I’m trans. I’m an educator. And I would happily make this joke myself.

The problem with trade embargos and sanctions is that if you use them excessively, you’re just sanctioning yourself.

Maybe companies shouldn’t be able to own companies. It just allows to much fuckery. Maybe only real human beings should be able to have ownership stakes in companies, llcs, etc.

Some trans people change their sex characteristics, some don’t. Some of us quite literally change our sex in a multitude of ways. Some transition just gender. Some transition sex but not gender. And I don’t mean just genital surgery. I would argue HRT changes your sex.

And it should be obvious where nonbinary people fit. It’s a bimodal spectrum, not two distinct categories separated by a chasm. Most folks lie on either end, but there’s plenty of room in the middle.

I can define a female and woman quite well.

Sex is a continuous bimodal distribution. Every sexual dimorphic trait follows a distribution. For example, the penis and the clitoris are the same organ, and organs can grow in all forms in between. Still, the vast majority of the population is born with something on one end or the other of that distribution. Same for all sexually dimorphic traits. If most of your sexual traits are towards one end of the spectrum, your sex is male, the other female.

And gender is on top of that. Society applies various values to the two sexes. Society classifies certain things as masculine, certain things as feminine. Society encodes many non-physical traits, behaviors, cultural practices, activities, etc. as masculine or feminine. A man is someone whose various gendered traits primarily align with the male sex cluster. A woman is the opposite. If you mostly want to do the male-coded things and be seen and treated as male, then you’re a man. If you want to do the female-coded things and be seen and treated as female, then you’re a woman. Having a few masculine hobbies doesn’t make someone a man. We’re talking broad averages here.

Or more succinctly.

Sex is a bimodal distribution. Culture creates two big blobs of traits mapped to each end of the sex spectrum. A man is someone who exists or wishes to exist in one of those cultural blobs, a woman the other.

She knows her situation better than we do. If she feels it’s not safe to be out yet, we shouldn’t assume that it is. “Comfort over conformity” assumes a lot about the type of environment a person is living in.

If your plane crashes you experience surviving it, this should not surprise you. You cannot experience the alternative.

As if that means shit.

Too late. It’s already baked in through the insurance industry reinsurance mechanisms.

That sounds about right. Though of note I do have AuDHD, so I do also have that autistic sense of justice thing going for me. So when there’s an egregious case of say the next national outrage of a cop shooting an unarmed black kid, I’ll be able to hyper focus long enough to bring the hammer down on them. Just don’t ask me to try and monitor everyone’s Internet history for wrongthink or operate some nationwide reign of terror. I just don’t have the spoons for that.

Me. I’ll be the final watcher who watches the watchers. You don’t have to worry about me turning into a despot as I’m just too god damned ADHD to run a proper dictatorship.

Fuck it. Pull a Trump. Do it anyway and make them sue or come after you for it. Boot up a state-backed volunteer-run ballot delivering operation. Encourage people to pick up their ballots at county courthouses or other similar locations. For those who can’t make it, have a portal where a volunteer can drive a ballot out to them. Same for picking the ballots back up.

If they want to litigate it, tie them up in court long enough that it won’t matter. You already have the ballots at that point.

That wing nut isn’t painted on, is it??

Challenge level: Impossible

Find a way to create a meetup for group for “adult tag” that doesn’t sound like it’s sexual in nature.

Have AI image generators decimated the furry art scene? From the furries I’ve known, I could see furries being more opposed to AI use than the population average, but then again, detailing your fantasies to a soulless machine will always be less embarrassing than describing them to another human being. There’s a reason the porno theaters of yore were replaced with internet porn. Or is AI-generating furry porn even practical for the average user? Unrestricted local models certainly could. But those aren’t as accessible as the big image generators. Do the filters on the big image generator sites prevent the creation of furry erotica?

No, that’s how they used to do it. The Hatfield Marine Science Center has a new blue whale skeleton.

The thing about a blue whale skeleton is that’s not a thing you can just go out and get. You’re obviously not going to go hunt one. There aren’t blue whales in captivity. If you’re a natural history museum and want an elephant skeleton, you can get one from a zoo after the elephant dies of natural causes. Not so much for blue whales. If you want a blue whale skeleton to display, you’re just going to have to wait until a blue whale washes up dead on the beach.

I’m not sure if this is documented anywhere online. But if you go to the Hatfield Marine Science Center itself and browse through their exhibits, one documents the process they used to clean the skeleton.

They did it by first carving the whale carcass into big chunks. They then wrapped these in nets and hung them from buoys that suspended the chunks into the water column of Yaquina Bay. Little sea critters could swim through the net and pick away at the rotting whale flesh, while the net prevented bones from being carried away. They effectively did a controlled artificial shallow-water whale fall.

So nowadays, on the Oregon Coast, you eat a whale by letting it be devoured by the small fish and crustaceans of Yaquina Bay.

Eh, some can be recycled up to ten times. And it’s not like you can use plywood forms infinitely either. Those break down after 10-20 uses as well on average. And, just like plastic, every time you reuse plywood molds some of the material gets lost. Some gets damaged when prying the forms off. Plywood sheets get cut down to the shape of the next job. Etc.

And again, I’m imagining this primarily where plywood forms are not practical without very skilled and intricate work. Imagine a home built like this. The cost would be completely impractical for normal residential budgets. But printed forms and injected concrete? Maybe.

The NY Times and Pearson, two of the most valuable US publishers, each have market caps of about $10 billion.

Let’s say Pearson went after OpenAI. They devote an unlimited legal budget to the fight. OpenAI is hoping to IPO as a trillion dollar company. If Pearson went after OpenAI, rather than fight them in court, a deal could be reached first. If that didn’t work, if a deal couldn’t be reached, OpenAI could bypass the problem completely:

1. Spend $5 billion to buy a controlling share of Pearson.
2. Fire the entire leadership team and install OpenAI minions in their place.
3. Once they control Pearson, sign a long-term licensing deal with OpenAI with very generous licensing terms and huge early cancellation fees.
4. Sell the shares back on the market at a (likely slightly reduced) value.

OpenAI would likely have to spend some money on net. The value of Pearson stock would likely be a bit lower after effectively giving away the rights to their works as training data. If signing a durable rights contract the new owners can’t escape isn’t practical, buying the company and simply holding it indefinitely would also be an option.

The problem with tariffs is once you use enough on them, you’re effectively imposing economic sanctions or a blockade on your own country.

If anyone ever does try to argue this in court, they’ll just change the justification to “national security.”

We need the most powerful AI we can make because our rival nations are building their most powerful AIs. Our rivals are using their AI to control drone swarms, perform automated intelligence-gathering, do mass automated hacking, and perform influence operations. Wars are quickly devolving into battles of drone swarms vs drone swarms, and the limit is on the people needed to control the. Our rivals are revolutionizing their supply chains with AI. They may even be performing vast automated influence operations designed to target individual citizens. In the near future, if you’re an American citizen, the Chinese government will know who you are personally, have a file on you, and will be using AI to try and psychologically manipulate you. We need to be able to fight this! We simply have no choice but to keep up. National security demands it. Companies participating in national security-crucial AI development will be exempt from copyright laws.

I’m no lawyer, but a law to allow this almost certainly already exists. US law is full of national security exemptions. For example, I’m pretty sure in wartime IP laws can be waived. If you’ve invented some amazing new technology with military applications? If the government comes knocking and you just refuse to sell to them or demand a completely impossible price, there has to be a mechanism in IP law for those rights to simply be waived, or the rights taken by a form of eminent domain. There’s probably some provision of copyright law that would allow a president to void certain copyrights in a national security emergency.