Flying Scanian

+ My brother says that he couldn’t be happier in his relationship of a year and some change. That she has met and been involved with events with my family.

And

- Because the woman is a Palestinian American Muslim from a religious family, that they don’t even know about him and if they did, that she reported there is a non-zero threat of murderous violence from her brother because my brother is a Jew just like me. And telling them will also likely mean she’ll be ostracized.

This is all by his own words.

And it proves the reality.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t keep kosher, has never been to Israel, half-assed his bar mitzvah, and honestly couldn’t name 3 famous rabbis with a gun to his damn head. We’re lucky if he could name more than the two he grew up with. Has he even fasted for Yom Kippur in the past decade? I doubt it. He’s nearly as assimilated as an American Jew, originally conservative, can get. He eats bacon, he never goes to synagogue, and he seems to know all the leftist talking points.

But he’s a Jew.

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> opens my email

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> launches a software

And sure, you can dismiss these people as lazy, as stupid, as being elderly and so who cares. But from my 17 years of experience, I can tell you that technical instinct and ability varies widely across the entire adult spectrum. And I can also tell you that people have different strengths, and that just because someone isn't good with computers doesn't mean they aren't smart as hell.

And I can also say, again, that it really doesn't matter.

Gen Z did not get that privilege.

They were called "digital natives" and people assumed they'd "just pick it up" without ever considering that everything else we ever "just pick up" is taught to us. We don't just sing the alphabet one day, someone taught us the song and that the letters mean things. We don't just start talking out of nowhere, we learn it by observing how the people around us do it, which is why you do not see a Mexican toddler spontaneously speaking Chinese.

At the same time that we decided we could throw Gen Z to the digital wolves, companies like Microsoft and Apple started making their software harder to access. When I was a kid, we could (and did!) poke around our computers' virtual guts for fun. We learned to download custom desktop icons and screensavers and where to put those things to make them work; we ran Napster and Limewire and had to sort the resulting files; we had to know where stuff went because autosave didn't exist yet.

Today's kids and teens are not having that experience. Indeed, today's kids and teens don't know how to access hidden files because there's no toggle for it anymore. I met a teenager last year who had no idea what "local memory" was because her entire life she'd been encouraged to "save to the cloud." If she had to set up Steam she'd be fucked.

A lot of the younger generations literally don't know they can do this, because they've been let down by an educational system that decided you could learn computer literacy the same way you learn to walk. And megacorps have taken advantage of that all the way to the stock market.

For fuck's sake don't be an ass to people who don't know. Teach them. Or direct them to someone who can.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

Do not engage in self help.

Do not engage in self help.

Do not engage in self help.

Do not engage in self help.

Do not engage in self help.

Do not engage in self help.

Do not engage in self help.

Talk to a lawyer.

Do not take matters into your own hands.

Don’t complicate things.

Do not say or do anything before you speak with a lawyer.

I don't even drink on a regular basis and my immediate response will be to use annual leave for the rest of the workday and go for celebratory cocktails.