That quote is not a exactly ringing endorsement of Binghamton. They have good spiedies there, at least.

But he’s always been like this. He had the world’s largest intelligence apparatus at its service, but didn’t believe what they said when it contradicted what his buddies Vlad and MBS told him.

Alternatively, they spend so much of their time listening to bots on the Internet that only other bots make sense to them.

Jesus was a socialist Jew. We had one of those run for President, too, but couldn’t make it past the Democratic primary.

Many Conservatives have been conditioned to stop looking for facts and believe what the TV tells them. Trump admitted as much during the debate. When challenged on the cat thing, he dismissed the reporter’s research and said that he believes it because he saw it on TV. His voters will, too.

Roger Ailes was Nixon’s media consultant during Watergate, and the lesson he learned was that if the media was on Nixon’s side, he could have gotten away with it. Ailes went on to run Fox News. That is no accident.

One of the few things I miss from Reddit is that random guy from Ireland who posted pictures of his cows.

Back in the day, if I saw some braindead karma farming post on Reddit, I took a look at their post history and quite a few times it was a brand new account. I would simply reply “Welcome to Reddit! How has your first [week/day/hour] been?”. I think precisely twice it turned out to be a new human user, the rest of the time they would just delete the comment (or possibly even the account).

I got banned years ago from r/funny because I was browsing on “new” (like I do here), responded to a post with a lame joke within minutes after it posted, then the powers that be decided the poster was a spammer, and banned me too. I asked them why they banned me, but got absolutely nothing in response. It turns out, though, that being banned from there made absolutely no difference to my Reddit experience.

Now that Reddit is a public company, and courting income from paid official subreddits, it’s only a matter of time before there is a huge class-action lawsuit over their uneven moderation policies. Especially if companies start steering a good portion of their customer interaction there. It is super unfair to be cut off from legitimate customer service because of a power-tripping mod in a totally different part of Reddit.

Besides, I hit on the best way to ensure I never get banned from Reddit: I don’t go there anymore.

Bullshit. AI are not human. We shouldn’t treat them as such. AI are not creative. They just regurgitate what they are trained on. We call what it does “learning”, but that doesn’t mean we should elevate what they do to be legally equal to human learning.

It’s this same kind of twisted logic that makes people think Corporations are People.

What’s better is that, thanks to Elon Musk, “STINKY” is the default name for its Starlink wifi. These people didn’t even change that.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-starlink-wifi-stinky

Except the one who gets the Nobel Prize for proving it

Cybermen? Daleks? The Slitheen?

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/769164/nutrients

INGREDIENTS: CARBONATED WATER, CARAMEL COLOR, ASPARTAME, PHOSPHORIC ACID, POTASSIUM BENZOATE (TO PROTECT TASTE), NATURAL FLAVORS, CITRIC ACID, CAFFEINE.

Think of someone who makes small crafts and sells them on some online platform. Someone who does this as a business will keep track of their materials costs, and subtract them from their sales cost, only paying taxes on their actual profit.

But the IRS will only let you do this if they determine your intent is to make a profit. If they think you are purposely just selling enough to cover your materials, but using most of the materials for yourself, they can tell you that you never had an actual business in the first place, and that all that deducting of expenses never should have happened.

Because too many people treat politics like a sporting event. You root for your team no matter what, and against the other team. You have to do it this way, because if the other side wins that means your side loses.

So there are too many people who view Trump as “Their Guy”, and are “rooting” for him. Anything they hear that might portray Trump in a negative light (like a criminal trial, for instance) must be the Other Side trying to cheat to win unfairly.

I remind people that Roger Ailes was Nixon’s media consultant, and the lesson he learned from Watergate was that Nixon could have gotten away with it if the media was more sympathetic. He then went on to be the CEO of Fox News. That’s no accident. There is a direct line from Nixon to Trump, and Roger Ailes drew it.

Each sport has different jargon for their officials, and some sports use them differently than others. Some sports (like football) use them all at once. There are some distinctions that tend to run across multiple different sports, not perfectly, but good enough to discuss.

Umpires tend to make binary decisions based strictly on the rulebook. Yes, sometimes there is some Grey area, like whether a batter “swung” or not. But the decisions are often yes/no.

Judges tend to make more subjective decisions, comparing against some sort of ideal rather than a binary decision. In most sports where scores are not accumulated based on goals but assigned by officials based on how well they perform their routine, those officials are judges.

Referees tend to make broader decisions that impact the overall game. They are also more likely to talk directly with coaches on either side, or the spectators.

And there is no perfect analogy. American football does have a “referee” who is the main official, as well as an “umpire” who has set duties, and all the rest are technically judges but enforce things like scrimmage violations and penalties in the secondary. When an announcer says “That’s probably a holding flag” it is because it is thrown by a judge who typically has responsibility for looking for holding. Baseball only has umpires, the one with the most seniority is the “crew chief” and acts sort of like a referee but they don’t call them that.

I think OPs point is that if Indy was burrowing a hole in the desert, and some random started talking to him, Indy probably wouldn’t respond by punching his way out of the hole.

Maybe Bill O’Frights is Bill O’Reilly’s cousin

As fucked up as the economy is right now, it doesn’t hold a candle to the 70s. People freak about 7% mortgage rates right now, they started there in the 70s and went up to 13%-ish by the time Reagan was elected. The shit show started under Nixon, but people seem to blame Carter. Probably because of the time he had the audacity to ask Americans to turn their thermostats down. (I was just a bit too young for all this, so this is all filtered through what my parents told me.)

Combine that with the Iran hostage crisis, and the fact that Carter was too honest for his own good, and he didn’t stand a chance in 1980 against a charismatic opponent who wasn’t afraid to bend the truth now and then.

I found this link to a good overview of it all. It seems to be part of some course (there is a quiz at the end)

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/jimmy-carter-and-the-malaise-speech

The PEE market is far less liquid than I would have expected