solstice @ solstice @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah, I really do wonder when the government and rest of the people start to seriously consider if it is worth it dropping $50 billion on places like SoCal and South Florida every few years or so. At some point you need to do the math and ask hard questions about whether it is worth it, and the answer damn well may be no.

I gotta say I'm feeling a little bit better about the election results. They've made it clear they don't intend to do a single thing they talked about, and that it is, was, and always will be 100% about money. So I don't think we really need to worry about WWIII, Gilead, mass deportations and arrests etc, because that would disrupt business and make the billionaires slightly - ever so slightly - less billionairish.

That's ol' Slippin Jimmy for you, ever hear about that time in Chicago with the sunroof? Good stuff

I agree and accept your judgment. I'm not optimistic about the future of this country; at this point my only hope is that we don't take the rest of the world down with us.

Serious answer: an astonishing, alarming chunk of the american population believes the reason why there are social problems, things like school shootings et al, is because there isn't enough religion. They truly believe that MORE religion is the answer. It's disgusting and intellectually offensive, and I'll fight to the death against anyone trying to force me to adhere to their superstitious dogma (praise be, under his eye). So you should be aware that's the ideology.

People often make the argument that churches do a lot of community service and charity work. Why, then, do you need to include the fairy tale nonsense of mystical deities? We can totally have organized groups of volunteers that do nice things for people, WITHOUT the mythological element involved.

All I took away from this is that there are lots of different variations of the stupid shit that stupid humans believe.

ChatGPT is basically like a really good intern, and I use it heavily that way. I run literally every email through it and say "respond to so and so, say xyz" and then maybe a little refining, copy paste, done.

The other day, my boss sent me an excel file with a shitload of data in it that he wanted me to analyze some such way. I just copy pasted it into gpt and asked it, and it spit out the correct response. Then my boss asked me to do something else that required a bit of excel finagling that I didn't really know how to do, so i asked gpt, and it told me the formula, which worked immediately first try.

So basically it helps me accomplish tasks in seconds that previously would've taken hours. If anything, I think markets are currently undervalued, because remarkably, fucking NONE of my colleagues or friends are using it at all yet. Once there's widespread adoption, which will pretty much have to happen if anyone wants to stay competitive once it gains more traction, look out...

I'm sure he was a swell guy, a lot of fun at barbecues, dog lover and good with kids yada yada. Plenty of awful folks in history are like that. I hear Hitler was a fun guy who liked dogs and kids too.

..well not ALL kids but still

I did a few game theory simulations in college and they were always real interesting. In one of them for example, it was a multiplayer game, with multiple interactions. I think it was to simulate global trade basically: you could cooperate with as many players as you want and each time you cooperate you both get a point. If you defect then you get two and they get none. However, all the players could see what the other players are doing, so if you defected they would know and probably would play (trade) with you. The best way to win was to form as many connections as possible and fully cooperate the whole time.

I formed maybe like 20-30 connections with other players and didn't defect. Each point was worth a few cents or something. So I walked out with a check for like $20-$50 or something. Many players walked out with nothing because they cheated too many people too many times and nobody wanted to trade with them.

Therefore, clearly, the best economic policy is protectionism, tariffs, trade wars, and fucking over both allies and enemies, right? Right?!?

By far the smartest show ever written and it's not even close!

Gaming is going to be at the bottom of the list, there, saved you a few minutes of googling.

As we have learned over the last few years, laws are only as strong as their enforcement mechanism. If the institutions responsible for upholding the law fail to do that, or even enable violating the law even more, then the law is useless.

That's basically my only hope. Incompetence, bickering, infighting, and just generally falling apart from within their own hate machine as these kinds of ideologies tend to do.

We are past this though. I remember screaming this into the air at the radio listening to Jack Speer on NPR in 2016. He was going on and on about the awful things Trump was saying and how we shouldn't be hearing this. I screamed then why the fuck do you keep repeating it Jack, why?!? I blame the media 100% for his election in 2016, all that free publicity. 2024 though...I really don't have any answers...

The right to not be gaslighted with lies, stupidity, and disinformation.

There's a little detail in the show that I always liked. They didn't shove it in your face and I appreciate the subtlety.

The detail is that there were actually very few groceries in the grocery store. If you look closely, the produce is always very low quality, and there just wasn't that much to choose from. It was a big deal when they got those navel oranges. Not much meats either, and they mostly got canned goods and such. It highlights how shitty their society is without going too overboard. "You might not have noticed, but your brain did."

Mass deportation of our cheap labor supply will do way more to increase cost of groceries than Chinese tariffs ever will. The cold hard truth of it all is that our entire way of life depends on exploiting cheap migrant labor. Democrats don't like to admit it because we don't like that kind of exploitation, and republicans don't like to admit it because they don't like immigrants. But we depend on them as much as we do the laborers in chinese factories, the somewhat educated cheap labor in India, the children in sweatshops in Vietnam, and so on. Our entire economy is based on exploiting someone, somewhere, artifically reducing the cost of living for us.

You're ok with little planes flying through hyperspace but draw the line at space hacking, lol

On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot

Man that's like the ONE THING that I totally give star wars a pass for. It wasn't a lucky shot. The design flaw was there, yes, but the targeting computer was never going to work. Red leader had a lock and it still didn't work. Wedge Antilles, the best non-Jedi starfighter pilot in the galaxy, expressed strong doubt at least two or three times. Luke had to use the force to destroy it, there was no other way. If you can suspend your disbelief to accept the existence of the force, it makes perfect sense in the context of the story. Fucking masterpiece!