Yes. They work in the store and know all the things. Others do not. It’s literally not their job to know. It may seem dumb when someone doesn’t know something you have learned 100x over. You may even convince yourself that any normal person should figure some thing out easily. But everyone isn’t working in that store thinking about this stuff for 8 hours at a time and we are all busy living our lives. I don’t believe in being a dick to someone because you think their question is dumb. Frankly we are all smart at some things and dumb at others and the rule should be to have some grace with one another about it.

The water cups may indeed be right there dude but excuse the fuck out of me for not spotting them - I just walked into this restaurant and there are a million things to look at in here.

GenX here. I think it’s the name that’s given to a small collection of social mismatches between the generations’ expectations of one another and their social behaviors.

Gen Z in my view do not place much value on social graces as I define them. They’re under no obligation to please me, I realize. But yeah they do not seem to care much for social graces as I define them. Things like “greet someone before you ask for something,” and “say thank you before you leave.” I try to do these things at all times and I find GenZ do not always return them or give any sign they even saw them. When a cashier hands me my change and it’s time for me to go, I will say “thank you,” and imho it’s good social graces for them to say “thank you” as well or “you’re welcome” or even just “have a nice day.” But with GenZ cashiers, I say thank you, and then realize they had stopped paying any attention to my presence even before I said it. The second the change has been handed to me, it seems they consider the transaction over, period. It can feel abrupt. And in that moment, someone like me can be waiting to hear that “you’re welcome” and instead see the other person staring off into space. I have also heard of worse cases where someone is asked a direct question and instead of answering they just stare. I think those are more extreme cases but it’s believable to me and I’ve heard it enough times for it to be credible. It’s obviously not a universal, constant thing.

I also think that for this generation, being a retail worker is much more of a misery than it was when I was their age. Wages suck more now. People may be less polite now. And corporations have really tried to squeeze the most out of every employee. They have to do a bunch of different things. It seems they schedule the bare minimum number of people they can get away with. Maybe in my day kids enjoyed their job more because they could literally only stand at the register talking to customers when there were some, and in between horse around with the other workers. I think a lot of that slack has been squeezed out of the system. Frankly a lot of service has also been squeezed out of the system. I remember when waiters would pack the rest of your meal to go for you. They still did this when I visited Portugal last year and it was so nice. Many things like this have disappeared. Maybe this is part of why customers are less polite now. Service isn’t what it once was. Not always the fault of the workers.

The bit about the Stare is not always true or even most of the time. But it’s something that happens often enough to notice as a pattern. Once you’ve heard the stereotype of the “GenZ stare” you can start to experience confirmation bias of it. And really you never know if the person you’re facing is GenZ or not.

So it’s not a thing one should over-think. But yes I think there is something real behind it. Like a lot of stereotypes, it’s not fair to apply to everyone, but it may have some origin in reality somehow.

As it happens, I am married to someone raised in a Chinese family so I hear you and am familiar with a lot of the dynamic. We just talk about it very openly as an unhealthy and even abusive way to grow up.

I remember I got promoted at work and one of the VPs above me sent me an email saying “we’re proud of you.” He happened to be Asian. And my wife was floored that he actually said this.

There is no right answer to great big stereotypes like this. Sure, raising someone with love and tenderness can keep them from growing up into a big violent asshole. I call that a good outcome. But in previous generations, this was somehow made into a bad thing. “The women made him soft!” That’s hardcore patriarchal bullshit and an excellent example of men oppressing men.

It sounds like you may be deep in the pocket of that oppression, if you think that “stoic as hell except for occasionally getting mad” is neutral. That is not neutral dude. That sucks. I’m sorry you dad never showed you love and kindness, to the point where you question your mother for doing so. Wake up from this for your own sake.

Could you be confusing the facts with your feelings? You thought the relationship issues were fixable but the partner did not. Were they just saying that as an excuse to abandon you? You could look at this differently. Everyone gets to decide if a relationship is where they want to invest their life. If you honor their right to do this, you could stop looking at it as if the entire enterprise was a great big abandonment of you. That really does sound like your take on it. We’ve all had relationships end. I’ve been on both ends of it. I didn’t see it through the lens of abandonment because I don’t have that upbringing.

But you seem to insist that the facts align with your feelings, therefore your feelings are pretty legitimate and so you don’t know what to do. It really sounds like your feelings are 100% in charge of you here. They don’t have to be.

The Houthis are a large group controlling a big area of Yemen, but not the official government of Yemen. So if the Houthis enter a conflict, that’s not the same as the government of Yemen doing so. But Israel is trying to equate the two. They’re basically saying “Yemeni government, we hold you responsible, we think the Houthis are your proxy.”

So this accusation is not so much about the mere act of entering the conflict, itself, and more about WHO has actually entered it.

A comparison might be if Hezbollah carries out an attack, that’s not necessarily the recognized Lebanese government doing it. But Israel will blame them anyway, if for not other reason than to accuse them of not doing enough to stop it. This comparison is quite apt because both Hezbollah and the Houthis are well aligned with and funded by Iran.

First of all they do it because they are stereotyping, which is lazy and dumb (and these people are lazy and dumb).

But why do they stereotype everyone to Mexico and not somewhere else? Easy. It’s the US’s largest Spanish speaking neighbor. It’s actually the largest Spanish speaking country anywhere, #10 by population in the world, with 150 million people. So if you had to guess, Mexico would generally be a higher probability guess.

Instead of throwing up my hands waiting for someone else to ratify a framework, I personally give substantial direct financial support to an African American family, not because I feel personally responsible for what happened 200 years ago, but because I know that what happened 200 years ago didn’t end 200 years ago but continued on and eventually became Jim Crow and eventually became the War on Drugs and all the while has just simmered there as subconscious racism. It affects them all day every day every time someone looks at them, every time they board an elevator.And alltogether it has unfairly advantaged me and disadvantaged them. I can’t even imagine the mental stress of being a black American over the last several years. And the entire 200 years we’ve been abusing and short changing these people, they have paid us back in unique gifts of art, music, and literature (on top of their everyday contributions to science, industry and education like everyone else makes too). I pay because it’s the least I can fucking do to help and say “someone sees, someone cares.” I give because I can, and never had to face what they face. I give because it’s their money.

You do you.

Thank you for the reminder.

Older tech did stuff for us. Newer tech does stuff to us. If you think everything newer is better, I can understand that, but it probably means you are young and don’t know what tech used to be like. One small way people try to recapture those times is by opting out of all the latest apps and fuckery and using something simpler and retro. For example, the guy who writes the Game of Thrones books does it all on a DOS command line PC. It works for him and has no distractions. No one is going to hack it because it doesn’t have a network cable.

I have no idea why you want to make this about gender identity. Those parts of your question seem to challenge the name of the sub community.

Whatever you do, do it right

The precise situation is that US states don’t have age verification laws right now but Texas tried to implement one on Jan 1 (Texas SB2420 - it got blocked by a judge as unconstitutional) and Louisiana and Utah have laws coming into effect soon.

So it’s both true that platforms are moving because of laws but there are no laws. The laws have been announced for many months. They aren’t trivial to implement so of course platforms are doing advance work. They might even want to test it before the laws come into effect, and see how badly it hurts them while they still have time to adjust and fiddle.

No company wants to do age verification IMO. There is no upside for them. Maybe if we actually prosecuted tech companies for harming children, there would be, but lolz.

Birth rates decline as societies develop out of pure agrarianism, by virtue of the fact that unskilled farm labor is no longer as valuable.

If anyone else wants to hear a whole song and dance sideshow to this, see the above. 👆

Okay, that was condescending. Elitist just didn’t seem like the right word to me.

Won’t your donation be even more meaningful if it turns out they don’t have much now?

Why do you need to know that they already have a good library before you’ll help improve their library?

I don’t think it’s elitist to say that you should read books before you build a library. That’s just good advice. And it’s fair to wonder if someone who cannot string a sentence together reads many books.

Oh my god it’s the same person who made me think I was having a stroke with the Rodney Dangerfield post. For fucks sake, I think we’ve found a use for AI at last.

OP, allow me to help:

“Rewrite this as if your brain is not melting like a crayon that’s been farted on a thousand times a second” (and then paste in what you want to post).

The professor seems to understand the difference between the full complexity of the real world and a limited educational exercise with a manageable scope. Mr. Melon does not understand this and seems to only be able to engage with the real world at full complexity. The professor is completely open about the fact that he’s running an artificial scenario with a limited focus to help students build up their fundamentals of understanding. Mr. Melon just lobs confounds at it repeatedly. I will have to say that the professor is in the right here.

But because the professor has a british accent, glasses, and a bow tie, he’s coded as an elitist prick. And Mr. Lemon’s vernacular, colorful clothing, and casual style is supposed to contrast with this in a classic “book smart” versus “street smart” trope. In fact the entire movie is built on this premise: real world wealth and popular appeal help Mr. Lemon triumph over age, social hierarchy, institutional rules and many other obstacles to achieve social success and the attention of eligible young women. Therefore, in the language of the film, Mr. Lemon is most obviously “right.”

I wrote this mainly to reassure myself that I was not in fact having a stroke while reading the OP’s title.

I think you are asking, essentially, why there are no retail non-profits. Operate them like a charity for the common good, etc, but all you do is sell stuff. No fancy human rights work or animal rescue. Just sell stuff. Cheap. As a non-profit.

Here’s the best possible answer to this: good idea - go do it.

I think what you will find is that you can’t get any kind of investment to help you, not even a small business loan. So it’ll be hard for you to compete at all. And in the beginning you’ll be so small that you probably won’t be able to sell for less than the big stores. They buy at special lower prices because they are so big. You don’t get that. And even if you frame the whole thing as a charitable enterprise to help the poor, who will your donors be? Why would anyone give their money to this cause over something that helps the most vulnerable directly?

Locales differ but in my experience:

1. no one is required to eat the cafeteria food
2. the cafeteria food has a cost
3. the cafeteria food quality was low when I was young but not terrible, and is much improved now
4. many kids absolutely do bring their own lunch. My kids look at the monthly menu and decide if they want to bring something from home or eat what’s being offered at the cafeteria

To be honest I find your question confusing. It seems to start with the question of whether everyone has the option to buy items or eats at the cafeteria, but then jumps suddenly into “is the food that bad.” I don’t honestly understand quite what it is you want to know.