It’s authored by the guy who coined the term originally; so however he’s using it, that’s the way it’s used.

I asked my family what the last useful thing Congress accomplished that made life better for Americans.

The only 2 answers were the 2010 Affordable Care Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Two actions in 40+ years.

French’s just changed their mustard recipe and my whole house rioted because it tastes “wrong now.” I don’t eat mustard but my husband and kids made me go to the discount grocery to stock up on “old French’s” before it goes away.

Oh yeah, the cast grows and grows every episode or so until there’s much more likeable people. Senku is always there but his role gets smaller until he’s tolerable.

It was 24 eps and I liked it better after like 6-8 but it’s an ensemble cast that grows bigger basically every episode so I’ll once you get the swing of it, it carries you along.

No shit, I had the hardest time getting into the anime Dr. Stone for this exact reason. Thankfully, someone held me down for the first 2 seasons and I learned to love it.

I have a growing personal hatred of people in white pearl-coat cars right now. They are the new BMWs for me.

This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.

The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.

The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.

So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.

Interesting! Thanks. That has some more nuance than I was expecting.

PA state government is rife with corruption of every level and so we as residents tend to leap to conclusions that every state official, especially the elected ones, are always committing some kind of crime and it’s just the unlucky ones who get caught and tried. The State Treasurer in particular has a recent bad history.

Source? He was a State Treasurer involved in a complicated bribery and contracting scandal. It’s not a he-said-she-said sort of case. His accuser was a deputy comptroller for Pittsburgh Public Schools who noted contracts were wildly overvalued for the work and called the State Auditor General who called the FBI to investigate the matter. Who are you suggesting was lying?

Yeah they are called experts and they used to be employed by Universities and Research groups. But Americans decided they didn’t care or want people who actually had credentials, talent, or acclaim somewhere around 2016 and have spent all their time tearing down everything that made people credible experts in their field.

In information literacy circles we called this “the death of authority”, which basically means nob one cares who wrote or said something any longer. The person providing the opinion no longer has enough weight on the thing being said to keep absolute yahoos from being considered as good as experts.

Information and media literacy tells people to look at 4 things about a source

Currency (when it was published) Authority (who wrote it) Relevancy (how does it relate to what you are doing) Purpose (why did the author want you to know this)

And all of these are being eroded away. News articles pushed at you with no date, Opinions and Editorials disguised as regular news articles, etc.

Blaming birth control for later infertility has a long history despite being absolutely unproven medically.

Damn, I’m old enough to remember this post the first time it happened on Reddit. I laughed about this poor fool all day. Good times.

True, but the second part was far more important. It’s not that they think they are right, it’s that they are CONVINCED that everyone else ALSO thinks they are right and are too scared to say so. So they are thrilled to force their racist beliefs on everyone because they are sure we are just victims of the “woke mind virus” or equivalent. They are sure they are saving us from ourselves and it makes them insufferable.

We didn’t do a good job in the aftermath of the Civil War cleaning up the people who caused the problem. We were too quick to pardon everyone and try to get back to normal.

That gave the losing side the idea that it was only a temporary setback everyone secretly thought they were right or else we would have been more angry with them and it’s been a huge fucking problem ever since.

Can we call it the Tri-State so every “Tri-State area” has no hope?

On purpose or by accident?

What proof do you have that your waste is being processed correctly? I have proof mine is not and plenty of news reporting from across the US in the last 5 years that says consumer curbside recycling is basically dead.

I’m just speaking as someone who does carefully separate everything, only to watch the truck put it all the same place. My individual actions mean fuck all if the rest of the process doesn’t work.