Colonel_Panic_

I mean true. At least Germany and Romans didn't have JarJar.

If it helps, read the first one and if you don't like it, you don't have to finish it or the series. It stands alone decently well. I know that's obvious, but I often don't do things because I feel like starting something mean I have to finish it. Books, games, movies, etc

I reread 1984, Animal Farm and Farenheight 451 recently, for no particular reason, but they are more accurate and depressing than ever about current events.

Highly recommended. But be prepared to be angry or depressed.

I completed the Wheel of Time last year and liked the Sanderson style of the latter books and am now on book 3 of Stormlight Archive and love it so far. It took me a good half the first book to "get it" or "get into it" rather, but now I see the vision and am enjoying it all. Planning on the other Cosmere series and books after.

Sanderson is definitely one of the better sci-fi/fantasy writers I've read.

Learning about the history and timeline of things sped my deconstruction considerably. Namely the Council of Nicea (sp?) where a group of men decided what to add or remove or change. The King James stuff. And I forget the names, but there were other places where they have found copies of the original or older manuscripts and it paints an interesting story that is NOT what is presented in present day as "the unchanging truth that has always been", but it paints more of a "men made all this up or there was some original story that maybe did happen and it has been changed a million times through the ages like a game of telephone to the point that not much remains of the truth." Sorta story.

Also, an epistle is the wife of an apostle. 🤣

Driving directions to your mom's house. 🥁

I'm on book 3 of the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. It's fantasy, it's weird in a lot of ways, but it's well written for the most part and enjoyable to read. It feels like reading an unfolding story of people in a parallel universe where things are half the same and half completely alien and different, but to them, it's commonplace, and I like that.

Exactly. Everyone likes to blame AI right now, but the actual reality is that everything has been getting more automated, centralized, efficient, etc. What used to be an entire office of people using typewriters and paper and pens and file cabinets is now a single SQL database with some code doing analysis and reports. What used to be an entire team of programmers and analysts can now be a handful of people using AI and pre built templates or software. AI is just the next evolution of an already existing story of evolving industries. Similarly 1 farmer in an ACed tractor can now sow and reap entire fields of food that used to be hundreds of people for days in the hot sun.

We don't need to be afraid of the technology, but we also don't want to move so fast that we lay off thousands of people all at once and they have no other job to go to.

We COULD, in theory demand that every worker that gets replaced by AI and laid off or fired in any way gets a retirement or UBI or something. Some small cut of their former paycheck, but we all know what is about to happen, the few executives at the top are going to fire more and more people and automate more and more things and collect all of the profits and wealth for themselves and leave the rest of us to starve. But that's what the Republicans want, it's the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" party, which in practice just means screw you, I got lucky and got mine.

The only good thing about AI is that, in theory, anyone could train up their own ML system and profit off what it does. That does give the command person the potential to enter industries they didn't before. Similar to the movable type printing press suddenly opening the way for more people to publish a book. Or the Internet opening the way for me to talk to you where we couldn't have like this 40 years ago.

All of that to say, in a long way, we create more and better technology and tools as a species, it's what we do. We need to embrace that, but also be mindful of what we are creating and for what purposes. Splitting the atom can provide power to entire cities or destroy them. So too could AI provide something good for mankind, but could also destroy.

Punt Gun vs 23 kidnappers 4K 200,000FPS slomo.

Bring a bigger group.

We had the Boston Tea Party and they threw all the tea into the harbor.

I think we should name this one the Gulf of Mexico MAGA Party and act accordingly.

Whoa now. That's dangerously close to sounding reasonable. We don't do that here.

Be careful though, emergency dissolution of the Senate is exactly how Palpatine gained power. There has to be a careful plan and new system ready to go and not just fall to the one person it shouldn't.

I know it's fiction, but just saying. Dissolving it is one thing, but having a coherent plan is another.