Several things can be true at once. We don’t have to be all-in on one side or the other of the Snowden affair. I’ve never understood why people seem so eager to pick a team on this issue.

Well the other team is SF, which if I had to guess is probably the right’s most hated city in America. It must be galling to them that the 49ers are easily one of the winningest teams in NFL history.

Same. Mine is a regular watch with hour and minute hands and a digital read-out in the background that I can turn on and off. It’s nothing fancy, but I wear it with a fat black leather wrist-band which is pleasing to my easily-entertained soul.

I am a simple man in many ways.

This is basic cat stuff. “Oh, smell good! Must investigate! Do want or no? Not sure, is hot, but definite smell good! Maybe want?”

It’s from the Cohn brother’s movie, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” Early in the film Buster lists off some of his other “cognomens,” one of which is The San Saba Songbird. It’s not really relevant to anything, I just thought it was amusing. I do, however, play guitar and sing cowboy songs.

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.

Sure, it works great if you’re a single person who doesn’t have all that much to buy, but here’s the thing; if you’re shopping for a family or a multi person household or whatever, and you have to buy a lot of things at once, your self checkouts just plain suck ass because pretty much no matter what you do, you’ll get dinged with an error message every ten or 12 items and have to wait for the overworked and underpaid attendant to come free you up so you can keep going until the next inevitable fuckup.

Self checkout is fine if you have something like 15 or less items, but anything more than that and it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

According to my British friends Yorkshire Gold is legit. I don’t know if it’s as strong though. Not much of a tea drinker myself, just reporting what I’ve been told.

No, conservatism is ultimately about some people being naturally more deserving than others. It really is that simple. Everything else follows from that proposition. There’s no reason to further complicate it by looking for more proximate explanations.

“Need” probably isn’t the best word. It’s not a “need” so much as it is a belief. They “believe” themselves to be better and more deserving. Everything else follows from that. Start plugging it into what you know about conservatives and you will immediately see that it’s by far the best and simplest explanation.

Also bear in mind that people are often, and in fact quite usually, unaware of why they hold certain opinions and far from using reason to arrive at their opinions, tend to arrive at an opinion and then use reason to rationalize why it’s correct.

The SCOTUS is a great example; we already know how the justices will rule because we already know their underlying opinions about the world. What we don’t know is how they will justify their rulings. If this weren’t true, then neither party would care about SCOTUS nominations. The fact that we care very much tells you that we all privately know that I am right.

You and I do it too. We all do. Some of us are more aware of it than others.

Craigslist struck the first blow against newspapers by taking away classified ad revenue. The death blow came when Silicon Valley taught people that “information wants to be free,” which meant that no one wanted to pay for local news anymore. That led most local newspapers to collapse, while the few that managed to survive --apart from a handful of “legacy” papers-- mostly did so at the cost of turning into click-bait sites or outrage machines.

We have to bring back the idea that people should be happy to pay for local news.

Or, you know, we go back to the time when the news media had real gatekeepers and not just any random jackass could churn out some bullshit copy and broadcast it to the world, let alone have it get published by their local paper.

It’s nice that the Internet has democratized access to a national or even global audience, but let’s not pretend for a moment that it hasn’t caused a ton of problems in the process such that now many people have no idea of what to believe while others believe whatever they want.

It’s still pretty easy to tell the difference. You have to have a pretty low level of media literacy to not be able to easily spot it. Unfortunately we already know that most people don’t have a clue when it comes to mass media, and even if they did, we also know that people tend to believe whatever reinforces their priors.

It also raises the very thorny issue of who adjudicates what is and is not “memetic effluent.”

Out of curiosity, how do you think she’ll rationalize it?

I named my truck, but “Old Clunky” doesn’t exactly jump out as the kind of name you’d want to advertise.

Of course sometimes the predictive algorithms are wildly and hilariously inaccurate too, as we should expect.

Podcast Republic. I don’t know if it’s the best, but I’m used to it and it does everything I want and nothing I don’t want. It’s also open source.

Same, but I still use Google docs to store copies of all my published work.

I like Podcast Republic because it’s easy to keep it simple for troglodytes like myself who don’t want or need all the bells and whistles.