Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 11 August 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 11 August 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
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lol holy shit, apparently a US chain is trying to do"AI-based" individualised pricing of goods in-store
can't wait to hear of someone being charged $500 for a packet of gum
An "Oops, racism!" incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.
probably a couple of them, too :|
(I can speculate a few off the top of my head as-is, but not sure I want to enumerate them)
Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?
(also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)
I'm sure such blatant and unrepentant price gouging won't end in any violent altercations from infuriated customers!
(Ah, who am I kidding, somebody's gonna blow their lid over Kroger jacking up water prices on a hot day. They'll be lucky if nobody gets shot before they ditch the idea.)
Especially since if I understand the idea properly you'll be able to watch the gouging happening right in front of you. Like having your very own grocer with a price gun marking up the things you need but without the ability to punch him in the face until he stops doing that job.
Is that in any way legal?
it’s the USA, it’s near certainly going to be multiple ways of legal
and if they get kicked in the teeth, they’ll get around it by putting up a little sign somewhere near the door (visible, but unobvious) which claims that “by shopping there you accept the possibility”, and that may be enough
this might run afoul of some of our scattered price gouging regulations (see some instances of sellers getting slapped during the toilet paper shortage nonsense), but interestingly this was announced after the Supreme Court kneecapped our ability to enforce any regulations at all
it’s almost like the corpos took a monstrous lesson from covid and were waiting for the right combination of deniable technology and probability of the success of the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup to announce something like this
hmm yeah that's a good point. I wonder if they're planning to skirt that by capping the raised price, just plan to avoid places with that regulation entirely, or what else
probably it'll be some inventive new form of extremely-USAian fuckery that I'm not in a cynical mood to guess at in speculation right now
I happened to come across an article mentioning the Robinson–Patman Act (from 1936) in relation with wage fixing by algorithm.
From Wikipedia: "a United States federal law that prohibits anticompetitive practices by producers, specifically price discrimination"
It might be relevant here. Obviously I am not a US lawyer specialised in monopoly law.
Common Kroger L.
They just got done being bullied into dropping plans to go to 100% self-checkout, too.
I never really got the (E: thanks froztbyte, I meant user complaints here, there certainly are job complaints re self-checkout see reply below) complaints of self checkout, works great in most places in .nl I tried it.
And then the local Lidl got a self checkout. I now get why people hate those things, somebody really designed it with the idea of 'people in our stores are criminals we must catch' in mind. Turns out those styles of self checkouts are more common in EE as well. A small example of a problem with it. The part where you in other self checkouts would put your bag to put your stuff into was a scale, and because of that I couldn't put my bag there as I thought I was trying to sneak products through, and every item had to be placed there on the scale after weighing. (And then it didn't always work correctly). You could almost smell the security person who designed it going 'im gonna catch all those baddies!' (that could have also been me, I need to remember to wash my clothes). The machine also felt cheap, and the way the employees had to interact with it (they had to physically touch the machine with some key, and not use a tablet like all the other self checkouts (I had gotten something with alcohol in it)) didn't help this feeling.
Moral of the story, there are ways to do self checkout better than others.
there's that (the high-trust vs low-trust designs), but also there's another dimension of it: cashier (and similar jobs) are one of the few low-end open to a lot of people in the US, which means this would kill yet another avenue of earning for many of them
(to which the fix is not a simple yes or no to whether self-checkout should be an option)
One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.
Yeah I should have mentioned that, I do get those complaints. But most people I see complaining about self-checkout dont take that angle. Sorry I should have used my brain, realized where I was typing and not forgotten that people here tend to be more class aware.
I got flashbacks from reading this.
You have to imagine that the future roadmap includes robot dog enforcers for capturing shoplifters.
Laundry Files curse strikes again
fr! BTW, speaking of class consciousness, I once got myself in big trouble with one of these things.
My SO and I had just finished reading Kraken by China Mieville when we went into Krogers to pick up a few things.
spoiler
One of our favorite characters, Wati, managed to overthrow the reigning order in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife after thousands of years of servitude by unionizing all of the magical assistants. Dude rocked. He is tragically lost in the final chapters of the book, and we both kind of had a grown-up cry over it.
The one open checkout line was 40 miles long (as is tradition), so she ducked into the self-checkout, and I said, "Wew, Wati would hate that we're doing this."
She didn't talk to me for the rest of the day, which was 100% fair.
I run into this process every time I visit Poland (mostly because I visit so rarely that I forget) and every time I'm astonished how seriously fucked up it is.
The most annoying part is having to scan a receipt in order to exit the self checkout area.
In the stark contrast to the above self checkout process in Switzerland works so smoothly. Mostly because nobody is subjected to the bullshit described above. There's even an option to grab a scanner, scan everything on the go and just pay at exit.
@mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then you’re good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.
'Steekproef/steekproeven/Steekproefsgewijs' Here.
Do note that I have some suspicions that these random checks are not random and are in fact tied to some ML algorithm combined with all the new cameras that are in supermarkets now.
ah heh, that would’ve been the other leg of this plan, I imagine
“sorry about the unfortunate pricing” says the dead-ending support flow, which doesn’t have the ability to contact an actual human anywhere in the tree