Musk is more like Andrew Carnegie. Both the richest people of their times, and both spent a lot of money to do PR. Musk’s PR is to pretend he’s not an idiot, and Carnegie’s PR was to pretend he wasn’t pure evil.

Now knowing for sure that this is AI, as I can see the evidence myself, it makes me think about other ways that I could have known, even if AI didn’t leave telltale artifacts.

In my imagination, if the Soviets did design a vehicle in this range, it would be boxier and have fewer or different windows. Like, at the very least, the roof wouldn’t taper down towards the back.

For a vehicle of this type, you probably want more horizontal surfaces. The ease of construction and consistency of materials would probably be more important than any aerodynamic efficiency. Or aesthetics, if you can even use that word when talking about a cyber truck shape.

Other AI sorts of artifacts I noticed are a complete lack of door handles, and the fact that not only is the vehicle needlessly very dirty, but the room is needlessly quite clean. You’d think that they’d want to clean it up if it was being presented like this, and that if it was dirty, some of the dirt would get on the ground.

Every wealthy donor who doesn’t want the government packed full of fascists should be pushing their representatives for significant and meaningful campaign finance reform.

It’s too bad that they’d be giving up some of their influence, but at this point, everyone should be able to see that it’s becoming a matter of physical safety.

A character acting out of character may not technically be a plot hole, but for the consumer of the media, it is tantamount to the same thing. The character’s previous characterization is equivalent to “the existing rules of the story”.

Not to say that characters cannot change, but you can tell when a character suddenly does something out of character simply because the author decided that some event has to happen for the plot to work, and it makes the plot seem impossible.

I promised myself that I’d try my best not to argue with people on Lemmy over completely trivial things, but sometimes it can be a challenge.

Our timeline is even stupider than the Biff timeline.

“Entire Trump team hated Elon Musk”…

If you’ll recall, after Trump’s first term, it was revealed that the entire Trump team hated Donald Trump.

Basically, any marginally competent person will hate working with people like Trump or Musk who make drastic changes without any reason or even any idea of what they’re doing.

AOC told a story about how a pro Israel person offered her a huge campaign donation, which she declined. One of the reasons she could easily decline it was that she already had enough money. By that time, her seat wasn’t in that much danger.

I’m not saying that AOC would have taken the money if she had a smaller campaign fund. There’s no way to know that.

But you can be sure that if we did proper campaign finance reform, and stopped every instance where a single source of money can create undue influence, then a lot more politicians would be able to afford to be honest.

Our current system nearly guarantees that honest politicians will be forced out by corrupt politicians who can easily accept huge donations.

I don’t think Donald Trump is capable of speaking like that.

There have also been a few “this you?” sort of messages responding to people outraged at 8647 who had previously posted 8646.

The logical end to that sentence would be something like, “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me, and in fact, in retrospect, it seems like it was a mistake for President Trump to appoint me as United States Secretary of Health and Human Services in the first place.”

Of course, RFK Jr. didn’t say that, though. And people shouldn’t be taking advice that relies on logical thought from him, either.

This is how you get past the problem of Senate confirmation hearings when the person you want to appoint is so horrible that the process could expose things like how they’re less of a Nazi sympathizer and more of an actual Nazi.

Similarly, Trump’s team has repeatedly denied that Elon Musk was the head of DOGE in order to reduce the amount of congressional oversight that he receives.

If all of these Republicans, including members of congress like Rand Paul, are complaining, where are their actual teeth?

If they have even the tiniest bit of integrity left, they should be saying, “If he accepts this plane, which would be a huge crime, I will personally do everything in my power to ensure that he is impeached and removed from office.”

The problem is that he doesn’t have the authority to do this via executive order. So if he does create this illegal order, it will almost surely be struck down by the courts, just like the previous one was.

But in doing so, he can claim credit for trying, despite never doing anything.

Bad headline, WaPo. “Judges say” is pointless. There’s simply no other explanation. Somebody is saying, “I know where you live.”

I think that the pros are obvious. It should simply be legal, and other comments have given good reasons.

However, there are some cons that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.

It impairs you, so any activity where that is a problem, like driving, may need extra attention or public education.

For smokers, inhaling smoke is dangerous.

The library may need to review its policies if a person can borrow 100 books at once, though.

I agree 100% with everything you said. Just like you said, it was a good point and definitely worth a mention. My problem is that it was the main segment of his first show back. Just like I said, a waste of time when there were much more important things to talk about.

The comedian in question is Jon Stewart, though. Do you really think that Jon Stewart has to “both sides” everything so that he doesn’t alienate his conservative audience? I doubt that you’re saying that. I don’t think he has ever done that.

It doesn’t make sense to try to generalize how comedians act when we’re talking about how one specific comedian acts, and it’s already clear that he doesn’t act like the generalization presented.

I have no doubt that Jon Stewart simply did the segment because he thought it was funny, and he didn’t care about alienating people.

The reason I’m so sure is that he predictably alienated a lot of left leaning people with his “both sides are old” segment. I say “predictably” because there’s simply no way that somebody didn’t talk to him before air and say something like, “You know, this is going to irritate the people who like you the most.”

Even if they’re not a right-winger and don’t claim to be a centrist, "both-sides"ing things is a waste of time, at best.

Like, when Jon Stewart came back to the Daily Show. I think it was his first show back, but it might have been his second… And his main talking point was about how both Biden and Trump were old. I know he’s just a comedian on a comedy show, but it still felt like a betrayal. At the very best, it was a waste of a chance to say something that could have actually made a difference.