I saw a documentary about the ultra rich teenagers in the US years ago. One young girl in that film explained that maintaining friendships with “regular” people was impossible. Her reasoning was that rich people do rich people shit. And you have the choice to pay someones way, which makes for awkward obligation/ resentment. Or you could exclude them, which also causes hard feelings.

That teenage girl? Ivanka Trump.

It’s so sad that McConnell isn’t going to live to see the America he was so instrumental in creating.

In a just world, the Catholic Church would have so many judgements that they would be forced to mortgage Vatican City and put a roller coaster in Taco Bell presents: the Sistine Chapel, by Pepsi.

I prefer to buy individual spices because you can customize them and because the ones you really like won’t be zombies in your pantry after 10 years. For example, I’ve got a bottle of Chinese five spice that’s been used once because I don’t like the licorice/fennel taste of star anise.

I do keep garam masala because I use that regularly. And I intend to try Berbere.

Trump promised not to do another Iraq or Afghanistan. He never said anything about another Vietnam.

IDK how Trump ever expects to get the peace prize by blowing up Colombian fishing boats. A real Peace Prize winning president knows to be rational and humane by bombing Yemeni weddings instead.

I need windows for flight sims. My problem is not so much the software, it’s the hardware. I have a head-tracking camera, a set of pedals, a throttle, and joystick. All need separate drivers. None support Linux. My throttle is so old that it hasn’t been supported since W7 and it’s work to get it going on W10.

It’s just way easier to dual boot than to try to get all that hardware running on Linux.

Treat capitalists as you find them. Forget morality. What is advantageous and legal is automatically good. What is advantageous and illegal is a cost/benefit calculation.

It’s really sad when non-believers don’t value other’s freedom to believe what they want. It seems hypocritical. Citing Muslims as an example of Chinese religious freedom is either dishonest or ignorant.

Everybody who laughs at this uses Yahoo for Email.

In American leftism there is a definite divide between black and white.

For example second wave feminism is often thought of as Women seeking entry into the workplace, but at the same time black feminists were trying to leave the workforce and take care of their own kids.

The labor movement has an explicitly racist history. A fact that Capitalists often took advantage of by leveraging black scabs who were often ineligible for union membership. Eugne Debs identified this as a problem with the socialist movement.

I’m not saying that racism is common among today’s lefties, just that white lefties are often ignorant of black American life and especially black radical thought and activism.

If you are vexed by Bernie Sanders’ struggle with black voters, you’re probably not very familiar with this history.

It seems obvious to me that if our taxonomy fails to describe the natural world, then our definition of life is inadequate. Viruses being “not alive” because semantics has bugged me since the 7th grade.

I’m suspicious of an article about advanced robotics without any description or depiction of said robots. Humanoid robots are for advertising brochures. They’re impractical for almost everything.

This is some anecdote from executives jotted down by journalists who never got near these factories.

Not saying its fake, just lazy and incurious journalism.

But with OpenAI, [Sam Altman] told me, “there’s something real happening here”.

This sentience strikes me because it’s a tacit admission that AI as it stands is way less valuable than people like Altman promised it would be. But trust me bro.

It’s a myth that circumcision is a Christian practice. Early Christians debated keeping the covenant, but since they were a proselytizing faith, cutting on your dick is a hard sell and they decided it wasn’t necessary.

The actual origin is 19th Century lunatics who thought masturbation caused disease. These were more health nuts than arch conservatives. Most were vegan, and some even feminist. But they promoted circumcision among boys and girls to prevent masturbation. This is why the practice is American but not European.

Onedrive is Microsoft’s attempt to make Home Windows users a revenue source by making it a subscription service. This has been SOP in smart phones for a decade now.

His company DevDroid makes remotely controlled machine guns, that use AI to automatically detect people and track them. Because of concerns over friendly fire, he says they don’t have an automatic shooting option.

“We can enable it, but we need to get more experience and more feedback from the ground forces in order to understand when it is safe to use this feature.”

That’s some real Dr. Strangelove logic in the wild. Can’t let robots kill people until it’s safe.

The concept of a bloodline is incoherent.

Since the number of direct ancestors doubles every generation you go back, individual lineage is closer to a bowl of spaghetti than a family tree.

Every generation you go back, you share less and less genetic markers. You share exactly 50% of your DNA with each parent, about 25% with each grandparent etc. Eventually you’ll find a direct ancestor with whom you share no DNA markers. It’s 12 generations back, on average.

So, go back a few hundred years, and you’re not genetically related to anybody. Go back a thousand, and everyone’s list of ancestors is indistinguishable.

The single most impressive, and lasting legacy of this show is Woody Harrelson’s carrier. Can anybody else think of a regular sit-com actor who broke into Hollywood? Bruce Willis is the only other one I can think of, and he never broke type.