Random Thoughts

[Molandfreak]

Do humans spend more time waiting or standing in lines, over the course of their life?

In what context do you stand in line without also waiting?

When you can't stand walking...



If you think you spend more time "waiting" than "doing" (and you're not rewarded for that downtime), consider improvements in life and inquire within.

You might be endlessly waiting for someone to move over and let you by. Which is the worst thing about these conveyors.

[formulanone]

Do humans spend more time waiting or standing in lines, over the course of their life?

In what context do you stand in line without also waiting?

When you can't stand walking...



If you think you spend more time "waiting" than "doing" (and you're not rewarded for that downtime), consider improvements in life and inquire within.

You might be endlessly waiting for someone to move over and let you by. Which is the worst thing about these conveyors.

People who use it to blah-blah to others in the standing zone are annoying but will typically move if asked.

One thing's for sure, little kids will literally outrun you on these things because they're made of magic.

[Molandfreak]

Do humans spend more time waiting or standing in lines, over the course of their life?

In what context do you stand in line without also waiting?

When you can't stand walking...



If you think you spend more time "waiting" than "doing" (and you're not rewarded for that downtime), consider improvements in life and inquire within.

You might be endlessly waiting for someone to move over and let you by. Which is the worst thing about these conveyors.

People who use it to blah-blah to others in the standing zone are annoying but will typically move if asked.

One thing's for sure, little kids will literally outrun you on these things because they're made of magic.

You shouldn't have to ask in the first place. They should have the situational awareness to know what they're doing.

[kphoger]

Do humans spend more time waiting or standing in lines, over the course of their life?

In what context do you stand in line without also waiting?

When you can't stand walking...

Of course, if you stand on one of those, then you're also waiting to arrive at the end of it.

[jgb191]

And now we finally know:

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/six-flags-great-adventure-announces-worlds-fastest-spinning-coaster-for-2027/4440087/

SF Great Adventure near the Philadelphia area has a replacement for the late Kingda Ka!

[LilianaUwU]

I can tell you I've wasted enough time waiting at self checkouts for people who make their bags after they've paid.

I have a family of five, and we hardly ever go out to eat.  Every two weeks, we do a big shopping trip, and then a smaller one on the off week to pick up produce and this-or-that.  So our grocery cart is pretty full, especially on the big shopping trip weeks.  We use the self-checkout lane, but one of the ones that has a conveyor belt with a bagging area at the end.  We bring with us one big cardboard tray—the kind they sell apples from at Aldi—and one reusable tote.  My wife scans, and I box everything up as it comes down the conveyor.  By the time she's done running coupons and paying, our cart is already loaded up and ready to go to the car.

See, this is how you do it. People here can't even figure out that they should put their things in the bag BEFORE they pay.

[kphoger]

they should put their things in the bag BEFORE they pay.

Why?  What difference does it make what order they do it in?

[vdeane]

they should put their things in the bag BEFORE they pay.

Why?  What difference does it make what order they do it in?

If you put everything in the bag(s) while you're scanning, that takes less time than doing it later because you're not setting in in the bagging area and then bagging it separately, especially if you're on your own and can't do it concurrently with paying.

Of course, this means that you need to plan ahead and have an idea of how everything will fit into the bag(s) so that you can scan everything in the same order you need to place them in the bag(s).  And if the machines at a given store are finicky, it means you need to know their quirks so they don't freak out at you (for example, I won't place my first item in the bag until it shows up on the screen and it tells me "please place the item in the bag"; for some reason that first one always takes a long time to register, and before it does, trying to bag it will yield the error "please remove the last item from the bag and scan it before placing it in the bag" even if it was scanned; self-checkouts these days also tend to want you to add all bags before you even begin scanning, not keep adding new bags as needed).

[kphoger]

Oh.  I was still thinking of the kind with a conveyor belt, not the kind with just a tiny little bagging area and nothing else.  I can't imagine setting the groceries there but not in a bag—especially because then I would have no bagging area to work with anymore.

[Scott5114]

Some machines are wonky enough about properly handling customer-supplied bags that it actually is faster to just scan them all and put them on the scale unbagged and then bag them after the transaction is done, so as to avoid the dreaded "unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"approval needed" pipeline.

Of course this isn't an issue for me anymore—WinCo got rid of their self-checkouts and replaced them with old-fashioned "15 Items or Less" lanes.

[vdeane]

Some machines are wonky enough about properly handling customer-supplied bags that it actually is faster to just scan them all and put them on the scale unbagged and then bag them after the transaction is done, so as to avoid the dreaded "unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"approval needed" pipeline.

Many around NY will ask "did you add a bag?" because of that - then it knows to add the weight of the bag to the expected total for the weight.  Otherwise, the weight will be off, and you get stuck where you'll be either over or under no matter what you do.  Unfortunately, they often forget to ask unless you add your bags at a very specific time - and customers might just scan something while the prompt is up, dismissing it without indicating that a bag was added.

[Max Rockatansky]

I do find some amusement that some of you put more thought into how a modern retail POS (Point of Sale) works than I do.  It is literally my job to find theft exploits and ways they can be manipulated.

[Scott5114]

I do find some amusement that some of you put more thought into how a modern retail POS (Point of Sale) works than I do.  It is literally my job to find theft exploits and ways they can be manipulated.

I get the impression that some of us put more thought into how a modern retail POS works than the people who designed them.

Self-checkout machines share a lot of guts with slot machines. I happened to be at Walmart once when they were doing drop on them and they had an MEI bill acceptor stack more or less identical to what I worked on.

[Max Rockatansky]

I do find some amusement that some of you put more thought into how a modern retail POS (Point of Sale) works than I do.  It is literally my job to find theft exploits and ways they can be manipulated.

I get the impression that some of us put more thought into how a modern retail POS works than the people who designed them.

Self-checkout machines share a lot of guts with slot machines. I happened to be at Walmart once when they were doing drop on them and they had an MEI bill acceptor stack more or less identical to what I worked on.

They are also full of glitches and bugs that make them easy to fake scan at.  We usually have at least a dozen or so closed shoplift cases annually involving self checkout manipulation.  Most systems seem to be rushed out before things like that are field tested and mitigated.

[kphoger]

I do find some amusement that some of you put more thought into how a modern retail POS (Point of Sale) works than I do.

It's either that or start bashing the screen in with a metal travel mug the seventh time it tells us we've done something wrong.

Some machines are wonky enough about properly handling customer-supplied bags that it actually is faster to just scan them all and put them on the scale unbagged and then bag them after the transaction is done, so as to avoid the dreaded "unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"approval needed" pipeline.

Many around NY will ask "did you add a bag?" because of that - then it knows to add the weight of the bag to the expected total for the weight.  Otherwise, the weight will be off, and you get stuck where you'll be either over or under no matter what you do.  Unfortunately, they often forget to ask unless you add your bags at a very specific time - and customers might just scan something while the prompt is up, dismissing it without indicating that a bag was added.

The whole self-checkout process is garbage.  The only reason Carrie and I use it for large shopping trips is that we have a system that works well, and that I'm pretty particular about how items get bagged.  Yes, I've gone through the regular checkout lane with a giant box to fill with the groceries—but, in that case, I usually just tell the bagger that I'll handle it myself and they can go assist another checkout lane till I'm done.

[1995hoo]

Some machines are wonky enough about properly handling customer-supplied bags that it actually is faster to just scan them all and put them on the scale unbagged and then bag them after the transaction is done, so as to avoid the dreaded "unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"unexpected item in bagging area"→"please place item in the bagging area"→"approval needed" pipeline.

Many around NY will ask "did you add a bag?" because of that - then it knows to add the weight of the bag to the expected total for the weight.  Otherwise, the weight will be off, and you get stuck where you'll be either over or under no matter what you do.  Unfortunately, they often forget to ask unless you add your bags at a very specific time - and customers might just scan something while the prompt is up, dismissing it without indicating that a bag was added.

The three stores I visit the most—Wegmans, Giant, and Harris Teeter—all use the scale-style self-checkouts and they all have a button for "Use My Own Bag." When you hit that button, it asks you to place your bag(s) in the bagging area right then. If that's not available, I've found over the years that the solution is to scan one of your heavier items first and then to bag it and place the bagged item in the bagging area. The system doesn't know you placed a bag there along with an item, it just knows you placed something there. The person monitoring the self-checkout at Teeter suggested that to me once and it's worked pretty well. That method also seems to work pretty well if I need to add an extra bag to what's already there.

Overall, I use the self-checkout far less often at the grocery store than I used to because, since they went to the "scale-style" self-checkouts, the stores restrict them to 20 items or fewer. Most of my trips are weekly trips to Wegmans (I do the grocery shopping in our house), so I almost always have more than 20 items. (And before someone says "ignore the limit," the problem is that the bagging area isn't big enough to hold everything if you have a larger order containing larger items.) The main place I use self-checkout these days is Home Depot, and their system works differently because there are so many large items that don't lend themselves to being placed in a small "bagging area."

[kphoger]

Panamá doesn't print its own bills and uses the U.S. dollar instead.  However, it mints its own coins, and those coins—with the exception of the B/. 1 coin—have the same dimensions and metal composition as their U.S. coin counterparts.  I think this means that Panamanian 5, 10, 25, and 50 centésimo coins will work in U.S. vending machines, and at a fixed 1:1 exchange rate too.

[Max Rockatansky]

Most of Nevada outside of Reno and Las Vegas is pretty much a post civilization wasteland.  Ghost towns and long abandoned mines are pretty easy to find even along the most well traveled roads.  The inhabited towns I write about usually have some sort story about a post-mining collapse from several thousand residents. 

I've been working on blogs related to highways through Nelson, El Dorado City and Searchlight.  The theme of post mining collapse is consistent between all three.  One exception that was an outgrowth of what I was researching on US 95 through Searchlight Cal-Nev-Ari.  Cal-Nev-Ari was founded in the mid-1960s near the three state tri-point in southern Clark County.  The hook with Cal-Nev-Ari was that it was intended to be accessible to small personal aircraft. 

I don't know how many Cal-Nev-Ari residents actually use airplanes but many of the roads actually do interact with the community airstrip.  I guess that it never occurred to me until now that it was more than a desert modular and RV enclave. 

[kphoger]

On my way home from work today, I saw a license plate that said [SNORLAX], and of course I immediately thought of cocaine.

[formulanone]

On my way home from work today, I saw a license plate that said [SNORLAX], and of course I immediately thought of cocaine.

Snorlax speaks for the sneeze

[ZLoth]

Most of Nevada outside of Reno and Las Vegas is pretty much a post civilization wasteland.

The furthest east that I have gone on I-80 has been Wells, Nevada before going north on US-93. I remember someone posting about ten years ago that traffic volume on I-80 dropped once you got east of the Reno/Sparks area. I remember topping off at both Winnemucca and Wells before heading north on US-95 and US-93 respectively. Those off-interstate roads, while paved, do not favor the unprepared.

[ZLoth]

[LilianaUwU]

ew AI slop

[The_Ginger]

ew AI slop

I agree. It wouldn't be that hard to make a similar image in a program such as Inkscape.

[Scott5114]

Who can forget the days of landline phones, when to contact a loved one one had to actually dial □ □ □ - □ □ □ □.