Schadrach

Yeah, but it’s mixed with other stuff which impacts the boiling point.

in the hands of untrained people with no background checks

In the context and language of the time, “well regulated” essentially meant “properly trained in their use” so there’s a constitutional argument to be made for mandatory firearms training as a prerequisite gun ownership. That’s…not going to reduce shootings in the ways you might expect, since a large portion of shootings are not done with legally owned guns to begin with, and there’s no good reason organized crime (think gang and/or narcotics related, connected is why a few dozen counties account for something like 4 in 10 homicides) would use guns legally registered to themselves.

Would probably reduce the suicide rate though - anything that breaks the immediacy between wanting to do it and trying to do it tends to.

An important step up on the whole issue would be making gun owners legally liable for any crimes committed with a firearm they own, even if it’s stolen unless the theft was reported beforehand and there is clear evidence that it was properly secured at the time of theft. You steal your father’s rifle and go shoot up your school and he’s on the hook for the murders too. Would make a bunch of folks much more concerned about properly securing their arms, which would further reduce the suicide rate if nothing else and put a dent in the “lone nutter shoots up their school” types as well.

To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.

Because it’s a cult. You believe whatever nonsense the leader tells you to in order to be a member, and you want to stay a member because it fills some psychological need within you.

So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.

It’s a shiny new tool that is really powerful and flexible and everyone is trying to cram everywhere. Eventually, most of those attempts will collapse in failure, probably causing a recession and afterward the useful use cases will become part of how we all do things. AI is now where the internet was in the late 80s - just beyond the point where it’s not just some academics fiddling with it in research labs, but not in any way a mature technology.

Most gaming PCs from the 2020s can run a model locally though it might need to be a pruned one, so maybe a little farther along.

to prove the fucking obvious(that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism)

Eh, there were a few studies that showed a link including one of the largest ones. Now I get to move this from the “very unlikely but possible” column to the “almost certainly false” column.

There’s a pretty wide spectrum with autism, ranging from “a few quirks” to “nonverbal and more or less totally incapable of taking care of themselves, ever”.

So his ‘genius’ anyways eluded me

His genius is entirely about being very good at picking the right companies to invest in, and having an ego big enough to pretend that he’s behind their creations himself. Except maybe the cybertruck, that one feels very Elon.

Wouldn’t make a difference. We’ve got him for a bare minimum of at least another year and six days. Otherwise it would count as a term for Vance. They’ll Weekend at Bernie’s his bloated corpse for a year if they have to for that.

There was a slice of time even farther back where you’d eat Taco Bell because you could get an absolute fuckton of food for very little money, even compared to other fast food.

Isn’t she the one who wanted to be cast as Princess Zelda that a surprising number of terminally online folks were super angry about because trans?

Dragon Breaks, a dragon break is what happens when time becomes non linear the fun thing is that it can be both retroactive and postactive. The ending of Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall is sometimes theorized to have caused a dragon break so massive that it basically rewrote the setting with its shockwave. This is admittedly just an in universe way of explaining retcons.

Notably these are called Dragon Breaks because the god of time Akatosh is represented as a dragon and a Dragon Break is essentially time and causality just sort of having a stroke for a bit. Multiple versions of events that could have happened did, regardless of being mutually exclusive and some combination of their outcomes is what sticks when things are over and normality resumes.

I kind of suspect TESV: Skyrim will get referred to as a dragon break later in the timeline, with things like exactly who won the civil war being one of those things where there are clear memories and clear records of both sides winning, where two different people were the Jarl of each hold, etc. How that lands afterward when things settle I don’t know. Hopefully in the least helpful possible way for the Thalmor.

Ooh, good to know. Might have to actually try it out sometime. It’s been years since I played Morrowind.

There’s even OpenMW if you want some modern quality of life features.

It’s been years since I played. Will OpenMW work with original MW mods, and if not what does it’s modding scene look like?

it just lets you doom the world if you really want to.

…and it still leaves a back route to complete the main quest. You just have to murder the living god who is a mantling of Mephala to start the alternate route.

the amount of lore to explore is HUGE

…and then you come up for air after reading the 36 Sermons of Vivec, realizing that very basic steganographic techniques were used to conceal at least a couple of hidden messages withing them and the start branching out from there into trying to understand the concepts of CHIM and the Towers and Amaranth and so on trying to wrap your head around the metaphysics of the setting.

We have healthcare, the best healthcare actually

We actually do. We have some of the best healthcare in the world if you can afford it, and healthcare stats that make it absolutely clear just how few people that is.

Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)

There’s an Asian AI lab that’s demoed an early version of an AI-driven humanoid robot domestic servant. There are suggestions in might hit market within a few years and cost about as much as a decent used car. Figure those estimates are always too optimistic and something like 2035 and $15k is a possibly realistic estimate assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong.

No it generally makes sense to teach kids to not cite Wikipedia. Though it is consistently checked and updated you can look at the wiki link and drama for the Israeli genocide just to see a perfect example of why it shouldn’t be cited.

Wikipedia is generally terrible for anything that was politically controversial since Wikipedia has been a thing. A lot of why is very intentionally buried in layers of bureaucracy and wikilawyering to make it look like totally reasonable, neutral point of view decision making. One of the big routes to viewpoint control on Wikipedia is arguments about notoriety and what is or is not a “reliable source” and what sources are sufficient to discuss a topic.

If we’re talking about Scott Alexander’s writings, I feel like Sort By Controversial reflects reality far too well. Fucking prescient.

Yeah. Though I liked Ra more than There Is No Antimemetics Division. Especially the way he did a certain thing involving right versus left aligned text early on that if you were paying attention should strongly trigger a “wait, how did that happen?” response in a way that hints at very important things.