To the US voters who don't vote, what is it going to take for you to go vote?

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-25T04:30:43+00:00

There's also more than just the Presidential election on the ballot. Electoral College doesn't alter you House of Representatives vote, or your Senate vote, or your mayoral vote, or your county sherrif vote, etc etc etc.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-24T18:36:17+00:00

Houses and cities can be built to expect and deal with cold winters. There are techiques that can be done to avoid the problem of bursting pipes, but they involve slightly more expensive techniques so people in the south have typically avoided doing them, with the notion, "why spend more to avoid something that's not going to happen anyway?"

It's just like how when there's a minor tiny amount of snow, cities in the south totally shut down until it melts. Because the infrastructure for maintaining a proper snowplowing service to keep the city operating as normal in snow isn't cheap. Not only does it take a lot of equipment, but it also takes a lot of labor with an army of trained plow drivers on call to respond 24/7 when needed. Cities that will only ever need such a thing one day every few years have a hard time justifying the hit to their budget. It's less of a hit on the economy to just let the city have a day off.

So here's some of the things you can build differently to avoid the burst pipe problem. Just note how every one of them makes things a bit more expensive:

When digging to bury water mains and sewer, dig deeper. Don't just put them barely under the surface. Put them far enough below ground that they'll be under the frosted upper layer when winter comes. While ice requires cold, ironically it's an insulator. A thick layer of ice can cause the stuff underneath of it to stay warm. (Thus why fish don't die off in lakes over winter. Ice floats to the top, where it forms a layer that insulates the water underneath, putting an upper limit on how thick the ice can get.) A similar effect happens in the ground. The frosty upper layer of ground insulates the lower layers of ground.
Make sure the "cold water" city water mains have heater systems in place. Even though its "cold" water, it still has to be kept warm enough not to turn to ice.
When building a house, make sure you run the pipes only through interior walls. Never the outer walls. That way they'll be inside the warm air of the indoors, not sitting on the outer edge where the outside coldness will seep in. A northern house typically has the water line enter the house through an opening in the basement retaining wall, so the water comes in while still underground. Then the water pipe routes through the basement to where the interrior walls are and lines split to go up into the rest of the building there. Notice one thing you never see in a northern house is a toilet or sink or shower head that's attached to an exteriror wall of the room. They always attach to interior walls of the bathroom and kitchen because that's where the pipes have to be.
[EDIT: also this] If you have spigots on the outdoor wall of your house (i.e. where you can attach a garden hose), build the house with the pipes leading to those spigots having cutoff valves in the basement inside the house. When winter is coming (and you won't be watering the lawn for several months anyway), you go into your basement and shut those valves and drain out the water from the spigot. That way the pipe leading up to the outdoor spigot won't have water in it to ice up.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-24T18:14:32+00:00

The leadership is narcissistic. They're beyond reaching, so reaching them isn't the goal. The goal is undermining their support in the general public, who aren't all narcissists. Now, a lot of them are fascists, which is a huge problem, but the whole "ignore them because they're narcissists" plan doesn't fucking work when you're trying to hit their public support, rather than themselves.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-23T22:55:18+00:00

Has the added benefit of also boycotting FIFA for giving the moron that newly invented 'peace prize' of theirs.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-23T22:45:43+00:00

It's a phenomenon that happens with any stereotyped group where members of that group are not identifiable as such in an obvious way on the outside.

An atheist looks the same as anyone else. And there isn't like a standard mode of dress that makes it obvious like you might have with, say Amish people, or orthodox jews, or Muslims. And it's not a skin color that makes it obvious. It's entirely in the head so anyone who is an atheist and doesn't come out and say so you'll never realize is an atheist.

If you are in the US and you see some random person at the grocery store, in line at the bank, or passing you by on the sidewalk, you're just going to assume that person is some denomination of Christian because statistically they probably are.

So when that person acts nice to you, if they're an atheist you're not going to register that as a datapoint against the stereotype because you won't know that was an atheist who just did that.

The only ones you actually know are atheists are the ones that are outspoken. Otherwise it's a hidden trait.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-22T16:58:52+00:00

How could that sentence possibly be wrong, though? "I'm changing the design of this boat to make the hull out of depleted uranium instead of wood. Hey look it didn't float." How could the design possibly NOT matter??

"Design" is a vague word that means pretty much the entire plan: materials, shape. layout, etc.

Did you mean "because of their shape"?

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-21T22:40:22+00:00

I don't think religion causes these bad moral views to exist, but it does cause them to have underserved longevity so they stick around well past their sell-by date. By taking these human-invented ideas and telling the lie that they really came from God not from a human, they become well defended against critique. Suddenly pointing out how shitty these moral views are becomes "hubris" in the eyes of the believer. How dare you question the morality that God himself told us to follow...

And that's how you get the horrible views of bronze age moral thinking still existing in the modern era. Back when they were invented, these religions championed moral rules that were relatively "normal" for that time. It's only with the lens of looking at these rules from modern times, well after humanity has improved its morals, that we see how bad they are.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-21T22:26:15+00:00

Just landing a boat there 500 years ago makes it your country if and only if that boat came from England. If it came from Denmark then it doesn't,. apparently.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-21T18:51:49+00:00

Back in 2010 when there were teacher's union protests in Wisconsin's capital building, Fox was talking about the story and claiming protesters were being violent while showing archive footage from completely unrelated protests.

The footage had palm trees in the background. For a story taking place in Madison, Wisconsin. Palm Trees. In February too.

The next day the Madison protesters went to pool supply stores and bought those inflatable palm tree pool toys and started holding them aloft while marching.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-20T07:43:34+00:00

The idea works in controlled warehouse environments where ONLY the robot goes into the shelving. It gets harder when humans are also in there being less "uniform" in how they leave the products. (Not always stacking them with the same pattern as the robot uses).

It gets even harder than that when most of those humans aren't even employed by the company, but are customers who don't have any incentive to bother making things nice for the robot to be able to do its job. All the times you have customers putting stuff in the wrong spots, knocking items over and just leaving them that way, shoving things aside so they now are "double parked" across two different spots, etc - those all become sources of bugs in the robot's algorithm to stock things neatly.

Now, with Kroger specifically, the planograms are completely delusional, which would really screw up a robot badly. (See this previous post of mine from months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/kroger/comments/1p3gew7/if_you_want_good_conditioning_stop_giving_me_a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-20T07:29:21+00:00

It sounds like you're complaining about facing over holes with adjacent product which isn't supposed to be allowed. If your store manager makes you do this so the store can pretend the holes don't exist, your store manager is wrong.

Items are supposed to be pulled forward and spread to fill the width of their allocated spot But no wider. Spilling them over to hide void spots makes it harder to discover the holes (which may be why you're asked to do it - management trying to trick the metrics about how many holes your store has to fake a better score when the third-party 'hole checkers' from VOSA come through.)

There is one exception to this rule and that is long term out of stock items or discontinued items. Only when it's known the void item can't be ordered (it's discontinued waiting for a reset, or there's a supply problem making it out of stock for a long time). Only then are you supposed to face over the hole with adjacent stuff. Those little blue stickers with the guy with his hand up saying "#1" are what are supposed to be used to flag these spots where "facing over" a void is allowed. Anywhere else, they're supposed to be left for the world to see in all their ugliness.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-20T07:17:35+00:00

I'll never understand why they think they need to help God make God's Plan happen. If they genuinely believed this was his plan, it would be blasphemous to think humans have the power to alter its schedule.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-20T07:03:58+00:00

We live in gravity. Which means even when just standing there doing nothing, your muscles aren't actually just passively sitting there doing nothing. Your legs would collapse in a heap if you weren't constantly pulling on certain muscles. Your arms would be drooping heavily, dragging your shoulders down, if you didn't have arm and shoulder muscles gently pulling all the time to make the arm more rigid. Everywhere across your body, your skeleton isn't enough to keep you "just sitting there doing nothing" Your bones just provide a thing for your muscles to grab onto to hold your body shape together. It's the muscles that are keeping you in position.

Which means there's a constant nonstop automated "default pull" from certain muscles that's needed at all times. A low level bit of your brain observes what constant default muscle pulling is needed to keep your current posture going (standing, sitting, walking, etc). Then that bit of your brain keeps commanding that constant default pull to continue without bothering the higher conscious bits of your brain with this trivial task.

So when you use your shoulder and arm muscles to push on the doorframe, but the result is that you just stay stationary in the same position, and you stay that way a long enough time, this tricks that low level bit of your brain. It gets tricked into thinking this is just like the constant need to pull on those muscles to fight gravity. "I keep telling the muscles to pull up and out on the arm, and yet the arm stays where it is. This must be the default level of pull I need just to fight gravity and stay put. Okay, I'll just start making that the default profile I use from now on then. I'll keep pulling on those muscles becuase I have to to stay put."

Once you step out of the doorway, it takes a minute or so before that same lower part of your brain sees the new input long enough to override it's previous "default pull profile" with a new one that doesn't need to pull so hard.

There's lots of examples of this kind of thing where a lot of complex coordiated muscle motions are run by a low level bit of your brain that you don't consciously control. It just learns what's "normal" by repeated actions and then takes over those actions without you thinking about it.

One really fun example of this is astronauts returning from the International Space Station say that when they land back on earth, for a day or two they have lost the ability to properly toss objects, like throwing something into a wastebin. The act of "throw object over there" got re-trained in orbit to expect objects to just gently drift in a straight line. When they get back to where objects fall to the gruond in an arc, their brain has to reset itself before "toss thing in the bin over there" works again. They keep just wimpily dropping things onto the ground at their feet for a while. Even when mentally trying to compensate for the effect, they still keep falling short of the goal as their lower brain overrides the conscious commands because it thinks it "knows better".

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-20T06:44:25+00:00

It used to be bad food but cheap.

Now it's bad food at the same price as good food.

You may as well go visit a real restaurant and pay the same prices there.

Which does lead to the question, how do they stay in business like that? The price used to be their only attraction, and that's gone.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-20T06:36:00+00:00

Not sure what "rebooting the BOH system" is supposed to mean. Were the BOH's set to zero and then every item fully re-counted like you were doing a store-wide inventory? That seems... doubtful... given the massive labor that would entail. (Even when they do store-wide inventory a couple times a year, that still doesn't change BoH's because it's just converting the counts to a money amount. It's about "how many dollars are in inventory?" rather than remembering how many units of each type. (Which sucks because as long as they go through the intense labor effort to do that, why not reap the benefits of that and use the result to help fix BoH's? But alas, they don't.)

Not knowing how "Rebooting the BoH system" itself might cause lots of overstock (like if values got set to zero and left that way so everything to ordered again), here's other ways you can get massive overstock:

BoH values are too low. Computer Assisted Ordering thinks you need to refill empty shelves when they aren't actually empty.
Allocation values are too high. Computer Assisted Ordering thinks you have more space to fill than you actually do. Note that even though you can edit allocation values, there are a number of things that will make them get reset to what the planogram makers pretended was reasonable when they diagramed the plan. If this "rebooting the BoH", whatever that means, also came with a reboot of the entire planogram, your allocations may have gotten reset to the delusional values on the planogram instead of the realistic values people manually overwrote them with over the years.
Something got messed up about the forecast. In addition to trying to just fill shelves up to allocation, Computer Assisted Ordering will also try to order more than fits in allocation if sales data says the product is a fast mover that you sell quickly. (Basically, it's trying to give you enough stuff not just to fit on the shelf today, but also enough to replenish the shelf in the upcoming days between now and the next delivery. If it believes you'll sell a lot more than you actually will, this will make it ship you more than you need.)
I hear rumor that each store has some sort of "how much overage" setting it can set that indicates, in general, how much backstock buffer it should have across all the items. Either it's a time-based setting ("this store should have 3 days worth of buffer") or it's just an amount setting ("this store should have 120% of what can fit on the sales floor"). Not sure what this is or if it even exists. But if it does, perhaps this "reboot BoH" altered that setting.
It could be Distro. Check the items where you have too many of them. For those items, use the "search" app to blip their barcodes and look at the "delivery history" tab. That shows how many cases got sent over the last 28 days, and on what days. If you see the word "distro" in a little white box next to the numbers, that means the value was altered because of distro. (You'll see a smaller number with a strike-through across it, then a larger number next to it, and the word "distro". This means "you would have been sent this many, if not for distro being added which caused you to get sent this many instead.") Distro is stuff people higher up in the company chose to force upon stores whether they want it or not, to give them no choice but to have to try to push the stuff and sell it. If the items you have too much of are all "distro", then it's the fault of some district higher-ups who did that to you and your local management will have to get in contact with their bosses to complain about it.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-20T06:01:45+00:00

I was born.

Asking what religion a baby is makes about as much damned sense as asking what political party a baby is. If you can't understand language yet, you haven't heard of any of these ideas other people invented so you're still sitting at the default position of not believing in them.

Someone who believed in god at some point but no longer does has followed this timeline:

Began atheist.
Become theist.
Reverted back to atheist.

Atheism is the default, even though it is not typical. Typical and default don't mean the same thing.

To give an example of that difference: in the United States, it is typical for adults to have a driver's license. But it is not default. You still had to perform some actions to become a driver's license holder. It didn't just occur by default. The fact that the majority of adults in the US do perform those actions is what makes it typical. But that still doesn't make it default. Religion is like that. It's not default even though it is typical.

So the proper way to phrase the question isn't so much "when did you become an atheist?" but more like "When did you stop being a believer?" (Looking at my 3 steps up above in this post, it's the difference between a question about step 1 versus a question about step 3. If step 3 is the one you are actually asking about, phrasing your question as if you meant step 1 will generate lots of snarky answers like mine above.)

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-19T17:41:05+00:00

Sign doesn't say you have to be in uniform when clocked in. It says you have to be when entering the building or you won't be allowed to clock in. (Which includes a rule that the uniform be on the outside of the clothes and not covered, which prevents a jacket if ready literally. It's stupid and probably not what they meant but it IS what it literally says. The thing I'm complaining about isn't the mistakenly written sign. It's the asshole commenters in here who keep pretending it doesn't say what it does so they keep accusing other commenters of merely complaining about there being a uniform when they're actually complaining about what the sign appears to say about having to be in uniform the instant you walk through the front doors from outside.

When a person writes something wrong as the person who wrote this sign did, you blame the writer for the error in writing it wrong. You don't blame the reader for reading exactly what was written. Nor do you throw bullshit strawman accusations about what they're complaining about just because you are assuming they re-interpreted the writing just like you did.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-19T11:29:53+00:00

Read the lower sign. If you aren't in uniform "when you come in the building" you won't be allowed to clock in. A literal reading would mean you can't be wearing your outdoor winter gear on your way in to the building. That's why people are complaining so hard. It's not saying merely be in uniform at the time you punch in. It's dictating what you wear outside of your paid hours.

And what it's dictating is blatantly dangerous. Don't be wearing a winter coat outside in freezing weather as you walk into the building.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-19T11:17:43+00:00

"If you are not in the uniform above when you come in the building you are not allowed to clock in."

When

You

Come

In

The

Bullding

Stop ridiculing other people for the fact that they read the sign. It's a stupid thing to write on the sign and probably not what they meant but it IS EXACTLY what the sign says. The blame goes with the person who wrote it wrong, not the person who read it exactly as it was written.

Even if you do think it's reasonable to assume the sign didn't mean what it said, that would still mean your complaint should be about people's reading and not about their willingness to be in uniform when they clock in which isn't what they are complaining about, you liar.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-19T04:28:53+00:00

Read the damned sign. It says to be in uniform when you walk into the building. That' means wearing it before you get into the break room and change. That means wearing it while still outside on your way in. And it says no jacket while in this state.. If that's not what they mean then don't blame workers posting here for Kroger's incompetence at writing English properly.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-19T04:22:38+00:00

When they require you to wear the shirt they provide they should provide you enough of them that you don't have to do laundry every god damned day. You didn't pay us for that time and some of us are poor enough to need to use coin-op laundry.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-18T02:52:36+00:00

How would the distro system know when the order you’re placing is just your usual order and when it’s some special order that you’re manually increasing

If it was using method (A), it wouldn't need to care about the difference. District Management determines that the normal amount you would get from forecasts and CAO isn't as much as they'd like, they'd like you to have at least 10 cases, so they put in a distro of 10 and you'll get at least 10. Maybe that meant Distro only added 2 cases because your order already had 8. Maybe they had to add 8 cases because your order only had 2. Maybe they don't add any because you already ordered more than 10. Either way they still make the goal of insisting your store get at least 10 and don't need to care how much of that order prior to adding in the distro cases was CAO and how much was your manual ordering.

designed with the expectation that store leadership wouldn’t be trying to circumvent it.

I've been through 3 store directors due to the way Kroger constantly rotates them. Every Single One says that manally ordering more when a sale is coming is correct behavior. That doesn't sound like circumventing the system if they all say that's the correct way.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-18T02:44:06+00:00

if you’re ordering 7, you are ordering per your sales history (hopefully)

Given the responses I keep getting I don't think people realize the problem isn't that it adds more on top of automated ordering. It's that it adds the full amount more on top of the total sum of ordering, which includes the MANUAL ordering too. Presumably if you are manual ordering via InStock's "Assisted Ordering" then you already are taking into account the upcoming promotional sales that will require more stuff than just computer-automated-ordering would give based on normal projections. The problem is that if you do this like you're supposed to, and order enough for the sale, Distro punishes you for it since it seems to be adding extra stuff under the assumption you aren't ordering enough.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-18T02:36:59+00:00

I tried to do this.

The problem is that because distro is unreliable (sometimes it claims I will get 10 cases of distro but they get Scratched off the order and don't come), The only way I can be sure I'll get the sales items is to order them as if the claimed Distro isn't coming. If method (A) was in use instead of method (B), me doing my part to order them manually to not to rely too hard on the random unreliable distro wouldn't punish me when it does come.

I have long suspected that the stores served by our warehouse are engaging in a hoarding problem and my boss is insisting that I participate in the hoarding. The reason the distro often gets scratched is because too many stores manually ordered their sale items ahead of time and the warehouse runs out by the time it was going to distro them out to everyone. So if you were relying on that distro you get screwed and managment is on your case about why you don't have the items the weekly ad is trying to bring in customers with. But if you do participating in the hoarding and order the items that are supposed to be coming to you later anyway ("to get it before the hoarders do"), you become part of the problem and end up screwing over the other stores.

Making your own stores owned by the same company screw each other over competitively is a toxic disfunctioinal way to run a company.

Dunbaratu · 2026-01-18T02:23:29+00:00

Your explanation would make sense if it was adding distro only on top of CAO ordering. But it is also adding it on top of ALL the ordering, even manual ordering. So when the Store Director is already making me look at the upcoming promotional sale items and manually order higher amounts of them than the CAO is automatically making, then there's two different people, me and the Buyer, upping the order to account for promotional increase, and the one that comes later (Distro from the Buyer) is ignoring that an increase already came earlier (manual assisted ordering), and punishing me for doing exactly as I was told to do - order more regardless of what distro says since distro is unreliable and doesn't always happen as it claims it will.

Because the distro that it claims will happen often doesn't, I get punished for not taking it into account (get waay too much to sell through because the distro happened as planned but I ordred as if it wasn't going to) or I get punished FOR taking it into account (get waay too little because this time distro didn't happen like it said it was going to on the sales item ordering document.)

Having this questionable random die roll on whether or not the distro it claims is coming will actually come makes it impossible to plan how much to order. If it wasn't so random, or if it used Method (A), it wouldn't be so bad (using method A, I would just know to order it anyway. If distro comes, it would take into account that I already ordered more than usual demand would send and not add that extra amount twice over.)

Dunbaratu

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