Well I only read them if someone is FLAYED ALIVE and CONDEMNED to ETERNAL DAMNATION. Everything else is just weak sauce.

Somewhat deeper cut: Rafi - Bathtime. Just try not to hum along once you’ve heard it once!

Some context in case you’re not aware: https://time.com/6971773/kristi-noem-memoir-dog-kill-children-net-worth/

It’s not quite the same as the meme but also not that different either

they went to the Oscars on acid

That’s not all of their shenanigans at those Oscars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSxHnsddg20

That’s not so hard to remember! In France, turkey is called “dinde,” derived from “d’Inde” (“of India”), which is much farther east than Türkiye. So just remember that in France, Türkiye = India.

In 2013 Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a famous analogy about the US Supreme Court gutting the voting rights act. She said it’s like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” That comes pretty close to your sentiment, OP.

Yeah the house example doesn’t fit well with the numbers listed in the post. 113k -> 400k would mean that the price has roughly doubled twice over 36 years or undergone a 3-4% compounding increase in price per year. That’s still a lot, especially since housing is usually a person’s largest expensive. But the rate of increase isn’t as much as that of college education, where people end up with loans today that rival mortgages of 30 years ago.

In 10 years there’s going to be a post like “TIL the US officially renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario during Donald Trump’s second term, but then everyone ignored and forgot about it”

When I use CAPITALS, no one says I’m CAPITALISTIC

Yeah, a bunch of historians get together and use a quill pen to write in a big book called “History” and whatever they write is officially what has happened. The historians got together just yesterday and wrote “The USA lost the Iran war.” Now that’s the official history. /s

Where do you get your drm free music? I’ve been using Spotify for a while but am very interested in switching. Do you use Bandcamp? Do they have basically everything a person could want or do you get your music from somewhere else?

The survey that the article is based on seems pretty fishy to me. It’s conducted by some financial services company that is mostly involved in selling financial products, not doing research. The methodology section is pretty threadbare and they don’t provide the survey data itself.

The figures are also way out of line with more reputable research organizations like the KFF which estimates that 17% of Americans delay or avoid healthcare due cost.

Is 17% still really high and an unethical travesty in the wealthiest country on earth? Yeah. But there’s no way that 92% of people are skipping the doctor due to cost. Just as an example, the top quintile of earners in the US make more than 300k per year. I doubt that anyone in that group in delaying or avoiding healthcare due to costs and yet the survey would mean that a good chunk of them are.

I worked at a gas station about 20 years ago. Even then it would be impossible for someone to give away gas in this way.

Before the pump turns on, either the customer would have to authorize the transaction with a credit card, or an employee would have to manually authorize the transaction if they were paying with inside the store. If the gas wasn’t paid for, it would be immediately obvious by the end of the day that the till (or books or whatever) was short. To clear out the transaction without paying, we’d have to push some buttons on the register to declare that the customer drove off, and essentially accuse them of stealing, get the manager to check the security cams for the license plates, etc. No one could use that pump until the previous transaction was cleared out.

Maybe some gas stations worked differently, but I doubt any big chain ones had less security than that.

One unusual piece of Trump-lore is that he has really bad vision but hates the way that he looks in glasses. Maybe he wears contacts in public, or maybe he isn’t able to do so for some reason. But occasionally photographers get a shot of him wearing glasses.

Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi would pour a drink out in your honor

I literally said that Meta was firing people for protected leave, disabilities, and medical issues. What I was denying is that they were firing people on the basis of “pre-diagnoses.” All the complaints in the lawsuit are based on diagnoses that employees disclosed to Meta. I think that’s shitty and illegal, but I don’t think there is evidence that Meta is acquiring undisclosed medical information about their employees and using that for layoffs.

Alright, if you look at this story from a more reputable source (Reuters), it’s quite a bit different. Meta isn’t accused of using AI with people’s medical information to make early diagnoses and lay them off. Instead,

According to the complaint, Meta used a number of internal AI-assisted systems to score and rank employees ⁠on a ​termination list. Those included “Metamate,” a large language model assistant; an employee-trained “second ​brain” that tracked workers’ communications and documents; and a productivity score drawn from scanning keystrokes, screen content, emails and browser history, according ​to the lawsuit.

The 26 plaintiffs, who ⁠filed the lawsuit anonymously, are accusing Meta of violating federal and state laws that ban discrimination or retaliation against workers who have disabilities, take medical leave or are ​pregnant. They also claim that Meta failed to test its AI systems for ​bias in ⁠violation of recently adopted California and New York City laws.

So it’s still shitty workplace surveillance and discrimination but not the same kind of surveillance and discrimination alleged in the Twitter posts. Meta is using AI to try to rank workers’ productivity (on a bunch of shitty metrics) in a way that may discriminate against people with disabilities or who take medical leave or who are pregnant.

Speaketh for the self, for this one does not

I don’t think this is even a good example. “Self” is usually treated as a reflexive pronoun, although I’m not sure if it still counts as one if you say “the self.” And “this” is a demonstrative pronoun. And “one,” as it used in this sentence is an indefinite pronoun.

In 2019 Quebec passed a law prohibiting public workers who are in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols. The law violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, particularly rights around freedom of religion and expression. But there’s a fancy little mechanism called the “notwithstanding clause” that allows you to pass unconstitutional laws under some circumstances, which Quebec invoked and allowed the law to pass and withstand court challenges.