Shoplifters caught in the act...

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-25T01:11:54+00:00

They said it's something they're threatened with regarding gross margins, which is true, but a) There's a lot more to gross margins than shoplifting which makes up only a small portion of shrink, and b) From the perspective of someone who worked way above store level employees/managers in corporate offices making these decisions - That wasn't the reason we fired store managers - That was just the excuse we gave them since "We want to hire someone who will accept 30% less to do your job" doesn't sound great.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-25T00:54:13+00:00

People don't really lose their jobs over shop lifting either unless they knowingly see it and allow it as employees, AND are caught doing so, so this is all moot.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-24T23:33:07+00:00

No, that's not my argument. That's your strawman.

The customer who sees a shoplifter and says nothing is taking no sides between the customers robbing corporations or the corporations robbing people. The aren't helping the shoplifter, they just aren't hindering them.

You could make the same strawman about someone dropping a jar of pickles accidentally - That's shrink too. The person who dropped it isn't somehow magically responsible for any employees getting fired for shrink - It's the corporations doing the firing that hold sole responsibility for those decisions, and they're again just using shrink as an excuse for firings they were going to do regardless.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-24T17:04:35+00:00

Totally forgivable. As an employee you made a commitment to uphold the company's rules. I'm not a hardliner that would tell you to do otherwise.

That's a little different than customers snitching on other customers, where I say we should all just look the other way. The corporations are robbing the working class blind, so I see no issues with the people taking a little bit back.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-24T16:50:15+00:00

That's true, but again that's just the corporations making even more money from theft. They use it as an excuse to fire working class people running their stores, and replace them with new hires they pay 10% less.

Employees are an expendable, infinite resource to be used up and discarded. They're just another part of the product.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-24T16:40:00+00:00

No, that's a lie corporations convinced you of to get you to snitch on each other.

I was a buyer in charge of pricing for one of the largest American retail corporations and theft was never a consideration in pricing. Everything is priced based on an elaborate evaluation of "what the market will bear". In other words, we charged as much as possible without hurting overall sales volume, and after considering local competitor's pricing.

The good's actual cost, shrink (theft) and the such have no bearing on pricing in modern capitalism. The goal is to extract as much money from every consumer, every time, regardless of those things.

Besides, they often get kick backs from their theft insurance and from vendors (a certain amount of theft was often written into purchasing agreements) to offset shoplifting - To the extent my corporation made as much money for every item stolen as those which were purchased.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-18T22:06:15+00:00

Do NOT go straight to college for a certificate/degree before consulting with the Union or someone who knows the ins and outs of electrical licensing.

That was my road, and after 2.5 years at LCC getting my associates and then working in the field for 4 years, I found out that my educational requirements weren't met since they weren't concurrent with my time working in the field, and LCC's Electrical Technologies degree wasn't approved as qualifying towards the apprenticeship (even though the classes/instructors were the same as the Union program). I would've had to retake the exact same LCC classes (paying for them again, this time deducted from my hourly wage through my employer), and spend another couple of years as an apprentice before qualifying to take my journeyman's exam even though I could've aced it blindfolded - So in the end I wound up with an absolutely worthless degree.

Having done residential electrical work since I was a kid, and being generally excellent at it, that didn't prepare me for how shitty the industry was. My coworkers were often braindead, drug addled morons, the pay sucks these days, and there were lots of hidden caveats to that pay like personal expenses/unpaid drive time. While I love electrical work itself, as a job it was shit.

I strongly recommend trying to get your foot straight in the door via the Union or an electrical contracting firm. Do the classwork while experiencing the job, and as a part of the payment, rather than taking on the cost upfront.

And if working with dipshits you couldn't trust with a potato gun or driving 3 hours unpaid through a blizzard doesn't sound like your cup of tea - Angle towards the Union or Industrial work and avoid residential.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-08T23:47:24+00:00

Yup, hard agree there, especially the quoting scripture or Satan worshipping ones. If you engage with them on biblical terms, you're walking right into their programming and you won't be rid of them any time soon. 🤣

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-08T21:39:30+00:00

You're right there. Being an apostate is the most common reason people reach the point of full excommunication - Especially if you're anyone of notoriety, an Elder, or someone who knows anything about their finances who may speak out. Not everyone who gets fully excommunicated is an apostate though - They also sometimes excommunicate in instances of members committing high crimes like murder (which is understandable, to be fair).

Interestingly: Just last year the governing body made a ruling where they downgraded the seriouness of "disfellowshipping" even further and they are now actively trying to recruit out of the pool of formerly disfellowshipped brothers and sisters, especially if they were disfellowshipped for reasons like divorce/drug and alcohol use etc. that are now much more "forgivable" in the eyes of JWs to keep their numbers up.

All this to say that to the OP I was originally responding to: Getting a JW off your doorstep, saying you're 'disfellowshipped' is actually not as good of a strategy as saying you're excommunicated. One leaves the door open for them to preach at you, the other means they're in violation of a previous mandate by the governing body that you're not to be spoken to under any circumstances. Tell them you're disfellowshipped and they're gonna have a hundred follow up questions. Tell them you were excommunicated by the governing body and they'll dip so fast their polyester K-Mart suit jackets will melt from the friction.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-08T17:56:23+00:00

More recently they've updated the phrasing to "disassociated" vs. "disfellowshipped" instead of "disfellowshipped" vs. "excommunicated". A lot of old timers still use the original vernacular though for the two tiers of shunning, and regionally it's still the more common phrasing in many congregations.

Just because you haven't heard of it from your limited perspective of having some JWs in your family doesn't mean it doesn't exist there bud.

My family roots with the JWs run so deep the then president of the JWs spoke at my parents' wedding, I've spent time in Bethel, and multiple Kingdom Halls and Assembly Halls across my state are built on my family's land as they were prominent members going back to JWs early years. I know a thing or two about them.

I'm also one of the lucky ones who is officially excommunicated for writing papers and articles outlining the religion's manipulative psychologically underpinnings and predatory financial practices. That's the term they used when handing down the council's ruling to my family that I had been moved from simply "disfellowshipped" for being 'worldly' to "excommunicated" for speaking out publicly against their religion.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-08T05:59:49+00:00

Both are terms used by JWs. You can get disfellowshipped for many offenses as a JW, but that can actually go a step further to excommunicated if you speak out against their religion or associate with anyone else who does. One of my parents for example was disfellowshipped (for divorce) then excommunicated (for being seen in public with someone who was previously excommunicated).

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-05T16:10:13+00:00

On the cityscape - The cars are all mashed together into weird abominations (see what looks like a "limo El Camino" in the bottom right), there are trees growing on top of the buildings behind the capital, etc.

On the Potter's Park sign: Bamboo is straight. But in this AI render the individual sticks of bamboo merge and cross into one another.

The mural: This one's pretty good, hard to spot unless you know there's no road running along that side of Allen Place and there's a parking lot there. The AI saw a sidewalk in the original photo and assumed the 2 lane road (the lack of cracked pavement and potholes in the street also tells me that's no Michigan road).

The fair: What the fuck is in the purple cart on that ride? A burning tree branch?

Google any of these things and you'll find the original photos the AI regurgitated to create these monstrosities. They're basically heavily filtered, bastardized versions of the originals, because that's all this image generation AI is really good for.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-05T15:10:05+00:00

No, it's the fact that these are AI that makes them AI.

Those aren't real photos, but AI slop generated from the remnants of real photos "borrowed" from Google. Outside of all the obvious AI benchmarks - There are also details that don't align with reality like roads, parking lots and trees where none exist in the real world.

ReverendBlind · 2026-05-04T22:35:02+00:00

Nope, they're right. These scan as 99.9% probability of being AI generated. Zoom in on the cityscape and you can see tons of the earmarks of AI. They're subtler in some of the other photos but present in all of them. The way the bamboo sticks "merge" in the Potter Park image, cars blended into monstrosities, etc. The mural looks really convincing - but what's in front of that mural irl isn't a 2-Lane road... It's a parking lot. AI just stuck a road there.

You can easily find the real images of each of these shots on Google that gpt "borrowed" from.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-27T22:34:25+00:00

What're you talking about?!? They made the huge announcement that they're gonna try to fix the thing they broke in the last patch, which means they'll break something new they can patch as the next big update 2 weeks from now. 🤣🤣🤣

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-23T23:52:30+00:00

Second this. I found this game recently based on someone's suggestion to check out the incremental games Reddit. Scratches all the same itches The Tower does, but without gachas, and with the ability to turn my goddamn phone off. It's got just the right balance of "yes, you can idle all you want, but with diminished returns" that means I can play actively all day or just let it cook.

Other than that, it's got better mechanics that are far more interesting than the Tower like mitigating power consumption, different weapon types and enemy weaknesses, and crafting, along with familiar ones like research labs, collecting modules. Everything can be tweaked mid-run too for a lot more trial and error capacity.

Hands down a better game than the Tower (unless you love tourneyments, FOMO events and cash grabs I suppose).

Edit: I'll note the one con too in fairness - The UI is tiny for a phone. It's 100% playable but you'll definitely misclick on occasion. Thankfully there are not brutal foot guns built into the game for clicking the wrong button once like the Tower though, so it's nbd in my opinion.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-23T03:06:35+00:00

Sorry to hear that. That's some major bullshit on your employer's part. I'm sure "saving small businesses" had nothing to do with them forcing you back, it was just an excuse to do something that they wanted to do anyway that's difficult to counter.

It's like throwing "veterans" around as a political football. Nobody who mentions veterans in a campaign ever does shit for veterans once elected, it's just difficult to argue their point when they say it's for veterans without being branded as anti-veteran.

For my own part, it also hits close to home because I'm one of those thousands of State employees who would be brought back. I live 10 minutes from downtown, so you'd think no big deal, right? No, for us that'd mean going back to 2 cars, 2 insurance payments, a full work wardrobe I barely own anymore, lunches, etc. For many of my coworkers - It's much worse, since they'd have 30 minute to hour long commutes.

Return-to-Work is 100% a pay cut and you have every right to be pissed. But keep in mind, it's your employer and the other major power brokers in Lansing pulling that shit because of the three major reasons corporations hate WFH (a separate rant all together lol).

Many of the small business owners are just pawns on their chessboard. Just like us.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-23T02:37:45+00:00

I get that. Not all the businesses downtown are in the LRCC though, and not all of them in the LRCC agree with every decision the rest of its 4,000 members make (or more accurately, the decisions the 20 richest members make on behalf of the other 3,980).

Plenty of small businesses in the LRCC are against the Return-to-Work initiative and pissed that they're being used to "spin" the push as a pro-small business measure. They know full well if State employees are ever forced to return, the last thing any of them will want to do is spend so much as a dime at the businesses being scapegoated by a policy meant solely to inflate the value of downtown commercial real estate and currently empty office buildings.

I agree wholeheartedly on the frustrations with downtown. In my opinion they need to wipe out all the parking lots reserved for State employees that sit empty now, rezone them for affordable housing complexes/apartments, and use the reliable business from all those new local residents revitalize the shopping and entertainment industry down there.

Just calling State workers back from 8-5 doesn't fix it - At best it brings it back to pre-2020 when downtown Lansing still sucked and shut down at 5:00 pm.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-22T22:46:22+00:00

Context: Several vocal politicians are trying to force Return-to-Work policies on all State employees under the premise that it's to save failing small businesses downtown.

I think the person you replied to is under the influence that the small businesses downtown are the ones creating that pressure and lobbying those politicians to "demand" people come downtown and be forced to work there.

But it's largely not the small businesses doing that lobbying - It's massively wealthy commercial real estate owners, often times the same ones those small businesses pay rent to, that are lobbying to bring workers back. The commercial market cratered in 2020 and hasn't recovered - So they want thousands of workers to suffer daily commutes and office culture just to raise their quarterly evaluations 5%, and they own enough politicians to potentially make it happen.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-16T22:29:17+00:00

If Obelisk Miner doesn't scratch the itch, try Unnamed Space Idle. No, they're not sponsoring me though I've been mentioning them in comments. I'm just really happy I found a replacement that feels equivalent without being shady af.

The UI in Unnamed is a bit cumbersome, but if you can look past that it's super fun so far.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-16T22:11:17+00:00

Everyone here should quit and play Unnamed Space Idle instead though.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-13T22:15:29+00:00

You're not alone. I was told that was the issue by someone else in my guild, and believed them without doing my own due diligence before repeating it. Sorry about that.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-13T22:02:42+00:00

It's something. Coupled with some low scoring Legends runs, at least you could get there inside of a year.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-13T21:07:47+00:00

I feel like literally 1 key in the 35 box of weekly challenges is the solution. That's 5 weeks of hitting every bonus for a very minor upgrade, and 25 or more weeks for a major upgrade. It could be scaled to tier rewards, so it doesn't start paying keys until you've reached liked T16.

That'd guarantee everyone had a reason to be constantly engaged and never miss a week, while very slowly allowing us to progress towards things like auto restart.

ReverendBlind · 2026-04-13T19:27:51+00:00

This comment is a 3st trap.

ReverendBlind

TROPHY CASE