quicklime

Climate “ambitions”, huh. The pressing need to avoid or mitigate the collapse of civilization is merely an “ambition” now…

It’s still (moderately) difficult to find a bunch of 6 year olds with guns. But the way things are going, I’m sure that will be remedied before long.

Based on having read this same SFGate article about five days ago, I made an online appointment for a booster shot at a Safeway store’s pharmacy, semi local to me in San Francisco. My previous booster was circa last November so it had been more than six months, and the recent news stories about a surge of covid detected in the city’s sewer outflows and also a general rising wave of cases locally seemed to give good reason to stay on the six month program rather than wait until it had been a year.

The appointment was easily made online, but the pharmacy telephoned me and told me their advice was to just wait closer to a year unless I was over 65 or immune compromised. Neither applies so I cancelled the shot.

Good for $25 off any elective procedure costing twenty thousand dollars or more!

Along the same lines, let’s not forget L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology some years after telling a sci-fi writers’ convention that starting an actual cult would be a great way to make far more money off science fiction than just by writing it.

Exactly. Even if he gets an appeal, even if he wins such an appeal, even if his sentence gets commuted or otherwise obstructed or diluted, we can truthfully refer to him forever and always as a convicted felon on 34 counts.

When reminding or teaching the younger community about George H.W. Bush, let us not forget to mention that when the US elected him, it elected the former CIA director to the presidency.

A supposedly democratic Republic elected its own chief of secret police to lead the executive branch of government. Somehow even at that time most Americans didn’t seem to be aware of that glaring fact, and far fewer have seemed to realize it ever since.

And then the country went on to elect that guy’s completely unqualified son to the same office less than a generation later. /facepalm

I mean… it’s not artificial intelligence no matter how many people continue the trend of inaccurately calling it that. It’s a large language model. It has the ability to write things that look disturbingly close, even sometimes indistinguishable, to actual human writing. There’s no good reason to mistake that for actual intelligence or rationality.