emphasis mine:

Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.

First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.

Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.

So in short:

• Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
• Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
• Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.

That would make sense, but then why did they follow that with “Workers need to demand living wages at the same time as ban comes into effect”?

Only real way to get rid of this culture is to ban it to start.

A ban would be a bit extreme. Is tipping banned anywhere?

For me, the fix is to establish a fixed tip like some parts of Europe used to have. E.g. $1—2 per person for good service regardless of bill. This would accomplish two things:

• The tip cannot be an income supplement (thus wages increase if the resto wants to have staff)
• There is still a quality control signal in place

Tipping isn’t bad. Being underpaid is bad. If we as consumers want to add a little more for good service, I don’t see a problem.

The two are at odds with each other; that’s the problem.

Exactly… that was constantly on my mind. Last time I hired a plumber to fix a leak while I was away, the plumber was incompetent. Did not find the leak (which was in /exposed/ pipework), charged 200 cash and ran with the money. The plumber actually charged 4 times as much as I paid a doctor to make a house call.

Some plumbers can legally buy sulfuric acid for this purpose. So in fact by law I was essentially being forced to hire a plumber, in effect.

My way of thinking is that I’m going to learn something & my tooling costs will be less than a plumber. I’ll “own” the problem for the next time. This one about drove me to the edge, considering I was about to experiment with borderline parasites.

A pro would have had an expensive snake cam… so there’s that. I would not want to put my own snake cam down the pipe because it’s not made for such filthy environments… would likely ruin the cam.

I blame whatever plumber installed the drain. They used many hard-right 90° fittings that hinder snakes. Then they installed no clean-out. And no vent. I also suspect the pipes under the floor may be goffred (accordian-like). So the lesson here is that snakes are not always the answer if the pipes are lousy.