Are you the NYPD? If so, yes. The guy who shot that CEO? I actually saw him. With my own eyes, I saw him abducted by a flying saucer! It scooped him up in a beam of light and zipped away. No need to bother looking for him, he’s long gone. Light years away by now.

They voted for Trump, but not because they actually wanted a bunch of asshole CEOs in power. The electorate wanted real transformative change; they’re looking for anyone who can offer even a hope of some bold transformative change. The only party offering real change right now is the Republicans. Democrats just want to offer a few piddly means-tested tax credits like they usually do, while doing absolutely nothing to actually rein in corporate wealth and power. Kamala’s flagship domestic policy was a $25k home tax credit that only a sliver of the populace would be eligible for; and it would only serve to bid up housing prices.

Like it or not, the Republicans did actually have answers for people. They aren’t good or noble answers, but they were answers. Democrats were too chickenshit to run on a platform of “CEOS are ruining your life, we need to come down like the hammer of God on the greedy oligarchs.” The Republicans in turn ran on a platform of, “the reason your life sucks is a bunch of DEI programs are putting unqualified people ahead of you. We’ll end that. Illegal immigrants are taking your job opportunities, and we’ll deport them all. House prices are too high, so we’ll deport 20 million immigrants and lower them!”

Those are abominable answers to the problems we face, but they actually had an answer, however evil and ultimately unproductive. Yes, obviously deporting millions of immigrants won’t actually help people, but it doesn’t matter. The Republicans actually had an answer to the question, “what transformative change will you do to improve the lives of Americans?”

Democrats had no answer. And for that, they lost.

People are hungry for dramatic change. They feel the system is rigged, and they are right. Democrats were too cowardly to take up that message and push for change against the corporate class, and that left Republicans as the only party offering any real change.

You don’t need to radically transform society to want change; the country already clearly wants change. The fundamental problem is the only ones offering change are the Republicans.

Possible interpretations:

1. They’ve run a distance of 1,000 miles while wearing a butt plug.
2. The 1000 miles is the distance the device has moved back and forth within their rectum.

Why not just start with disclosing that you’re human right off the bat?

Sure. I remember reading the concept somewhere, perhaps in an old r/asksciencefiction thread. I didn’t come up with it originally.

I don’t believe in ghosts or psychic phenomena, but I do love the concept in fiction that ghosts aren’t actual human souls. Rather, they’re a sort of psychic “burn in.” If a living person experiences strong emotions, such as a prolonged period of grieving, or the incredible emotional intensities that come with being murder victim, those emotions can become embedded within a place. Do you grieve for a deceased partner, mourning for years, remembering key moments over and over? A reflection of that grief becomes embedded within reality in the location you experienced those emotions. When you die or leave, someone else can come into that place and experience a recording, a reflection, or echo of the emotions and memories you experienced.

Ghosts are effectively traumatic memories burned in to the fabric of the world. They don’t actually experience anything; they’re not conscious beings. They’re not souls looking to complete their business and move on. They’re simply psychic echoes. They’re imprints left on reality from very intense and painful emotions, particularly those experienced repeatedly over a long period of time.

This also explains why ghosts have a half life. Ever wonder why in the US, all the ghosts seem to be old timey white people from the 1800s or similar? Considering the total number of Native Americans that must have lived in what is now the US down the millennia, the vast, vast majority of ghosts should be Native American. But aside from the classic example of a disturbed native burial ground, Native American ghosts don’t show up much in fiction. It’s usually old timey white people.

The reason for this, in the imprint theory, is that like any imprint, ghosts tend to fade with time. Just as most footprints will slowly be eroded, the knots in the psychic fabric that ghosts represent slowly work themselves out over time. The ghosts people do experience tend to be from the last century or two, as most ghosts older than that have decayed below the level of human perception.

The self-driving taxis and humanoid robots companies like Tesla are developing are just a thinly disguised way of getting around immigration law. We’re a very long way away from having autonomous humanoid robots that can clean your house for you. But one remotely piloted by someone in Bangladesh wearing a haptic suit? If the tech was cheap enough, that sort of thing would be profitable.

It’s effectively an extremely perverse and exploitive form of immigration. When we bring immigrants in, they typically take low-level jobs. But they also get opportunities to advance themselves further. Moreover, in the US at least, any children immigrants have on US soil automatically become US citizens. So yes, immigrants come in on the bottom of the social ladder, but they have an opportunity to climb.

Here though? This is a way of getting all the labor we want from immigrants but without offering them the usual deal in return. And even worse, they won’t even be owed minimum wage.

I was in Houston for Hurricane Harvey. We didn’t get flooded, but the whole city was paralyzed for two weeks. And that was just to get basic transportation functioning again. I was teaching undergraduate students at the time, and my class was just cancelled for two weeks in the fall term. We just missed two semesters of the fall term with no makeup.

My home didn’t get flooded, but many of my students and colleagues did experience flooding. We did however have a leak open up in the back wall of our townhome. We had a leak that allowed water in the back wall, which resulted in water damage in two rooms. I filed a claim with insurance, but they lowballed us, and after the hurricane, contractors only wanted to work on big projects, whole house gutting and repair. So I actually did the repairs myself. I figured I could either use the insurance payment to cover 1/3 of the repair cost, or I could use the insurance payment to buy the tools I needed to do it myself. I first built an access scaffolding behind the unit to fix the leak. Afterwards on the inside I tore out a bunch of drywall and repaired the interior damage.

Oh well, it put me down the path I’m on now. I eventually got really into woodworking, starting with the tools I had bought to do that repair. And further down the road, that put me on the path to pursuing a PhD in wood science. So what a tangled web we weave, I suppose…

A lever and a proper surface on which to stand.

Maybe. On a completely unrelated note, can you let me know the next time you’ll be in public, preferably not standing within several feet of anyone else and anything flammable?

To light things on fire with my mind.

https://timecube.online/

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Full self driving should only be implemented when the system is good enough to completely take over all driving functions. It should only be available in vehicles without steering wheels. The Tesla solution of having “self driving” but relying on the copout of requiring constant user attention and feedback is ridiculous. Only when a system is truly capable of self-driving 100% autonomously, at a level statistically far better than a human, should any kind of self-driving be allowed on the road. Systems like Tesla’s FSD officially require you to always be ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. They know their system isn’t ready for independent use yet, so they require that manual input. But of course this encourages disengaged driving; no one actually pays attention to the road like they should, able to intervene at a moment’s notice. Tesla’s FSD imitates true self-driving, but it pawns off the liability do drivers by requiring them to pay attention at all times. This should be illegal. Beyond merely lane-assistance technology, no self-driving tech should be allowed except in vehicles without steering wheels. If your AI can’t truly perform better than a human, it’s better for humans to be the only ones actively driving the vehicle.

This also solves the civil liability problem. Tesla’s current system has a dubious liability structure designed to pawn liability off to the driver. But if there isn’t even a steering wheel in the car, then the liability must fall entirely on the vehicle manufacturer. They are after all 100% responsible for the algorithm that controls the vehicle, and you should ultimately have legal liability for the algorithms you create. Is your company not confident enough in its self-driving tech to assume full legal liability for the actions of your vehicles? No? Then your tech isn’t good enough yet. There can be a process for car companies to subcontract out the payment of legal claims against the company. They can hire State Farm or whoever to handle insurance claims against them. But ultimately, legal liability will fall on the company.

This also avoids criminal liability. If you only allow full self-driving in vehicles without steering wheels, there is zero doubt about who is control of the car. There isn’t a driver anymore, only passengers. Even if you’re a person sitting in the seat that would normally be a driver’s seat, it doesn’t matter. You are just a passenger legally. You can be as tired, distracted, drunk, or high as you like, you’re not getting any criminal liability for driving the vehicle. There is such a clear bright line - there is literally no steering wheel - that it is absolutely undeniable that you have zero control over the vehicle.

This actually would work under the same theory of existing drunk-driving law. People can get ticketed for drunk driving for sleeping in their cars. Even if the cops never see you driving, you can get charged for drunk driving if they find you in a position where you could drunk drive. So if you have your keys on you while sleeping drunk in a parked car, you can get charged with DD. But not having a steering wheel at all would be the equivalent of not having the keys to a vehicle - you are literally incapable of operating it. And if you are not capable of operating it, you cannot be criminally liable for any crime relating to its operation.

I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

1. A set of securities fraud charges.

2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.

To me, it’s not even just about what it looks like. It’s what it represents. One cyber truck, if were unique, could be a legitimately cool work of art. But as a mass-market vehicle it’s just ridiculous.

Like, if there was only one cyber truck, and it was something a local gearhead had welded up in his garage, I would legitimately respect it as a cool and unique work of artistic expression. It would show that they have creativity and are willing to make a bold statement to the world.

But if you just buy one of thousands of cyber trucks that exist in the world? That no longer represents your original creative expression. That just represents having bad taste and having poor personal finance skills.

Building your own art car is cool. If Ford decides to start making them by the millions, then that would just be sad.

The cyber truck is the vehicle for the man who wears a fedora with a t-shirt.

I think those just need to move to have their own independent sites instead of basing their operations on social media. Ultimately what they’re doing is entirely legal, but it’s way too easy for some asshat billionaire to pull some strings to get them pulled from a platform.

Well, first, I’m not a guy. But two, if anyone ever makes a comment like that, I just say, "look…my work involves cutting, grinding, smashing, burning, and straining wood specimens until they break and buckle. If you really want to associate that with certain body parts, be my guest. But…it sounds quite painful.*

“What is he trying to hide‽” I dunno, man. Maybe he recognizes that there’s a bunch of unhinged weirdos who are hellbent on stalking “Satoshi,” and he doesn’t want to be harassed?

Forget being harassed. Honestly, being kidnapped is a serious concern. Whoever or whatever group Satoshi is, it’s estimated he, she, or they own something like a million bitcoins.

Kidnapping is normally a pretty poor choice of crime for a criminal gang to undertake. It had its heyday back in the early 20th century. But as the FBI really got going, and we got better at tracking down people across state lines and internationally, kidnapping became much more difficult to pull off. Kidnapping someone - physically abducting them - is the easy part. But actually sending their family a ransom letter and collecting the money in a way that can’t be traced back to you? That’s a whole different matter. Actually getting the ransom money and somehow getting it into a form you can spend, all without getting caught? That’s nearly impossible in this day and age.

But someone with a million Bitcoins? It’s entirely possible that everything needed to access those funds is entirely within that one person’s skull. Either the private keys themselves, or some way to access or generate them.

Someone with that amount of Bitcoins is actually at incredible risk for kidnapping by an organized crime outfit. We’re talking about $65 billion USD worth of assets that can be obtained by just kidnapping one person and torturing them until they give up their private keys. Then once you have them, the coins can be transferred to another account and washed through numerous transactions until they’re untraceable. And the poor bastard who gets kidnapped for this just never leaves their captors alive.

And even if they keep their keys in their home instead of in their head? Now they’re at risk of break-in, or being held hostage during a nighttime break-in.

Hell, even just being suspected of being Satoshi would be incredibly dangerous. That’s an even more horrifying scenario. Imagine an organized crime outfit thinks you’re Satoshi, they’re incorrect, and they abduct you and torture you, demanding you give them something you are simply incapable of providing…