#NeedsMoreLikes

[MerelyGifted]

Warnock wins Georgia senate runoff

What’s the point of having an Olympic swimming pool full of oil industry cash if you can’t swim in it!?!

[FGD135]

Days Gone director blames reception on 'woke' critics

Could this be the quote of the day? The week? The month? The year even?

[chenille]

@DukeTrout

Musk offered to buy Twitter on an impulse, like buying expired, discounted Paqui ghost pepper chips at a bodega. But his friends double-dog dared him to eat the whole bag, and now that he’s in the ER getting his stomach pumped, people are trying to explain how that was his plan all along.

This analogy.

[milliefink]

This crowbar.

Why Tom Morello and Ted Nugent are friends

There are rare exceptions. For instance, if a fascist is about to kill someone, it might be a good idea to argue with them as a distraction while a friend sneaks up behind them with a crowbar. And if you think that’s not really what debate means…that’s all it means to them. A distraction while the other fascists go out and hurt people. As Mindy and Melizmatic say, they never engage in good faith.

[Sally_Mahoney]

Free speech foe Elon Musk suspends Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz for asking him for a comment

I’m shocked, shocked that someone who’s been ingratiating himself with the far rights is doing the very thing that he’s accusing other people of doing.

[Sally_Mahoney]

Redditor's share they're list of most annoying grammatical error's

Their they’re, yule bee awl write.

[FGD135]

Russian "meat magnate" who criticized Putin dies in fall from hotel window

Magnates, how do they work? looks up definition for magnate Turns out, they don’t.

[Sally_Mahoney]

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/alex-lubins-book-never-ending-war-on-terror-explains-it/238604/4?u=sally_mahoney

[anon52120741]

I always thought that magnates were repulsed by prols

[milliefink]

Indeed. As well they should be.

Egads, the prols are revolting!

[gero]

In a challenge to Google, Microsoft is adding ChatGPT to Bing

As someone who spent 25 years in AI, I take strong exception to this characterization by the Times. This is unequivocally false. The whiz bang AI chatbots and art generators we see now are not creative. They are not creating or synthesizing new information. They are elaborate statistical models that are averaging all the existing art/words currently in the world. They’re more like the median of all previous creativity, rather than creating it. We may never get to the point of AI being truly c…

[smulder]

@docosc

Literally every player in the league will be injured in the course of their employment. In fact, depending on how you count it, it could be hundreds of % due to every one being injured multiple times.

[Sally_Mahoney]

Iowa Police Chief arrested after selling black market military machine guns

Did the Adair PD really need all those heavy weapons? Hell, yes. Remember that only a good guy with a helicopter-mounted Gatling mini-gun can stop a bad guy with a helicopter-mounted Gatling mini-gun that he just bought from the chief of police for pennies on the dollar. It’s a jungle out there.

[Sally_Mahoney]

Why Decimal Point and Decimal Comma

In the spirit of “why not both”, I have taken to using a semicolon. Thus pi = 3;14159…

[Sally_Mahoney]

Moral panic article from 1984 about the demise of slide rules

Maybe we did lose something when we moved from slide rules to calculators. We lost a visceral understanding of what it’s like to manipulate numbers, but we gained so much more. Consider how humanity chanced when we moved from memorizing epics to writing them down. Minstrels needed to have an unbelievable amount of memory to recite these poems. Very few people these days have a memory like that. Our minds have gone to mush in a way. That being said, I prefer what we have now.

[FSogol]

KathyPartdeux

(Odd Stuff (Part 3) - #4545 by KathyPartdeux)

National Park Service

@NatlParkService

You know it’s cold outside when you go outside and it’s cold.

12:50 AM - 18 Jan 2023

Still laughing at this one.

[Melizmatic]

@DukeTrout

If you don’t mean what you’ve said, then say so. If you have been misunderstood then make your point clearer. But just repeating the cycle of asserting a point, denying it, and acting aggrieved by my disagreement is rude. It’s called gaslighting; you’re trying to tell me (and the community) that words don’t mean what they mean; that my objection to your words is based on anything but their meaning; that you are somehow the victim of some injustice in my insistence as to their meaning and as a result, that your position is deserving of some kind of privleged immunity from disagreement.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have poured a lot of time and energy into this online community. I care deeply about the quality and civility of discourse here. That doesn’t give my words a privleged place here anymore than anyone else’s; what it does mean is that I will freely spend my time and energy to keep making this place a good place for people to discuss topics. And I find cutesy rhetorical dodges harms that effort.

So you can expect that I won’t just let them go, and that I will challenge them every time. And you don’t get to dictate that. If you want to engage with this community, be aware of the standards and have respect for all of us when you contribute to it.

Emphasis, mine.

[milliefink]

This Is Fine

Too true. It’s getting more than a bit insulting that we’re considered too stupid to understand the game they’re playing. Some of their moves are more obvious than others, but they also brag about most as accomplishments. Controlling people through underemployment and low wages while increasing their cost of living isn’t new. Remember all of the media reports about the average worker being two paychecks away from homelessness? Next came the rise of payday lenders and repealed/relaxed usury…

[smulder]

Happy Large Boulder the Size of a Small Boulder Day!

[IMG_0475] I hit this rock a few years back while biking to work. It flattened both tires. I took it home. It was on the mantle for awhile, but I don’t see it anywhere. Now I’m worried. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust it at all.

[Sally_Mahoney]

Odd Stuff (Part 3)

Suddenly jet packs and taco trucks become synonymous with the future.