sometimes cultural differences are really small things. it's the name of a cleaning spray. it's professional long-arm quilting services. it's the direction of the sea. it's how you prepare the same coffee. and there is a temptation, because these are small things that don't feel like A Cultural Tradition Requiring Respect, to argue over which thing is right. because we need to be right about something. shoes off in the house. how to eat with a fork. small things. but the small things are the culture, and you have to treat people decently in the small things.
I remembered that google maps has an option to also go through the older street view footage, and while the place looks a lot different now, in 2009 this spot looking towards my childhood home looked just as I remembered it being when I was 5 years old. Painted from this streetview screenshot:
never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱
the reviews are in... glad everyone's enjoying song of the worm
[id: tumblr tags reading 'dude This Fucking Rules', 'holy fucking shit! that was legit so cool?', 'holy shit that is fucking metal', 'oh this fucks severely', 'yeah no this fucking SLAPS', 'yo this RULES']
I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore 😭
Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the app…. Which requires your login information….. and also stores your card information so even if you didn’t use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.
I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.
Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:
Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.
No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.
So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:
Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:
Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.
Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.
POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.
When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)
If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.
In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.
Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.
I've seen some people in the notes express (very fair) concern that this is only going to inconvenience already under-paid laborers, and not have any impact on corporate. While I can't speak for every company or every store, I do work in a grocery store and I can tell you this is precisely the kind of thing that would have an impact, especially if people are doing it en masse. Stores absolutely track their shrink numbers, and they do draw distinctions between what gets stolen, damaged, or wasted for other reasons. If people are making it clear that the reason they're bringing things to the cashier is that the prices are not adequately represented on the displays, and rather than improving business it's wasting product, slowing down transactions, and causing confusion and mistrust in customers, that is a language that shareholders speak.
I worked in retail for years. If this had happened while I was working retail, I would have been delighted and felt great solidarity with anyone who was wasting my employer's time and money and giving me busy work as an act of protest. In point of fact every moment the employee spends carting items back to the shelves is a moment not spent standing at a register.
In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for produ
Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring. Here, we report a shift from this norm in Messor ibericus, an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste. As a result, males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago. The evolutionary history of this system appears as sexual parasitism that evolved into a natural case of cross-species cloning, resulting in the maintenance of a male-only lineage cloned through distinct species’ ova. We term females exhibiting this reproductive mode as xenoparous, meaning they give birth to other species as part of their life cycle.
Little fire ants (Wasmannia) doing something similar where the males and females are different species and there is so much sexual conflict that The females have evolved to make reproductive clone babies. The males have evolved to wipe the female dna from eggs and make reproductive clone babies. Basically, the male and female reproductive lines are operating in an entirely different evolutionary pool than the sterile workers, who are still made by mixing genes from both sexes.
An extreme case of sexual conflict has been unearthed in the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata. Queens produce sterile workers by sexua
And then we have a harvester ant with Genetics that are functioning as if they have at least 3 different sexes, divided amongst colonies.
Basically, we have two variants of ants and a queen needs needs to mate with the same variant as herself to produce queens and the opposite variant to produce workers. So a queen needs to have mated with both if she wants to have a healthy colony and be able to pass on her genes to future queens. And all types of colonies need to be present in a population to keep it stable.
Functionally, it can be argued to be more like FOUR operational sexes. IT IS VERY NEAT.
While making the recent BBC Radio 4 series, Sexual Nature: A Brief Natural History of Sex , I came across some research on North Ameri
Actually also also I feel like it's worth how ants (and bees and wasps) normally do genetics because it's also interesting
You know how humans and most sexually reproducing animals get half their genes from one parent and half from the other, resulting in two every gene? This is called diploid. (Diplo=2). The eggs and sperm have a half set of genes (one of each) and are called haploid.
But Ants-Bees-Wasps use a haplo-diploid system.
The females (queens and sterile workers) have two of every gene, 1 from each parent, and are diploid. But the males are born from underutilized eggs. They have 1 of every gene from their mom only, and are haploid.
This results in some complicated math about what percentage of genes each parent gets to pass on, but the net result is that females are more related to their own sisters (75%) than to their own offspring (50%). And thus, it is evolutionarily beneficial to remain in a large social group and raise sister-queens rather than go off and have your own daughters.
Also if you run out of sperm for some reason you can just start spamming out males
