The servers in the local resurant here have a small tablet and can just look this up on the fly. No need to memorize anything. Not quite sure about the allergens, but that could easily be solved with software.

I can see how this could be a required skillset for a waiter in a super high-class restaurant where it would add to the prestige and professionalism, but in a average restuarant I’m totally fine with the waiter having a look at the tablet before answering a question about the menu.

At this point you could just have a tablet at the table and let the customer look it up themselves. In the mean time, for restaurants that don’t provide tablets to their waiters (which is most of them), this is a skill they need.

I guess being annoying is a skill. But I absolutly fucking hate when people do that. The job is to take the order, not suggest one.

Again, outside of super-fancy restaurants, I’d think that’s actually quite inappropriate.

This is specifically a waiters job. I love that you think you’ve never been sold anything at a restaurant. Those waiters did a good job.

The entire fake-friendly act with a fake-smile is a very annoying American thing. Your job is to take the order and bring the food. After that I really don’t want to hear anything else but “Enjoy your meal” and “Was everything alright?”. Talkative waiters are the worst.

Hate it all you want. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s part of the job for American waiters. They don’t have the luxury of not having to be friendly.

Mechanics don’t qualify as unskilled either, since they require education and certification. They fall under “skilled trades”. My brother is a mechanic (a master tech), and he’s done probably 10+ years of schooling, and has more certifications than I can recall. He’s one of like 3 people across 4 counties that is qualified to do everything he does.

But yeah, I don’t like the term “unskilled labor” in any context, even if it’s technically accurate in some cases. It feels dismissive, and many of the jobs it’s used to describe are the backbone of a functioning society. Honestly, I think we need to just do away with the value judgment terms like “skilled” versus “unskilled”, which only perpetuate the division of the working class.

What if we categorized all labor on a tier system with no implied superiority of one tier over another, just clarity on pathways to move from one tier to the next? Here’s a rough idea:

Tier 1: Specialized Service & Essential Labor

• Jobs that require training, adaptability, and situational skills but not formal education.
• Examples: Waitstaff, retail workers, janitorial staff, delivery drivers, housekeepers.

Tier 2: Technical & Trade-Based Roles

• Jobs requiring certifications, apprenticeships, or vocational training (but not necessarily a degree).
• Examples: Electricians, plumbers, EMTs, pharmacy techs, truck drivers (CDL).

Tier 3: Associate Professional & Supervisory Roles

• Jobs that may require some college, specialized training, or years of experience in Tier 1 and/or Tier 2 roles.
• Examples: Restaurant managers, IT support, paralegals, bookkeepers.

Tier 4: Degree-Dependent Professions

• Jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher, often with licensure.
• Examples: Nurses, teachers, engineers, accountants.

Tier 5: Highly Specialized & Advanced Credential Roles

• Jobs requiring advanced degrees, residencies, or elite training.
• Examples: Surgeons, research scientists, professors, aerospace engineers.

A lot of places won’t even hire wait staff without prior waiting experience, so “entry level” still doesn’t cover it very well.

Maybe “specialized service work” or something.

There’s a lot more to it than “carrying a lot of plate at once”.

First, you have to memorize the menu backwards and forwards. Not just the items, but also the ingredients and the cooking techniques. A customer is allergic to everything in the nightshade family. Do you know what you can’t offer them? Better learn it. Someone has never eaten smoked chicken and is concerned with the pink color of the meat. You better know how to explain the smoking process and how it affects meat color. What is the temperature difference between medium and medium-rare? Are your oysters local? What’s in rice pilaf? Why is it called “she-crab soup” (it’s not why you think)? You have to know all of this and about a million other things, and be able to recall it on the spot without hesitation and with full confidence, every time someone asks.

Second, you have to be a salesman. You need to be able to know how to convince people to buy something that they may not have considered buying when they walked through the door, and you have to know that they will not only thank you for it in the end, but financially reward you for it.

Third, you have to be cool under pressure. You might think you are, but until you’ve worked a dinner rush, you have no fucking idea. It is non-stop, go go go, and you need to time everything just right. You’ll also be talked down to by customers, yelled at by cooks, burned by hot plates, sexually harassed by both customers and coworkers, while fielding complaints and mistakes, and you have to do all of this while looking like you’re having the time of your life. A sour expression or a snarky comment will get you pulled from the floor, and if you’re waiting tables in the US, there goes about 20% of this weeks income.

Fourth, you need to be able to get along with everyone, or at least be such a convincing liar that Ted Bundy would be impressed with your sociopathic people skills. I am not kidding. You have to be able to ingratiate yourself like family with the drunk college bro table just as well as the black church group table. If you aren’t a social chameleon, you need not apply.

I could go on and on, but I hope you get the idea. Waiting tables is not easy, it’s not “unskilled”, and it takes a very specific personality type to do it well. The job has a high turnover rate because most people can’t do it.

Both. It’s actually funny. Someone posted that image of alternatives to things like Reddit and Whatsapp and Google, etc, and it had Lemmy on it. I was at the point where I was getting sick of Reddit and had one account banned already. I joined Lemmy, and a few days later my other account got banned for up voting a comment that was just the gif of Luigi (the Nintendo character) smoking a cigarette. I had already decided I liked Lemmy more at that point, so whatever. The one thing that sucks is that I had my own little sub with a couple thousand members where I posted my writing, and people seemed to like it. I enjoyed sharing my stories with all those weirdos, and now I can’t.

I don’t think that’s true really. I really think that some people don’t think their decisions through to the end, or at least halfway through. Just look at brexit, after the vote passed, people were googling the consequences lmao.

Brexit is a perfect example of “dumb” intersecting “cruel”. 33% of Leave voters said they voted in favor of it due to immigration. A thinly veiled excuse for “too many brown people in my white country”. Brexit has done nothing to elevate the white population or reduce the non-white population (the cruel part), but it has done a lot to fuck over British trade (the dumb part).

It’s not about being dumb. It’s about being cruel. Those two just happen to intersect more often than not.

Goddam what an obvious fucking name. If you wrote a procedural cop show where the child traffickers ran a site called KidFlix, you’d be laughed out of the building for being so on-the-nose.

“Hey, if some caked-up mud pie got on your face, would you just wipe it off with a dry piece of tissue and call it a day? No! You’d wash it. So why is your butthole any different?” - Detective Allen Gamble, ‘The Other Guys’

This is the kind I have, and I will never not have one again.

You are working under the assumption that these “pedo hunter” groups are all acting in good faith and on good information. I encourage you to do some reading. There are many cases where these groups pretend to be 18 year olds, lure an unsuspecting person into a meeting, and then lie to their audience about the age they originally claimed to be online, as Xatolos has pointed out.

Lots of them do it to lure in and attack LGBTQ+ folks, while others act on false accusations they receive from third parties:

Innocent dad tortured and killed by group of chainsaw-wielding ‘paedophile hunters’
A gang of vigilantes tortured and killed a father of eight as they tried to force a confession out of him for crimes he didn’t commit.
The case of the brutal torture and murder of Bradley ‘BJ’ Lyons, which shook Australia in December 2018, is once again under the spotlight as a jury has brought to justice the gang leader, Albert Thorn, and some of his mates who helped during the hideous attack.
Mr Lyons was referred to the gang by his wife Jana Hooper, who had falsely accused her husband of sexually assaulting two of her teenage daughters.
Thorn, the leader of the vigilante gang with a specific hatred for paedophiles, was found guilty this month of the torture, imprisonment and murder of Mr Lyons. Later this year, he will face a pre-sentence hearing.
Two other members of the gang who took part in the ordeal, Jordan Bottom and Rikki Smith, were found not guilty last week of the killing of the father.

And I can’t tell you how many times they just straight up confront the wrong person. Here’s one example, and here’s another, here’s one more, and here’s yet another.

These are not professionals. They are YouTubers looking for fame and relying on outrage and violence to get it, and they all-too-often don’t care who gets hurt or killed in the process.

Some of these “pedo hunter” groups have attacked completely innocent people where the accusation of someone being a pedo was completely unsubstantiated. This is the problem with monetizing vigilantism: It creates a demand, and if that demand is not being met by a supply of actual criminals, then it will be filled by vigilantes criminalizing innocent people.

Yeah they’ve come out and said recently that even interacting with any content or comments that could so much as be perceived as being related to Luigi Mangione is a violation of Reddits policies against promoting violence. People have been getting warnings that their accounts are in danger of being permanently banned just for visiting certain subs. Not for posting. Not for commenting. Not even for voting. Just for visiting.

I had two main accounts. My oldest account got permabanned for a joke about Nick Fuentes. After his address got doxxed and he pepper sprayed a woman who rang his doorbell back in December of last year, I said “hey as an incel he should be happy that the ladies know where he lives now so they can share a cocktail with him”, and I added a cartoon gif of a Molotov. It was obviously a joke, but they said it was “promoting/glorifying violence”. I ate the bullet on that one because they were technically right, even if they were a bunch of humorless twats.

My other account got banned about a month ago when I up voted a comment that was just a picture of Luigi Luigi (the Nintendo character) smoking a cigarette. Again for “promoting/glorifying violence”.

Elon Musk is a weak little crybaby and Steve Huffman is a pathetic coward.

This is the correct answer. Once Youtube and other platforms figured out that the only thing that sells better than sex is hate, they built algorithms around feeding their viewers a constant stream of hate to keep their eyeballs glued to the screen. It’s yet another example of how Capitalism will always gravitate towards Fascism.

Yeah Pewdiepie was an entry point for kids. There were a ton of them back in the early 00s that did video games and other seemingly innocuous stuff on YouTube, but would slow-drip the racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, while promoting the “heroic death” trope. I have two nephews who loved those TY channels, and luckily my brother caught on real quick to their game and made some changes. Now I have two full grown Leftist nephews.

For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,

The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.

If i had to guess, it’s probably less money (certainly right now that’s the case) and more to do with all the bureaucracy.

That Forbes article is 6 years old. Money has been the issue for a long time. On top of a dwindling and almost nonexistent middle class, traveling abroad from the US is just more expensive than traveling abroad from a European country because we have to cross huge oceans.

You can wake up tomorrow and drive all the way across america, with basically no paper work. I would be surprised if many people in america even had valid passports to be honest.

With travel to Europe being so expensive for Americans, our foreign destinations of choice have historically been Mexico or Canada. Americans didn’t used to need a passport to travel to Mexico or Canada, and even some Caribbean countries, as long as we went by land or by sea (flying always required a passport). We could just drive or take a cruise there like we were going to any other state. After 9/11, the government began pushing the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and in 2007, passports became mandatory even for driving to Mexico and Canada. So instead of going through the hassle of getting a passport, a lot of Americans are just choosing not to travel outside the country at all.

Not to mention all the work you have to do in preparing overseas accommodations. And potential language barriers. Traveling outside of the US has got to be like 10x more difficult than traveling inside the US.

It really is. And since we don’t make it mandatory to learn a foreign language in school (unlike most European countries), the language barrier is a big deal.

I also imagine that if people DO travel outside, they’re going to go on a big trip, to see a lot of things, and it’s going to be more expensive. It’s just how that kind of thing tends to work. It’ll be some shit like a wedding, for example.

Which puts overseas travel out of reach for most Americans.

America is a huge fucking country. If you want to have interesting travel, there are PLENTY of places you can go within america alone.

I would love for this to be the answer for why most Americans don’t travel internationally. The US is massive, and it’s one of the most geographically diverse countries on earth. Just look at this list of ecoregions of the US. Also, damn near every nationality you can think of has made a home here, and they brought their culture with them. There are Congolese enclaves in North Carolina, Somalian enclaves in Minnesota, Cambodian enclaves in California, Indian enclaves in New York, Finnish enclaves in Oregon, French enclaves in Alabama… The list goes on and on. It’s actually insane how much beautiful variation there is here, both geographically and culturally.

Unfortunately, the real reason most Americans don’t travel abroad is far more depressing. The numbers that Dogiedog64 was citing come from a survey conducted by OnePoll, which wound up in this Forbes article.

In fact, survey results showed 76 percent of the respondents wanted to travel more than they do currently. The reasons they gave for why they don’t are what you would expect: mainly due to a lack of finances or just feeling unprepared and ill-equipped to venture forth into unknown territory. More specifically, 63 percent of Americans who have never left the country said an international trip would be out of their price range.

When you consider that nearly 40% of Americans can’t cover an unexpected $400 expense, it starts to make sense that so many Americans don’t travel abroad. It’s heartbreaking that we basically invented “grind culture”, and yet most of us can’t afford the same kind of vacation that a minimum wage worker in Denmark gets.

I don’t know, but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue the way “cold turkey” does.