TheSanSabaSongbird

That must be nice. My company does a lot of work for one of the world's largest chip manufacturers and getting access to some of their facilities is like pulling teeth. Somebody forgot to submit the right paperwork, it didn't go to the correct department or project manager, this facility is always locked down on the third Tuesday of every month, for reasons, you name it I've encountered it.

I think this can be the case, but I also think intent has to matter. I don't see any evidence that OP intends to be transphobic.

I live in Portland and it's the same here on the Columbia and the Willamette. We don't get the giant container ships because they can't cross the Columbia Bar, but we do get midsize grain ships headed for Asian and South American markets.

Also it's cheaper to ship grain from the upper Missouri region to the Columbia Plateau and then down the Snake and Columbia on barges where it then gets loaded onto freighters in Portland, Vancouver and Longview and shipped to Asia and South America. By volume the Columbia is the second largest watershed in the US. Obviously all of the Columbia Plateau grain gets shipped down the Columbia as well, which is a lot, since it's a major grain producing region.

The downside is crossing the Columbia Bar which is also known as the graveyard of the Pacific, but there are highly paid Columbia River pilots for that.

Same. Mine is a regular watch with hour and minute hands and a digital read-out in the background that I can turn on and off. It's nothing fancy, but I wear it with a fat black leather wrist-band which is pleasing to my easily-entertained soul.

I am a simple man in many ways.

It's going to be an issue anywhere rural.

But we're also demographically a lot smaller than boomers, millennials or zoomers, so we kind of flew under the radar.

That's one of the risks of not being unionized. My employer can't touch my pension (not that they would want to since they all came up from the union rank and file too) because it's all managed through our union contract and there's no chance in hell that we ever approve a contract that gives them that kind of control.

The mistake here is in assuming that it's either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.

The reality is that they're great for some applications, but suck ass for others.

Here's the deal; if it's just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it's me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it's way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won't be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.

What part about this do people not understand?

I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don't actually have to shop for families of their own.

You have to wonder if they've ever actually met any Taiwanese people.

Bad risk assessment. Most Americans are deeply confused about the things that are likely to kill them vs the things they actively worry about. Maybe that's not you, but statistically it almost certainly is.

Unless you are a young man in a concentrated poverty neighborhood, your chances of encountering deadly interpersonal violence are vanishingly small. You're far more likely to be killed by heart disease due to an unhealthy lifestyle, yet the vast majority (not all) of gun-owners pay little or no attention to that aspect of their personal well-being.

The need some people feel to carry a gun isn't rooted in accurate risk assessment and instead is about a desire to feel empowered or because like my old man --a Vietnam combat vet-- they have a blown-out fight or flight response so that everything looks like a threat even when it's not. (This is why so many Vietnam vets --again, like my old man-- ended up living off in the woods by themselves; that way they could be in control of their environment at all times which is also why they always carried firearms.)

But ultimately the real problem is that many people aren't honest with themselves about why they are so wedded to carrying.

Otter Box makes pretty bullet-proof cases. They're expensive, but worth it. I dropped a phone 10 stories off of a swing stage once and it was fine due to being in an Otter Box. It did break a window on the way down though, so that probably slowed it.