I would instead say if you don’t vote for Kamala you have your head up your ass. Some people are too stupid to actually “hate” anything, they just don’t know suicide from shinola. Sometimes you just want a good satisfying battle, so you look around for some evil to smite. But usually a good horse whippin’ doesn’t actually fix anybody.

Proctologists need not reply.

Does it have to be a giant tree tho? There are floating machines cleaning plastics out of the ocean right now. One of them I’m pretty sure was conceived by a high school student for a science project, and it worked so well somebody built it. Good shower thought tho.

Since fossil fuel contains animal remains, wouldn’t veganism be inherently against all petro products, including plastics?

So do “based on” and “based off” now. I can’t figure where “based off” came from or why we need it. A base has always been something you put things on. Things sit ON a base. They’re based ON it. Don’t get me started. Ok, too late… sorry.

Learning slang, in which words aren’t meant literally, is pure memorization and no more difficult in one language than another.

The button pressed a spring-loaded thing that struck a piece of metal, almost like a wind chime, emitting an ultrasonic note. I discovered by accident that I could make my parents’ stereo change channels by clinking coins together.

Those remotes used little spring-loaded mechanical chimes that emitted ultrasonic notes. As a kid I discovered my parents’ big Magnavox console stereo would change channels if I clinked a handful of coins.

I think a lot of old school products worked better than modern equivalents. Take toasters - when I was a kid our toaster consistently made toast with the same degree of doneness. I’ve had modern ones that said “microprocessor controlled” on them that couldn’t make consecutive pieces the same. Also flashlights. Simple metal flashlights just worked. My new sophisticated one cycles through multiple levels of brightness and then strobing (so I can what, have my own rave?) but sudden motions make it spontaneously turn off. I mean how hard is an ON/OFF switch?

And what’s the deal with airline food? I’m thinkin’ hey!

Wow, yeah if only we had some alternative to Trump.

LOL I wonder how far back this goes. When I was young and immortal I ate at McDonalds a lot because it was handy, and the Quarter Pounder (aka Royale) with Cheese was my favorite thing there. After decades of avoiding it I did venture into one a couple years ago. Was a yuge McLetdown.

The AI bubble might be the 2020s’ dotcom bubble.

I don’t like it dripping with grease either, I like it dripping with honey and just the right amount of butter!

So they’re more worried about misinformation about the results than misinformation that influences the actual voting. Well alrighty.

Unrelated, I can’t help noticing how much Altman reminds me of Luke Dunphy from Modern Family.

Thanks for putting so much time and thought into the discussion. All the problems you talk about exist for every search engine in actual use today. For example, publishing a site on a brand new domain has the exact problem you’re describing with spinning up a new Forte instance. There can be a 24-hr lag before DNS can reliably find the site. Perfect search is an aspirational goal. The realistic goal is to satisfy most needs. No matter how many words you throw at it, I don’t think federated search is an outlandish idea at all.

we hrd u lik fredum so we freed u frm votg

Thanks! Noting this for if I’m ever in London again!

A few years ago I was in a local place where the food and service were both entertainingly bad. For decades it had been a wonderful little Greek restaurant, until the couple who ran it moved to Greece for a well-deserved retirement and their son took it over. The son remodeled and reopened it as a combination Greek/sushi restaurant and sports bar, hanging five or six large screens from the ceiling. In a place slightly larger than my living room.

I was eager to try the sushi. “There’s no sushi tonight. Dennis isn’t here.” Oh, alright, when is Dennis here? “We don’t know. Maybe Wednesday. He never says.” Well alrighty then. Dennis is livin’ the dream I guess. So I ordered spanakopita, another favorite. What I received was a brown chunk resembling a giant Totino’s pizza roll, on an otherwise bare plate, where it dryly slid around all by itself. It looked and tasted like a Costco product they took out of a package and over-microwaved. The driest, crispest spanakopita I’ve ever had.

I took a chance and ordered the baklava. It tasted okay but instead of being flaky it was actually soggy - not as in dripping with butter and honey, I mean watery. The only watery baklava I’ve ever had, and also the only serving of baklava in my life that I did not finish.

A guy dining at the next table asked the waitress for the check, but said he would like a cup of coffee first. I was directly facing the clock and happened to notice it was exactly 7pm. At 7:10 she returned with their check and said, “We’re out of coffee.” Wat? They’re open for another 3 hours and they’re out of coffee LOL? And it took a full 10 minutes to return with this info. It’s a tiny place, I could see the coffee machine like 12 ft away. And there are like six customers. Seemed like a dismally bad restaurant in a sitcom, reminding me somewhat of the diner in The Dark Backward.

There were a couple other things but that’s all I can remember. Anyway, this new version of the place didn’t last long and it’s permanently closed now.

Doesn’t seem to me like you did anything serious enough to be banned from a whole platform, but moderators and administrators are individuals and some of them can’t be objective when something presses their person hot buttons. If a right-wing Christian claimed abortion was Sexual Assault, that obviously would not automatically make abortion an off-limits topic, but I can imagine a moderator thinking differently. I agree with your response that nobody was being forced into anything, but using loaded words like “woke” is a good way to get yourself labeled by someone who thinks in memes.