Hey, I saw this movie!

Didn't end well for the guy with the plutonium.

I wouldn't mind if it were a static image, but it's that Gemini ad that's constantly writing and erasing text. It's definitely cut down how long I stay on the site.

Oh, I don't know. An EV version of the Reliant Robin might be just what the world needs right now.

Bullshit weasel words. "Cleaner" does not mean "clean".

A shit sandwich, now with 50% less shit! is still a shit sandwich.

No, those are the words of someone who has seen nothing but slop for more than a decade (OK, there were a couple of exceptions), and has reached the point where there is no expectation things will ever get better. I have also given up hope that Star Wars will ever be good again.

I expect your opinion, which I share, is a majority opinion. Star Wars is almost nothing but slop now.

People with my genetics start dying around age fifty - polycystic kidney disease.

I'm ten years older than that, my blood pressure earlier this evening was 120/70something, my last fasting sugar was around 85, I weigh ten pounds more than I did in college, and I've walked 1,393 miles in the last year. My last vice is caffeine and I will go off it periodically, in one instance for seven years.

I got dealt a terrible hand, health wise, Lyme at forty that triggered a complex immune condition, but I refuse to feel (or look) bad. A lot of it IS in your hands, you just need the will to change. It's not easy ...

The US has never been a completely anarchistic hellhole - we've always had laws (aka regulations). Gambling, for example, was very tightly regulated for hundreds of years and only recently has been opened wide (with all the expected problems).

If you're desperate for capital-F Freedom, I hear Somalia is pretty lawless. You can go set up a compound and fiefdom there.

It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

While universal basic income is a useful policy tool and I think we WILL reach it eventually, there are economics papers out there that demonstrate that, sans Pigouvian transaction tax, AI is a race to the bottom.

The AI Layoff Trap by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas is still sitting on my desktop. A quick Google search reveals they are not the only ones who are pursuing this line of thinking.

BUt here in the U.S. "muh freedumb" will ensure that we run that race till the bottom falls out. Hopefully Asia and Europe play this transition a bit smarter, so something of our society continues.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

Hah, good to know. I almost wrote "F350" because they're the most egregious "luxury commercial trucks", but 150s are so much more common I went with that instead. Luckily they have plenty of carrying capacity for all that regret.

Oh, I know. It's a very thin lining.

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.