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Confessions of an Ableist
In the midst of all the rabbit-hole nonsense that comes with an election season, I was taken suddenly aback today when a Best Buy clerk offered me a plastic bag for my purchase for only 10 cents. “It will all go to charity,” he assured me with a straight face. Someone in that organization was paid real money to come up with this. I count it as California stupid, but any feral jurisdiction could be responsible.
Commercial transactions all have a drag coefficient. In stores, the floor staff should be visible and be helpful when needed and otherwise out of the way. Checkout lines should be short and efficient. And the rube that thought charging for the bags “for charity” should be shifted to duties more suitable to their talents. Restocking shelves might be too challenging. Maybe fit them for a broom.
Biden has shown us there are consequences for placing the disabled in positions of responsibility. If he were missing an arm or a leg or an eye, no problem. Instead, he is the babbling, mumbling, befuddled laughingstock of the world, although the thousands not properly evacuated from Afghanistan and still trickling out slowly are not laughing much.
Paper or plastic is a fair question. Ungraciously holding a bag ransom for a consumer purchase where gratitude is called for, just to turn around and “virtue signal” that the dime goes to charity, is amazingly in tune with the Biden-Harris-Fetterman disableist gestalt of the age, but it does not recommend Best Buy or the other icons of anti-Ableism as worthy of support.
If you’ll excuse me now, there are kids on my lawn.
Published in Culture
Planning their tricks or treats.
That’s what they believe.
Is there more people poop than doggie poop?
I often thought the decline in America started with Craig-y Ferguson’s retiring from the Late Late Night Show.
But come to think about it, that happened just as the banning of plastic bags came in vogue.
To cheer you up abt the plastic bag insanity, a small joke:
WalMart is scheduling the closure of 147 stores later this year. This will result in the loss of 14 cashiers nationwide.
Just to be snarky (and even more ableist), why would one possibly need a bag for Best Buy purchases? One doesn’t buy a cartful of items at Best Buy. One is generally buying one or a few items. The larger items are already in packaging in which they were individually delivered to the store. Such boxes should be more than adequate for taking the item from the store to home. The vacuum cleaner I bought two weeks ago (which wouldn’t fit in any bag anyway) and the laptop computer I bought about six weeks ago both carried the shipping labels on the boxes. Otherwise one is buying no more than two or three small items (cables, phone or computer cases, etc.) that should be easy to carry without a bag.
(OK, this is assuming my local Best Buy is typical – strip mall with ample parking 150 feet from the front door, and a staff willing to carry the particularly large items like large televisions to your car if you pull up to the front door. I suppose if a Best Buy is in a mall in which a customer might continue shopping at other stores while carrying his Best Buy purchases the experience might be different.)
@sisyphus
Feral or Federal jurisdiction? They seem to be merging nowadays. Here in South Korea, they haven’t gone quite that far with the bag situation. The stores encourage ‘eco-friendly’ shopping bags, but you can still do spur-of-the-moment shopping without your virtue bag. The store will still charge you 50 or 100 won (5 or 10 cents) for a plastic bag, but they don’t say it’s for charity, they just charge you. Some of the smaller stores still use paper bags.
For grocery shopping, Mrs. Tabby prefers to use reusable bags. She asks the clerk to pack the bags full so she has only three bags for a typical week’s groceries to carry into the house instead of the ten or twelve or more single use plastic bags that the clerk would otherwise package. She can wedge the full reusable bags into the back of the car so they stay put for the drive home, as opposed to the single use bags that tend to roll around with their contents.
The reusable bags are made of some type of semi-rigid plastic coated non woven fabric, with a rigid plastic base, and stand up on their own in a nice rectangular structure. She originally got them from the supermarket where we used to live (Wegmans for those of you in certain parts of the northeast). A very close friend who visits us from there once in a while brings replenishments as the bags do eventually wear out.
She wipes down the bags with cleaner once in a while, but doesn’t worry much about contamination. Everything that goes into the bag is in its own packaging, including the produce which goes into those filmy produce bags that we then reuse to package kitchen waste before putting it into the trash. Raw food is never in direct contact with the reusable bag.
She has used our daughter’s cloth reusable bags, which can be laundered, but their lack of structure makes them harder to use.
Our local Aldi does not hand out single use bags. They do sell reusable bags. But they always have available in a rack some cardboard product case bottoms left over from their product shelving process so that people can use those to carry their purchases home.
These are great to consolidate bags when you go inside. They have a wide opening and a low profile. Folds down to nothing. I don’t think there are any others you can get on the Internet. I also use gigantic L.L. Bean totes.
https://lapolicegear.com/la-police-gear-collapsible-multiuse-bag.html
There have already been cases of norovirus from reusable bag contamination. Those were ones serious enough to require hospitalizations, imagine how many didn’t.
There are hundreds of extremely safe lawncare products on the market today. And waterwise products as well.
And green grass is the prettiest plant there is. What it does best is fight loneliness in neighborhoods because its beauty attracts the eye. Pretty soon people are pausing and talking. From there spring friendships.
Creating beautiful social spaces outside is really important–in fact, for a lot of reasons, it’s the most important thing we can do for each other.
And a healthy lawn keeps a house cool and supports far fewer house-invading bugs than the grass alternatives.
People shouldn’t assume when they see a beautiful lawn that they know how it is kept that way. Grass is just like every other plant–there are many ways to keep it healthy. Furthermore, the pest control and fertilizer companies are some of the most environmentally conscious companies in the world. Today’s lawn and garden companies are depending more and more on microorganisms to keep plants happy and healthy.
So, no, a beautiful lawn is not the source of the world’s cancers. It’s actually a pretty amazing human achievement.
I am well acquainted with federal jurisdictions, or encampments, I have worked in them, and I certainly meant feral. Los Angeles, Detroit, New York City, DC, Richmond, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and the list goes on. Looting. arson, assault, and murder conducted with impunity by the Left, while those standing in visible range of a federal building wearing an opposition hat are arrested and held without bail or due process for years.
The vagaries of federal jurisdictions are such that federally administered health facilities are promising abortions in states where they are illegal. Military bases, Veterans Administration facilities, etcetera. I have no idea where the law lands on that, but reversal is only an executive order away. Other features of federal jurisdiction is that the enforcement across the board is and has been generally surer and harsher on even mundane speeding charges. I expect that even woke administration will not see the feral disorder generally extend to federal jurisdictions because a looted PX is a dangerous thing in the way a looted Target is not, and because the federal workforce is a key constituency not to be trifled with.
Ahh, snark. Let’s simplify the question. Any store that sells me things that are more conveniently managed in a bag than loose that wants to charge me for the bag will be liberated from my oppressive patronage thence forward. One less person of pallor lining up to buy thumb drives or phone covers or tablets. Best Buy has been a convenient place to do these things, but ingratitude for the purchase is indicative of a deeper, corrosive rot and a misguided self-righteousness. It is not as if they make too little from the goods to throw in the bags. They mean to teach me a lesson, but they are shaping their customer base in an unnecessary and damaging way and opening market share for their competition.
And, to be fair, it may just be this store. This was not an issue in other Best Buys recently, but it is an opportunity to explore the competition. I have been avoiding national chains in general and woke ones in particular. Small business is the lifeblood of the community and the republic. These guys? Not so much.
Instead of a hundred years, how about the same length of time that the petroleum sat underground?
I despise comparisons between the computer industry’s value progression, which is entirely due to miniaturization, with other parts of the economy where miniaturization isn’t possible. Until someone figures out how to miniaturize humans, we will be consuming food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and most luxuries in unminiaturized forms.
Power generation simply doesn’t miniaturize like computers have.
Wow, I had never heard of that! Our big shopping is at Costco. We just put the stuff back in the cart after scanning and transfer to our bags at the car. Everywhere else when asked “Paper or Plastic?”, I always say plastic. It saves the trees and is recyclable. I have to admit, however, we humans do create a lot of trash.
Power generation is also about 125 years older than the integrated circuit, to pick an arbitrary point for measurement. There has been a lot more time to wring out efficiency. Will there be future breakthroughs? Maybe. You can be sure that people are looking.
The non-human animals and the plants. I believe that humans should not exist truly is the view of most of the hard-core environmentalists.
If you are of the atheist pure evolutionary belief system, humans were successful in getting to the top of the food chain only because humans unfairly exploited other creatures and plants, and therefore don’t deserve the rewards for such exploitation (a view commonly seen in less dramatic form in “the left’s” view of most everything – the successful are successful only because of unfair exploitation, and therefore must not be allowed to persevere in their success).
If you are of a belief system that says that an all-knowing, all powerful deity designed the world and put humans at the top of the pecking order (particularly the Judeo-Christian belief system), the humans didn’t do anything to deserve that position and therefore must not be allowed to persevere in the position in which they have been placed.
For justice to prevail, the world must be freed of humans and their inherently malicious input. Humans must disappear so that the proper world without humans can operate more equitably.
That no non-human animals or plants have the reasoning capacity to appreciate the resulting equitable world is irrelevant.
The suburban “anti-racism” ladies send mountains of waste to the landfills.
Norovirus Outbreak Traced to Reusable Grocery Bag (webmd.com)
It was a while back, but I suspect that most of any follow-on stories just aren’t mentioned.
But we always have. Gehenna was a valley full of trash that apparently was perpetually smoldering. Before that where did cave men throw their bones?
According to a Young-Earth Creationist, that is about a hundred years. [;)]
Seriously, microrobots will be mining all the landfills in 50 years.
Where do people get these ridiculous ideas? What on Earth makes you think atheists think that way?
Whenever I see the reusable-bag people at WallyWorld, they almost always look like Cat Ladies. And I assume, therefore, that they keep the empties in the laundry room, tucked behind the litter box.
Years ago when I was devouring all of this stuff, it looked to me like this was a clear problem.
There is tons of data from every vector that they shouldn’t be doing this.
In 2020, Albuquerque had implemented a plastic bag ban and stores pushed the reusable bags. Sometime during the lockdown, when it was thought Flu Manchu was spread on surfaces, reusable bags were determined to be disease spreaders and banned from stores. Now both are back. The plastic bag ban was put on hold during the pandemic but I thought was reinstated this summer. Still see the plastic bags at the grocery store though.