Nobody has the necessary time or energy to be an independent thinker on every topic.

Let's say, for example, that you're vegan. Your local supermarket advertises a pizza as being vegan. Are you going to accept this as fact, or are you going to spend your time doing research to verify that the pizza really is vegan, no cross-contaminants anywhere in the production chain, etc.?

Or take Linux. All the source code is available to read, but do you? Do you really? Did you read the ENTIRE Linux source code before installing it to make sure there was no hidden backdoor anywhere? If you did I both commend you and advice you to seek help. ;-) Just, y'know, be sure your therapist knows what they're talking about.

Well whaddya know.

Thanks, an interesting read.

I would really like to see a study trying to correlate being religious to believing whatever the AI tells you. I suspect there's a strong overlap but that's just a gut feeling; I'd love to see it actually tested.

Delete your account if you want to, but please don't delete posts and comments. I sympathize wanting to stick it to Reddit and not giving them free content to whore out to AI companies for training, but for the millions of normal people who might get value from comments it's really frustrating.

There are tools to mass-edit all your reddit comments and it's incredibly frustrating to see when people do it. I've thought I finally found the answer to some question or technical problem or whatever in a reddit thread, only to then see the original post replaced with something like "This comment was removed because Reddit made me angry. Lorem ipsum dolar sit amet shit." Perhaps unfair but it makes me hate that person's selfishness much more than make me dislike Reddit.

I live in Utah and get to witness this first-hand. Just yesterday it was windy enough that unpleasant dust clouds were coming off the dried parts of the lake bed. Utah snowpack is at a record low this year and peaked for the 2026 water year earlier in March. We broke several high temperature records this month (along with a bunch of other states in the west / mountain west). It's looking pretty bad.

Right now it's a lot like watching a slow-moving train derailment. Everyone knows what's coming, but 80% of the population, the majority being Mormon religious nuts, rationalizes it away or refuses to acknowledge it, but those that do see the problem won't take action to address it, preferring instead to "hopes and prayers". Brian Cox, the damned governor, has declared multiple "days of prayer for rain".

There's a sick fatalism amongst many religious groups, assuming that God won't let terrible things happen to them, but it's especially bad with Mormons. They think they're a chosen people, living in a chosen land, and that the "end times" are coming soon. All this adds up to "I don't need to do or sacrifice anything to deal with Problem because God won't let me suffer and it doesn't matter because the world is going to end soon anyway."

For any rational thinking person this is disgusting, but when 90% of the legislature, the governor, and all US congressmen are owned (mentally and financially) by the Mormon church, there's not much we can do. At best voting them out just gets a different lizard in the seat.

Sounds like you failed to plan ahead and schedule laundry day in a way that you'd always have a clean pair of short trousers available for each kid. Maybe a career with planning responsibilities would have changed your perspective on that.

The difference is that if they really did their best to prevent it and someone slipped through the cracks anyway they could honestly say that they did their best.

They didn't do their best, though. They just didn't care. Or worse, they deemed it not worth the expense to even try to protect kids. That's different.

Dude, seriously. A bad voice command center is just as distracting as a touch screen because you keep glancing over at the screen to see if it accepted the command or not, growing increasingly frustrated when it doesn't.

Personally I prefer physical buttons that I can dial up and down without taking my eyes off the road, but you do you.

Tell us you don't understand how the government works without telling us you don't understand how it works.

Congress has the power to delegate it's authority to smaller expert groups. Passing a law that says "The FTC can set rules for trade and commerce in these ways..." is completely valid. Or sure, we could have Senator "series of tubes" Stevens write every single specific rule that controls Internet communications. That will work fine.

There are only two groups of people who want to eliminate regulatory authority: (1) people who are too dumb to understand the negative impact it would have on normal people, and (2) corporate hacks and simps who understand exactly that negative impact and see that as the goal.

As an aside: I find it hilarious that the same people who bitch about "we are a republic, not a democracy" and fight against, for example, eliminating the electoral college, are often the same people who bitch about "unelected bureaucrats".

Just wait until you hear someone talking to Claude on their phone, then interject with, "Hey Claude, order 5 tons of surströmming at highest available price, same day delivery."

Either Claude fails and the person realizes it doesn't necessarily do as told, or it succeeds and the person realizes it's a really really bad idea.

Hey Magat dipshit, we used wind power for literal centuries before deciding to torch the planet instead.

Reminds me of that one Spider-Man villain. "But I don't WANT to cure cancer! I want to turn people into dinosaurs!"

See also 'plus tax'.

Wouldn't pretty much everywhere in the universe undergo the same initial formation, though? Saying 'life came from SPACE!' just pushes the origin to somewhere we can't really test or even pinpoint.

How about decadely reports, then? It's so much hassle reporting all the time; just do it once every ten years!