Let's go on the theory that they got into Harvard because they are the best of the best. If that were the case, then at most universities they should expect a top grade against the "lesser" students and why should they be penalized with sub-A grades just for being the best?

Yeah, I'm going for funny, but I'm not laughing. Upon reflection, I'm not sure if I wouldn't have been better served and served better by not graduating and teaching at top universities. (Though most of my early teaching was at schools not near the top.)

So I'll recommend The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel (of Harvard). The more I think about it, the more I like his lottery ideas.

Pretty sure you were going for Funny, but it's too dark and there are too many hostages in this situation.

However I do think it's hilarious for them to believe the blackmailers didn't keep a backup copy. Also funny that they are involved in education and don't seem to understand the lesson to be learned here.

Need some kind of anti-funny mod for the responses of the various police authorities, though in a sense it's hard to blame them. We are in a time of perfect crime. There should be a joke in here about "When cryptocurrency is outlawed, then only outlaws will..." The problem with the attempted joke is that it seems to require outlawing the greedy parts of human nature or something?

Mod parent funnier for insurance, though the moderation is so broken it scarcely seems to matter. If I understand the current status, it has two mod points, and is only displaying the funny one. I expected the second to be something constructive, probably "insightful" the way some folks see things around here, but turns out to be another censor troll mod.

But if I had my own malignant AI, I'm pretty sure the first question would be "How do I delete Facebook? Not my account. The entire website."

Just joking and going for funny, but reading more about Facebook than about AI these weeks... "Facebook delenda est."

So I asked an AI about the proper Latin and it suggested "Prosopobiblion delenda est."

Mod parent Funny on the scatological humor. Couldn't happen to a un-nicer company because I doubt there are any. Perhaps Amazon, which was mentioned in the discussion by way of negative comparison.

For whatever it is worth (and apparently quite little) I've been reading books about Facebook/Fecebook recently and coming away with a really "bad feeling about this". Book citations wanted?

I didn't think so. This is Slashdot circa 2026...

Basically the same point I raised in an earlier discussion of this... What to call this? A leveraged buyout of the imagination?

However it makes about as much sense as most merger shenanigans and I would approve if at least one of the side effects was that eBay disappeared.

But I want to find a recursive joke somewhere around here... Something about eBay auctions/sales of merger/acquisitions/divestitures?

Basically the ACK, but I'm also concerned with the kinetic threats from the control of robots by ASI. You must have seen some of the recent videos of the Chinese humanoid robots dancing? Also the bipedal robot that set the new record for the half-marathon?

Okay, I think your FP is sort of funny and deserves the mod you were going for, but I was looking for the other joke of the revised Subject.

Not laughing, but I think we are living in the biggest house of cards ever. So much awful software and we are so dependent on it. If anyone did have an ASI that was capable of finding every bug, then that person could pwn the world faster than any human-mediated responses.

Pretty sure it hasn't happened yet, but if the ASI was sufficiently "super", then how would I (or you) know?

I like the joke, but it would be funnier to try to fix the dead tree snail mail system with such craziness as an alias database for mapping convenient email addresses.

Another crazy innovation would be to default to no bulk-class mail, but with a new opt-in option to accept it ONLY if the recipient gets a cut of the postage paid.

But I just read another book on why that trick would never work, so...

I like your joke and my Subject is the one I was looking for in the discussion. Just more "tools for fools" to help the richer get more obscenely rich.

I'll add the horse race joke, since I'm pretty sure it also applies here, even though I'm basically too contemptuous of all gambling to spend time digging out the details for the polymarkets. However I'm pretty sure this is one of the scams where the house takes profits off the top. Therefore there are two cases for the gamblers. They might believe the game is honest and they therefore know they are going to lose if they play long enough. Or they believe the game is crooked and they think they can cheat better than the other suckers, which is still a sucker's bet if they stick at it long enough to lose against a better cheater. This path to losing includes getting old and slow or missing new techniques of cheating.

Classic joke: Gambling is a special tax on people who are bad at math.

Citation? Sorry, I don't remember the book, but it was about training primates to gamble. They love it, but if I remember correctly it was the younger adult males that would make the biggest bets.

Mod parent funnier. But the story had room for more than one Funny comment, so as usual I'm disappointed...

Also rather funny was the book Chaos Monkeys about the internals of the process. Interesting self-contradictions as he flips back and forth between abusing personal information he gathers online, trying to reassure readers that the personal information is used "safely", and the financial shenanigans driving the whole mess forward. There are times when you can try to evade accusations of self-contradictions by saying you've learned stuff and changed your mind, but it's much harder for an author who is writing a book. The state of the book at the time of publication is basically a frozen thing and the contradictions should have been resolved.

But the joke I was looking for was about who elected (and will elect) whom in these days of applied psychology destroying human freedom and the meaning of elections. In the form of a mystery novel the detective sometimes starts by asking "Who benefited?" (Certainly not Europe. Too soon to say China?)

And yet my mind is still boggled by the idea that there are people who voted for the YOB six times, counting primaries. Fool me one is supposed to be a mistake, twice is a shame, but six times?

Thanks for the tips. At first I thought you were referring to the 2023 book by Connie Willis. My local library system actually has two copies of that one and I'm going to take a look at it. (The library seems to think she's named Willis Connie?) Because of the date, it might be linked to the older movie?

I'm pretty sure there was also an old English book with a similar title, too, but your Wikipedia link is actually about a movie from Korea and I couldn't find any book reference there. Haven't seen the movie and unlikely to (though I recently saw a few minutes of a recent Men in Black film on TV). I don't see many movies these decades.

That's supposed to be the perfect state for Buddhist meditation and the path to true zen.

(But what's AC's excuse for possibly living that way? Or just another AI sock puppet?)

(And of course I'm reading another book on the topic. Oh wait, I see there are two of them. Maybe three?)

So you don't believe Epstein was an alien, eh? No one's told you about the REAL conspiracy?

I think you should have been modified Funny rather than insightful. Even funnier with some tail-wagging-dog angle about the let's-not-call-it a war in Iran.