Schadrach

We have healthcare, the best healthcare actually

We actually do. We have some of the best healthcare in the world if you can afford it, and healthcare stats that make it absolutely clear just how few people that is.

Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)

There’s an Asian AI lab that’s demoed an early version of an AI-driven humanoid robot domestic servant. There are suggestions in might hit market within a few years and cost about as much as a decent used car. Figure those estimates are always too optimistic and something like 2035 and $15k is a possibly realistic estimate assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong.

No it generally makes sense to teach kids to not cite Wikipedia. Though it is consistently checked and updated you can look at the wiki link and drama for the Israeli genocide just to see a perfect example of why it shouldn’t be cited.

Wikipedia is generally terrible for anything that was politically controversial since Wikipedia has been a thing. A lot of why is very intentionally buried in layers of bureaucracy and wikilawyering to make it look like totally reasonable, neutral point of view decision making. One of the big routes to viewpoint control on Wikipedia is arguments about notoriety and what is or is not a “reliable source” and what sources are sufficient to discuss a topic.

If we’re talking about Scott Alexander’s writings, I feel like Sort By Controversial reflects reality far too well. Fucking prescient.

Yeah. Though I liked Ra more than There Is No Antimemetics Division. Especially the way he did a certain thing involving right versus left aligned text early on that if you were paying attention should strongly trigger a “wait, how did that happen?” response in a way that hints at very important things.

To quote UNSONG Chapter 17: No Earthly Parents I Confess (https://unsongbook.com/chapter-18-no-earthly-parents-i-confess/ and yes it’s chapter 17 despite the URL, and I’m sure there’s something significant about that but I am unsure exactly what offhand, but everything in UNSONG is significant):

"Picture a maiden lost in the hills.

“Maiden” can mean either “young woman” or “virgin”. Its Greek and Hebrew equivalents have the same ambiguity, which is why some people think the person we call the Virgin Mary was actually supposed to be the Young Woman Mary – which might change the significance of her subsequent pregnancy a bit. People grew up faster, back in the days when they spoke of “maidens”. Mary was probably only fourteen when she gave birth.

I am a kabbalist. Words matter. Nowadays we have replaced “maiden” with “teenage girl”. A maiden and a teenager are the same thing, but their names drag different tracks through lexical space, stir up different waters. Synonymity aside, some young women are maidens and others are teenagers. The girl in our story was definitely a maiden, even though it was the 1970s and being a maiden was somewhat out of fashion."

Chicken breast in a slow cooker full of salsa works well too. Or get one of those birria bombs (it’s like a bath bomb but spices), a pork loin and some Mexican beer (Corona or Modelo is fine, something in that general style), all in the slow cooker, come back half a day later.

Cranberry salad was a bowl of strawberry jello with cranberries and pecans with a layer of cool whip on top.

The variation of that I’ve had involved strawberry jello, whole berry cranberry sauce and canned pineapple tidbits with the pineapple juice from the can replacing the water in the jello. No nuts or fake whipped cream, though.

So it’s entirely optional, you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way, and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)? Sounds like they couldn’t stop themselves from joining the dick hammering bandwagon, but decided not to hit it too hard.

Google gives you an option as to how autonomous you want it to be. There is an option to essentially let it do what it wants, there are settings for various degrees of making it get your approval first.

Unironically this. I’ve only really tried it once, used it mostly because I didn’t know what libraries were out there for one specific thing I needed or how to use them and it gave me a list of such libraries and code where that bit was absolutely spot on that I could integrate into the rest easily.

It’s code was a better example of the APIs in action and the differences in how those APIs behave than I would have expected.

I definitely wouldn’t run it on the “can run terminal commands without direct user authorization” though, at least not outside a VM created just for that purpose.

…and he very, very carefully threaded the needle and chose his words to avoid perjury. It’s why he had questions like asking them to define “sexual relations” (the definition they gave didn’t include oral, so he did not have sexual relations with her by their definition) and what the definition of “is” was (specifically does it mean currently or does it include at any time in the past).

Their position is more accurately something like “If I have to pay for you to have things, you shouldn’t be allowed to have nicer things than I can afford.”

Marinading yourself is not a useful step towards eating the rich.

If you’re not “poor enough” to need snap, and you can’t afford to buy whatever food you want, within reason, then either, you need snap and you’re in denial, or you need to learn money management.

There are breakpoints where earning slightly more money can cost you more benefits than you gained in pay. I could also totally see someone being in that range where they’re only a little out of range for SNAP and as such have to eat on their own income while someone earning a bit less gets supplemented to a higher total budget than they have.

Snap recipients are forced to spend the money on food, since that’s the only place that money can be spent AFAIK…

I mean without doing shady shit, yeah. But then in lots of places there are known and routinely practiced ways to launder SNAP into cash. One that was popular here for a time a while back was a convenience store that would buy cases of canned soda of specific kinds from anyone who came in with them for less than wholesale price. People on SNAP who wanted to launder it into cash would go somewhere like Wal-Mart, buy cases, go to this store and resell them at a loss to get cash while the store stocks shelves at a discount.

Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn’t need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.

If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.

Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we’ll call it a deal. You don’t mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn’t take out a mortgage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be responsible for mine, right?

What’s the best way to do that, presuming I already have access to a Usenet server but that’s really all I know?

I mean I’ve used Usenet before, but that was back in the late 90s using Netscape Communicator and I was mostly (but not exclusively) reading text groups. Most of my piracy back then involved trolling IRC channels to either find DCC bots or get access to FTPs. And even then was limited because, well, dialup.

Was going to be my second pick after the considerably more niche VR.5. Which involved the MC entering the minds of people via modem because it was 90s scifi about virtual reality. It also tended to be trippy as hell in a way that is just amazing. Also basically impossible to find without sailing the seven seas, and not easy even then.

Was going to throw Kindred: The Embraced in as a third choice. Also considerably more obscure than Heroes, it was basically a White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade TV series.

To quote Marilyn Manson:

"If you die when there’s no one watching,

then your ratings drop and you’re forgotten.

But if they kill you on their TV,

You’re a martyr and a Lamb Of God. "

Now lie detectors don’t work at all…

Meh, they do work. They just measure stress response, not truthfulness. The idea being that you’ll have a heightened stress response to a question you are lying about the answer to, which may or may not be accurate depending on individual and situation.