Other countries often send help to places battling forest fires. You’ve got to wonder if that will give them pause when the pilots need to be concerned about being used for target practice.

Yes that always irks me. We can have 15 “markers of a recession”, but as long as nobody says it’s name, it can’t be true. The media has the Voldemort approach to economics.

The stock market is a weird thing - prices seem to be tied to whether a company can make more this quarter than last quarter, and not tethered to whether a company makes a profit. I figure that they made record revenue and now need a strategy to make even more profit next quarter, which they hope to achieve by reducing expenses via layoffs.

I don’t like it, but the economy is more tethered to speculation than reality.

I think it’s that this type of Christian believes so wholeheartedly in Jesus’ forgiveness that they assume it means they can do anything they like and claim repentance afterwards

I can’t help but laugh when one of them gives a 5 minute interview about how disappointed they are in getting scammed, but ends it by saying it was the only voting option and they would never vote Democrat even now.

This is what society looks like when your vote can be expected and doesn’t need to be earned.

When they say deported, does that imply that a different state would take them?

If not, what a dejecting step in conservation by a state that pretends to be a pristine place for wildlife tourism

Bullshit factory is very apt. I was using it for an open book exam and it gave answers entirely skewed to the way the question was asked.

For example, if I asked “is X bacteria a pathogen in Y disease”, it would say yes, it was a very bad pathogen.

If I asked “what effects does X bacteria have in this body system”, it said it was a beneficial bacteria.

Never trust the AI summary, you have to fully read the studies.

Lately, whenever anyone draws the obvious parallels to 1984, posters seem to jump to say that Orwell had unsavoury beliefs and therefore it negates any correct thing he ever said.

It’s such a weird world where we decide someone must be 100% correct by today’s standards or else everything they ever said must be complete bunk.

All of our historical heroes were assholes by today’s standards, and we will be assholes in the eyes of our descendants.

I’m not sure that’s true. In day to day life, I find the majority of people will accept whatever the media tells them to accept.

The normalization of AI in the past couple of years has been rapid. Even my 70 year old aunts are delighting at AI-photoshopping themselves into flowers and revealing outfits. Prospective employees hand in chatbot-created resumes and cover letters, masking the fact that their spelling and grammar is godawful.

The media will tell us to celebrate the end of overpaid actors and influencers, and many people will be pleased to see them knocked down a peg.

To add to your point, English is an amalgamator of words from many other languages. When another language has a word without a perfect English equivalent, English tends to adopt it, allowing words like shampoo and karaoke to become part of our language too. It’s a good part of the reason that English has more words than most other European languages

English breaks most of its own rules to begin with, and we seem to delight in finding ways to toy with the language even more.

The scary thing is that AI summaries are often inaccurate. I have an open book licensing exam that I am required to write every 5 years. I put one of the questions into a search engine hoping to find a study that would contain relevant information - the search results came up fine, but the answer listed in the AI summary was blatantly wrong.

MAGA is itself a religion. They are Christian because it gives them an excuse to treat women and dark skinned people badly, not because they believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

If they have to choose, MAGA aligns with their beliefs more than a segment of Christianity that many Evangelicals already dislike.

I have no doubt that he is too lazy to read the religious book that he purports to champion

Pivot seems inadequate as a term here. You could pivot from making shoes to work gloves.

But from shoes to AI infrastructure? That’s more “my company failed, and using the same name and corporate structure is a way to save money on my unrelated business idea”.

Sometimes I think that if there was an anti-Christ, they wouldn’t be aware that they were the anti-Christ. If that’s the case, JD Vance would be the perfect candidate.

I’m a dentist and we get summaries of the disciplinary actions taken by our board. A few years ago, there was a male dentist who finally lost his licence for grabbing patients’ and staff’s breasts. The summary read that he had been disciplined for this five times already and they were only just waking up to the fact that he should no longer be licensed to practice.

Looks like everyone started a new road perpendicular to the shore line, and the mess occurred when the roads got long enough to meet.

Wonder if the Trump administration will keep up their threats to tariff Canadian potash. They’ve already tripled the price of nitrogen input, why not fuck around with potassium too?

History is written by the victors. This realization has made me question every version of history I have ever been taught