The mistake here is in assuming that it’s either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.

The reality is that they’re great for some applications, but suck ass for others.

Here’s the deal; if it’s just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it’s me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it’s way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won’t be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.

What part about this do people not understand?

I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don’t actually have to shop for families of their own.

Sure, it works great if you’re a single person who doesn’t have all that much to buy, but here’s the thing; if you’re shopping for a family or a multi person household or whatever, and you have to buy a lot of things at once, your self checkouts just plain suck ass because pretty much no matter what you do, you’ll get dinged with an error message every ten or 12 items and have to wait for the overworked and underpaid attendant to come free you up so you can keep going until the next inevitable fuckup.

Self checkout is fine if you have something like 15 or less items, but anything more than that and it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Yeah, I have one of these for backpacking. Works great.

They’ve become increasingly common in recent years. I don’t think there’s as much of an aversion as you appear to imagine.

Yeah that’s bullshit.

The Intercept? Are you kidding me?! They are openly committed to advocacy journalism. They don’t even make a pretense of trying to be fair-minded, objective or operating in good-faith. Greenwald is an attorney who’s openly said that he approaches journalism the same way he approaches a case as a litigator.

I am a journalist by formal academic training --though I don’t really work in the business anymore-- and I can tell you for a fact that The Intercept is basically a case study in how many different ways a publication can violate SPJ’s code of ethics. They are a fucking disgrace to the profession and it’s galling that people like you take them seriously.

Bed.

Bad risk assessment. Most Americans are deeply confused about the things that are likely to kill them vs the things they actively worry about. Maybe that’s not you, but statistically it almost certainly is.

Unless you are a young man in a concentrated poverty neighborhood, your chances of encountering deadly interpersonal violence are vanishingly small. You’re far more likely to be killed by heart disease due to an unhealthy lifestyle, yet the vast majority (not all) of gun-owners pay little or no attention to that aspect of their personal well-being.

The need some people feel to carry a gun isn’t rooted in accurate risk assessment and instead is about a desire to feel empowered or because like my old man --a Vietnam combat vet-- they have a blown-out fight or flight response so that everything looks like a threat even when it’s not. (This is why so many Vietnam vets --again, like my old man-- ended up living off in the woods by themselves; that way they could be in control of their environment at all times which is also why they always carried firearms.)

But ultimately the real problem is that many people aren’t honest with themselves about why they are so wedded to carrying.

The thing is that the experiment you imagine --implementing common-sense gun-reform-- has been run hundreds of times in other countries and the result was not, as you hypothesize, that suddenly they were overrun by bad guys with guns who don’t care about gun laws, but rather was that they saw precipitous declines in gun violence and gun-related deaths.

Basically, your hypothesis, which you and others take for granted as evidently true, is objectively incorrect, and has been shown to be so many times. What does a rational actor do when their hypothesis is shown to be incorrect? Do they continue to defend it? Help me make sense of your thinking, because what it looks like to me is a complete refusal to confront and accept reality.

Wilderness Area is an entirely different designation from a national park. They aren’t administered by the park service but instead by the Forest Service and they don’t typically come with amenities/facilities apart from trailhead parking lots, usually a trail system and sometimes designated campsites and the like. Just FYI. Not that it really matters in this context.

We all do that. Whether we’re aware of it or not. Some of us are more aware of it than others.

According to my British friends Yorkshire Gold is legit. I don’t know if it’s as strong though. Not much of a tea drinker myself, just reporting what I’ve been told.

Otter Box makes pretty bullet-proof cases. They’re expensive, but worth it. I dropped a phone 10 stories off of a swing stage once and it was fine due to being in an Otter Box. It did break a window on the way down though, so that probably slowed it.

Because it would be a good way to ensure a Trump victory. I hate that it’s come to this, but unfortunately it’s the reality.

Lemmy is largely populated by children who lack the intellectual maturity to appreciate that democracy is about compromise and that winning elections doesn’t mean that you get to do everything you want.

There’s this myth that somehow Biden can just wave a magic wand and get everything he wants, but he’s not doing it because in spite of being arguably the most powerful man on the planet, he’s secretly in the pocket of corporate America. It’s a very childish view of the world and is entirely disconnected from reality.

That’s just bullshit. Many North American publications have called him far worse than a demagogue. You’re saying something that “feels” right but that isn’t actually true. It’s part and parcel with how disconnected from reality so many of us have become.

Nope. You aren’t looking at the bigger picture. The unions that were holding out were doing so to the detriment of the rest of organized labor. Had they continued to be allowed to do so, the economic consequences would have been a devastating PR blow to organized labor, as would the political consequences.

I have to wonder how many of you naysayers are actually involved in organized labor activism, given how out of touch you appear to be with how unions are actually thinking about the railroad strike. We, meaning organized labor, aren’t on the same page as you at all, and while we don’t doubt that you have the best intentions, at this point you’re basically making yourself the enemy by elevating the odds that Trump wins reelection, which would be devastating to organized labor.

I fully expect to be downvoted by Lemmy’s purist zealots, as frequently happens when I don’t toe their extremist line or pretend to be who they think I should be as a union organizer and activist. But I’m the one down here on the front lines, not you fucking privileged cry-babies who are going to flip the table over if you don’t have everything your way.

It’s bullshit. With friends like you, working people don’t even need enemies.

You’re getting downvoted by Lemmy’s far left extremists, but most of us rank and file union members know that Biden did what he had to do in a bad situation with no good options. Had he not stepped in and ended the strike, inflation would have continued to rise, the predicted “red wave” election would have happened, the country would have tipped into recession and Trump would be guaranteed a win in '24, all of which would be far more dire for working people.

Furthermore, it’s simply an objective fact that Biden is by far the most pro-union president in modern times. Again, the consensus in organized labor leadership is that he did what he had to do.

These purists are acting like children who don’t understand that democracy is about compromise, not getting everything you want.

Local 10 till I die!

Most of us rank and file union members think that he did what he had to do because inflation was already out of control and shutting down the railroads risked tipping the country into recession which would’ve guaranteed a “red wave” election in '22 as well as the reelection of Trump, both of which would be far more dire for working people.

Local 10 till I die!

It would require massive reform to our current laws in order for there to be a viable 3rd party option. That’s what you should be working for, not throwing away your vote.