PassingThrough

I think you have it right. Refusing the check is not alone sufficient grounds, and that is why if you (politely, no reason to be a jerk, they’re just cogs in a machine working for a pittance) refuse and walk away, they just turn to the next one.

It is, as many have concurred, for show. The idea that you may get asked, the anxiety that develops thinking you might get caught, deters all but the most hardened thieves. Same with exterior lights on a home; before cameras what good did a lightbulb do to stop a thief? Does a lightbulb injure or detain a thief? Call the cops for you? No. It upsets their resolve. The light may make them visible to a witness they aren’t aware of. And a witness might call the cops or hurt them. On to a darker house, then!

It’s not just about what’s legal for the store employees to do either. Were I a thief, I wouldn’t be worried the manager is going to ban me from the store, or the frail old lady they have at the door is a threat, I’d be more concerned what vigilante schmuck is going to “help” the store by taking matters into his own hands after he overhears me arguing with the greeter or manager. The store gives up after you leave the sidewalk, “hometown heroes” don’t.

Straight theft aside, I imagine it does also help them recover some losses from mistakes. Any time they catch somebody with legit missed items under the cart and guide them towards fixing it, loss averted. Start noticing it happens a lot from a particular cashier or self checkout supervisor and get them corrected, more losses averted. I imagine you’d need a fairly wide sample set to figure it out?

It’s not a…totally unfair concept in theory, but they really aught to find a way to make it feel less adversarial and it would be more tolerable.

I understand that each state makes adjustments to this which may grant more or less powers, but here’s a Wikipedia on the overall concept:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper%27s_privilege

So for example during the aforementioned security theater at the doors, someone who is legally a representative of the company ownership(generally the managers making salaries are bonded to this) is doing their best to catch someone in the act of stealing, putting something in a coat, loading a cart and bypassing the register, etc, and this gives them grounds for some mild detainment. This apparently covers them stopping you at the door or firmly requesting you join them in their office to clear things up(and wait for the real authorities), and means no one questions if they grab the cart which is company property and doesn’t let you leave with it.

I once sat and chatted with one of these guys waiting for a bad downpour to stop. Being stopped sucks, I know, but here’s some insider information:

They are stopping you for appearances. They absolutely are skimming your receipt, they really don’t care about you personally. It’s all circus.

If they are looking, they are looking for the big loss items. That TV that gets rung up in the back, was it actually rung up? The water case under the cart coming from self checkout? Another big loser for the company. Coming with a tote or loaded cart from the wrong direction is a little obvious to everyone.

Every other stop is for show. To remind the tote runner they are watching. To make the TV thief skittish. It’s all about appearances and breaking down resolve. The door guys can’t stop you, but they can make you afraid that they are vigilant and someone who can is waiting(and the salarymen can, shopkeeper’s privilege apparently in the US). It does work, loaded carts abandoned near the doors apparently testify to the effectiveness.

Some door hosts get by with being passive, they are supposed to be pretty chill and friendly, and dial up the theatrics when someone is reported to be suspicious or when a “frequent flyer” walks in. But that just makes it seem discriminatory and unbalanced so apparently some managers want the theatrics 24/7 to avoid the complaints of unfair treatment.

You are looking at the software, but how’s the hardware?

How old is the server? Could the thermal paste be old and dried up? Is the cooling fan working?

A CPU with bad cooling can still run, up to a threshold and then it will throttle itself to avoid going over, but since the cooling sucks just being on will keep it there.

Fair, and this is why I hesitate to recommend LibreWolf as a true alternative to Firefox. It wasn’t meant to be the common man’s general browser. It was flavored with a privacy goal in mind and that’s what it does.

It’s a half-step toward recommending someone use Tor browser as a daily driver. Which wouldn’t work out very well. But it’s quite private and anonymous!

There just wasn’t a need/enough funding or drive for another “good enough” browser like Firefox, the answer for that was Firefox. Everyone else is off one deep end or another.

default dark themes make surfing less secure

Not less secure per se, but less anonymous. Default dark mode reports your preference to websites and analytics, so it ends up being something that makes you different.

Same reason privacy browsers use a default resolution and won’t let you stretch websites bigger if you have a huge monitor, keeping a border instead…

The idea is to devalue tracking attempts by making the results a big nothing burger of more of the same. A herd of clones.

I think the USSR is good to point out.

Didn’t some rich assholes buy up everything in there for cheap during all that, and become the new lords through Oligarchy?

Thats where we are heading here. With nearly every cut, there’s a remark about how the private sector could do it better. They are normalizing the idea that they, the oligarchs, the billionaires, can run government better than government can, so when the National Weather Service has it’s duties assumed by The Weather Channel(for a nominal fee of course), it will somehow be “better”, when Medicare and Medicaid are failed and private insurance companies shored up, we will be grateful for the “efficiency”. When social security “runs out due to bureaucratic mismanagenent”, the privately held 401k will be the only hope.

An excellent question. For a literature example to share, have you ever heard of Anne of Green Gables, a series of novels from the early 1900s? The title character herself would be treated for ADHD today, and there is another whose name escapes me that would be under ADD.

But they don’t have these terms, it’s the 1900s, so these characters are simply excitable, absent minded, moody, day-dreamers…

Neurodiversity has been with us probably as long as neurons, but we like to make people fit a mold, and anyone who deviates is given a funny nickname and pushed into the mold anyway, or ostracized for their “incompatibility”.

Same with autism and any others, we’re just at the point where we want to look at it medically, and use medications and therapies to get them in the mold, rather than “a good whipping and back to the school books, damn ~slur~” you’d get in the past.

I generally go with Debian, makes a good stable base. Then over SSH you can use a helper script like LinuxGSM, or use Docker containers. Or both? I’ve seen containers that use LGSM inside…

For the web aspect, you can use DockGE or Portainer as a simple interface for the docker containers, but if you want to dig into the game configs from the same panel, you might want a full grown game management program, or a system level panel like Cockpit.

One cool looking option is to set up a full out hosting panel like AMP, though admittedly it gives me weird issues often enough to think about downgrading to more basic options again. It was meant for a hosting seller environment, and behaves accordingly.

And don’t even get me started on “AI”.

As the family technical person, I can say after years of attempting to teach people to understand and solve their own problems, my support calls are down in the past year! Is it because they got smarter? No! They started using ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc and following it blindly. Do they understand the concepts of what they are changing and doing? No, but as long as the original problem is fixed, who cares if a dozen more are created, as long as they(the problems) keep quiet.

I am cursed to be in the middle, couldn’t just be given a well paying technical job like my forebears, but nobody thinks they need my technical skills anymore, so I have talents now viewed as outdated and of limited use.

To me, something like this might be a great help as the economy hits a downturn and people look to tighten purse strings. While there would be some guilt, tips are “optional”, and adjustable, so if money is tight I’m sorry but the percentage is going down. Ideally I never would have eaten out at all but if I did…

Ok, so I guess I’m also a little salty about tipping culture in general, how it has changed to a passive aggressive percentage system that now tries to push high values at the register instead of actual like, token of appreciation tips.

Listen, I can drop a bill on the table if it was good service, but now that things are so often percentage based…wether I got the burger or the steak did not change the level of service you provided, yet my expected tip has doubled with the meal price? And bringing the tip down to the value I have free is now an “insult” at “only” x percent?

I personally have taken to avoiding services that “require” tremendous tips, and the guilt that the tip makes up 90% of a persons pay rather than being a treat on top like it used to be has only emboldened that decision.

I hear the argument that tipped workers can actually walk away with much more than average wage after tips on a good night. Is this common or a happy outlier? I also hear they can get royally screwed on a bad night.

And now that we so often have the tips included in our receipts, part of digital payments instead of cash on the table, how much are they actually getting it vs the house keeping most of it or it being averaged out to the cooks and managers?

Then begets the argument, shouldn’t the cooks get a tip? They put significant labor into the food prep that the waiter delivered, but we tip the waiter only if we leave cash…

And so I hate tips and may be a little biased. I think we absolutely should be paying people wages, and tips should be token gifts granted for exceptional services or from charitable people with money to burn.

In the video game Wolfenstein, the side character Tekla goes on a wonderful rant about the continuity of consciousness.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_4oU7sB_AJ0

If you want a darker aspect, the game SOMA is all about this concept, though it is meant as a horror game, so it explores all the worst outcomes.