Category: News

Sam’s Club reveals plan to eliminate checkout lanes completely with major change:

Sam’s Club, the Walmart-owned membership warehouse, is rolling out a major change to its grocery payment system and embracing artificial intelligence (AI).

The retail giant plans to phase out traditional checkouts across its 600 stores and create a friction-free shopping experience which will include customers scanning goods on the go with an app and then having and AI scanner verify the goods as customers leave. The technology would eliminate the need for receipt checks at the door.

The system, known as “Scan & Go,” was initially launched in April 2024 and allows members to use the Sam’s Club mobile app to scan their products.

The latest announcement adds the AI check, known as “Just Walk”/”Just Go” exit, to the process and will see the option of traditional checkouts being eliminated.

The new plans were announced by Chris Nicholas, Sam’s Club president and CEO, who outlined the company’s growth ambitions at its 2025 Investment Community Meeting last week.

“This is one of the fastest, most scalable transformations happening in retail today,” Nicholas said. “We’re investing with intention — in our fleet, our associates and the member experience — to become the world’s best club retailer.”

Making me do more of the work is not improving the member experience.

You know, gentle reader, I go to the local Sam’s Club once or twice a week. I have almost since we moved to Springfield, and I’ve been a member for, what, 25 years? But I am not going to do this.

For one, I’m an old curmudgeon now For two, as a longtime remote worker, my interactions with the cashiers at Sam’s Club represent some of the only in-person contacts with people on a regular basis. So I am not going to load the corporate app onto my phone so that I can scan all the goods and to let it try to track me all day long. Just so that the corporation can get a couple extra nickels from me.

Why do I say that this rhymes? Remember when some gunslingin’ marketin’ genius decided to try to make Walmart more upscale, resulting in almost $2,000,000,000 in lost sales?

I imagine this will go that way, kind of like how Walmart went all-in on self-checkouts and then pulled back.

But it will be a year or two without Sam’s Club for us. And we’ll see if Costco captures us as it has so many of our friends.

CT scans could be a contributor to cancer, study finds:

CT scans could be an “important cause of cancer” in the United States, according to a new study.

According to the study by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, CT scans could account for 5% of cancer cases in the U.S., more than tripling previous estimates.

Since 2007, the number of CT scans performed in the U.S. has increased by 30%. The research also indicates that CT scans are being overused for instances of upper respiratory infections and common headaches.

Not depicted: Scanners that have become ubiquitous at the exits of major retailers. Old timey ones waited for an RFID to pass through them without deactivation (no (they have been around for, what, forty years now?) but are becoming even more elaborate as they scan items in your cart to make sure you paid for them.

Not as heavy of a dose of radiation as a CT scan, but you don’t get a CT scan several times a week.

Boy, oh boy, we are all guinea pigs, all the time. Presumably because they can no longer test with actual guinea pigs.

The front page of the New York Post has a video leading to a story about the San Diego earthquake. The video depicts a woman sitting on a couch who jumps up, grabs a baby, and runs for the front door.

What caught my eye is the Roku logo and date and timestamp at the bottom.

The Roku is watching you.

But only if you turn it and give it explicit permission to do so. Wink.

Missouri woman living with breast cancer asks lawmakers to pass Cancer Patients’ Bill of Rights:

She approached Democratic St. Louis Sen. Angela Mosley about writing a Cancer Patients’ Bill of Rights. This bill would ensure patients have the right to clear explanations in their language, shorter waits for test results and appointments with specialists, access to clinical trials at request, and much more. Insurance companies would be expected to bear any costs associated with this bill.

Our financially and probably otherwise illiterate legislators continue to layer up mandates on insurance companies and then slag on them when insurance prices go up. And then they mandate purchasing insurance coverage.

Republicans are not immune to these feel-good, hide-the-cost bills. One of my current senators made it mandatory that my health care coverage pay for autism treatments that I’ll never use.

It’s filtering to the masses: The economy is cratering! Recession! Depression! Doom!

My mother-in-law is no longer technically a shut-in, but she does watch a lot of cable news. My beautiful wife is steeped in the non-profit world and other feminine sources of information. And even the newspapers that are nominally Trump-supporting such as the New York Post have to fill column inches and screen pixels several times a day, so some doom-mongering is inevitable. They’re starting to fear in a herd-like fashion.

But.

In recent years, during what was presented as the best economic recovery ever, Jack, the price of gas and groceries effectively doubled? And that was fine?

But now the word tariffs gets screamed from the broadcast tours and the tubes and wires of the Internet, and now we’re supposed to panic?

Yeah, nobody’s hair is on fire, and day-to-day has not changed.

I guess a lot of government people are out of work and uncertain. Kind of like tech jobs have been shed over recent years by the tens of thousands and how manufacturing jobs have evaporated en masse in the last couple of decades.

Head down, everyone, and carry on. No one knows what lies ahead.

‘Born alive’ bill passes Missouri House. Critics say it threatens medication abortions

It’s in the Springfield News-Leader, but it is not by News-Leader staff or, heaven forfend, the “news” organization Associated Press. It’s by the Missouri Independent people, a left-wing editorial organization whom I remember from my old days blogging with the political blog 24th State.

I’ve seen a lot of Missouri Independent pieces infesting the small newspapers I get from around the state. I’m always disappointed to see it, as the news “article” trashes Republicans as news. But the small town papers are starting to trend leftward even though their readerships are not (and as their page counts diminish and they cannot afford actual people in their area to write articles). On the other hand, when they unexpectedly close shop, I’ll save money on annual non-local subscriptions, so that will be nice.

In the Friday mailbag today at Founding Questions, someone asked:

Re: The meme (for lack of a better term): “The world stopped in 1999, and this is a simulation (or whatever).” Question: In your opinion: How much of the slowdown in culture, etc, is due to the Boomers losing their juice? Be it personally, physically, socially, and so on? How much of the meme is simply trolling people wth fuzzy memories? And how much is Religion (big R) going away, and the search for meaning spilling over to any nook or cranny?

I have given this some thought, gentle reader, and I attribute it to the decline of the educational establishments in the country, whether it’s the consolidation of school districts to solve problems Horace Mann identified in 19th century (spoiler alert: they did not, in fact, solve the problems, but they sure made room for a lot of administrators) or the change in the nature of colleges (now universities). Heck, maybe it was the electrification of the country, where culture shifted to radio and later television (and, in some places, but not all, movies).

So the depth of the source material from which creators and writers decreased. Instead of imaginative books or even radio, writers and whatnot started taking their main inputs from visual media, and you can see it in their outputs.

Now, we’ve reached a point where young creators and writers have taken their inputs mostly from movies. For example, this PJ Media column alludes:

Enter the Donkey version of Loki, the deeply duplicitous trickster-villain from the Marvel Cinematic Universe….

Not the Norse god of lies. Not the comic book villain for almost 70 years now. No, the Loki from a contemporary series of movies (no, man, Thor was 2011, which is like fifteen years ago–it’s an old movie).

If you read widely, historically speaking, you’ll find that even pulp (the best of it) from the early 20th century has depth that a lot of contemporary mass culture (movies, mostly, but also television) lacks. Classical allusions, retelling of stories, maybe just hitting most of the Hero’s Journey, for crying out loud. But the new films are trying to retell the older (not necessarily old) films. Why do later Star Wars movies merely thinly retell the original Star Wars movies? Because the filmmakers’ inputs were not classical serials but the original Star Wars movies (a thinner source from which to draw). You can apply this to other “franchises” which just retread and message-swap the stories.

Now, this might apply less to writers, who tend to start out readers and who might have some depth in their inputs, but I assure you this does not necessarily apply to poets as some of my book reports suggest.

Where are we going to be in twenty years when the prime creators grew up on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? Me, I’ll be reading old books, same as ever. As a culture: Can it really get any worse?

So what is to be done? I dunno. Read a book? Write something more than twee blog posts? Probably more advice to me than many of you.

Branson fire crews working natural gas leak that may have caused an explosion at a hotel:

Fire crews in Branson are actively investigating a natural gas leak at a hotel in Branson that may have caused an explosion.

Witnesses told KY3 they saw an explosion at the hotel, and pictures sent to KY3 show blown-out windows. According to the city of Branson, it was at the Spark by Hilton, located at 263 Shepherd of the Hills Expressway.

As I often say, not every Hilton that I’ve stayed at has caught fire, but every hotel I’ve stayed at that caught fire was a Hilton.

Series of explosions on buses in Israel are suspected to be a militant attack, authorities say

One suspects the authorities would not follow the AP Style Guide of Moral Equivalence.

‘Fed up’ brother kills ‘bullying’ sister and shoots parents, claiming family ‘gangs up on him’ for being broke and unemployed: Police

This occurred in near the apartment complex where I first lived in the 1970s before we moved to the projects. I just mentioned them last August.

(Link via Wirecutter.)

Springfield cookie store is asking for help finding teens who stole tip jar

Although they have security camera footage, the media is blurring the faces of the youths.

Presumably because they’re juveniles.

But it runs counter to the stated purpose of the article.

Also not in the article: any physical description of the youths.

Tucked into a story entitled Bill Gates says he will never downsize from his mega-mansion with 24 bathrooms — despite being a single empty-nester, we get this declaration:

Xanadu 2.0 — which he named as an ode to the 1941 film “Citizen Kane” — is the epitome of billionaire luxury, featuring six kitchens, 24 bathrooms, an indoor trampoline room, a private library and a swimming pool equipped with an underwater music system.

An ode, gentle reader. An ode. Xanadu is from Citizen Kane. Ye gods.

I’ve done an Internet search to see if Gates himself called it Xanadu 2.0 or if others did, but it’s unclear. Maybe it’s deep in the book The Road Ahead which I have not read, I don’t think, and I don’t think I have a copy of in the Nogglestead library which is odd. It was like Wayne characterized Frampton Comes Alive–it was so ubiquitous in the 1990s and in used book stores and sales for a decade thereafter that it seemed like everyone had a copy that they did not read.

I found one active link that to a story that says the house was called Xanadu in a subheadline (which seems to be the source of the assertion in the Wikipedia entry on Gates’s house. I guess nobody thought of calling it La Cuesta Encantada 2.0. But that would have required not only reading more than a Wikipedia entry but also maybe knowing what Citizen Kane was about. So cinematic history or history of the profession of journalism. Either would have worked.

I’m just here to slag on journalists, whom I suspect do not read almost 100 books, including classics, every year. Because they’re busy tracking down stories by reading the Internet instead.

Oh, and if you’re looking for my comment on Gates owning a very large house (well, several) with no intention of downsizing: So what? I don’t think I would, either, especially since it has a sweet library.

Family survives wrong-way crash on James River Freeway:

A series of wrong-way crashes on the James River Freeway this month, including one that sent a mother and her two children spinning across the highway, raises concerns about driver safety.

Weird how all these crashes are occurring in the area where they’ve added a bunch of diverging diamond interchanges and where they’ve been tampering with traffic patterns for years and not on the parts of US 60 with lights or more traditional on ramps and off ramps.

Probably will be a couple of years (or decades) before Experts and Professionals make a connection. Until then, I guess it’s up to us conspiracy theorists.

Oh, I know: Many of these drivers are intoxicated, and maybe some of them are not from around here, you know. But I would expect that an impaired driver might have a better chance of navigating a regular interchange than something with a lot of atypical loops and whorls.

The exciting new designs, each one different!, might look good in the sketchbooks, artists’ depictions, and the awards ceremonies and magazines, but they’re a lot less fun when you’re trying to drive them at night or in the rain even when unimpaired.

UPDATE: Props to Facebook who is on it in providing me with related content after I posted this morning:

Full disclosure: I have been a skeptic of this particular traffic pattern for a long time (I posted about them and roundabouts in a post in 2011 responding to Steven Den Beste, pbuh). And this is before I almost got creamed at a one such interchange in Joplin where I was driving the family to an athletic event some, jeez Louise, five or six years ago now. No doubt I would have been coming down the ramp to Range Line Road after having driven directly into the sunset and small city traffic. I didn’t realize the underpass was a double diamond–most of our interchanges in Springfield at the time went over the highway (although we have a couple under the highway now), so I yielded and as nothing was coming from my left, I made my right. Ha, ha! Joke was on me! The lanes immediately to the left were the southbound traffic which would have not been coming my way–southbound traffic was stopped at the light to my right across the lanes because the northbound traffic had a green light–and it was coming at 40 miles an hour on the lanes across the roadway, obscured by the pillars and jersey barriers in the middle of the road. I would say I got tootled at, but that’s not the sound of a 40 mile an hour vehicle surprised you would be so impudent as to pull out before it.

I did not get creamed, but I am very sympathetic to drivers who don’t recognize the interchange type and do something foolish. Even impaired ones.

‘Planet parade’ to light up the sky through the end of the month:

The end of January has a wonderful surprise in store for stargazers.

Just by looking up, you’ll be able to catch a glimpse of some planets shining brightly in the night sky.

Wait a minute. If you’re telling us about it in advance, it’s not much of a surprise now, is it?

Ernie Biggs Dueling Piano Bar closing in downtown Springfield

A downtown Springfield hotspot is closing.

In a Facebook post, the owners of Ernie Biggs Dueling Piano Bar announced that this would be its final weekend. They blamed financial challenges for the decision to shut down.

Downtown Springfield has seen another wave of closures recently for evening entertainment. Not sure if it’s really due to crime, homelessness (some overlap), or the challenging economy. Heaven knows I’ve only been downtown at night a couple of times over the last couple of years. Well, I’ve been to the local business co-working space for development meetings, but not for dinner and certainly not for drinks.

But “hotspots” don’t tend to close for financial reasons.

Full disclosure: We actually went to Ernie Biggs for drinks on our anniversary twelve years ago. So maybe I’m the problem by not supporting the downtown nightlife.

Jesus’ real name wasn’t Jesus, scientists claim — here’s why

Scientists have discovered:

• Jesus did not speak English.
• Jesus was not born in the Anglosphere at all.
• Jesus was born a long time ago.
• Different languages have different words…. and sounds!
• History was a long time ago. Like before Trump was president the first time.

The scientists in question are not actually scientists at all.

None of the information in the article is actually news to practicing Christians who attend a church and understand how the Bible came about.

But it’s news to a journalist, and perhaps is proof that Christianity IS BUILT ON LIES!!!!!!

The headline: CNN host Wolf Blitzer roasted for NFL TV setup after fans spot ‘veteran’ detail.

What, was something plugged in incorrectly? A slice of cheese on the uncooked meat, metaphorically speaking? Nah: Twitter just is dumb kids:

While Blitzer has been waiting a long time to witness his Bills lift the Lombardi Trophy, it appears it’s been even longer since he bought a new television.

According to his own photo, the reporter owns a very old school home entertainment setup, featuring a plasma screen television, DVD, VHS and CD players, and at least four difference remotes.

Social media users were quick to roast Blitzer for his ‘veteran’ setup as many urged him to upgrade his setup to more modern standards.

‘Love the two VCR’s. Can rewind one while watching another. Veteran move,’ one fan posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

‘Bro is stuck in the 80’s with his furniture and TV. I thought @CNN paid better. Viewership must be way down,’ another added.

‘Like most grandparents, 20 year old tv with 20 year old peripherals,’ a third said, suggesting Blitzer wouldn’t be the sole member of his generation with a similar setup.

Yeah, dumb kids. Thanks to the news media for reporting the tweets of the uninformed, who will watch, briefly, the latest streaming pap or approved wokelderized versions of classics. Who own nothing and pretend to like it on the Internet.

Nogglestead’s peripherals are older than that. Even the television, big screen projection model that it is, is coming up on 20 years old. And I have almost fifty-year-old gaming systems hooked up.

I would pretend to get worked up about Twitter kidz (who might be 40 years old these days), but I cannot even pretend anymore. It’s all so tiresome.

Postal customers say they’re fed up with backlog of mail sitting in Springfield’s post office

I guess it’s not just me wondering about whether we’ve reached the “then quickly” part of the death of the USPS.

The reporters reached out to the Springfield post office where a man’s drugs-by-mail sat unmoved for days, and their response echoed that of the Postmaster General:

I only reiterate these problems because post offices have been a hallmark of a growing functional country. I mean, one of the only good things to come out of the Qin Shi Huang dynasty in China was a post office, and Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General of the United States over two hundred years ago. A government organization which cannot do its function but instead does oh, so many other things of lesser value is really a fin de siècle symptom.

We watched the holiday movie Die Hard 2: Die Harder last night, and today we learn Die Hard 2 star dies after long health battle as heartbroken wife pays tribute

It was Art Evans, who played the engineer Barnes.

I need to stop reading and watching anything since people I read or watch keep dying.