This Joe's Place

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

sleeve garters

I just wanted to draw Quincey rolling up his sleeves (how saucy), then of course I needed to draw John and Art too. All of my Dracula doodles are here if you're interested!

Maria Ressa

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 2 October 1963 

Ethnicity: Chinese, Filipino

Nationality: Filipino / American

Occupation: Writer, journalist, entrepreneur, professor, activist

I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.

The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.

Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.

A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:

Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.

Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.

Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns

Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.

I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.

It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:

Extremely rare Donkey Kong 64 render of Diddy Kong from behind. This was only ever used once, in the German official guide for the game, and never appeared in any other material, including guides from other regions.

Bachelors

The three bachelors who propose to Lucy in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)! I laugh at the thought that it's like the Victorian Bachelorette (but in a funny satirical way like in Shrek). I love that Art canonically has a bunch of terriers (spoiler? lmao)

I know the obvious answer is probably that everyone still deserves rights regardless, but I think there's still some nuance I'm missing maybe? ty, I'm very fascinated by this stuff

Oof, I thought I'd answered this one, I'm sorry. It's so old now!

In essence, them getting their rights taken away is what happens -- but it's through what's called due process of law. People have a right to be free; when they're put in jail, that right is taken away. Due process of law is the part where the government has to justify why it put them in jail.

The 'due process' part is also where the government proves that 1) they were the one that dun it, and 2) that they deserve the rights being taken away as a result. Without that due process, the government can just point at someone and say "that guy, John A Smith, is a rapist! cut his balls off!" and the cops will arrest that guy and a doctor will grab a scalpel and someone will generate appropriate paperwork and nobody will check to make sure they got the correct John A. Smith, much less whether he actually was a rapist.

A very real example of this, right now, is deportation. ICE is deporting people with the most excruciatingly minimal due process of law that I've ever seen, and I promise, "due process" was always pretty fucking basic and janky. (See: my entire series of posts on the legal system.) ICE will just write up a piece of paper that says "This guy sucks and we get to take him out of the country" and when they show it to other legal authorities, those legal authorities are like /shrug, yeah, this looks like legal paperwork, I guess there's nothing we can do. But that guy didn't have a lawyer for that. That guy didn't have someone to advise them of their options. In many cases, no one even translated the paperwork they were intimidated into signing. That's what it looks like to have your rights taken away without due process.

In any society, there's going to be a little bit of taking people's rights away. It's one of the compromises that happens when you have a lot of humans trying to coexist in a network. Due process is, in theory, the thing where you make sure you do it right and fair.

(In practice, it's the enshrining in law of a lot of stupid human biases, thus making it seem right and fair when it is, in fact, on the whole, deeply horrifying.)