That’s the issue - so did AI. Real people use them less often because real people often don’t read a lot of books. AI might not really understand the words it’s spewing out, but it’s at least good at formatting them as it’s been shown.

Again, I didn’t change it to “later” I changed it to “if the cliff drivers win the next vote, it’ll be a short drive.” Do you really think that’s inaccurate? Look at how Trump drove the country into the ground in his first 4 years, and how easy it was to just keep doing it even after we had 4 years of democratic leadership that was meant to get things back on track. I don’t call that “ice cream,” I call that “sitting by the cliff waiting for the cliff drivers to be in power again.” We need leadership that will drive away from the cliff even if it upsets the people and politicians that want to drive off it.

No, I changed it to “one side killing us, the other not, but still leaving it on the table” Which is a huge difference, but still a troubling scenario. Not driving off a cliff is orders of magnitude better than driving off a cliff, but still significantly worse than ice cream.

If you think literally saying “they’re definitely different, but the difference is smaller than ideal” means “they’re the same” then things will never be fixed.

You’re right - it’s more like one group voting to drive off a cliff and the other voting to just drive really close to the cliff in case we decide to go off on some other vote, but so long as the cliff doesn’t win now, we can focus on convincing people ice cream is the better option. We don’t, and instead wait 4 more years to complain about the lack of ice cream, but that’s a separate problem.

Yeah, pretty much. You take someone who has what they see as a perfect life, but one without sex or with unfulfilling sex, and you introduce some reason for them to have sex with someone who’s good at it. Maybe they’re being blackmailed or persuaded - anything that makes them feel like they need to have sex in order to return to their previously idyllic life. Then, as they have more sex, they find that they enjoy it, and slowly start to prefer sexual side of their double-life to the one they used to think was idyllic. Time passes, and they end up fully engulfed in a life of wanton sex, abandoning the life they were trying to save in the first place.

I’m not super familiar with patents themselves, but I used to work in genetics back when human genes were able to be patented, and Myriad Genetics used their patent of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to lock genetic testing for these common factors in breast cancer predisposition behind a massive paywall. Even after gene patents were no longer allowed, they refused to share their previous test results with researchers trying to develop a more comprehensive, accurate, and cost-effective test, slowing down medical research.

Research eventually progressed without Myriad Genetics’ help, and within a few years after the genes stopped being patented, genetic testing for the BRCA genes and many more was down to an affordable price, even for people without insurance coverage. We now learn more and more about these genes quicker than ever, and can offer tests that cover many genes at once for a low price and with high accuracy, due to the sharing of test results between labs that never would have happened while genes were patented.

This may be an outlier in patent usage - though I doubt it - but it still shows that big companies can use patent laws more to bully fair competition than to offer a better product. Patents are a good idea for helping small businesses and individuals protect their right to make a new product without a big company swooping in, but there are still massive issues with the process that need to be fixed to keep those same big companies from using the process in reverse to keep small businesses from growing into the competition necessary for a healthy economy.

My sister has a lot of anxiety about whether or not she’s acting like our mom, who was a real piece of shit. I always tell her that the fact that she’s even reflecting on it shows that she’s not. The defining feature of people who lack empathy is that they don’t self reflect. They lack the ability to understand others because they don’t even understand themselves.

The pledges mean nothing; Trump uses words as nothing more than a way to get people to do what he wants. To him, speaking truthfully is as foreign and unnecessary as speaking backwards.

People think it because those in power want us to think it, and tailor the media coverage accordingly.

They didn’t forget, they enacted a decades-long propaganda campaign to ensure we’ll be too preoccupied with fighting each other to band together.