The other day I went out for lunch with a friend and some acquaintances. One guy ordered a burger, and then he went on for a little time about how is it possible there are enough cows for everyone to have a burger? How many burgers can you get from a cow? Where are all these cows coming from??

So I said it’s factory farming, these cows are produced for the sake of their meat. A cow is huge, a quarter cow is enough meat to feed a family for a whole year. I don’t think this guy was being purposefully obtuse, because I don’t know him to have that kind of personality, so the only remaining explanation is he really is that ignorant/stupid. In this age, we have lots of people who don’t care, or wilfully turn their eye from it. But to not know?

It seems a probable case is she misunderstood or misheard what was being said to her as “she needs to finish the drink” and complied with the request she thought was being given to her.

Heck, even as a hearing person, if someone told me I can’t have an open beverage in a space (alcoholic or not), finishing it seems like a reasonable way to be rid of it.

Good God, of all the ways one could gamble, this sounds like playing Russian roulette with five bullets loaded in the revolver.

Thanks for articulating it this way for me. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me, at least in my situation. I reported my boss to the directors. He was (still is) planning to cut a guy from our team, claiming he costs too much. But when I did the math, I found that my boss’ personal expenses on food, gas, phone, vehicle, etc. (with increasingly unaccounted-for amounts) are more than that guy’s pay.

My boss isn’t worried about the financial health of the organization, he’s worried he won’t be able to keep spending it on himself if he has to pay the workers.

I know you didn’t say they are (can be) racist, I am. I’m disagreeing that they are uninformed; a lot of Asians actively side with Trump and Musk. I know this because I am Asian myself and hear it from my parents and their friends who are Pro-Trump, anti-immigration, and racist against Black people, Hispanic people, Brown people, Muslims, LGBT people…

My dad defends every accusation against Trump. He thinks every bad thing said about him is a lie made up by his enemies. My mom’s best friend loves him and says he’s so smart, and everyone who disagrees with him is too stupid to understand.

A lot of Asians people are racist against non-white people and Asians of other countries. There are Pro-Trump Asians just as there are Pro-Trump Latinos who think they’re “one of the good ones” and all about pulling up the ladder behind them. The people buying cybertrucks at best don’t care and at worst are positively for it.

Truly, I don’t understand why, but there are fully grown adults who believe that anything an LLM says is true. Maybe they think computers are unbiased (which is only as true as programmers and data are unbiased); maybe its the confidence with which LLMs deliver information; maybe they believe the program actually searches and verified information; maybe it’s all of the above and more.

I know a guy who routinely says, “I asked ChatGPT…”, and even after having explained how LLMs are complex word predictors and are not programmed for factual truth, he still goes to ChatGPT for everything. It’s a total refusal to believe otherwise, but I can’t fathom why.

Historically, the mongers of violence and war have only been ended by stronger violence and better war strategies and resources. The whole take the higher road and tolerance thing is what got America into this current mess in the first place. These assholes are cowards and only come out when there are no consequences, but go back into hiding when there are.

People should not be punched in the nose for their race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc., basically who they are. People should be punched in the noise for being assholes, their bad behaviour.

All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he’s in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he’s doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.

If they had, they’d know there was a 13th disciple named Matthias. I’m not even kidding, it’s in the Book of Acts. He was selected to replace Judas, and is described as having been with them since the beginning.

I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

Saul (Sha’ul) is a Jewish/Hebrew name. Paulos is a Greek name. Even until now, bilingual people who are of a minority culture (compared to where they’re living) often have two names, one in their their native (family) language and one in the local majority language, one official, the other unofficial.

This was not limited to Paul, even in that immediate timeline. Levi (Jewish name) was also called Levi (Greek name). There’s no reason to believe Paul “changed” his name sheet his conversion. He continued to go by Saul after he became a Christian. He went by his Jewish name among Jewish people, then his Greek name when he travelled across Rome and interacted with Greek-speakers.

Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.

I’d imagine he thinks that other evil rich people and sycophants whose immoral compasses are aligned are his friends, but in reality they’re around because it benefits them (or they think it does), and they’d stab him in the back as soon as it benefits them. (It’s just that so far it hasn’t benefited their morally corrupt causes yet.) So people like the deceased Epstein, and Canadian traitors Kevin O’Leary and Gretzky. AB Premier Danielle Smith wouldn’t even be an afterthought of a “friend” in this context, but she’s trying so desperately hard to be accepted, it’s pathetic.

As bad as American prisons are, they are not on the scale as being deported (is that even the right word in this case?) to what amounts to a concentration camp in a foreign country without any process.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

I don’t believe nothing will change. I do believe Musk will capture communications and use it to monitor people he believes are his biggest enemies, then use it to best-case blackmail them, worst-case have them arrested in trumped-up (no pun intended) charges.

Random unknown people are being kidnapped, tortured, and sold internationally as slaves by the government. These are the cases we know about because they are getting to the media. How many are not getting through the Right-supporting media? Do we really think actual opponents aren’t just waiting targets?

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

I understand your point generally, and would agree with you under most circumstances. However, you’re talking about the guy who came out swinging from Tariff Town before he was even inaugurated, which has already made for negative economic movement. Under his watch (if you would even be so generous to say he’s “watching” at all), there’s already been all kinds of administrative chaos for the USA by wanton firings and other cuts and more EOs than you’ve ever seen in your lifetime.

So, yes, absolutely the country can blame Trump, at the very least for putting all his attention to causing chaos and not on the things he campaigned on. (Not that I ever believed he had any intention to ever pay attention to them.)