The amount of vegan food in Taiwan is astounding and wonderful. It is the easiest place to be vegan I’ve ever traveled to, including places in North America. Taipei alone has hundreds of vegetarian restaurants. We largely have Buddhism to thank, but there are also people doing it for health/environmental/animal rights reasons.

Because there’s so much variety, you can be picky about where you choose to eat. My faves tended to be the buffets where you pay by weight because not only were all my meals at those places CAD $10 or less, but also:

- I didn’t have to try to read the menus (I suck at traditional Chinese characters, having studied simplified all these years)

- I got way more protein, because most restaurants will give you a ton of rice or noodles and just a bit of protein, whereas the buffets let you load up on veggies and fake meat to your heart’s content.

- you get to eat a huge variety of dishes all in one meal! This was how I tried a small amount of stinky tofu at one meal and discovered I kinda love it.

creekfiend:

About ten years ago I decided that the next step I needed to take in my life was to accept and explore what it meant to be a failure and to have failed. This infuriated almost everybody in my life and clearly terrified a lot of people. People do not want you to accept failure. They dont want you to like… Sit with and think about it and pick it up and turn it arpund in your hands and really examine it. They want you to keep throwing yourself against the impossible walls until your body explodes! They do not want you to say “alright then, I’ve failed. What does that mean for me? Im still here. What does the life of someone who has failed look like?”

This makes people very angry and panicky.

My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure … Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.

It is so taboo to fail and admit it openly and talk about it. It is so taboo to talk about or think about failure in an accepting way rather than hiding it shamefully until you experience a degree of success in some area which allows you to present the past failure as “a stepping stone” to your current situation. Fuck that. We are put in positions of guaranteed failure by society every day and then punished and shamed for it. Lets fucking talk about failure

Pay inequality related to social identity has been observed among physicians, even after accounting for hours worked and specialty. Physician identity factors, such as gender and race, may contribute to practice behaviours in ways that affect income. In this study, we sought to explore how Ontario family physicians understand the relation between their identities and practice patterns and to form a theory of how identities may influence practice decisions in ways that result in income disparities.

We conducted a constructivist grounded theory study to understand how social identities affect income discrepancies among physicians. We conducted interviews with family physicians practising in Ontario. Physicians were purposively and then theoretically sampled for variation on several identity factors. We staged the analysis using constant comparative techniques.

Fifty-five family physicians participated. The analysis identified physician perception of patient expectations as a key factor influencing income. Based on the interviews, we developed a 4-stage theory to explain this mechanism: physician understanding of patient expectations, the nature of the expectations, physician responses to those expectations, and financial implications of those responses. We illustrate this theory with data from 2 frequently occurring examples: how physician gender influences income via patient expectations, and how physician culture, language, and immigrant or nonimmigrant status influence income via patient expectations.

Patient-centred care requires individualized approaches, yet common physician remuneration models fail to account for the time needed to provide these meaningful interactions. This dynamic may create structural disincentives for physicians who provide relational, emotionally intensive, or culturally tailored care, potentially reinforcing income disparities related to social identities.