It’s like the TikTok equivalent of YouTube clickbait titles and thumbnails. I don’t even use TikTok, but I can hear the stilted AI lady voiceover saying, “Wait Until The End. You Won’t Believe The Transformation.”

No worries, like I said in my edit, you fixed it while I was writing my comment. I’m just leaving mine unedited for the extra info.

I mean incentivizing them to invest it into things like public works and other beneficial things, but I also expect that that would go about as well as the current tax incentives do. It would be the thing that requires the least effort possible from the government, though, which I think makes it the most likely to actually occur. Actually taxing them more is pretty much a pipe dream.

That article disagrees with the second part of your comment. It says that the Welrod replicas are rare and mostly used by veterinarians, and looking them up, they’ve only been available for import to the US since 2021.

I don’t know where you got your 300 million figure from. Wikipedia puts the total number of civilian firearms in the US at about 393 million, and that includes shotguns, hunting rifles, etc. The most popular pistol in the world I think is the 1911, and I imagine that holds true for veterans as well, and there have been about 4.3 million produced in the past 110 years. The most produced handgun is the Glock, estimated between 10 to 20 million guns.

It’s also not confirmed that that was the pistol he used, just suspected. I saw people talking about how you’d potentially have to manually cycle a regular semi-auto pistol like he did if you were using a suppressor and subsonic rounds because they wouldn’t produce enough force to cycle the gun on their own.

Edit: You fixed your comment while I was writing this, but I’m gonna leave it unedited for the info.

I think part of it is the form that that wealth exists in. Not defending billionaires in any way, but they don’t have stacks of cash lying around. The way that they live is that their money is in various forms of equity that passively increase in value, like stocks and houses, which they take loans against in order to pay for things. Then, they take out more loans to pay off the previous and repeat until they die and the debt disappears due to legal loopholes.

Stuff like the yachts and all the other crazy expensive stuff is one thing, but to redistribute the wealth, it’s not as simple as handing out cash to everybody (and I think turning all their mansions into subsidized housing instead of selling them would be more beneficial anyway).

I think incentivizing them to do more useful things with that cash and disincentivize them from simply hoarding it in various forms would be a decent short-term solution to the issue without having to put in much effort on the government’s part, but I never expect to see that happen.

Did you appeal it? Insurance companies bank on people not appealing when they get denied, even if their policy should cover it.

The older I get and the more I learn about health insurance, the more I realize how accurate that scene from the beginning on The Incredibles with the little old lady really is. I just saw somebody last night say how most claims that are appealed get approved except for cases of incorrectly submitted forms by hospitals and the like, and pretty much all hospitals are required to have a financial assistance program that can end up getting potentially 100% of any debt you have from a procedure absolved. Insurance companies make their money by making the system as difficult to get through as possible, but if you know how to deal with it, you can save yourself tons of money (at the expense of jumping through plenty of hoops).

They would, but UHC deemed it unnecessary care and denied their claim.

I heard my first Christmas Carol on the radio the second week of September this year. I’m ready to burn it all down.

Tyranny of the Early Birds: Morning People Dictate Our Society

Was trying to find that photo of the woman giving a presentation on how morning people are an oppressive class, found this article from the American Council on Science and Health instead.

“Sorry, that’s above my pay-grade.”

Yeah, I figured you didn’t mean that and wasn’t trying to imply that you did, lol. I was just trying to specify that when I was talking about the Wright Brothers I meant the technological jumps between their first flight and the moon landing. We’re probably several technological leaps away from anything that could be considered actual AI.

The Wright Brothers didn’t figure out the moon landing. They figured out aerodynamics. There were plenty of other discoveries that went into the moon landing such as suborbital flight, supersonic flight, and orbital dynamics to list a few. It’s less about the specific time as it is about the level of technology. The timescale is much harder to put down due to the nature of technological innovation.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the most dangerous things about these AI programs is the lack of responsibility or culpability.

Definitely not a question of AI sentience, I’d say we’re as close to that as the Wright Brothers were to figuring out the Apollo moon landing. But, it definitely raises questions on whether or not we should be giving everybody access to machines that can fabricate erroneous statements like this at random and what responsibility the companies creating them have if their product pushes someone to commit suicide or radicalizes them into committing an act of terrorism or something. Because them shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it does that sometimes. We can’t and won’t do anything about it, though” isn’t gonna cut it, in my opinion.

Appreciate it, I remember reading many years ago that after WW2, most countries agreed to sign into law that soldiers were legally obligated to disobey unlawful orders and report the person who gave the order to their superiors, but that the US was one of the nations that didn’t.

But a quick search brings up nothing but articles talking about what you posted, so I can’t find any info on it. I wonder if in other countries it’s enshrined outside of military law, and that’s the distinction? I have no clue.

What country did you serve for? AFAIK, the US is one of a handful of countries that don’t have a law stating that soldiers are obligated to refuse unlawful orders and to report those who gave those orders.

Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.

The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.

IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.

Big Carrot is coming for your stew

This was my thought as well. Too many years of retail has left me with an instinctual hatred for holidays. Like how Labor Day is a holiday for the rich to “celebrate” the working poor who have to work that day.

A third world country in a Prada belt.