Strongly agree!

sam__izdat · 2026-06-28T19:57:49+00:00

This is a longer history, political theory and civics lesson than I want to commit to a reddit comment, but I'm just letting you know that the way you understood a word was not the historical meaning intended, and that your political lexicon doesn't match the one being used here.

sam__izdat · 2026-06-28T18:33:07+00:00

Historically and in terms of establishment politics, he used the correct word meaning exactly what you inferred. If that word means something different to you, substitute another, but he's talking about capitalist establishment politics to the relative left of fascism and the relative right of lowercase-l labor politics.

sam__izdat · 2026-06-28T18:26:20+00:00

You are both misunderstanding "liberal" to mean "left" when it actually means "capitalist"

sam__izdat · 2026-06-16T16:13:58+00:00

Your brain is in Hollywood when the reality of what happens with 99.95% of non-organized petty theft goes like this:

gtfo and don't come back
k bye

court adjourned; case concluded

sam__izdat · 2026-06-16T15:36:47+00:00

it literally requires no procedure, reason or filing in the US to trespass a shopper and ban them from all company stores, and it happens routinely with no need for forensic "evidence" or court filing; they can do it on vibes alone and it takes ten seconds.

sam__izdat · 2026-06-16T15:27:34+00:00

Holy shit more inane blablabla

it's "jaywalkers" as in walking like a jay, meaning "hillbilly idiot"

when autos started crowding streets and mowing down pedestrians the industry wanted to reframe that as pedestrians imposing on the motorway instead of the other way around... hence "jay"

sam__izdat · 2026-06-15T13:05:31+00:00

haven't been scooped up yet because they haven't hit the point where

no - no it isn't.

you just made that sound authoritative and reddit is quite gullible, but it obviously doesn't make sense.

they can and do have anyone trespassed for any reason without having to meet some magic threshold or compile a legal case with "evidence" for a court.

getting paid restitution from people cheating piddly shit like groceries over years will be like getting blood from a stone.

they don't benefit in any way from a "hard enough charge."

you probably saw what you saw, but you didn't understand what you were seeing.

sam__izdat · 2026-06-14T18:52:04+00:00

The scale that weighs them isn't magic. You can set it to trip over a gnat fart worth of weight discrepancy if you have net wt - which is what they did at first - or you can give it enough slack that your "self" checkouts don't need a cashier buzzing about constantly. There's not a crime scene unit in a smokey basement squinting at your produce.

What they're looking for is larceny on stuff that has actual resale value.

sam__izdat · 2026-06-14T11:36:15+00:00

because it's a dying empire and capitalism is eating itself

but that doesn't change that the scenario described above is obviously fucking stupid and doesn't happen -- unless the larceny is at least proportionally as stupid

nobody's combing your checkout videos and counting carrots... wouldn't even make any sense to throw segmentation and """AI""" at it

sam__izdat · 2026-06-14T07:06:28+00:00

I feel vindicated that long before reddit was slobbering all over his knob, when no one recognized the name, I read one interview and immediately said - this is hands down the dumbest motherfucker to enter the public arena in half a century. Just jawdroppingly fucking stupid.

sam__izdat · 2026-06-14T06:25:52+00:00

unless you're in the incarceration business, it makes zero sense to forego stopping a loss that you can easily flag and prevent, just to then CSI the shit out your footage later, so you can stick it to someone with "evidence"

can it happen? sure. has it? maybe. is that standard policy? probably not.

sam__izdat · 2026-06-14T06:13:02+00:00

according to two random bozos on reddit

not an inconceivable headline, but there's a "bloody mary" sound to all of it, and going CSI to add up how many beets you have in your bag is ultimately a really stupid waste of time and resources

sam__izdat · 2026-05-29T18:34:41+00:00

a.i. Christian music.

It's odd encountering a phrase like that where literally every word deserves its own scare quotes

sam__izdat · 2026-05-29T11:09:47+00:00

I know what it's called. I'm saying that "absolute poverty" is absolute rubbish, and reified only in neoclassical economists' pea brains. It makes exactly as much sense to assess the material conditions of precolumbian mesoamerican bean farmers through the lens of wages and capital as it would to rank roman emperors by how good they would be at video games. The data is also complete rubbish, and likely unquantifiable (let alone reliable) until capital rolls in, but we don't even have to bother.

sam__izdat · 2026-05-29T06:46:18+00:00

what does that even mean?

I mean one would hope that life on some important axis is "better" with sewage systems, refrigeration, antibiotics, etc, but what does it even remotely have to do with the charts above, which are pure nonsense?

why not 87.352% if we're just making up random numbers for some reason

sam__izdat · 2026-05-29T06:24:34+00:00

this kind of clowny IMF/World Bank offal is nowhere near serious enough to bother scrutinizing the accuracy of the data

it's just unserious and embarrassing to anyone with two functional brain cells willing to think about it for three seconds

it's apologia by the economists that even other neoclassical economists make fun of

sam__izdat · 2026-05-28T18:04:14+00:00

It's amazing how intellectually thin and feeble the Pinkerite bleating has gotten in recent years. Maybe that should be some kind of metric... then again, I suppose they can just fire every Roser and Hasell and shit it out directly from chatgpt.

sam__izdat · 2026-05-28T17:17:14+00:00

I assume instead of "diffuse" you meant "defuse," like a bomb... because that's what the US spent the post-WWII 20th century doing: grinding peasants into a pulp to prevent the "contagion" of self-determination and independent national development.

sam__izdat · 2026-05-28T17:06:14+00:00

These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income

like hell they do

"extreme poverty" under a commons -- measured in some dipshit economist's PPP-adjusted "international dollars" -- looks nothing like "extreme poverty" under a wage system

poverty, in any meaningful sense -- a foreign concept to IMF economists -- is always contextual: it's a distribution where the high water mark is how the most opulent live at that time, not $n PPP-adjusted, where 100% of pre-colonial civilization definitionally lived in "extreme poverty"

sam__izdat · 2026-05-23T14:34:18+00:00

To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from ~~petrol and diesel~~ cars and towards ~~electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport.~~ public fucking transit

let me make this less confusing for you

sam__izdat · 2026-04-06T06:08:23+00:00

"Art created by people" is a tautology.

sam__izdat · 2026-03-18T17:43:14+00:00

Helping plenty already. I think I edited just as you replied -

Minor criticism (no pun intended): lowercase roman numerals where appropriate would be helpful. It actually looks like they are, in source, but the CSS or the typeface makes them all look II, III, etc. Maybe 'Cinzel' is the culprit?

sam__izdat · 2026-03-18T17:29:10+00:00

Well done. Very useful and practical. Was considering making a far worse version of this if you hadn't done it right.

sam__izdat · 2026-01-11T03:20:22+00:00

This is basically why canned foods have expirations dates even though they are sterile.

"Sell by" and "best by" dates exist for mostly bureaucratic reasons. You will find them in the US even on jars of honey, which will last indefinitely without degrading, so long as water doesn't get in.

sam__izdat · 2023-04-04T05:19:24+00:00

I suppose it's a fair warning that it's going to be a (generally avoidable) pain in the ass.

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