Mr PoopyButthole

OK but why is my state mandated minimum insurance nearly $90 a month for a Toyota Prius that I only drive like 30 miles per week?

My liability only plan was $55 in 2018.

I’m over 30 years old with no tickets or accidents on my record.

Maybe the whole data farming thing is being used as an excuse also, but this is bullshit all up and down.

I keep thinking how great it would be if the federal government made a central server system to access digital content for free via taxes.

All public domain and publicly funded research and content, all in one place. Could also host owned content for people/entities and pay out royalties automatically based on consumption.

There are ways to make this fairly affordable to everyone via taxes, but maybe the big opportunity is it could also allow companies to train AI on all the data for a fat, but fair subscription. The value of that could easily pay for enough to shrink any tax costs for the public.

I don’t think he was trying to make literal statements with things like that. Yes, he used sociopolitical commentary as his medium, but he was still a comedian.

He’s not trying to convince his audience that everybody is stupid, he’s speaking to a feeling most of us have had when looking at what others are doing. Everyone sometimes feels like like everybody around them must be stupid, just like we all sometimes feel like we’re the only one missing something.

He’s beloved because most really talented comedians can derive humor from relatable or absurd situations and stories, but Carlin could make a rhythm linking broad abstract concepts of human experience to really specific examples.

He’s not a god, he was just a really talented comedian that had a unique style and medium.

As others have said, this could be symptomatic of something like ADHD.

I didn’t get diagnosed until 18 and it changed the game. I was very hesitant to start stimulants because of misinformation and stigma, but my doctor corrected a lot of that and it’s changed my life.

Doctor Russell Barkley has been at the forefront of ADHD research for decades and has a YouTube channel that’s packed with useful information. If what you see resonates with you, I’d talk to your doctor about it.

I want to combat all the people saying “um, actually things are getting better”

What they mean to say is “The largely meaningless or deliberately misleading metrics the government uses to make its own report card say things are going great!”

Everybody keeps talking about how the “economy” is so strong. That just means the stock market is doing well and owners of capital are happy.

Meanwhile, the US has the highest rate of homelessness in its recorded history. Worth noting that the way numbers are reported for things like homelessness, unemployment, and the like are very intentionally designed to under-report.

Local, state, and federal government all have a long history of changing the method of reporting/calculating those metrics during a term in office so they can say “unemployment dropped 30% under my watch!” When all they really did was not count 30% of the people previously counted.

Yes, wages are finally rising, and it has nothing to do with the government. It’s entirely the work of unions and organization of labor to raise wages, and it’s still got a long way to go.

The best thing that anyone can do is vote for better representation at every opportunity.

The best thing that not everyone can do is talk to a doctor if you have signs of depression or other mental illness. Yes, it’s possible to have those things brought on by circumstance, and no, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do anything about it.

If you can’t afford doctor’s visits like that, look up non-profit health care organizations. You may be lucky enough to have real, free Healthcare options available through places like Good Samaritan.

And don’t forget to let yourself acknowledge the REAL progress of the world. We’re seeing rapid development and insight on treatments for cancers, dementia, new vaccines, renewable tech, and computational efficiency.

There are many broken systems to overcome, but even still there are incredible humans building the foundations for an incredible future if we keep working at it. Maybe we can help make sure Gen Alpha gets a fair shot.

I wish I remembered the details, but I read a couple years ago about new batteries using the same sort of principal.

It was being studied as a way to handle a specific part of radioactive byproduct from nuclear power.

You sandwich the tiny radioactive bit in materials to generate a charge, and the whole thing is encased in conductive man-made diamond.

A battery the size of a half dollar coin could generate roughly a watt of power for, ostensibly, up to hundreds of years.

The big seller beyond its lifespan is that the diamond is dense enough to shield the tiny amount of radiation inside.

Incredible potential that probably wont be realized in consumer goods for decades. Just think about never having to change the battery in a remote ever again. Or even a lot of wireless smart home sensors and devices.

A shocking amount of things take very little power. Air tags that never die. E-book readers. You could make super dim puck LEDs that are always on and can go anywhere for illuminating pathways.

You could never scale it much in size/output because the diamond encasing would become disproportionately heavy and expensive, but for anything 1.5 Watts and less, and possibly up to 3 Watts or so, could be totally feasible.

The sooner you can tell your kids God’s not real, the better. Just make sure you tell them it’s not their job to explain that to their peers.

Unless you meant Santa. In which case the same applies.

What’s funny is that this could only help if just one or two people use it in a given meeting. But if 4/6 people were to use it, then most of the meeting’s purpose is gone, and the notes are about nothing.

I feel like these LLM transcription summaries are better for quick reviewing of info.

The real dream is that when a boss has a long shpeil to dump on everyone, they could just ramble on to a conference room of bots and then it turns their whole “talk” into the paragraph email it should have been.

Nowadays, everybody is trying to talk, like they have something to say. But nothing comes out when they move their lips, just a bunch of gibberish, like they forgot about Dre.

“Hot Rod”, “Accepted”, or “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”

I 100% recommend TWIT, best tech podcast I listen to.

I usually listed at 1.2x speed with gap skipping on, because they can talk a bit slow.

Really great for weekly overviews of tech news, and excellent guests.

This kind of thing (and e-waste in general) is why I think we need radical laws about unsupported hardware in general.

If an electronic device (phone, laptop, etc) stops receiving software support, the most recently available firmware should be made freely available under public domain.

Apple is obviously the worst offender, but it’s just horrible when you have really great hardware that’s 100% worthless just because the software is unsupported and proprietary.

The number of iPads, smart home products, and other devices that become e-waste every year is unsustainable. If companies were forced to release the code for free when they stopped supporting devices, maybe they would support them longer. Or at least bother innovating for a change.