you could also use a colon

Now, with the caveat that prescriptive grammar is kind of stupid, you’d need to remove the word ‘that’ to make the colon a “correct” choice.

Remember, anytime a New Yorker cartoon doesn’t land, just substitute the caption with “Christ, what an asshole.” You’re guaranteed a befuddled chuckle at minimum.

Like, she was cool with the slaughter of sand people, sorta.

I mean, that’s kinda enough… 😬

“I killed them all. They’re dead. Every single one of them. And not just the men… but the women… and the children too.” Followed immediately by “To be angry is to be human” and a few scenes later by “I truly… deeply love you… and before we die, I want you to know.”

If the meme fits, wear it, Ms Padme…

I get it. We skew older here, but somebody playing around on the fuzzy edges of spelling a gen-z meme is not illiteracy. To be clear, I am also a clueless old, but I thought I’d look it up before piling on.

I’m deep into my 40s, and I’m one of those. I can get up to 70 words per minute for short stretches, but it’s still a weird dance that combines muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.

I did learn just enough to know to hover my hands and keep my arms at a good posture, so I’ve never had any RSI from typing. That also may be partly because that I’m so inconsistent that I don’t get enough of the R for RSI, LOL.

It’s not exactly the same as an express line, but IIRC Starbucks already has a process where if you order brewed black coffee, the cashier dispenses it for you before taking the next customer, rather than turning it over to the baristas’ queue. There are so many things you can say about Starbucks, but failing to understand efficiency is rarely one of them.

In small but statistically and financially significant numbers, yes, absolutely.

The bigger paradigm shift will be moving corporate users to per-token pricing, and that’s the one that will really kill Anthropic and OpenAI (and maybe Oracle) if it doesn’t go how they need, but there are way more actual people spending money on AI than one might think… or hope.

I like listening to Ed Zitron stuff, though admittedly part of it is AI Doomer comfort food, but one of the drums he beats is that the spend is absolutely obscene, and they’re going to have to start dramatically dialing up the prices, and soon, to have any chance at all of converting to profitability.

From what I’ve seen, even people who like AI won’t pay for anywhere near as much as they’re using now while it’s free or flat rate.

“What’s worse than lies but not as bad as statistics?”

“DAMNED LIES, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Fair enough, LOL. Just love that it’s “oh I pay TONS of taxes, but asking me to pay more in taxes won’t help anything.”

“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,”

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”

WT-absolute-F? I think he got oxygen-deprived in space.

Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:

Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.

So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.

At this point, I think its most lasting cultural impact is everyone’s opinion on how little cultural impact it had.

That’s a fair take, but for me it just went past the point of willing suspension of disbelief, and I don’t find that meta-narrative compelling. It may well be a reason for me to re-evaluate it though, to decide if I think it’s poorly done versus something where what they wanted to do simply didn’t connect with me.

I recently finished Blue-Eyed Samurai, and Mizu’s increasingly powerful plot armor comes very close to ruining the whole show.

Okey-dey!

Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

part of a deal to resolve President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

Yup. The sitting president was suing an agency of his own executive branch, folks. A lawsuit he filed – checks notes – four months ago. They’re barely even trying at this point.

Not to mention state and local governments. One of the dirty little secrets of our economy is that undocumented workers have a significant direct and indirect tax burden, but other than schools (which are for literal children, lest we forget) they’re excluded from almost all benefits that require any sort of, well, documents.

So you’ve got a permanent underclass who are paying into the system but literally aren’t allowed to reap all the benefits. Now, on the one hand, I kind of get how that’s a devil’s bargain they were willing to make to get to the US from countries with more immediate issues, but to argue that they’re a drain on the country and need to be hunted down post-haste, and not treated as the human beings they are, that’s just evil on so many levels, but one of them is that it upends the economic deal America tacitly made with them by accepting their labor. They literally pay a huge tax to be in the country at all. Even the business owners used to understand that. I assume most of them still do, but none of them will pick this hill to die on.

This is definitely the right community, LOL. I am absolutely a dogs>cats person, but this junior-high school-paper article has me questioning 20 years of a catless house.