Getting customers to do the job of scanning items and putting them in a bag is a very clever wheeze by shops. Must save them a lot of money. It worked because it seemed such a radical idea when it first came in, and customers couldn't believe they were being trusted to scan items themselves, which made them feel happy for a while. It's only later that you realise you're doing a job that someone else used to do.
You could say the same about walking around the store and taking items off the shelves. Time past that was something done for you. Doesn't mean it was better in the past.
I generally prefer the robotills because they normally have a communal queue, and so I don't have someone specifically right behind me, with their goods on the conveyor belt, waiting for me to finish packing my shopping and forcing them to wait. If it weren't for the fact that they don't work, and can't weigh things properly, then they would be perfect.
And working all day at a checkout scanning people's shopping is a bullshit job, and I glory in fewer people having to do it.
Having all human checkout tills provides no advantages to the customer or the business over a good number of auto-checkouts.
I think most people have worries about automation to some degree, especially with the next generation of AI eating into more 'middle class' tasks, but what's the alternative here - do things in a worse way deliberately to retain those jobs? Knowing it can be done better and easier won't make it a very appealing one.
Getting customers to do the job of scanning items and putting them in a bag is a very clever wheeze by shops. Must save them a lot of money. It worked because it seemed such a radical idea when it first came in, and customers couldn't believe they were being trusted to scan items themselves, which made them feel happy for a while. It's only later that you realise you're doing a job that someone else used to do.
You could say the same about walking around the store and taking items off the shelves. Time past that was something done for you. Doesn't mean it was better in the past.
I generally prefer the robotills because they normally have a communal queue, and so I don't have someone specifically right behind me, with their goods on the conveyor belt, waiting for me to finish packing my shopping and forcing them to wait. If it weren't for the fact that they don't work, and can't weigh things properly, then they would be perfect.
And working all day at a checkout scanning people's shopping is a bullshit job, and I glory in fewer people having to do it.
I’m sure that for some people it’s not a bad job in the grand scheme of things. If you aren’t particularly mobile, have health issues etc then sitting at a till all day is a job you “can” do. It might be that you can get a job near where you live in the local supermarket when you don’t have means of transport or cannot afford to find work elsewhere further away. It might be the only way you get human interaction in your life. If those jobs go the people behind the tills aren’t always going to be able to get a job that they can do.
So I never mock it as a job and I always use those manned tills in the hope that if enough people still want to use them then the shops will keep those jobs to a small extent.
Getting customers to do the job of scanning items and putting them in a bag is a very clever wheeze by shops. Must save them a lot of money. It worked because it seemed such a radical idea when it first came in, and customers couldn't believe they were being trusted to scan items themselves, which made them feel happy for a while. It's only later that you realise you're doing a job that someone else used to do.
Much of the ealry industrial revolution in textiles replaced men by machines - it impoverished handloom weavers for example but provided lots of new jobs and cheaper goods in the relatively short-term. Since the customer in the store puts the stuiff in the trolley any way...why not scan as well?
Perhaps we could create a means whereby the customer can send a list to the shop and receive the goods from a delivery method? It's magic, I tell thee!
Delivered by eco-friendly means by a young lad on a bicycle?
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I would be much interested in the financial situation. A lot of the talk centres around Musk acting like an arse and bemusing corporate driven tweaks and announcements, but with no rival yet threatening them (I assume), how is it actually performing as a business?
Getting customers to do the job of scanning items and putting them in a bag is a very clever wheeze by shops. Must save them a lot of money. It worked because it seemed such a radical idea when it first came in, and customers couldn't believe they were being trusted to scan items themselves, which made them feel happy for a while. It's only later that you realise you're doing a job that someone else used to do.
You could say the same about walking around the store and taking items off the shelves. Time past that was something done for you. Doesn't mean it was better in the past.
I generally prefer the robotills because they normally have a communal queue, and so I don't have someone specifically right behind me, with their goods on the conveyor belt, waiting for me to finish packing my shopping and forcing them to wait. If it weren't for the fact that they don't work, and can't weigh things properly, then they would be perfect.
And working all day at a checkout scanning people's shopping is a bullshit job, and I glory in fewer people having to do it.
I’m sure that for some people it’s not a bad job in the grand scheme of things. If you aren’t particularly mobile, have health issues etc then sitting at a till all day is a job you “can” do. It might be that you can get a job near where you live in the local supermarket when you don’t have means of transport or cannot afford to find work elsewhere further away. It might be the only way you get human interaction in your life. If those jobs go the people behind the tills aren’t always going to be able to get a job that they can do.
So I never mock it as a job and I always use those manned tills in the hope that if enough people still want to use them then the shops will keep those jobs to a small extent.
Self service tills are a pain if buying anything with age verification or security tags. Much better to use the manned checkouts.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
The app has held up relatively well: the advertiser portal not so much.
Getting customers to do the job of scanning items and putting them in a bag is a very clever wheeze by shops. Must save them a lot of money. It worked because it seemed such a radical idea when it first came in, and customers couldn't believe they were being trusted to scan items themselves, which made them feel happy for a while. It's only later that you realise you're doing a job that someone else used to do.
You could say the same about walking around the store and taking items off the shelves. Time past that was something done for you. Doesn't mean it was better in the past.
I generally prefer the robotills because they normally have a communal queue, and so I don't have someone specifically right behind me, with their goods on the conveyor belt, waiting for me to finish packing my shopping and forcing them to wait. If it weren't for the fact that they don't work, and can't weigh things properly, then they would be perfect.
And working all day at a checkout scanning people's shopping is a bullshit job, and I glory in fewer people having to do it.
I’m sure that for some people it’s not a bad job in the grand scheme of things. If you aren’t particularly mobile, have health issues etc then sitting at a till all day is a job you “can” do. It might be that you can get a job near where you live in the local supermarket when you don’t have means of transport or cannot afford to find work elsewhere further away. It might be the only way you get human interaction in your life. If those jobs go the people behind the tills aren’t always going to be able to get a job that they can do.
So I never mock it as a job and I always use those manned tills in the hope that if enough people still want to use them then the shops will keep those jobs to a small extent.
Self service tills are a pain if buying anything with age verification or security tags. Much better to use the manned checkouts.
That's why most places have a mixture, which works better for everyone.
It’s a country where the solution to every problem is a cry of “more money” instead of working out better solutions on the ground.
It’s a country that has forgotten that “hard cases make bad law” so when a particularly egregious situation comes up the press bay for fierce solutions so those solutions leave no room for compromise.
It’s a country where common sense and dealing with situations on a case by case basis has replaced that approach with a box ticking, rules based, layers of management approach to work, life, laws.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
It’s a country where the solution to every problem is a cry of “more money” instead of working out better solutions on the ground.
It’s a country that has forgotten that “hard cases make bad law” so when a particularly egregious situation comes up the press bay for fierce solutions so those solutions leave no room for compromise.
It’s a country where common sense and dealing with situations on a case by case basis has replaced that approach with a box ticking, rules based, layers of management approach to work, life, laws.
On your first point, that's only partly true. Often the solution to every problem is "ignore it", or "unspecified reform" will solve it.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I would be much interested in the financial situation. A lot of the talk centres around Musk acting like an arse and bemusing corporate driven tweaks and announcements, but with no rival yet threatening them (I assume), how is it actually performing as a business?
Well, we don't know how many people have paid for Twitter Blue, but we do know that (a) the company is not currently profitable, (b) the other investors who bought Twitter alongside Musk have marked down the value of their holdings by about 65%, and (c) the value of Twitter debt is trading at 50-60 cents in the dollar.
Personally, I think the Twitter debt looks quite interesting at these levels.
My nearest grocery store installed automatic tills (as I guess you call them) some months ago. Three comments:
1. That store (part of a small local chain) chose machines that only take credit and debit cards, not cash. (The machines in other stores in the area take both.)
2. A friendly checkout guy told me that, as one would expect, theft has gone up, and sometimes customers over pay, not understanding how to operate the machines.
3. And then there are the Kroger stores in the area (QFC and Fred Meyers). They are, apparently, under severe rules on alcohol purchases, requiring everyone not to just show an ID, but to take it out and have it scanned. (Since my hair has turned mostly white, it has been many years since I was asked to show an ID.)
(I don't know what the Kroger stores did wrong, and, so far, have not asked any employees why they are doing this, and whether they can go back to the old procedures any time soon.)
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
If false positives are racially biased, that will be a huge reputational hit for the shop, and could even drive them out of business via boycotts.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
I don't know if anyone noticed it, but a couple of days ago I noticed "he's Jewish" was the top trending item on the home page. A single click took you through to some of the most disgusting antisemitic bile I've ever had the misfortune to read. I can't imagine a situation where that would have happened under pre-Musk twitter.
Now, I still find Twitter an irreplaceable source of breaking news, as well as up-to-the-minute chat about various things (I've spent a lot of day reading about LK-99, today's trending topic). But I have absolutely no desire to pay a subscription fee for a site that pushes antisemitic content on me, and if I was a brand manager there is no way in hell I'd be putting ads on Twitter as it stands.
It's really hard to see where Twitter goes from here. At the moment, there's no other site or service that can match it for breaking news, and while Reddit is good for more in depth stuff it has its own problems too. But the moment something better comes along it is hard to see how Twitter survives.
My nearest grocery store installed automatic tills (as I guess you call them) some months ago. Three comments:
1. That store (part of a small local chain) chose machines that only take credit and debit cards, not cash. (The machines in other stores in the area take both.)
2. A friendly checkout guy told me that, as one would expect, theft has gone up, and sometimes customers over pay, not understanding how to operate the machines.
3. And then there are the Kroger stores in the area (QFC and Fred Meyers). They are, apparently, under severe rules on alcohol purchases, requiring everyone not to just show an ID, but to take it out and have it scanned. (Since my hair has turned mostly white, it has been many years since I was asked to show an ID.)
(I don't know what the Kroger stores did wrong, and, so far, have not asked any employees why they are doing this, and whether they can go back to the old procedures any time soon.)
Similar regime at my local Dead Fred store in Seattle.
My quasi-educated guess, is that operative(s) from WA State Liquor Control Board purchased alcohol at at least one of these stores, using bogus ID(s)?
That's classic method of enforcement. With serious penalties for retailers who sell beer, wine & spirits to minors under 21.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
But what about my point - that EM is a bean counter, rather than a scientist or technologist?
Getting customers to do the job of scanning items and putting them in a bag is a very clever wheeze by shops. Must save them a lot of money. It worked because it seemed such a radical idea when it first came in, and customers couldn't believe they were being trusted to scan items themselves, which made them feel happy for a while. It's only later that you realise you're doing a job that someone else used to do.
You could say the same about walking around the store and taking items off the shelves. Time past that was something done for you. Doesn't mean it was better in the past.
I generally prefer the robotills because they normally have a communal queue, and so I don't have someone specifically right behind me, with their goods on the conveyor belt, waiting for me to finish packing my shopping and forcing them to wait. If it weren't for the fact that they don't work, and can't weigh things properly, then they would be perfect.
And working all day at a checkout scanning people's shopping is a bullshit job, and I glory in fewer people having to do it.
I’m sure that for some people it’s not a bad job in the grand scheme of things. If you aren’t particularly mobile, have health issues etc then sitting at a till all day is a job you “can” do. It might be that you can get a job near where you live in the local supermarket when you don’t have means of transport or cannot afford to find work elsewhere further away. It might be the only way you get human interaction in your life. If those jobs go the people behind the tills aren’t always going to be able to get a job that they can do.
So I never mock it as a job and I always use those manned tills in the hope that if enough people still want to use them then the shops will keep those jobs to a small extent.
Self service tills are a pain if buying anything with age verification or security tags. Much better to use the manned checkouts.
Also a PITA if buying more than one bagful. My trolley at the weekly shop at the big Sainsbury's goes through staffed till, whereas if I'm just grabbing a couple of items at Sainsbury's Local, I'll generally use self-service.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
Two out of three ain’t bad. And if you want one of them to fail it’s the social media network echo chamber rather than the rocket ships that are going to take us to our new home on mars when we’ve fucked up earth and the electric cars that will buy some time to get the Mars Mansions built as I’m certainly not going to live in a weird space pod on Mars.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
If false positives are racially biased, that will be a huge reputational hit for the shop, and could even drive them out of business via boycotts.
Moeen makes it look so easy. I always feel like he has under achieved at test match level.
One of the most elegant batsmen to play for England since David Gower.
Mike Atherton said the other day he reckons if Moeen Ali was five years older then he would have become of England's all time best batters because his career would have coincided with with Graeme Swann's and played as a specialist batter than a jack of all trades who has batted from 1 to 9 in tests.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
But what about my point - that EM is a bean counter, rather than a scientist or technologist?
A bean counter would have had a better idea of how much Twitter was worth before bidding double, and also of how and where Twitter made and lost money before randomly cutting people and divisions.
Root yet again loses his wicket for a beautiful half century.
Declaration soon, surely?
Also - shame England have no spinner.
I think they will give Jonny the chance to get a century which he will fail at then just tell everyone to go in and slog at everything and try and pile on an extra 30 odd at worst from that. Each of the tail try and smash a few fours and lots of entertainment.
Think this is looking like a good prediction. Next up my surprise Tory majority call and a glorious 20 year rule by Rishi.
Don't forget starlink....it seems highly likely that all air traffic will switch to using it for internet access. Not just so you can watch YouTube on a plane, but because advantage of planes being able to transmit constant telemetricsz which other internet options can't really provide.
It’s a country where the solution to every problem is a cry of “more money” instead of working out better solutions on the ground.
It’s a country that has forgotten that “hard cases make bad law” so when a particularly egregious situation comes up the press bay for fierce solutions so those solutions leave no room for compromise.
It’s a country where common sense and dealing with situations on a case by case basis has replaced that approach with a box ticking, rules based, layers of management approach to work, life, laws.
Notably not mentioned much by the press covering the story is that this is a privately owned prison run by a French conglomerate.
Moeen makes it look so easy. I always feel like he has under achieved at test match level.
One of the most elegant batsmen to play for England since David Gower.
Mike Atherton said the other day he reckons if Moeen Ali was five years older then he would have become of England's all time best batters because his career would have coincided with with Graeme Swann's and played as a specialist batter than a jack of all trades who has batted from 1 to 9 in tests.
I don't know, Mo seems to so often to ease to 30, then just switch off and play a poor shot.
The details of the police's new anti-crime efforts are hidden behind a paywall, but I'm sure they have meticulous plans.
Elon Musk will launch a site under the X brand, where identifying shop lifters to policemen, from streamed security footage, get you five minutes of free porn per capture.
Moeen makes it look so easy. I always feel like he has under achieved at test match level.
One of the most elegant batsmen to play for England since David Gower.
Mike Atherton said the other day he reckons if Moeen Ali was five years older then he would have become of England's all time best batters because his career would have coincided with with Graeme Swann's and played as a specialist batter than a jack of all trades who has batted from 1 to 9 in tests.
I don't know, Mo seems to so often to ease to 30, then just switch off and play a poor shot.
Yes, but it lost momentum as he tired. Bairstow at 3 as a specialist batsman?
I don't fancy Bairstow against the new ball. What he is brilliant at is taking an older ball and warn out bowlers to the cleaners.
He does it fine in one day cricket. I think it would be worth a go.
White ball cricket is totally different. The ball doesn't move in the way it does with especially Duke red ball. White ball, if it moves much after 5-6 overs it is real surprise. Hence why Buttler is probably best bat in white ball cricket and opens the batting, but looks lost in red ball.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
But what about my point - that EM is a bean counter, rather than a scientist or technologist?
Elon's great skill - other than the ones above - is not bean counting, but realising the implications of technological change.
He saw what mobile phones were doing to battery density, and thought "wow, if this trend continues, then at some point it'll be cheaper than gas powered cars".
He saw that modern computer control technology would allow you to build rockets that used inexpensive kerosene as fuel.
So, no I don't think he's just (or even mainly) a bean counter.
Moeen makes it look so easy. I always feel like he has under achieved at test match level.
One of the most elegant batsmen to play for England since David Gower.
Mike Atherton said the other day he reckons if Moeen Ali was five years older then he would have become of England's all time best batters because his career would have coincided with with Graeme Swann's and played as a specialist batter than a jack of all trades who has batted from 1 to 9 in tests.
I don't know, Mo seems to so often to ease to 30, then just switch off and play a poor shot.
Yes, but it lost momentum as he tired. Bairstow at 3 as a specialist batsman?
I don't fancy Bairstow against the new ball. What he is brilliant at is taking an older ball and warn out bowlers to the cleaners.
He does it fine in one day cricket. I think it would be worth a go.
White ball cricket is totally different. The ball doesn't move in the way it does with especially Duke red ball. White ball, if it moves much after 5-6 overs it is real surprise. Hence why Buttler is probably best bat in white ball cricket and opens,.but looks lost in red ball.
The colour of the ball has that much effect on the dynamics??
Yes, but it lost momentum as he tired. Bairstow at 3 as a specialist batsman?
I don't fancy Bairstow against the new ball. What he is brilliant at is taking an older ball and warn out bowlers to the cleaners.
He does it fine in one day cricket. I think it would be worth a go.
White ball cricket is totally different. The ball doesn't move in the way it does with especially Duke red ball. White ball, if it moves much after 5-6 overs it is real surprise. Hence why Buttler is probably best bat in white ball cricket and opens,.but looks lost in red ball.
The colour of the ball has that much effect on the dynamics??
It isn't the colour as such, its the way its made / has to be leather is die for the white colour, but yes it does, massively. They can't shine a white ball in the way they can the red, and thr white goes softer much faster.
The pink one is different again, but less so than the white ball...Starc seems to be able to really swing the pink ball.
Yes, but it lost momentum as he tired. Bairstow at 3 as a specialist batsman?
I don't fancy Bairstow against the new ball. What he is brilliant at is taking an older ball and warn out bowlers to the cleaners.
He does it fine in one day cricket. I think it would be worth a go.
White ball cricket is totally different. The ball doesn't move in the way it does with especially Duke red ball. White ball, if it moves much after 5-6 overs it is real surprise. Hence why Buttler is probably best bat in white ball cricket and opens,.but looks lost in red ball.
The colour of the ball has that much effect on the dynamics??
Yorkshire CCC did a study and decided that white balls are trustworthy and straight but coloured balls will be sneaky and not proper.
Don't forget starlink....it seems highly likely that all air traffic will switch to using it for internet access. Not just so you can watch YouTube on a plane, but because advantage of planes being able to transmit constant telemetricsz which other internet options can't really provide.
I flew on a plane with Starlink the other day. It was (a) excellent and (b) gate-to-gate, although there were a couple of brief drop outs on the way.
(Also: when I wrote SpaceX, I was - of course - including Starlink in there.)
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
But what about my point - that EM is a bean counter, rather than a scientist or technologist?
Elon's great skill - other than the ones above - is not bean counting, but realising the implications of technological change.
He saw what mobile phones were doing to battery density, and thought "wow, if this trend continues, then at some point it'll be cheaper than gas powered cars".
He saw that modern computer control technology would allow you to build rockets that used inexpensive kerosene as fuel.
So, no I don't think he's just (or even mainly) a bean counter.
Well, part of the SpaceX story is that, on the jet back from Russia, he crunched the numbers. In Excel. And announced that he thought they could launch for less than the Russians.
And Jimmy still struggles to work out how to use the wooden thing in his hands.
I can see a 45 year olf Jimmy still terrorising Lancashire league batsman, but I still don't reckon it will be batting much higher than 11...unlike some test match lower order who would smash most league cricket all over the place.
As an aside, it's amazing how differently Starlink and Twitter are run. With Starlink, they have been very willing to support competitors like OneWeb. Even though it is probably in the interest of SpaceX's Starlink for them to fail, they've made capacity available at short notice to their competitors.
By contrast, on Twitter, they've consistently implemented measures to discourage people linking to competitors sites.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
Republican candidate with what sounds a lot like Marxist analysis (also, he was literally both manager and owner of several enterprises). Weird.
The most fundamental divide of our time is not black vs white, gay vs straight, or even Democrat vs Republican. It is the Great Reset vs the Great Uprising. It’s the managerial class vs. the everyday citizen. Aristocracy vs sovereignty. Self-governance vs monarchy. It’s a 1776 moment. https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1684564459623444482
Don't forget starlink....it seems highly likely that all air traffic will switch to using it for internet access. Not just so you can watch YouTube on a plane, but because advantage of planes being able to transmit constant telemetricsz which other internet options can't really provide.
So we are giving a Bond-level supervillain the power to access any and every aircraft in existence? Are we thinking of networking them as well? Well thank you Professor Daystrom/Dr Baltar/Admiral Shelby, but that plot point has been done to death.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
If false positives are racially biased, that will be a huge reputational hit for the shop, and could even drive them out of business via boycotts.
As an aside, it's amazing how differently Starlink and Twitter are run. With Starlink, they have been very willing to support competitors like OneWeb. Even though it is probably in the interest of SpaceX's Starlink for them to fail, they've made capacity available at short notice to their competitors.
By contrast, on Twitter, they've consistently implemented measures to discourage people linking to competitors sites.
Is that because the moat around social media isn't much and very fickle (see Threads traffic, which looks dead within 3 weeks after launch)...where as putting up internet accessing satellites isn't easily replicated.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
But what about my point - that EM is a bean counter, rather than a scientist or technologist?
Elon's great skill - other than the ones above - is not bean counting, but realising the implications of technological change.
He saw what mobile phones were doing to battery density, and thought "wow, if this trend continues, then at some point it'll be cheaper than gas powered cars".
He saw that modern computer control technology would allow you to build rockets that used inexpensive kerosene as fuel.
So, no I don't think he's just (or even mainly) a bean counter.
Um, isn't Starship using methane (methalox) to enable it to produce fuel in-situ on Mars?
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
If false positives are racially biased, that will be a huge reputational hit for the shop, and could even drive them out of business via boycotts.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
As an aside, it's amazing how differently Starlink and Twitter are run. With Starlink, they have been very willing to support competitors like OneWeb. Even though it is probably in the interest of SpaceX's Starlink for them to fail, they've made capacity available at short notice to their competitors.
By contrast, on Twitter, they've consistently implemented measures to discourage people linking to competitors sites.
Is that because the moat around social media isn't much and fickle...where as putting up internet accessing satellites isn't easily replicated.
The fewer competitors that Starlink has, the more money it will make.
As an aside, it's amazing how differently Starlink and Twitter are run. With Starlink, they have been very willing to support competitors like OneWeb. Even though it is probably in the interest of SpaceX's Starlink for them to fail, they've made capacity available at short notice to their competitors.
By contrast, on Twitter, they've consistently implemented measures to discourage people linking to competitors sites.
Is that because the moat around social media isn't much and very fickle (see Threads traffic, which looks dead within 3 weeks after launch)...where as putting up internet accessing satellites isn't easily replicated.
SpaceX is launching the satellites for its competitors. Another one went up yesterday - massive GEO one.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
Well as all da yut currently committing crimes now wear coverings like it is still height of covid.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
If false positives are racially biased, that will be a huge reputational hit for the shop, and could even drive them out of business via boycotts.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
But what about my point - that EM is a bean counter, rather than a scientist or technologist?
Elon's great skill - other than the ones above - is not bean counting, but realising the implications of technological change.
He saw what mobile phones were doing to battery density, and thought "wow, if this trend continues, then at some point it'll be cheaper than gas powered cars".
He saw that modern computer control technology would allow you to build rockets that used inexpensive kerosene as fuel.
So, no I don't think he's just (or even mainly) a bean counter.
Um, isn't Starship using methane (methalox) to enable it to produce fuel in-situ on Mars?
Yes, yes, yes
But that's now. SpaceX was formed on a vision of low cost rockets powered by kerosene.
Getting customers to do the job of scanning items and putting them in a bag is a very clever wheeze by shops. Must save them a lot of money. It worked because it seemed such a radical idea when it first came in, and customers couldn't believe they were being trusted to scan items themselves, which made them feel happy for a while. It's only later that you realise you're doing a job that someone else used to do.
You could say the same about walking around the store and taking items off the shelves. Time past that was something done for you. Doesn't mean it was better in the past.
I generally prefer the robotills because they normally have a communal queue, and so I don't have someone specifically right behind me, with their goods on the conveyor belt, waiting for me to finish packing my shopping and forcing them to wait. If it weren't for the fact that they don't work, and can't weigh things properly, then they would be perfect.
And working all day at a checkout scanning people's shopping is a bullshit job, and I glory in fewer people having to do it.
I’m sure that for some people it’s not a bad job in the grand scheme of things. If you aren’t particularly mobile, have health issues etc then sitting at a till all day is a job you “can” do. It might be that you can get a job near where you live in the local supermarket when you don’t have means of transport or cannot afford to find work elsewhere further away. It might be the only way you get human interaction in your life. If those jobs go the people behind the tills aren’t always going to be able to get a job that they can do.
So I never mock it as a job and I always use those manned tills in the hope that if enough people still want to use them then the shops will keep those jobs to a small extent.
Having to scan through a big shop (I go to the supermarket once a fortnight for a family of 5) yourself is an almighty pain in the arse and takes ages. People who do it professionally take about a quarter of the time I do. At our local Sainsbury's in New Cross they have a good rapport with the customers too, it's nice to see a friendly face. I guess I am getting old!
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine? I'm not sure they really care very much about them. No doubt the sheer number of mines and now drones that Russia is using makes things more difficult. So why doesn't the US at least provide weapons where Ukraine would have a distinct advantage i.e ATACMS?
As for the Black Sea situation, perhaps they want to leave it to Erdogan to sort out? However given that Turkey alone has more naval ships in the Black Sea than Russia why on earth should it not be possible to escort commercial ships out of Ukrainian waters? Instead we have the nauseating spectacle of Putin beneficently handing out grain to various African leaders in St Petersburg having recently been bombing silos in Ukraine. Nato reaction quieter than a pin dropping. Here's John Chipman Director General of the IISS:
'A further point on the reason why sending a humanitarian flotilla into the Black Sea comprising a coalition of the willing including some NATO nations is as sensible as it is needed by the rest of the world: Putin would not dare threaten it. If he did an aggressive air patrol over one of the ships, it would be shot down and the coalition would say so in advance. A key element of good strategy is keeping 'escalation dominance'. The West has instead been so frightened of escalation that it has under-perfomed against its huge balance of power advantage. Putin should fear escalation more than the West: Russia is losing to Ukraine. The military is disgruntled. The command is divided. No one in Moscow thinks they would win a war against NATO. A peaceful escort of ships taking grain and fertiliser to Africa and Asia is the provision of an international public good delivered by actors with good intentions. So the international community should proceed with strategic determination and quiet resolve. The ancillary advantage of this humanitarian mission would be that it could accelerate the end of the war in the victim's favour.'
As an aside, it's amazing how differently Starlink and Twitter are run. With Starlink, they have been very willing to support competitors like OneWeb. Even though it is probably in the interest of SpaceX's Starlink for them to fail, they've made capacity available at short notice to their competitors.
By contrast, on Twitter, they've consistently implemented measures to discourage people linking to competitors sites.
Is that because the moat around social media isn't much and very fickle (see Threads traffic, which looks dead within 3 weeks after launch)...where as putting up internet accessing satellites isn't easily replicated.
SpaceX is launching the satellites for its competitors. Another one went up yesterday - massive GEO one.
20 stories tall, that one: I believe by several tonnes the largest commercial satellite ever launched.
The app is working incredibly smoothly for me now. The hysteria about the whole thing falling over because of Elon Musk firing people seems like a distant memory.
I am sympathetic to much of what Musk says he is trying to do, but I think something has gone very wrong with Twitter. I keep getting my feed filled up with loads of 'suggested posts' which are often of dubious quality, and which I never got before when I could just look at content from people I followed.
Part of the problem is Twitter Blue: basically, you are getting shown posts by people who paid to be on the platform. Which feels icky to me.
Does not current trajectory of Twitter, or whatever it's called for next 15 minutes, reflect reality, that Elon Musk's actual expertise is actually BEAN COUNTING extraordinaire - NOT science or technology?
Musk is a brilliant and driven man, who gets his people to work at extremely high levels.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
But what about my point - that EM is a bean counter, rather than a scientist or technologist?
Elon's great skill - other than the ones above - is not bean counting, but realising the implications of technological change.
He saw what mobile phones were doing to battery density, and thought "wow, if this trend continues, then at some point it'll be cheaper than gas powered cars".
He saw that modern computer control technology would allow you to build rockets that used inexpensive kerosene as fuel.
So, no I don't think he's just (or even mainly) a bean counter.
Um, isn't Starship using methane (methalox) to enable it to produce fuel in-situ on Mars?
Full face shutoff on a pintle injector proved key to a cheap, restartable, deep throttling LOX/Kero engine.
The FFSC* Methalox engine is about getting both thrust and ISP high enough to do relatively fast transits to Mars and have a fuel that it is locally makeable.
*It’s strange that Blue Origin haven’t gone FFSC. The hard bit is gas/gas stable combustion. Which they needed for their chosen cycle. So why not go all the way?
Comments
I think most people have worries about automation to some degree, especially with the next generation of AI eating into more 'middle class' tasks, but what's the alternative here - do things in a worse way deliberately to retain those jobs? Knowing it can be done better and easier won't make it a very appealing one.
So I never mock it as a job and I always use those manned tills in the hope that if enough people still want to use them then the shops will keep those jobs to a small extent.
What kind of retarded country is this?
Edit - although now Bairstow is out, perhaps?
It’s a country that has forgotten that “hard cases make bad law” so when a particularly egregious situation comes up the press bay for fierce solutions so those solutions leave no room for compromise.
It’s a country where common sense and dealing with situations on a case by case basis has replaced that approach with a box ticking, rules based, layers of management approach to work, life, laws.
Jack Taylor out for 98.
Would have been a first century in about five years.
Personally, I think the Twitter debt looks quite interesting at these levels.
1. That store (part of a small local chain) chose machines that only take credit and debit cards, not cash. (The machines in other stores in the area take both.)
2. A friendly checkout guy told me that, as one would expect, theft has gone up, and sometimes customers over pay, not understanding how to operate the machines.
3. And then there are the Kroger stores in the area (QFC and Fred Meyers). They are, apparently, under severe rules on alcohol purchases, requiring everyone not to just show an ID, but to take it out and have it scanned. (Since my hair has turned mostly white, it has been many years since I was asked to show an ID.)
(I don't know what the Kroger stores did wrong, and, so far, have not asked any employees why they are doing this, and whether they can go back to the old procedures any time soon.)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/29/home-office-secretly-backs-facial-recognition-technology-to-curb-shoplifting
Now, I still find Twitter an irreplaceable source of breaking news, as well as up-to-the-minute chat about various things (I've spent a lot of day reading about LK-99, today's trending topic). But I have absolutely no desire to pay a subscription fee for a site that pushes antisemitic content on me, and if I was a brand manager there is no way in hell I'd be putting ads on Twitter as it stands.
It's really hard to see where Twitter goes from here. At the moment, there's no other site or service that can match it for breaking news, and while Reddit is good for more in depth stuff it has its own problems too. But the moment something better comes along it is hard to see how Twitter survives.
Chief constables pledge more resources to tackle shoplifting and car theft
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/uk-police-pledge-investigate-every-crime-2023-3cv82w6t7 (£££)
Chief constables lurk on pb?
My quasi-educated guess, is that operative(s) from WA State Liquor Control Board purchased alcohol at at least one of these stores, using bogus ID(s)?
That's classic method of enforcement. With serious penalties for retailers who sell beer, wine & spirits to minors under 21.
SpaceX will change the world. Tesla (while he was not the founder) would never have succeeded to the extent it did without Musk.
But Twitter...
That's a much harder call. It's very hard to shrink your way to success. It's also hard to turn something into the everywhere app, while cutting your engineering resource.
And there are legal issues incoming: in particular, Twitter has now become the new hub for pirated movie content. You want to see a stream of Oppenheimer or Barbie... well, Twitter's now the place.
Which is ironic when you think about it
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/29/home-office-secretly-backs-facial-recognition-technology-to-curb-shoplifting
He saw what mobile phones were doing to battery density, and thought "wow, if this trend continues, then at some point it'll be cheaper than gas powered cars".
He saw that modern computer control technology would allow you to build rockets that used inexpensive kerosene as fuel.
So, no I don't think he's just (or even mainly) a bean counter.
The pink one is different again, but less so than the white ball...Starc seems to be able to really swing the pink ball.
(Also: when I wrote SpaceX, I was - of course - including Starlink in there.)
That doesn't happen too often.
I can see a 45 year olf Jimmy still terrorising Lancashire league batsman, but I still don't reckon it will be batting much higher than 11...unlike some test match lower order who would smash most league cricket all over the place.
By contrast, on Twitter, they've consistently implemented measures to discourage people linking to competitors sites.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
Weird.
The most fundamental divide of our time is not black vs white, gay vs straight, or even Democrat vs Republican. It is the Great Reset vs the Great Uprising. It’s the managerial class vs. the everyday citizen. Aristocracy vs sovereignty. Self-governance vs monarchy. It’s a 1776 moment.
https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1684564459623444482
GOP lapping it up, of course.
I think David and Tendulkar may have added up to that at the end of Dravid's career, but they of course were specialist batsmen.
Could be the DfE.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
But that's now. SpaceX was formed on a vision of low cost rockets powered by kerosene.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/cricket/test-matches/england-v-australia-betting-32503518
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine? I'm not sure they really care very much about them. No doubt the sheer number of mines and now drones that Russia is using makes things more difficult. So why doesn't the US at least provide weapons where Ukraine would have a distinct advantage i.e ATACMS?
As for the Black Sea situation, perhaps they want to leave it to Erdogan to sort out? However given that Turkey alone has more naval ships in the Black Sea than Russia why on earth should it not be possible to escort commercial ships out of Ukrainian waters? Instead we have the nauseating spectacle of Putin beneficently handing out grain to various African leaders in St Petersburg having recently been bombing silos in Ukraine. Nato reaction quieter than a pin dropping. Here's John Chipman Director General of the IISS:
'A further point on the reason why sending a humanitarian flotilla into the Black Sea comprising a coalition of the willing including some NATO nations is as sensible as it is needed by the rest of the world: Putin would not dare threaten it. If he did an aggressive air patrol over one of the ships, it would be shot down and the coalition would say so in advance. A key element of good strategy is keeping 'escalation dominance'. The West has instead been so frightened of escalation that it has under-perfomed against its huge balance of power advantage. Putin should fear escalation more than the West: Russia is losing to Ukraine. The military is disgruntled. The command is divided. No one in Moscow thinks they would win a war against NATO. A peaceful escort of ships taking grain and fertiliser to Africa and Asia is the provision of an international public good delivered by actors with good intentions. So the international community should proceed with strategic determination and quiet resolve. The ancillary advantage of this humanitarian mission would be that it could accelerate the end of the war in the victim's favour.'
Or is that the odds?
The FFSC* Methalox engine is about getting both thrust and ISP high enough to do relatively fast transits to Mars and have a fuel that it is locally makeable.
*It’s strange that Blue Origin haven’t gone FFSC. The hard bit is gas/gas stable combustion. Which they needed for their chosen cycle. So why not go all the way?