John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

I've only ever used it when sick. I eat a lot of takeout in general, but for me that usually involves physically walking down to the restaurant in question. Ordering delivery just feels like a level of lazy that I don't want to resort to unless I've got something contagious.

I do use food delivery apps a lot. I don't really have a good reason, it's mostly just because I don't want to drive.

Yeah, they probably make a lot more sense in the suburbs where you have to sit in a small metal box for half an hour in order to go anywhere. For me though, living in a place where there's literally multiple restaurants that I could hit with a rock from the front door of the apartment building, I'd rather just walk.

Or, you know, a supermarket.

Pretty much.

If someone doesn't have the energy to go to a restaurant, they're probably not up to making a full home cooked meal. And that's assuming they have cooking skills, since cooking classes in US schools were famously cut down in various districts along with art classes about two decades ago.

Yeah,t hat's true, and it's a shame. Everyone should be able to cook a decent meal, not just girls.

On The Devil Went Down To Georgia: which one, John? Because that's a pretty popular cover song, and I'm willing to bet the Guitar Hero version is more popular these days than the original.

And to remind people of the other segments, lots of laughs with both the police station that censored culprits' faces with Lego heads, and how Donald Trump is raising money to pay for exorbitant legal fees.

Hope that for all of WBD's bad decisions, they never consider cancelling Last Week Tonight. It's bad enough that they did so with the version made in my country (that even already discussed delivery apps - there's English subtitles for those who click - with a particular focus on how underpaid the ones actually delivering are).

Oh wow, last night's episode knocked it out of the park. Investigative journalism used for both a serious subject (the source of lethal injections used for death penalties) and a lighter one (seeking out the guy used in tons of stock photos).

Or, you know, a supermarket.

Like, you know this show has covered food deserts in the past, right?

Or the time to cook when working on something resembling a rigid schedule. Food delivery isn't necessarily cheap and it sometimes takes a while to come anyway, but it's time that someone without much temporal capital can spend elsewhere.

Having the ability to cook and being able to cook are not necessarily the same thing.

That's what I meant, that it is handy to have a supermarket nearby so you can cook yourself more easily.

And yes, these food deserts are ridiculous. For one of the wealthiest countries on earth, the US sure can be... poor in some ways.

Gotta love that massive income inequality and disparity! Though Europe also handles food far differently than the US in regulations. Which is why yogurt and apple juice in Germany is a million times better than the US...

I loved the most recent episode. From the serious part to the fact John Oliver contacted an embassy in Azerbaijan to get a photo with an actor!

Food deserts usually exist because stores can't make a profit there. The margins for supermarkets are notoriously thin, and where there's lots of shoplifting food stores go out of business rapidly if they go in at all.

Then how do they make a profit in Europe?

There are food deserts in Europe. I'm just not sure about how the problem compares to the US, especially given how differently different countries can handle things (farmers markets, supermarkets, public transport, ect).

Blaming shoplifting for food deserts is a pretty low blow. Most shrinkage in retail comes from the employees. The problem, as always, is affordability. When people have low incomes, they can't afford high-quality food no matter how much of it is available.

Food deserts aren't just in low-income areas. One famous version is a result of gentrification; all the grocery stores get replaced by restaurants, but people can't afford to dine at mid-tier restaurants for every meal, so they starve.

Well, not literally starve. We have too much mobility for that. But they would starve or go broke if they didn't leave.

There are plenty of lower quality cheaper options for supermarkets over here. It really isn't all upper end retail.

And even the upper end ones have their cheap home brands and their microwave dinners.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 9th 2024 at 3:52:29 PM

I never used food delivery apps mostly because I was a bike courier for a few months and saw how all these companies worked.

It was in 2017, so before they exploded in popularity, and at the time restaurants hadn't known the pandemic yet, so the apps treated them with respect. But their couriers were a whole different story - since they are nominally "self-employed", they were treated like shit.

I did it to stay healthy and allow my unemployment rights to last longer in case I failed my studies, so I had no big results pressure, but holy crap was it hell for those who wanted to live of it. You had to fight to work at specific hours (basically refreshing a Google Calc to write your name in the best hours once a week), and while at Foodora (for whom I worked) there was a base hourly rate if we got nothing, Uber Eats didn't have such a thing, so if you spent three hours waiting for deliveries to come - you would make 0€.

And then, a few years later, I learnt that some people registered as self-entrepreneurs (the status you need to be a courier)...but then exploited illegal migrants who couldn't get this status by making them work for them - and taking a fee of course, which means that the migrant made a fraction of what a food delivery guy made. It was basically the lower class exploiting the lowest class.

But I guess it's just as capitalism intended. Honestly, nowadays, if you can't/won't cook and don't want to move to a restaurant, I highly suggest you use companies that deliver meals on a schedule instead of going through whatever the intermediary between you and a restaurant is. There's one that's sponsoring a ton of This is History podcast episodes, but the name eludes me (and I think it's in the UK).

And this is why limiting migrant work opportunities is a bad thing.

But if we don't limit migrant employment opportunities, who is going to do all the work no one wants to do for peanuts?

Well, the obvious answer is investing in automated farming solutions. We could pay those from the increased taxes from migrants getting better jobs.

Will migrants automatically get better jobs, though? Will there even be better jobs available? We're not exactly in an economic boom at the moment, at least least not in the sectors that employ a great deal of questionably educated workers. Automating those few jobs that do away doesn't seem like a great solution.

I think liveable wage laws would be far more effective. Perhaps even subsidise wages in certain sectors like agriculture.

Actually, we are in an economic boom.

It's just rebuilding from a massive downturn.

Also, if there was a Guaranteed Basic Income and no one needed to do the terrible jobs to survive, then there would be more pressure to get rid of those terrible jobs entirely. Right now, it's cheaper to exploit the lower classes than to automate a job.

Though in fairness, most forms of basic income wouldn't cover non-citizens, so it's still hardly a perfect solution.