I am constantly reminded of a song from the early 2000s called Bastard by Ben Folds, especially the lyric that goes "spread the facts on the floor like a fan. Throw away the ones that make you feel bad."

The Republican party is a cult through and through, and the way cults work is that they give the desperate and victimized an answer to their troubles. They tell them that it isn't their fault, it's someone else's. Specifically, it's the Outsider's fault. They appeal to their emotions and create an insular bubble against anybody who says anything that goes against what they believe. Because if you aren't with them, then you're against them. And that makes you an Outsider, too. An enemy to be hated and vilified.

So they decide on their answers before they've even seen the facts, and any that don't fit what they want can be safely discarded as the enemies' lies poisoning their glorious truth.

And what makes this even harder to combat is that there's a tipping point for most people beyond which it's incredibly difficult to come back from. You have the real crazies who don't care anymore, if the leader says babies are delicious, then they'll start boiling cooking oil, but for most people in a cult, the thing that truly traps them even if they've realized that the cult is wrong, is that they'd have to admit that they're wrong. And not just that they, themselves, are wrong, but that everything they've done, everything that they've believed, for years and years, is wrong. And it's a rare kind of person who can look down from the summit of that mountain and accept that every step they've taken up it has been a step in the wrong direction.

I'm also reminded of Nazi Germany. The people turning in Jews weren't the monsters at the top, like Heimlich Himmler, they were "good people" - the neighbor who always has a pocket full of dog treats when they go out for a walk, the owner of the local grocery store. The people you walk past every day at work or on the street. Your mother, father, aunt, or cousin. Your friends. "Bad people" are never "bad" people. They're just people. There's footage of Hitler that's been floating around the web for decades at this point that people almost unanimously say is unnerving: it's Hitler, sitting at a table outside, who turns to the person holding the camera and gets up, saying "What are you doing, filming an old man like me? I should be the one filming a beautiful girl like you!" People are unsettled by it because it's simply Hitler being human, like anyone else. He's not acting like the monster that we see in our heads. He's just...a person. And that goes for all of the worst monstrosities to ever walk the planet - and the most gentle of saints. Each and every one of them is...just a person, who, like everyone else, believes that they're the hero of their story.

Counter-counterpoint: my coworker is obnoxious and is not attractive and I'm afraid I'm starting to develop Stockholm Syndrome from the amount of my life I spend having to listen to them die on anthills all day.

The last part of their sentence is about how their body goes into survival mode and tricks their brain into eating more in order to put on extra weight without them realizing it by delaying the feeling of being full longer than normal.

So burn 10% more calories but eat 25% more without realizing it and be worse off than before you started.

And here they make $2.75

It's definitely a shower, not a grower.

To me the issue seems to be that they are blaming the server for asking tips and not the restaurant for not providing a liveable wage to their employees.

Yes, that's my entire issue with this comic. It seems like they're upset about wait staff "demanding" tips for just doing their job, when the real issue is that restaurants don't pay their servers what their job is actually worth. It's often an opinion of people who look down on "unskilled labor" like service industry employees. Fun anecdote: airplane mechanics were considered "unskilled labor" throughout WW2 and into the early Cold War, when the profession was suddenly rebranded as "skilled labor" due to a pressing need for aircraft mechanics with the rising demand from fighter jets and airliners and a lack of people entering the field. There's no such thing as "unskilled labor," just undervalued work.

And my second bit that I always make about the 2 years retail service is that it would either destroy the country or make it a nicer place where people respect each other more, and at this point I don't know which is better.

Hard agree. It's a shitty practice with shitty origins that allows companies to pay incredibly low wages and justify it with the idea that the employees should make up the difference with a nebulous performance-based appeal to customers' sense of charity.

It's also 6 inches across. I don't think my graphics card alone could fit in a 6 inch cube, let alone my full PC.

Apparently they were originally intending for it to be around the $750-800 range for the base model.

You do also have to factor in that it's about a 6 inch cube, though, so it's no surprise that the specs are underpowered.

People like this artist are why if I were ever elected President I would mandate 2 years of retail service for the entire population. They simply do not understand the stress of dealing with people in a customer-facing role in a service industry.

There was a study on job stress done a number of years ago now (I wanna say in the 2018-2020 range) by psychologists on determining the most stressful jobs, and much of the top of the list is what you would expect: firefighters, EMTs, non-active duty military, EOD technician, active duty military, etc. But the top 3 on the list, above everything else including jobs that have life or death situations, were all customer service related - baristas, customer support techs, wait staff, that sort of thing.

And the reason for this ranking was simple: jobs like bomb defusal, active duty soldiers, and firefighters are incredibly high stress but with long periods of little to no stress in between. A soldier is only on duty a few months out of the year, and in active combat for a small portion of that time. They have tons of low stress time to allow them to destress and heal from the time they spend fighting for their lives. Meanwhile, your average wait staff is in a medium to high stress environment of having to handle the abusive general public every day of the week, day in and day out. They have very little time to recover from a consistently stressful environment that only mounts higher and higher as the years go on.

As somebody who worked a job for 10 years that could basically be described as all 3 of the jobs in this comic rolled into 1 (I worked at a fish market), if there's one group of people that I will bend over backwards to help have an easy time, it's the kid at the grocery store, the cashier at Walmart, and the waitress at the restaurant. They don't get paid anywhere near enough to deal with the shit that they do.

And that's why. For a lot of states they're making like $2.75 before tips.

Plus, it's also very relative to what exactly you are doing. A decent bartender can pull like $200+ a night on a weekend in tips.

I didn't know "any license plate reader" also scanned your phone as you went by and added your dog to their database to better identify you as an individual.

They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.