Viewing profile — aaronbaugher

The small-town Dollar General I visit turned the second, usually-idle checkout lane into a self-checkout about a year ago. A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used i…

Smart people can get away with tricks like that.

I'd love an example too, and an example of the classical system that this replaced. I'm willing to believe the worst of the school system, but I'd like to understand why.

Probably. I hated memorization when I was a student too, because it was boring. But as soon as I did some teaching, my attitude changed to, "Just memorize it, it'll make your life …

True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get fo…

Yeah, a whole lot of Americans who still click the "religious" box on a poll are just going on habit and family tradition, or they go to a church that's become part social club and…

Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of is…

I've noticed in a lot of newer movies, people's phones only vibrate and they always notice it and grab it (unless the script says they miss the call/text for plot reasons). Of cour…

It seems odd because it assumes you agree that silent prayer would make people feel unsafe, and that prayer is a form of "freedom of thought." You could agree that freedom of thoug…

I got high marks for cursive in grade school, but I switched to printing in high school when I took Latin, because it made the distinction clearer between m's and n's and things li…

Aside from learning, I also find that pen-and-paper is much more effective for journaling, when I want to work through a problem or brainstorm something. Once I've worked it out, I…

People who don't know how to code know they don't know how. They can look over your shoulder and see that it looks like gibberish, and they also have no interest in understanding i…

I assumed it came from investors trying to get out in front of a coming trend that didn't happen, or didn't happen yet. There's a desire by part of the population, including some p…

> Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders. I'm starting to get asked, "Could AI help you do such-and-such faster?" At first I tried to explain why…

I asked an LLM to guide me through a Salesforce process last week. It gave me step-by-step instructions, about 50% of which were fine while the others referenced options that didn'…

Part of it is that the bosses often don't know what they want, so they leave the details up to marketing or whoever, so replacing marketing or whoever with AI would mean figuring o…

I served on a grand jury a while back, and one of the few cases that wasn't a slam dunk was one where a woman's baby smothered while in bed with her and under the covers, possibly …

My place is actually rural, but there's one of those little cornfield subdivisions (I like that term) a few miles from me. I don't really get it either. I like living in the countr…

It's unlikely that the people in that rural subdivision are driving two hours a day for work. In the US Midwest, you're rarely more than 30 minutes from a town large enough to have…

Right. The big lie of what's called Our Democracy (in the US, UK, and other Western nations) is that having 51% on your side and winning elections means you get some control over g…

No one who knows anything about cattle does, but that leaves out a lot of people these days. Polls have found people who think chocolate milk comes from brown cows, and I've heard …

If it were highly effective, it already would have replaced importing the workers, since it's cheaper to hire them over there. But I've seen multiple companies go big on offshoring…

It's hard for me to believe that anyone working in a tech industry hasn't seen this kind of thing happening or heard managers/owners talking about gaming the system. When people sa…

When you're tilling, planting, or harvesting, you're often trying to beat the rain or the season. You don't want to go any slower than necessary.

My town still has quite a few third places (the mall, bowling alleys, bars, etc.) and even some new ones like a trampoline place. Most of them are struggling because the young peop…