I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Disney has pleasantly surprised me with how they're dealing with Star Wars. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

LK

Sometimes, they write love letters to the fans.

LK

HBO might not mean anything to Gen Z and later but for us Gen X and earlier, there was still a level of prestige associated with the brand.

It was stupid to throw that away.

LK

I called it out on another branch of this discussion but I'm talking about things like, someone posts a question that goes something like this:
"Am I The Asshole for declining a second date with the chick I met on Tinder after she told me she was trans?"

Topics like this are ban honeypots because even getting too close to a verboten position will get you banned by Reddit.

I have seen it. I have been threatened with a ban for expressing the opinion that 8 year old children shouldn't be given sex reassignment surgery.

Reddit is toxic.

LK

I chose that specific example precisely because it's banned on all of reddit. If you say that there is any difference between XX CIS women and XY Trans women, you'll be banned from Reddit.

Ridiculous, right?

LK

Or general relationship subreddits.

Someone will ask "Am I transphobic for not going on a second date after this chick I met on Tinder told me she was trans?"

It'll be a ban honeypot.

LK

Good faith disagreements can get you banned from a lot of them.

Someone who is prone to falling in line with group think will likely never encounter it but it's real.

LK

It's a stupid echo chamber full of stupid people who are chasing stupid agendas.

It's a place where they will permanently ban you for suggesting that there is any difference of any kind between XX CIS women and XY Trans women.

It's a place where you'll be mod bombed into oblivion for saying that you wouldn't want to date a current or former sex worker.

It's a place where honest discourse goes to die.

Seriously, fuck Reddit.

LK

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

It's worth running the numbers.

In 50,000 years, there could be a whole new crop of coal to repeat this whole cycle all over again.

LK

That's the thing about the eco wackos that really burns my ass.

Nuclear is the only viable option for cheap, clean power and they fight it tooth and nail. Solar and wind are great additions but nuclear would give us everything we need.

They don't want that. They're not pushing for thorium power, they're not pushing to update safety standards. They're fighting to shut it all down.

They're not concerned with saving the environment, they're neo-luddites.

Cheap, clean power would do more than anything else within our reach at the moment to improve the lives of everyone on this planet and they oppose it, have you ever wondered why?

LK

It might be a factor. However, the population is growing, and while the demographics are shifting a bit, they are still a lot of kids, reaching drinking age.

However there are milestones that us older folks had while growing up, that no longer seem as important to the younger generation.

Watching a PG13, R Movie, Getting a drivers license, drinking, smoking, Having Sex, Getting Married, Going to College, Getting an Apartment, getting a house... All these are in decline with the younger generation. Some because of increased difficulty with finance, due to increased cost of living rising higher than salaries, and also prevalence of online culture and access to direct media, so people are finding Cliques that are not necessarily tied to doing particular things, and accessing stuff they are more interested in.

They are plusses and minuses to this trend, but I wouldn't spend too much time complaining about it, younger folks will be doing their own thing that is different than the way older people did for generations.

Is there any chance of Disney Lucasfilm ever being run by adults again? They announce new movies several times a year, but none of them get made, which is good, because the ones that do get made are all garbage. Well, all but one.

I can't believe they haven't damaged the company so much they have to start selling properties off, and I'll be happy when they do.

Disney delenda est.

No, but normally as production increases a lot of the carbon offset is mostly better managed at scale.

For example, a Diesel train may burn 4 gallons of fuel per mile. however being that it carrying so much payload that they rate it 500 miles per gallon per ton.
While an Electric Car that says has 100 eMPG will not be as carbon low in energy expenditure if needed to pull so much weight.

That number seems like the cost to make the material, from start, not in sets of hundreds of thousands of drives.