"I think it's worth it. It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment..." -Charlie Kirk
That's one of the many problems I have with the current regime: they can't say anything without framing it as an opposition to some exaggerated bogeyman. I get it, politics is about messaging. But can't these fools, for once, rise above it and just do something without taking a jab?
But what about the Board of Peace? https://boardofpeace.org/ ... I love the quote: "...the war in Gaza is over." If people weren't dying, that would be hilarious!
Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.
I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?
I didn't attend an Ivy League, but I think I went to a good school. I was very nervous before I left for school - a little intimidated, so I talked to an academic mentor. He told me something I'll never forget: "You're gonna be around a lot of really smart kids. No doubt about it. But, mostly, what you're gonna find is you're surrounded by a lot of rich kids." He was 100% correct. Lots of smart kids, and lots of kids from well-to-do families. I think I met, maybe, 2 other kids that were as broke as my family.
Maybe it's me, but I've kinda lost the desire to personalize my OS/apps. It's probably because I'm older and lazier now, and I have other things to do now. But also, I feel like it's not as fun to tinker with this stuff anymore. Everything is so connected now, I feel like all my OS/apps are watching me - like, if I added a Buffy bitmap to the background, I'm gonna get some sort of notification: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer is owned by The Walt Disney Company. You are violating the terms of service of your app. Blah blah blah." I'm probably just old and paranoid, but honestly, it just doesn't feel the same these days.
I've lived next to the bicycle lock-up area of an elementary school for over 20 years. In all those years I've never seen a single bicycle, not once. Of course, every morning and afternoon my neighborhood is grid-locked with minivans, but yeah, no bicycles.
Reminds me of 1984, not the book itself, but the time when Amazon deleted it from everyone's Kindle because of some sort of copyright issue. I think that's when most of us first realized that the digital media being purchased doesn't really belong to you.
I removed myself from Facebook years ago because of all the toxic arguments about politics - almost entirely whataboutism and name calling. I've recently rediscovered Facebook and came up with a little game: sit back, watch all the political arguments, and take a drink every time someone concedes a point (not the whole argument, just a single point), as in, "Shit, you're right. I didn't realize that." I'm probably gonna quit soon because it's been around 2 months and I haven't taken a single drink.
Distract the masses with the 'birthright citizenship' ruling, while simultaneously giving the 1% what they paid for: more influence over elections/legislation. 4D chess.
I think the question Theo asks is the most relevant: Do you think [an AI-generated song] holds as much value? And I think we've been asking this question for years now, in different contexts: recorded music (records), copyable music (dual cassette recorders, CD-burners, mp3s), sampled music (of other artists' songs), AutoTune (basically removing the human singer from the song), etc. I feel like we've been marching toward this for nearly a hundred years now, replacing the human connection to the music with something artificial.
> This goes for someone anywhere on the political spectrum; I'm not just picking on the right.
I respectfully object to this. I’m thinking of research that was done a few years ago, measuring American’s knowledge of current events. The folks in the research that leaned right were generally more informed - meaning, they knew about a lot more currents events. But they were also overwhelmingly wrong about what they ‘knew’. Further, folks on the right tended to rate themselves higher than left-leaning folks wrt their knowledge, even though they were wrong a lot more.
I don't know what the best solution for the current healthcare clusterfuck in the US is, but I think disassociating health insurance from employer/employment is a great first step.
I keep hearing that whole area is gonna be razed as part of the Midway/Sports Arena redevelopment, but I feel like as long as MCRD stays put, Les Girls will always have a home. LOL
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
That scene is gold. Neil pauses for a little longer than 30 seconds before he decides to abandon Eady, meaning he followed the intent of his rule (walk away), just not the timing (30 seconds flat). If he made the same decision in less than 30 seconds, he probably would've gotten away.
Back in the mid-90s I was doing desktop support. It was a lot of work because PCs were relatively new (and they were garbage!), and people broke shit all the time. Sometime around '96 a disk-cloning utility called Ghost was released. It was great - one could provision a fully working PC with all required apps and config settings in minutes! Sounds lame now, but back then it was revolutionary. It had a dark side, though. After about a year most people I worked with had lost the ability to troubleshoot even the most basic problems. The solution to every problem was to just re-apply the standard Ghost disk image (we called it 'Ghosting' back then) ... Can't print? Ghost it! Not receiving emails? Ghost it! Word is too slow? Ghost it!
Back in the early-2000s, I passed the Microsoft certification exam for IIS. I had never even heard of the product (I was told my company had some extra credits at the testing center, I was there taking another exam (Solaris 8 certification), so I figured why not?) I know, MCSE exams were notoriously simple back then, but good god - usually, for every question, 3 of the 4 possible answers didn't even make sense. Anyway, I figured there was no way IIS would last if any dipshit could become "certified" in the product.