Werner Herzog's Bear

Our idiotic online public sphere is of course set up to amplify their voices so I’ll be having their destructive, crank opinions shoved in my face forever.

There are centrist liberals who use most of their energy attacking the left and leftists using most of their energy to attack liberals and both need to shut their dumb, fatuous mouths forever. Moyn and Chait are mirror images of each other and I’d be happy never hearing about them ever again.

For Quayles, 'Kinder, Gentler' Rafting (Published 1989)

People are talking about how J.D. Vance had the Army Corps of Engineers reduce waterflow from a dam to make his little canoeing trip easier. He's not the first moron hayseed Vice President to do that. Dan Quayle had the Secret Service do the same thing for a whitewater rafting trip in 1989!

I think Democrats should offer voters a broadly defined anti-fraud platform. Yes, obviously, start with Trump’s influence peddling, but don’t stop there. Online fraud is massive, almost every phone call you get is a scam, and the solution has to be federal or it just won’t work.

They just keep repeating their narratives until they get accepted while liberals lack these outlets and also assume people will hear their message by osmosis.

If Democrats had their own Murdoch media the “Vance changes water flow to maximize his lake vacation” would be getting wall to wall coverage, forcing the regular media to turn it into a scandal that would stay in the headlines for days.

Of course Mark freaking Penn is involved with this. (Not the main thing but jeez Trump attracts the scum.)

Why don’t more scientists support Republicans? We may never know

Draining the nation's groundwater and skyrocketing electricity prices so cheating high school and college students only need to work on their paper two hours instead of four

Hopefully bare literacy is required so they know when to click on this screen.

I think sports betting should be legalized but it ought to be done in person at a bookmaker with a limited number of locations with limits on how much people are able to bet.

I can't believe we are going to have a bloody casino in Times Square or that we let sports leagues openly promote gambling apps on their broadcasts.

Also just wanna add that gambling sucks and I think it’s time we brought back anti-gambling political movements.

International travel cratering is probably the biggest culprit in Vegas losing tourism but also it just kinda sucks, especially in the context of its region. Given a choice between watching geriatrics lose their life’s savings on slots or seeing natural wonders my choice is pretty clear.

The irony of her of all people posting this…

one thing with POPULARISM's [RIP, 2021-2024] obsession with issue polling is that for the purposes of divining election wisdom from them you should immediately discard the 35% or so of the population who would put a spike in their own head before voting for a democrat

So you’re telling me the Wizard of Oz presented itself as a towering force of overwhelming technology, only to be unmasked as just some guy, off-screen?

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

a group of dancers are performing on a stage in front of a crowd . ALT: a group of dancers are performing on a stage in front of a crowd .

HHS announces it will wind down people over 30.

hey remember when Bill Clinton met Loretta Lynch on the tarmac?

right, yeah. the IRS has been more or less letting conservative churches get away with this for years, while Reform congregations, mainline Protestants, and the Black church have more or less strictly followed the law. will be interesting to see if norms follow the law.

This is it. Freeze it in amber. Hang it in a museum. The ultimate expression of the NYT and the elite class behind it.

The utter moral failure of ceding power to Trump? Acceptable ... if it is done in a clever, savvy way!

Zooey Deschanel in Almost Famous made a meal out of a small role and I immediately thought she’d get big.

Table from yougov poll, asking respondents, When considering what makes an adult American, how important is...? Two results are highlighted. 66% of respondents says "believing in the principles of the Declaration of Independence" is very important, vs. 16% who say that of "having many generations of American ancestors" https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Being_American_poll_results.pdf

The real headline for me:

"On What Makes American Identity, Americans Overwhelmingly Reject JD Vance"

66% say "believing in the principles of the Declaration of Independence" is very important, vs. 16% who say that of "having many generations of American ancestors"

Notes on a Day Bumming Around Manhattan Up here in the Northeast we had some lovely, September-like weather over the weekend.

I reflected on a day wandering Manhattan and how the people who fear New York do so because they know deep down their lived daily experience is lame. open.substack.com/pub/jasonteb...

Diddler on the roof

i have been thinking a lot about how the entire concept of “the deal” is antithetical to transparency, fair play and rule of law, as larry notes. the deal is necessarily nonstandard, ad hoc and dependent on the whims of the dealmaker

r/ChatGPTPro u/vurto • 28d If ChatGPT is not consistently dependable, how are we suppose to use it for actual work? Discussion It's behavior and results can randomly change due to some OpenAl tweaking that's opaque. On some days it can't even keep track of a fresh chat, it can't do calculations, it can't sort through a chat to extract relevant information, and when it's suppose to refer to source material in a PDF, it doesn't. All because OpenAl trained it for fluency and basically to simulate whatever it can for user satisfaction. I can use it for general chats, philosophical stuff, therapy, but nothing serious. I'm pro Al, but I approach it with skepticism knowing it's undependable (as I do with anything I read). And prompts can be interpreted/executed differently across users' own interaction with their Als so it's not truly scalable. How does the business world / leaders expect staff to adopt Al if it's not consistently dependable? It doesn't even calculate like a calculator. If the internet start claiming 2+2=5, that's what it'll answer with. I'd use it for hobbies and pet projects but I can't imagine using it for anything "mission critical".

You're so close

seems like a strong indicator that ICE fucked up big re: her visa situation

My dear friend @thestefansmith.bsky.social has been suggesting that we bring back monasticism in a non-religious form to accommodate rising numbers of unpartnered men. Don’t be an incel, be a volcel, and watch the world improve