Right? It’s still the Jews? Really? WTF? East Indian Americans are rapidly outpacing “the Jews” in terms of elite professionalism, but it’s still all somehow about the Jews?

What planet do these people live on?

NATO needs a similar mechanism as well, but for similar reasons doesn’t have one either.

True, but it still amounts to a vote for Trump, due to the electoral college.

Newspapers were a very different beast in Jefferson’s day.

Yes it is. I guarantee you that someone who regularly reads a reputable major daily is going to be better-informed than 90 percent of the public. Your attitude is part of the problem too. The vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to news media and don’t have any idea of how to evaluate credibility and accuracy.

I mostly blame the Internet for trashing the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also blame our education system and the profession of journalism itself for not giving people better epistemic toolkits.

The Biden administration is quite possibly the worst administration I’ve ever seen when it comes to messaging, and I am in my 50s. Someday in the future someone will write a PhD dissertation on why they are so dysfunctional in this respect, but for now I just don’t get it. They are singularly inept when it comes to publicizing and taking credit for their wins.

As a longtime SAR guy --I’m in my 50s-- I always tell people to carry a gun in the backcountry if that’s what makes them feel safe, but just know that you’re far far far more likely to get in trouble from things like weather, terrain, rivers, meltwater, falling, exposure, hypothermia and just the elements in general than you are from any animal. The risk profiles aren’t even remotely close. This is true even in places like Alaska where almost everyone is armed. As far as I’m concerned, a gun is dead weight. Lose it and concentrate instead on carrying the ten essentials and knowing how to use them

Among the world’s economically developed democracies, it absolutely only happens in one nation. This is not up for debate; it’s an objective fact.

How we choose to address this fact is up to us, but being in denial about it is not a sane option.

It’s older than that.

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.

Also some of them are paid very well. Any of your unionized specialty trades can easily make $150k+ a year, especially if they’re willing to travel or work a lot of OT. If you’re single or married with no kids, you can pretty easily afford a big fancy truck like that.

If you’re willing to travel that can be more than $50k a year in per diem pay, so in two years you can easily pay off a new trailer to live in and a nice truck to haul it with. I personally know people who have done exactly this. The catch is that you need to get into a good union and do your apprenticeship and generally have your shit together. It always surprises me that more people don’t know this.

This is a strictly American thing

If by “American” you mean North American, then yeah, you are correct, because pickups are also super popular in Canada and Mexico. But I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think you mean to specify the US which again, is incorrect. The fact that pickups are so popular in Canada and Mexico as well tells us that contrary to what I suspect you’re trying to imply, there isn’t some kind of special innate idiotic pickup truck gene that’s unique to Americans and that instead, it’s all about marketing.

After all, if marketing and advertising didn’t work, it wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry. What the big American car companies have done with amazing effectiveness is to make owning a pickup truck an intimate part of a lot of people’s self-image. That’s what you are arguing against and that’s why it’s nearly impossible to change anyone’s mind about it.

How do they even do it? I know for a fact that a lot of them are not especially wealthy.

Even so, it’s just an objective fact that blocking traffic hurts the working poor far more than it hurts the wealthy and powerful high-status people who wield real power in society. It also, at least in the US, just further alienates blue collar people from the Democratic party and the political left, a demographic that they should own, but are losing and continuing to lose precisely because they are so tone deaf. The right does not block traffic, at least not as a tactic in itself, because they are smart enough to know that it just pisses people off. This difference is diagnostic of why the Democrats are steadily losing support from non-college-educated working people of all races.

Blocking traffic is pretty shitty though because you’re hurting working people as opposed to the people who have real power and status in society. These are people who depend on hourly wages and often have multiple jobs together with childcare scheduling commitments and the like.

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.

It’s going to be an issue anywhere rural.

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.

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