The last week or so it’s been Too Much Too Young by The Specials. It was on the radio, once, last week and for no good reason I’ve been stuck with it since. Thanks brain.

Several things can be true at once. We don’t have to be all-in on one side or the other of the Snowden affair. I’ve never understood why people seem so eager to pick a team on this issue.

Same. Mine is a regular watch with hour and minute hands and a digital read-out in the background that I can turn on and off. It’s nothing fancy, but I wear it with a fat black leather wrist-band which is pleasing to my easily-entertained soul.

I am a simple man in many ways.

Hardcore agreement with regard to hiking groups. I’m in my 50s and happily married, but my wife has MS and isn’t really able to join me on my hiking excursions. I have a brother and a nephew and a son who will sometimes join me on my various expeditions, but they aren’t consistent partners, which is fine, so I’ve since turned to a local hiking group that has things happening on any given weekend.

I’m not single or even remotely looking for a relationship, but I’ve definitely seen some younger people find romantic partners in our little hiking group.

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.

There’s a good chance that it’s weather-related, so I wouldn’t take it personally.

I don’t know how it is where you are, but here in the PNW everything is basically an ice-skating rink, and no one is driving anywhere.

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.

Fuck! No, I fucked that one up too and accidentally picked a crazy Haight-Ashbury 1967 hippie together with a seriously damaged Vietnam vet, the two of them getting involved in weird cultish shit long before I was born.

It was a poor decision on my part. No one to blame but myself.

You have to wonder if they’ve ever actually met any Taiwanese people.

I even specifically said as much in my comment.

Yeah, me too. I pat myself on the back for this one nearly every day. Probably the best financial decision I ever made.

Accidentally buying a modest house in what at the time was a “distressed” neighborhood because it was all we could afford. 15 years later the neighborhood has been gentrified and is highly desirable. The property has tripled in value and the land is now worth more than the house itself.

Anyhow, it was dumb luck on my part and again, mostly had to do with the place being affordable and relatively close to my wife’s parents.

No, conservatism is ultimately about some people being naturally more deserving than others. It really is that simple. Everything else follows from that proposition. There’s no reason to further complicate it by looking for more proximate explanations.

“Need” probably isn’t the best word. It’s not a “need” so much as it is a belief. They “believe” themselves to be better and more deserving. Everything else follows from that. Start plugging it into what you know about conservatives and you will immediately see that it’s by far the best and simplest explanation.

Also bear in mind that people are often, and in fact quite usually, unaware of why they hold certain opinions and far from using reason to arrive at their opinions, tend to arrive at an opinion and then use reason to rationalize why it’s correct.

The SCOTUS is a great example; we already know how the justices will rule because we already know their underlying opinions about the world. What we don’t know is how they will justify their rulings. If this weren’t true, then neither party would care about SCOTUS nominations. The fact that we care very much tells you that we all privately know that I am right.

You and I do it too. We all do. Some of us are more aware of it than others.

Craigslist struck the first blow against newspapers by taking away classified ad revenue. The death blow came when Silicon Valley taught people that “information wants to be free,” which meant that no one wanted to pay for local news anymore. That led most local newspapers to collapse, while the few that managed to survive --apart from a handful of “legacy” papers-- mostly did so at the cost of turning into click-bait sites or outrage machines.

We have to bring back the idea that people should be happy to pay for local news.

I don’t know about that. I’ve run across some real turds from Yamaha over the years. That said, it’s been about 20 years since I last played one and maybe they’ve upped their game. For my money Guild makes the best lower-priced guitars, though granted they’re mostly more expensive than Yamahas.

Or, you know, we go back to the time when the news media had real gatekeepers and not just any random jackass could churn out some bullshit copy and broadcast it to the world, let alone have it get published by their local paper.

It’s nice that the Internet has democratized access to a national or even global audience, but let’s not pretend for a moment that it hasn’t caused a ton of problems in the process such that now many people have no idea of what to believe while others believe whatever they want.

It’s still pretty easy to tell the difference. You have to have a pretty low level of media literacy to not be able to easily spot it. Unfortunately we already know that most people don’t have a clue when it comes to mass media, and even if they did, we also know that people tend to believe whatever reinforces their priors.

It also raises the very thorny issue of who adjudicates what is and is not “memetic effluent.”

Out of curiosity, how do you think she’ll rationalize it?