@FaheemMitha It's probably because they fear unemployment?

Guess what? I went to the store today after the jog, and discovered that they have installed two cashier-free computerized checkout stations! You can scan all products and pay using a card, all without a cashier!

That's bad for employment, because the demand for cashiers might decrease.

And I'm not sure how they expect to prevent forgery. One could mix in some expensive nuts into inexpensive nuts, and weigh them using the station. That will be hard to tell without someone constantly keeping an eye.

@FaheemMitha Yes, that's what the joke is about. Yes, second-declension -us nominative singular nouns do have corresponding -i nominative plurals, but those from the third and fourth declensions do not. A declension is a grouping of shared inflectional patterns for nouns and adjectives, just as a conjugation is such for verbs. Latin has five declensions and four conjugations, plus irregulars.

I don't know if my question is relevant here, but how much do you think it takes to learn English deeply so as to feel free within most of contexts? Especially I am concerned about vocabulary: if I practice every day, is it possible to achieve sooner or later a native speaker's level of it?

@CowperKettle That sort of thing has been very common here for the past few years. I'm of two minds about it.

On the one hand it can be quicker, much quicker. On the other, they put people out of jobs.

@niamulbengali the light in the fridge

when a fridge door is open a light comes on

I guess so

no problem

I honestly found that one among the least appealing in the "Doctor, doctor" compilation I had as a kid

I believe it was a section in a joke book

Although I can't for the life of me remember the name at this moment

@niamulbengali He doesn't think his wife is a refrigerator. It's that she thinks she is, and he has accepted her delusion.

As the saying goes, the neurotic builds castles in the air and the psychotic tries to live in them.

Or some such thing.

@tchrist I see. Thank you.

@Cerberus There are options that don't accelerate climate change.

@Cerberus Right now 1 in 17 people are infected in Denver County. Don't leave your house.

@FaheemMitha Yes. But those are more expensive...

@tchrist Yikes.

@Cerberus I hear climate change is pretty expensive.

How is that possible, when your other statistics are somewhat similar to ours?

@FaheemMitha Not in the short term!

@Cerberus Depends how short term you mean. Current predictions are for serious problems by 2050 if nothing changes. I remember 1990. It wasn't that long ago.

@niamulbengali You didn't find much humor in it because it's not very funny.

@FaheemMitha That's too long for investors!

@Cerberus Well, I hope the investors enjoy their Brave New World.

@FaheemMitha They probably are.

@Cerberus I was talking about the future, circa 2050.

Investors don't care about the future, only about the now.

@Robusto I think there's still a lot of gray area... I've rad that self-checkout sometimes works well for companies and sometimes not, sometimes lots of fraud, sometimes way more hassle to run and not always cost-effective. At big box stores (Home Depot, or big grocery stores) there's always at least one person 'attending' the self-checkout area.

As a user of those, I do not use them at a grocery store because it's too much work. but at the hardware store where I only get one or two things, it's much faster.

I think I visited a small 'Amazon' convenience store where supposedly you don't have a cashier at all you just walk out with things and (by wifi or bluetooth or something) it's automatically billed to your paypal account or something. (it was very small, and there was an attendant who just says hi and helps with something I don't know what)

I'm sure it'll be unremarkable in 20 years, but it just felt weird.

@Mitch Supermarkets have been switching to self-scan for ages here.

Slowly but steadily.

And while keeping some real cashiers.

I always use the self scan, it's much faster!

And no queues!

And, in Corona times, no sticky cashier's fingers on your stuff.

Scan of mummy's head, where no excerebration was performed.

pubs.rsna.org/doi/pdf/10.1148/rg.285075112

"Volume-rendered three-dimensional image with the skullcap removed reveals that both hemispheres of the brain are shrunken within the dorsal region of the skull (arrow)."

That explains a lot.

Like the Hyksos invasion.

@Cerberus This is the reason I like them.

Yeah!

In Russia, some people spend large portions of their salary to buy food, so I'm afraid there will be pilfering at self-checkout stores.

A large proportion of the population are working poor. They work only to make ends meet, not to make any savings.

"Russians spend about 38% of their income on food" (Q2 2019) lenta.ru/news/2019/07/13/pricey

"In 2018, 41% of Russians had no savings, in 2019 the figure rose to 43%"

I gave 5000 rubles to a friend once so that she could go to a dentist.

@Cerberus same here...but nobody has switched to all selfcheckout or even majority selfcheckout.

@Cerberus eww

but also that works for pre- and post- covid

Yeah, but then it doesn't matter.

@Mitch How do you quantify cashiers versus self-scan?

@Cerberus number of checkout stations

We have more self-scan booths than cashiers. But they take up much less space.

It varies.

here, some take up a lot less space...and others take up only slightly less space.

Really?

yeah

but the selfcheckputs don't have the conveyor belt mechanisms, so they're cheaper that way

This is average here.

Much, much less space than cashier belts.

And nobody observes to make sure that the customers don't pilfer?

Sometimes, somebody is watching.

And there are random checks.

But, mostly, you can steal some stuff.

Still less costly than cashiers and conveyor belts.

And space.

Ours have a voice "Unexpected item in the bagging area" to bring attention to bear.

@AndrewLeach I suppose one puts the basket on the side and the bag in front here.

@AndrewLeach That sounds...mysterious.

What does it mean?

Ah, but ours weigh the "output" side.

Ours don't weigh anything.

At least not openly...

Anything scanned which is not reflected in the new weight of the bag yields an alarm.

We don't have that.

Apparently, it is not deemed necessary...

You're obviously more trustworthy than us Brits :)

Rather, we are cheaper!

More niggardly.

We don't like to pay for machinery or computer systems.

This is basically a tablet connected to a barcode scanner and a paying unit.

@Cerberus We don't get a choice. Stores put them in and the customers pay for them in the prices. But all stores work on the same basis. I've never seen one which doesn't have some theft protection.

And a receipt printer.

@AndrewLeach It's funny how completely arbitrary these decisions are.

Companies think they are being rational.

It's like Jews and Christians.

Maybe there should be an MRI scanner to detect the thoughts of pilfering in customers. But MRI scanners are expensive.

Each thinks his own decision is absolutely and irrefutably the best choice.

Many stores do have a "bag as you go" option with a smartphone app: scan as you go, put it in your own bag and then pay at the end for everything you've scanned. That does allow pilfering, and it's checked more often.

And yet both your system and our system exist. Both cannot be right.

@AndrewLeach Some shops have that as well here, but it's always seemed more cumbersome to me, never used it.

@Cerberus I love it. Far more efficient!

@CowperKettle Why non soothsayers?

@AndrewLeach Really!

More efficient than stations? How?

I have the basket in one hand, and I use the other hand to put stuff in it.

How am I supposed to scan stuff?

And why are those things so slow?

Because I can pack just once, when I put it my items the trolley, rather than put them into the trolley, get them out to scan them and then put them in my bag.

They're scanned on an app as you go round.

Ah, you put them in your bag immediately.

Good point.

Yes. I put my bags in the trolley and load them as I go.

But I never use trolleys.

And I need two paws to stand on.

So I have only two to hold basket and grab stuff.

I've only been checked once: the guy just had to scan five items and they had to appear on the receipt.

Does the scanner have a mouth handle?

@AndrewLeach That is what they do with the stations here.

@Cerberus You could hold three baskets and load them with your front paws, surely?

I suppose so. But Corona.

The lions here have been infected.

In the zoo.

I don't want to be next.

Besides, it would ruin my face masks.

Cats get it. Do dogs?

I think so?

> He often received order marks.

Is order mark a commonly used term to describe a situation when a schoolboy gets a special "mark" to indicate that his behaviour was improper?

I'm proofreading a case report translation, Russian to English, and the patient's past history is described. The patient found it hard to find friends at school and got into fights, and received "order marks" for this.

@CowperKettle I'd probably call them "black marks" as more idiomatic. If you wanted to focus on the behaviour aspect, rather than just a general ding, then perhaps "behaviour demerit" would suffice. It's not something I've ever seen awarded.

@CowperKettle I've never heard "order mark" used.

You could use demerits for something that ought to be understandable and a bit more formal than "black marks" ...

In primary school we were flagged with "check marks" for poor conduct, etc. Pretty vanilla term, IMO.

When I was at school there wasn't really a totting-up process. Corporal punishment was still a thing.

@AndrewLeach Well, I went to a parochial school, so corporal punishment was definitely a thing.

Still, we received demerits as well.

Any organization that reckons they are able to punish you into the afterlife has few qualms about punishing you in this one.

My current punishment is that I can't get FileZilla Pro to work right on my new computer. If I use my old computer, it accesses a certain FTP site with no problem. But on the new one it won't authenticate. Same program, same settings. This is weird.

@AndrewLeach I've never figured out how it knows. (or why it gets it wrong). Just a weight sensor? But you could just leave something there... too many ways it could be wrong.

@AndrewLeach You had it lucky...we had sergeant punishment

So I found out why my FTP connection wasn't going through. I mistook an "m" for an "nm" and I. JUST. COULDN'T. SEE. THE. DIFFERENCE. I must have looked at it 50 times and not seen it.

no fun

Nope.

But I wish I had a nickel for every time I've done something like that.

yes

It's when you're sure the problem can't be that simple, it turns out it is.

it is not too uncommon to get to the point where you know that the only thing left is staring at the code :)

Haha, true.

config and tool fighting are among the worst things with being a dev

This kind of thing usually happens at the end of a day.

we have a proxy server at work that man-in-the-middle attacks us employees, it causes pain too often

they change something and things break

I've been there.

wonder how gdpr compliant that thing is

We don't have GDPR here. I wish we did.

yes it is nice

many countries had what is in gdpr before but now it has some teeth

canada should join eu

wonder if uk will actually leave before they are back

@Cerberus Another lovely video for you:

@RegDwigнt Excellent, so far.

I'm around 4:00.

But a few uneducated accidents can be noticed.

He says "prose" when he means "verse".

And he uses "they" to indicate a man.

Finished. Very nice.

@Cerberus I noticed that. He really pushes "singular they" to its logical absurdity, doesn't he?

@Robusto I don't understand what you're saying. Did you mean, they're pushing them to their logical absurdity?

Then yes.

hides

@Cerberus Har-de-har-har.

giggles

I am not a fan of singular they, however au courant it may be.

Nor I.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

And I am aware that Shakespeare used it, and I still don't care. If Shakespeare went and jumped off a cliff, does that mean I should? No. I remain steadfastly on that cliff, feet planted on firm soil.

@tchrist ^

I didn't know split sharps were a thing.

@Robusto Shakespeare. Pfft.

@Mitch Well, but would you follow him off a cliff?

so... maybe?

Depends on the cliff?

If it's a super romantic cliff?

nah

seems like a lot of trouble

If he jumps off cliffs he's overboard, not overrated.

@Robusto Agreed.

Besides, it was probably used rarely.

OK settled then. Avoid all cliffs.

That way the question doesn't come up.

And Shakespeare. That guy was a weirdo

Did you know that he was one of the first people to be vaccinated?

Against Corona.

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55233021

yes, the second