domain:kvetch.substack.com
VinoVeritas
9hr ago
Then just smile and ask me if I'm planning to order something or not. Like don't go full NPC drone corpo 'I have nothing to say about that' and act inhuman. What happened to being neighborly. Perhaps I am old man yelling at clouds
Edit: But no I'm not. Just give me a cup of water. That's a new one for me, to be told they're not allowed to give out water.
Corvos
10hr ago
But you are not their neighbor. That implies they know you already. You are a stranger. A potential customer. This is their place of work, not a place to make friends. As an ex customer service worker myself I really want to stress this. People suck to deal with. The workers generally don't want to make friends with you. They want you to engage in the transaction that they are being paid for, so they can earn their money and go home.
To be fair, this is not the case at all times and in all places. It generally corresponds with scale and culture, and is much more the case in a big-chain shop than it is the case in, say, a little tea shop in a small town.
VinoVeritas
10hr ago
Oh my god dude she could have just said 'I'm not allowed to talk about it' or 'I'm really just here to do my job' but all your words words words don't erase the inhumanity of the fact that two 'normal' people can't talk anymore about current events because of...all the stuff you just said
Edit: I live down the street. I did put 'neighbor' in scare quotes because I anticipated pushback but this stung-out poor old gal works two or fewer miles away from my home. We're neighbors. Or at least we're 'supposed' to be.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10hr ago
Wouldn't this predict that large companies with huge customer bases and large, skilled dev teams (e.g. apple, google) would ship high-quality, stable, working software?
SSCReader
10hr ago
I was happy to buy a coffee and buy one for the employee, or one of her colleagues, for their candid take on current events. I am their neighbor, at least, on paper. This entire conversation is satanic.
Note that is not what you said in your OP! You never mentioned anything about telling her you were willing to offer anything in return.
"When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent."
But you are not their neighbor. That implies they know you already. You are a stranger. A potential customer. This is their place of work, not a place to make friends. As an ex customer service worker myself I really want to stress this. People suck to deal with. The workers generally don't want to make friends with you. They want you to engage in the transaction that they are being paid for, so they can earn their money and go home. It is not their job to give you their take on current events about their business. Especially with the possibility their job is at risk.
If you want to reorganize society such that a Starbucks employee giving their honest opinion at work to a random customer, means they do not risk being fired for it, then go ahead and work on that, but note that still does not mean they have to engage with you on anything outside the service they are being paid to deliver to you. Your relationship is transactional. Nothing more. The barista is not your friend, she is not even an acquaintance. She sees hundreds of people every day. Some of whom are nice and some of whom are unpleasant. She likely just wants to get through her mind numbing shift as easily as possible.
If you want to talk to someone who is off duty and make that same offer, then you have a bit more leeway. They aren't on the clock, they are probably a bit more relaxed, not being measured by their productivity, not having other employees over their shoulder, so many customer service employees will be much more happy to give you the truth (though they may still be suspicious if you come across as a journalist in a situation where there is a national protest or something going on).
Corvos
10hr ago
But it's also understandable that employers don't want to be undermined by having any one of their employees act as impromptu spokesman for any cause, anytime, anywhere. Even the striking employees as a whole don't necessarily want that - remember how antiwork was basically destroyed by one bad interview?
I think it helps to consider people as having rights and responsibilities linked to the roles they play. When you are wearing a uniform and you are dealing with a customer, you are (like it or not) visibly representing the company and you are expected to do and not-do certain things. After work, it's different.
VinoVeritas
10hr ago
Yeah, I should have just gotten a small black coffee and asked absentmindedly. I didn't do that because I didn't want to give Starbucks money, but that's what I should've done. Thumbs up
VinoVeritas
10hr ago
I don't necessarily reject any of your assertions prima facie but this is an absurd way to organize society. I was happy to buy a coffee and buy one for the employee, or one of her colleagues, for their candid take on current events. I am their neighbor, at least, on paper. This entire conversation is satanic.
TheDemonRazgriz
10hr ago
You weren’t even a real customer, you didn’t buy anything! She could’ve told you to piss off and make space for paying customers. You could have been a journalist (honestly this is much more likely than the reality of you just being some guy who was curious), and if she was quoted or her store was mentioned in an article she could get in trouble with corporate. And who really wants to talk to a journalist at work anyway? Especially right at the start of a shift.
My opinion of the average current-year-plus-ten starbucks barista is not that high either, granted, but you were not helping yourself here. If you really wanted an answer, you should’ve ordered a small black coffee (or whatever) and asked your question while she was ringing you up.
SSCReader
10hr ago
For asking a question that you should have known if she answered may have got her fired? Back in my customer service days I'd have just rolled my eyes and ignored you, and called for the next person, as you had already said you didn't want to buy anything. Perfect plausible deniability for me. Then bitched about you to a colleague once you left. You'd probably make the "Can you believe what this customer did?" list when winding down after work. You may not have been at the top of the list. There are a lot of customers who do unbelievable things after all, but you'd probably have been on it.
To recap you walked into a retail establishment, to ask a contentious question about a labor dispute to a basic barista out loud in the open, where anyone could hear, and apparently did not consider that the barista would have been gambling that you weren't a snitch or that anyone overheard her, and expected her to answer. That is probably not your finest hour to put it mildly.
I don't think you thought through the consequences of what might have happened from her point of view. And therefore you are entitled to her scorn. That she kept it professional is to her credit. You are entitled to be treated professionally when ordering a latte or asking where they source their soy milk from. When you ask questions, the answers to which might get someone fired, you are off that reservation, and out on your own. She is not paid to answer those questions. It was rude of you to ask. Therefore rudeness back should be your expectation.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
10hr ago
Rates were around £35 per hour back when I did supos. Admitted this was a few years ago.
No_one
10hr ago
This made women choose men more for "love" than provisioning, which made us regress to our biological roots. Women all naturally want a high-value man and so they broadly chased after the same small percentage of guys (in other words, women's standards went up). These lucky few men got their pick of the lot and could treat women like barely-sentient fleshlights
This is only a feature of the mid to late dating app era, this was not the norm until dating apps because these unusually attractive men just could not be in enough places to create the pickiness.
There was a lot of hatred of men already appearing before dating apps really took off.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
‘The tail risks of marriage(abuse, divorce, infidelity) between reasonable and eligible people who are compatible and committed to making it work regardless of the cost are lower than commonly believed’.
VinoVeritas
10hr ago
LMAO how should she have treated me if not 'professionally'? If that was more than I had any right to expect, what should have been expected?
No_one
10hr ago
....this is a level of psychopathy that is frankly unlikely. Psyopping people to be moderately content with living in a pod and eating bugs is far more convenient and less risky than plotting genocide which is how you can get overthrown by your immediate underlings who'd even feel very righteous about it.
VinoVeritas
10hr ago
I appreciate that I was just some pain in the ass she didn't want to deal with so she could go on with her day. We are all so used to that now that we don't even blink when someone is like 'hey, no, I'm really just curious and I'm happy to buy a coffee and buy you one too. I just have a few minutes to kill here," and the other party reacts like it's an obvious scam or (like that other intelligent fella said, @DradisPing) I was a corporate spy
No_one
10hr ago
Is "do an arbitrary amount of testing, including testing the annoying boundaries with poorly documented external systems" where the incentives will point? I would bet against.
Incentives are aligned towards people getting what software they desire. If they're going to have more workforce, more work will be done to make systems safe.
SSCReader
10hr ago
When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent. When she told me she didn't have anything to say about that, and would I like to order anything, I asked for a glass of water and if she'd mind if asked one of her colleagues instead.
Why would you expect a random employee to answer you honestly on a question that is obviously contentious with her employer and may get her fired if you are recording her or from management? Your "just for fun" is her job, and for a working class person can be very precarious. Retail workers are not dancing monkeys, especially when you weren't even going to buy anything or tip her!
I'd say the fact she treated you professionally is more than you had any right to expect, given your approach. She may well have looked at you and was judging YOUR intelligence for asking such a question right there in the open.
Welcome to Starbucks - we hate people who ask questions that might get us fired (and aren't even going to tip), seems like an entirely reasonable position.
Honestly you come off as being very entitled here. Did you even consider that if she did answer you and was reported she might get in trouble or lose her job, or that she might worry about that? Would that be worth sating your desire for an anthropological survey, with absolutely nothing to gain for her? Heck anthropologists at least brought shiny beads to gift their subjects!
As for Starbucks itself, it's overpriced but the benefit is as with all chains that you know roughly what you are going to get. The little Ethiopian coffee shop down the road is probably better, but may not have such a broad selection, is much more variable and harder to find.
Rhiow
11hr ago
I don't know if your first question is meant to be rhetorical, but I'm going to assume it isn't.
I got to Starbucks about 2-4 times a month, depending on how much driving I'm doing on weekends. I can order from the app before I leave home, and by the time I arrive at the shop the drink will be ready for me. The only exception is their nitro cold brew, which I think the employees wait until you get there to pull to preserve drink quality. The employees pretty busy when I get there, but will respond with a "Have a nice day!" when I thank them for the drink. The seats in the café are almost always all occupied.
These are suburb Starbucks, and notably there's no other local coffee shops in the area. One of them is unionized, I have no idea about the others.
So yeah, emergency expedited Supreme Court oral arguments were today, about - contrary to what the headlines might initially seem to tell you - whether district court judges can issue national injunctions. More specifically, on if "relief" can be given to non-parties in a lawsuit, unilaterally by judge's decision. This is not on its face about Trump's birthright citizenship claims though of course that is more immediately at issue. I highly recommend this piece with a classic back-and-forth between two law professors who disagree about whether or not they should be allowed (disclaimer: both are, however, strongly against the Trump interpretation of birthright citizenship), a format I feel like is way underrepresented in today's news landscape (but weirdly overdone and trivialized on cable TV). NPR would never. Ahem. Anyways...
Some mini-history is these injunctions, as best I understand, basically did not exist until the mid-2000's when suddenly they started showing up a lot, and on big topics too. DACA, the Muslim travel ban, the abortion pill ban, various ACA issues, it has tended to cut across administrations though often the pattern is they show up against the one in power. Both professors agree that the Constitution itself doesn't really say much about the subject one way or the other beyond generalities, so it's going to rest a little more on general principles.
The central and immediate disagreement between the two seems to be whether or not you can or should trust the national government, when it loses a major case, to go back to the drawing board and/or pause the losing policy because narrowly slicing it up doesn't make sense, or whether you might as well do a nationwide injunction because of a lack of trust or simply that the application fundamentally isn't something you can legally slice up finely.
The more general disagreement, and this is the one that to me is more interesting, seems to be what to do about judge-shopping and partisan judges having disproportionate impacts, with some very different ideas about how to address that, contrasted below:
Is this frustrating for you [Professor Bagley] — for this to be the vehicle that may finally be forcing a resolution on the availability of nationwide injunctions?
Bagley: I suppose it’s a consequence of having developed a position over time and across administrations. What it means to have a set of principles is that they don’t change just because you happen to dislike the inhabitant of the White House.
I think a lot of people — and I’m not speaking of Professor Frost here at all — come to this issue out of righteous indignation against the president of the opposite political party, and that’s actually my big concern.
We want to put our faith in these judges, but these judges are just people too. There’s 500-plus of them, and they’re scattered all over the country. Many are smart. Many work hard. Some are dumb. Lots are political. Many are just outright partisan hacks.
All you need to do in order to get a nationwide injunction is file your case in front of one of those partisan hacks, and then we’re off to the races — with these immediate appeals up to the Supreme Court, where hard questions are decided in a circumscribed manner and where the courts themselves reveal a kind of highly partisan pattern of judging that calls the entire judiciary into disrepute.
I would love this birthright citizenship [executive order] to be blown up into about a billion pieces. It is a moral, ethical, legal, constitutional travesty. I don’t know that the engine to do that is a nationwide injunction. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not.
That said, I think no one who’s looking at 21st century America right now thinks to themselves, “Things are going great.” There are a lot of deep problems. I think our democracy has misfired in a pretty profound way, and some of the institutional constraints on the president that previously held are starting to give way.
I don’t think we give up much by giving up the nationwide injunction. I think we help right the ship, but I don’t know that I know that for sure.
And I think anybody who comes into these debates with extraordinary confidence, one way or the other, about the long-run consequence of doctrinal shifts like this, ought to have their head checked. I have a view, but, like many things in life, it is provisional and what I think is a principled and thoughtful view.
But lots of other people, who are also principled and thoughtful disagree, with me.
So in short, it's too risky to allow judges this power.
Professor Frost, you’re probably not in disagreement on all of these policy and practical issues. Where do you see agreement and disagreement?
Frost: First, I do not think there’s a single judge that exercises this power — in the sense that, yes, that judge issues the nationwide injunction in the district court, but it can be immediately appealed up to an appellate court of three judges, then immediately taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court, as was the case in the mifepristone case, as is the case in most of these cases.
You could say, “Well, we’re now forcing the Supreme Court to decide cases more quickly.”
Wait to see what happens to the court if each and every one of the children born in the United States has to sue to protect their citizenship. Courts will be overwhelmed in that situation.
The consequences for courts are not always great when they have to quickly respond to nationwide injunctions and reverse them, but they can do that. If it does quickly get reversed, then it’s just a couple of weeks, a month or two, that it’s in place.
I will also say that if forum shopping is your problem, your solution is to address forum shopping. And there are proposals out there by the Judicial Conference for more random assignments, and I absolutely favor those. I think forum shopping is a problem. I think politicization of the courts is a problem, but the answer is not get rid of nationwide injunctions. The answer is end forum shopping.
Nationwide injunctions are literally saving our nation at the moment.
It’s not just birthright citizenship, although that is the poster child for nationwide injunctions, and it’s an excellent vehicle in which to consider the issue for someone like me, where I’m worried about a world without them.
Think about the Alien Enemies Act. We have an administration that says it can deport people without due process, and when it makes a mistake, it’s too bad, too late.
If that could not be stopped through an injunction, I think we should all be afraid. And that’s one of many, many examples of an administration that wants to unilaterally rewrite the law without the impediment of Congress or any sort of legal process. Without nationwide injunctions, each and every person potentially affected would have to sue to maintain the rule of law.
So in short, national injunctions are sometimes infinitely more practical, and not the direct problem at stake to begin with, more problems lie upstream. However:
I hear Professor Bagley and the other critics as to the downsides, and here are the downsides.
While the nationwide injunction is in effect, the law is being stopped. This is the frustration Professor Bagley was [describing] about how the government can’t implement its policies. And maybe six, seven, eight months to, at most, a year, the Supreme Court rules and says, “Actually it’s a perfectly legal policy,” and we’ve lost a year.
I recognize that as a cost. However, I’d rather live in that world than the world where a lawless president, or even a president that’s edging toward that, [can act without that constraint].
Obama and Biden did a few things that I thought were lawless, even though I liked the policy, like Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens, which was enjoined by a nationwide injunction. That was an Obama policy.
The imperial presidency is a reality. They are all trying to expand their power, and I’d rather slow them down with the loss of some useful policies that I think are good at the end of the day and prevail in court, than allow for running roughshod over our legal system, as this administration is trying to do.
It's come up here from time to time whether the slowness of the system is a bug or a feature. This debate in at least some respects reflects that tension. Is it acceptable for judges, even well-meaning ones, to pause things for up to a year? One might reasonably ask then, can the Supreme Court thread the needle and simply restrict national injunctions to more narrow occasions (as just one example, the current citizenship case where precendant including Supreme Court precedent is pretty clear), not completely get rid of them? Bagley again:
And the trouble is, in our hyper-polarized environment, that kind of claim is made by partisans on both sides of the aisle whenever somebody is in office who they disagree with. So it is, I think, a comforting thought that we can just leave the door open a little bit, but if you leave the door open a little bit, you’re actually going to get the same cavalcade of nationwide injunctions that we’ve seen.
I’d be open to a narrower rule if I’d heard one that I thought could restrain judges that were ideologically tempted and willing to throw their authority around. But I haven’t seen it, frankly, and, until I do, I’d be pretty reluctant to open that door at all.
I know we've seen some vigorous discussion over the last while about activist judges. But one interesting theme I've been picking up over the last few months especially is, how much work exactly do we or should we expect the judges to be doing? For example, we had the overturning of Chevron, which ostensibly puts more difficult rule-making decisions in the hands of judges. An increase in work for them, championed by the right. But then, we had the right also start claiming that having immigration hearings for literally every immigrant would be too onerous and they should be able to deport people faster, perhaps without even (what the left would call) full due process. Too much work. And now we have the right claiming that each state or district would need to file its own lawsuit, or even assemble an emergency class action to get nation-wide relief, for an executive order with nearly non-existent precedent. An increase in work across all districts. Traditionally the right is against judicial activism in general, saying judges are too involved, implying they should work less. Maybe this all isn't a real contradiction, but still, an interesting pattern. What does judicial reform look like on the right, is it really a coherent worldview, or just variously competing interests, often tailored right to the moment? A more narrow, tailored question would be: what is the optimal number of judges, for someone on the right, compared to what we have now? Do we need more and weaker judges, or fewer and weaker? Or something else?
DirtyWaterHotDog
11hr ago
No radiation leak from any nuclear facility in Pakistan, says IAEA amid buzz after Indian claims
Addressing a press conference, Air Marshal AK Bharti said that Indian forces did not know about the site. He said, "We did not hit Kirana hills, whatever is there."
During a press briefing on Tuesday, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal was asked about social media buzz on ‘nuclear leakage’ in Pakistan after the Indian strikes.
“…Those are questions for them (Pakistan) to answer, not for us. Our position was made very clear during the defence briefing. As for your question, the Pakistani minister has already made some remarks on that,” he said.
India explicitly denied hitting nuclear facilities. The buzz was manufactured by media/social-media accounts.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
11hr ago
What are some of your favorite classes? I'm interested in learning more.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11hr ago
I don't follow the argument? If a party of four goes to a full-service restaurant, I'd expect somewhere on the order of 1-2 hours of human time to be spent by restaurant staff on that party (between host, waiter, cooks, dishwashers, management, etc). Assuming that employees are ~1/3 of the cost of running a restaurant, and that the customers make the same wage as the restaurant staff, that's a per-person cost of 45 - 90 minutes of wages. Probably not something you want to do literally every day, but seems like it should be easily doable a couple times a week, not just as an "occasional splurge purchase".
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
11hr ago
I maintain that the risk of Mr and now-Mrs good enough marrying, provided that they’re basically compatible adults seriously intending to make it work, is very low, but that many people ignore one or the other or the third condition. There are simply fewer Mr and Miss good enoughs than there used to be, it seems like modern secular(here used in the sense of ‘in mainstream society rather than a subculture’ rather than to mean ‘non-religious’) dating worries more about vapid nonsense than about big picture compatibility, lots of people don’t have the serious intent of making it work no matter what, etc.
Can you rephrase the first bit of this? I'm not following.
The courts should do their jobs and not do someone else's job. There's no contradiction here. It's not about the total magnitude of their power, as if there's some number that should be summed up over all the things they do and try to make sure the sums line up, it's about jurisdiction. The role of the judiciary is to interpret the law as written and intended, and apply it to individual cases, which are frequently weird and contain many facts and details that might make them edge cases or involve multiple laws that need to be combined together.
If the law doesn't say a thing and an activist judge pretends that it does by inventing new definitions for words that clearly were not what those words meant when the law was written, then they are legislating their own new laws, not actually judging. If judges go to some agency run by unelected non-judges and asks them to interpret the law for them, then those people are the judges, and the elected judges are not actually judging. They're supposed to judge, not legislate, not outsource.
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