• Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I just got back from drowning my sorrows into a patty melt at a local bar I frequent. I normally go at night, so the daytime servers were new to me. Got a 40ish year-old lady server who was overworked because everywhere is understaffed now. I asked for some tea because I hadn’t had caffeine yet, and she looks at me puzzled and says, “like hot tea?” And I say “Yes! Black please, but green is ok too if you don’t have it.” And she looked at me, still confused, and said, “Well i don’t know what that is, but we have regular hot tea I can bring you with some hot water.” After she left to put in my order, I couldn’t stop thinking about this exchange.

    This article gives me the same exact feeling. Whatever is happening that allows adult SERVERS to be unfamiliar with one of the most popular drinks on the planet. Whatever allowed it so so many people didn’t even realize Biden had dropped out…is the reason we lost to trump. It’s the reason Democrat weren’t able to break through on any issue. We were either talking to brick walls, or black holes. It’s no ones fault but that servers that she was unaware of black tea. You can’t force people to be intellectually curious or skeptical or even open minded. And these same people get to vote. And that’s why we can’t have nice things.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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        16 days ago

        I mean, TECHNICALLY, if you’re a US Citizen in Africa, yeah, you can vote absentee for President.

        One of my co-workers had to move to Algeria and was working remotely, pretty sure he still voted.

      • nexusband@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        I honestly don’t know where we go from here as a nation, and I fear folks like that will be the first casualties if the worst comes to pass.

        I mean, as deeply saddening as this sounds, the reality of it is…that issue will resolve it self. Ignorance is bliss…you won’t even know what hit you. And i’m beginning to think i should take that stance and just ignore everything and just carry on. Told a friend that, he immediately said, nope, you’re way too decent of a human being for that…so we’re going to suffer together.

        • AngryRobot@lemmy.world
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          15 days ago

          No, we have to fight for our country, or else we’re the 1930s Nazi sympathizers. Volunteer. Donate. When the time comes, help marginalized people escape the camps. This is OUR country, don’t let them take it.

    • The Real King Gordon@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      I deal with adults like this every day at my workplace. Can’t think, can’t reason, can’t troubleshoot, can’t read documentation, can’t even frame their problem correctly- let alone come up with a solution. Its insanity.

      • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
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        16 days ago

        Gods, I feel this so hard. I rose to a management position in a pretty short time for doing, like, what I consider to be the absolute bare minimum of learning how to do the job and solving problems on my own.

        I have a worker under me now who has been doing that position for longer than I did at this point and still comes to ask me questions that are basic fundamentals of the job.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        This makes me really appreciate my current employer, which actually vets people pretty stringently. It’s not 100% effective - nothing is - but by and large, I’m working with a lot of creative critical thinkers every day, many making me feel like a buffoon.

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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      16 days ago

      american culture is such that polite conversations do not permit the topics of religion, sex and politics to be discussed. as a result: evangelicals dominate our political trajectory, abortion is now illegal again; and people didn’t know that biden dropped out.

      there are also different levels of ignorance when it comes to each topic and it sounds like you’ve encountered one that’s at a slightly deeper level than that of your standard american voter.

    • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      I need to know what happened after that exchange. Like, after you burned the place down, did the fire department piss on it while high-fiving each other?

      • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        It was a pretty bad visit. I ordered ranch with my fries, and my patty melt with only American cuz i don’t know why you’d want swiss on a patty melt. They brought me the melt with swiss, and I got blue cheese for my fries. And didn’t get a water until i was finished with my melt.

        Tipped her 10$ cuz she was overworked and I used to be a server. Yay tip culture.

        • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          I was back of house, so I have difficulty with this. Forget tipping people with the IQ of a crayon for shit I don’t want.

          • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            I cooked at a bar for a year in college after i served, to this day i check for tip jars put out for cooks because you all deserve the real money. Only see them once in a while though, sadly

            • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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              16 days ago

              Cheers. One shop I worked at split tips with everyone, even the dish pit. That was fucking legit. I had to get out though, food stops being fun cooking for strangers.

    • would_be_appreciated@lemmy.ml
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      16 days ago

      Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.

      It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.

        • would_be_appreciated@lemmy.ml
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          16 days ago

          Sort of, with the major distinction that you can just tell somebody water green tea is and they’ll know what green tea is. It’s a trivial fix. You can tell a Trump supporter that Harris is not a communist, and they won’t believe you for a million years, with all the facts in the world behind you.

    • AngryRobot@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      I never you. I’ve had to force myself to be able to eat anything since Tuesday night. I’m so furious with my country.

    • hate2bme@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      That’s not the reason we lost. It’s because our party don’t do shit. That’s it. Everyone is afraid of what trump is going to do but what was done to prevent it? Nothing. We have a weak party with weak politicians.

      • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        So if the party did more, people wouldn’t be googling “is the current president running for president?” the day before election? I don’t really see how the party trying harder in the right way would fix people’s innate ignorance.

        The DNC deserves a ton of blame, but 2024 has taught me there is no democracy without an educated population, and ours is not educated.

  • suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml
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    17 days ago

    Not to defend the American public, who does not deserve any defense in the slightest, but…

    I have a friend in advertising who specializes in Google SEO, and he pointed out this will include searches that contain the phrase as a subset of the search, such as “When did Joe Biden drop out” or “Why did Joe Biden drop out”.

    • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      I mean short of running ads on football games that literally just said “Joe Biden, our current sitting president who took office after Donald Trump, has stepped down from running for a second term. Kamala Harris, our current VP is now the Democrat nominee”…actually…scratch that, maybe they should have done just that.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        I think one of the problems with Harris was that she actually believes that the American people are smart, capable, pragmatic folks with a penchant for helping others. That may have been partially true about some subsection of Americans at some point in time in the past, but 40+ straight years of institutional rot and attention attacks from an increasingly shitty and incoherent media ecosystem have taken their toll.

  • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    this could be very sensationalist because as far as I know, we have no idea what the absolute numbers are, the trend is measured in percentages:

    Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

    So it’s true that the peak is today, but that could be only a few people. Considering most of October the daily number was “0” (not enough data), I’m guessing the absolute numbers are fairly low. Anyone know how many datapoints google needs to publish data on trends?

  • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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    16 days ago

    So that’s why I had to vote for Biden as a write-in candidate!

  • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    This fact alone is so awesome about America. To be fair, I know very little about the UK government. I keep my voting strategy simple: whoever is proposing to get rid of first past the post closely followed by whoever is proposing more bicycle infrastructure. Failing that, whoever I think is going to lose.

    There are tools that help you decide how to vote. Waiting until the day comes and searching Joe Biden is hilarious.