In Trump’s letter to the Persians, chapter 14 verse 88.

I’m thinking that’s what he’s doing here. He’s threatening to fracture the furthest right to get what he wants and he’ll spend a pile to do it. I’m convinced this is his play to buy the Republican party.

Announce that they’re opening the investigation but need all their land back because the documentation is scattered due to the war. Oh, we just can’t investigate with all this bombing going on, but we really, really want to.

The thing I found out when I was a manager is you will get exactly what you measure. If you measure how long it takes to close tickets your customer service will suffer (that’s a stupid thing to measure anyway, but we had a stupid director). If you measure the number of tickets closed then you’ll get each step of a process as a ticket. If you measure billable hours you’ll get a bunch of time padding.

So since the religion is measuring the amount of sin and (in some denominations cases) good works performed, that’s what you’ll get. How many of the big 10 did you stay on the right side of? Did you put in 2 hours at the soup kitchen? Cool, here’s your ticket to heaven. It’s not measuring how good you are to your fellow humans. And they’re pissed if you don’t have to follow the same rules they do because you don’t believe in the same sins. So they try to force others to live by their dumb ass rules instead of trying to get others to be good people.

And the kid. And shot the dog. And likely deported the neighbor.

Case in point: the downvotes are from people who don’t know or care about the difference.

Depends on what you’re calling AI. LLMs (and generative AI in general) are garbage for all those things, and most things in general (all things if you take their cost into account). Machine Learning and expert systems can do at least some of that.

I absolutely hate that generative AI is being marketed as though it’s deep learning instead of a fancy Markov chain. But I think I’ve lost the battle over that nomenclature.

How will they sell a human at the lowest cost? People have to eat and sleep.

What kind of gardening? Violent gardening? Was she sowing the seeds of discontent?

Thing is, if it only happens a few times or once in a while that’s exactly how they treat it. But if the restaurants or drivers in your area are shitty and you’re constantly missing one item then your choices are to suck it up and pay for it or you can’t get delivery after a short while.

All of the formerly food delivery apps are like that. I hate it. And if you don’t get your stuff often enough or if the restaurant gets your order wrong too often they’ll tell you that you’re not allowed to get your money back anymore. And if you do a chargeback they won’t let you order until you pay them.

And that’s fine with me because I stopped using them a few years ago except once in a very great while. But I feel sorry for the people who rely on food delivery because they’re disabled or have time constraints due to working half a dozen jobs to make ends meet. I’ve got a buddy who can’t use Uber eats anymore because of this. He’s taking care of two kids and holding down a job that has him working far more than he should and he has no executive function and very little time left over.

“They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved…”

–Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex

I trailed off that quote because it’s a spoiler.

Not necessarily. Could be a stolen car. Balance of probabilities says you’re right and they know exactly who they’re looking for. Maybe they’re bad actors, maybe they’re trying not to have another Reddit “Mission Accomplished” moment, or maybe they’re incompetent.

But they saw him, they have a car, and presumably they caught him on body cam so they can compare his image to the image on the driver’s license the car is registered to. Maybe they’re taking those steps, but I doubt it. But it’s funny that they had descriptions of who they believe to be Luigi up pretty quickly but this remains a mystery man and they’re urging people not to go to the No Kings protest. A cynical person would say it’s a cop that did the shootings under orders to get rid of the one seat majority and quell the protest all in one blow.

Good thing I’m just a drunk and have never had thoughts like that.

ETA: they’ve released an identity. Cynics (definitely not harmless drunks like me) may have jumped the gun. But I’m sure that if they were here they would not apologize for what totally doesn’t look like a two birds with one stone issue.

He’ll help after exhausting all other options.

The snip was the best money I ever spent. I wear condoms because I don’t want a disease, but one thing I ain’t worried about is getting someone pregnant.

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I’ve got a buddy who does a variation of this. He’s got a little shack pretty close to town. He’ll work in the oil field for a few months, come hang out with everyone, and live a “normal” life. Then when he’s saved up enough he rolls out and lives in the woods with his dog hunting and fishing and growing veggies. We go by and check on his place every so often to make sure no one has broken in and it’s not rotting to the ground.

When he no longer has the money to stay in the woods he comes back. I say that, but he’s got the skills to feed himself out there. I think he gets bored after a year or two and wants to be around people for a while.

I asked him about retirement once and he’s got another shack right on a lake that’s been paid off since the 90s. His plan is to go there and fish and not come back.

As a drunk Texan, I can corroborate this information.

Thus the salute!