Cashiers are at minimum twice as fast as customers mainly because after doing it for a while they start knowing were the bar codes are in most products and don’t have to look around for them, know which are the awkward things to scan and how to do it, and are so used to the layout and sequence of the screens that they just go through them naturally.

You simply can’t be as fast at doing something you do once in a while, as somebody who spends hours every day doing it.

Also were I live the cashier doesn’t do bagging, the customer does, so whilst in a self-service checkout you’re doing both scanning and bagging, with a cashier they’re doing the scanning and you’re doing the bagging which also makes the whole thing much faster even if you’re making sure things are bagged the way you want it (for example, having all cold things in the same bag) because you can focus on bagging.

As for the lines being non-existent in self-service, that’s not quite so simple a judgement as it seems:

• First, I noticed that in stores where they introduced self-service checkout they invariably reduced the number of people manning the other checkouts in order to “induce” customers to use the self-checkout (because “the lines are usually nonexistent compared to a cashier”).
• Second, once a store has fully transited to only self-checkout, you get lines at the self-checkout, mainly because as I pointed out above, customers are way slower at doing the checkout themselves than cashiers so even though there are more self-checkout tills that there were tills with cashiers before, people take longer to go through them, especially when they have lots of things to checkout, so effectively each self-checkout till has less capacity than a cashier till.

That said, self-checkout is faster for customers in stores with mixed systems (both self-checkout and cashiers) if you have only a few things to checkout.

The sheer perfidy of the Norwegians, with their dastardly scheme to lure researchers away from US universities … by not treating them like shit.

From my own impression as a member of a small political party in my own country who joined not out of tribalism but simply because they seemed to mostly want the same things as I do, party members live in a bubble of people who are heavilly into politics and understand the importance of politics, whilst the leadership specifically in addition to this are also mostly surrounded by generally unquestioningly hero worship from the common party members plus they tend to have quite limited life experience outside the party as they’ve joined it as young adults (maybe when they were at university and involved in student movements) and it and its internal environment have always been a large part of their lives.

Those people usually see the supporters of their political adversaries in the same way as fans of a sports club see fans of other clubs, and don’t really “get” the point of view of people who don’t vote at all.

Carbon atom after millions of years of existence and countless light-years of travelling, having ended up as part of Elon Musk’s body:

• “Shit!”

I think people are mainly driver by the tabu against eating human meat rather than any kind of proper thinking about it, but the tabu itself probably came to be because people kept getting sick when they ate human meat but not when they ate other meats.

You see a lot of that kind of thing in other tabus, for example the ones against incest (inbreeding tends to produce offspring with health problems) or handling feces (because the bacteria in feces tend to cause disease much more than the bacteria in things like dirt).

I read it as meaning:

• “Just because two sides are fighting doesn’t mean you have to pick one”.

Every single disease that might be present in human meat is 100% capable of infecting humans, which is not at all the case for non-human meat.

Even if you properly cook the meat, things like prions can still remain.

I suspect that’s probably one of the reasons why the tabu against cannibalism is so widespread: from a health point of view human meat is a lot more likely to make you sick than non-human meat.

Britain has First Past The Post, a hereditary head of state who has some power (seldom used) to block legislation and no written Constitution.

It isn’t quite the opposite of Germany but not far from it.

Everybody aligned with Israel is pro-Fascism, same as everybody aligned with Russia.

It’s not just the US of course. Everyone everywhere will be paying more for everything. Tariffs just suck.

How exactly will somebody in, for example, the EU, pay more if the US are putting high tariffs on imported Aluminium?

Absolutelly, behind the tariff wall (i.e. inside the US), imported Aluminium will be more expensive (since there the imported stuff costs original price + tariff and the local stuff will tend to rise towards than value), but outside, people are still paying for it tariff free (so the original price with no extras). In fact, it’s quite possible prices outside the US will go down for some things were, seeing reduced demand from the US for their product due to US Tariffs, Producers lower prices to try and attract more customers outside the US.

The only things that would go up for that example EU customer from US Tariffs would be US-made products and services hit by EU counter-Tariffs and those represent a small fraction of what people in the EU buy, whilst, because of the “against everybody” way Trump raised Tariffs, US consumers will see price rises on everything imported, not just stuff from a single country.

The main impact of US Tariffs outside the US is not making purchasers pay more for stuff (since those outside do not pay that tariff), it’s making companies in areas where there was a lot of exporting to the US sell less because there is less demand from the US (which either hits them directly if they were exporting to the US or indirectly if their competitiors were and are now forced to try and sell more in other markets hence competing harder with them).

I think it’s more that the British Press in general is pretty political, heavy on the spin and hence one of the least trusted in Europe by the locals themselves.

When it comes to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine - which is very politically and geostrategically significant for the UK government - the level and direction of the bias of the BBC is no different from the Euromaidan Press hence for those who think the latter is not a “serious source”, the former is also not a “serious source”.

Mind you, on different subjects which are not related to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine (such as the Israeli Genocide in Gaza) I fully expect the Euromaidan Press is often less biased (on this specific example, significantly so) than the BBC.

Just because the BBC is posh doesn’t mean they’re honest (in fact from my own experience living in the UK, posh more often than not means fake. manipulative and dishonest)

NCD is leaking to World memes…

“Beware of shape-shifting murderous alien” would’ve required a bigger board, so it’s cheaper to put it like this.

I think at the root of it all is a far broader phenomenon than that which is far from gender specific.

In simple terms: quiet confidence doesn’t stand-out in “loud” environments were people’s attention is being sought by countless other people, especially for people who aren’t sophisticated and lived enough to recognize and value it, and the vast majority young people are such people as are (or so it seems to me at times) a large minority or even a majority of supposedly adults.

Putting it in another way, both quiet confident people are nowhere as invested into shaping the opinions of others as to spend most of their time “shouting” (and by “shouting” I mean all the ways people try and project and impression onto others, not just speaking loudly, so for example how some people always dress to impress rather than dress for themselves) and unsophisticated people are drawn to “loudness” rather than more subtle elements of how others talk, dress, make choices and act.

This stuff is behind phenomenons like Influencers, Celebrity Culture, Populist Politicians and so on, which has been pushed very hard in Western Culture for decades now.

So loud toxic masculinity posers with lots of exposure in the News Media (with the well known “Halo Effect” that people who are talked about a lot are perceived by others as important even when most of the talking about them is saying negative things) will get the attention of and influence emotional, social and/or intellectual simpletons.

Their good old performative “Fight for Equality” which very pointedly ignores Wealth Inequality and Wealth Discrimination which curiously, are not only the biggest of them all by a huge margin, but are even the mechanisms that multiply many-fold the negative consequences (and hence the hurt) from other kinds of inequality and discrimination, AND stop the descendants of the victims of past discrimination from pulling themselves out from the hole past discrimination threw their ancestors into (in simple terms: if you were thrown into poverty by discrimination, the poverty keeps the hurt going even after the discriminatory actions have stopped and will make it very likely your descendants are stuck there and keep on suffering).

They’re literaly doing the very minimum (when measured by actual effects) they can for Equality whilst claiming they’re “Fighting for Equality” as loud as they can, in order to claim they’re “helping the disfavored” and hence are there for the many not the few.

What he learned is that there are no real consequences for such “mistakes”

At least in the time of Obama they changed the definition of “Killed Enemy Combatant” to be “Every dead male of military age” to make the collateral casualty numbers of their “targetted” drone murders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan look less outrageous.

The current bunch don’t even care enough or are competent enough to manage the optics by “adjusting” a few definitions to shift the counts.

Mind you, for those on the receiving end of the bombings, the effects are still the same.

Whilst you’re absolutelly right that not everybody outside the US follows what’s going on in the US, it makes sense to expect that the universe of people who have the money and inclination to go spend a whole month travelling in the US AND are not at all aware of what’s going on in the US, is miniscule - if you’re a middle class person in a wealthy enough country (hence you can afford the plane ticket and the costs of 1 month worth of accomodation and travelling around the US), who can speak English and who is interested in the US that you want to spending a whole month travelling there, you’re almost certainly paying attention to all things America and since what’s has been popping up in the news all over the World, you’re almost certainly aware of that.

I mean, I can understand how poor people in Latin American who would want to immigrate to the US by walking all the way there might not be up to date with what’s going on in the US or at least fully understand the implications, but that doesn’t make sense for actual European tourists who can afford to and chose to fly there and spend an whole month there.

Those holding the Power Of Money will keep on using it as long as it has value to make sure they are alright (and screw the rest) hence they’ll keep on propping-up and buying out whomever controls Force and when those lose that control they’ll directly prop-up and buy out the yielders of Force.

Sure, they would’ve preferred it for the many to pay the full costs of formal yielders of Force whose main jobs is protect the holders of the Power Of Money and their assets from the rest - the way the system still works right now - but they can easilly afford to pay the yielders of Force directly if they have to.

Further, even if Money loses its value and hence its power, they’ll fall back to using what’s produced by the Assets they own (for example, food produced in fertile land) to pay the yielders of Force: in a total societal collapse (which, frankly, is unlikely) you can bet that the moneyed classes will use whatever power their money has left to either flee to places were society is not collapsing or setting themselves up as the Warlords of the subsequent age.

Anyways, the point anchoring my free thinking about this is that they’ll try to keep the very same ownership, dependency and control loops going, just at smaller and smaller sizes (i.e. instead of the society-wide “people have no option that directly or indirectly work for the owners of everything to pay for the place they live in and the food they eat who cost what they cost because just a few own everything” you’ll have a smaller sized version of it with a landowner whose land produces food and who uses that food and living areas in that land to pay a couple of armed people to stop the rest from taking the land and the food, so a smaller version of the societal loop we have now were the very people being exploited by money are the ones indirectly giving money the power to exploit them).

This kind of shit dates back to at least the aftermath of 9/11.

Some of us were paying attention when the rightous indignation following 9/11 was weaponized to lead America down the path of Authoritarianism.