def Religion: A large popular cult
def Cult: A small unpopular religion

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

Equating AI with Pac-Man isn't really the intellectual flex you probably think it is.

His surname is one transposition away from "AI Mode".

Yeah, because all even/all odd is (from basic statistics) rare, and happens to be rarer than the percentage of people who play all-even or all-odd, so you'd be more likely to split any winnings.

you joke but we did exactly this with our gas service. I noticed in the summer that literally 2/3 of our bill was fees, with only a gas water heater running.

Put in a heat pump hot water heater and turned off the gas from March/April to Oct/Nov. They really aren't used to people cancelling service lol.

Yep. I play a game and ask people who their State Reps are. VAST majority of people have no idea.

You get the government competence proportional to your involvement in it.

Same with HOAs. People scream about them but literally never attend the meetings or bother to stand for election themselves.

Yeah, but hard to compare apples to oranges here....

These Nordic idiots are the same folks that ride fucking bicycles in ice and snow in the middle of winter too....

Yes. I remember seeing a movie that took place in rural Arizona in the early '50s. Part of the plot had to do with moving a small herd of horses across country to a dirt road that was good enough that they could drive a truck up it and load the horses on it so they could take them to market and sell them. One evening they stopped at a ranch house that was still lit by kerosene lanterns because the team stringing electric cables wasn't due to get there for another six months.

It's a very apt 1st world analogy of 3rd world problems. It's not a 1:1 analogy.

Rural places wait decades for the 'modern world' to reach them...just like suburbia waits hours for the Cable guy.

Moving mass won't induce spin - it might cause it to readjust orientation to the earth. I'm guessing the amount you'd need to move would rival all the earth ever moved on earth if not more.

The amount of energy it would take to start the entire moon spinning is quite literally, astronomical.

Millions of people would disagree with it being dead.

Modern models will take into account statistical biases in lotteries. For example, here's ChatGPT:

Pick good lottery numbers for the Virginia powerball lottery

Good question. First, a reality check: Powerball is pure chance — there’s no “good” numbers that are more likely to win. Every set of 5 white balls (1–69) + 1 Powerball (1–26) has exactly the same probability.
wwwuat.valottery.com
+1

That said, I can give you a few tips + a sample “random but balanced” pick, if you’d like to pick your own numbers rather than use Quick Pick.

Some tips when choosing your Powerball numbers

Spread your numbers
Try to pick a mix across the range (low, mid, high). According to lottery-strategy advice, not clustering all your numbers in one group is better.
samlotto.com

Avoid patterns
Many people pick birthdays, anniversaries, or sequential numbers. That’s fine—but if you win, you might have to share with more people because these are popular picks.
lotteryvalley.com

Use “due” or “hot” numbers carefully
Some sites (like lottery-analysis tools) track which numbers are “hot” (drawn recently) or “overdue” (haven’t appeared in a while). But remember: past draws don’t change future odds.
m.lottostrategies.com

Mix even and odd
According to some statistical analyses, it’s less likely to draw all odd or all even numbers.
samlotto.com

Play responsibly
Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are extremely long: 1 in ~292 million.
lotterycritic.com

Sample “balanced” Powerball pick

Here’s a random-but-balanced combination you could use just for fun (or as a basis to tweak):

White balls: 8, 23, 41, 57, 65

Powerball: 12

If you like, I can generate 5 different “smart random” picks for the next Virginia Powerball draw (balanced by probability and number distribution). Do you want me to do that?

It's a damned shame '99942 Apothis' will miss us in a few years

It's not too late to fix that.

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."