why is returning the cart intrinsically some sign of “goodness” but returning your plates to the kitchen and washing them at a restaurant is not? The customer is at the store to fulfill their needs, not the store’s. Taking the groceries from the checkout to the car in a cart helps fulfill the customer’s aims. Returning the cart does not, same as picking up trash in the store car park does not. And the revenue from customers pays for return of the carts from the parking lot, so most customers feel that is a better deal than a place that forces them to return the carts.
The original article and many of the comments have a hugely moralistic tone - where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?
> where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?
The rules are not implicit; there are typically giant signs saying "RETURN CART HERE" over a metal cart corral that often contains other carts.
People are expected to learn this during their first or second trip to a grocery store that offers carts.
Similarly, at a full-service restaurant, you will be able to notice busboys picking up used tableware, and you will notice a scarcity of customer-accessible garbage bins (as compared to, say, a self-service fast-food restaurant).
If you are ever unsure of the protocol, you are always welcome to ask an employee. Employees at these businesses are typically distinguished by wearing a uniform.
Hope these tips help you on your future trips to Kroger/McDonald's/Olive Garden.
That's because the business is trying to save on their own manpower costs by shifting some of the burden to their customers -- much like self-checkout.
If by returning my cart I was helping the employees, I'd be inclined to go out of my way to do so. But actually all I'm doing is helping the business, who is trying to cut as many employees as possible (talking about big stores like Walmart, Target, not some small local grocery that might even be employee owned).
By that logic, why not also just throw your trash on the ground? And, if you need to use the restroom while you're there, why not just pee on the floor?
That would be a great way to fight the business, which would love to employ fewer people to clean that stuff up by shifting the burden of doing it right onto you, the customer.
Fair. The greater point was that you're not just "helping the business" by maintaining a clean environment (whether the "dirt" be carts or excrement). You're also helping your fellow humans.
And, in fact, you almost certainly are helping employees. Sure, there could be fewer of them, but they'd be doing less menial work. And the ones who got laid off due to your contentiousness would find less menial work elsewhere. Society as a whole would benefit.
You probably already know this, but the idea that we should make the world worse to preserve people's jobs is called the broken-windows fallacy.
I probably should have just responded with that originally.
Because the cart doesn’t belong in the road or parking lot the same way your plate doesn’t belong upturned on the floor of the restaurant. I’m not sure about you but I will even stack my plates and dishes and silverware so the bus boy can grab it all in one go. Maybe that makes me some sort of a holy man.
BTW, a lot of bussers prefer you not do that. They have their own system for stacking things in their trays, and they have to un-stack your things to do it their way. Like, they generally can’t pick up your whole tidy stack, set it in their tub, and walk away like that.
My acquaintances in food service tell me they appreciate the thought, but rather you not go through the effort.
I've found an anecdotal correlation that the (relatively few) people that have moralized at me about returning shopping carts also tend to dislike self-checkout at the same stores. I guess it is immoral to have someone return your cart, but moral to have someone scan your groceries? I generally don't return my cart, but I mostly self-checkout. I'm pure evil apparently.
Full-service checkout is a service that is explicitly offered by (most) stores, and yes, it's a service many people like -- in part because of the poor UX of the self-checkout machines. ("Please return item to the bagging area.")
I don't think many people would object to full-service cart return, in which employees immediately pick up your cart when a customer is finished loading their groceries into the car. But few (if any?) stores actually intend to offer that, as evidenced by the carts that sit for long periods of time strewn about the parking area.
> where are people expected to learn these implicit rules?
In my experience, someone that needs to be taught rules like that, at an age old enough to be pushing around their own shopping cart, is lost forever anyway. All it takes is half a second of considering what might go on with that cart after you leave it.
With regard to carts, because they roll around, into cars, and cause damage. Leaving your cart loose in the lot is a great way to damage other people's vehicles. The first ding in my first new car was caused by a loose cart some asshole left in the lot while I was shopping.
I was going to comment this exact thing about stacking plates. I think most servers/ex-servers also do this regardless of age. It's even easier to do than returning a shopping cart.
fyi, the account confirmation email redirects and ends up on a tab with address localhost:3000. looks like it did work, i was able to login after that, but many users may assume it failed and give up
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.
Perhaps you would apply the same logic to a family car, or the clothing you bought? Should they tax the value of your medical degree when you leave the country?
Exit taxes are generally applied as if the taxpayer sold all capital assets on the day of leaving.
At least in the US taxation regime (I'm unfamiliar with others), family cars don't qualify for a capital loss, and rarely appreciate. Clothing would be similar.
But it doesn't seem unreasonable that a country should want to be paid tax on unrealized gains as you're leaving. It would probably be more fair to wait until the gains were realized and then apportion the gains among the countries of residence, but if you're leaving, it's going to be hard to compel your participation later, so it makes more sense to do it as you're leaving.
could you maybe respond to the point made in the comment you are replying to? If it’s a good idea for all those other countries, why does the idea become a “turd” when america does it? is this some kind of “manifest destiny” (to be dumber than other countries)???
if it would give domestic manufacturers such great pricing power, then wouldn’t it also encourage foreign manufacturers to manufacture in the US to take advantage of that pricing power? Wouldn’t that be a good thing for the US? and as more manufacturers move to the US, wouldn’t that competition then tend to lower prices?
>if it would give domestic manufacturers such great pricing power, then wouldn’t it also encourage foreign manufacturers to manufacture in the US to take advantage of that pricing power? Wouldn’t that be a good thing for the US? and as more manufacturers move to the US, wouldn’t that competition then tend to lower prices?
Moving manufacturing into the US takes a lot of up-front investment and would take a long time to pay off. It could happen if the manufacturers believe that the pricing pressure is going to remain present for the time that it takes to pay off. This is what's meant by 'business wants to see stability'. The current administration has shown the opposite of that, with a chaotic series of rules which don't appear to be well thought through, or likely to stick, so it's mostly achieving the worst of both worlds.
(A similar thing is true of defense spending: if the government is commissioning some manufacturing for which it is the only buyer, and it has demonstrated that the amount that it actually buys is liable to fluctuate wildly in the name of 'cost savings', then the price it pays per unit is going to reflect the risk that the business which is setting up that manufacturing doesn't actually sell as many as promised)
So…they wanted him to take a polygraph interview regarding the nature of his relationship with Peter Strzok, and he resigned instead, did I understand that correctly?
They informed him of an intent to demote him if he remained in the FBI, even taking the polygraph. The alternative to demotion was to resign. So he resigned, and now he's speaking out about it.
True, but you also have former agents who complain that they get fired for things w/o having taken a poly. So, it seems, for some, passing a poly as proof they don’t do something wrong is important.
Why go through the stress and performative dance of a poly when there's zero upside? He admitted to being a friend and (according to the article) that's alone enough to demote and block advancement.
Polys are also subjective. They keep asking the same questions over and over again until there's some indication they can point to and say you're lying. It might be a sneeze, cough, or a deep breath at the wrong time. It's also generally a multi hour to multi day ordeal. I wouldn't bother if I was them.
The logical conclusion, yes. I hope we don't need to get to that point.
The current reality is that the people who say this often say it to those they know don't have guns themselves to fire back with. Bullies, to put it in the simplest terms. They only take easy targets.
In a game-theory-prisoner-dilemma kind of situation, yeah, maybe. In the real world, those guys were always sure to point their to guns to those they knew very obviously couldn't retaliate back. And I'm not strictly talking about minorities, by the way. Simply, those who weren't part of their circle had a rough time and the police made very clear that they would act in their defense if anyone tried something funny.
I've only seen shit like this in sicily in the early 90s, when the mob controlled much of the big cities.
I wouldn’t classify this as binary thinking - isnt the comment you are replying just defining boundary conditions? Then those two points don’t define the entire space, but the output there does at least let us infer (but not prove) something about the nature of the “function” between those two points? Where the function f is something like f: experience -> productivity increase?
You’re right that it’s possible to read the original comment as just laying out two boundary conditions—but I think we have to acknowledge how narrative framing shapes the takeaway. The way it’s written leads the reader toward a conclusion: “LLMs are great for junior, fast-shipping devs; less so for experienced, meticulous engineers.” Even if that wasn’t the intent, that’s the message most will walk away with.
But they drew boundaries with very specific conditions that lead the reader. It’s a common theme in these AI discussions.
> LLMs are great for junior, fast-shipping devs; less so for experienced, meticulous engineers
Is that not true? That feels sufficiently nuanced and gives a spectrum of utility, not binary one and zero but "10x" on one side and perhaps 1.1x at the other extrema.
The reality is slightly different - "10x" is SLoC, not necessarily good code - but the direction and scale are about right.
That feels like the opposite of being true. Juniors have, by definition, little experience - the LLM is effectively smarter than them and much better at programming, so they're going to be learning programming skills from LLMs, all while futzing about not sure what they're trying to express.
People with many years or even decades of hands-on programming experience, have the deep understanding and tacit knowledge that allows them to tell LLMs clearly what they want, quickly evaluate generated code, guide the LLM out of any rut or rabbit hole it dug itself into, and generally are able to wield LLMs as DWIM tools - because again, unlike juniors, they actually know what they mean.
I don't think junior vs senior is actually that well defined. There are met "senior" 30 year old programmers and "junior" 30 year olds (who have also been programming for ~2 decades).
no, those are two examples of many many possible circumstances. I intentionally made it two very specific examples so that was clear. Seems it wasn't so clear.
Fair enough but if you have to show up in the comments clarifying that your clearly delineated “IF this THEN that” post wasn’t meant to be read as a hard divide, maybe the examples weren’t doing the work you thought they were. You can’t sketch a two-point graph and then be surprised people assume it’s linear.
Again I think the high level premise is correct as I already said, the delivery falls flat though. Your more junior devs have larger opportunity of extracting value.
The guy was nice enough to explain his post that you got confused about. Rather than be thankful you used that as evidence that he was not clear and lectured him on it.
I gently suggested that the problem may have not been with his post but with your understanding. Apparently you missed the point again.
If multiple people misread the post, clarity might be the issue, not comprehension. Dismissing that as misunderstanding doesn’t add much. Let’s keep it constructive.
"But then there are good, smart, law-abiding people who still root for [Walter White], and I find that a very interesting sociological study"[1] - Vince Gilligan creator of Breaking Bad.
"Nevertheless, [Dan Harmon] and Roiland insist these people are a small subset. The worst of them—the ones who see Rick as a role model—are missing the point."[2] - On Dan Harmon's[Co-creator of Rick and Morty] view of Rickfandom.
"Tyler [Durden] has proven so perniciously stubborn as a hero of alienated young men."[3]
Generally, I see this aligned with Protagonist-centered Morality[4]. The way I discovered this phenomenon was repeatedly observing it in fan forums. I decided not to link to those because they are low signal to noise[5], but you're welcome and encouraged to seek them out. In revisiting them to refresh my memory, my present impression is:
1. Some people just like rooting for and sympathize with the main character above all else - no amount of atrocities can change that.
2. Some people just think the these characters are 'cool'.
Tony Soprano is an interesting case, because the creator was one of the die hard Tony fans, while much of the audience concluded that "He was a fucking murderer." I guess being in the creator seat doesn't magically bestow insight.
The original article and many of the comments have a hugely moralistic tone - where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?