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?

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.

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.

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.

WTF are you talking about? I see zero evidence that this is what OP is doing. It can’t be the case that every time someone asks a question that you don’t like, they must be doing so in bad faith. That’s a fallacy.

Oh, look at John fucking Von Neumann over here!

Either a square knot or a “granny” knot will work. A lot of people don’t know the difference, but it’s actually a pretty important distinction in different types of rigging because a square knot is so much stronger and more secure.

It’s how the other great apes do it too, which as far as I’m concerned is pretty much the end of the issue. It really is one of those things where there’s a right and wrong way to do it.

Double Nickels on the Dime, Minutemen. Also probably the best power trio record ever made. Granted, they only made one more record before D Boon died, but as legendary as he is, Mike Watt has still never done anything as good since.

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.

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.

This is basic cat stuff. “Oh, smell good! Must investigate! Do want or no? Not sure, is hot, but definite smell good! Maybe want?”

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.