Elon’s statements are the verbal equivalent of getting drunk and vomitting on a wall. Stuff comes up that you never expected to see, it creates a huge mess, and whatever sticks, sticks.

Side note: They do make a damn fine dish washer! (Not European)

Not a dad, but definitely team DeWalt.

Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats parrots, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, and a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus. What are these goddamn animals?”

Fear and Loathing in the Pet Store.

I attended both a Halloween and Christmas party where the hosts had invited someone selling sex toys. Much hilarity and shenanigans ensued. They were both great parties.

When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.

In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

Edit: spelling.

There was a Donner… but then there was a very unfortunate party.

That’s pretty much how my wife and I ended up together. I studied amphibians, she likes amphibians, Yada Yada Yada, married.

Looks like someone has a case of the Mondays.

I had a VHS copy of the Empire Strikes Back that my uncle recorded for me when it played on one of our 3 local TV stations. For the holidays I had a recording of a bunch of the old holiday cartoons that would play in a marathon every Christmas, and one of Ghostbusters (for some reason it used to play every Christmas in the evening, so it became a Christmas movie for me).

Aside from that I’d mostly just rent the same VHS tapes from our local hole in the wall video rental place every weekend (Neverending Story and Inhumanoids) from the ages of 4-6. Then I think we got a real video store and my movie watching experience improved a bit. To be fair, the hole in the wall rental shop was probably only about 10 feet long and 6 feet wide inside, and the shelves of movies lined the walls, so there wasn’t a lot to choose from.

We’ll never know…

I’ll assume that by normal, we’re referring to him not being wealthy. In that regard, I’d disagree. I think he’s a real narcissist, and even if he didn’t have all his wealth he’d still have similar issues, just on a much smaller scale. He wouldn’t have the large audience he currently enjoys, nor all the attention he gets without his money.

In other words, without his money we would just view him as another kook espousing whatever idea he happens to find interesting that day.

Lol. It’s literally what I gave the AI. My intentions were certainly not pure, but it was very very sensitive about what I typed in.

To be fair, I asked it to make it Coke brand flour. It came up with Coci-Cola all on its own.

Oh same note too! If you dare start doing something before you’ve gotten those bags ok’d, or if you plunk down a bag before it prompts you to do so it’s like you’re committing a felony.

That’s Coke brand flour. No responsible AI image generator would let you show spider-man sniff a pile of cocaine.

I would’ve but I had just spent an hour getting a cart full of groceries and I wasn’t about to go do that again somewhere else. Plus I couldn’t imagine, at the time, they’d be gone that long.

That thing could kill anything that ate it. Pretty sure one of those things would cause your blood to gellify.