It’s what Timothy Snyder called “the politics of inevitability” in his excellent 2017 book, “The Road to Unfreedom.” I highly recommend said book to anyone who wants to understand Putin’s larger project. It’s almost like Snyder had a crystal ball that he could see into the future with.

The mistake here is in assuming that it’s either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.

The reality is that they’re great for some applications, but suck ass for others.

Here’s the deal; if it’s just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it’s me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it’s way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won’t be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.

What part about this do people not understand?

I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don’t actually have to shop for families of their own.

When I was a kid in the 80s, the language my state used was that the yellow light means “prepare to stop.”

Not sure if still true. Much has changed since then.

“Most of the world”? Really? Maybe in the developed world I guess, but definitely not in “most of the world.” In most of the world law enforcement is very much a pay for service business like any other. Well, in a lot of the world anyway.