the shoo to her honk

or: a brief pause from my self-imposed exile to figure out why everything smells like pee

i would like to open this by giving the disclaimer that i am not a chemist, nor am i any kind of scientist at all. in fact, i have always been dogshit at chemistry - understand this as a layman's interpretation of data that is, quite frankly, above me. if there is anyone with more knowledge of this subject that wants to correct anything i've written, that would be wonderful - consider this more of an open dialogue to figure out why the hell fragrantica reviews think everything smells like piss, using the data i was able to find and interpret.

the first thing to keep in mind is that scent is subjective. it's a similar problem to the classic "how do you know that your red is the same as anyone else's red?" problem. in this case, wikipedia says that there's around 400 different functioning genes in humans that affect our olfactory receptors. as a result, the way every individual perceives scent is going to be different. certain chemicals picked up when you smell something could be stronger or weaker; you might be unable to smell some at all. one example of how different just one chemical can smell to each person is the common perfume ingredient iso-e super. to some, it smells woody, like cedar or sawdust; to others, it smells very sharp and chemical; and to others, it smells like nothing at all. all of this is to say; smells are very personal, and one person picking up a gross smell doesn't always mean it's gross perfume, it could just be that they're sensitive to one of the potentially hundreds of chemical compounds in the fragrance.

with that said: what makes pee smell like pee?

it's surprisingly hard to find a simple answer to this one. for starters, there's understandably not a ton of research into pee smell. pee is not just pee; it's a mix of water and all kinds of shit your body doesn't want to hang onto; salt, all kinds of different electrolytes, protein waste products, nitrogen waste products, lipids, tannins, hormones - this paper published by the NIH descibes pee as "a particularly difficult substrate to fully understand." to make matters worse, the composition of urine isn't static; since it's all the chemical byproducts from the food you eat and all the different chemical processes that keep you alive, the content of urine is going to vary from day to day, from person to person. which is also why doctors are so intent on making you piss into cups - there's valuable data in there.

so it's hard to figure out why pee smells like pee because we first need to identify what's actually in pee, which is a monumental task, and then figure out which of these chemicals have a strong smell. luckily, Maria Wagenstaller and Andrea Buettner have our backs. in 2013, they published a paper trying to do exactly this.

at any rate, neither myself, nor marx, ever denied that the petite bourgeoisie tend to work at their businesses. Indeed, this was specifically how marx defined the difference between the petite bourgeoisie and the other strata of the bourgeoisie. (again i told you it has a specific definition)

however there is a much larger class of people who work at businesses they don't own. sometimes even working as employees at those small businesses. this class is called the proletariat.

if you want to improve the economic well-being of people in this class, it helps to anticipate who might benefit from, and thus would be likely to assist such an effort, and who might be negatively affected by this, and thus likely to try to oppose it.

so for instance, if cooks are striking for a better wage, the cooks obviously benefit from that. even a well-paid engineer might benefit (can tell their boss "cooks get paid as much as me! give me a raise or i'm gonna quit and become a cook!") but restaurant owners don't benefit, because this increase their labor cost. this is true of both the owners of large chains, and small single-location business owners. regardless of the size of the business, the economic interests in relation to their employee's wages are the same.

you can try to paper over this by lumping together the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie as "workers" but to do this, you ignore significant undeniable material facts. facts which are relevant to any effort by the proletariat to improve our economic standing.