skweetis

joined 1 year ago
[–] skweetis@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Ok, so a million years ago me and a friend of mine were in Vegas and checked out Quark's Bar at the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. And it was great! I drank a dry-ice-powered "warp core" drink. A guy in a Klingon costume messed with me in a cringey but completely perfect "interactive theater" bit. The video screens all had Star Trek visuals playing. Super fun.

Anyway, a couple of years later we thought "Hey, let's go back to Vegas and we'll visit Quarks Bar again!" But we were big enough nerds that we didn't realize when we booked it that it was superbowl weekend. So, all the pro sports gambler types were in town. The "free drinks as long as you are gambling" policy in the casino seemed to be suspended - all the servers ignored us. We had high hopes of escaping to the nerd refuge of Quark's, but when we got there they had football on all of the screens, and a table of "Da Bears" style football dudes started fucking with us for, I don't know, not being manly enough or something. It sucked, but it's kind of funny in retrospect.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

We all know what to call you.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I saw video of her being interviewed on stage at a conference and she seems just as weird and psychologically unhealthy as Musk. Smug and condescending while narcissistically unable to acknowledge unpleasant realities that every single person knows are true. I think I'm mostly talking about style here. All big CEO-types would lay off thousands of good humans who are hard workers in a heartbeat to make their rich investors more money, but some manage to do it without the delivery of a shitposting bond villain. Watching her answer questions for 5 minutes made my skin crawl.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

I don't know, man. The comment that is getting downvoted proposes a narrative where people steal things from Target and then Target has no choice but to move out of the poor neighborhood to open up stores in a nice neighborhood, and therefore the people stealing are responsible for that harm to their communities. I'm downvoting that because it's wrong in like a thousand ways, some evidence for which is illustrated by the quote and article I linked to.

My bad on the "lemming" thing. I'm reading this on kbin so that's not in my vernacular, and the patronizing "tiny worldview" insult had me reading your comment in a certain tone.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago

I just happened to be in that Ballard target for the first time last week to get my Covid booster and it was weird. Besides the pharmacy, there were basically no employees. No cashiers, one person who ushered you over to the self-checkout, and two greeters (aka loss prevention). It's just anecdotal observation, but there was no visible sign of, you know, crime problem, i.e. nobody camped out on the sidewalk. But there were also zero customers. That store is tiny for a Target and seemed to have basically the same amount of inventory as a Bartells. For example, we bought a laundry basket while we were there and they just had one style and color (ugly as fuck!). And there is a CVS and a Walgreens basically a block away. And the Target has paid parking. So, I feel pretty confident that this Target was a loser due to bad business decisions.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

The article this thread is about is talking about Target losing 2% of their $27 billion annual PROFIT (as in the money the shareholders keep after they pay their employees) to theft. And here you are blaming poor people for the state of their communities.

"The fantastic journalists at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis and found that this single video spawned 309 separate articles about the Walgreens incident in the 28 days after it was posted. The researchers found that there was not a single article about a multi-million dollar wage theft settlement paid out by Walgreens to its California employees. (On January 5, 2023, after I wrote this essay, a Walgreens executive admitted publicly that the company had overblown their claims about retail theft.)"

https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/the-volume-of-news

You are the lemming, buddy.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 116 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

What the actual fuck?! When I read this story a month ago I was furious because they claimed he was out of the car and lunging at them with a knife when they shot him through a closed car window. Mistaking someone for being out of the car and lunging at you when they are inside the car with the window rolled up is not the same as (claiming to) think a knife is a gun. So, you get to lie about what you were scared about and then revise your lie to something more plausible later on? So much fucking bullshit.

Also, it should be noted that the police only "walked back" the statement about him being out of the car when the family went door to door and found ring cam footage that he was in the car. And they had to do this because the police wouldn't share body camera footage with the family.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Why would the cops get to decide how quickly people have to leave the stadium? Do you think there is a law that the stadium must be empty exactly 23 minutes after the game? Do you think the cops are experts that were trained on the amount of time that people can safely linger in a stadium after a game? The cops wanted to go home so they abused their authority and then violently assaulted a school band director in front of a bunch of kids.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a record of birth that you use to verify your identity. Gender doesn't need to be on there at all - "Oh, it says on this birth certificate that you're a boy, so I guess we know for sure that you are indeed Steve Smith!" But if it's on there, it should match the gender that the adult identifies/presents as. There's no reason the DMV needs to know what your genitals were (or, really, what the doctor thought your genitals looked like) when you were born. Imagine any other private information about your physical body being a public record - "We'll start processing your home loan now, Mr. Smith, sorry that you were born without nipples. That's gotta be rough!" It's stupid. And, of course, it's also cruel. But you seem pretty unbothered by that part.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe therapy could help you answer that question.

[–] skweetis@kbin.social 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

You think that you're saying something clever, but you're not. The suffixes "philic" and "phobic" are used in scientific contexts to denote when things are attracted or repelled. Yes, colloquially people use "phobic" to mean fear, but it doesn't always mean that in science. For example, when scientists talk about https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Supplemental_Modules_(Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry)/Physical_Properties_of_Matter/Atomic_and_Molecular_Properties/Intermolecular_Forces/Hydrophobic_Interactions they aren't saying that the molecules are literally "afraid" of water. They aren't wrong in their language. You are. Homophobic people are repelled by gay people, and so "homophobia" is exactly the correct term.

And, in addition to that, I gather from your replies that you are a straight person. If you consider yourself an ally, or just not a shitty person, then please refrain from reducing a homophobic murder to a semantic game. It's real life for gay people, not a thought experiment for you to exercise your contrarian rhetorical skills. You are not helping.

Editing to add: And, of course, people DO claim fear of gay people as a defense for murdering gay people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense

"A defendant may allege to have found the same-sex sexual advances so offensive or frightening that they were provoked into reacting, were acting in self-defense, were of diminished capacity, or were temporarily insane, and that this circumstance is exculpatory or mitigating."

So, even if you're junvenile semantic games were valid (they aren't), you're wrong. So, again, please take a seat.

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