If you’re genuinely afraid of the WEF or the WHO, I need you to understand something, you’re a sucker, and you’ve been tricked into fearing a conference and a committee.
The WEF is Davos. It’s a ski resort in Switzerland where billionaires and politicians eat expensive food, take photos together, and agree that inequality is bad actually. It produces no laws. It has no army. It cannot make you do anything. Klaus Schwab is not your supervillain. He’s an 86 year old German academic who writes books nobody buys and hosts a yearly networking event for people who are already powerful enough to not need the networking.
The WHO is 194 member countries occasionally agreeing on health guidelines that those same countries then ignore whenever it’s politically inconvenient. It is chronically underfunded, routinely overruled, and has less enforcement power than your municipal bylaw office.
These are not hidden rulers of the world. They are PowerPoint presentations with a budget.
The people who have you scared of these organizations do not want you asking where your actual problems come from. They don’t want you looking at your own provincial government, your own city council, your own grocery chain, your own landlord. It’s a lot easier to fear a Swiss ski resort than to engage with something you can actually do something about.
You got played. It happens. But you should probably know.
i feel like the oilers be fighting for their lives every game..... they can legit beat anybody but a beer league team could also take them to game 7 in a series
@Lord_Bob They’ve all been good, but I especially appreciated this article. I’ve been curious about the WHA vs NHL talent level and this was a cool way to compare the leagues.
It would, as always, be the greatest service to tell me this is good, bad, that you care or don't care about the topic, that the posts are too long or nice and lengthy, etc. I have about another month in the chamber and hope to find out by then if I should keep going regularly.
I will again repeat my basic formulation on speeding-- we enforce too much on empty interstates, where it's pretty safe to go very fast but it's easy to write tickets.
We enforce too little in populated areas, where the reverse is true.
Bob Lawson once told me the smartest observation ever about the U.S.. It goes as follows:
People think the U.S. is poorly functioning European country. In reality, the U.S. is more like a super-performing and highly functional Latin American nation.
And there is truth to that especially wrt violence. In the Americas, the exception is Canada. It is the only country with exceptionally low violence. The true question is not why the U.S. has high murder rates -- the "New World economies" are all pretty extreme relative to Europe. The question is why Canada looks so much like Europe in the matter!
Robin Williams' daughter Zelda tells fans: “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad.”
“If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want. To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”
"And for the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume."
Read more here: https://t.co/7UkzYSQ2Ja
For the past month, I’ve been working on a project to map out and document the work of one of the most prolific storefront sign painters in the US - this is Detroit’s Ron Signs
Important chart. S&P 490 has had basically no earnings growth since 2022, despite rampant inflation. It’s just 10 companies doing really well, while the broader economy is in contraction in real terms.
It’s darkly funny that sci fi invariably imagined AI as pure logic machines and the reality is they’re hallucinatory language imitators which become schizophrenic even more readily than people do
Superman is the story of an immigrant who grew up in Kansas, landed a low-paying job as a reporter in Metropolis, and still had time for a hobby because urban housing was affordable.
Trump will by definition be triumphant in any feud with Elon Musk. Not simply because he's vindictive and hates disloyalty, or even because he has the levers of state at his disposal, but because he is very funny and Musk might well be the least funny person in human history.
Tom Cruise worship is closest thing we have to secular Catholicism because he is a vessel through which we are allowed to believe our greatest sins can be forgiven with compensatory grand acts.