Microblog Memes

The quickest way to ruin doing most anything you love is to do it for a living.

I’ve heard “you love cooking? You should open a restaurant!” so many times and it’s such a horrible cliché!

Even if customers weren’t assholes, it would still suck. There’s no better way to kill your enjoyment of something than to do it for money!

I really wish making food was a more viable commercial option. A few years ago I looked into setting up a food truck and holy shit are those things expensive. I occasionally go to food-truck-athons and even with how insanely overpriced their offerings are, I don't see how they can ever be profitable. Around where I live, you can't even get permits for a food truck unless you're associated with a physical restaurant.

it will, however, create jobs

someone’s gotta clean up all the slop

i tryed to make a power point with copilot, i even gave a template as pptx file. it was horrible. it can not even put words in a table in the template.

Yup, and there are a lot less bakers around now that machines do most of it.

Baking bread has gone from an everyday job employing a significant fraction of the workforce to more of an artistic job that only a few people do. Bakers don't really compete with mass produced bimbos, instead they offer a premium product for people who are willing to pay more.

I think it's always like that when technologies get replaced. There are still people offering horse-drawn carriage rides, but it's a specialty service now instead of a common job. Same with many of the things you find on Etsy.

Jobs being replaced by automation wouldn't be a bad thing if the benefits were shared with the whole population and there were a social safety net for people whose jobs were eliminated. Unfortunately, the benefits always go to the people at the top. Some theorists have proposed economic systems where there are no people at the top, or where things are shared much more fairly. It's a sad fact that those systems seem incompatible with human nature as it stands. Country-sized experimentation with anarchism or communism still leads to people at the top who take a lot more than they give. Those systems seem to work fine in small communities where everyone knows each-other. But, not when they are implemented in countries containing millions of people.

The most effective systems right now seem to be mixed socialist / capitalist systems where unions are strong and willing to call major strikes and shut the country down. You still get "haves" and "have nots", but the "have nots" still get a voice and aren't completely trampled by the rich.

I haven't tried that particular model, but bread machines are, indeed, great. Instead of buying large loaves (which go bad in a few days) when I need bread I can just buy flour (which keeps for ages) and bake my own whenever I need it. The process of loading up the ingredients takes a few minutes but beyond that you can just hit a button and let it do its thing, and the resulting bread tastes better than what you'd get from a store.

My neighbor is an independent baker. He makes "regular" bread in various types in addition to pastries.

He closed his retail business during COVID and never reopened it. He reports that it is significantly less hassle to sell directly to local businesses (restaurants, delis, etc.) and their only consumer sales are now made at local farmer's markets. Your local bakeries only sell pastries because they're the only things that sell. The reason for this is broadly speaking that individual consumers are whiny and entitled shitheads, and "the grocery store has it cheaper."

in germany bread baking is its own valuable branch of baking and it's often treated with a lot of sincerity

I know it's not exactly what you're saying, but a lot of grocery store bakeries bake loaves of bread.

That's interesting, there's two bakeries with bread within walking distance from me. But they're not square loaves, it's sourdough and rodeo bread and challah and baguette and focaccia... And rolls, and yes pastries as well. Tbf, I live in Los Angeles so the unusual part isn't variety, it's the "walking."

That's odd, I live in a pretty small city and there are multiple local bakeries. I just wish there was one a little easier to walk to.

That's fair, but we also get successful bread much more than half the time.