Perlmutter was laid off from the Copyright Office after publishing a report on the contentions between artificial intelligence and fair use.

Oh, of course it’s ultimately about trying to do an end-run around Congress in order to enable the AI grift. Everything is always in service of one of the grifters providing Trump with a slush fund.

I’m so tired of all this.

That’s not the C&H I expected to see in this thread.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/cyanideandhappiness/images/9/90/The_Genie_of_the_Lamp_-_Gallery.png

A little random, but your comment reminded me of a poem I encountered in college. It’s by Liu Cheng, and in Burton Watson’s translation it’s called “Poem Without a Category.” https://ccl.northwestern.edu/curriculum/poetry/cp.cgi?C/Cheng/PoemWithoutACategory

It’s directed by Terry Gilliam, and it’s brilliant. It’s set in a bureaucratic totalitarian state, and follows a minor functionary who is slowly losing his mind. There are multiple overlapping plots, involving a rebel heating engineer, a man mistakenly abducted and tortured to death by the government after a computer glitch, the functionary’s politically ambitious mother, a quack plastic surgeon, a beautiful truck driver, terrorist attacks, and the functionary’s ever-growing escapist fantasy life. It’s one of my favorite films. Right up there with Delicatessen in terms of dystopian comedy sci-fi.

They may have meant to say “vulture capital,” which is a term sometimes used for that kind of private equity firm.

My high school did this. They hauled me and my friends in front of one of the deans because we’d been playing chess in the lunch room, and they said that if they let us play chess, they’d have to let the other students play dominos, and when they play dominos, they gamble, and when they gamble, fights break out, and there weren’t enough security guards to handle that. So no chess. We pointed out that we were the school chess team, but they were unmoved on the topic.

It was really dumb.

We talked a bit about the possibility of having a couple of our better players play mental chess, that is, no board or pieces to look at, and just yell moves back and forth across the lunch room while the rest of us loudly gambled on the outcome, but we never actually did it.

You left out the most important reason: getting people to come kiss Trump’s ass to ask for exemptions. Nothing is more important than getting Trump the sycophancy he has to settle for in lieu of respect.

Thanks, that does help.

That has nothing to do with the claims about bullet ballots though. You made it sound like there were a bunch of people all united behind a single, specific claim about a statistical anomaly, and as far as I know that’s simply not accurate.

So, when I search on this, I can only find reference to a single guy, Stephen Spoonamore, making this claim. You said “multiple prominent Computer Scientists and Statisticians”; do you have a link for that?

Pick a number. Any number.

Sticking only to ones I haven’t seen mentioned:

• Tandis : geometry puzzler
• Gateways : a 2d portal-style puzzler
• Elliot Quest : pixel adventure
• Phoenotopia Awakening : also a pixel adventure, had trouble with the final boss but the rest is great
• Wuppo : flash-animation-style comedy adventure
• Alba : sweet game about a girl who loves wildlife
• Salt and Sanctuary : 2d soulslike
• Legend of Grimrock : tile-based first person dungeon crawler (“dungeon master” spiritual successor)
• A Short Hike (really short but amazing exploration game)

Ones I have seen mentioned but can’t bear not to mention:

• TIS-100 : the finest of the Zachlikes; a programming puzzle game
• Crosscode : 2d adventure with incredibly fine-tuned combat and puzzles
• Outer Wilds : fantastic time-loop puzzle
• FTL : space adventure “one more run!” game
• Slay the Spire : deck-drafting “one more run!” game

I’m pretty excited about the upcoming “Free Stars: Children of Infinity.” I backed them on Kickstarter.

I liked Horace okay at first, but it definitely gets bastard hard in a hurry.

Alright, how about the fact that the TFR in the US has been below replacement since the 1970’s, then. (It got close to 2.1 during the 2010s and then dropped again, and is currently around 1.6-1.7.) Is that relevant enough for you? Antinatalism is just as toxic as pronatalism these days. I swear, neither side is willing to actually look at facts.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA

The US population in 1980 was around 226 million, and in 2020 it was around 330 million. That’s an increase of about 50%. By comparison, the GDP in 1980 was about $2.75 trillion; in 2020 it was over $20 trillion, an increase of more than 600%.

The problem isn’t that we’re spreading out the same amount of money over too many people. It’s that we’re making much, much more money, but concentrating it in the hands of a tiny number of people and letting everyone else scramble for scraps.

He actually does have one positive trait: he’s open to the idea of psychedelics for the treatment of mental health disorders. Past administrations have had way too much love for the Nixon-era “War on Drugs” DEA schedule, which treats magic mushrooms as more dangerous than fentanyl. It doesn’t make up for all the other damage he’s doing, and even this one thing he probably won’t handle in an appropriate way, since he’s also, y’know, incompetent. But it’s conceivable that this one thing could move in a good direction despite his leadership.

There will probably be some slant in that direction, but there’ll be a much bigger slant towards killing the elderly, the immunocompromised, those who can’t afford medical care and time off, etc. As usual.

It’s an episode of “The Climate Denier’s Playbook” entitled “Let’s Just Plant a Trillion Trees.”

Thanks! I debated whether to include it, because it’s definitely one of those “well my brain sure isn’t normal!” things, but now I’m glad I did.