(Angry woman over the phone) Why is my pineapple cut into the shape of a penis?
Is it too big or too small?
Hey, why didn’t I get a pineapple penis?
We don’t always have time to make them.
What the fuck is this?
Yam penis.
What the fuck is this?
Chicken feet.
You can purchase pineapple penises from our Doordash (delivery service) menu.
Etiquette
How should I answer the question “Hi, how are you?”
Owner usually ignores the question, but according to social critic Paul Fussell (who also hates the “how are you” question), that’s rude. So we’ve come up with a few responses:
I’m a recovering narcissist so I’m not allowed to talk about myself anymore
I don’t know
Why do you want to know?
I don’t like sharing my feelings to strangers
None of your business
or tell them how you feel.
My butt hurts!
Angry, I want to kill someone
Horny, can we fuck?
Cranky, I want to throw this at someone.
Tired, I want to sleep until I’m dead
How the batshit crazy answer stupid questions.
Menu
Is it true that I can order an original poem for $5 on Doordash?
Sometimes, and it comes with a gift. Check Doordash menu to see if it’s available.
Are the poems any good?
No
Any samples?
Here’s an excerpt from a twenty-line poem:
Do I love you? Would you know if I do? What does love taste like? A taste familiar, yet refreshingly new
Not good but hopefully it’s entertaining and makes someone’s day better.
What happened to the avocado salad?
Replaced with a beet salad. The beets are cooked and then poached in a vinegar, pineapple, garlic, and ginger mixture. For now, they’re paired with beans and pickled cucumber. It’ll evolve.
What’s in these jars?
Fire cider: ginger, garlic, jalapeno, orange peel, and vinegar. $5.
Other
Is it true that you offer free SAT tutoring and resume writing service? Yes
Where would it take place?
In our dance studio.
Um, what sort of crazy resume will he teach my kid to write?
One that guarantees that he’ll get call backs. One that looks like this: Boy Wants Job to Get Laid Resume
I sincerely want to know how owner is doing. Can I get an answer?
Between 4am-2pm, he’s angry and happy (workout high). From 2-5, he’s angry and tired = cranky. (That’s why he’s usually on break during those hours). From 5-10pm, he’s angry and happy (yoga high). Now stop asking him this question.
Wait, how can someone be angry and happy at the same time?
Example: football players coming out of the gate are happy and angry at the same time. Anger + happy = focused and high pain tolerance. Now stop having feelings about feelings because that’s why you’re batshit crazy.
Thanks to everyone who helped us make it to nine years. We’re now the third oldest juice bar in Seattle metro area.
We’ve evolved from a place that makes eating veggies convenient and normal to a place that welcomes those who aren’t supposed to like veggies. Lately, we’ve been exploring how culture triggers our addictions to sugar and other drugs, legal and illegal. Our aim is to create an Alive Juice Bar where people can feel free enough from cultural constraints to examine societal norms as potential sources of our angst. It’s a place where we turn mainstream culture upside down just to see, as if a laboratory, what happens. What happens, for instance, when we encourage people to be assertive instead of polite? Kind instead of nice? Frank instead of euphemistic? What if we stop telling people we’re “fine” all the time and say instead that we’re in a lot of pain and are ok with it? What if we tell people it’s okay to feel anger and sadness, and to embrace such emotions to fight through the pain, just as a championship football player and a world class ballerina do? Would such an embrace bring us closer to the Dionysian spirit Nietzsche writes about?
Transform Beethoven’s ‘Hymn to Joy’ into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck- then you will approach the Dionysian. (The Birth of Tragedy)
The Dionysian spirit finds strength and rejoices, not despite, but because of one’s own suffering, similar to how a brutally sacked quarterback gets back up to throw a game winning touchdown. People are suffering not because of their suffering, but because they’re uncomfortable with their and other people’s suffering. The source of the obesity and opioid epidemic is our fear of pain, even though pain is what makes life worth living.
Nietzsche predicted that a stifling mass culture would emerge from democratic capitalism. This culture, he warned, will subvert our instincts — that Dionysian spirit — to live nobly. And we’ll instead become slaves to envy and vanity, greed and sloth, and afraid of emotions such as anger and sadness. Watch out for that because the emotionally motivated pursuit of excellence, not freedom from pain and anger, is what affirms life and makes it worth living. We want to be the place where people can cultivate their pursuit of excellence by relieving themselves of the burden of trying to fit in with mass culture. We want to be a place of mischief.
Next Move We have a year left on our lease. Since complex anchor 24 Hour Fitness is moving, we’ll also be moving to be closer to where they’re moving, We’re looking at spaces now, including a high ceilinged space next to Juicy Yoga. We’ll likely bring the dance studio with us and will design it as a flexible space so it can double as a restaurant (Redneck Bistro) three nights a week. Let’s see what happens.
There’s a lot of work to do. Let’s do it, and let’s be troublesome about it. Agape.
Don’t try to beat the competition by making the best product.
Instead, pick a price point and make the best product for that price point. If you ask me which juice bar has the best salads, I’ll pick Heartbeet Cafe. But I don’t try to make a salad similar to theirs because theirs costs $15, while mine costs $6. My customers show up 3-5 times a week, theirs show up once or twice a month.
The process is the business.
Amateurs think about recipes, professionals care about processes. Focus on process, not recipes. When a process breaks down, everything goes to shit. Create processes that minimize mistakes and speed up delivery time. Remove anyone, including customers, who repeatedly fucks up the process. Letting a process break down is much deadlier to a business than pissing off a few customers.
Base recipes on process
Recipes should be based on, for instance, how long you want people to wait for something, never on what makes it seem fancy to customers. Complicated recipes means longer wait time and more mistakes so keep it simple. Less is more and less tastes the best.
Choose ingredients based oninfrastructure and price stability
Again, restaurants don’t begin with recipes. They begin with your ability to work with the space and utilities infrastructure to develop recipes unique to your situation. Ingredients you choose to use should be based on the context you’re working in: from the price stability and hardiness of an ingredient to the equipment you have. Use ingredients in as many recipes as possible so you can purchase them at a volume discount and hedge against low sales of certain items. For instance, we use beets in multiple drinks, a salad, and as chips. That allows us to buy beets at a much lower price point than if we only used it in a salad. The Nasty Shit smoothie is possible not because it sells well — it doesn’t, its purpose on the menu is to brand us as serious about veggies – but because its ingredients are used in our best selling drinks.
Choose your customers
Customers don’t choose you, you choose them. This will make you more pro-active in getting to know your customers — their fears and dreams — and make work more enjoyable. When you host a party at your home, would you prefer to choose whom to invite or do you let random people in? Costco doesn’t let everyone in. The best night clubs let few people in.
We chose the “Redneck Juice Bar” brand because juice bars, like yoga studios, are gendered feminine and men were refusing to come in. So we masculinized the juice bar so much so that 50 percent of our customers are now men, especially working class men. And many of them are drinking kale smoothies and eating their veggies, they tip well, are respectful, they’re just fun to serve and be around. To get their business, we had to piss off a lot of pompous and condescending customers, customers you and your employees shouldn’t have to deal with anyway.
Mindset matters. Its what feeds the bad habits others have written about it.
Bad cooks:
* assume everyone likes what they like.
* take it personally when someone doesn’t like what they like
* feel happy when complimented on their cooking
* take it personally when someone doesn’t like what they make
* don’t consider context
* don’t think about what the eater is experiencing
* have high self-esteem
The above explained.
Bad cooks assume everyone likes what they like.
Because they’re narcissists. It’s never occurred to them that other people are not just_like_them, that other people may not want to be treated the way they want to be treated. So they don’t make an effort to get to know other people as individuals with their own palates and preferences. Watching them cook is like watching a guy stick his dick up some woman’s ass without ever asking her if she’d like that because he assumes every woman likes anal.
Not everyone likes cheesecake. Not everyone likes kimchi. Not everyone likes bacon. Some people like broccoli. Some people like raw oysters. Some people like it up the ass. Some people don’t like it up the ass. Bad cooks are like shitty lovers, they’re not observant and curious enough — they rarely ask questions — to ever pay attention to their partner’s unique preferences.
Just because he likes it up the ass doesn’t mean everyone does, ok?
There are only two drinks on my menu that I enjoy and drink daily: the Attitude Cleanse and The Nasty Shit, both of which 99% of people won’t like. The drinks I don’t drink, they’re for customers who have different palate preferences from mine. If I only serve what I like, my business would fail. So know your audience and then figure out how far you’d go to satisfy them. You don’t have to take it up the ass if you don’t want to. (I’ve seen juice bars resort to selling alcohol and ice cream to satisfy customers). And don’t try to satisfy everyone. If you do, it means you have no integrity. Stand for something.
This is a stupid life rule. Narcissists live by this rule because they think that what they want is what everyone else wants or should want.
Bad cooks take it personally when someone doesn’t like what they like.
“How can you NOT like __________!!!!?????” asks the bad cook. And then he goes on and on and on about how much and why he likes it until he’s made it clear to everyone that he’s superior to anyone who doesn’t like what he likes.
Snobbery doesn’t work if the goal is to get someone to like something they don’t like. Snobbery is about inflating the ego at another person’s expense.
Bad cooks feel happy when complimented on their cooking Which isn’t the same as feeling happy when someone is enjoying food. Bad cooks waste their emotions on stupid shit like praise and cook to feed their ego instead of their customers. Put simply, bad cooks are addicted to compliments. Which means they lack integrity, they’ll do whatever it takes to get as many compliments as their addiction needs. If there’s no purpose to the food other than to win compliments, then sell candy instead of kale because a lot more people want the former than the latter.
And in any case, happiness (or is this contentment?) shouldn’t be contingent on external events because you can’t control what happens around you and trying to do so is usually futile. True happiness comes from within, from that faith in oneself to handle any situation with aplomb. Bad cooks are who they are because they’re an emotional mess, they lose it when an oven stops working or Gordon Ramsey calls them a “dickface” or a car crashes into their kitchen (which happened to our neighbor, who handled it with humor and nonchalance).
Bad cooks take it personally when someone doesn’t like what they make Bad cooks attach their ego to every dish they make. They think working this way makes them “passionate” when in fact it makes them too emotionally needy to ever take risks that make cooking fun in itself. That’s why bad cooks stick with popular recipes for popular dishes because it’s too risky to invent a dish someone may not like.
Bad cooks don’t consider context
Bad cooks are so focused on what they want that they’re unable to work with what’s available and to cook from multiple perspectives. This limits their repertoire and ability to improvise when something isn’t available. It would never occur to a bad cook. for instance, to cook a meal on the engine of a running car (roadtrip cuisine!); to use a lemon instead of a lime to cut cost; to substitute this for that when that isn’t available; to work with the seasons.
Bad cooks don’t think about what the eater is experiencing as they eat Inexperienced employees often ask what size this apple or that cucumber should be. Never tell or show them the answer. Ask them instead what size the customer wants it to be. What does a woman want to look like while she’s eating a salad in public? Does she want to open her mouth as if a porn star getting ready to swallow some Zulu sized dick or does she want to look dainty? Would customers prefer their bento meals to look half full or almost too full when they open it? How should a salad be arranged to maximize its appeal to customers? How many colors and what type of shapes and textures should be on a plate?
Bad cooks have high self-esteem
They think so highly of themselves that they can’t imagine themselves making silly mistakes, like forgetting to put ice in a smoothie. So they never implement checks — eg. feeling temperature of cup after pouring smoothie in it — into their workflow processes, if they even have one.
This hot dog also tastes like shit.
So What Makes a Good Cook?
Good cooks are primarily focused on what their customers want, not what they themselves want. And then they work to strike a compromise between what the customer wants and what they themselves want and are willing to make. What else? Good cooks — their mindset –:
keep their egos out of their work
know that they’ll make mistakes
assume everyone has unique preferences
Good cooks keep their egos out of their work
This makes them more objective when assessing their work. This also allows them to not be hurt if someone doesn’t like what they make. Which in turn frees them to experiment any way they want because they don’t care about rejection.
Good cooks know that they’ll make mistakes.
That’s why they check their work and invite colleagues and customers to check their work.
Good cooks assume everyone has unique preferences
This encourages them to ask customer questions about their preferences and priorities before telling them what they should get. Good cooks respect each person’s individuality.
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General guidelines on how to run Alive Juice Bar and more cooking tips coming soon.
Dumber than the second dumbest idea — “free college for all” — because I can at least imagine that program helping a few people (and hurting most) while jobs for all fucks everything up for everyone.
To begin with, most people are unemployable *in the present economy*. Just because someone has a job doesn’t mean that that person is employable — “suitable for paid work” — most who work are just live bodies filling in space that needs to be filled, like the kid stuck in right field because he can’t catch a pillow thrown at him. And then there are those who are unemployable because they consistently produce negative value: give them a dish to wash and they’ll break it; a car to transport things and they’ll run over people; a bank to run and they’ll start a nation-wide recession. There are plenty of those and the goal should be to keep most people from working, not to give people jobs they’re sure to fuck up.
The Pareto Principle: the 80/20 Rule
Once upon a time, an Italian renaissance man named Vilfredo Pareto noticed that ~80 percent of the peas in his garden came from ~20 percent of the pods. He looked around some more and saw that ~80 percent of land in Italy was owned by ~ 20 percent of Italian citizens. And 80 percent of the food was grown on 20 percent of agricultural land. This 80/20 is everywhere.
For instance, 80 percent of wealth is owned by 20 percent of population, and that’s typically true across all nations (aberrations are eventually self-corrected). Eighty percent of Microsoft Word users use 20 percent of its features, while 20 percent of users use 80 percent of its features. Twenty percent of employees generate 80 percent of revenue and vice versa. Twenty percent of people commit 80 percent of crimes and vice versa. You get the idea, the Pareto Principle is a law of nature and when you go against the law, you get something like the Killing Fields — disaster.
Pol Pot was a Social Justice Warrior. He executed 1.5 million of his countrypeople in the name of social justice.
It’s always been this way, most people have been un or barely employable, regardless of era and regime, and that’s never going to change. Men sitting in basements jerking off and playing video games isn’t a unique symptom of our post-industrial society, it’s a variation of what men have been doing for centuries, except ours is less violent because the routine acts of violence are virtual rather than real thanks to Nintendo and Playstation.
Examples
Customer who is a Boeing engineer told me that she mostly goofs off at work (and she was concerned about what that was doing to her work ethic and mental health). The reason she goofs off is because her manager isn’t an engineer, he has an MBA and has no idea how long it should take an engineer to solve an engineering problem. He gives her, for instance, two weeks to complete an assignment she finishes in four hours.
So who hired the barely competent, hardly qualified project manager who is too lazy to ask his staff how long it takes them to finish a task? Incompetent human resources executives who hire incompetent human resource administrators who hire people based on degrees of questionable value (e.g. MBA) instead of their competencies. Beginning to see how 80 percent of employees in a business can contribute so little to a project yet keep their jobs, including executive ones? An aside: you can’t study business the way you can Math, Physics and Logic. Running a business is more of an art than a science — the context (e.g. regulations, taxes, weather, culture) is constantly changing and no two businesses are alike. It’s not like Math, where 2+2=4 no matter the weather, the tax laws, and who is president of the United States. In Math and Physics, a consensus is possible. In business, it isn’t and when someone insists it is, it leads to disaster, like nosediving demon planes. Now let’s get back to the question about the prevalence of incompetence in the workplace. From the New Republic’s investigative news article Crash Course: How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution led to the 737 Max Disaster, “the
Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.
Oops, Boeing 737 goes splat!
How about high school counselors, how many of them are good at advising students on coursework, college and career options, and life in general? Or do most regurgitate basic basic info that’s easily found online? Here’s a test you can give to a high school counselor, see how many can answer these questions off the top of their heads:
Identify the following schools, which state each is located and what each is known for:
a) Williams College
b) Bryn Mawr College
c) CalTech University
d) Harvey Mudd College
What percentage of counselors have an informed opinion about any of the schools listed? Now these aren’t some fringe schools that don’t matter, these are some of the most prestigious schools in the US that every competent high school counselor needs to know about to serve their students well
Williams College — located in rural Massachusetts, considered one of the top liberal arts colleges in the US, ranked number one liberal arts college several times by US News World Report’s annual college rankings
Bryn Mawr College — located in suburban Philadelphia, a “Seven Sister School,” one of the top ranked women’s colleges in the US
Cal Tech University — located in Pasadena CA, considered by some as the top engineering research school in the world.
Harvey Mudd College — located in Southern California, the top science and engineering liberal arts college in the US.
What’s the point of having a high school counselor who doesn’t spend two weeks a year to learn about schools most aren’t familiar with so he can properly advise students on college options so that each individual’s personality matches well with the spirit of a particular school? If he’s too lazy to do his work properly — hey fucktards, read at least the annual US News college rankings so you know what is and isn’t a safety school or a good match for each college bound student — should he be advising students on career and lifestyle choices? Are these the same fucktards who tell every student to go to college regardless of personal interest and test scores so a bunch of kids grow up to be broke and confused adults who wasted their most productive years getting bullshit degrees from bullshit colleges? Is bad advice that ruin people’s lives what taxpayers are paying for?
Let’s look at teachers: how many of them have you had who were good, who made a positive difference in your life? How many didn’t make a difference at all? How many wasted your time? How many fucked you up, beat the curiosity out of you with asinine rules and demented pedagogy? Count them up. What percentage made a positive difference, is it closer to 20 percent or 80 percent? Or did they overall teach you to act, talk, and think more like a Trader Joe’s cashier than the CEO you dreamed of becoming? Are you even capable of asking a question — any question — other than perfunctory ones like “how was your day?” when you’re on a date, or do you mostly talk about yourself and repeat cliches because you spent a sizable chunk of your childhood in a:
dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says anything very truthful, where everybody is playing a kind of role, as in a charade where the teachers are no more free to respond honestly to the students than the students are free to respond to the teachers or each other, where the air practically vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those small parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother with, and thus remain his. It is a rare child who can come through his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence or his sense of his own dignity, competence and worth. (John Holt, published in Saturday Evening Post, 1969)
Which sounds a lot like the Boeing work environment — sub “teacher” with “manager” and “students” with “staff” — the above cited New Republic article describes. Should we be surprised that our work environments aren’t much different from our school environments? Should we spend more money on to replicate dysfunction and incompetence?
What Sort of Jobs? Let’s play along, what sort of jobs would the Federal government provide? Bernie says:
As part of the Green New Deal, we need millions of workers to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure—roads, bridges, drinking water systems, wastewater plants, rail, schools, affordable housing—and build our 100% sustainable energy system. This infrastructure is critical to a thriving, green economy.
At a time when our early childhood education system is totally inadequate, we need hundreds of thousands of workers to provide quality care to the young children of our country.
As the nation ages, we will need many more workers to provide supportive services for seniors to help them age in their homes and communities, which is where they want to be.
So does Robbie the Rapist teach four-year-olds the pledge of allegiance? Should Fat Freddie be anywhere near a shovel? What happens when Sad Sally takes care of grandma? Mickey the Methhead promises to never jerk off again while at work. The US government already provides jobs to anyone of “working age” who wants one — that’s what the US military does and it’s still not meeting its enlistment goals — unless he or she:
is a psychopath
has an iq below 82
is obese
is mentally or physically ill
National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC showed that 39.6% of US adults age 20 and older were obese as of 2015-2016 (37.9% for men and 41.1% for women). According to Mental Health First Aid, “in the United States, almost half of adults (46.4 percent) will experience a mental illness during their lifetime,” with “half of all mental disorders [beginning] by age 14 and three-quarters by age 24.” Ten percent of the population have IQs lower than 82. Let’s not even bother to look up the percentage of people who are psychopaths, which I’m sure is waaaay underestimated. So are these minimum requirements for employment reasonable? Go imagine yourself having a threesome with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren if you think not. If they are, then what percentage of the US population is unemployable? Are we really going to let someone who is obese build a bridge? Or someone with an IQ lower than 82 to engineer a bridge? A chronically depressed caretaker to take care of the elderly?
Freddy wants a job. He especially likes to babysit kids.
The private and public sectors already employ many who don’t meet minimum US military requirements for employment. Meaning, most of the unemployed are probably the worst of the unemployable — they can’t wake up on time, they never brush their teeth, they can’t remember anything that doesn’t have to do with themselves, they’re pathological liars, etc. And some feckless politicians still want to guarantee them jobs? It takes a highly skilled and disciplined workforce to build and repair roads and bridges — work already done by the Army Corp of Engineers by the way — you can’t just let anyone have at it.
But Work Makes People Dignified
How so? According to a 2017 Gallup poll, 85% of workers in the world hate their jobs. A 2013 Forbes magazine reported that “work is more often a source of frustration than fulfillment for nearly 90% of the world’s workers.” The good news is that in the US, only 70% say they hate their jobs, comparable to the percentage of American kids who say they hate mandatory education. Am I missing something, is there something dignified about hating your job? Or are the government jobs going to be so gosh darn awesome that *everyone* is going to love them and turn into the model workers champagne socialists fantasize about?
It’s not a politician’s job to tell people what is or isn’t a dignified life, that’s playing God and will lead to tyranny. And we don’t force Puki the Pomeranian Princess to pull a sled in the snow to be a dignified dog. People can decide for themselves what sort of life they want to live, and for some, it’s going to be a life without work. You can still have a sense of purpose in life without going to work — think of all the retired grandparents who hang out with their grandkids and tend gardens.
Puki says: “Kiya the crazy Husky can pull sleds. Me, I just want to look pretty and pampered.”
Universal Basic Income
There are a lot of people who want to work but are unemployable. Like the journalist who is too lazy to fact check and too unimaginative to sense the implausibility of someone’s account; doctors who don’t wash their hands between patient visits; personal trainers who only talk about themselves during the entire session; Sociology professors who teach books they’ve never read; lawyers who don’t read contracts they’re paid to read.
The good news is that the next phase of automation will result in more of the unemployable employed to become unemployed. That’s a good thing because it’ll lead to a significant increase in productivity and — if we do it right — quality of life. Leaving a lot of people out of work, however, is a bad thing because they’re likely to riot as the Luddites did in the early 19th century when their jobs were replaced by industrialization. To reduce the likelihood of widespread social disturbance and to offset the economic effects of automation, we should aim to pay everyone — yes, EVERYone in the world — a living allowance. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend — $1000/month to every American citizen age 18-64 — is a step in that direction.
What Happens Next?
Technologically, we’re so close to providing universal healthcare without reduction of quality and rising costs. The automation of most healthcare work will significantly reduce healthcare costs and make it and many other services accessible to everyone. This will happen sooner than later if we stop using resources to fund policies that create disasters we have to clean up and start preparing people for a future without work as we define it today. A new world is around the corner, we should see what it looks like instead of turning around and running back to 20th century solutions — guaranteed jobs and free college — to 21st century problems.
