I am a lifelong atheist. I attend a very progressive christian church where I am open about my lack of belief. They seem to accept me, including the minister. I don’t try to convert them and they don’t try to convert me. I started going because I was lonely and I wanted some opportunities to do good. Their whole theology is about helping people and trying to change the world for the better. The two major precepts are “God is love” and “Jesus has no hands but yours.” They don’t talk about sin or redemption. We have a huge rainbow sign that says “All are welcome,” and we actually mean it. The minister talks about Jesus as a teacher, not as a saviour. We raise money and food for the local food bank, and provide community outreach to people, many of whom have disabilities. We sing. We eat cookies and drink absurd amounts of coffee. I suddenly have so many sweet old lady friends, and even a handful of friends my own age.

You may be faster at the till than I am. I admit I lack practice. You make a good point about waiting in line behind slow customers, though. One of the biggest advantages of the self checkout is the single queue. Having six lineups for six checkouts never made sense.

Self checkout is not automated, you fool. you are doing the work for the company. It is not a new technological solution. A human is still working the till.

When my wife was in university, she went on an exchange with a dozen other students to a Chinese university. The program assigned her group a pair of local guides.

The first night, the guides offered to take them out for snake. Everyone refused.

The second night, the guides repeatedly offered everyone snake, saying that there were plenty of local places to get snake. Everyone refused.

The third night, her group had a discussion. They didn’t want to offend their gracious hosts. Snake had to be a popular local delicacy, because the guides repeated their offer daily.

They decided to be adventurous. One of them spoke up: “yes, we would like to try snake…”

The guide said, “what kind of snake do you want? chips? hot dog?”

I have never saved time at a self checkout unless I had 1 item. I am absolutely not interested in looking up the code for a poblano fucking pepper using their shitty menu.

Haha like the ONLY good thing about self checkout is the potential for stealing. As for the small talk thing: the most I’ve ever had to say to a cashier was “hello” and “thank you”. I can handle that.

I can’t even begin to understand the “you are being an asshole” argument. Am I an asshole because I protect jobs? Am I an asshole because I don’t want to pad the earnings of a multi-billion dollar corporation at the expense of workers? No, dude, I am 100% with you. I have abandoned my purchases as well, and I actively avoid stores that push self checkout.

Are people losing their minds, though? I thought the reaction was pretty muted. There was some celebration, to be sure, but I think that is a pretty rational response.

Je parle aussi dragon. Foos!

I turned down a promotion this year for several reasons, one being that i didn’t want to supervise my friends. I didn’t want the awkwardness, and i was afraid my imposter syndrome would get much worse. My friends know too much, haha

I have crazy high hours on Skyrim because I replayed it in French and Spanish. It is a very fun way to get the cheapest language immersion ever (though your vocabulary becomes a little, um, specialized)

Musk has now surpassed Carnegie. You are right about Mansa Musa (for now), but the gap is closing. According to google today, Musk is at $334B, Carnegie peaked at a modest $309B, and Mansa Musa had about $400B, though there are quibbles about personal wealth vs. kingdom’s treasury. If you want to compare Musk and Musa, I think you could reasonably add the GDP of the US to Musk’s fortune, since he is one of the puppeteers behind Trump. All figures adjusted for inflation, by the way.

Haha right you are. It is in his nature, I suppose, to grasp and grasp after already being the richest person in history. In a better world, we would put people like Musk in a nice, humane institution.

Yes. I would go even further, and say that pollution is the necessary result of capitalism. Capitalism is the mistaken belief that exponential growth can continue forever in a finite ecosystem. My country targets 2-3% growth annually - this implies a doubling of the economy every 30 years or so. It has already been almost 2 doubling periods since human consumption began to exceed the Earth’s sustainable capacity. Even the fucking shithead most responsible, Jeff Bezos, acknowledges the problem. Does anyone really think going to space is just a ‘hobby’ for that sick fuck?

This may sound naive, but I think that most people are good and would favour sound environmental policy if they could count on getting food, shelter, and healthcare without destroying the planet. It is no coincidence that republicans are pro-business and anti-healthcare. Oligarchs want people to remain so desperate that they can never act on their conscience.

Yep. Fortunately for Elon (and, you know, fascism) he doesn’t need it any more. For Elon, it is already ‘Mission Accomplished’. The richest, most thin-skinned losers on Earth already control the biggest economy and the biggest military. What more could that shitstain hope to get out of Twitter?

Yep. Especially when you’ve been using computers for 40 years, as I have. Do you know how many times MS (or any tech company) has moved each and every button? Do you have any idea how many times something as simple as saving a document has changed since I started my career? Over the years, I have saved documents to at least six different types of physical media including the local hard drive. Then I had to start saving to a network drive, then a different network drive, then a cloud drive, then a different cloud drive. I have worked with Linux, Windows, Mac. Techniques and keyboard shortcuts I learned in the 80s and used for decades get changed/dropped/redesigned. I have had to go back and alter little programs I wrote years ago because the corporate file system was redesigned for the 25th time and now all my file paths have to have forward slashes instead of backslashes for the code to run… When I ask a less experienced colleague where to find the screen share button, it is because I know they have only had to relearn its location 1-3 times, so their memories won’t be all jumbled yet.

My mom started developing dementia about a decade before she died. 5 years after we first noticed the changes, she could barely form a sentence. That is when I mourned her because that is when I lost her. When she finally died I felt mostly relief. I will always miss her but I was happy when her suffering finally ended.

You say ‘politics’ like it is some trivial thing. Politics involves beliefs on personhood, human rights, racism, equity, crime and punishment, and fundamental ideas about morality. I think it is totally appropriate to make judgments about a person’s character based on their politics.

This is the perfect answer. Self-reinforcing loop