How do you think your son would feel about that when you’re on your death bed, if he knew? Knowing that he could have had you around for another year or more, if only you hadn’t used this power? Do you think those fleeting moments would be worth more to him than those extra years?

How would you feel if he, in turn, decided to spend decades of his own life to extend those last few moments with you?

“The only thing that can slow our Country down is another long and damaging Government Shutdown,” Trump wrote on Thursday evening.

Best pro-shutdown endorsement he could possibly have given.

Well, being on video committing animal abuse, for one.

We absolutely want to, and if having money was the only barrier to doing so, we’d sell in an instant, but unfortunately it’s simply not an option for a lot of people

And, you know, US Presidents whose families own real estate empires.

Here’s the thing that I think a lot of people don’t understand about home ownership: Housing prices going up is only beneficial if you plan to sell.

We were (very) lucky and were able to get in on the tail end of the early 2010s housing crisis and leverage the first-time homebuyer incentives that were offered at the time to buy a modest house. It cost $245k. It’s currently worth $550k, and people seem to think this means we made $300k in profit! Yay us! And technically, on paper, sure, we did, but in reality, no.

Housing prices across the board are up, and we still need a place to live, so if we sold this place, we’d have to buy something else (at the same grossly inflated prices), or we’d have to rent (at grossly inflated prices). If the $550k this place is worth on paper buys us something that would have cost $245k in 2010, we haven’t gained anything.

Either way, we have no intention of selling, so we will never see a cent of that increased value. What we are seeing, however, is increased property taxes since the property has, on paper, doubled in value.

What I’m getting at is, this doesn’t benefit homeowners, it benefits housing investors, who are the group Trump really wants to prop up.

This is the #1 thing I wish I had realized earlier in life. If you enjoy something and you aren’t hurting anyone, you do you.

Gattaca is the new Torment Nexus.

If someone told me this is specifically why it isn’t called that, I’d believe it.

Dub Dub Dub

And yet when we create a database of ICE agents, it’s terrorism… Hmm…

If the 17000 employee statistic is accurate, $780M won’t even last 6 months. That’s just shy of $46k per employee, and according to Glassdoor, the average salary is considerably more than that.

I would be one of the creepers getting all up in that tail’s business; just look at it! It looks so soft… I just want to hug it!

To also be fair, the last time the reserve list was updated was 2010, and the newest card that’s on the reserve list is from 1999.

and privatised

Completely agree with you here. If the technology was being developed and made available to everyone for non-commercial use, while they charged for the commercial use cases, I’d have less of an issue with it (aside from the obvious and serious objection that they’re functionally stealing creatives’ work and profiting off of it - but again, I think this objection could be invalidated with UBI.)

I’m going to play devil’s advocate and present a hypothetical alternative here…

Visual art is not about portraying something in such or such specific manner (be it realism, surrealism, or whatever else) it is about sharing an experience (which no AI can do, as it doesn’t live and can’t experience shit by itself) and it is about sharing an emotion that can be ranging from the pure emotional one to the most cerebral.

AI art is boring.

I’d argue that in some applications, this is fine. For example, corporate logos, the equivalent of clip art in presentations, etc. You can argue that that isn’t really ‘art’ in the sense that you’re describing it, but whatever you want to call it, personally, I don’t care if no artist has to do that BS. I highly doubt many artists really want to be doing that stuff. The problem isn’t that AI is being used to generate soulless art for soulless projects, it’s that it’s taking work away from real artists (and that we as modern humans, as a whole, put so much weight on employment).

If we gave UBI to creatives that covered all of their expenses and let them pursue whatever projects they wanted to work on (and thereby we still, as a species, got to enjoy the actual art by actual artists), would it be so bad that the shitty work is being done by a computer? Theoretically there’d be more ‘real’ art, since artists wouldn’t have to waste their time on the bullshit. Let’s go back to a system of patronage, where society as a whole become the patrons.

Trump had a call with Tim Walz yesterday, so of course he’s pro-Minnesota right now. Just wait until Pam Bondi phones him up today, and he’ll pivot again.

They have to realize that eventually people are going to start fighting back, too, and their leadership don’t give a fuck about them. They’re a means to an end, and that end is getting people to riot so Trump can declare it an insurrection. If they think they fear for their lives now, wait til people start responding with actual force, not the imaginary threats they complain about.

Oh look, once again Trump is on whosever side last spoke with him.