I’m sure government agencies buy commercially available products all the time. The problem is that we are no longer just consumers in the market, we are also unwillingly the product.

I guess there is good and bad with either style. I generally prefer the self checkout because I can bag my own stuff

True. I remember thinking it was a load of crap, but it certainly got the message across that I’d be alone and out of a job if I tried to form a union.

And I also remember lessons in class where the textbook weren’t l went into great detail about the corruption and mob ties of some unions, but very little about anything positive. There has definitely been an effort on the part of powerful folks to denigrate unions.

I remember reading The Jungle in college and getting a much different perspective of labor laws and union value

Depending on where you lived you were plied with anti-union rhetoric. I remember back in the '80s and working at a department store and they had us watch “training” videos about how we were a big family and how unions broke up that family and made us adversaries. I thought it was a bunch of bull, but I’m sure there were plenty of folks that bought into it.

They are on the wrong sides of the bottle

Maybe I’ll stop getting those “He Gets Us” ads if I cruise the atheist subreddits.

Lately it is getting more like we are not just the consumers, we are the product. It is very uncomfortable.

I used to hate cilantro because I thought it tasted soapy. Then my kid was telling me about this “gene” one day and I said that I must have it. Then I asked them what they thought cilantro tasted like, and they told me it was onion-y like chives.

We were at a restaurant at the time and I was eating something with cilantro which is why it came up. So I took a bite and tried to see if I could taste what they meant by onion-y. And damned if I couldn’t make out that chive sort of flavor.

Since then, I can’t taste the soapiness, it just tastes good.

So I doubt it is actually a gene of any sort if you can reprogram your brain like I did to get the taste.

Everyday. You can put the baking soda on dry or mix it into a paste. Make sure you massage it into your scalp (not too hard). Then you rinse that out and put on a rinse of vinegar water. I comb my hair out at this point and then rinse out the vinegar then apply a little vitamin E oil after I towel dry it.

I stopped using shampoo years ago because I’m allergic to a lot of the stuff that goes in them. I use baking soda and apple cider vinegar (you rinse in between so you don’t make a volcano). My hair has always been brittle and frizzy, but now the texture is really nice.

And for the record, no my hair doesn’t stink. You can use vitamin E oil after with essential oils if you really want your hair to smell pretty.