Stayed at a rental in Omaha... Beautiful neighborhood and a very nice house. From a glance. Great location. But the lawn wasn't great. Leaves needed raked, basically they did the bare minimum mowing. The trash was heaped up and overflowing. Did anyone show up and put the trash cans on the curb? The deck was getting a bit old, the grill seemed like a toss aside charcoal grill that wasn't super safe. (You couldn't kill the airflow when you were done to quickly drop the temps. I grill/smoke on charcoal a lot and would've thrown it away.) The inside was not great. Furniture was an odd ball mix of things from who knows where. Basement was very dank/musty/stinky. Other clues like that too. Basically this house should've just been sold off to a family that could love it and take care of it and make it a home. Very sad. Basically had all these clues that the owner/manager was doing the very minimum they could get away with. But hey, let's worry about what the renter should/shouldn't do...

I want to share my little perspective. I worked at a McDonalds about 26 years ago. For several years while in high school and a bit in college. It was near the Interstate, in Mitchell South Dakota. This means we were quite busy, quite a bit of the time. If a bus came through, and they certainly did, one of if not the most likely place it would stop is there. We were paid near eight dollars an hour which inflation adjusted is probably the same now. As a high schooler, we worked pretty hard. There were two or three kids faster than me but I certainly held my own. And I took personal pride in assembling a nice, neat burger, and not smashing it all to hell wrapping it up. When I go to most fast food restaurants now, its shocking how slower they are. In the years I worked there I saw the "quality" and freshness of food slip every year. The eggs not cracked and mixed, more things pre cooked, etc. We certainly didn't play pricing games then either so if you were busy, you just buckled down and got the food out as quick as you could. The best part is it taught me to do dishes and not grumble. Cooking got easier, and now I'm happy to rarely eat out. I go to a bbq joint, or whatever and almost always think to myself that this could've been better if we made it at home. Anyways, learn to cook. Make your own baked beans, bread, lamb burgers, whatever. It is worth the time and effort to learn. And get a smoker and a charcoal grill if you can. I'm still glad I had that experience; they were mostly all good people. But it certainly should've paid better.

Dude!! Think about what happened in February - that has to be the most inconsequential and incomplete state of the union speech I can possibly imagine. Within days he attacks Iran and just destroys everything of substance a real state of the union would've covered. All the low fuel prices, great economy, poof. Gone. I'm not very old, but I can't remember a bigger waste of time SotU speech than this one in 2026.
Anyways back on topic I agree w/ sibling AC, nothing Trump/MAGA idiots can say has merit as long as right wing AM talk radio is the most biased ridiculous thing to possibly exist soaking up the "public" air waves. And further, the main stream media IS NOT something of or from the left at all. It's maybe centrist and maybe right wing/corporate. But it's not left.
I realized I wasn't a Republican when I'd listen to right wing talk radio and just get fuming mad at the utter stupidity I'd hear during the Bush and early Obama years. I moved on and listened to NPR. They're dumb too and say stupid things, but I would get less angry at the radio. And there were less advertisements. I'm still not a Democrat yet, but man, Trump is sure pushing me closer. Where's the fiscal conservatives at? Where's the I-hate-Hunter-Biden anti corruption Republicans at? It's dire.

When, or perhaps if, AI "falters" do you think Republicans will have an ounce of self reflection after all the screaming they've just "performed" about Socialism and Communism? Trump has already taken public ownership of companies and would surely use it as an excuse to take more when he bails them out. I'm sure he'll frame it as the only rational thing to do and a good deal. We should all hope and pray it crumbles in 2028 before the election so it'll feel like 2008 again.

will it run off after a rabbit and give you an hour of exercise? Get a real dog people! They clean up all the food you drop. Help you remember countless things, like, what food they can and cannot eat. How much you should feed them. They get you out for walks, see nature, keep your vitamin D dosage up. They help you socialize with other people that have dogs and give you something to talk about instead of awkwardly avoiding politics and just talking about the weather. For bonus points you can get a proper hunting dog and really have fun.

Such as freetaxusa. Search around. Turbotax is so lame and overpriced. Rant: we should just have some basic withholding percentage, tariffs, and then a similar basic flat percentage from all corporate revenue. No funny deductions, no net profit games, just revenue almost like a federal sales tax. IMHO if these were some reasonable level it'd be fine, we could then fund the rest on deficit spending (like we're so prone to do anyways.)

Why is the goal to create superhuman intelligence? Do we need something smarter than us? Are you trying to get us all killed??

I look forward to the end game where we have no taxes. No corporate taxes. After all they just pass it on to consumers. No income taxes. Just pay for it on import tariffs. Skip that too, why not? We already run a large deficit. All the spending sits on the ever expanding national debt. Now no one has a say except those who sit on massive piles of cash that faces risks of devaluation. Sounds awesome. Even foreign holders of cash/debt. They matter more than the citizens after all. Power to the powerful!! After all, they're already in charge.

What a travesty! What a waste! Hippy nonsense! Do you realize how insane your comment is? Of course, water should reach the sea. Water should replenish aquifers. We should be careful when choosing what and how to dry land farm and what to irrigate. But we aren't, humans are wasteful and greedy.

I have only owned one subaru, and it is a 2007 that I've had for a year. I bought it with 243k miles, specifically because it was cheap, so my daughter can drive herself to school and all her activities.

I've spent more on fixing it than I spent on the car itself. I have needed replace tons of parts. It was basically a lemon (with no rust). However... it does not flash ads. I would rather have this lemon than a new computer on wheels that shows ads.

They were called the Bush tax cuts as a disparaging term. Bush campaigned on eliminating the debt, so fast. But the economy hit a road bump, so he cut taxes. We even then went to war and didn't pay for it. So yea, he gets to wear that. Typical fiscal-cough-cough-conservative. We've been living in his dystopian "the economy sucks so keep taxes low" world view ever sense. Even the democrats couldn't buck the trend. Which is a damn shame.

I have taught C++ and other computer science classes at a community college for the past 9 years. I started out only using paper exams, and students had to print their code for homeworks and projects. Then during the pandemic we moved online, and other than a couple of semesters, my classes have stayed online. Virtually all of the community college CS courses, for the entire state system, are online. I lecture virtually instead of in person and all assignments and exams are done through Blackboard.

Now with AI, I cannot distinguish between what a student wrote vs what AI wrote. It's absolutely impossible to tell the difference. Before AI, I could often tell when someone got help (if you submit code that doesn't match your skill level on the exams) or copied someone else's assignment (if you hand in the same code with the variable names changed...). Again, now I can't tell at all.

At the community college level, the deans are stuck with a problem: fewer students are enrolling, and those students want to learn about AI because they see it as the next job skill you need to have. At the state university level, the CS dept has gone the other direction: exams are on paper and homework is now 5% of the final grade instead of 50%

I tell my students at the beginning of the semester "You are paying tuition to learn the material in the course. Using AI to do your classwork is like going to the gym and having a robot lift the weights for you. Don't use AI"

When I was a computer science and engineering undergrad 25 years ago, there was talk of creating a licensing process for software engineers, similar to civil engineers. It was a terrific idea and I hope it got traction. But AI has turned software engineering into a mess. Software is every bit as critical to the safety of humans as civil engineering, but you would never trust AI to create buildings. The software engineering students of today are absolutely ill-equipped to write the vital software that is used today.

How does this help me (or anyone) socialize? It doesn't help bring people together, it drives them apart into their own little silos with the AI being their only gateway outside of that silo.

Reminds me of war dialing, looking for modems to connect to a network.

This doesn't take away freedom of opinion, but it does let the viewer know whether the influencer has any credibility.

Think back to the time when America was "great", which may be the 1950s according to MAGA. If an average person didn't understand some scientific topic, they didn't pretend to. They trusted Jonas Salk and others because they got to see the horrors or polio and the they saw the effect of the vaccines. The children saw some students not come back to school in the fall because they contracted polio over the summer. The parents saw the same thing and understood just how important vaccines were, whether they understood how it worked or not. Now everyone pretends to be an expert, even if they're actually an idiot. Even idiots knew their limits in the "good old days" before social media.