Just propose to them already, holy cow.

They seem really, really desperate to invent a fully sapient slave that can't fight back.

In the grand scheme of things someone being here illegally and working construction is about last on my list of priorities

They bother me.

They are taking up housing that US citizens could use....everyone keeps complaining about needing more housing, eh?

They are a burden on our schools and other public resources.

They are dead weight on our medical system...in many cities they overrun the ERs of hospitals making it difficult for true US citizens to get emergency care in their own country.

Just a few examples.,,....the US budget would save a lot of money if they were GONE.

It turns out that immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizen

There you go again, conflating ILLEGAL migrants with LEGAL migrants, especially those that actually wish to come legally and become US citizens because they want to melt in and believe in our principals ans way of life.

Add some guard towers with machine guns and the border is starting to look like post WW2 Berlin.

Except in Berlin they were trying to keep people IN....there's a big difference from letting people freely leave if they want....and invasion from foreign entities.

Frankly, iI'd be all for settting up our snipers, they could get some free practice...

And a No Man's land....complete with a field along the border of land mines.

Ok I have a name for the project...

Operation: Hot Tamale

Thank you...thank you....I'll be here all week...

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

One other thing I forgot to mention. I'm skeptical that this "AI startup" actually did what it claimed to do, but since I have no evidence either way, I reserve my judgment until more details are given.

If the startup can't or won't provide evidence, that in itself is suggestive of some kind of fraudulent behavior meant to hype up the company, a la Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes. But in so far as the underlying scientific principles are involved, the strategy seems plausible. I just don't know if this company actually did it.

So I only remembered a little bit of the virology of phages from what I learned in school--namely, that they infect bacteria and that they are everywhere. And when I saw some of the early comments posted here that were big on knee-jerk reactions and scarcasm but small on actual science, I decided to read the Wikipedia article.

Phages don't infect eukaryotes; they only infect bacteria. And phage therapy has been successfully used to combat antibiotic resistance in humans, although the problem of resistance in general remains. This makes sense: bacteria replicate rapidly and have relatively little in the way of proofreading mechanisms, so when there is selection pressure, they mutate and develop resistance very easily, even to phages. So engineering a phage to target an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain might work in the short term, but unless there's a way to cultivate phages that are able to adapt in response to (and not simply target) that strain, the strategy is intrinsically self-limiting.

To those comments drawing ill-informed comparisons to engineering viruses that infect humans, know this: phages are literally everywhere on this planet. They are far, far more abundant than bacteria, and most people can appreciate how ubiquitous bacteria are. You already have phages inside of you, and in fact, they form an entire ecosystem. Same thing with bacteria--you have bacteria all over and inside your body. You have more bacterial cells coexisting on and inside you than you have your own cells. And what's more interesting is that these phages seem to be protective by helping to maintain a balanced microbiome.

The concern I have with engineered phages is not that they would be harmful to the environment or to us, or that they could mutate to be harmful. That is extremely, extremely unlikely, because such a concern doesn't reflect an understanding of how phages actually function in real life and how they co-evolve with the bacteria they infect. If anything I would be concerned about spreading bacteria that become extensively resistant to antibiotics and phages. Thus we need better education about what phage therapy is, and to ensure that study participants are adequately informed of the potential risks and benefits. The direction such therapy would most likely need to take is quite similar to CRISPR and other gene therapies, in that it would need to be a form of personalized medicine. If we can develop computer models to help perform this personalization more efficiently, then I'm for it; such an approach may also prove useful for treating cancer.

Am I the only one that finds her to be somewhat strangely attractive ?

She's not beautiful by any stretch.....but something about her, maybe the big eyes....I find somewhat attractive.

Anyone else?

Precisely. I alluded to this in my previous comment, but you give very simple and specific examples of this phenomenon.

Other examples with significant impact:

Ability to borrow money is almost nonexistent for the poor, except for usurious rates such as in payday loans or credit card interest. An absolutely astonishing percentage of Americans carry a balance on their credit cards from month to month, and pay interest on that balance. And the poorest Americans can't even access credit. This inability to borrow at a favorable rate impacts major purchases that would, in the long run, save enormous sums of money, such as financing a home or an automobile. A home builds equity and doesn't enrich a landlord. A car lets you commute to better jobs and saves time otherwise wasted on public transit.

Fines, fees, and consumption taxes as a proportion of income are vastly higher, and there is no legal recourse. Late on your credit card payment because your employer didn't pay you on time? The bank doesn't care and you don't have money to sue your employer, not to mention they might just fire you. Sales tax is extremely regressive; 8-10% makes no difference to the well off, but regularly stops the poor from being able to afford basic necessities--and many state/local governments continue to seek increases in sales tax in order to make up for budget shortfalls as a result of their own lack of fiscal discipline.

What bothers me is how the wealthy class is always quick to point out how much "assistance" is given to the poor, but when it comes to the poverty tax and actually having an equitable playing field in economic affairs, they are dead silent. And the middle class eats up this narrative, because they don't want to believe that they have more in common with the poor than they do with the rich. Most Americans are one health emergency away from bankruptcy. Most cannot afford to lose their job. Yet so many believe that they should direct their anger at the poor for "being lazy and taking the benefits their taxes pay for," when the truth is that the truly wealthy have rigged the financial and political system to pay almost no taxes and steal far more tax dollars than all of the poor are ever given.

It is a kind of mass delusion perpetrated by the rich in order to sustain their wholesale theft of the wealth created by the entire working class, and the fact that so few of us have woken up to this reality is what makes me want to scream.

What this allocation seems to suggest is that study participants who receive UBI feel compelled to distribute some of that income to their loved ones, because they too need assistance, and doing so improves their social circle's quality of life in ways that are not so material as buying goods and services. Therefore, if UBI were made available to everyone in need--and not just to study participants--then such redistribution would not occur at this rate.

What I've noticed with these studies is that critics of UBI and other forms of social safety net programs frequently come from entitled backgrounds. They have never known poverty and have formed this narrative of poor people "wasting" the money they earn or receive as the reason for their poverty. They can't understand why poor people don't just "find a better job," or "stop eating so much food," or "find a cheaper place to live." They look at the world through their own lens of plenty, and don't see how society severely penalizes the poor for simply being poor and extracts from them additional financial costs that the more fortunate do not have to pay.

In the same vein, there is this insidious undercurrent of elitism in the criticism that UBI recipients need to have their spending monitored and judged before they are entitled to it, because it reinforces this false narrative that poor people are poor because they don't use their money "wisely." Meanwhile, we have a billionaire class that truly wastes their obscene wealth on luxury yachts and monuments to their greatness. If anything, it is the poor--who have lived the experience of scarcity and have to decide every day what is truly meaningful in life--who should be entrusted to wealth, because every day they feel the tremendous pressure, anxiety, and insecurity of not having it, and therefore know how important it is to make sure that others do not suffer the same.

So when they give money to their friends or family when they barely have enough for themselves, you KNOW they aren't doing it frivolously. Unlike billionaires, who only love themselves, they know how important it is to share with the people you love.

The carbon fiber is a protective overwrap, much like anti-spalling wrap on ballistic armor.

...Now, does anyone have a spare $30K they could loan me?

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a......