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CuddleCryptid posted:I want to have grocery shopping be as close to just shoplifting as I can legally make it and things like that are a good step. IBM had you covered a decade ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA
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Aug 23, 2023 17:09
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That would be incredible, although I am not sure that grocery stores would ever actually pay the four cents it takes to tag one banana rather than just paying a cashier eight dollars to ring them up for an hour (or in this case self check outs).
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Aug 23, 2023 17:12
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Crunch Buttsteak posted:There's a new, more-infectious strain out there, and a new line of boosters is set to be released. Conspiracists, most notably Alex Jones, have connected some dots and are banging the drums that they've all heard from people who have heard from industry and government whistleblowers, that they are going to institute full lockdowns by September and we'll have to fight *cough nonviolently cough* back. Yeah, some RWM radio guy was talking about how "they" are timing this around the election season. Even though we're over a year out. I highly doubt it's going to benefit Biden and Democrats if we have a second (or third) serious wave of all that poo poo and I'm not sure why any Republicans would think it would either. Who wouldn't love another 200,000 dead people, closed businesses and arguments about loving masks in gas station convenience stores? Governing during another pandemic sure is a real winning situation. I'm sure Biden would love to try and surf his 80 year old rear end on that shitwave straight into a second term, yeah. The first go round went so well. Unless maybe they think he can drum up another $1400 round of checks, which is probably what they're thinking. That and a "PLEASE everyone vote by mail" message so he can do another voter fraud.
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Aug 23, 2023 23:02
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BiggerBoat posted:Yeah, some RWM radio guy was talking about how "they" are timing this around the election season. Even though we're over a year out. I highly doubt it's going to benefit Biden and Democrats if we have a second (or third) serious wave of all that poo poo and I'm not sure why any Republicans would think it would either. Who wouldn't love another 200,000 dead people, closed businesses and arguments about loving masks in gas station convenience stores? Governing during another pandemic sure is a real winning situation. They can pay me $1400 to vote by mail.
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Aug 24, 2023 01:08
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Dameius posted:They can pay me $1400 to vote by mail. Well...yeah.
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Aug 24, 2023 04:06
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BiggerBoat posted:Yeah, some RWM radio guy was talking about how "they" are timing this around the election season. Even though we're over a year out. I highly doubt it's going to benefit Biden and Democrats if we have a second (or third) serious wave of all that poo poo and I'm not sure why any Republicans would think it would either. Who wouldn't love another 200,000 dead people, closed businesses and arguments about loving masks in gas station convenience stores? Governing during another pandemic sure is a real winning situation. The pandemic was a net boost for just about every incumbent worldwide that at least went through the motions of confronting it and capitalized on doing so during their campaign. Trump was an anomaly in failing to do either so much that it turned out to be a wash (he lost to Biden basically exactly as 2019 polls predicted.) But I totally agree that another peak would not help an incumbent now regardless of party.
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Aug 24, 2023 04:29
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Oh, and a friend of the family on Facebook just dropped a good one.
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Aug 24, 2023 05:58
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I'm all for an end to self-checkouts, but only because we ended Capitalism. There's no reason to have cashier be a job, it's about as pointless an existence as you can inflict on someone without putting them in prison.
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Aug 24, 2023 06:38
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Killer robot posted:The pandemic was a net boost for just about every incumbent worldwide that at least went through the motions of confronting it and capitalized on doing so during their campaign. Trump was an anomaly in failing to do either so much that it turned out to be a wash (he lost to Biden basically exactly as 2019 polls predicted.)
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Aug 24, 2023 08:23
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Killer robot posted:The pandemic was a net boost for just about every incumbent worldwide that at least went through the motions of confronting it and capitalized on doing so during their campaign. Trump was an anomaly in failing to do either so much that it turned out to be a wash (he lost to Biden basically exactly as 2019 polls predicted.) When I first heard there was a contagious new virus spreading worldwide, I was sure it was going to be a huge boon for the Republicans. Epidemics promote xenophobic thinking, and they are the xenophobic party, so they could capitalize a lot on it. Too bad for them they are really inept, I guess.
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Aug 24, 2023 11:17
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TremorX posted:I'm all for an end to self-checkouts, but only because we ended Capitalism. There's no reason to have cashier be a job, it's about as pointless an existence as you can inflict on someone without putting them in prison. I remember a friend of mine once visited and commented to me how startling it was to see cashiers actually sitting down in stores. Seemed very humane to him and got us both wondering why in the hell we can't allow that here in the States. There's no real reason to require those people to stand all day.
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Aug 24, 2023 13:36
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BiggerBoat posted:I remember a friend of mine once visited and commented to me how startling it was to see cashiers actually sitting down in stores. Seemed very humane to him and got us both wondering why in the hell we can't allow that here in the States. There's no real reason to require those people to stand all day. I worked at Best Buy as a manager for a few years and this was a corporate mandate. "No cashiers or other employees sitting, it gives the impression to customers that they are lazy and makes employees who can't sit jealous"
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Aug 24, 2023 13:48
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90% of it this kind of stuff just bad corporate ideas who heard some hot productivity take (e: ^ like so), bad management, and lack of workers rights. Self checkouts as a thing you go to and have to scan each item while a machine shouts at you are already becoming old hat though, the latest ones are all CuddleCryptid posted:I mean hell, my grocery store has a mobile app that you can scan your purchases as you pick them up to tally them up and apply coupons, and then you go through the "5 items or less" line and dump 50 items in it with a qr scan on the machine. It's not ultra efficient since often you have to have a worker scan a few items in your cart randomly as a "not stealing stuff" check but that gets less frequent as you use it. The only issue with the app is that the scanner is super sensitive and if you leave it on while you're moving around it'll scan the codes of items on shelves.  It won't be long until all larger stores are using things like that, medium size co-ops are using self-checkouts with assistants, and it's only convenience stores with directly manned sales.
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Aug 24, 2023 13:54
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Guavanaut posted:90% of it this kind of stuff just bad corporate ideas who heard some hot productivity take (e: ^ like so), bad management, and lack of workers rights. Those things aren't new. I think any store who wants them most likely has them. They had these at the Albertsons I worked at in 2004.
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Aug 24, 2023 13:59
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:Those things aren't new. I think any store who wants them most likely has them. They had these at the Albertsons I worked at in 2004. Those have been in Stop and Shops around here since I was in high school in the early 2000s.
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Aug 24, 2023 14:01
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Those are the only version I really like, because it means that I can bag up all my groceries as I shop, then just pay at the checkout without having to unpack or weigh anything and walk out. I hate having to organize my cart, then unpack it all for scanning and then immediately repack it, only now under a time constraint so I'm not holding people up. Also good for accurately tracking your total as you shop - obviously you can do that yourself, but it's a nice feature.
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Aug 24, 2023 14:07
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Guavanaut posted:or the Scan & Go devices, which are basically the same idea except you don't need a smartphone, or to be holding your phone out all the time while shopping, and the scanner is button activated. Those are ideal but also require maintenance and inventory on the store's part, whereas most people have a phone that can scan codes so it's a lower barrier to entry aside from app design.
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Aug 24, 2023 14:14
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They only really rolled out here in 2012, looked janky as hell, and people were suspicious of them at first. The new ones are a lot more app-y in their interface. (When they are not doing this lol)  Apparently people still prefer the apps to using them, and the big change in willingness to use either was mostly down to the pandemic. "Reducing contact between customers and retail staff" is a good thing when it's flu season. e: CuddleCryptid posted:Those are ideal but also require maintenance and inventory on the store's part, whereas most people have a phone that can scan codes so it's a lower barrier to entry aside from app design. Larger stores still seem to want to keep them alongside apps, whereas medium places are going with third party suppliers who say "hey we already made the app and backend, send us your logo and we'll skin it for you" like Ubamarket. Guavanaut fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 14:14
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BiggerBoat posted:I remember a friend of mine once visited and commented to me how startling it was to see cashiers actually sitting down in stores. Seemed very humane to him and got us both wondering why in the hell we can't allow that here in the States. There's no real reason to require those people to stand all day. Medullah posted:I worked at Best Buy as a manager for a few years and this was a corporate mandate. "No cashiers or other employees sitting, it gives the impression to customers that they are lazy and makes employees who can't sit jealous" The Islamic Shock fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 14:40
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I think people underestimate how willing people would be to comply with public health directives. People in places that took it seriously will take it seriously again. Unless the disease is much scarier, the places that didn’t, won’t. People don’t give a poo poo about Covid right now because extremely few people have been getting sick with Covid. Only like a hundred a week are dying nationwide. If people start to feel unsafe they will act like it. TremorX posted:I'm all for an end to self-checkouts, but only because we ended Capitalism. There's no reason to have cashier be a job, it's about as pointless an existence as you can inflict on someone without putting them in prison.
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Aug 24, 2023 14:43
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Mellow Seas posted:I think people underestimate how willing people would be to comply with public health directives. People in places that took it seriously will take it seriously again. Unless the disease is much scarier, the places that didn’t, won’t. The issue is that fear manifests in many ways. Covid already went through this, and it showed that while most people will follow the mandates they need to live a normal life, there's a large portion of the population who manifest fear as extreme denial. Rage is a lot easier to hold inside yourself than fear, especially if you are not used to that kind of fear. That's the root of a lot of conspiracies, trying to force a rationality to the world where it isn't possible for you to randomly get sick and die because you walked past someone in a store.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:06
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Mellow Seas posted:Sometimes I think you can go too far in fetishizing the labor itself; I think we should focus on building a society where labor is voluntary. It’s just occupation #43679 where you got hosed if it was your job, and it’s not worth fighting to keep any more than “coal miner” or “pog creator.” The problem is just that we keep using every piece of technology to create even more labor than we eliminate (it’s economic growth!) So basically, start killing a few hundred billionaires and/or wait at least fifty years.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:12
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Mellow Seas posted:Yeah, I think all in all people don’t mind bagging their own groceries; it’s a fine thing to do for five minutes but doing it for 8+ hours not so much. Sometimes I think you can go too far in fetishizing the labor itself; I think we should focus on building a society where labor is voluntary. It’s just occupation #43679 where you got hosed if it was your job, and it’s not worth fighting to keep any more than “coal miner” or “pog creator.” The problem is just that we keep using every piece of technology to create even more labor than we eliminate (it’s economic growth!)  The problem is that it's the biggest stores with the worst employee relations who get the fanciest gadgets to make shopping easier first, but now it's at the level of a skinned app there's an equalizer there. And the actual solutions are taking a portion of those increased profits the superstores get from beep beeps and laying off staff and using them for future prospects, and having some kind of collective that can find out what sucks most about working there and present it in a formal manner up the chain. (But neoliberalism said that government and unions don't work so it can't be those  )
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Aug 24, 2023 15:16
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I don't think I've ever seen a standing cashier at any supermarket in my life. Pay isn't fantastic, but working times are flexible enough that it's reasonably popular with university students who don't have formal education yet. To be honest, there seems to be a pretty severe difference in how retail workers are perceived and treated in the US vs. Germany.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:17
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The Islamic Shock posted:UBI would be nice for this but I can't help but think that would result in the price of rent everywhere being increased to exactly how much that check comes to or some obvious artificial inflation poo poo like that, especially since taxing the piss out of the rich is about the only way to come up with that kind of tax revenue. Also for labor to be voluntary, pay would have to be good enough for people to want poo poo jobs. The equally-good flip side is that people will be able to do fun stuff they care about and not worry as much about what they make. The artificial inflation is a concern, it would be neurtralized if we had an adequate housing supply. Housing has to be dealt with before a lot of problems can be dealt with. When half your country is laying out >50% of their pay for housing, things are going to be rough. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 15:26
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Self checkout rocks. Everything here except small local markets I go to for one dinner type stuff has no-limit huge areas and unless I’m with my spouse or kids I get in and out with noise-cancelling headphones and music or a podcast, never talking to a soul And it ain’t like I think retail workers are scum, I’ve been the worker and loving hate talking to customers too It’s always faster too, unless some hapless Old decides to use it even though they do not understand it at all, at which point they will inevitably start screaming at the attendant and blaming the machine for their stupidity Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 15:42
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Mellow Seas posted:
Bertrand Russell posted:Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
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Aug 24, 2023 16:35
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We ended up with the Bad Future version of society that Russell promoted in In Praise of Idleness, the gig economy and side-hustles.
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Aug 24, 2023 16:40
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VitalSigns posted:As always it's not about the fetishization of labor, it's that if your job goes away it's pretty much a death sentence. (apologies for the old-timey gendered language) (Also maybe tangential but I think “pretty much a death sentence” is a pretty extreme overstatement, many more people lose their jobs every year then become homeless or can’t buy food. Like, by orders of magnitude. It can absolutely lead to someone’s death, but almost never does. We do have unemployment insurance and people do have informal networks of support. The problem is just that some people fall through the cracks and we say “gently caress ‘em.” And I suppose my point is that you shouldn’t expect people to act like they are living in a country where your boss can basically kill you on a whim when they aren’t.)
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Aug 24, 2023 20:28
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Yeah they probably don't physically die but most Americans are in such precarious financial circumstances that losing even a lovely job can mean their life is utterly destroyed. If anyone loses their job and it dominoes to losing housing/transportation/health, you've just given them a slow death. But I think it's obvious that the solution isn't to keep society clinging to lovely jobs like cashiering and coal mining or whatever, it's changing society so that employment isn't a condition to meet for basic survival. I think the people arguing in favor of keeping the jobs around are doing so because it's the only feasible option under our current system. e: back when I worked in big box pet retail, I actually loved cashiering because it was like the one position in the store that wasn't constantly being held to unreasonable performance metrics that expected you to do the work of three-four people and provide exceptional customer service to everyone on the sales floor. Absolute labor nightmare to do anything else. Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 20:33
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One of Bertrand Russell's proposals for that was a "vagabond's wage" paid to everyone to ensure they didn't become homeless if their job was lost, which would (in theory) move work to fewer hours rather than fire half the people. So he was a UBI guy a century ago.
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Aug 24, 2023 20:44
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Sure if you can find another job you won't literally die. If. Hence why people are concerned when jobs are eliminated entirely versus just moving around to different companies. And yes the solution is abolish the wage system, it makes very little sense to keep workers mining coal that nobody wants just so their activity makes it feel like they are earning a paycheck rather than being given welfare, but that's also a nearly impossible task so it's no wonder people worried about their immediate livelihood focus on the relatively easier to attain goal of "preserve my job in the existing system". Also the coal industry obviously would really like it if the government bought all their coal to keep them in business even if it all just got tossed in a ditch.
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Aug 24, 2023 21:04
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Paying people to dig holes to fill in other holes people had been paid to dig was Keynes' alternative.
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Aug 24, 2023 21:06
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Guavanaut posted:Paying people to dig holes to fill in other holes people had been paid to dig was Keynes' alternative. We do that, it’s called “the defense industry” and it is quite a nifty little jobs program. If some people happen to end up in those holes, hey, can’t make an omelette…
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Aug 24, 2023 21:53
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Guavanaut posted:Paying people to dig holes to fill in other holes people had been paid to dig was Keynes' alternative. That wasn't a serious suggestion though right, I get the feeling he had a wry sense of humor. Like when he responded to defenses of the gold standard with something like: oh the work of digging up the gold makes it valuable you say, fine we can bury jars of paper money for people to dig up then!
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Aug 24, 2023 22:13
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Yeah, I think the joke was: Keynes: We should do public work projects to make sure people have jobs. TradLibs: But what if there is no public work to be done? Keynes: Have them dig holes to fill in the previous one.
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Aug 24, 2023 22:18
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Trying to convince the Hoovers of the world to do something as the economy had collapsed and years of mass unemployment brought us all to the brink of revolution must have wild. "ehhhh use public money to pay the unemployed to build things we need? But what if we create a perfect society and there's no work left to be done, they'll just be unemployed again, how can you support such an unsustainable system?"
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Aug 25, 2023 04:33
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People are capable of being wrong about things for a crazy long amount of time, just because it's the way they've always done things. Weird example maybe, but in baseball, you have nine fielders to handle batted balls. Hitters have very, very strong tendencies in where they hit the ball in the field, to the point where many basically never hit the ball to half of the field. It took them over a hundred years to figure out "hmm, maybe we should put all the guys where the balls are going to go, instead of just in the same place every time."
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Aug 26, 2023 07:27
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Mellow Seas posted:People are capable of being wrong about things for a crazy long amount of time, just because it's the way they've always done things. 
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Aug 26, 2023 09:22
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Mellow Seas posted:People are capable of being wrong about things for a crazy long amount of time, just because it's the way they've always done things. And now fielders can't do that.
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Aug 26, 2023 13:07
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