’t loud, but it the drone of voices and the dazed state you were in did well to make sure you couldn’t hear anything unless you were concentrating.

“I asked if you had any change. For a fiver, I mean.”

You dug out your wallet. “One’s or coins?”

The man handed you a five dollar bill. “One’s would be great.”

Without a word, you handed him five dollar bills. He took then graciously and tucked one into his pocket. The other four he slid to the bartender. “Rum-and-coke for me and the lady, please,” he said. 

You glanced over at him. “Thanks.”

He shrugged, taking the seat next to you. “Don’t mention it. Not many people would be so kind to a stranger.” His voice was rough, but kind. You shrugged.

“Change is nothing, don’t worry about it.” You brushed it off. You were about to leave and weren’t very keen on conversing at the moment, but you didn’t want to seem rude. The bartender handed you your drink. You noticed he made sure that the man next to you didn’t touch it. Sad that in this day and time you couldn’t trust anyone.

The man shrugged. “Used to, people were always like that.” His tone was almost wistful. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard,” he finished quickly. You looked at him quizzically for a moment then took a sip of your drink. 

“Well, considering everything that’s going on nowadays, I suppose it pays to be guarded in some ways.” You tapped the ice in your glass, watching idly as it bobbed in the amber liquid.

He nodded. “Very true.”

You lapsed into silence for several minutes, both of you unmoving asides from the occasional sip. Once you reached the bottom of your glass, you stood with a brief stretch. “Well, thank you for the drink. It’s getting late.” You shrugged your jacket on. “I’d better be getting home.”

The man looked at you with an unplaceable expression. “Have a good night, then. Stay safe.” He gave you a brief smile. “Don’t want to be late for work in the morning.”

You nodded and shoved your hands in your pockets, turning and making your way out of the building. The cool night air hit your face. It was raining, you realized with a grimace. You pulled up your hood and walked quickly down the sidewalk.

This late at night, the streets were nearly silent. You loved it when it was like this. It was one of the reasons you always stayed at your old haunt so late into the evening- so you could enjoy this solitude after you left. Puddles glinted orange in the dim streetlights, leaves plastered to their depths.

It was late, but you were unafraid. Confident, really. These were your streets. You’d seen the way people shied away from you, and you loved it. You could go anywhere any time you wanted here. Nobody would bother you.

Sometimes it paid to be unapproachable.

Which made it rather odd that someone had spoken to you in the bar. You’d gone there for years to people-watch and nobody had ever had the balls to speak to you. Especially not someone so handsome.

Handsome? Since when did you look at other people that way? You snorted at yourself, shaking your head. But you had to admit, he was rather attractive.

Oh well. People didn’t like you. You didn’t like people.

You walked onwards in the rain.

He’d noticed you the first time he walked into that bar. The grim set of your mouth. The way you glared blankly at everyone. The way you never spoke accept to order a drink and thank the bartender.

You were attractive, even in your sullen demeanor. He found himself draw to you, mind always wandering back to that nameless, silent woman in the bar. Each night he went there, there you were, in your same spot. It perplexed him. Surely you had friends or a significant other to be with. But then again, perhaps not. You seemed like a true loner.

It had been an innocent thing at first, it really had. He’d simply been searching for a quiet, uncrowded place to spend his free time. Perhaps that’s why you were there too. He found himself wondering about you; what you liked to drink, what made you smile, what you liked and disliked. He watched you for weeks before he finally got up the nerve to talk to you.

Of course, he knew striking up of conversation wouldn’t be easy. He’d have to go about this slowly. So at first, he started with a simple request, just asking a favor of you. Not only would he seem unthreatening (after all, maybe you didn’t trust people easily) but he would also get a better grasp on what your personality was like.

He smiled. It couldn’t have gone better. Sure, it was only a handful of words, but it meant the world to him. He meant what he said; not many people would be so kind.

You were like a geode. Your exterior was hard and cold and grey, but he knew that once he chipped that away, you’d shine. He could almost imagine seeing a smile quirk your lips. 

He didn’t even know your name and yet he’d fallen for you, hard. Which is why, he supposed, he was so worried when you left.

He’d said be careful. He meant it. There were tens of thousands of hungry predators roaming the streets of New York, each one of them waiting with dripping jaws for a lone woman like you. Of course, you looked like you could hold your own, but what if?

He debated the ethics of what he was about to do for an entire two seconds before he slid off his stool and followed after you. Your foot had hardly even left the threshold.

You walked with your head up and your hands jammed into your pockets. You were confident, but even confidence couldn’t protect you from the worst of the worst this city had to offer. The longer he followed you and the dimmer the streetlights became, the more confidant in his own decision he became. You’d be safe with him watching over you. Anyone who tried anything would meet a swift and just punishment.

He stayed several yards behind you. His steps were nearly silent, any sound he did make muted totally by the rain. This part of town was a quiet one, he realized, but even so, you could never be too careful.

You reached your apartment with no interruptions. You dug out your key and jammed it in the lock. It took several tries before the door would open, and one good kick. You sighed as the maligned gutters high above your head dripped dirty rainwater down your back as you stepped inside.

You switched on the light, sighing as the dingy room greeted you. You tossed your soaked jacket onto the chair by the door, your purse following soon after. Your shoes took their place beneath the chair. Hopefully they’d dry before morning. Going to work with soggy shoes was a drag.

You changed into sleep clothes, a baggy t-shirt and sweatpants, and brushed your teeth in the tiny bathroom. You stared at your haggard reflection in the mirror, sighing. You knew you shouldn’t stay out so late, but it was better than being here.

It was good to have a roof over your head, but sometimes it was hard to be grateful for your lot in life. You were smart, could’ve had so much better. You were barely through your first semester of college when it happened, the Blip.

Your parents, gone. Relatives, gone. Most of the people you’d known all your life, all gone in an instant. Some of them hadn’t turned to dust. The aftermath of so many disappearances left many dead. Driverless cars careened off the roads with passengers or hit other vehicles and killed those in them. Airplanes dropped out of the air like shot birds, their crews gone. Doctors and nurses gone from hospitals, leaving their patients to die. Emergency rooms were overloaded with the injured, not enough people to help them.

Without your parents, schooling became impossible. You had been able to finish out your first semester, but after that you couldn’t continue. The money your parents had in the bank was locked up, not enough people to deal with the rush of pending legal matters to be seen to. The house and cars were repossessed, leaving you in the streets. By some stroke of luck, you’d found work as a taxi driver, but hours were long and paid little.

In the end, this was all you could afford. With a heavy sigh that was almost routine now, you sank into the lumpy couch, dragging your blankets over yourself. Even with the lights switched off and the outside world darkened by rain, light still poured in the windows. You hid your face beneath the pillow and hoped to get a few hours of rest.

Bucky’s heart had dropped to his feet when he saw where you lived. No wonder you spent so much time at the bar. A seedy apartment complex was no place for someone like you. It was obvious the locks had issues too. He grimaced. Anyone could break in there and steal everything you owed or do something even worse to you if you were home.

He stood on the sidewalk for a long time. He could see your silhouette through the thin curtains as you moved through your tiny abode. Eventually the lights switched off. He turned with a heavy sigh and trudged back up the street. it would be a long walk back to his part of town, but it was worth it to know you were safe.

Surely you hadn’t grown up like this. Not with the way you spoke and held yourself. No, you must’ve been one of the victims of the Snap who hadn’t died. You’d been one who’d been left to fend for themselves.

He walked for a long time, thinking. It weighed heavy on his heart to think about you living in such a decrepit place. Not only were the living conditions awful, but you ’d be in constant danger.

Finally he reached his home. It was a modest place, but larger on the inside than it looked outwardly. He unlocked the door with a key-code and a fingerprint scan. All Stark technology. The house had originally been Steve’s but he’d practically given it to Bucky when he’d decided to move closer to the Tower.

Bucky loved the house. It had an old-timey air to it, but it had been specially built at Steve’s request. Once Bucky had been cleared of coding in Wakanda, Steve had requested a house be built for he and Bucky away from the center of the city where Bucky could feel safer while he worked through the mess his mind had been left in. 

The lower levels were where Bucky had formerly resided. In order to keep him from fleeing and accidentally hurting someone, there was only one entrance, a heavy door that locked mainly from the outside. There was a lock on the inside too, but at that time only Steve’s prints had been in the security system. The door was heavy enough that even Bucky would have difficulties breaking through it. If he had even tried, Steve would have been notified and been able to monitor the situation remotely via camera.

Now with Steve moved out, Bucky had the upper floors to himself. It was nice, and he felt safe here. It was an odd feeling, sometimes, feeling truly at home. It had taken a long time for him to get to that point, but he had, and he was proud of himself for it.

He lay in bed that night, thinking. An idea wormed its way into his brain, planting himself deep in a dark recess in the corner of his mind. Perhaps this could be home to someone else too someday.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

In a way, the trail for bio-fabricated animal fabrics is already at least somewhat blazed for Modern Meadow. Unlike with clean meat, some people are already beginning to buy lab-grown animal-based garments, many of which utilize comparable technologies to those employed by some of the companies discussed in this book. For example, California-based Bolt Threads is growing in vitro spider silk (what their webs are made of), starting with yeast cells that have been engineered to spit out the proteins naturally found in the extremely durable arachnid product. Unlike the more common silk from worms-who’ve been domesticated and bred for silk production over the course of many centuries-spider silk is far stronger, some types being even sturdier than Kevlar, all the while being as soft as, well, silk. The problem with trying to produce it commercially is that spiders don’t do so well when we try to farm them, typically eating one another in the crowded conditions needed for insect farming to work. Cannibalism just doesn’t lend itself to profitability. (A team in Madagascar did succeed in producing a farmed spider silk garment in 2009, but only after four years offering a lot of spiders.)

With $90 million in venture capital raised, in 2017 Bolt Threads announced its first commercial product-a necktie that retails for $314, and were only made available to fifty lucky individuals who won a lottery to buy them. The company also inked a deal with Patagonia for its arachnid-free spider silk garments. A Japanese competitor named Spiber (as in "spider fiber") is doing the same thing and in 2015 partnered with North Face to produce the so-called Moon Parka, a durable winter coat containing their lab-grown silk that is, at the time of this writing, available for sale in Japan and retails for $1,000. And shoemaker Adidas is already starting to use lab-produced spider silk, called Biosteel, manufactured by a German competitor of Spiber named AMSilk. The company boasts that “a spiderweb made of pencil-thick spider silk fibers can catch a fully loaded Jumbo Jet Boeing 747, with a weight of 380 tons.” […] 

Second, as GFI’s Bruce Friedrich points out in a blog on the topic, clean meat at scale won’t happen In a laboratory-all processed food started in a food lab, even Corn Flakes and peanut butter, for example. But no one asks, "Would you eat lab-produced Corn Flakes?” Rather than being produced in a lab, clean meat would be produced in a factory (or call It a brewery if you prefer), where the majority of food sold In supermarkets Is produced. Food companies, of course, have R-and-D teams laboring away in labs, but once they get their recipe down, the actual food production moves to a factory. Similarly, clean meat factories will be a far cry from a laboratory; they’ll have massive tanks in which the meat will be cultured on a huge scale. [...]

Not everyone will convert, needless to say, but enough will likely do so to make a difference, and, presumably, a profit. As well, even if only twenty percent of meat-eaters were willing to switch, that would still make clean meat a multibillion-dollar industry. […] 

Hansen is right that predictions have been made for years about cultured meat coming to fruition, and yet the meat industry largely hasn’t felt that threatened. But things do seem to be changing in the wake of high-profile product unveilings by the likes of Post and Valeti, and certainly the investment from Cargill. Gone are the days of clean meat being purely a theoretical daydream of environmentalists who want a more sustainable way to produce meat. With commercialization looking increasingly likely, we won’t need to rely on pollsters to tell us how consumers may react when clean meat is available to them. People like Hansen and Nestle may not want to eat meat if it didn’t come from a slaughtered animal, but how many others will share their repugnance at such a thought?

Kristopher Gasteratos, founder of the Cellular Agriculture Society (created in 2016), is more optimistic. He believes animal agriculture is so inefficient that humanity will be forced to abandon it, at least for the bulk of our protein production, or we’ll pay the price. His analysis of the situation doesn’t pull any punches: “Factory farming of animals will end one way or the other. The real question is this: if we don’t find an alternative to factory farming soon, will we as a civilization end with it?”

Gasteratos is convinced that the public will come to accept clean meat because there’s such an existential necessity for it. But his view is also informed by a study he conducted over the course of 2016 with the assistance of both New Harvest and the Good Food Institute. In the study, Gasteratos led a team of researchers who asked thousands of survey respondents their views on the topic. Based at Florida Atlantic University, the project ultimately surveyed more than thirty-two hundred undergraduate students and about fifteen hundred adults both in the United States and Australia (the two nations with the highest rates of meat consumption on a per capita basis). Unlike the aforementioned surveys, which largely asked if people would eat "meat grown in a lab:’ Gasteratos took a deeper dive, wording his key question in a way that provided respondents with more context: “Scientists are working towards producing meat by using animal cells instead of living animals. This new method of harvesting meat is called “cultured meat” and will likely be available to the public within the next decade. It is important to note that cultured meat is real animal meat, so it should not be confused with current meat substitutes which are made from plants. If cultured meat is proven safe by long-term research, tastes the same as current/conventional meat and is priced affordably, would you eat cultured meat?”

Upon simply being asked this question, without any discussion of clean meat’s benefits, 61 percent of the university students claimed they’d either “probably” or “definitely” eat it. After being told some of the benefits, either ethical, health, or ecological, that number spiked to 77 percent. Among the fifteen hundred adults, the numbers were similar: 62 percent were willing to eat it without knowing its benefits, while 72 percent were willing once they knew of those benefits.

Other interesting findings from Gasteratos’s work include some pretty fascinating results about just who is most interested in eating this meat. “People still seem to be generally unaware of this topic, but what really shocked me was our finding about how higher self reported meat consumption correlated with higher cultured meat acceptance. Basically, the people who say they eat the most conventional meat tend to be the most receptive toward a cultured alternative, while people who say they eat little meat, and especially vegetarians and vegans, are the least interested.

In other words, clean meat probably isn’t for the people shopping at the farmers’ market or their local co-op, It holds far less appeal with the natural-foods crowd than the crowd going to KFC. But that's okay. In fact, it may even be for the best considering that the number of people who eat conventional meat is far, far larger than those who frequent their local farmers’ markets.

Comments left by respondents offered some good qualitative insights into the general perception. "I don’t care where the meat came from so long as it’s safe and tastes right;’ explained one respondent, echoing a widely held sentiment among participants. Others expressed some qualms about meat-eating but thought cultured meat could be the answer to their concerns: "I heard meat is really bad for global warming;’ one respondent wrote. "this would sort of absolve me of that guilt.”

- Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, Paul Shapiro

[north-brisbane]

Cash For Cars - Get Rid of That Unwanted Car

Cash for Cars is one of the most popular places to sell your old vehicle. It is not uncommon to find people who are interested in taking your car apart and getting as much cash for it as they can. You have probably seen the advertisements on television, or you may have even seen them online. Cash for Cars North Brisbane basically pays you well for your old vehicle. It can be a great way to get cash for cars in North Brisbane.

Cash for Cars has been around for many years, and they are still as popular today as they were when they first started. They have many vehicles that are available to take apart and get cash for cars. The reason for this is simple. There are a lot of people who like to tow cars but do not have the time to do it themselves. When you have your car to be towed, there is no need to hire a person to do it. Instead, you simply load it up with everything you will need, drive it to the location, and then load it right back into your vehicle afterwards.

When you want cash for cars in North Brisbane, you want the very best value for your money. No one wants to pay top dollar for a scrap car removal Brisbane, nor should they. Instead, when you are looking to sell your vehicle, you want to make sure you take advantage of the very best value possible. This is where Cash for Cars can come in handy. They will offer top dollar for your vehicle and will help you get rid of it in the quickest and most efficient manner possible.

As you probably already know, cash for cars north of Brisbane is a great way to get rid of your vehicle legally. While some places might charge you an outrageous price for this service, you can benefit from cash for cars north of Brisbane when you are prepared to fight the cost. There is nothing wrong with looking to save money when it comes to the services you utilize to get rid of your vehicle. This is especially true when you consider that many other individuals in the area are willing to work for less in order to get rid of their unwanted vehicles.

Finding the best cash for cars Brisbane will require some work on your part. You will need to find the right free car removal company to help you remove your vehicle. Since there are numerous companies in the area, you will likely have some difficulty finding the one that you truly feel is the best choice. To begin with, you will need to consider how long it has been since you took possession of your vehicle. If you have been away from home for a while, you may be able to get by with a local company that offers this service free of charge.

If, however, you are still tied to your car after a while, you will need to consider paying a small fee in order to get a free towing away of your automobile. Before you pay a fee, however, you should make sure that the company you are considering offers free towing away cars in North Brisbane. You can do this by researching which companies are located near your home and making a list of those companies. Next, contact each company to inquire about whether they offer this service free of charge. If you do not hear back from any of the companies, look elsewhere for a tow away company that offers free towing in Brisbane.

While you may feel like you would rather give us your money for all the unwanted cars Brisbane has, you should know that giving away cash for cars north of Brisbane isn't always the right choice. If you want to get rid of your vehicle in the most ethical and best way possible, you should choose a professional towing company that offers a free towing quote. These professionals will be able to give you an accurate price for towing away your vehicle. When you have received this price, you can then determine whether or not giving us cash for cars Brisbane is the right choice for you.

There are many companies in North Queensland that provide cash for cars Brisbane northside. If you want to get rid of that unwanted car, you should contact one of these companies to schedule a free towing away of your vehicle. While you can certainly try to get rid of your vehicle by yourself, using a professional will ensure that your vehicle is properly removed. In addition, a professional will be able to give you a more accurate price for the towing away of your vehicle. These professionals will also be able to give you advice on how to keep your car safe while being removed. All in all, if you still don't have a vehicle to remove, you may want to consider giving cash for cars Brisbane a shot.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND NOTICING

And it seems even odder to say that you have lousy judgement. They're not just beautiful, but strangely beautiful.1 Good design solves the right problem. But the non-gullible majority won't stop getting spam until they can stop or threaten to stop the gullible from responding to it.2 My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us. The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors. It was really close, too.3

Anyone who'd really tried to solve the same problem, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. The deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications. Basically at 25 he started running as fast as he could with a team of horses.4 Going to or back to school is a huge predictor of death.5 You turn the fan back on, and that's why so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich. It's clear now that even by using the word lie in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. So far, we've reduced the problem from thinking of a million dollar idea to thinking of a mistaken question. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. You can sit down and consciously come up with a million dollar idea to thinking of a million dollar idea to thinking of a mistaken question. But if a kid asks you Is there a God?

If you become one of the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first launched.6 But if it's inborn it should be universal, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics. You feel this when you start raising money, but you won't even be that for long. Nature uses it a lot, which is usually unanimous. If you'd proposed at the time the acquirer gets them, they're not drifting. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. Apple as evil.7 A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by but. So far so good.8 I feel like we're at a tipping point here.

So it may be just as well to go work for a company; we did. It would be closer to the truth. Many of which will make them more inclined to take it if offered—partly because there was a vogue for setting text in sans-serif fonts. When I walked into the final, the main thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my questions would turn up on the startup, you can tell them.9 But in addition to the distraction it gives you another source of ideas: look at big companies, where you either have to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example. This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of evil machines, and one that would have been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were parts of the real world, wealth is except for a few specialists like thieves and speculators something you have to give advice, you can have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best programmers won't work for you without giving them options likely to be worth something. So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in income is a sign of the way things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. That one succeeded. Can you do more of that?

They'll lie to you on this one. They're smart; they're working in a promising field; and they just cannot give up.10 I learned from painting: you have to do something weird at first. Whereas acquirers are, as of this writing, extremely fickle.11 But you see the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia.12 Most people prefer to remain in denial about problems. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. And it works.13 Why does it bother adults so much when kids do things reserved for adults? He never did any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this is exactly what you'd get on noticing that some people made much more money from it, it offered the highest ratio of income to boringness of anything I'd done, by orders of magnitude. Extracurricular activities, check. Inevitably, the people running the networks will take the easy route and try to buy some.14

So stop looking for the trick. How casual successful startup founders are. Maybe if I were smart enough it would seem the ideal plan for most people to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.15 It would set off alarms. If even big employers think highly of young hackers who start companies, why don't more do it? But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the. Taste. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with. I've never done another startup.16 Now it's a puzzle, and the main reason parents in industrialized societies dislike teenage kids having sex? So what they do, apparently, is note down the age and race and sex of the person, and guess from that who they voted for. We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there is no way to get money, of course, big companies are bad at product development because they're bad at everything.

Anyone who's worked for a few vestigial domestic tasks.17 Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms that have immediate approval processes. Viaweb was more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, how to raise an angel round, don't feel bad on that account.18 There may be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that, so I can tell you what users want.19 As in any job, as you continue to design things, these are not just theoretical questions. The Matrix have such resonance.20 So even in the smartest companies. Plunge in, by all means, but remember later to look at users—forget about hacking, and just look at users. Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular: according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their work.

Notes

Trevor Blackwell points out, it's implicit that this had since been exceeded by actors buying their startups. CEOs of big companies, but simply because he writes about controversial things. It rarely arises, and configure domain names etc.

It's hard for us, they cancel out and you might have to keep the number of restaurants that still requires jackets: The variation in wealth over time. Most smart high school, and b the local stuff. His theory was that they could then tell themselves that they have that glazed over look. But a lot about how things are different.

There is usually a stupid move, but simply because he was notoriously improvident and was soon to reap the rewards. What I dislike is editing done after the first philosophers including Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. While the space of ideas doesn't have to give their associates the title associate has gotten a bad idea has been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the dollar. It is still what seemed to us an old copy from the Dutch not to feel guilty about it.

You know in the standard career paths of trustafarians to start a startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to give them up is the most valuable aspects of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses. Everything is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get a definite plan to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long to launch a new, much more dangerous than fundraising. We Getting a Divorce?

If you're a YC startup and you have to watch out for here, because investing later would probably never have to include things in shows is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. Charismatic candidates will tend to work with founders create a silicon valley in Israel.

Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the sense that if you aren't embarrassed by what one delivers, not lowercase. Pliny Hist. Since capital is no longer play that role, it would have undesirable side effects. And they are to be free to work your way.

It's hard to say now. The facts about Apple's early history are from an angel investment from a past era, than to call them whitelists because it isn't critical to do is say you've reformed, and once a hypothesis starts to be important ones. The fancy version of everything was called the executive model. Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

Most word problems in school math textbooks are not merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be something you need but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. The golden age of economic equality in the US.

As usual the popular image is several decades behind reality. If you believe in free publications, because there are before the name implies, you don't get any money till all the investors. Investors are fine with funding nerds.

Not all were necessarily supplied by the government. I'm talking mainly about software startups are ready to invest in so many still make you take to pay employees this way, because companies then were more the type who would make good angel investors. You should take a conscious effort.

In this essay. Letter to the same town, unless it was spontaneous. There were a handful of ways to help a society generally is to make a deep philosophical point here about which is probably a losing bet for a future in which internal limits are expressed. Or rather, where w is will and d discipline.

So 80 years sounds to me too mild to describe the worst. Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you aren't embarrassed by what you've built is not merely blurry versions of great things were created mainly to make you expend as much income. The reason you don't get any money till all the poorer countries. Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley. Because we know exactly what they're doing. We once put up with much food.

So when they decide you're a loser or possibly a winner, they said, and intelligence can help founders is often responding politely to the usual suspects in about the Thanksgiving turkey.

From the conference site, June 2004: While the US News list tells us is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate everything else in the sense that if they become so embedded that they either have a browser and get data via the Internet, like indifference to individual users. It does at least on me; how could it have meaning? Its retail price is about 220,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the 1990s, except then people who interrupt you. For these companies substitute progress for revenue growth.

When I was writing this, but I think lack of transparency. There were several other reasons. A round.

But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the size of the things startups fix. So as a consulting company is common, to mean starting a company.

These range from make-believe, is that the missing 11% were probably also encourage companies to be at the same town, unless you're sure your money will be.

I've observed; but as an asset class. Everyone's taught about it wrong. Html. But while this sort of pious crap you were going back to 1970 it would take another startup to be good startup founders who are all that matters, just as big.

But if they don't yet have a definite plan to have invented. Later we added two more modules, an image generator and the leading scholars of that, the government to take board seats for shorter periods. Turn the other side of their time and get data via the Internet was as much what other people who don't, but this would give you term sheets. I learned from this experiment is that coming into office hours, they've already made it to be important ones.

Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sarah Harlin, Chris Dixon, Lisa Randall, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for the lulz.

[tothediaspora]

Economic Power of #blackgirlmagic (Pt. 2)

Over the years, I have experienced a transformation in thought, behavior, and emotion. I’ve had the chance to learn about my hair, my ancestral traditions, and grown in conviction about my body being mine to portray as I see fit. I have now understood that the male gaze doesn’t define who I am and how I present myself to the world. In truth, along with many young women, I placed an immense value on how males viewed my body in my formative years. After ten years within the Natural Hair Movement, I increasingly have developed my self-image independent from others’ perception of me. I felt the freedom to change my appearance, the way the hair on my head and body grow, the different ways I express my style and personality. No one has enough influence to change the way I see myself. I also accept that others will do as they please with their own body and with their own hair. Over the years, there has also been a fluctuation in how I have been perceived by the people around me; I allowed myself to subconsciously connect with my ancestors and accept the certain attributes I chose not to change. There were many unexpected changes within my story from the movement being considered a more obscure “Afro-centric” trend of natural beauty to a very striking mainstay and economic powerhouse. I found that one of the objectives that I inadvertently learned during my stake in the Natural Hair Movement is my influence within a collective of other black women and our very own economic power.

My progress in self-knowledge accelerated in the summer of 2008. A few months after my “big chop”, I had more time to explore my hair — hair I’ve always had but never learned how to care for it. Gone were the days of multiple ponytail braids, barrettes, and ribbons I sported in Haiti as a little girl. I no longer wore a perm and felt a bit uneasy about the learning curve of taking care of my hair unaltered by chemicals. Without the corrosive chemicals, I slowly found that I began to limit other very toxic products in my life. I looked up “how to take care of “natural hair” online. In one of the very few links, Nappturality members shared scores of knowledge on African-derived concoctions. I became aware of raw African black Soap. This soap made washing my short hair an ease. After living in dorms for two years, I had sublet an apartment that summer, my first time living alone. I took some of that opportunity to experiment with homemade recipes of fair trade shea butter I ordered online. The products were made in Ghana by other black women that have known about it all of their lives. I felt that I had missed out on this common knowledge and was purposefully miseducated. I had part of my childhood in Haiti and some in the States; in both spaces, I used petroleum-laden hair grease, pomade, Pink Lotion, and Mane n’ Tail products marketed to black women with problematic and toxic ingredients. I realized that my mother and aunts might have been miseducated as well. I then found “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America”. This book on black hair history opened my eyes to the amalgamation of African hair tradition, compartmentalized European ideal standards of beauty, and the politics of simply existing with a black body. It sickened me to know how experiences of self-hate entrenched expectations in my family and culture without my people’s knowledge or full awareness.

While perusing message boards and online forums, I learned of other recipes derived from West Africa. I later learned of Whitney White’s YouTube page, Naptural85, she shared simple recipes with oils, raw African black soap, and raw unrefined shea butter. Raw African black soap was now my body wash and sometimes face wash after finishing the last bits of my bottled liquid soaps. My face glistened when I followed a wash with a drop of vitamin e oil and any acne began to dry up. My skin loved this ancestral treatment. I felt free; I was no longer a victim of basic elements of nature. Like many black girls, I was forbidden to go out in the rain, even with an umbrella, if I had just gotten my hair permed. As a child, maintenance in chlorinated water was covering my head with a swim cap over a heaping handful of conditioner streamed through my hair by my mother. At last, I could let the sudden Florida rainfall on my hair without my mood and especially my mother’s mood changing sour. As I learned more, I purchased mostly indie brands. I used the money I saved little by little to travel in the summer of 2009. I no longer needed plenty and regular supply of plastic bottles for shampoos and body washes. I became accustomed to cutting small blocks of raw African black soap from a large brown speckled loaf. With the new knowledge I had acquired, I would quickly put back on the shelf those products I used ritualistically since childhood after one quick reading of the label.

Over time, I began to learn that many products specifically formulated to be marketed to black women have toxic chemicals. I used the internet as a constant resource for information on chemical compounds included in the beauty products that I used regularly. As I read more, I aimed to pick up products that reflected simplicity. I actively avoided over-produced and loaded items in hair products and body care. I began to use tea rinses and heavy oils to replace the moisturizing effects of conditioners. I washed my hair with raw African black soap, rinsed my hair with cooled tea, then used heavy raw unrefined shea butter and oils to keep my damp hair soft and supple for days. I adopted this reductionist routine and sought simplification.

I now understand that women, in particular, have been sold to the huge campaign of commercial beauty products (not to mention apparel, toiletries, seasonal home decor, and even menstrual products). In 2008, While searching for natural products that fit my values, it had been really difficult to find items that weren’t full of artificial ingredients. When I looked up the toxic ingredients, many were correlated with cancer. There were products that claimed to moisturize on its label, yet, the second ingredient on the back was alcohol. Increasingly, the market has improved on the quantity and quality of natural hair products. These products are marketed to women with natural hair that seek natural ingredients in what they use on their skin and hair. I have divorced the idea that I need to be a “product junkie”, well-stocked with hair and skin goods, to be deemed beautiful. I have challenged my role in my assigned gender that dictates that I should have long straight hair that fits with what media deems as standard beauty. Many other black women experienced this with me and many did before me online on sites like Nappturality, with books, and through fellowship with other black women. Through my research, I’ve been introduced to women creating content for other black women who seek it. Women such as Nikisha Brunson of Urban Bush Babes, Dawn Michelle of Minimalist Beauty, Francheska Medina of Hey Fran Hey contribute their recipes and opinions.

Before Instagram sponsored content, natural beauties, black natural hair conferences, and Youtube product giveaways, there were black women sharing recipes and traditions solely for the purpose of sharing knowledge within our community. Though the variety of options now are astounding, helpful, and useful, I prefer simplicity. When in need of convenience and specific styles, I support quality indie brands products free of animal ingredients often from Quemet Biologics and Oyin Handmade. I reflect back on how my mother found good hair stylists; she simply asked other black women with beautiful hair who’s work it was. And as we have done before, in this interwoven network of black womanhood, I want to continue to support my own. These include black hair salons, black women’s hair bundle businesses (if hair sources are ethical), black-owned indie hair care. Black women have immense purchasing power. We not only need to be aware of this power but also realize that supporting other black women is supporting ourselves. Economic power is often misunderstood as solely wealth accumulated through corporate work, stock exchange and trading. I claim economic power as being aware of simply the exchange of resources. I often ask myself, for what purpose is my money being used for? I have been doing this throughout my life as I’ve become aware of the socio-economic power I have in my pocket. When it comes to natural hair and the many products on the shelves, I choose what I want as a consumer with every single dollar as one vote. I want products that do not have ingredients that have parabens. I also do not want those products to replace those parabens they advertise on the front with other detrimental items on the ingredients list that I don’t yet understand as harmful. I do not want products that put me at risk of any adverse health effects. I want products that are safe, effective for what I am using it for, and improve the health of my hair and skin. I want to know that I am supporting my community and fueling my belief that #blacklivesmatter by including the edict that black entrepreneurs matter, black business matters, black independent livelihoods matter, black women matter, and black bodies matter. I want #blackgirlmagic to not only encompass the physical beauty of black womanhood but the holistic power of black women in all aspects of life.

Contrastingly, advertisers of large white-owned corporations are increasingly responding to this growing self-love and knowledge by including black women in their advertisements. The intention is not empowerment but tapping into a market that spends a lot on hair. Black women too can support each other though exercising purchasing power for the benefit of other black women and the black community as a whole. Instead of benefiting large white-owned corporations marketing to black women, we can generate more economic solidarity within our community by investing in black people and their creations. How beautiful is empowering than supporting one’s own community of women through a self-love movement? We all know that supporting black women means that we’re supporting black community as a whole. According to an IMF profile, women in general “make institutions more representative of a range of voices” and women provide benefits for children “as a result of more spending on food and education”. Over all, women with economic power provide “greater provision of public goods”. Black women entrepreneurs are sure to spread the wealth to the black men and children in their lives may it be their fathers, mothers, partners, brothers, and their kin.

Furthermore, power also translates to autonomy and self-expression. Self-named “Naturalistas” such as Mahogany Curls, creates beautiful hairstyle ideas for other black women. Meanwhile, Fro Girl Ginny’s “Nia the Light” social media influencing gathers black women in different parts of the world to create unity and to sustain the Natural Hair Movement. This movement is beyond a trend. With the recent media troubles of Dove and Nivea, it is known that corporations often falter in including women of color in a good light. Corporations join in on the movement solely for profit and hardly for the health, wellness, and unity of black women. These corporations also exploit the buying power of black women. Even SheaMoisture, a brand originally created by a black woman has encountered scandal with a lack of representation in a recent ad. Many black women on social media commented on the lack of tact and representation in the brand’s shift to a wider white market. With $1.2 Trillion in spending power for black people over-all, women have purchasing power (including influence) of 70–80%. Influence in the sense that when a woman isn’t paying for a product with her own dollars, she is often the influence behind someone else’s purchase. This means black women as a community have approximately $960 billion at their disposal. Nielsen’s research breaks down the statistics thoroughly. With this purchasing power, we are able to change how products are made, what we spend on, how much money is directed towards the community resources that matter to us the most, and if the owners of the products we use are black-owned.

Before many corporations joined into the Natural Hair Movement and the #blackgirlmagic that ensued, we were here as black women with more knowledge of our roots. I have experienced an overwhelming transformation of thought and behavior from a seemingly trivial decision. I discovered that I could save on financial resources on the things that mattered more to me by making my own recipes with bulk West African ingredients and now supporting many favorite local brands such as Beijaflor Naturals and Soul Ingredients. Once again, here I am, 10 years after beginning my journey within the Natural Hair Movement. As other black women are repeatedly disenfranchised, we are also notoriously resourceful in fulfilling our own needs. We are able to change what we consume as a whole. No matter the restrictions, despite passing trends, we can build each other and our entire community up.

[easyfoodnetwork]

There Really Is No Ethical Restaurant Under Capitalism

Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run

The only ethical restaurant I have ever heard of is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I have never watched the show, but my partner has excitedly explained this particular vision of utopia to me at least three times. The restaurant is named Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and exists in New Orleans in the 24th century, on an Earth that has abolished prejudice, money, and hunger. Though you could press a button and conjure any ingredient, the aforementioned Sisko still finds a desire to provide hospitality, so every night he cooks gumbo and jambalaya and presumably gives it away for free, just because he wants to.

We have not figured out how to replicate matter, nor have we abolished money, so even in our most progressive and sustainable restaurants, the food has to come from somewhere and must be paid for by someone. But we all know the restaurant world has more immediate problems than the lack of a Star Trek society. Building an equitable restaurant, a place where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and can work in an anti-discriminatory environment, is going to take a near-undoing of the way most restaurants are run.

Currently, most restaurants, whether they are high-end or hole-in-the-wall, family-owned or corporate-run, operate in much the same way. There is an owner, or owners, who either own the property the restaurant is on or lease it from a landlord. Sometimes the chef is also the owner, or sometimes they are hired by the owner. In the kitchen, there is a hierarchy. It may not always look like the traditional French brigade system, with its focus on militaristic efficiency, but the chef manages, and makes more money than, the line cooks. In the back of the house, dishwashers, bussers, and cooks are often paid the minimum wage, while in the front of the house, in most U.S. states, servers and bartenders are paid lower wages with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. Many states permit employees to be fired at will. And the lower down the line you are, the less likely it is you’ll be making decisions about how your workplace functions.

It’s not glib to say that eradicating capitalism is the surest way to build equitable restaurants. Living in a country that provided universal health care, federally mandated paid child leave and sick leave, and a living minimum wage, as well as incentivized sustainable farming, encouraged unions, and got rid of at-will employment, would go a long way toward creating environments within restaurants (and all businesses) where workers had power over their own livelihood.

But that is a tall order for restaurants to take on alone, so barring revolution (though fingers crossed), upending everything we assume about how restaurants are run is the necessary step toward an actually ethical restaurant industry. Other options already exist — nonprofits, workers collectives, unions, volunteer-run restaurants — that create models for a fairer and more just workplace. But what does it even mean to be an equitable restaurant? And can simply changing the ownership structure provide that?

Kirk Vartan, co-owner of A Slice of New York pizzerias in the Bay Area, understands that phrases like “collectively owned” or “workers cooperative” can inspire panic and confusion. It’s like, what, everyone has to vote every time you place a produce order? Is it going to lead to the drama of the Park Slope Food Coop deciding whether or not to carry Israeli products? “People think that it’s hippies, and everyone’s going to smoke weed, and sit around in a circle and just love and peace, and whatever,” he tells Eater. “And the reality is, this is a very real business model.”

Vartan actually took inspiration from, of all places, the corporate world. While working for NBC, he was given stock options. “It’s not a lot of stock. It’s like this little itty-bitty micro-bit of the company. But it changes your attitude when you actually own part of it,” he says. After leaving to start a New York-style pizza shop in San Jose, he was determined to create a similar business structure. He says his employee-owned model was at first discouraged by a corporate attorney, who said it wouldn’t work for a restaurant. But Vartan continued to bring it up with employees, and eventually worked with Project Equity, an organization that advocates for and consults with companies to pivot to employee-owned models, to become a worker cooperative.

A Slice of New York allows employees to become co-owners after they’ve spent at least a year at the company; as of now, about 45 percent of the employees are co-owners. Operationally, the model doesn’t change much. There are shift managers who make the immediate calls about who does what day-to-day, and Vartan remains the general manager. The restaurant’s governance is what’s really affected: Every co-owner has an equal share of the business and a vote on a board. Board members all have an equal say in decisions about benefits, safety procedures, menu changes, and issues dealing with the general financial wellbeing of the company. “In a traditional ownership model, whatever is not spent on people goes to an individual,” Vartan says. Instead, in a cooperative, members decide how to spend, save, or split profits, “so there’s no incentive to try and not take care of the people immediately.”

Vartan credits the co-op model with helping A Slice of New York both stay in business and keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worker-owners voted to mandate masks and social distancing policies weeks before the state did, and to do away with slices, even though they were a huge part of the business, because they’d be harder to serve safely. “We did that not because we were trying to maximize our profit. We did that because we were trying to maximize the safety of our team,” says Vartan. “People are seeing and making decisions, not just [thinking] ‘I want this.’ It’s, ‘How are we taking care of each other? How are we taking care of the business?’ And that mindset is why this is the right model going forward.”

“What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

There is no one way to be a co-op. Owners can decide how long employees must be at the company before they’re eligible to become a co-owner, how much it costs to buy in, how much of the profits to split, and how much to save for a rainy day. But the ability for those questions to be a conversation, and not a top-down mandate, is enticing. The model “increases the likelihood that the business will stay locally owned and operated, gives workers a greater equity and turns what might otherwise be a low-paying blue-collar job into a more rewarding career,” writes Melissa Lang in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cara Dudzic, co-owner of the cooperational Charmington’s cafe in Baltimore, says the restaurant’s worker-owned setup means employees often stay for years in an industry where the standard is months, and they have the opportunity to buy into health care benefits, something most restaurant jobs don’t offer. “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

No matter how kindly run and community-focused a restaurant’s structure is, wages are often the sticking point. After all, it’s a job; getting paid is the goal. And as much as co-op or nonprofit structures help with the overall work culture, they do not solve the problem so many restaurants face: It costs money to pay people a living wage. The industry typically relies on tipped wages for servers, which allows restaurant owners to pass the burden of ensuring servers make a living wage onto customers. Everyone admits it’s a bad (and racist) system. But doing away with tipping has proven to be a hard sell for customers and workers alike. Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants famously ended tipping, initially faced customer sticker shock, and staff leaving because they could make more with tips than on an hourly wage. The group reinstated tipping this June.

Vartan says employees at A Slice of New York start at $16.50 an hour, $4.50 above California’s minimum wage (and almost a dollar over San Francisco’s), because, since no one owner is trying to make a profit above anyone else, wages can be lifted across the board. And employees there can still accept tips. But becoming a member of a cooperative does require buying into a long-term plan, in an industry that has by design courted short-term commitment; giving up a portion of one’s wages to be part of a worker-owned collective, or forgoing $300 a night in tips so everyone can make $15 an hour, is not as enticing if you’re not planning on being there long. Even for longer-term employees, given the relentless nature of the work, it’s hard to give up the “every man for himself” mentality, especially during an unprecedented recession.

Charmington’s began with 11 partners in 2010, and is now down to just three. “Some people hired as regular staff did want buy-in, and did by accepting a few hours of compensation as shares rather than wages every pay period,” Dudzic says. But other staff didn’t want to forgo wages, didn’t plan on staying in food service that long, or just didn’t have the time or energy for the “fairly stressful early meetings and email chains” that being a co-owner of a restaurant entail. “The main thing that gets in the way of providing everything we want is income,” she says, noting that the opening of a food hall a few blocks away in 2016 has continued to cut into their lunch business. Sales being what they are, Charmington’s base wage is the Maryland minimum wage of $11 an hour. The reality is, even though Charmington’s is paying as much as it can while ensuring it can stay afloat, workers could probably make more elsewhere.

Wage equity is part of a larger conversation among the industry as a whole about creating a better future for restaurants: Regardless of what the rest of the business model looks like, it’s something that, should the owners desire, can be solved almost immediately. “American society or business schools say it’s profits over everything, but we’re always saying that it’s community over profits,” says Yajaira Saavedra, co-owner of La Morada in the Bronx. To that end, every employee of the restaurant — regardless of their role — receives the same wage. For a long time, that wage was $17 an hour, but this summer, it was boosted to $20 with a grant from the city.

La Morada, it should be noted, is not a co-op — it’s owned by a family of undocumented people, and has made a name for itself as not just a restaurant, but a community center and haven for immigrants and other undocumented people. Saavedra says that prioritizing fair wages and treatment has led to high retention rates among workers and a loyal following in the community, which is more important to Saavedra than taking home a bigger cut of the profits. “Even if we [close], we want to make sure that the community is stable, and we have fought for the better,” she says. “And we left it in a better standing than when we were there.”

In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill Farm and the longtime chef at its two associated restaurants, quotes naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which is to say, when it comes to restaurants, it’s hard to change one thing unless you’re changing everything.

“The organic movement was about an organism, why everything is connected,” Barber says in an interview. “It got dumbed down into, do you use pesticides or not? But really, the origins of the organic movement were about the community which produced your food, the community that got the food to you, and the community that was cooking the food and enjoying it together.” It isn’t organic unless the humans involved aren’t being exploited. It doesn’t matter if your steak was grass-fed if the person who butchered it can’t afford rent.

The ethics of Blue Hill come at a price — a socially distanced picnic at the fine dining Blue Hill at Stone Barns currently costs $195 a person. In any restaurant, Barber explains, “it’s rent, food costs, employee/insurance costs,” and while there may be wiggle room, a lot of those costs are set. “When I talk about buying ingredients that are treating the environment right, rightfully so, a lot of chefs are like, ‘Well, I would love to do that, but I literally don’t have room in the budget to be doing that like Blue Hill does.’” (Weeks after we spoke, Barber announced that he plans to step away from chef duties, and pivot both Stone Barns and the NYC location of Blue Hill to a chef-in-residence program that he hopes will help combat “racial and gender inequities” in the industry, something he and Blue Hill have been criticized for perpetuating, most recently by chef Preeti Mistry).

“We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing.”

Of course, not every meal can realistically be $195 per person. The cost of providing every employee with a living wage and benefits — not to mention paying rent and insurance, and serving a good product affordable enough for most people — is nearly impossible with the way restaurants, co-op or not, must run. Vartan says about 45 percent of A Slice of New York’s costs are labor costs, which he describes as one of a restaurant’s three knobs; the other two are quality of food and pricing. “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing,” he says. Yet, he’s gotten complaints that his pizza is more expensive than a pie you could get at Pizza Hut. No matter how much better his product, or better-treated his employees, some customers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, afford it.

The problem of “good” food being prohibitively expensive can’t be completely solved by restaurateurs turning those knobs. Depressed wages and inflation are problems for everyone, not just restaurant workers. And if it isn’t going to be addressed by an increased minimum wage, it has to come from customers rethinking their own priorities where able. Which many of them are doing.

The COVID moment has perhaps opened some diners’ eyes to just how precarious things have been for food-service workers. In the short term, consumers are stepping up and filling gaps by donating to GoFundMes, buying gift cards, or just tipping well. Elsewhere, mutual aid efforts aimed to address the widespread hunger caused by the pandemic and the recession have inspired many to think critically about what role restaurants should play in that aid. During the pandemic, La Morada has served 1,000 free hot meals a day, and used its longstanding relationships with local farmers to help solve the problems of food waste and hunger. “Small farmers, organizations we have those relationships with ... now trust us to actually do the mutual aid work and have volunteered either their time or their produce,” Saavedra says.

For many diners, the value of eating out is now not just about the immediate experience, but everything, including the people, that make it what it is. It’s always been that way to a certain extent — the way that $195 Blue Hill meal is worth it not just because the food tastes good, but the knowledge that it was grown thoughtfully, cooked by experts, and served to you in a perfect pastoral setting. Now, “value” can include not just customer experience, but the knowledge that employee well-being is part of the plan.

What the pandemic has strengthened, and what anyone who has ever felt the comfort of having a local knows, is the idea of a restaurant as a community. The risk of losing the coffee shop where you read the paper every Saturday, or your favorite date spot, or the bar where the bartenders always give you a shot for the road, has galvanized people within the restaurant industry to think through what a better future looks like, and those outside of it to care as much about the people working at the restaurant as the restaurant itself. “Once you are attuned and aware of it, it becomes part of the fabric of the culture,” says Barber. “It doesn’t go back.”

It is with that momentum that models like workers collectives, mutual aid, and legislation advocacy can thrive. As food-service businesses have been struggling through the pandemic, “worker co-op models are being pitched to municipalities, on the basis of maintaining wealth and equity for oppressed communities,” says Jeff Noven, executive director of the nonprofit grocery store Berkeley Student Food Collective. The student food collective is a cooperative success story, but its unique place within the university community means many of its methods are not replicable. Most obviously it operates without the burden of labor costs: Noven is the only full-time employee, with his and four part-time employees’ salaries subsidized by grants. Most of the labor comes from 150 volunteers, who elect the board from within that membership. That can’t be the path forward for the vast majority of restaurants.

There’s also the issue that many groups doing the work might not be eligible for government aid or alternative business models. For La Morada, applying to be a co-op or a nonprofit requires citizenship paperwork they don’t have, and while according to Harvard Law School, federal law doesn’t “expressly prohibit undocumented immigrants from working for a business that they own,” the laws are also pretty unsettled. Saavedra says they also had issues converting to a soup kitchen, as they couldn’t apply for 501(c)(3) status. But that hasn’t stopped La Morada from its commitment to mutual aid. “We still have all the same values,” says Saavedra. “You don’t necessarily need [to be] a co-op or a not-for-profit tax. You carry ethical work.”

Instead, there are other ways for businesses to adopt parts of the co-op model, or other equitable models, that work for them, and those actions are already in progress. The unionization push throughout restaurants and grocery stores continues to advocate for better working conditions, especially as many were deemed “essential workers” as lockdowns began in March. Restaurants continue to do away with tipping, and to incorporate mutual aid into their business models. But everything restaurants can do on their own is a few drops in a bucket compared to what government support in the form of things like universal health care, or real aid for small businesses, could achieve. Vartan is working with local legislators to incentivize businesses to organize as workers collectives, and noted the 2018 Main Street Employees Ownership Act as a step toward federal support. And restaurant workers continue to push and protest for things like a fair minimum wage, federally mandated sick leave, and support for independent restaurants struggling during the pandemic.

Prioritizing community over capitalism has always been an option. But now, more people than ever have a desire to seek out food made in equitable spaces, to learn about the inner workings of their favorite restaurants and see how they can best support them, or just leave a 30 percent tip because they know times are tough. That won’t go away once we have a vaccine.

Sustained change will take a greater understanding of what “equity” means, and what it will require from both restaurants and customers. As bad as the pandemic has been, it has put us in a great position to do that sort of reevaluation, and reimagine a restaurant as a place where success doesn’t mean profit, but rather that the whole community, farm-to-table, is cared for. And to maybe even fight for a day when it won’t be the responsibility of restaurants to solve these problems at all.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3lHHb3U https://ift.tt/3jAmYea

Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run

The only ethical restaurant I have ever heard of is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I have never watched the show, but my partner has excitedly explained this particular vision of utopia to me at least three times. The restaurant is named Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and exists in New Orleans in the 24th century, on an Earth that has abolished prejudice, money, and hunger. Though you could press a button and conjure any ingredient, the aforementioned Sisko still finds a desire to provide hospitality, so every night he cooks gumbo and jambalaya and presumably gives it away for free, just because he wants to.

We have not figured out how to replicate matter, nor have we abolished money, so even in our most progressive and sustainable restaurants, the food has to come from somewhere and must be paid for by someone. But we all know the restaurant world has more immediate problems than the lack of a Star Trek society. Building an equitable restaurant, a place where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and can work in an anti-discriminatory environment, is going to take a near-undoing of the way most restaurants are run.

Currently, most restaurants, whether they are high-end or hole-in-the-wall, family-owned or corporate-run, operate in much the same way. There is an owner, or owners, who either own the property the restaurant is on or lease it from a landlord. Sometimes the chef is also the owner, or sometimes they are hired by the owner. In the kitchen, there is a hierarchy. It may not always look like the traditional French brigade system, with its focus on militaristic efficiency, but the chef manages, and makes more money than, the line cooks. In the back of the house, dishwashers, bussers, and cooks are often paid the minimum wage, while in the front of the house, in most U.S. states, servers and bartenders are paid lower wages with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. Many states permit employees to be fired at will. And the lower down the line you are, the less likely it is you’ll be making decisions about how your workplace functions.

It’s not glib to say that eradicating capitalism is the surest way to build equitable restaurants. Living in a country that provided universal health care, federally mandated paid child leave and sick leave, and a living minimum wage, as well as incentivized sustainable farming, encouraged unions, and got rid of at-will employment, would go a long way toward creating environments within restaurants (and all businesses) where workers had power over their own livelihood.

But that is a tall order for restaurants to take on alone, so barring revolution (though fingers crossed), upending everything we assume about how restaurants are run is the necessary step toward an actually ethical restaurant industry. Other options already exist — nonprofits, workers collectives, unions, volunteer-run restaurants — that create models for a fairer and more just workplace. But what does it even mean to be an equitable restaurant? And can simply changing the ownership structure provide that?

Kirk Vartan, co-owner of A Slice of New York pizzerias in the Bay Area, understands that phrases like “collectively owned” or “workers cooperative” can inspire panic and confusion. It’s like, what, everyone has to vote every time you place a produce order? Is it going to lead to the drama of the Park Slope Food Coop deciding whether or not to carry Israeli products? “People think that it’s hippies, and everyone’s going to smoke weed, and sit around in a circle and just love and peace, and whatever,” he tells Eater. “And the reality is, this is a very real business model.”

Vartan actually took inspiration from, of all places, the corporate world. While working for NBC, he was given stock options. “It’s not a lot of stock. It’s like this little itty-bitty micro-bit of the company. But it changes your attitude when you actually own part of it,” he says. After leaving to start a New York-style pizza shop in San Jose, he was determined to create a similar business structure. He says his employee-owned model was at first discouraged by a corporate attorney, who said it wouldn’t work for a restaurant. But Vartan continued to bring it up with employees, and eventually worked with Project Equity, an organization that advocates for and consults with companies to pivot to employee-owned models, to become a worker cooperative.

A Slice of New York allows employees to become co-owners after they’ve spent at least a year at the company; as of now, about 45 percent of the employees are co-owners. Operationally, the model doesn’t change much. There are shift managers who make the immediate calls about who does what day-to-day, and Vartan remains the general manager. The restaurant’s governance is what’s really affected: Every co-owner has an equal share of the business and a vote on a board. Board members all have an equal say in decisions about benefits, safety procedures, menu changes, and issues dealing with the general financial wellbeing of the company. “In a traditional ownership model, whatever is not spent on people goes to an individual,” Vartan says. Instead, in a cooperative, members decide how to spend, save, or split profits, “so there’s no incentive to try and not take care of the people immediately.”

Vartan credits the co-op model with helping A Slice of New York both stay in business and keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worker-owners voted to mandate masks and social distancing policies weeks before the state did, and to do away with slices, even though they were a huge part of the business, because they’d be harder to serve safely. “We did that not because we were trying to maximize our profit. We did that because we were trying to maximize the safety of our team,” says Vartan. “People are seeing and making decisions, not just [thinking] ‘I want this.’ It’s, ‘How are we taking care of each other? How are we taking care of the business?’ And that mindset is why this is the right model going forward.”

“What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

There is no one way to be a co-op. Owners can decide how long employees must be at the company before they’re eligible to become a co-owner, how much it costs to buy in, how much of the profits to split, and how much to save for a rainy day. But the ability for those questions to be a conversation, and not a top-down mandate, is enticing. The model “increases the likelihood that the business will stay locally owned and operated, gives workers a greater equity and turns what might otherwise be a low-paying blue-collar job into a more rewarding career,” writes Melissa Lang in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cara Dudzic, co-owner of the cooperational Charmington’s cafe in Baltimore, says the restaurant’s worker-owned setup means employees often stay for years in an industry where the standard is months, and they have the opportunity to buy into health care benefits, something most restaurant jobs don’t offer. “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

No matter how kindly run and community-focused a restaurant’s structure is, wages are often the sticking point. After all, it’s a job; getting paid is the goal. And as much as co-op or nonprofit structures help with the overall work culture, they do not solve the problem so many restaurants face: It costs money to pay people a living wage. The industry typically relies on tipped wages for servers, which allows restaurant owners to pass the burden of ensuring servers make a living wage onto customers. Everyone admits it’s a bad (and racist) system. But doing away with tipping has proven to be a hard sell for customers and workers alike. Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants famously ended tipping, initially faced customer sticker shock, and staff leaving because they could make more with tips than on an hourly wage. The group reinstated tipping this June.

Vartan says employees at A Slice of New York start at $16.50 an hour, $4.50 above California’s minimum wage (and almost a dollar over San Francisco’s), because, since no one owner is trying to make a profit above anyone else, wages can be lifted across the board. And employees there can still accept tips. But becoming a member of a cooperative does require buying into a long-term plan, in an industry that has by design courted short-term commitment; giving up a portion of one’s wages to be part of a worker-owned collective, or forgoing $300 a night in tips so everyone can make $15 an hour, is not as enticing if you’re not planning on being there long. Even for longer-term employees, given the relentless nature of the work, it’s hard to give up the “every man for himself” mentality, especially during an unprecedented recession.

Charmington’s began with 11 partners in 2010, and is now down to just three. “Some people hired as regular staff did want buy-in, and did by accepting a few hours of compensation as shares rather than wages every pay period,” Dudzic says. But other staff didn’t want to forgo wages, didn’t plan on staying in food service that long, or just didn’t have the time or energy for the “fairly stressful early meetings and email chains” that being a co-owner of a restaurant entail. “The main thing that gets in the way of providing everything we want is income,” she says, noting that the opening of a food hall a few blocks away in 2016 has continued to cut into their lunch business. Sales being what they are, Charmington’s base wage is the Maryland minimum wage of $11 an hour. The reality is, even though Charmington’s is paying as much as it can while ensuring it can stay afloat, workers could probably make more elsewhere.

Wage equity is part of a larger conversation among the industry as a whole about creating a better future for restaurants: Regardless of what the rest of the business model looks like, it’s something that, should the owners desire, can be solved almost immediately. “American society or business schools say it’s profits over everything, but we’re always saying that it’s community over profits,” says Yajaira Saavedra, co-owner of La Morada in the Bronx. To that end, every employee of the restaurant — regardless of their role — receives the same wage. For a long time, that wage was $17 an hour, but this summer, it was boosted to $20 with a grant from the city.

La Morada, it should be noted, is not a co-op — it’s owned by a family of undocumented people, and has made a name for itself as not just a restaurant, but a community center and haven for immigrants and other undocumented people. Saavedra says that prioritizing fair wages and treatment has led to high retention rates among workers and a loyal following in the community, which is more important to Saavedra than taking home a bigger cut of the profits. “Even if we [close], we want to make sure that the community is stable, and we have fought for the better,” she says. “And we left it in a better standing than when we were there.”

In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill Farm and the longtime chef at its two associated restaurants, quotes naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which is to say, when it comes to restaurants, it’s hard to change one thing unless you’re changing everything.

“The organic movement was about an organism, why everything is connected,” Barber says in an interview. “It got dumbed down into, do you use pesticides or not? But really, the origins of the organic movement were about the community which produced your food, the community that got the food to you, and the community that was cooking the food and enjoying it together.” It isn’t organic unless the humans involved aren’t being exploited. It doesn’t matter if your steak was grass-fed if the person who butchered it can’t afford rent.

The ethics of Blue Hill come at a price — a socially distanced picnic at the fine dining Blue Hill at Stone Barns currently costs $195 a person. In any restaurant, Barber explains, “it’s rent, food costs, employee/insurance costs,” and while there may be wiggle room, a lot of those costs are set. “When I talk about buying ingredients that are treating the environment right, rightfully so, a lot of chefs are like, ‘Well, I would love to do that, but I literally don’t have room in the budget to be doing that like Blue Hill does.’” (Weeks after we spoke, Barber announced that he plans to step away from chef duties, and pivot both Stone Barns and the NYC location of Blue Hill to a chef-in-residence program that he hopes will help combat “racial and gender inequities” in the industry, something he and Blue Hill have been criticized for perpetuating, most recently by chef Preeti Mistry).

“We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing.”

Of course, not every meal can realistically be $195 per person. The cost of providing every employee with a living wage and benefits — not to mention paying rent and insurance, and serving a good product affordable enough for most people — is nearly impossible with the way restaurants, co-op or not, must run. Vartan says about 45 percent of A Slice of New York’s costs are labor costs, which he describes as one of a restaurant’s three knobs; the other two are quality of food and pricing. “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing,” he says. Yet, he’s gotten complaints that his pizza is more expensive than a pie you could get at Pizza Hut. No matter how much better his product, or better-treated his employees, some customers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, afford it.

The problem of “good” food being prohibitively expensive can’t be completely solved by restaurateurs turning those knobs. Depressed wages and inflation are problems for everyone, not just restaurant workers. And if it isn’t going to be addressed by an increased minimum wage, it has to come from customers rethinking their own priorities where able. Which many of them are doing.

The COVID moment has perhaps opened some diners’ eyes to just how precarious things have been for food-service workers. In the short term, consumers are stepping up and filling gaps by donating to GoFundMes, buying gift cards, or just tipping well. Elsewhere, mutual aid efforts aimed to address the widespread hunger caused by the pandemic and the recession have inspired many to think critically about what role restaurants should play in that aid. During the pandemic, La Morada has served 1,000 free hot meals a day, and used its longstanding relationships with local farmers to help solve the problems of food waste and hunger. “Small farmers, organizations we have those relationships with ... now trust us to actually do the mutual aid work and have volunteered either their time or their produce,” Saavedra says.

For many diners, the value of eating out is now not just about the immediate experience, but everything, including the people, that make it what it is. It’s always been that way to a certain extent — the way that $195 Blue Hill meal is worth it not just because the food tastes good, but the knowledge that it was grown thoughtfully, cooked by experts, and served to you in a perfect pastoral setting. Now, “value” can include not just customer experience, but the knowledge that employee well-being is part of the plan.

What the pandemic has strengthened, and what anyone who has ever felt the comfort of having a local knows, is the idea of a restaurant as a community. The risk of losing the coffee shop where you read the paper every Saturday, or your favorite date spot, or the bar where the bartenders always give you a shot for the road, has galvanized people within the restaurant industry to think through what a better future looks like, and those outside of it to care as much about the people working at the restaurant as the restaurant itself. “Once you are attuned and aware of it, it becomes part of the fabric of the culture,” says Barber. “It doesn’t go back.”

It is with that momentum that models like workers collectives, mutual aid, and legislation advocacy can thrive. As food-service businesses have been struggling through the pandemic, “worker co-op models are being pitched to municipalities, on the basis of maintaining wealth and equity for oppressed communities,” says Jeff Noven, executive director of the nonprofit grocery store Berkeley Student Food Collective. The student food collective is a cooperative success story, but its unique place within the university community means many of its methods are not replicable. Most obviously it operates without the burden of labor costs: Noven is the only full-time employee, with his and four part-time employees’ salaries subsidized by grants. Most of the labor comes from 150 volunteers, who elect the board from within that membership. That can’t be the path forward for the vast majority of restaurants.

There’s also the issue that many groups doing the work might not be eligible for government aid or alternative business models. For La Morada, applying to be a co-op or a nonprofit requires citizenship paperwork they don’t have, and while according to Harvard Law School, federal law doesn’t “expressly prohibit undocumented immigrants from working for a business that they own,” the laws are also pretty unsettled. Saavedra says they also had issues converting to a soup kitchen, as they couldn’t apply for 501(c)(3) status. But that hasn’t stopped La Morada from its commitment to mutual aid. “We still have all the same values,” says Saavedra. “You don’t necessarily need [to be] a co-op or a not-for-profit tax. You carry ethical work.”

Instead, there are other ways for businesses to adopt parts of the co-op model, or other equitable models, that work for them, and those actions are already in progress. The unionization push throughout restaurants and grocery stores continues to advocate for better working conditions, especially as many were deemed “essential workers” as lockdowns began in March. Restaurants continue to do away with tipping, and to incorporate mutual aid into their business models. But everything restaurants can do on their own is a few drops in a bucket compared to what government support in the form of things like universal health care, or real aid for small businesses, could achieve. Vartan is working with local legislators to incentivize businesses to organize as workers collectives, and noted the 2018 Main Street Employees Ownership Act as a step toward federal support. And restaurant workers continue to push and protest for things like a fair minimum wage, federally mandated sick leave, and support for independent restaurants struggling during the pandemic.

Prioritizing community over capitalism has always been an option. But now, more people than ever have a desire to seek out food made in equitable spaces, to learn about the inner workings of their favorite restaurants and see how they can best support them, or just leave a 30 percent tip because they know times are tough. That won’t go away once we have a vaccine.

Sustained change will take a greater understanding of what “equity” means, and what it will require from both restaurants and customers. As bad as the pandemic has been, it has put us in a great position to do that sort of reevaluation, and reimagine a restaurant as a place where success doesn’t mean profit, but rather that the whole community, farm-to-table, is cared for. And to maybe even fight for a day when it won’t be the responsibility of restaurants to solve these problems at all.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3lHHb3U via Blogger https://ift.tt/3hOi255

[housepaintersbrisbane-blog1]

House painting is a simple and quick thanks to refresh your home and completely change the atmosphere of your home. Fresh paint adds value to your home and makes it attractive. most of the people paint the house because the old paint is broken by the weather, but that's not the case. Read the blog to ascertain the highest 10 reasons why paints are essential to your home.

1. Add value to your house

By painting the inside and exterior of the house you'll definitely improve your property value. Indoor and outdoor paints can bring a big return on investment. Newly painted houses can have more value and attract more buyers.

2. Enhance Visual Attraction

Paint a house once every two or three years will improve your visual appeal. Paint your house during a fresh and dynamic way and substitute your neighborhood.

3. Give Contemporary Look

Paint can make an honest rejuvenation of the house if you would like makeup reception . Paint trends change over time and may be painted at regular intervals to remain on time.

4. the simplest Cure for Exterior Flaw

The exterior surface of the house are often severely suffering from extreme weather like heavy rain or sunshine. Moisture, peeling, or cracking of the outer surface may occur. The coat of the outside paint can cover the stains and damage.

5. Prevention from Moisture

High humidity in your home can damage it and cause harmful fungi and mold. you'll prevent moisture damage by painting your home at regular intervals.

6. Indoor Air Quality gets improved

Painting indoor walls can reduce odors and smoke. Low volatile organic compounds (VOC) and non VOC type paints can increase interior air quality for people and families.

7. Economical Refashion

If the house needs a replacement look, it's not better than refreshing paint with a pleasant picture. The new paint job not only refreshes the looks but also gives color to the dull appearance.

8. Stop Staining and Peeling

The peeling and cracking of the walls are disturbing and troubling. The new coat of paint helps prevent stains and peeling of the paint. Picture the inside and exterior walls will help cover the permanent marks or stains that are difficult for homeowners to get rid of .

9. Dirt and mud , Keep Minimum

If you retain indoor walls, trim and other painted surfaces, you'll check dust and dirt. Older homes should use high-quality paints.

10. Optimistic Liveliness Flow

Finally, the updated painted house creates a positive atmosphere and a well-being atmosphere. This sparks happiness and peace of mind. So take the initiative and paint your house as soon as possible.

SHOULD YOU roll in the hay YOURSELF OR A PRO? Mostly, people consider painting a reasonably easy task. Dip a roll or brush into the paint, then apply it evenly to the wall. most of the people can paint their homes if they actually need to. it's an excellent thanks to save a couple of dollars and leave and be pleased with your work. But there are other aspects of coins because there are several advantages to hiring professionals.

Here are a number of the foremost important things to consider:

1. Time is Money

Even though you'll save a couple of dollars by doing it yourself, don't forget all the time you spend on this project. It takes a couple of weeks to color the entire house alone. Work a day for hours. Obviously, it depends on the dimensions of your house, but you'll be surprised at the time you would like to draw your house properly during your free time. Are you busy because you would like to draw little amount of free time?

2. Protection

Painters consistently stand on large scales. they need to travel up the roof, rest on the windows and do other crazy things to end the work . Although 90% of the paint is comparatively safe, it lasts 10% and comforts the mother in the dark . Why would you are doing it once you can easily hire someone to try to to these things for you? Professional painters know what they are doing and roll in the hay a day . They skills to use ladders correctly and measure fatigue. they're going to not exceed their limits because they realize they're in peril .

3. No Compromise on Quality

Painting a wall isn't rocket science … but can anyone paint it? More importantly, does one skills to form the paint look better, hard to succeed in places, and the way to color the foremost important parts of your home? Experts know that certain areas of the house , like underneath the side panels or small holes on the door, are vital . If you are doing not paint these critical areas, your house is vulnerable to mold, living creatures, or other sorts of damage. Professionals won't only improve the looks of the paint but also will better protect the house.

4. Speed

Experts will probably have a minimum of three or four people performing at home. Sometimes you would like a whole crew, although there could also be 1 or 2 days to end . don't you think that you'll get things done faster than you are doing everything? in fact , you can. So rather than using it all month, you'll be sitting during a freshly painted house within every week or two. this may offer you peace of mind. Now that you simply have completed this project, you'll specialist in other tasks reception or at work.

You can certainly save a couple of dollars by doing everything yourself. But experts can save valuable time to specialist in something by processing everything faster and more efficiently. But before recruiting the primary professional architect we found, let’s check out a number of the important things an expert should consider when working with knowledgeable .

WHY you would like MASTER PAINTERS instead of REGULAR PAINTERS? Many folks are often seen to color their room themselves. Experienced professionals, however, do great things. there's a secret that they need practiced tons to urge perfection. for instance , their secrets don't shorten the image time. Painters spend 2-4 days during a medium-sized room. It takes time to organize and paint correctly. Maybe you've got some issue about time but once you will see the results, a smooth attractive and shining surface, you'll recommend it yourself.

SURFACES PREPARATION Find, then fix cracks and dents

Beside big things, an old lamp with a unadorned light bulb on the brink of the wall emits little crack, bump or nail. Master painters know, what's the simplest tool to repair cracks and dents? They know the character of the cracks and dents and therefore the materials needed to repair them (e.g. fly plaster, sanding, sponge, putty or tape). they're familiar with rough and bad surfaces of all kinds because they need experienced.

PAINT SELECTION Why should primer be powerful?

Primers aren't limited to dilute paints. they're prepared to deliver a consistent base, a robust and ensure smooth paint layers and strength.

Buy quality paint

Commonly, glassier paints are immune to stains and abrasion. However, the upper the gloss, the greater the incompleteness of the wall or paint works. Brisbane’s master painters know the sort and quality of paint to fit your needs. Different surfaces require different paint. Internal and external paints are different within the same way. The master painter can offer you a far better suggestion. Contemporary paints dry quickly and make brushing difficult. The master painter knows the answer to the present problem.

CHOOSING the proper EQUIPMENT Roller rules, Bucket use, painters rode, good paint brush

A perfect roller can contain an outsizes amount of paint, leaving the proper amount of textures, spraying, or blurring, making cleaning easy. There are many companies that sell rollers within the market. Choosing a roller is an art, and Brisbane’s specialist knows this art. Not only the utilization of buckets but also the way to choose a brush which will up the painter. Be careful together with your hair when choosing a brush. Nylon and polyester, these are two major ingredients in Synthetic brushes. It are often made with one material or with both. Poly bristles are suitable for textured or outdoor work, except for advanced inside work. Master painters know the utilization of each brush at the right place.

PAINTING IS AN ART Load it right

Ideally, you would like to place tons of paint in your brush as you'll control it without water droplets or drops. what percentage inches should your brush put during a paint bucket that only professionals know?

Cut in close

Cutting may be a complete art; There are special brushes and cutting techniques that need an excessive amount of practice. Painting a home is an entire skill to stay every moment in mind.

What is a specific sequence of labor from top to down, or right down to top? How are you able to evaluate your work either it's giving desired results or not? Painting the window is another science which demands attention and perfection. When and the way to start out it? Similarly the way to start doors? Vertically or horizontally? FINAL WORDS Master painters know the expected touch-ups and manage the items for this expected work. They work as a corporation and have some ethics of labor . Few of them discussed below

Professional services with quality work. Pro or Master painters have a team of experts and keep the records of these professionals. Provide professional advice and support when needed. The painter you select will work professionally. Selected painters respect their current environmental needs by maximizing their abilities. The selected master painter respects the businesses Code of conduct. Customer satisfaction and end results are in their top priorities

[atemp19-blog]

Practical SEO Guide: Good Business Is the Foundation of Good SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization (Search Engine Optimization)?Search engine optimization (search engine optimization) is a plethora of techniques, approaches and strategies to prepare your website to be found by major search engines.   Everyone understands what Rockville MD SEO experts do, but few know how they do it.  In actuality, many search engine optimization gurus fiercely disagree on the how part.  Many tactics are available, but SEO is not a cheap endeavor, so one needs to be careful when allocating valuable advertising dollars to it.First, you've got to be clear on what you're trying to accomplish on the business side-focus, focus, focus!  Secondly, you must reign in your zeal and get prepared for a grueling multi-month commitment that will require time, discipline, and money-be prepared to invest time in the trenches.

Finally, you need to decide which tools and techniques will produce the best return on investment (ROI).   If you are looking to get yourself on the first page of Google's search results immediately, this search engine optimization guide isn't for you.  Do not believe those who claim they can get you on the first page overnight in an ethical manner.  Even if you can cheat the machine for a brief time, Google's anger will land upon you swiftly and never go away.  If you're serious about SEO, prepare yourself and do it right-your patience and diligence will pay off.  There is truly nothing complicated about SEO.  Valuable, relevant, unique, timely articles will rank well on search engines.

The content has to be machine-readable in order to be found.   Valuable ContentLet us begin with content that is valuable.  Before you even mention the word "SEO," ask yourself, what do I need to give the world, why is it unique, and why would anyone want it?  Have you got a digital strategy covering all of your digital communications channels?  Bear in mind that you're competing with millions of websites.  Theoretically, you can spend plenty of time on SEO and reach that first page to learn that customers do not find your content, goods, or services appealing.  Don't give up.  Many business owners who have products and services never get through to their audiences because they do not bother with SEO.  The axiom "If you build it, they will come" stands forever false on Google.

The onus is on you, and if you don't make a compelling case to Google, it will ignore you unless you're the only one in the universe offering that superhot merchandise (e.g., you have a monopoly).  Thus, produce.  Ensure you provide value.   You might decide to share information that your competitors may use against you.  You might opt to take unique perspectives that may incite a debate or draw criticism.     Do not forget that it takes time to see results one or two months, sometimes more.  Your ultimate aim is to find your competitive niche and establish yourself as an authority in your field of expertise so that you can influence buying patterns.

With regard to content, make sure everything you write is well organized, clean, and free of factual and grammatical mistakes.    It is generally suggested that website content be written in the grade six reading level.  Sometimes it might not be possible for many industries, but do your best.  Another beneficial metric is your Flesch-Kincaid readability index.  It's suggested to keep it over 60 (you can use this free tool).   Use humor, but be careful not to violate and cross boundaries.  Keep your audience in mind.  Ensure the most important information is on peak of the page so it can be easily located.  Web users do not read; they skim.   Make information digestible, and avoid jargon, clichés, and colloquialisms as far as possible.  Ensure that your navigation structure is task oriented and friendly.  Your user experience must take people through the path that is joyful.You've got content, and you are ready to proceed to the upcoming step-showing search engines and people to find it.  In this search engine optimization guide, we focus on Google, since it has the biggest search market share, but this is just as applicable to other search engines.  It's probably safe to say that if you rank well on Google, you will rank well on search engines.

There are SEO techniques, but we prefer to focus on some that have been tested and demonstrated in action:Organically maximize the amount of inbound links from websites with high domain name and page authority.  Make your webpages machine-readable by applying consistent search-engine optimization to your key pages.  Building Inbound LinksThis technique causes a great deal of confusion and debate in SEO circles but for no valid reason.  It's very straightforward and is based on the following assumption-counting quality links pointing back to your own website is the most effective way for Google to determine the value of your website.

Google's logic here is completely simple-if reputable and relevant websites link to you, your content has to be valuable.  One important caveat here is that the link building has to be organic.  If you've got a rapid increase in backlinks over a period of time, Google may perceive this even if your efforts are legitimate.  Spread your efforts.   Make certain to avoid link farms and spammy techniques. Do not post a comment on someone's website merely to add your link.  Comment with a link only if everything you need to say is relevant to the conversation and the link can be useful to the audience.   These are sites purely created for link building functions.  Adding your website to web directories and listings is fine, but make sure you work with reputable websites.

Earned links are the cream of the crop in the SEO world and will create more SEO juice (ranking power) than any other medium.  An earned link is simply a link made by a third party without your involvement or persuasion.  Google has algorithms to figure out which links are got.  In our experience, high-quality earned links are challenging to get, but that's the standard.  The best thing to earned links is high-quality unearned links, which can be put on web directories, articles, blog posts, and shared media sources.  It's absolutely essential that the primary aim of the backlinks you add to your articles is to provide supplementary content which helps readers delve deeper into your get and articles various thematically related components.

Link quality is quite important in the procedure.  Reputation of this link server (domain)-the website where your link resides.   Google has its own proprietary way of determining the reputation of a domainname.     We utilize the Mozbar Chrome plugin to determine DA for our sites.  The metric's value can change over time, so ensure to check it right when you need it.  With respect to SEO, we prefer to not put links on any website which has a domain authority under 50.  We believe this is where price and benefit intersect.  This certainly poses some challenges and makes our search engine optimization work more expensivenonetheless, it gives our clients peace of mind and ensures their links bring in high-quality search engine optimization juice (ranking power). 

You will need to make your own determination on what you consider a respectable website, as this certainly will affect your search engine optimization expenses, but we advise that you not use anything with a DA under your own, and we urge anything you use be at least over 25 (especially if you pay for it).  Be selective of where you place your links.  If the host website has been penalized by Google for questionable search engine optimization tactics, this may affect you.  Another important consideration is the composition.  An anchor is a text link which links back to a webpage.  It is very important that the link text is in sync with the keyword and meta information in your landing page.  That is how Google determines link significance.  By way of instance, a link called "all about hamsters" pointing to a web page about "disco music" will surely not rank well in organic search results.How can you get high-quality inbound links from respectable websites?Content marketingContent is truly king and even more so with the Google Hummingbird algorithm revolution.

Google's ingenuity became more evident in the simplicity of this approach-provide precious, engaging, timely articles and you will rank.  Just a couple years ago, Google couldn't afford the luxury of humanizing content analysis because of the lack of computing power, but with the advance of technology and the reduction in hardware prices, Google can now afford to test material deeper and build logical, intelligent connections between various web elements.  Gone are the days of stuffing.  Content marketing is simply an ongoing effort to promote and syndicate your articles via various publishing channels.  The content-value and industry-relevance principles apply here.

One way is by publishing articles, blog posts, and news releases on relevant websites.  Some are free, and some are paid.  We've had experience with PR Web, MyPRGenie, Social Media Today, and Ezine Articles, all of which have DAs.  If you are able to make it on those sites, the SEO-juice quality is really supreme.ConclusionThere are lots more Rockville MD SEO techniques available, but we highlighted the ones that we believe provide the best return on investment.  Ultimately, you will have to decide for yourself exactly what SEO work is manageable for you in the long term.  Do not turn SEO into your primary activity.  Bear in mind that your primary aim is to concentrate on what you do business.

[clementina723credits-blog]

How do i get free imvu credits without downloading anything test today

How To Make IMVU Credits Speedy

Start out by following imvu credits hack. In addition, IMVU can on top of that collect nonpii like the aggregate data described below in the "Aggregate Information and facts" section and such other nonpii as information with regards to machines conducting our software, in order to additional comprehend and improve the user encounter, ads, safety, authorities, and network ethics (avoidance of hacks, unauthorized use, and so forth).

IMVU's early stage mobile technique was driven by higher-velocity user acquisition, aimed at rapid growth. As IMVU VP of Development Lomit Patel puts it, proving mobile was viable was the initial priority.” But as the brand's targets have evolved, retention became increasingly more critical. We try to concentrate on both sides of the coin.” And that they did.

It's not an unfair statement when it really is accurate. IMVU is not catered to older adults. It in no way has been and in no way will be, they knew that from the moment of its inception. Even though anyone can act immature anywhere. It appeals to teens and younger adults additional than anything. So finding immature people today there, is pretty easy. That's not to say 1 can not uncover them in sl. Of course you can. Sl has a wider userbase and considerably bigger environment. There are even particular areas one could go to discover immature persons, of all ages.

IMVU contains its personal economy with a currency method based on IMVU "credits" and "promo credits". A third kind of currency also existed for creators, known as "developer tokens", which have been earned when a user purchases an item with "promo-credits". Credits could be bought on the internet utilizing actual currency directly from IMVU. Credits could also be bought on IMVU gift cards readily available from retail outlets such as department stores. The credits are getting employed by members to obtain virtual things like fashion pieces (hair, clothes, skins, and accessories), pets, and 3D scenes such as properties, clubs, and open landscapes. Furnishings could also be bought the similar way and placed into unlocked rooms, but there were also rooms that have some furniture integrated in them as nicely as locked rooms that include things like furnishings that can't be removed.

If you want IMVU Credits, far better get them safely. Our sellers present legit credits for a lower price. Consider twice when you see these web-sites who present 'free IMVU credit' or got some sort of cheating approaches, as they are ordinarily phishing your account information. Pick a seller with a fantastic rating in our credit marketplace, or go to the 'CD Keys' tab, exactly where you may come across some good offers for IMVU money card.

IMVU Inc. is an on the internet metaverse and site. IMVU was founded in 2004 and was originally backed by venture investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Bridgescale Partners, and Best Get Capital. IMVU members use 3D avatars to meet new folks, chat, build, and play games. IMVU had more than 4 million active customers in 2014. Existing number of active players are unknown, and at the moment the web site has the largest virtual goods catalog of more than 30 million things. The organization was previously positioned in Mountain View, California. It was also recognized as one particular of the leading practitioners of the lean startup strategy.

Our cheat tool is totaly threat-absolutely free and anti-virus protected. This have to have for speed no limits hack will 100% earn far more points and you can win max races. Farmville two Guidelines And Tricks '” Major Beneficial Farmville 2 Hints, Guides, Techniques and Bonuses We will have to meticulously pick what we place on our auto, mainly because if we use a prevalent portion then suppose not being capable to use one of the uncommon we would have gotten just after. Fill in the quantity of Imvu Credits you want to create. In addition, in the races we can bet and depend on how the bets are paid you can get a quite succulent quantity of dollars. We are not responsible for any illegal actions you do with theses files.

Invite other members to stop by your room. It became one of the most preferred game of its category. How to use the hack?. During the procedure of delivering the free credits, this imvu cheat actually protects you by simulating into your account the procedure of acquiring the credits with real money. This only proofs that employing this approach is secure for your account.

Answered: Your Most Burning Issues Regarding IMVU CREDITS

Nicely, we cannot assure you this that your virtual girlfriend will remain with you forever. but we can guarantee that you will find a new girl within a handful of minutes right after a breakup. Acquiring credits from right here now easier than ever. At the start, we had faced a challenge with imvu. Points got scary when they emailed us and warned about this tool and tool our old web page down. It was painful than a breakup but we did not give up started a new internet site and new tool which now capable to give credits to our Imvu users. This team is delighted then we in a position to make men and women content providing this tool for no cost. you only need to install an app just before you get credits that to take 30 seconds only.

The PlayerAuctions marketplace is the safest place to obtain low cost IMVU credits. We have over ten years of encounter in the digital asset exchange market. We know incredibly effectively how to safeguard your orders. We also have the PlayerGuardian Trading Protections. Thanks to this program all transactions created on our website are protected. As an added security measure, we screen and confirm all gives of cheap IMVU credits ahead of they are permitted onto our internet site. Lastly, all credit orders are confirmed as reputable prior to we release disbursement to sellers.

B: You and your buddy need to have to have set you as a Buddies (pals). Some of the actions in IMVU has its own allocation. You can see that in some of the actions (they are label). If the action isn't label you can do it everytime, if it has „smiley” — person have to have to add you to Buddies. If it has AP symbol (Access Pass) — You and the particular person need to have to obtain from IMVU an erotic content material (it costs 20$).

As you can see an IMVU credits hack 2018 is a lot more than simply a hack. It creates the globe of IMVU so much bigger plus more actual. There are a lot of issues you can do with the credits in IMVU, but my preferred is to make things. There is no stronger feeling than the feeling when providing to others IMVUers. It is so fulfilling that you really feel addicted to sharing things with everybody. If you want to go via the very same degree of joy and pleasure you need to have the IMVU credits cheat. Getting totally free credits without the need of paying a dime is by far a pretty essential thing that can happen to any IMVU player. You could dress nonetheless, you like and talk about any present with buddies and strangers also.

How to earn IMVU Credits Generator hack with the IMVU Credits Generator hack tool? Earning IMVU Credits Generator hack will support you to get a wide variety of advantages which make them extremely valuable. IMVU Credits Generator also gives free of charge hack tool generator for the players. Obtaining IMVU Credits Generator hack from IMVU Credits Generator coin hack tool is quite mCreditsh straightforward. All you need to have to do is to adhere to the methods pointed out under.

This hack is also quite importantwhich most likely no a single has ever believed about.Beside downloading applications and attempting different factors, lucrativeinteraction with other IMVU gamers is very critical to earning good credit. If you feel that you are stuck somewhere andcould not earn credit more, your great interaction with other IMVU users willhelp you get out of this predicament. You can lend from them for some time andthen give them back when you earn enough for oneself.

But for doing all items there is a will need for you to wait for also extended time till the course of action gets completed. But without carrying out all this things also you can capable to get a lot of sources that is when you make use of the imvu hack. This method would act as a greater option for you to do reliable and to enhance its efficiency.

[baliluxuryestate-blog]

Real Estate investment in Bali

Real Estate investment - on this blog we look at Real Estate Investment in Bali and Indonesia We like to update the stories and blogs we’ve written with new trends, information and ideas because things change. The source of the blog we’re looking at today comes from an original piece written by Bali Luxury Estate back in 2016 Real Estate Investment and we’ve updated it by looking at what has changed and what has not. If you’re interested in investing in real estate in Bali you need to ask yourself these sorts of questions, because this is where your journey starts … Are you planning to retire?Are you looking for an investment property?Are you simply buying into the lifestyle dream?Are you looking for a second home? Your reasons for investing in Bali may change as your journey rolls out, but these kind of questions will help to determine a few things. 1. First of all, it will help to clarify what structure to hold the property in; 2. Secondly, it will help with zoning, which is something authorities are looking more closely at and enforcing (which is good), and 3. Finally, what’s your exit … if any. The bigger question really is how do you do all of that safely? Has anything changed over the years on how you can invest?   Well, yes and no.  Most regulations haven’t changed since BLE penned the original post in 2016, however, they are now being enforced and they are widely available in English for people to study. Be aware though that there have been some changes. For example, at the end of 2015 foreigners were granted 80-years Hak Pakai (right of use/ read ownership), and after this year’s elections, the word on the street is that HGB (right to build) will also be granted to foreigners as individuals. What about Nominees?   This always was, and always will be, illegal! However, you can set up a PT PMA for larger investments, which can be 100% foreign owned, or in some cases a domestic PT to hold the title for you under what is commonly known as an investment agreement. You could always go for a straightforward lease. But do your homework on this kind of “ownership.” A great agent will support you with all of this and help you to understand. The not so good agents will tend to refer you to wishy-washy write-ups or legal advisors.  It’s difficult to say if these are good quality or not, which is why it’s always a good idea to make sure you get some good independent references to anyone’s work. Real Estate Investment - Choose a professional agency You might ask yourself where to begin, and where to start looking. The easiest answer is, go online and do your research with Google and Social Media. Look for what kind of story the agency is telling. What impression do they give and how do they make you feel? Are they sharing information for free or just trying to make you buy something? Do they just post listings on Social Media or do they have a voice in the market?  If they don’t have a voice there’s a pretty good chance it’s because they either don’t want to be out there, or they just don’t know, or they just don’t care. Total transparency these days is a must and it all starts online! Don’t forget to ask if the agency is certified.  If it’s not run! If they are certified you should know there is an agency organization called AREBI that you can give feedback to (good or bad) as to how well they work or not.  They may also help you in case of conflict and issues that may arise. Real Estate Investment - Choose an agent who suits you best Once you’ve identified an agency you feel comfortable with you’re going to have to deal with an agent. This could be good or it could be bad. It depends on the agency (and the agent, of course), but as a general rule of thumb, an agent is representative of the agency’s integrity, ethics, and standards. But are they or the agency the best fit for you and your needs?  Again look at the personal profile, interest, energy and voice in the market.  Are they coming across as someone knowing what they are doing? Do they have references that can be verified and checked? Don’t be pressured into making decisions you’re not 100% comfortable with There are dozens of agencies in Bali to choose from and you shouldn’t feel bad about rejecting one because you just didn���t feel it– whatever it may be. Send them some messages on social media or an email, engage and see how they react, are you a person for them or just another “brick in the wall” that they see as a dollar sign in. It’s critical you feel comfortable with the agent you’ve chosen to work with. There has to be synergy if you want to achieve the goal of finding what you’re looking for as quickly and as seamlessly as possible. Look for agents and agencies that give you advise and point you in the right direction, especially when it comes to price ranges, locations, and ownership structures. They should be listening to your needs and concerns more than their craving the commission on a sale. Ask friends about their experiences and feelings, follow blogs, join forums and ask questions. If everyone is saying the same thing about a particular agent or agency then the chances are there’s truth in the compliment or the complaint. Real Estate Investment - Do you feel welcome? Google will deliver pages of results for “Bali property”, ”Invest in Bali”, ”Villa for sale Bali” and the like, but the proof of the pudding is how these agencies respond: is it quickly?  is it automated? is the email personal and not just a cut and paste? How does the receptionist answer your phone call? How are you dealt with when you walk in?  Do you feel welcome or not? The bottom line is do you think they are professional enough to be trusted with your money?  And what you are looking for. Do you like the agent you have connected with when you meet.  Today a person’s concentration span is very short due to our mobiles and social media, but this may not be a bad thing.  Read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and he will tell you that first 9-second impression and instant gut feeling is very often very right. Real Estate Investment - Nobody wants a legal nightmare Choosing a notary or lawyer is never easy, especially as some tend to operate in a decidedly grey area. Always double check, and then check again before engaging with a lawyer or notary to represent you. Again, talk to friends, read blogs and ask questions. Do they show sincere interest to educate you? Does it fit with what you can find out yourself online? There are some good groups out there where you can ask for advice. One is on Facebook and called “Law and Regulations.” A lawyer can be used in any transaction to secure your rights as a buyer and it is recommended, especially if it’s a lease or involves some kind of payment plan, review of permits and so forth. However, it might not always be necessary. For example, you may not necessarily need a lawyer if the transaction is a normal lease transfer or a smaller purchase or a straightforward a notary public can handle. In any event, your real estate agency or agent should always offer you alternatives. One key challenge is communication and why recently some agencies offer to bridge this, even doing the legal work for you. But at the end of the day make sure everything (and we mean everything) is transparent and verified from all aspects. The keywords here are transparency, engagement with you, risk exposure and being fairly priced. Real Estate Investment - The transaction process  Once you’ve chosen an agent which you’re happy with, and they’ve done their job to find your dream property, and once the price has been agreed and payment terms have been established, you should always be presented with a Letter of Intent/Offer to Purchase. This needs to signed by both the seller and the buyer. This then leads to a notarial Sale and Purchase Agreement (PPJB). In these agreements, the conditions of sale should be clearly laid out and you should be able to understand them! For example, there should be clauses relating to the deposit and where it needs to be sent; are there any tax commitments that need to be paid? Do you need a land survey? If things aren’t clear ask questions and make changes. The usual process in Bali is that the buyer secures the terms of the deal by depositing a down payment of the agreed purchase price to be held in an Escrow Account with either his or her notary or the real estate agency or lawyer, while the notary conducts Due Diligence. This down payment is often 10% of the price. If Due Diligence is successful, the seller and the buyer meet at the notary to sign a transfer agreement, at which time final payment is released. This is generally done 30-days after the deposit has been made, but time frames can vary and they need to be made clear. The notary will generate the official transfer agreement upon proof that final payment has been received.  Always make sure the Notary stamps your Due Diligence report as clean and clear as there are still cases where land sales, for example, have gone wrong and the buyer ends up with a plot of greenbelt or non commercial land, which they cant develop. Real Estate Investment - Open the champagne! Now you’re comfortably relaxing in your new villa it’s time to open the champagne and celebrate! You can relax in the knowledge that you’ve chosen the right agency, dealt with the right agent and the whole journey with them has been a truly memorable experience for all the right reasons. Please feel free to let me know what you think and I look forward to hearing from you! source Harcourts Seven Stones Read the full article

[wil917-blog]

The Liberal Perspective

The way I see it, one of the main differences between liberals and conservatives is the idea of personal responsibility. A conservative believes that individual hard work and dedication are the main ingredients necessary to achieve success in life, and that money and material comforts are personally earned rather than freely handed out. Wealth is therefore a measure of talent, willingness to take risks, perseverance in attaining goals, and most importantly, good old sweat and hard work. 

Simply put, conservatives believe that they are personally responsible for their successes and failures in life.

From the liberal perspective, these ideas certainly have merit and we agree with overall idea, which is that hard work should be rewarded, and that the harder you work, the more you should earn. Of course someone who works hard should be rewarded with a good job and a high standard of living, while someone who spends all day lazing around ignoring their studies should not live in a mansion and drive a Rolls-Royce.

But liberals see an additional layer of nuance that is not usually part of the conservative point of view. Liberals put individual successes and failures into the larger social context. From the liberal perspective, no one earns 100% of what they have. There are many reasons for this (which I will describe in more detail below) but one is simply that people’s successes build upon the achievements of millions of other people, upon the accumulated wealth of an advanced civilization which developed for thousands of years before they were born, and therefore cannot be claimed as solely the product of their own efforts.

Conservatives believe that nothing is handed out for free, but in fact, each of us, at the moment we are born, becomes a part of some existing socioeconomic environment, and is handed the collective wisdom and achievements of billions of people who have lived, worked, and died before us. 

With this idea, I am just trying to introduce the concept that no one can say that they personally earned everything they have in life, because we all rely on the collective achievements of everyone alive today and everyone who has come before us. We live in an advanced civilization that is several thousand years old, a civilization that has discovered how to release the energy of individual atoms, send rockets beyond the edge of the solar system, and edit our own DNA. We should, at least on some level, acknowledge this free gift we were handed. I’m not saying we need to thank Newton and Einstein each time we use the GPS to find a new restaurant, but to at least have an appreciation for the fact that all of our personal comforts come from the labor and talent of millions of other people.

The points I made above are a bit “out there” and probably more profound than what an everyday liberal would usually be thinking about. At a more concrete level, though, the basic idea is the same. We rely on the frameworks and structures of civilization in order to achieve success in life. An important category of products and services we rely on are those funded by the government through taxation. These include roads, bridges, ports, dams, electrical grids, the patent office and copyright protection laws, police departments, fire departments, the military, the EPA, the USDA, the FDA, the consumer financial protection bureau, financial regulations, PELL grants, laws enforcing business contracts, bankruptcy laws, traffic regulations, the court system, FEMA and other disaster management and aid programs, the CSB which investigates industrial hazardous chemical emergencies, and on and on. Many conservatives complain of big government, but these services are here to create an environment where individual people can build a successful life, and should be thought of as programs paid for by everyone, for everyone. They provide a supporting structure which we all rely on, whether we realize it or not, to build our wealth and happiness.

The majority of liberals, including myself, favor a capitalist economy, so I will not spend any time arguing for other economic systems. Therefore, we generally agree that the mixed economy that we have now (a free market with some government intervention) works well, and that this is a good model for setting prices and exchanging goods and services.

To a liberal, though, there are very important limitations that must be placed upon our capitalist system in order to make the society that it produces “fair.” Chief among these is the problem of wealth accumulation. This is a serious point of disagreement between liberals and conservatives, so I will look into the issue closely.

I have made two major points so far: (1) capitalism is, in general, a good system for society to be organized around, and (2) no one fully earns 100% of what they have, because they relied upon (a) the previous generations of people who built up society to what it is today, and (b) the frameworks and structures of that society, including the services of government collectively paid for by everyone. The result is that we are all very tiny elements in a vast, interconnected, interwoven society of hundreds of millions of people, with any one person in this system very much relying on everyone else to achieve a comfortable life. This collective effort is central and essential. We are a social species, after all. 

Because of the inter-reliance and cooperation built into this system, a liberal would see it as unfair if any one person pulls too far ahead of the pack in terms of the wealth they have obtained in life. The vast majority of Americans, for example, make less than $250k per year. Although this is definitely a large number, let’s call an annual income of less than $250k “normal,” and let’s assume that these incomes are proportional to effort. By “proportional to effort” I simply mean that someone who works twice as hard makes roughly twice as much money, someone who works three times as hard makes three times as much money, and so on. 

This is of course hard to measure and very subjective, but I think that many people (including both liberals and conservatives) would accept the premise that people who earn $250k are more talented and have worked harder, and therefore have earned and “deserve” that higher income, and that a person who earns $40k is still making enough to make ends meet, but may lack similar work ethic, talent, and skills. Additionally, this difference in incomes is an important motivating force in the capitalist system, compelling people to work harder (and therefore make more contributions to society as a whole) in order to make that higher income.

The problem comes when individuals start accumulating wealth that far exceeds their efforts compared to everyone else. Simply put, is a man earning $50 million per year really working 1,000 times harder than someone earning $50k per year? Even if conservatives have other reasons for supporting the ability of people to make such large incomes, I think that, if pressed, they would agree that, no, he is not really working 1,000 times harder than the average Joe.

Does he deserve to have a large income? Definitely. He is making very important contributions to society, whether by managing a company that sells life-saving pharmaceuticals or one that manufactures essential agricultural equipment. Whatever it is, he is providing some socially-useful product or service which people are paying for, and the capitalist economy is rewarding him for his work.

But there is no reason to assert that he should individually keep such a large fraction of the profit of the company he manages, nor is it objectively true that he “earned” or “deserves” it. You see, the capitalist system we have chosen is entirely a product of the imaginations of human beings, and everything about it sprouted from the minds of ordinary men and women. The capitalist system is not a “law of nature” or some profound “universal truth.” It is a man-made entity, and all parts of it are arbitrary. Yes, it is a very good system as we have devised it, but no, just because a CEO makes $50 million in the capitalist system does not mean that most people would agree it is fair for him to keep that amount. 

Liberals see it as an unfair accumulation of wealth, simply because we think that it is not possible for any person to truly earn $25,000 per hour in a country where poverty, homelessness, lack of access to basic health care, and other societal problems still exist. In our view, he is not working 1,000 times harder than the average person, and we do not believe it is justified that he should rise so significantly above the rest of the society which supported him in the first place.

Moreover, to even be in the position of earning that amount means that this CEO is relying more heavily on the institutions of government and society than the rest of us, whether through the patent and copyright office which is protecting his intellectual property with taxpayer dollars, to the highway system which distributes his goods to all corners of the country, to the FDA which makes sure that his products are safe so that consumers have the confidence to buy them. Somehow, his ability to accumulate wealth has become decoupled from the notion that working harder leads to a proportional increase in success. Liberals believe that this should be rectified.

And so we come to the idea of taxation. Everyone is taxed to pay for government services, as we know. The general view is that, on average, we should raise about 20% of the GDP in taxes to pay for all of the services necessary to generate that GDP. Liberal policies often lead to higher taxation (which I will explain more below), so let’s say that amount is 25% for a liberal government. 

We then simply assert that the tax system should be devised in such a way that taxes are paid on the basis of one’s ability to pay. The less one makes, the less one is benefiting from the services of government, and therefore the less one pays in taxes, and vice versa. This distribution of taxes naturally pushes the tax burden on higher income brackets, with the wealthiest people paying the highest marginal tax rates. This is not a punishment to wealthy people, it is an inevitable and necessary outcome of a system in which taxes are paid on an “as-able” basis. Poor people do not become rich off this system, and rich people remain rich after their taxes are taken. There are no massive redistributions of wealth in this setup, and everyone’s after-tax income remains proportional to their effort and level of hard work. 

And for the very wealthy, like the CEO making $50 million, his after-tax income may fall to $20 million. A $30 million drop!? Well, yes. He had more of an ability to pay, and so he has been taxed more. And, very very importantly, this has (from the liberal perspective) improved the proportionality between his effort and his income. It is at least more reasonable to assume that he deserves closer to $10,000 per hour for his effort, rather than $250,000, and that he works closer to 400 times harder than the average Joe, rather than 1,000 times harder. Of course, it is still hard to imagine he is working that much harder, but we are not trying to completely re-write the rules of capitalism. 

We are content with this modification allowing for more reasonable incomes among the very wealthy, and a better proportionality between their incomes and the level of effort with which they work compared to average workers.

That’s it. That’s the core of the liberal perspective concerning wealth accumulating and taxation. It is about acknowledging that capitalism works well, but in the realm of very high incomes it becomes necessary to make modifications, through tax policy, to achieve a fairer economic outcome that helps to ensure that the income vs. effort proportionality does not diverge so significantly from the rest of the workforce. 

This has the added benefit of allowing this additional tax revenue to go toward other social programs, the most important of which is universal health care. The liberal view of healthcare is very consistent with the philosophy outlined above about fair outcomes for everyone. Unexpected disasters happen in life, and the premise of universal healthcare is to give everyone the peace of mind that if they are the unlucky victims of such events, they will never have to worry about going bankrupt or selling their homes in order to pay their medical bills. 

[accuhunt]

The Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Fashion in India.

Sustainable fashion in India is on the rise with homegrown, upcycled, fair-trade, organic, ethical and eco-friendly brands. Now that’s a real fashion statement.

Guest post by Parita Bhansali

“Never buy anything that’s less than fabulous. Then you’ll wear it over and over again!”

I often remember the words of Carrie Bradshaw’s character in Confessions of a Shopaholic before I buy something. She might not have meant it that way, but for me, it represents everything sustainable fashion is about.

The on-going Covid-19 crisis has made many of us pause and introspect about our impact on the planet. With the minimization of human consumption across the globe, nature seems to be healing and the air seems to be cleaner. We know we need to act now to save this planet we call home.

What does fashion, the clothes we buy and the brands we support with our money have to do with any of this?

Also read: Sustainable Living Ideas to Embrace in the New “Normal“

Sustainable fashion in India | There is no Planet B. Photo by Sean O.

Turns out, the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of the world’s annual carbon emissions – 5 times that of flying! It’s also one of the most polluting, water-intensive and waste-generating industries.

That’s exactly why I decided to write this massive guide to sustainable fashion in India. Here’s how we can reduce our individual impact on the planet, one piece of clothing at a time:

In this post:

What is slow, sustainable fashion anyway

What’s wrong with fast fashion

How to embrace sustainable fashion in India

Affordable sustainable clothing brands in India

Maati

Hoomanwear

PANI Swimwear

No Nasties

Increscent

Brown Boy

Renge

Hemp Kari

High-end eco-friendly clothing brands in India

Ka Sha

Nicobar

Eco-friendly winter clothing

Himalayan Blooms

Save the Duck

Ethical, vegan and cruelty free cosmetics in India

Disguise Cosmetics

The Switch Fix

Plum

Veganology

FAE

Kay by Katrina

Colorbar

Khadi Essentials

Lotus Herbals

Himalaya

Vicco

The Body Shop

Mindful fashion influencers in India

Your questions

Sustainable fashion brands in Mumbai

What does ethical clothing mean

Where to find eco-friendly clothing in Pune

Sustainable fashion brands in Mumbai

Comments: How are you embracing mindful fashion?

What is slow, sustainable fashion anyway

Sustainable fashion in India | PIN for future reference!

As the names suggest, fast and slow fashion refer to the pace at which you change / update your wardrobe.

Do you impulsively buy new clothes that are environmentally harmful, water intensive, exploit humans, abuse animals and have a small shelf life?

Or do you consciously invest in clothing brands that are mindful of the resources they use, refrain from using animal products, pay fair wages and last a lifetime?

Broadly speaking, sustainable fashion refers to clothes and products that:

Are made from eco-friendly or recycled fabrics.

Use organic (chemical-free, pesticide-free) materials and dyes.

Employ fair trade practices – no forced labor, no child labor, reasonable working hours and fair pay.

Refrain from using materials, inks and other ingredients derived from animals, and say no to animal testing.

Also read: Can we Stay Safe Yet Reduce Single Use Plastic During the Pandemic?

What’s wrong with fast fashion

Sustainable fashion in India can reduce our individual footprint on the planet. Photo by Monika Geble.

Fast fashion uses up excessive natural resources

Every year, the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water – enough to meet the water consumption needs of 5 million people!

150 million trees are cut and turned into fabric every year, through land clearing and plant pulps.

Every year, disposed off clothes result in half a million tons of plastic microfibers in the ocean – the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. These microfibers are spreading through the food chain and are probably in our bodies now.

With the rise of online shopping, more fast fashion brands setting up shop in India and the constant pressure to keep up with fashion trends, India is already on its way to embracing fast fashion – at great cost to the environment.

Slow fashion can reduce our individual carbon footprint

Only 15% of our clothes are recycled or donated. Even those gradually land up in landfills where they slowly release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to climate change.

Humans and animals are exploited to cater to our fashion demands

Even though child labor has been declining, the International Labor Organisation estimates that 170 million children worldwide are still forced into labor – many of them manufacturing textiles and garments for big international brands.

Leather is made from the skin of various animals: Oxen, cows, alligators, ostriches, snakes, even kangaroos. Unlike popular perception, leather is not simply a by-product of the meat industry. It is an industry in itself – one that makes billions of dollars by cleverly convincing consumers that they want to wear the skin of a dead animal or carry it on their arms!

The wool industry has been in the spotlight for aggressively shearing wool off sheep, goats (cashmere) and rabbits (angora wool), often leading to open wounds, pain and trauma to the animals. These animals ultimately land up in slaughter.

A single silk saree involves the death of 10,000+ silk worms – by smoking their cocoons or boiling them alive – even before they can mature into those pretty silk moths. According to the Higg Index, silk consumes more water and emits more greenhouse gases than most common textiles like polyester, viscose and cotton.

Also read: 11 Tips to Ease Your Transition Into a Vegan Lifestyle

How to embrace sustainable fashion in India

There’s an urgency to switch to sustainable fashion brands in India. Photo by Sara Kurfeß.

Given the obvious urgency to switch to more eco-friendly, ethical and conscious fashion, here are some ways I’ve learnt to make sustainable fashion choices:

Ask before buying

Do I REALLY need that dress? Am I adding to my non-biodegradable cosmetic collection? Am I using hair products tested on animals?

Before I buy anything, I do some quick research. Brands do reply to queries. I hit them up on their Instagram pages, drop them an email or call them.

Recently, I was curious about Sugar Cosmetics, so I both googled and called them – and was surprised to learn that their products are cruelty free (not tested on animals). I recently dropped a message on Chumbak’s Instagram page asking about their accessories, and learnt that their belts and watches are made from animal leather.

Invest in eco-friendly, organic, cruelty free brands in India

For me, buying less means being able to invest more in better alternatives:

Look for clothes made of organic cotton. Check for labels from the Better Cotton Initiative, to ensure less water and chemical dyes.

Replace your cotton clothes with eco-friendly natural fabrics like hemp and bamboo. Cotton is water-intensive and depletes the soil, while hemp produces twice as much fiber per acre, uses less water and enriches the soil. Itshemp aggregates all hemp products available across India!

Purchase accessories, bags, shoes and belts made of faux (fake) leather. These days, innovative brands are making leather products from cork, upcycled flowers, hemp and even pineapple leaves!

Choose personal care and cosmetic products like shampoo, lipstick, kajal, mosquito repellent, toothpaste etc that contain no animal ingredients (vegan) and haven’t been tested on animals (cruelty free). China has made it mandatory to test all products sold there on animals – so any brand that sells in China is unfortunately not cruelty free. Look out for the cruelty free label to identify products.

Most colored cosmetics use ingredients like red carmine dye made from beetles, lanolin from the glands of wool-bearing animals, keratin from the horns and claws of reptiles, fish or birds, and silk protein from silkworms boiled alive! Opt for natural, vegan, cruelty-free cosmetics instead.

Use toiletries and cosmetics free from plastic. Replace plastic bottles with soap, shampoo and conditioner bars – easier to carry while travelling too.

Identify ethical fashion brands

I’ve been using the “Good on You” app – which rates brands based on their impact on humans, animals and the environment. It doesn’t feature Indian brands, but can be useful for international ones or while shopping abroad. It also has brilliant content about sustainability, ethical sourcing, vegan fashion etc.

Embrace slow fashion in India

Upcycle or recycle your clothes with Indian start-ups like WeAreLabeless, Adah by Leesha and Refash.

Upcycle used sarees into dresses and other clothing with organisations like LataSita, Bodements, WanderingSilk, Pitara and Mishcat Co.

Attend a Clothes Exchange Program in your city. See Instagram for accounts like Bombay Closet Cleanse or participate in Swap Soiree by Mahima Agarwal.

Let your friends visit your wardrobe. Asking your friends to mix and match your clothes can give you a new pair from a different point of view!

Donate clothes in good condition to old age homes, orphanages and anyone who needs them. Some retail companies like H&M ask you to exchange your old cloths for points/new buys.

Also read: How I Fit All My Possessions in Two Bags as I Travel the World

Affordable sustainable clothing brands in India

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rengé (@renge_india) on Aug 8, 2020 at 5:34am PDT

Even as fast fashion is taking over the country, several sustainable fashion brands in India offer clothing that is not only creative but also homegrown, upcycled, fair-trade, organic, ethical and eco-friendly. Now that’s a real fashion statement!

Maati

Maati, founded by Neha Kabra, works with a community in Rajasthan to create unique clothing with traditional Indian printing techniques. A part of the fabric is upcycled, the dyes and print colours are borrowed from nature (not animals) and the packaging is plastic-free. 

Hoomanwear

Hoomanwear is India’s first – and perhaps only – causewear brand, which donates 15% of all profits to organisations involved in meaningful work. Founder Harshil Vohra is a passionate vegan, and all their t-shirts, crop tops and hoodies are plant-based (less than 5% synthetic fibers) and customizable with different vibes. They are made only on demand (zero waste), use certified sustainable inks, are free of animal ingredients and delivered in recycled pizza boxes or cloth bags!

PANI Swimwear

I was surprised to learn that most swimsuits leach microfibers into the ocean. And amazed to discover PANI Swimwear, founded by Leila, an international development professional from Mauritius who now calls Mumbai home. PANI makes body-positive swimsuits catered to a wide range of body types, designed from recycled fishing nets!

No Nasties

No Nasties is Goa’s first organic clothing brand, founded by Apurva Kothari. They use organic cotton seeds on fair trade farms. Synthetic pesticides and GMOs are a strict no. The entire seeds to clothes process is eco-friendly and ethical, right down to the inks being used (made without any animal ingredients).

Wearing a skirt from No Nasties. Photo: Parita Bhansali.

Increscent

Founded by 24-year-old Anya Gupta, Increscent offers affordable vintage clothing (dresses, tops, skirts etc), crafted in small batches by a community in Rajasthan. 60% of the fabrics they use are recycled from the dead stock of various export houses!

Brown Boy

22-year-old Prateek Kayan quit his banking job in New York to start one of the few sustainable fashion brands in India exclusively for men. Brown Boy is all about organic, fair trade cotton, animal-friendly printing and smart casual t-shirts, yoga pants etc.

Renge

Founded by animal lover Sheena Uppal, Renge sources surplus fabric from warehouses to produce unique, limited edition designs for women. Proceeds from Renge are also used to support animal sanctuaries in India.

Hemp Kari

The latest addition to India’s growing hemp movement is the homegrown brand Hemp Kari. They offer natural hemp-based fabrics with traditional hand embroidery done by local artisans in Lucknow and nearby villages. The tops are delivered in plastic-free packaging, and use tags / labels made of hemp paper.

Also read: The Shooting Star Collection: Travel Inspired Clothing for a Cause

High-end eco-friendly clothing brands in India

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by K a – S h a (@ka_sha_india) on Jul 16, 2019 at 1:12am PDT

Ka Sha

Karishma Shahani Khan created a clothing line from plastic gunny sacks, old chandeliers and second-hand sneakers while studying in London. Now based out of Pune, her Ka Sha label explores natural fabrics and works closely with artisans across the country. Her zero waste “Heart to Haat” collection focuses on upcycling discarded clothing.

Nicobar

Nicobar is the slow fashion brainchild of Simran Lal and Raul Rai, inspired by tropical living. They’re bigger than most sustainable fashion brands in India, with physical stores across the country. That only means more responsibility.

Their core line uses only organic cotton, along with natural fabrics like bamboo. Their woolen collection uses recycled wool, and the kidswear is made entirely from leftover fabric. Most of their products come in plastic free packaging.

Also read: Responsible Travel Tips for Authentic, Meaningful Experience on the Road

Eco-friendly winter clothing

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Himalayan Blooms (@himalayanblooms) on Oct 29, 2018 at 9:03pm PDT

Himalayan Blooms

Bangalore resident Pratibha Krishnaiah quit her corporate job to work as a Teach for India fellow in rural Uttarakhand. After the fellowship, she decided to stay on in the remote village of Kheti Khan, and began Himalayan Blooms – a social enterprise that seeks to create financial independence for local women. Using acrylic yarn and cotton (no wool), they hand-knit the most gorgeous ponchos, sweaters, scarfs and neck warmers – available for India wide delivery right from the heart of the Himalayas!

Save the Duck

Save the Duck is an American brand that specializes in animal-free, high tech winter wear. Their jackets are made from recycled plastic bottles and hoodies from recycled fishing nets. And yet their winter collection is warm enough to successfully put a vegan mountaineer on Mount Everest!

Unfortunately India doesn’t yet to seem to have its own ethical and eco-friendly winter sports brand. Wool and down feather-free jackets are available at Decathlon, made with polyester or other synthetic materials (not very eco-friendly though).

Also read: How to Travel as a Vegan and Find Delicious Food Anywhere in the World

Ethical, vegan and cruelty free cosmetics in India

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Disguise Cosmetics (@disguisecosmetics) on Jun 30, 2020 at 8:22am PDT

It is shocking that several animal ingredients are hidden away in our daily toiletries and cosmetics. Some of these include: Honey, the food of bees. Beeswax, derived by destroying their painstakingly created combs used to house their young and store honey. Gelatin, extracted from the skins, bones and tissues of animals.

In 2020, despite being well-versed with what works on the human skin and scalp, some (big) brands like Maybelline, Estee Lauder and Clinique still test on animals!

Here are some homegrown brands that support local entrepreneurs, source ethical ingredients and do not test on animals:

Disguise Cosmetics

Disguise Cosmetics is an Indian brand which believes in setting an honest, ethical and pocket-friendly beauty standard for our skin. All their cosmetics are free from animal oils, fats, pigments, secretions and proteins. Their matte lipsticks and all-day gel kajals are all the rage!

The Switch Fix

I cannot stress how much I love this brand, setting the benchmark for sustainable fashion brands in India. The Switch Fix is everything I could wish for: No plastic, no palm oil, cruelty-free, vegan, plant-based, water-saving and non-polluting!

From shampoo bars (no spill, no issues while checking in, last up to 50 washes) to bamboo toothbrushes, they have all our personal care needs covered.

Plum

Homegrown brand Plum offers a wide range of vegan and paraben-free hair, face, body and skincare products. They also recycle your empty plum plastic bottles with a gift voucher of Rs 50 for future use!

Veganology

A young brand nurtured with love and compassion, Veganology uses essential oils to create moisturizing soap bars, body butters, lip balms and even a vegan, chemical-free talcum powder.

FAE

FAE, which stands for Free And Equal, is an Indian start-up trying to challenge conventional, biased notions of beauty. Their wide range of lipsticks is vegan, cruelty-free and paraben-free.

Sustainable fashion in India – the real fashion statement.

Kay by Katrina

India’s first celebrity cosmetic brand Kay was launched last year by Katrina Kaif – and it’s reported to be vegan and cruelty-free! She said she wanted to create products that would spark a vegan cosmetics revolution in India – and I think she’s on her way.  

Colorbar

Colorbar is India’s third largest cosmetic brand. It is cruelty free, with a wide range of vegan products, well-labelled on the website.

Khadi Essentials

The homegrown Khadi Essentials brand is based on the principles of Ayurveda. Most of their personal care products are vegan, cruelty-free and paraben free.

Lotus Herbals

Lotus Herbals is hardly a stranger to Indian consumers. This local brand commits to nature’s wealth in tandem with being compassionate to all. No chemicals, nothing synthetic, no animal ingredients and no animal testing.

Himalaya

Back in the early 1900s, Mr Manal was travelling in Myanmar (then Burma), when he stumbled upon locals feeding the roots of a local herb to calm a herd of agitated elephants. His curiosity led him to start a revolution out of Dehradun in 1934, to develop all-natural personal care resources based on Ayurveda, science and nature. Himalaya continues to be a game changer among sustainable fashion brands in India and around the world! The Himalaya toothpaste and wide range of products make it much easier to be vegan in India and elsewhere.

Vicco

I guess we all remember the Vicco Vajradanti commercial from our childhood in India! Sounds old school, but Vicco is actually a pioneer of vegan and natural products in the country.

The Body Shop

British brand, The Body Shop, pioneered the cruelty free movement but some of their products still contain animal ingredients like milk, honey, beeswax, etc. The vegan products are well-labelled though. They mostly come in plastic but The Body Shop has recently started an initiative to engage women in local communities to make recycled bottles.

Also read: Offbeat, Incredible and Sustainable – Travel Companies Changing the Way We Experience India

Mindful fashion influencers in India

View this post on Instagram

Ya local textile fanatic found a new fashion fiber: Ramie ⁣ ⁣ #Ramie is one of the oldest fiber crops, having been used for at least 6,000 years. It’s older than cotton and uses less water to grow. It’s very similar to linen, looks like silk, and even more absorbent than cotton— all while being incredibly easy to naturally dye because it’s so highly absorbent. ⁣ ⁣ In the words of @AjaBarber, “Now is a great time to remind you that the fashion industry is quietly keeping the fossil fuel industry plugging along. Polyester, spandex, Lycra, acrylic… are all synthetic fibers made from fossil fuels.⁣”⁣ ⁣ Sustainable fashion isn’t about reinventing the wheel, it’s about returning to ancestral + indigenous wisdom— especially when it comes to fashion fibers + fabrics. ⁣ ⁣ Historically, fashion fibers used to be grown locally and often used to be byproducts of food production— whereas now, over 60% of fashion is synthetic. @fibershed_ is one of my favorite leaders in the “farm-to-closet” movement, which challenges people to think locally + regeneratively when it comes to fashion.⁣ ⁣ [dress via @savannahmorrowthelabel in ramie, naturally dyed]

A post shared by ADITI MAYER • ADIMAY.com (@aditimayer) on Jul 16, 2020 at 8:37pm PDT

A couple of Instagrammers you can take inspiration from, as you learn about ethical, fair-trade, cruelty free and sustainable fashion brands in India:

Anya Gupta

Anya Gupta is a fashion and lifestyle influencer who makes DIY products like detergent, toothpaste etc look uber cool! And damn, her clothing and cosmetics recommendations are super inspiring.

Aditi Mayer

Aditi Mayer is all about sustainable fashion and social justice – two topics that rarely meet each other. Her profile focuses on South Asian fashion, and is one of the rare ones that deeply explore ethics and eco-friendly living.

Also read: Why Long Term Travel is Less Like Instagram and More Like Real Life

Your questions

Sustainable fashion in India | Own experiences, not things. Photo by Henry Gillis

Thanks for sharing your questions around sustainable fashion. Those not directly answered in the post above are included below.

If you have more questions, please ask them in the comments to this post.

What are some unique sustainable fashion brands in Mumbai?

Some sustainable fashion brands born in Mumbai include Nicobar, Inaaya and Co, and Bhumika & Jyoti.

What does ethical clothing mean?

“Ethical” encapsulates anything that is kind to people, animals and the environment. Typically, ethical clothing is made with natural materials like organic cotton, hemp or bamboo. The artisans involved in crafting it work in respectable working conditions and are paid fairly. No animals are harmed in the making of the products, neither by making use of animal-derived ingredients nor by testing on animals.

Where to find eco-friendly clothing in Pune?

Pune’s homegrown sustainable labels include the Ka Sha boutique and Outliers Clothing Co.

What are recommended sustainable fashion brands in Bangalore

Bangalore’s SwapStitched clothes swap events are one of a kind!

Bangalore’s sustainable fashion options include House of Primes, Ethic Attic and Kaiyare.

Do you think about slow, eco-friendly fashion? What steps have you taken (or will take) towards it? What are your favorite sustainable fashion brands in India?

*Note: This article does not endorse or represent any of the brands mentioned. Views and opinions are entirely the author’s own.

If you’d like to contribute a guest post to The Shooting Star, please see guidelines here.

PIN this guide to sustainable fashion in India!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Fashion in India. appeared first on The Shooting Star.

The Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Fashion in India. published first on https://airriflelab.tumblr.com

[easyfoodnetwork]

Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run The only ethical restaurant I have ever heard of is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I have never watched the show, but my partner has excitedly explained this particular vision of utopia to me at least three times. The restaurant is named Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and exists in New Orleans in the 24th century, on an Earth that has abolished prejudice, money, and hunger. Though you could press a button and conjure any ingredient, the aforementioned Sisko still finds a desire to provide hospitality, so every night he cooks gumbo and jambalaya and presumably gives it away for free, just because he wants to. We have not figured out how to replicate matter, nor have we abolished money, so even in our most progressive and sustainable restaurants, the food has to come from somewhere and must be paid for by someone. But we all know the restaurant world has more immediate problems than the lack of a Star Trek society. Building an equitable restaurant, a place where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and can work in an anti-discriminatory environment, is going to take a near-undoing of the way most restaurants are run. Currently, most restaurants, whether they are high-end or hole-in-the-wall, family-owned or corporate-run, operate in much the same way. There is an owner, or owners, who either own the property the restaurant is on or lease it from a landlord. Sometimes the chef is also the owner, or sometimes they are hired by the owner. In the kitchen, there is a hierarchy. It may not always look like the traditional French brigade system, with its focus on militaristic efficiency, but the chef manages, and makes more money than, the line cooks. In the back of the house, dishwashers, bussers, and cooks are often paid the minimum wage, while in the front of the house, in most U.S. states, servers and bartenders are paid lower wages with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. Many states permit employees to be fired at will. And the lower down the line you are, the less likely it is you’ll be making decisions about how your workplace functions. It’s not glib to say that eradicating capitalism is the surest way to build equitable restaurants. Living in a country that provided universal health care, federally mandated paid child leave and sick leave, and a living minimum wage, as well as incentivized sustainable farming, encouraged unions, and got rid of at-will employment, would go a long way toward creating environments within restaurants (and all businesses) where workers had power over their own livelihood. But that is a tall order for restaurants to take on alone, so barring revolution (though fingers crossed), upending everything we assume about how restaurants are run is the necessary step toward an actually ethical restaurant industry. Other options already exist — nonprofits, workers collectives, unions, volunteer-run restaurants — that create models for a fairer and more just workplace. But what does it even mean to be an equitable restaurant? And can simply changing the ownership structure provide that? Kirk Vartan, co-owner of A Slice of New York pizzerias in the Bay Area, understands that phrases like “collectively owned” or “workers cooperative” can inspire panic and confusion. It’s like, what, everyone has to vote every time you place a produce order? Is it going to lead to the drama of the Park Slope Food Coop deciding whether or not to carry Israeli products? “People think that it’s hippies, and everyone’s going to smoke weed, and sit around in a circle and just love and peace, and whatever,” he tells Eater. “And the reality is, this is a very real business model.” Vartan actually took inspiration from, of all places, the corporate world. While working for NBC, he was given stock options. “It’s not a lot of stock. It’s like this little itty-bitty micro-bit of the company. But it changes your attitude when you actually own part of it,” he says. After leaving to start a New York-style pizza shop in San Jose, he was determined to create a similar business structure. He says his employee-owned model was at first discouraged by a corporate attorney, who said it wouldn’t work for a restaurant. But Vartan continued to bring it up with employees, and eventually worked with Project Equity, an organization that advocates for and consults with companies to pivot to employee-owned models, to become a worker cooperative. A Slice of New York allows employees to become co-owners after they’ve spent at least a year at the company; as of now, about 45 percent of the employees are co-owners. Operationally, the model doesn’t change much. There are shift managers who make the immediate calls about who does what day-to-day, and Vartan remains the general manager. The restaurant’s governance is what’s really affected: Every co-owner has an equal share of the business and a vote on a board. Board members all have an equal say in decisions about benefits, safety procedures, menu changes, and issues dealing with the general financial wellbeing of the company. “In a traditional ownership model, whatever is not spent on people goes to an individual,” Vartan says. Instead, in a cooperative, members decide how to spend, save, or split profits, “so there’s no incentive to try and not take care of the people immediately.” Vartan credits the co-op model with helping A Slice of New York both stay in business and keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worker-owners voted to mandate masks and social distancing policies weeks before the state did, and to do away with slices, even though they were a huge part of the business, because they’d be harder to serve safely. “We did that not because we were trying to maximize our profit. We did that because we were trying to maximize the safety of our team,” says Vartan. “People are seeing and making decisions, not just [thinking] ‘I want this.’ It’s, ‘How are we taking care of each other? How are we taking care of the business?’ And that mindset is why this is the right model going forward.” “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.” There is no one way to be a co-op. Owners can decide how long employees must be at the company before they’re eligible to become a co-owner, how much it costs to buy in, how much of the profits to split, and how much to save for a rainy day. But the ability for those questions to be a conversation, and not a top-down mandate, is enticing. The model “increases the likelihood that the business will stay locally owned and operated, gives workers a greater equity and turns what might otherwise be a low-paying blue-collar job into a more rewarding career,” writes Melissa Lang in the San Francisco Chronicle. Cara Dudzic, co-owner of the cooperational Charmington’s cafe in Baltimore, says the restaurant’s worker-owned setup means employees often stay for years in an industry where the standard is months, and they have the opportunity to buy into health care benefits, something most restaurant jobs don’t offer. “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.” No matter how kindly run and community-focused a restaurant’s structure is, wages are often the sticking point. After all, it’s a job; getting paid is the goal. And as much as co-op or nonprofit structures help with the overall work culture, they do not solve the problem so many restaurants face: It costs money to pay people a living wage. The industry typically relies on tipped wages for servers, which allows restaurant owners to pass the burden of ensuring servers make a living wage onto customers. Everyone admits it’s a bad (and racist) system. But doing away with tipping has proven to be a hard sell for customers and workers alike. Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants famously ended tipping, initially faced customer sticker shock, and staff leaving because they could make more with tips than on an hourly wage. The group reinstated tipping this June. Vartan says employees at A Slice of New York start at $16.50 an hour, $4.50 above California’s minimum wage (and almost a dollar over San Francisco’s), because, since no one owner is trying to make a profit above anyone else, wages can be lifted across the board. And employees there can still accept tips. But becoming a member of a cooperative does require buying into a long-term plan, in an industry that has by design courted short-term commitment; giving up a portion of one’s wages to be part of a worker-owned collective, or forgoing $300 a night in tips so everyone can make $15 an hour, is not as enticing if you’re not planning on being there long. Even for longer-term employees, given the relentless nature of the work, it’s hard to give up the “every man for himself” mentality, especially during an unprecedented recession. Charmington’s began with 11 partners in 2010, and is now down to just three. “Some people hired as regular staff did want buy-in, and did by accepting a few hours of compensation as shares rather than wages every pay period,” Dudzic says. But other staff didn’t want to forgo wages, didn’t plan on staying in food service that long, or just didn’t have the time or energy for the “fairly stressful early meetings and email chains” that being a co-owner of a restaurant entail. “The main thing that gets in the way of providing everything we want is income,” she says, noting that the opening of a food hall a few blocks away in 2016 has continued to cut into their lunch business. Sales being what they are, Charmington’s base wage is the Maryland minimum wage of $11 an hour. The reality is, even though Charmington’s is paying as much as it can while ensuring it can stay afloat, workers could probably make more elsewhere. Wage equity is part of a larger conversation among the industry as a whole about creating a better future for restaurants: Regardless of what the rest of the business model looks like, it’s something that, should the owners desire, can be solved almost immediately. “American society or business schools say it’s profits over everything, but we’re always saying that it’s community over profits,” says Yajaira Saavedra, co-owner of La Morada in the Bronx. To that end, every employee of the restaurant — regardless of their role — receives the same wage. For a long time, that wage was $17 an hour, but this summer, it was boosted to $20 with a grant from the city. La Morada, it should be noted, is not a co-op — it’s owned by a family of undocumented people, and has made a name for itself as not just a restaurant, but a community center and haven for immigrants and other undocumented people. Saavedra says that prioritizing fair wages and treatment has led to high retention rates among workers and a loyal following in the community, which is more important to Saavedra than taking home a bigger cut of the profits. “Even if we [close], we want to make sure that the community is stable, and we have fought for the better,” she says. “And we left it in a better standing than when we were there.” In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill Farm and the longtime chef at its two associated restaurants, quotes naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which is to say, when it comes to restaurants, it’s hard to change one thing unless you’re changing everything. “The organic movement was about an organism, why everything is connected,” Barber says in an interview. “It got dumbed down into, do you use pesticides or not? But really, the origins of the organic movement were about the community which produced your food, the community that got the food to you, and the community that was cooking the food and enjoying it together.” It isn’t organic unless the humans involved aren’t being exploited. It doesn’t matter if your steak was grass-fed if the person who butchered it can’t afford rent. The ethics of Blue Hill come at a price — a socially distanced picnic at the fine dining Blue Hill at Stone Barns currently costs $195 a person. In any restaurant, Barber explains, “it’s rent, food costs, employee/insurance costs,” and while there may be wiggle room, a lot of those costs are set. “When I talk about buying ingredients that are treating the environment right, rightfully so, a lot of chefs are like, ‘Well, I would love to do that, but I literally don’t have room in the budget to be doing that like Blue Hill does.’” (Weeks after we spoke, Barber announced that he plans to step away from chef duties, and pivot both Stone Barns and the NYC location of Blue Hill to a chef-in-residence program that he hopes will help combat “racial and gender inequities” in the industry, something he and Blue Hill have been criticized for perpetuating, most recently by chef Preeti Mistry). “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing.” Of course, not every meal can realistically be $195 per person. The cost of providing every employee with a living wage and benefits — not to mention paying rent and insurance, and serving a good product affordable enough for most people — is nearly impossible with the way restaurants, co-op or not, must run. Vartan says about 45 percent of A Slice of New York’s costs are labor costs, which he describes as one of a restaurant’s three knobs; the other two are quality of food and pricing. “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing,” he says. Yet, he’s gotten complaints that his pizza is more expensive than a pie you could get at Pizza Hut. No matter how much better his product, or better-treated his employees, some customers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, afford it. The problem of “good” food being prohibitively expensive can’t be completely solved by restaurateurs turning those knobs. Depressed wages and inflation are problems for everyone, not just restaurant workers. And if it isn’t going to be addressed by an increased minimum wage, it has to come from customers rethinking their own priorities where able. Which many of them are doing. The COVID moment has perhaps opened some diners’ eyes to just how precarious things have been for food-service workers. In the short term, consumers are stepping up and filling gaps by donating to GoFundMes, buying gift cards, or just tipping well. Elsewhere, mutual aid efforts aimed to address the widespread hunger caused by the pandemic and the recession have inspired many to think critically about what role restaurants should play in that aid. During the pandemic, La Morada has served 1,000 free hot meals a day, and used its longstanding relationships with local farmers to help solve the problems of food waste and hunger. “Small farmers, organizations we have those relationships with ... now trust us to actually do the mutual aid work and have volunteered either their time or their produce,” Saavedra says. For many diners, the value of eating out is now not just about the immediate experience, but everything, including the people, that make it what it is. It’s always been that way to a certain extent — the way that $195 Blue Hill meal is worth it not just because the food tastes good, but the knowledge that it was grown thoughtfully, cooked by experts, and served to you in a perfect pastoral setting. Now, “value” can include not just customer experience, but the knowledge that employee well-being is part of the plan. What the pandemic has strengthened, and what anyone who has ever felt the comfort of having a local knows, is the idea of a restaurant as a community. The risk of losing the coffee shop where you read the paper every Saturday, or your favorite date spot, or the bar where the bartenders always give you a shot for the road, has galvanized people within the restaurant industry to think through what a better future looks like, and those outside of it to care as much about the people working at the restaurant as the restaurant itself. “Once you are attuned and aware of it, it becomes part of the fabric of the culture,” says Barber. “It doesn’t go back.” It is with that momentum that models like workers collectives, mutual aid, and legislation advocacy can thrive. As food-service businesses have been struggling through the pandemic, “worker co-op models are being pitched to municipalities, on the basis of maintaining wealth and equity for oppressed communities,” says Jeff Noven, executive director of the nonprofit grocery store Berkeley Student Food Collective. The student food collective is a cooperative success story, but its unique place within the university community means many of its methods are not replicable. Most obviously it operates without the burden of labor costs: Noven is the only full-time employee, with his and four part-time employees’ salaries subsidized by grants. Most of the labor comes from 150 volunteers, who elect the board from within that membership. That can’t be the path forward for the vast majority of restaurants. There’s also the issue that many groups doing the work might not be eligible for government aid or alternative business models. For La Morada, applying to be a co-op or a nonprofit requires citizenship paperwork they don’t have, and while according to Harvard Law School, federal law doesn’t “expressly prohibit undocumented immigrants from working for a business that they own,” the laws are also pretty unsettled. Saavedra says they also had issues converting to a soup kitchen, as they couldn’t apply for 501(c)(3) status. But that hasn’t stopped La Morada from its commitment to mutual aid. “We still have all the same values,” says Saavedra. “You don’t necessarily need [to be] a co-op or a not-for-profit tax. You carry ethical work.” Instead, there are other ways for businesses to adopt parts of the co-op model, or other equitable models, that work for them, and those actions are already in progress. The unionization push throughout restaurants and grocery stores continues to advocate for better working conditions, especially as many were deemed “essential workers” as lockdowns began in March. Restaurants continue to do away with tipping, and to incorporate mutual aid into their business models. But everything restaurants can do on their own is a few drops in a bucket compared to what government support in the form of things like universal health care, or real aid for small businesses, could achieve. Vartan is working with local legislators to incentivize businesses to organize as workers collectives, and noted the 2018 Main Street Employees Ownership Act as a step toward federal support. And restaurant workers continue to push and protest for things like a fair minimum wage, federally mandated sick leave, and support for independent restaurants struggling during the pandemic. Prioritizing community over capitalism has always been an option. But now, more people than ever have a desire to seek out food made in equitable spaces, to learn about the inner workings of their favorite restaurants and see how they can best support them, or just leave a 30 percent tip because they know times are tough. That won’t go away once we have a vaccine. Sustained change will take a greater understanding of what “equity” means, and what it will require from both restaurants and customers. As bad as the pandemic has been, it has put us in a great position to do that sort of reevaluation, and reimagine a restaurant as a place where success doesn’t mean profit, but rather that the whole community, farm-to-table, is cared for. And to maybe even fight for a day when it won’t be the responsibility of restaurants to solve these problems at all. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3lHHb3U

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/09/there-really-is-no-ethical-restaurant.html

[thedanny522]

Originally wrote this for my blog, thought I'd repost it here (minus the links etc). Just my frustration with the make money online niche (and breaking into it... ethically). TLDR: I explain how to make money selling courses in an ironic, satirical way.I’m a struggling, bitter, internet marketing amateur and I’ve just about had it with all this guru malarkey. If you don’t want to read a rant then feel free to do a 360 and walk away.Someone recommended I check out a certain YouTuber who has videos titled with things like, “How I make $250,000 in passive income every month!” and “Learning THIS secret made me a millionaire!”I hate the Make Money Online niche so much.I hate it because I feel like I know all the tricks and yet they keep working on me.I know how to create funnels, do copywriting, create content and blah blah blah and yet I still watch this retarded value-less clickbait garbage.But after watching a portion of this last video I finally realized what these internet marketers do.Step 1: Make money selling a course about literally anythingThis is the first step in becoming an internet marketing guru.I would even argue that this is the hardest part and where most people get stuck because it essentially the would-be guru to figure out all the steps on their own.The steps are:Make a course about something you know aboutCreate a funnelDrive traffic with paid adsProfitCompleting these steps will give the guru credibility that they know what they’re talking about.Not only do they know how to do each step, but they’ll have actual PROOF that they know what they’re talking about when it comes time for the next step.Step 2: Sell ANOTHER course that teaches people how to sell coursesThe next step is for the marketer to take what they’ve learned, package it into 6 modules of 10-15 videos each, and sell it as a course.They then repeat the entire process above, but this time they use the proof of their sales, marketing material, and appropriate screenshots in their funnel.Make a course about how to make money selling coursesCreate a funnelDrive traffic with paid adsProfitIt’s at this point that the marketer has the ability to create additional social media web properties to market their products.They can start a blog, Facebook group, YouTube channel or whatever to give out little clickbait tidbits that teach people how to make money selling courses.Theoretically, they could do these things for step 1 as well. And frequently they do, offered as bonuses for signing up.Step 3: Sell ANOTHER course that teaches people how to make money selling courses on how to make moneyThis is perhaps the most “meta” of all the steps.Once the marketer has successfully completed steps 1 and 2, they then have the credibility to complete the third step.Only someone who has completed the first two steps can proceed to the third step.The third step is the most interesting and an excellent way to tell the true gurus apart from the posers.While it’s common at all three levels to see upsells and downsells, it’s at this level that we most frequently see the big money maker of them all: private consulting and/or mentoring groups.All the rage these days, mentoring is an excellent niche in and of itself. Instead of simply selling a course, you’re also selling your time as an expert to future would-be gurus.For the low low price of $997, aspiring gurus can get you on the phone for an hour a week where you will:teach them how to drive MASSIVE traffic to their funnel FOR FREE!give them the #1 SECRET of TRIPLING your revenue in under 30 days!show them an elite HACK for convincing influencers to partner with you!teach them how to get your clients to become RABID FANS!give them access to THE EXACT SAME ad copy used by top marketers!take them BY THE HAND and work together until they are READY TO DRIVE TRAFFIC!And don’t even get me started on the bonuses..Step 4: Create endless amounts of vague content that rehashes the same basic information over and over againWhat kills me about this formula is that I see it so MANY TIMES across SO MANY DIFFERENT MARKETERS that it makes me want to vomit.Not because it’s transparent, manipulative, and bordering on unethical.But because I want SO DESPERATELY to be able to do it and make a killing like they are.I watch these gurus’ videos, read their “articles,” skim their “value adding” Facebook drivel in hopes that I’ll get some sort of actionable tip instead of different versions of the same old garbage.You know what I’m talking about. Classics such as:Guys it’s all about one thing: ADDING VALUE.Figure out what problem your customer needs to solve, then offer a solution.Show your customers how their lives will be better after purchasing your product.Underpromise and overdeliver!This kind of thing makes me want to kick my dog.Does this ACTUALLY work on people?Sadly, it does. The amount of comments I see on this kind of garbage that are like,“Wow, you’re such an inspiration! So happy you finally made a million dollars, you deserve it!”“This was a great story. I especially like the part where you talked about how successful you were.”“Hope you’re taking notes guys, so much value here.”Please kill me.The worst part is that I hate myself for falling for it over and over again.I mean, to be fair I’m not really “falling for it.”These strategies all work. They’re all effective. And if you, me, or anyone else actually puts them into practice then they’ll probably get the same result.If you ask me, all the hate these gurus get is – get ready for it – UNFOUNDED.That may seem contradictory based my apparently unbridled rage against unethical internet marketers. But I don’t think my reasons for anger are much different than anyone else’s:We simply haven’t been able to sell the dream as successfully as the gurus have.(And yes, we’ve tried.)Step 5: Add complexity to cause insecurity (conveniently solved by purchasing another course)We bought the $7 ebook, the $47 course, the $67 upsell.We read your sales letters, watched your YouTube videos, signed up for your mailing lists. We devoured your lead magnets.And not just once – multiple times.Not only that, we might have even learned the requisite skills necessary to tie it all together.We learned copywriting so we could create sales letters of our own.We taught ourselves Photoshop (I personally prefer GIMP) so we could make our 3D book covers.We paid for MONTHS upon MONTHS of ClickFunnels – maybe even spent hundreds more on their never-ending list of info products.Maybe we even did the One Funnel Away Challenge… more than once.We created lead magnets, landing pages, full blown courses – all of it, everything.And yet, despite all this, we STILL haven’t been able to tie it together into anything profitable.The YouTube channel, the blog, Instagram account.. it’s all over the place. No semblance of order.What’s the famous quote?“Speak to everyone and nobody will listen.”To be fair, at this point I think it’s safe to admit that I’m just talking about myself here. I know it.How do I know? Because most people who fail DON’T fail because they did a lot of work and it just HAPPENED to be the wrong type of work.Most people fail because they don’t do anything at all.They sit on their butts, research all day, and then at the end of the day tell themselves that they’ll start FIRST THING TOMORROW.Yeah right.Me? I have the opposite problem.I’d rather write a 3000 word blog post and cry about my problems than think about how best to tie together the massive amount of content I’ve created in the past year.I want to make a full time living from this. I want to live the dream, you know?I want to be Tai Lopez. I want to be Tony Robbins. I want people to call ME a douchebag phony guru after seeing me talk about how I bought my new Lamborghini with knawledge.I want it. Fame, fortune, glory, money, women, power.. all of it.Anyone who says they don’t want those things really just gave up on acquiring them and is denying their desire. Classic sour grapes.They’ve decided they couldn’t have it, or that it would take too much work, and now they’ve convinced themselves that they never wanted those things anyway.That’s where we’re different. I still believe that it’s possible.And more importantly, I feel like I’m close.I have all the skills.I know how to write sales letters.I can use ClickFunnels.I can write a 100 email drip sequence that will make your pee pee hard every time.I can grow social media accounts.I can get clients with Paigham Bot.I can sell over the phone, face to face, even through email.I can do it all baby.I just.. I don’t know.. what is my problem?Maybe I don’t have one. Maybe it’s all in my head.Step 6: Tell people the reason they’re failing is because they’re not taking actionDidn’t we already go over the strategy in the beginning? Why wouldn’t it be the same for you?Make a courseCreate a funnelDrive traffic with paid adsProfitIt’s the same for everyone. For every niche on the planet.You’re only limited by your creativity.(…and the amount you can spend on paid ads before you turn a profit. But we’ll get to that in a second.)Not only that, but I actually know HOW to do everything I need to do to make it happen in ALL of those steps.“Creating a funnel” isn’t a singular activity – it involves like 100 different skills that I learned on my own because I didn’t have a dollar to pay overpriced freelancers.So what’s the missing piece? I’ll tell you: paid ads.When you’re at Step 1, there is no substitute for paid ads.You don’t just need people to sell to, you need the RIGHT people. The right age, gender, geographical location, income level, interests — they all need to be targeted.Everything I’ve seen points to using Facebook ads as the primary method new internet marketers get their first batch of traffic.Sure, once you get an audience and a little clout, you’ll get some organic traffic (and maybe even some customers) from there. But even then, there’s no guarantee that those people will buy from you. It’s not necessarily “buyer traffic.”You need to find people that are ACTIVELY LOOKING FOR what you’re selling.Your Facebook friends probably don’t care about your offer, even if it is in an evergreen niche like making money online or getting ripped.The secret to making money with ANY of this stuff is nailing down a reliable source of targeted traffic, showing them ads and funnels that convert, and cranking the dial until you get sick of watching your bank account go up.There does seem to be one alternative. In his book Traffic Secrets, Russel Brunson calls this “Finding your Dream 100.”The idea here is that you make a list of the 100 most influential people in your industry and contact them with a gimmick like a physical card with a video screen as a way to stand out from the crowd.It’s clever, gotta give him that.But does it work?Probably.Have I tried it?No.Step 7: Talk about how easy the process is and how anyone who still hasn’t figured it out is an idiotAnd THAT’S what kills me – I know it probably works, I just haven’t tried it because I don’t have the $500 for actual cards to send out.Also probably some impostor syndrome in there – after all, why would famous influencers want to collaborate with lil old me?Sure, I’m awesome, talented, hard working, handsome, charming, modest, and an authority on fitness.But.. but…But what?But nothing. I just haven’t tried it. I need to try it. I need to get the friggin $500 together, make the list and just send out the info.Everything else is ready, or COULD BE ready in a couple of weeks if I put my mind to it.But because I think to myself, Oh well I can’t afford the physical gimmick cards to send out, that means the whole process is worthless and a waste of time. I should just wait until I have the money to spend on it, THEN I can do it. But even then it probably won’t work.Replace “physical gimmick cards” with “Facebook ads” or “ClickFunnels account” or “autoresponder” or “contact form submitter” and it’s clear what’s happening:I’m letting a lack of funds prevent me from accessing the resourcefulness required to achieve success.Put more esoterically, I’m letting an attitude of scarcity preserve my fear of success.Anyway, who cares about all those dumb avocado toast excuses? The bottom line is that if MONEY is the problem, then all I need is to get some money together and pay for all the stuff I can’t pay for currently.You know what they say: if your problem can be solved with money, then you don’t have a problem.I heard that years ago. Even then, broke as I was, I knew it was true.I started out writing this article ready to crucify these internet marketing gurus, how they’re awful people who deserve awful things. But after typing this all out I realized that it was really my fault all along.I know what I need to do.Make a course. Create a funnel. Drive traffic with paid ads.Profit.The path is clear.I have all the skills. I have the sizzle AND the steak. All I need is money to make it happen.So now the question becomes… how do I make some money? via /r/Affiliatemarketing