InappropriateEmote [comrade/them, undecided]

I’m not sure if it’s a different situation in Europe than where I’m at as far as things like self checkout, surveillance, how much store employees care, etc., but I’ll tell you what works for, uh… some friends I know in the US. This is only for grocery stores with self checkout and using a handbasket. First, buy one of those reusable grocery bags you bring from home if you don’t already have one. It should be opaque and fairly rigid. Grab a handbasket and put your normal, green-friendly grocery bag in it with the bag open. Expensive + small things go into the bag. Larger, hopefully cheaper things go in the basket but on top of the bag. You will be paying legit for the latter things. Do not put things into your bag if it would exceed 1/3 of your bag volume and don’t put stuff on top that would exceed 2/3 (a little bit more is fine). Go to the self checkout. Take the things out of your basket but not out of your bag which stays in the handbasket along with its contents. Scan those items and pay for them as normal. Start loading your purchased groceries in your grocery bag on top of your unpurchased groceries that never left your bag. Casually leave the grocery store with bag in hand, along with a receipt for a bunch of stuff in your bag, right there filling the top 2/3rs of it. There’s just more stuff beneath it that isn’t on the receipt.

There are a few things that can go wrong and you can probably think of them. However, having known people who have done this for years and never had a problem is a pretty good indication that these things rarely do (if ever) end up going wrong, so long as you’re really careful, casual, and only do it in the appropriate stores. And yes, this is done with cameras all over the store and at least one employee managing all the self checkouts. That last part is why it’s better to do this when it’s busy at the store, but it usually seems to work fine even when it’s not.

edit: typos fixed.

The United States Empire doesn’t have much time left on this earth. I think they are already into the process of ruining it for the rest of us on their way out.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this were in fact true, but if you or @yogthos@lemmy.ml can point me to where you saw this, I would really appreciate being able to read about it. Regardless of what heinous crimes against humanity and all life on earth that the US would actually perpetrate in a large scale nuclear war scenario, I was under the impression that their nuclear posture and targeting strategies are “highly classified” and even though they don’t have any NFU policy, they still at least pretend it’s about deterrence.

Ok, well I appreciate the comment and I stand corrected. Your meaning in the first comment was a bit ambiguous but on rereading it I can see that it makes sense that you’re referring to the post title, not to the article title. That said, the post title is referencing a meme and might make more sense in that context, but it is also not wrong. This war continues to be waged due to the insistence of NATO (essentially the US) that it continue. The opinions or consent of the Ukrainian people is immaterial to those in control, and Ukrainians will keep being sent to fight and die regardless of whether or not the majority of them actually wants to sue for peace or make territorial concessions (a position that is almost certainly being suppressed).

but arguments of the type “and your more” have never led any movement anywhere.

Also immaterial. What I said had nothing to do with leading a movement, it was merely calling a spade a spade and pointing out hypocrisy.

I have no idea what Reddit China relationships are and I doubt there even is one.

So are you genuinely ignorant about how redditors are constantly engaging in sinophobia with the encouragement of their mods and admins, all while being a major vector for spreading ridiculous anti-China propaganda? Or are you so dense as to think that u/yoink was referring to some official state relationship the CPC has with a US social media company?

Ellen pao is Chinese and she was a Reddit ceo.

Ellen Pao was born in New Jersey. Like, do you think olympic medal winners from the US who have Chinese heritage should be said to have won a medal for China?

Stop acting like a removed and grow up.

I’m not sure what slur you just used, but stop being a shitbrained bigot and grow up.

So what you’re complaining about is a biased title… even though the subtitle explicitly makes clear the way in which you think the title could be interpreted as biased? Putting that in the subtitle is the opposite of how you think it’s being manipulative. And even if it weren’t, that’s not “childish.”

If you think that’s manipulative, let me blow your mind by introducing you to NYT, WaPo, BBC, or literally any mainstream western media that straight up lies in the title, doubles down in the subtitle, and maybe if you’re lucky buries a nugget of truth near the bottom of the article in a passing mention surrounded by weasel words.

Also, do you think the (checks notes) Kyiv Post is a Russian propaganda rag, and they’re being manipulative on the part of that dastardly Putin or something? lol

Then you need to do more reading because I did work in this field and have read the science on it as well. First all, you have to take into account what time scales are being discussed. What you’re reading is, I’m all but certain, just talking about the coming few decades, in which yes, millions at least will likely die. And even then the science that tends to reach the public is toned down, pacified, and doesn’t represent the whole truth. You should be familiar with this as a communist trying to get an understanding of what’s really going on with the world via popular journalism. Is what you’re reading about “catastrophic weather events” also discussing what will be happening 1000 years from now? 10,000? Despite the longer scale, what we are doing right now and in the coming decades will have an effect on those longer scales. Climate change is so much more than simply an intensification of weather events. It is literally a rapid change to the composition of our atmosphere. An atmosphere which has, by the way, been completely altered by life in one of the most chemically fundamental ways possible, from a reducing atmosphere to an oxidizing one. This is what I mean when I say even many leftists just do not understand how extreme the risks are here. A runaway greenhouse wouldn’t just kill a billion, it could well end our species and most other species of “higher lifeforms.”

Well… Earth becoming more like Venus is an inevitability in the high hundreds of millions of years (and for scale, multicellular life has been around for roughly 5-600M years, with the more than 3 billion before that just being simple single-celled prokaryotic life), but that is completely independent of anthropogenic climate change, it is because of the expansion of the sun towards it’s red giant phase. In terms of being habitable to life, Earth is easily past the half-way mark already, no matter what. However, that is far enough out that it doesn’t bear worrying about and isn’t something we can have any sort of impact on.

That said, the climate change that we as a species are causing right now could lead to a runaway greenhouse effect on much shorter time scales. The fact is, there have been times in Earth’s history where it has been so hot that complex life could mostly only survive at the poles (with the equator being a death zone to all but simple, single-cellular extremophiles) and there have been times where Earth was encased almost entirely in ice except perhaps at the equators - not just our usual conception of an ice age, but “snowball earth,” and this was likely caused by certain forms of simple life, fascinatingly enough. The feedback loops we are triggering right now have a potential to drastically change the composition of the atmosphere on a far shorter timescale, one in which we are talking about an end to most complex life (obviously ourselves included). It was almost certainly volcanism that caused Venus to go from a mostly habitable planet to the completely, utterly inhospitable world it is. Volcanism has also been responsible for extreme heat and mass extinctions on Earth, but obviously it never tipped over into Venus-like territory. The thing is, right now we’re changing the atmosphere at a rate far faster than volcanism has in the past! And rate of change matters a lot with this kind of thing. I’m repeating myself, but again, it is not a certainty but it is a possibility that anthropogenic climate change could hit tipping points that Venus-ifies Earth on a much shorter, nearer term than anything relating to the expansion of the sun, on time scales that are worth worrying about (if we value humanity as a whole), and is the sort of thing we can have an impact on.

Both. I do believe that “communism will win” as an inevitability (with one big caveat, see below). Capitalism obviously is unsustainable and rife with internal contradictions that can only lead to its eventual demise. The obvious and broad example being that it requires infinite growth on a finite planet. But I think it can get very bad before it gets better, and expect it will further devolve into fascism (much more so than it already has) for most if not all of the western world, and the entire world will suffer as a result. Socialism, then communism will eventually emerge (since fascism is just as doomed by its contradictions as capitalism is), but before we get there, I expect there is going to be some truly unimaginably dark and horrible times on the way there. So in that sense, I am ultimately optimistic about the future of the world, but extremely pessimistic about its more immediate future.

But now for the caveat. I think that most people, even leftists, don’t fully appreciate how much climate change is going to reshape the world. There is a real chance that it will get bad enough that civilization may not survive, that humanity as a species will be among the many that don’t make it through the mass extinction we’ve only just entered. Even people fully on board with knowing climate change is bad and must be curtailed as much as possible as soon as possible still mostly don’t realize how much a genuine existential threat it is on a planetary scale, on a scale of centuries and longer. It is by no means a certainty, but given the feedback loops we don’t fully understand and definitely don’t know how to interrupt, there is a possibility of Earth even going the way of Venus. Obviously I hope that’s not the case, but it would be a mistake not to recognize the extreme potential of climate change. If we are able to mitigate it in time, I am like I said, ultimately optimistic. But I am beyond afraid that we won’t be able to mitigate it in time.

In other words, it’s not just “socialism or barbarism,” it’s socialism or annihilation.

Yeah, I think it’s really unfortunate that we can’t dunk on this sort of thing on hexbear unless someone sufficiently famous says it, especially for our anarchist comrades who may not want to post their dunks on an ML-specific instance, or for people who have their feeds set to local. But since several months ago, it was inexplicably decreed that there is no place on hexbear for dunking if it’s not actual politicians or someone with enough renown like Elon Musk directly, who are on the receiving end of the dunk. So for future reference, if you do want to dunk or discuss something concerning (or worse) that you found online somewhere, you now have to go to lemmygrad to do so. Thems the rules.

alcohol seems fine to me in comparison to the things that drive people to drink excessively

This is so relative and variable, it’s impossible to fully agree or disagree with. Addiction and the root causes for it involve such a complex interactions of different factors that such a statement is almost meaningless.

Like, is alcohol “fine” compared to the crushing weight of a lifetime of extreme alienation due to capitalism? I don’t know if “fine” is the right word, but sure, yes, alcohol is the smaller evil and the lesser detriment to society over all, in comparison. But that doesn’t mean that the person who, completely understandably, drinks a bottle of vodka every night for years to deal with that alienation isn’t doing damage to themselves (and likely increased pain and difficulty for their loved ones), by orders of magnitude greater than just the slow burn of alienation alone would have, even as the vodka makes the alienation vastly more bearable in the immediate short term.

And yes, almost any kind of distraction that replaces some pain of reality with a bit of dopamine can become an addiction that can potentially do great harm to the person afflicted by it. But there is still a spectrum of how bad various addictions can be to a person’s over all health, and alcohol undeniably holds a place close to the far end of that spectrum of harm. For example, you aren’t going to die at 40 from liver failure because of a social media addiction.

Addiction and habituation are complex. Different people are effected to different degrees by different types of addictions, but that doesn’t mean all distractions that can potentially become addictions are equally dangerous or detrimental. None of that has to do with any of those addictions being at “fault” either. But it’s a simple fact that continuously using alcohol as a means of coping with difficulty or pain will come with rapidly increasing costs to a person’s health as well as diminishing returns on its efficacy even as a coping mechanism.

Always use frontends like invidious, piped, or others. Then you won’t ever have to worry about giving views to channels you don’t like or dealing with youtube and its ads. Also you will have increased privacy.

In this case, piped: https://piped.yt/watch?v=div2SXe1NBA

invidious: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=div2SXe1NBA

edit: HexReplyBot beat me to it with the alternative links.

Seriously. It’s the only reason I ever would have clicked the link. I feel bamboozled.

Never in my life would I have imagined that someone would try to apply dialectical materialism to physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism#Lenin’s_contributions

No. electrons and protons dont attract because they have a history or because of the conditions surrounding them

What are you even talking about, yes they do. Two particles will interact if their shared history (light cone) includes them being in the right conditions (like proximity to each other, opposing charge, etc.) for that to happen.

they do so because of intrinsic properties of themselves

Their intrinsic properties are part of the conditions that cause any given particles to behave the way they do. The environment they find themselves in, such as what other particles they are in the presence of, very obviously plays just as much an important part of the role in determining their behavior as their intrinsic properties. And those conditions at any point in time exist because of the history that led to those conditions - which is just as true of leptons and bosons as it is of kings and peasants.

they didnt arrive to their current situation thru a struggle or process of any kind

Yes, they absolutely did! “Struggle” would be an inappropriate (but still not necessarily inaccurate) term for it just because it carries the implication of intent and human emotions. But dialectical materialism, which is a metaphysical framework, absolutely does not rely on intention in any way - in fact it’s largely defined by the fact that it does not rely on intention since that would be idealism. But that’s just a matter of odd phrasing, because if you take the word “struggle” out, and just say “they didnt arrive to their current situation thru a process of any kind,” you would be completely, even incomprehensibly wrong. Of course they arrived at their current situation through a process. It could be any measure of complexity in the process that led to their conditions, but at it’s most simple, it’s literally just cause and effect. True of human society, true of particle physics.

they just are the way they are

As is literally everything else.

and dialectics tells u nothing about how electrons and protons will behave. Dialectical materialism is just one way to look at the world and it is good and accurate when used to describe somethings and useless when used to describe others, its a model like any other, it is more dear to our hearts than most models but that doesnt make it perfect or a theory of everything.

Dialectical materialism is a metaphysical framework. The issue here is not that we have to use it to describe particle interactions or predict their outcomes, but that particle physics and dialectical materialism are absolutely compatible with one another. It is even perfectly reasonable to look at the interaction between electrons and protons through a dialectical materialist lens, as @QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml pointed out, by considering that interaction as a contradiction and resolution relationship, (law of unity and conflict of opposites), even negation of the negation.

It’s political inadequacy aside, let’s just take a look at the first few sentences of wikipedia’s entry on Dialectical Materialism

Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that has found widespread applications in a variety of philosophical disciplines ranging from philosophy of history to philosophy of science. [emphasis mine]

It’s way too much to quote, but also please note the section on Lenin’s contributions to dialectical materialism, and note how it relates to physics. I do not mean this in a mean-spirited way, but you don’t seem to understand either physics or dialectical materialism. Almost everything you’ve said indicates a deep misunderstanding of both.

Yep, this is who the episode was about where the rule came from.

Episode 346: Gaddafi’s Gold

In the music video? Yeah, that’s not going to last for anyone, lol. But for what I was talking about above, I know people who have been doing that at the same stores weekly since covid began and have never had a single issue besides an evil eye stare.

Fuck it, just do what these guys do:

Do your bit, Rob the Supermarket

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wqUJ0go5Pww

https://piped.yt/watch?v=wqUJ0go5Pww

It was Target that was well known for doing this, tracking shoplifters and waiting until someone could get arrested for a felony when a minimum amount of dollar worth was stolen. I never did, but from my understanding, Target was the place shoplifters knew not to shoplift as it was and likely still is extremely aggressive this way and more likely to break the law itself by detaining you against your will (which in the US is technically not legal but that doesn’t always stop them from doing it, especially if they think you don’t know that). Walmart on the other hand, was actually surprisingly hands-off and one of the easiest of those kinds of stores to steal from, I was told. It’s possible this has changed in the last couple years that I haven’t kept up, but well into “post”-covid times, if you were shoplifting from one of the big box stores like that, a good bet was Walmart while Target was regarded as the hard-ass goon-hiring bastards and hence the one to avoid.

– EDIT: Removing a bunch of stuff I’m not 100% sure is wise to leave up

I will note here, that while these are among the laws you should know about and use to your full potential benefit, it doesn’t mean that the stores necessarily will, know them or follow them. Regular grocery stores, from everything I know, really don’t give a shit. The method I described above works so well because even if someone does eye what you’re doing and get suspicious, it will be underpaid retail workers and grocery baggers that almost certainly don’t care or are even glad to see that kind of thing happening. BUT other kinds of stores are not necessarily like that. Part of why Target was so bad is because they were known for not caring that they themselves and their thugs were the ones breaking the law. A time could be coming when even grocery stores start getting more like this, and there are probably ones that already do. It can’t hurt to test out the situation on something light. A single bottle of shampoo. Get a feel for the store. Items do matter. Don’t steal the alcohol. THIS is watched heavily in large part because of minors who frequently try to steal it for obvious reasons. I knew someone else who often stole from grocery stores literally by walking in, taking shit and walking out. None of this trying to look legit shit. He was shockingly successful until he tried doing it with liquor. That ended his shoplifting career. At least from grocery stores. In that town. For a little while.

I hope this has been a helpful comment.

Mods: If any of this shouldn’t be here, I get it, no hard feelings if it’s deleted. I’ll also gladly be the creator who removes it if that’s better.

That’s my only issue with the image. It kind of implies the the blue pill and red pill tend to be mutually exclusive when in fact those things are very often comorbidities.