• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Just like the shopping cart theory itself, this is mostly just a thought experiment at this point in time.

    The point of a protestation is to make it hard for others to ignore, and make it clear what the end condition is. I don’t plan on just starting to do this as an individual because it would have no impact; I still make sure my own carts get returned personally.

    The point stands that our goodwill is frequently exploited for profit, often under the pretense that it’s just basic human decency.



  • I gotta be honest, my bf or I still make sure the cart goes back every time we shop, but I increasingly question whether I should bother. These grocery stores keep raising their prices well above inflation so they can pocket the rest and brag to shareholders about it, at the cost of people who actually shop there.

    It’s tempting to say that if they’re going to play that game, they get no courtesy from me as a customer and can hire more cart collectors. It’s miniscule on an individual level, but it is unpaid labor.

    There’s the argument that unreturned carts mostly inconvenience other customers, but honestly if the store is exploiting both customers’ goodwill and wallets, I think it’s fine to make the experience at that store just that little bit worse; maybe that last little push will encourage people to shop elsewhere (where it’s an option of course, i.e. not a small town).

    I don’t feel this urge at stores like H Mart even though they have so many fewer return stalls and it’s often a longer walk to do so.

    I guess this is kind of an antithesis to Shopping Cart Theory I’ve been developing in my head over the past little while. It’s conditional on the store itself being overtly greedy, but I think there might be something to it.




  • Anything within a sealed loop such as blood or brain fluid shouldn’t be boiling. Your body is pretty good at keeping that stuff inside as long as you don’t have any major cuts or something. That said, I don’t think even a minor cut suffered in the vacuum could clot or scab without oxygen.

    All of the air in any of your orifices would rapidly get sucked out (including from one’s butt), and pretty much any liquids exposed to the resulting vacuum would boil. Negative pressure within the body means more room-temp boiling liquids, which then creates more air to get sucked out! It’s a feedback loop!

    A space-exposed corpse would likely end up quite dehydrated for the above reason.


  • I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

    It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

    Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.



  • I think they’ll get away with it because they’re deliberately marketing it the way so many similar movies are managed: formulaically for kids, but with some actors and writing meant to give ‘the adults’ something to watch too. Unfortunately, ‘the adults’ are almost always assumed to have only a passing familiarity with the subject material, and I have a feeling they’re going to write the ‘for the adults in the room’ jokes with that assumption in mind.

    It feels like it’s being written on an outdated manual, ignoring the fact that there’s a very sizable core audience of 20 and 30-somethings they could tap into. My guess is that everything they tried only tested well with children in focus groups, since apparently they were dead-set on a live-action format from the very beginning. I hate to be so cynical, but it’s possible they decided to go all-in on kids because they can hit the appeal without worrying as much on the production standards.