Tag Archives: laziness

Wally World Comes To Your Fridge!

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Humour, Personal, Social commentary

Just how lazy can people be?  Now, admittedly, I have been taking advantage of the Kroger’s ‘click-list’ whereby I place an online grocery order, then just drive up at the appointed time and a Kroger employee brings my groceries out and loads them into my car.  I started doing this in the early days of the pandemic and have continued due to both the pandemic and my own health problems.  I don’t subscribe to their delivery service, in part because of the cost of about $20 per delivery, but there have been times in the past 4 months that it’s been tempting.  Still … I would never … not in a million years … subscribe to the new service offered by Wal-Mart.

From an article in CNN Business …

“Walmart is expanding its push to deliver groceries straight into customers’ kitchen fridges, even when they aren’t home.

Walmart (WMT) said Wednesday that it plans to make InHome, its $148 annual delivery option, available to 30 million US households by the end of the new year, up from six million today.

Walmart did not disclose how many shoppers have signed up or stuck with the program. But it’s targeting wealthier, time-strapped customers who are willing to pay a subscription — and are comfortable with a stranger entering their kitchen — to avoid going to the store or sitting at home waiting for their order to arrive.

Here’s how InHome works: Customers who subscribe order groceries online and select InHome as their delivery option. Walmart’s employees wear a camera when they enter customers’ homes, allowing shoppers to watch the process live from their phones.”

I’m sorry, but I really don’t want a stranger rooting around inside my fridge!  What’s next … they come and cook the food for you, too?  Perhaps they could throw in a load of laundry and unload the dishwasher while waiting for the veggies to sautè?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to Kroger and pick up my online order!

Voter Apathy — Part I

Posted on by under Election 2018, Political commentary, Social commentary

An article in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer caught my eye yesterday.  The headline?

12 Young People on Why They Probably Won’t Vote

Say what???  In the wake of the Parkland school shooting last February, I thought young people were energized, I thought they were determined to make their voices heard, to make a difference.  According to the article, however, more than half of American adults plan to cast ballots in November, but only a third of people ages 18 to 29 say they will. What happened?  I had to know, so I read the article.  Here are some of the highlights …

  • 2016 was such a disillusioning experience. Going into the election, I was so proud to be in this country at this moment, so proud to be voting for Hillary Clinton. I had my Clinton sweatshirt on all day. I was on Twitter telling people that if they didn’t vote they were dead to me — like the whole thing. Watching the results come in, it was just disheartening. My faith in the whole system was crushed pretty quickly.

  • I think there’s a way to be an informed nonvoter. I’d rather have an informed nonvoter than an uninformed voter going in and making a choice they don’t understand.

  • There are things that I’m aware of where I’m certain I’m right. But for most things, although I feel strongly, it’s very probable that there’s some aspect of this that I don’t understand. Somebody provides a new avenue of thought, and it changes the way I think about something. I never felt certain enough to vote.

  • I tried to register for the 2016 election, but it was beyond the deadline by the time I tried to do it. I hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety. I don’t remember seeing voter-registration drives, no. I’ve seen a lot more the past two years. I’m sure there must have been stuff. I just don’t remember it.

  • I guess I still thought, Okay, my vote is largely symbolic in this election because I’m in Texas. Even if Texas went blue, I’m pretty sure my vote wouldn’t matter anyway. Austin is very liberal, but it’s very gerrymandered.

  • I have ADHD, and it makes it hard for me to do certain tasks where the payoff is far off in the future or abstract. I don’t find it intrinsically motivational.

  • I rent and move around quite a bit, and when I try to get absentee ballots, they need me to print out a form and mail it to them no more than 30 days before the election but also no less than seven days before the election. Typically, I check way before that time, then forget to check again, or just say “F*** it” because I don’t own a printer or stamps anyway.

  • I feel like the Democratic Party doesn’t really stand for the things I believe in anymore. Why should I vote for a party that doesn’t really do anything for me as a voter? Millennials don’t vote because a lot of politicians are appealing to older voters. We deserve politicians that are willing to do stuff for our future instead of catering to people who will not be here for our future. I’m a poli-sci major …

  • I look at it this way: That report just came out the other day about global warming, talking about how we have 12 years, until 2030, for this radical change unlike the world has ever seen. And The Hill newspaper just put out that article about how the DNC does not plan on making climate change a big part of their platform, even still. I just do not understand why I would vote for a party that doesn’t care about me in any way. They can say, “Sure, we’ll lower student interest rates.” Well, I don’t give a shit about student interest rates if I’m not going to live past 13 more years on this planet.

  • Most people my age have zero need to go to the post office and may have never stepped into one before. Honestly, if someone had the forms printed for me and was willing to deal with the post office, I’d be much more inclined to vote.

  • I vote when I feel like I have to. But I mostly consider it something that sucks a lot of people’s time and energy away from actually building power with the people around them.

  • For a while, I thought it was an immoral act to vote. It means that we’re giving our approval to a system that I totally do not want to validate.

  • My parents are of the generation where they actually watch the news, and they know about candidates via the news. Where my generation, the millennial generation, is getting all their news from social media like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, and that is not always the best. Reading things through social media is snippets, and it’s not the whole details on everything, you know? It’s a wild theory, but setting voting up so that it’s all on social media, putting all that information in just an Instagram Story, in a Snapchat filter or whatever — bulleted-out, easy-to-read, digestible content — would encourage me to vote.

As you might guess, the article left me torn between a sense of intense fury, seriously wanting to go smack a young person, and one of “we are doomed, folks … these are that ‘next generation’ we’ve been counting so heavily on!”  Who’s to blame here?  Perhaps we all are, but offhand I am angry with parents who have not bothered to instill a sense of responsibility into these young people, and our schools who somewhere along the line decided it was more important to teach them to program a computer than to teach them how our government works and how very important each and every vote is. vote-3