The article says it could result in a fine that’s based on the value of the damage. You’d think having a famous artist’s work would increase the value of the building.

I know NYC is a major city and media hub but I’ve never seen a bunch of bozos so unable to handle a municipal election before. And in a municipality that routinely elects the most embarrassing mayors. The Onion even has an evergreen article about NYC mayors. https://theonion.com/de-blasio-well-well-well-not-so-easy-to-find-a-may-1847151201/

RIP US Democracy (aged 1965 or so to 1980 something). We hardly knew ye.

Imagine the piss pant stains if Trump supporters were forced to take the Metro or a street car to occupy a major city. Any civil war would have to have a regional hub with microwave pancakes and ionized water at their neighborhood (now closed) Bed Bath and Beyond for whatever moron troop movements anyone planned.

To be clear, I hope people who think little kids should be exposed to diphtheria to find out who is trans don’t rise up. But they won’t win a whole war even if they cause more human suffering than every “East India” company combined.

America was founded by tobacco companies and people so weird about religion, they were told to leave Europe even though mass communication wasn’t invented yet and they probably could have just been slightly less weird a kilometer away. Our justice system was probably always going to favor disgraced sex pests.

I got one at a CVS in Louisiana but had to have my doctor call in a prescription. Insurance covered it. There’s also apparently some weird supply issues. A colleague (who is over 65 and clearly eligible) had an appointment at a large hospital and they told her they were out of COVID vaccines but had plenty of flu shots. She was ultimately able to reschedule and get a Pfizer shot but they were still out of the Moderna one and whatever the non-mRNA shot is called.

It all sort of smacks of disorganization (possibly deliberate incompetence considering we have a loon with brain worms in the driver’s seat). But it seems like some people are having access issues and other people just waltz into a Walgreens/CVS and get their booster in minutes.

Well, the good news is that we all know centrists will side with capital. The last step before fascism is almost always cowardly centrists trying and failing to maintain their shreds of status in a world they can’t understand because they lack a binding moral framework.

That’s actually the bad news, I guess. But at least we know it’s coming.

I’d buy one if it came with every David Attenborough (or similar) nature documentary included. I don’t need 8k for games or movies or anything else but I’ll watch the shit out of whatever high budget nature documentaries are produced and put my nose against the screen to see the critter details.

Is anyone in A Clockwork Orange Amish?

They should do a “Victims of Communism” style statue for him except it’s victims of people who don’t think germs are real.

I’ve seen a lot of bands doing that at their merch table. I think for most bands, it’s just a keepsake like buying a T-shirt or sticker or whatever after a show. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who prefer cassettes (or at least the Walkman aesthetic) but for the most part, it’s just a souvenir.

I’ve never been into tapes but I collect vinyl. Part of the fun is all the extras tossed in. It’s like buying a boxed set or special edition DVD/Blu-Ray. Tapes don’t really have the same space for fun stuff but Taylor Swift probably has the budget to do something “extra” and make it a whole thing people put on Instagram.

I’m expecting December/January to be when Americans will really start to see widespread price rise and shortages. Every big company was trying to import/warehouse enough stock to get through the holiday shopping season without paying tariffs. But at some point, the price hikes are coming.

It’ll be noticeable before December/January for anything that can’t be stacked in a warehouse or frozen or whatever. But that’s not going to last forever. If nothing else, Kona, Hawaii is the only place in the US where coffee beans can be grown. Even well-off people will notice when coffee costs more.

The other way a partisan gerrymander can backfire is that there’s fewer truly safe seats. So a smaller shift can cause a wave election. Like, to squeeze every drop from a gerrymander, you don’t create 80% GOP, 20% Dem districts; you make several 55% GOP, 45% Dem districts. It doesn’t take as seismic of a shift to flip an aggressively Gerrymandered map.

I don’t eat carbon-based foods. Exotic silicon lifeforms, fresh from Titan’s methane seas.

I don’t think there’s many consumer use cases for things like LLMs but highly focused, specialized models seem useful. Like protein folding, identifying promising medication, or finding patterns in giant scientific datasets.

New Orleans might as well just send him the phone book.

“A.I.” can’t fund itself right now and it doesn’t seem to have gotten much better in the last year or so.

It’s definitely going to put sci-fi authors who write about A.G.I. out of work or at least make them add 1,000 years to their timeline.

Historically, the Senate has a tradition where the Senators from the state submit a “blue slip” with their opinions on it. If they don’t submit one, it can delay a hearing or kill the nomination. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_slip_(U.S._Senate)

Whether it matters changes all the time — see the history part of the Wikipedia article’s History section — but other Senators want theirs respected so sometimes it does. If nothing else, it can give a Senator who doesn’t want the nominee cover from bucking party leadership.

At this point, I don’t think Russia could win a conventional war with France, much less one they attack France first and it triggers Article 5. I might not have thought that before Ukraine but once you start relying on North Korea for bullets and personnel, you’re down bad.