This is a mistake that should surface and get corrected in high school or earlier if the education system is working properly. Around 14 I bombed a writing assignment because my response was all personal feelings rather than reasoning and evidence. My teacher told me he agreed with me personally, but I did not actually complete the assignment as asked. I never did that again. Though I am not entirely convinced this wasn’t deliberate to create a culture war story.

I really agree that communication is where the American “left” is way behind. Both in terms of individual campaigns and as a whole.

The American “right” now has endless well-funded platforms to push messages and narratives. Podcasts, streamers, YouTube channels, news networks, social media accounts, etc. They also embrace AI to increase exponentially the amount of content they can shovel out. And they understand you need to use apolitical or quasi political interests as an entry point.

There are examples on the left of all of these, but not at the same scale and with the same financial backing.

I don’t think anybody really knows. My understanding is the problem is KSA reports unaudited reserve numbers, so you have to take them at their word. There’s a lot of skepticism because they would report unchanged reserve numbers for years despite high exploitation. While they can certainly discover new reserves, it seems unlikely it would consistently be about equal to what they pumped out. I’ve read some analysts think they have less than half of what they report.

You can see some case study examples on their consulting website.

Very true. I’m genuinely curious how many Trump voters didn’t find it likely enough last year to vote for him and only now do.

About 22% of all Americans (not just voters) voted for him in 2024. So there’s still millions of people who voted for him and believed he knew.

I think there’s something to be said about a game that is both able to be and worth modding to such a degree. Bethesda has a bit of an unfair advantage due to decades of community knowledge building on the creation engine, however. I don’t disagree with any of your criticisms though.

This is not a surprise if you actually talk to random voters, like while canvassing. People are just cynical about that government actually doing any of this, not if they are worth doing. If we can get a slate of progressives elected who truly accomplish some of these goals, that could start some real systemic change if properly communicated.

I haven’t played Starfield due to its reception, but Fallout 4 for me was excellent taken for what it was. Granted, the modding community (as usual for Bethesda) elevated it from a good to great game. I was surprised the number of hours I’ve put into it actually surpassed New Vegas. Though overall imo New Vegas > 4 > 3.

From an administration with low favorability ratings, two people with high unfavorability ratings. Foolproof plan. No notes!

This is my current job. I’ve got monthly, every three months, every quarter, once per year… Thank goodness the last service they added has SSO.

Americans are not practiced in large enough numbers in protest, demonstration, civil disobedience, and solidarity for a large scale general or rent strike to be successful. There needs to be a ramp up period with increasingly more frequent and expansive demonstrations for that to become practical.

It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.

They seem like a UK offshoot of the Black Hebrew Israelites.

If they want to live in tents in the forest instead of yelling at people walking by on the street, I suppose that’s an improvement.

Ohio has lost its relative population and economic significance in recent years, but historically it was a pretty significant state. To give an idea in terms of # of representatives in the House:

Ohio had more/equal reps compared to California until the 50s, Texas until the 60s, and Florida until the 90s. Its numbers have been very close to Illinois for the past century also.

The collective cultural awareness of cities in such a state holds inertia for a while, and Ohio still has a decent population despite some decline.

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.

There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is “Hellfire Citadel entrance.”

Viruses and prions fall under the umbrella of germs/pathogens. They did not disprove germ theory. They still align with the idea that pathogens cause diseases. That’s still true.

Yeah, my team actually has a mix of great, good, and replacement level PMs. The bad ones either get let go or moved elsewhere. It helps that we tend to draw them from the roles that would be on projects they’d manage and seem to compensate them well enough that we retain all the good ones.

If an org can’t find good PMs, the org needs to create them and pay them enough that they stick in the role. It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science.