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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Couldn’t have said it better myself. The amount of pure hatred for AI that’s already spreading is pretty unnerving when we consider future/continued research. Rather than direct the anger towards the companies misusing and/or irresponsibly hyping the tech, they direct it at the tech itself. And the C Suites will of course never accept the blame for their poor judgment so they, too, will blame the tech.

    Ultimately, I think there are still lots of folks with money that understand the reality and hope to continue investing in further research. I just hope that workers across all spectrums use this as a wake up call to advocate for protections. If we have another leap like this in another 10 years, then lots of jobs really will be in trouble without proper social safety nets in place.




  • I don’t fully agree with that. The extreme right have definitely weaponized memes to be form of modern propaganda on a whole other level. We mock this for being a “hello fellow kids” kind of boomer attempt at memes, but it 100% works for the targeted young male adults. Just look at the demographic data for how many young males voted for this and continue to propogate their cult’s extremism across the internet.






  • Have you called the police? They fucking suck, but even in legal states they still have city ordinances that don’t allow lighting off fireworks all night long. I know in the last city I lived in that allowed them, you had to stop by 2230 and they typically enforced it on every day that wasn’t the 4th of July. The city went on to eventually ban fireworks year-round except for NYE and a 2-week window around the 4th.

    My point is, if your city doesn’t have these types of ordinances, you should rally local support to get them implemented. I guarantee you there are tons of people who feel the same as you about assholes lighting off big booms at 1am.




  • For sure, I’m not saying that bugs aren’t important to the ecosystem. The way the article was presenting the information, it seemed like they’ve become much more numerous starting around 2022. To me, that indicates that the ecosystem there is out of balance (unsurprisingly, given that climate change seems to be the catalyst for this).

    As a side note, I have a friend who lives in New Orleans. When she was telling us about the annual termite swarms, we were legitimately aghast, lol.





  • which is why big blue states like California and Illinois and Massachusetts and New York also refuse to implement the far more efficient and equitable public health reforms common to countries in Europe with much smaller GDPs.

    Those states do have a lot of benefits for low income families when it comes to healthcare that red states don’t offer.

    But a big reason they don’t do universal healthcare, aside from billions of dollars in insurance and healthcare capital lobbying politicians, is because you need all the neighboring states to also be on board as well. Why would it be beneficial for me to have universal healthcare if I live on the state border and work in another state? If I get hurt and I need to go to the ER in the other state that doesn’t have universal healthcare, I’ll be super screwed when the bill finally hits. I bring this up because people in the US travel between states quite often.

    But aside from that, I’d argue the biggest issue is that even though California and other blue states have large GDPs, they don’t usually have much money to spare. The fact that the Federal takes so much money from regular people in addition to State taxes, it wouldn’t be feasible to offer universal healthcare without buy-in at the national level.

    The simple fact is, the healthcare system is broken. Costs are so high because they’ve been able to get away with it due to millions of people throwing money into insurance and not needing to use their insurance the majority of time outside of routine appointments. As a result, these companies had billions just sitting around and for-profit hospitals knew this. As such, it’s become a greedy race to the bottom.

    A typical surgery even 40 years ago would not drastically hurt anyone financially. Yes, technology and medicine has drastically improved, and correct me if I’m wrong, but fixing a basic broken bone hasn’t changed much in the last 50+ years. So why does getting a broken leg fixed now cost thousands of dollars when it used to only cost maybe a couple hundred?

    Greed, is my conclusion.