Invested.inc is repeating the highlights from a report by the Open Markets Institute. OMI has a policy agenda. They want more regulation and better protection for those of us most likely to suffer in an economic collapse, instead of financial shenanigans where billionaires offload their debts onto regular people so they don't loose in a collapse. The report is persuasive, but heavily sourced and rigorous. One of the strongest parts is where they point out that regulators are simultaneously reducing financial transparency, weakening bank capital requirements, and opening retirement accounts to opaque private credit while the risks of doing so continue to increase. So, yeah, the parasite class is engineering the finances so that we are the ones who suffer in the next collapse.

An actual email sent by my company. (not representative of their usual)

A few from my recipesage library. Mapo Tofu,
Garlic Eggplant Crispy Tofu, Tofu Broccoli Quinoa, Tofu Taco Filling. Hmm. I feel like I should have more good tofu recipes...

How far do you have to go these days to write satire that isn't going to be true tomorrow?

So now we're complaining about the enshittification of everything driven by the need to maximize profit in a capitalist system and blaming it on our grandparents? More divisive intergenerational warfare bullshit. If you want to find who to blame for this shit look at the capitalists demanding more and more profit from airlines, manufacturers, literally every part of the economy. It always comes down to class war.

I feel a lot more like I did when I got here than I do now.

Slugworth talked with all the children. You can see Slugworth behind each one whispering in their ear after they won a golden ticket. Tevee even asked his mother what secrets they could sell to Slugworth. They all had the opportunity to be honest, but only Charlie did. Even Grampa Joe wanted to sell the gobstopper to Slugworth, but Charlie refused. That's why he won in the end.

tempting. Does anybody here have a subscription to kagi? Is it worth it?

Even this article, despite repeating over and over how we have already crossed the "it's too late" thresholds, ends with a call to action, as if we can still do something about it.

And as long as we go with their mendacious flow, hundreds of millions, and then billions will die well before “Net Zero by 2050” or “our great grandkids’ future” arrive. Because we are out of time. And we need to get to work immediately. There are a million things to do.

What is there to do? Let's say we shut down fossil fuel infrastructure. What goes with it? Fertilizer production, farm equipment, transportation, refrigeration, all the requirements to sustain the lives we worry will be lost due to climate change. Let's replace it with renewables, then. The cost in energy, production, and resources to replace the current world-wide farming, transportation, and energy infrastructure with renewables is somewhere in the high trillions of dollars and who knows how many years (decades) of time to make it happen. Of course we should still try to do it. But it's not going to save us. The damage is already done. The patient is fatally poisoned. We could maybe stop the flow of poison, but they'll still die. The hard pill to swallow here is there is no solution. We've painted ourselves into a corner and we're going to die here. You can blame the oligarch class. They deserve it. But remember how hard it was to do even a partial shutdown during covid? The level of shutdown required to stop poisoning our planet is way more severe than that. It's not going to happen, not willingly. Not until there is literally no way to deny what's happening. And by then it will be far too late.

I love this. It's really practical for a city. Though I'm wondering about the sail idea now on more rural roads. Roads turn this way and that, and the wind shifts. You'd need someone sitting in the thing orienting the sail. I wonder if you made it a little larger with a largish sail and you had a driver on roller blades and a sailor sitting in it catching the wind how fast could you get it going? Depends on the wind, I guess, but a boat probably has more friction in the water and sailboats go pretty fast.

Ooh, maybe you could add an outrigger, a pole that slides left and right with a wheel on either side, to keep it from tipping.

"not professional", bah. Beat them at their own game. Tell them it's evident they have much to learn, so we will be spending the next three weeks on sex education.

I think the issue is most people don't understand what an LLM is doing. It's not thinking about your question and finding the right answer. It is just doing a bunch of math to calculate the most probable response based on all it's training plus or minus some minor random variation. If your question could be answered by a thorough Google search then an llm can probably give you a good answer. If it's about something you're not going to find on the internet then the LLM will just make up something that sounds convincing. And that's the problem. It may sound convincing but it's a con man.