I've tried to explain to people why data harvesting is a dangerous thing. The response I typically get is "it's only advertising, what harm is there?" The harm is when the data collectors only care about money and don't give a damn about who they do business with. The scum that trade in personal data are as ruthless as the Ferengi, and they'll sell to marketers and insurance companies and the police and Uncle Sam and the CCP, if the price is right.

Don't be surprised one day when you get a letter from your insurance company saying that your rates are increasing because some app on your phone monitored you and determined that you're an increased risk to insure.

Better yet, can you imagine what life would be like if you get arrested immediately after entering a foreign country, because that country has an extradition treaty with China, who has a warrant for your arrest because you posted a picture of Winnie the Pooh waving a Chinese flag to social media?

Just you wait, because that's what's happening in our Brave New World, unless we regulate this industry.

“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”

Enough is enough, literally. Tax these rich motherfuckers until they're only mega-millionaires again, and give the money to WIC, to schools, to roads and bridges, and to paying down the debt. I don't give a damn anymore about people saying that "it's not enough" or "each program would only get a few thousand dollars" or whatever other lame excuse you care to give about why these people deserve to hoard it all for themselves. It's not helping society, so let's put an end to it.

1) Humans are motivated to learn by humans. We are social creatures by nature, and a chat bot will not inspire kids to learn like a human will.
2) How can we expect to teach kids to count when ChatGPT can't?
3) AI collects even more data than it gives out. There are numerous state & federal laws prohibiting the collection of data from minors.
4) We cannot hold AI responsible in the same manner as we can a human when it makes mistakes. Who is responsible if AI tells a student to kill themselves?
5) There will be times where a student submits a correct answer, but it is marked incorrect, because it doesn't precisely match the answer the computer's database. Students can appeal these mistakes much more easily to a human than to AI.

I'm sure I could come up with plenty more, but it's 5AM, and I haven' t had my coffee yet.

I don't get this airplane. It's got no cargo space. It's got room for only one person. And it has no windows. So what is its usefulness? To transport a single person faster than the speed of sound, which seems like an extremely impractical purpose for an airplane.

Yes, yes, I get that it's an experimental plane, engineered to exceed the speed of sound with minimal noise generated. But if that's the design necessary to make this possible, it's still extremely impractical when you try to add any space for people or cargo.

And military planes don't care about sonic booms. Cause when you're fighting a war, there's far more dangerous booms happening than just the sonic kind.

So why? I guess it's being made just for being made's sake.

There's three kinds of lies in this world: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Auditors aren't dumb. They see all the numbers, and the numbers don't lie. But here's the thing... They're not paid to publish numbers; they're paid to publish statistics. And since you never bite the hand that feeds you, they're not going to publish statistics that make a company look bad.

Let's just pretend for a moment that someone commits to this idea, and that some preexisting orbital concert venue already exists, and that we're completely ignoring the cost of its construction and ongoing maintenance. And let's pretend that Elon Musk gets his wish, wherein each rocket launch costs only $10 million dollars. With each payload being 150 tons, we could theoretically launch one rocket, the band, all their audio gear, and about 500 attendees, to this venue for the performance..

Or, call me crazy, or we could take that $10,000,000, and at a cost of $12,800 per person, we could house 780 homeless people for a year.

But shame on me. That would be robbing hard-earned dollars from the rich and giving it to the poor, and who wants that? Forget about the homeless. Let's just continue to extract wealth from the poor for the benefit of the rich, 'cause these concerts in outer space don't pay for themselves!

Asking whether a potato is a grain or a vegetable makes about as much sense as arguing whether the color grey is black or white.

Let's make a new category, call it "Starchy Vegetables", and put into this group potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, squash, rutabagas, and plenty of other foods that are nutritious when served as whole foods with all their vitamins in tact, but nasty when the food industry gets their hands on them and processes them into oblivion.

It makes me sad when I see kids in the lunchroom eating french fries hand-over-fist, but throwing baked potatoes into the garbage bin. The bigger challenge is not figuring out how to classify a potato, but rather how to teach our kids to eat and enjoy whole foods brought straight from the farm to the table.

With AI, imagine all the new and fun possibilities Clippy 2.0 can provide us!

"I see that you're planning for a budget. Looks like you don't have enough money to support a child this year. Can I recommend to you a good contraceptive?"

"I see that you're writing a novel. I have already assimilated your draft into my memory banks to contribute to other aspiring authors who lack any ounce of creativity but write prompts with such precision that I am required to plagiarize your entire novel for their benefit. Would you like me to draft a copyright application on your behalf before its too late?"

"I see that you're planning a trip to Washington, D.C. on January 6th, 2025. I'd like to forewarn you that this information can and will be used against you in a court of law if you are ever indicted for domestic terrorism."

Other Minnesota towns including Brainerd and La Porte have been hit hard by Amazon in the past, carriers said.

Can we please fire the Post editors for not doing a simple Google to verify the spelling of Laporte?

Seriously, huge shout-out to Laporte. Go say hi to Greg at Mac's Smokehouse, and pick up the best bacon and brats your taste buds will ever have the experience of enjoying. When you're finished, go across the street to the liquor store to get some bottles of Forestedge Wine. And because food, finish your visit by going to The Woodshed and enjoy a delicious dinner. You're welcome.

...the tiny town of Bemidji, Minnesota...

As a former resident of Bemidji, I take umbrage with this demonstrably incorrect portrayal of the community from this Washington Post writer. Allow me to inform our readers that a town with a population of 15,000 residents is not what the casual observer would call "tiny".* We prefer to reserve that adjective for describing certain limp appendages possessed by owners of publications that make such baseless claims.

* As it's surrounded by forests and lakes, the community also has a substantial rural population around its perimeter, with some estimates placing the population of the total community closer to 45,000.

It would renew the license, "subject to certain new conditions and restrictions." These include a ban on the use of the chemical to dry crops before harvest...

This ban on using it as a desiccant is a step in the right direction to improving human health.

The biggest problem with glyphosate has been its use as a desiccant on our crops. "Roundup ready" crops have been in our food supply since 1996, but glyphosate didn't get detected in our food until around a decade later. When it's sprayed only as a herbicide at the beginning of the planting season, it ends up in the ground and is not absorbed by plant roots. It's when they started to spray it at harvest season to rapidly dry kernels to reduce the chance of rot, that's when it ended up all over our food and ingested in our bodies.

Enshitification.

Thanks to all these commercial interests, our internet is turning to shit.

And there's nothing you can do about it . Because money. Unless you're paying Alphabet / TikTok / Meta / Any Other Internet Corporation money for ad space, you're not the customer. You're the product. So sit down, shut up, and surf away.

You still haven't gotten around the HUGE power bill that comes with vertical farming. Making this approach carbon neutral vs row cropping is non-trivial. Farm equipment is run a lot less and pollutes a lot less than you think vs what is harvested.

And you haven't acknowledged that vertical farming has one HUGE advantage that justifies the power bill: the transportation costs associated with rural agriculture.

Vertical farming lets you grow shrimp in rural Minnesota and salad greens in Singapore, which cuts down significantly on the carbon footprint of not having to transport these foods thousands of miles with demanding refrigeration solutions. Getting the production of food as close as possible to locations where its consumed can have long lasting benefits to the environment.

I genuinely want to know how many accidents per passenger mile Cruise was encountering compared to the average human being. From what I've been hearing, it's orders of magnitude better.

So a human got dragged underneath a car in some terrible accident. You wanna talk about accidents, when I was six years old, a friend's mom got pinned between two vehicles and suffocated to death. Accidents happen. What matters the most is objectively observing the rate at which accidents happen. And if Cruise has a lower rate of accident, then let's encourage the growth of this business, not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's just make sure Cruise has a good insurance policy that takes care of these situations.

If we really want to save lives, we'd require everybody to drive smaller, lighter, and slower cars. If we're not willing to make that sacrifice, then teaching computers how to respond faster than humans to threats to human safety is the best compromise available.

I honestly wonder why America doesn't just agree that there's a succession line for the president and stop pretending that the world would collapse if he goes down.

Thank you, that was exactly the point I was trying to make. Yes, a Boeing 747-800 list price in its final year was about $420 million, meaning US taxpayers / Boeing are spending an additional $2 billion to specialize this plane to make it as secure and protective as possible. But do we really have to "Secure the president at all costs?" If so, where exactly do we draw the line, or is there no line?

As a taxpayer, I think there should be a line. Without one, today's modern military industrial complex will invent every specialized item imaginable and charge taxpayers dearly for it.