Wow, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised given what I already knew about the history and present-day reality of humanity’s interactions with animals, but I’m still surprised.

It’s notable that on the island your links describe, the entire penguin “industry” and several shipwrecks’ worth of dead sailors were the product of one moderately-successful entrepreneur’s ambitions, that he received widespread condemnation at the time, and that this condemnation was not enough to stop him.

Is that true? It’s in the middle of an unrelated section of the article and has no citation.

Medieval

Potatoes

My suspension of disbelief is ruined completely.

That and the sign is probably not real too.

Isn’t this a very reasonable rule? I really would prefer that you did not wash your balls in the Baja Blast.

It’s fairly straightforward to give a child no opportunity to lie about the things important to the parents, if the parents put in the effort. They can watch the kid come home right after school and sit in the living room doing homework all evening, and the school will tell them his grades and whether or not he’s behaving well.

Reminds me of “Ninja parade slips through town unnoticed” from the Onion.

Depends on what you mean by “strict”. I think the meme is about the parents who get angry over little things but don’t actually pay attention to their kids much - the ones who just assume that their kids would not dare to misbehave. However when I was in high school, I also saw plenty of kids (often immigrants) who had successfully been taught to work pretty much non-stop. I think their parents watched them (or at least their grades) closely enough that they couldn’t have gotten away with anything. It seemed to work well - they got straight A’s, never got in trouble, and went to prestigious universities. I can’t think of a single one I knew who burned out or rebelled (while in high school - I don’t know what happened to them afterwards). However, the ones I got to meet were already filtered, with the low- and medium-achievers not admitted to that school.

The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other?

But in fact both The Democrats and the Republicans raise money.

Yes, and so what? $5.5 billion was spent on the 2024 presidential election. That’s very little. There are individuals capable of spending more than that. So if spending more could actually affect the outcome in a significant way, why wasn’t much more spent? Surely the difference between Harris and Trump is worth more than just $5.5 billion. My conclusion is that while some amount of money is necessary to run a campaign, even the relatively small amount being spent now is so far past the point of diminishing returns that spending more isn’t worth it even to billionaires who could easily do so and care a lot about the outcome.

That advertisement had no effect on me whatsoever.

I’m not expecting prominent muscles. I just don’t want my stomach protruding like an inflated balloon even when the rest of me is bony.

I think posture does have something to do with it, because when I stand up straight and tense my stomach muscles, I look a lot better. I suspect that the problem isn’t so much that I have excess fat on my stomach (although I do have some) but rather that my stomach muscles aren’t preventing my stomach from bulging out unless I’m deliberately focusing on keeping them tense. I think better posture can be made subconscious (or else why have adults always told children to stand up straight) but I don’t think there’s a way to keep the muscles tense subconsciously. Or is there?

Speaking of posture, my new office chair has a significant forward curve at my lower back which I find uncomfortable. (I used to sit in an old-timey banker’s chair with a back that sloped smoothly backwards.) Is that because my posture is bad? Am I supposed to be sitting in a way that conforms to that curve? I know some people who strap cushions to their car seats in order to add that curve. I find those cushions really uncomfortable too, but are those people actually on to something or are their backs just different from mine?

I’m skinny everywhere except on my stomach. My body thinks that when I diet to lose weight it’s because I want to look like Skeletor, so the first place I lose fat from is my face and it becomes gaunt and looks unhealthy.

Nah if I’m going to shill for any Manhattan grocery store, it will be Fairway. It’s also really expensive but it feels like being in the sort of store you’d go to if you were rich, not like being ripped off. Their cheese counter has prices per 1/4 pound for some of the cheeses but then if you get some $15 per 1/4 pound cheese it will taste so good that you’ll think it was worth it. I haven’t been there in years but I still long for that cheese.

I don’t think that’s actually an unusual conversation for people who live in Manhattan to have. The comments about relative prices are accurate in my experience - I live on the same block as a Gristides and I still never shop there because of how expensive it is, even compared to Whole Foods. I get most of my groceries in Brooklyn on the weekends.

I also know a woman with a whole stack of different credit cards, so she always has the one that gives her the most rewards for whatever specific thing she’s buying. I’m sure she has one for grocery shopping.

My mother loved Dr. Mario. She would sometimes encourage me to skip school (“Are you sure you feel alright? You look like you might be sick. Maybe you should stay home just in case.”) and we would play it until my ten-year-old self got bored first. However, she had zero interest in even trying any other games.

I’m not sure what’s novel here. No one thought that modern AI could solve arbitrarily complex logic problems, or even that modern AI was particularly good at formal reasoning. I would call myself an AI optimist but I would have been surprised if the article found any result other than the one it did. (Where exactly the models fail is interesting, but the fact that they do at all isn’t.) Furthermore, the distinction between reasoning and memorizing patterns in the title of this post is artificial - reasoning itself involves a great deal of pattern recognition.

Serious answer:

That’s cool. What makes it special?

Sometimes people talk about how expensive something they own is simply because they’re proud that they could afford it and even when they’re being tone-deaf, there’s no benefit to getting offended when you could just move the conversation along instead. (Although you might have to listen to them talk about watches.) If they were trying to brag, now they’re stuck trying to explain why the watch is actually worth what they paid and you’re the one judging them.

Cars (and watches) aren’t so expensive that a middle-class person can’t plausibly already own the one he would buy even if money was unlimited. You can act like that’s true about you. My status-conscious former mother in law was bothered by the fact that I owned an old car, but when she would bring it up I would just say “I really like the 2008 model.” She couldn’t argue with that.

Your “facial data” isn’t private information. You give it away every time you go outside.