I was checking out some groceries today, and the person next to me was clearly doing something the machine didn't like.

"Please scan the item before putting it in the bagging area".

Over and over again. I started thinking about what an entirely bogus thing "self-checkout" is. It seems to have exactly zero benefits to the consumer. No bagger, no help if you're missing a price sticker, not even ample room to put your groceries while you scan. You're left with exactly one square foot of space to do this job.

Is it making groceries cheaper? After all now they don't have to staff as many cashiers now. Nope! Groceries are higher than they've ever been! All that delicious margin gets sent straight to our benefactors at the Kroger corporation. Where would we be without them!

Not to mention the thing is calling you a thief every five seconds. The ones by me even film you and if they feel you're swiping something, it will show a slow motion video of you in the act and it tells you to correct your mistake.

So it's work that I have to do. That nobody is getting paid for. And that is taking videos of your face and your behaviors. And it's constantly announcing that you're a bread thief to everyone in the store.

And for what? To increase unemployment of course! It's one of those things I can't believe collective society has taken sitting down. It's one of the most egregious examples of pure corporate greed at the expense of the consumer experience, all the while cutting swaths of entry level jobs.

Threw together some stuff in the fridge. Toasted of course.

Old photo. Had a picnic for Father's Day last year. Made a couple giant sandwiches. There was an identical one except with turkey. Actually had a guy approach us and ask where we bought them. They were fantastic. Obviously I let my Dad take home the leftovers.

So, with the Cloudflare outage, I have found my self hosted services are not accessible outside of the home. I use a SWAG reverse proxy from linuxserver.io and bought my domain through cloudflare. I'm fairly new at this stuff, so is this a secure way of doing things? Does cloudflare have access to my data? I'm fairly new at this, so I apologize if this is a silly question. Is there some way to self host what cloudflare does?

I had this idea the other day about how the evolution of religion over time seems to correlate directly to the part of the hierarchy of needs that most members of the faith fail to achieve.

God as nature

The first deities belonged to groups of people that were entirely at the whims of their environment. Storms, droughts, floods meant death. This was the time of Animism, where our god's controlled the weather, the crops, the change of seasons. These ancient gods served the physiological needs, ensuring humans ate, had shelter, and survived the winter. These were polytheistic gods.

God as warrior

After this, deities belonged to nations. The Israelites believed Yahweh would lead them into the holy land and defeat their enemies. This was polytheistic in the sense that it was believed other nations gods existed, but were engaging in battle with one another. These gods served safety and security need. Keeping us safe from them.

God as parent

After the ages of war and the movement into global trade, the need failing to be met was community and companionship within our nations. God began to be viewed as the "parent" over all his "children". We are all siblings, so God wants us to all get along. God wants community love and friendship. This serves love and belonging, and is the current state of most religions.

God as power

The resurgence of "witchcraft" displays the desire to build our self esteem. Magic, ritual, and individualist spiritual practice serve the needs of achievement and uniqueness.

God as self?

Eventually, once all needs are met, we will unify God with our own consciousness. We have all our needs met and can experience pure living. Religion will seemingly fade away, and we will deify our own experience of existence.

Hello all,

Apologies if this isn't the right place, but I have moved instances a few times, and in doing so I've accumulated a number of subscriptions from my old instances. I always used the "migrate" feature, and I have roughly 200 communities I'm subscribed to. Most are from various other instances that aren't my own. That being said, I have Lemmy open on "subscribed" and "scaled", as I found this gives me just what I want to see when I boot up the site.

But it is very slow, sometimes even timing out on Jerboa. I thought it was my instance, but I've had this issue on other instances as well. I'd imagine federating all my subscriptions would take some time, but then wouldn't "All" cause even more problems? I've tried to look into this to no avail.

Am I the only one? I'm asking this more out of curiosity than an actual solution.

In American science fiction of the 1950s and '60s, psionics was a proposed discipline that applied principles of engineering (especially electronics) to the study (and employment) of paranormal or psychic phenomena, such as extrasensory perception, telepathy and psychokinesis. The term is a blend word of psi (in the sense of "psychic phenomena") and the -onics from electronics.

Maybe it's just because the latter evokes that speech from the Heath Ledger joker, making it less serious.

... And at worst, actively making your bedroom less functional and more cumbersome to use. The arguments I hear in favor of it are completely asinine and I will address them one by one.

1. It makes it more comfortable to sleep in.

I have absolutely no idea where that comes from. Do you all sleep like Dracula? My bedding is usually tussled about within minutes of me laying in bed. Blankets balled up for knee support, one leg sticking out for temperature venting. I couldn't imagine sliding under the covers and laying perfectly supine like Vladimir Lenin.

1. It doesn't take much time, so you might as well do it.

I find any task not worth my time to be a waste, so unless it has a purpose, it is actively infuriating to do.

1. It looks nice. And an unmade bed looks lazy

Given that this is an entirely subjective reason, I can't exactly "disagree" with it. But if there was someone I trust enough to be in my bedroom, I'm not going to waste my time convincing you that I do not, in fact, sleep in my bed.

Not to mention that if you want to nap or even sit on the end of the bed, you have to make it again. It is an incredibly unstable artwork, making me avoid using my bed unless I really need to.

If you make your bed, I have no judgment for you. Just like people who fold designs into the ends of their toilet paper. I couldn't imagine caring about something like that, but it literally doesn't affect me at all, so go nuts.

But I think we should be honest and call it what it is: some kind of shameful cleaning ritual that is probably some vestigial military chore, and I want nothing to do with it.

Last week, I ordered food from a restaurant and went to go pick it up. To my surprise, there was nobody at the counter. However, my food was sitting on a shelf in the lobby, labeled "mobile orders".

I had a moment of pause. Should I wait for someone to witness me taking this? It is, after all, my food. Bought and paid for. I confirmed the name and order number on the bag.

But even if the employee witnessed me taking this, what would that prove? They don't know what the person who ordered this looks like.

When the pandemic started, and these popped up everywhere, I imagined they'd be abandoned relatively quickly. After all, it would be very easy for me to walk into a restaurant and grab a bag.

I'd imagine these companies would have a very low tolerance for food theft, intentional or otherwise. I figured only one or two transgressions would result in the shelf being locked behind the counter.

Maybe the food isn't taken. Or if it is, maybe the loss is small enough to not bother. Maybe it goes unreported.

Whatever the cause, I'm glad they've remained.

Red mercury is a discredited substance, most likely a hoax perpetrated by con artists who sought to take advantage of gullible buyers on the black market for arms. These con artists described it as a substance used in the creation of nuclear weapons; because of the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons development, it is difficult to disprove their claims completely. However, all samples of alleged "red mercury" analyzed in the public literature have proven to be well-known, common substances of no interest to weapons makers.

Always found this interesting. Like a non-living cryptid. Ever heard of red mercury, and all the stuff it can allegedly do?