Your intelligence isn’t improved by calmness. Calmness may simply be the state when it is the most unimpeded.

I think what you’re not picking up on is the whole Ms. Moos vibe on CNN. She is basically satire. She always jumps on the most outrageous stories and narrates them in that annoying pseudo journalistic voice and has done for decades. The stories may be actually true but you should never assume that they are. They are a knock knock joke for people who watch 24h news channels.

I don’t know anything about this case more than having watched the CNN video. Mr. Fir-lung and his doctor needn’t be actors. He could’ve really had it in his lung but played up the “haha, maybe I breathed in a seed” line because it got him attention on TV and paid interviews. And he doesn’t mention how he was in a landslide being chased by a bear 5 years ago and that’s when he accidentally inhaled the debris. The doctor may just have mentioned in a subordinate clause that it looked as if the sprig was growing in the lung but never actually claimed it did. Or he also believes in homeopathy. Or he also got paid for the interview. There are a thousand explanations why we get presented the story like that. But the biggest red flag remains that Jeanne Moos was reporting on it.

Psy op implies an amount of planning and the involvement of the military or the intelligence community. I think it is better attributed to chance that the cryptic pretentious musings of one person snowballed into a cultish internet movement. Because it garnered strength online, the musing person at the heart of it probably changed due to tiny power struggles.

People like to know there is a plan for everything. People always suspect a secret cabal behind everything. People are also dumb and impressionable. It doesn’t take a general or CIA buffin to try to target the Venn diagram of those three groups. I think it had the results you describe, it contributed to what we see in the US today: a weakening of the rule of law and a slide into fascism.

Calling QAnon psy op is giving what basically started as a 4chan meme too much credit. If no one took a gun to find a nonexistent basement in a DC pizza restaurant, society at large may have never discovered this snowballed cult, and jumped on it like a cat does catnip, enlarging its reach. The secret “cabal” behind it is maybe a handful of people. Bored and slightly Machiavellian internet users with odd political views and/or the love of endorphin-inducing likes and reach. Never attribute to conspiracy what you can more likely attribute to stupidity. QAnon is stupid. Stupidity with disastrous cobsequences. But not a planned psy op campaign.

Are you getting inundated with JFK was anti Israel posits and hot takes? Because I sure aren’t.

If illegal immigrants were possible to be identified easily by the IRS, ICE would have taken them over already.

The problem is two-fold. A lot of the immigrants who fall into this “illegal” category are not on the books, they get a brown envelope, and pay little to no taxes at all. And the more “sophisticated” ones look just like your average American. So if you taxed them more, you’d be affecting a lot of the “legal” population as well.

Also, the American economy is full of jobs that no “non-deportable” would like to do. Agricultural jobs come to mind. The current regime’s idea of eradicating all illegal immigrants runs contrary to a lot of economic interests (and I read that they’ve done a lot less deporting on the farms recently. Curious …) Even if you could just tax them more, you’d still mess with those interests as well.

And while I’m not a tax lawyer, I’m gonna go out in a limb here and say it’s not going to be easy to make a tax law like that that isn’t going to be heavily scrutinized in the courts because it is unabashedly discriminatory.

I think it’s because these are people with the power to do more than thoughts and prayers. But they just stick with that while also taking health care off veterans and giving tax breaks to the rich.

Gaslighting

Sphinxy is mad then. Or poops prodigiously. Sphinxy is much, much smaller than any of the surrounding pointy poop parlors.

Art is a message. It has a sender and a receiver. The sender aka the creator has an idea and their synapses create the piece of art. The receiver - even when privy to the thoughts of the creator because they talked or wrote about it etc. - consumes it and has a response. It could be along the lines the creator had intended but it doesn’t have to be. Both sides could be equally happy with their side of it while thinking completely different things.

So an artist can try to attach a certain meaning to their artwork but it is no guarantee the audience will see it that way. Is the person in Munch’s The Scream screaming themselves or holding their ears to block out screaming they hear? I read what the artist intended and I can tell you I thought the other thing.

So far I’ve been talking about a single artist and a single consumer. That’s not how this works. There could be a group who have differing ideas about the art they’re creating, like a song. So it means different things to different people on the sender side already.

It gets really messy on the receiver side because ideally the art will be consumed by hundreds and thousands of people. In that group you will have opinion leaders tastemakers and they in turn will influence other recipients. History also filters artworks. I don’t think Leo thought his postage stamp size portrait of a smirking Italian merchant’s wife would be the most famous painting in the world if experts hadn’t endorsed it, it hadn’t forcefully changed owners, hung in Napoleon’s apartment, was stolen and recovered. So there are biases built in and it isn’t as clean cut as saying everybody interprets it their own way in most circumstances.

“They say those who can’t play coach. It seems those who can’t coach stand ten rows back shirtless shouting obscenities.”

Wow. It’s like they have discovered the concept of biases. A coffee table book of umbrella pictures would’ve had a similar effect no doubt.

For their next study they will surely test dihydrogenoxide in its liquid aggregate state for wetness.

This pretty much applies to all search engines. Because of that I don’t see the point of it being posted in this lemmy.

You are making it seem like this is a new problem. And it isn’t.

Centuries back it was weavers who were displaced by the industrial revolution and automated spinning machines. Coal mining went unfashionable from the late 1970s onwards and miners had to find new work. Industry in the US closed up shop and moved to China. These are just three examples of workers being made redundant in their then capacity. Two out of these three went by without much loss of life, the majority of the workforce found new jobs over time, and only some of them were screwed on a more permanent basis. Unfortunately, that’s the shitty bell curve of these changes. But another thing that’s been proven again over time is that we always think these miners or these factory workers are completely unhireable and it turns out the majority isn’t. People thought MS Excel would eradicate the entire bookkeeping profession. And they are still around and I think actually grew in numbers because they are free from pencils and calculators and could do more interesting stuff instead. Don’t fall for the so-called AI will replace everything talking point. The people who say this are either invested in so-called AI companies or drank the koolaid. All we hear for the moment is how theses models do a good a lot of the time and then break catastrophically bad somewhere. Humans still need to have a look for the time being. And thus a new job is born: chAIperone.

The problem these days is how the state responds to massive shifts like that. Social security nets have a finer mesh in the developed world outside the US. It’s much easier to go from no job to living in a car to living under a bridge in the US. A lot of people in this thread call for UBI, which is sensible but isn’t even likely in the more socialist Europe. UBI is a good answer though. Education is another one, e.g. free training programs or college classes for long term unemployed. None of that seems likely under 47.

That’s not an argument, that’s somebody who only looked at the cover of the cliff notes on presidential terms but didn’t read it. Consecutivity isn’t required. Neither president should get elected a third time without a change or suspension of the constitution. With the rule of law under 47 weakening it is not impossible but I’m still optimistic.

This is grade A PR fluff. We are providing free advertisement here for the company that did a reasonable test with no big hope of success. It’s corpo clickbait - even when you’re snarky about it. It’s perpetuating their talking point that so-called AI will do everything in the future. Which, frankly, remains to be seen.

So you’re trying to apply logic to an animated kids show. My advice is: stop. It doesn’t matter. Cookie monster never eats a cookie either.

I like to imagine that all creators of kids shows were high as a kite when they came up with the premise. [Takes a massive hit] “Duuuude, they’re like a team of first responder dogs but they can fly helicopters and one is a cop. They’re like the Village People but dogs.” [Takes another hit] “And they can talk!” And thus Paw Patrol was born.

[Lights up spliff] “Oy, mate. 'ere’s the thing. She’s a cheeky one, this Peppa. And she’s a pig. 'Er 'ead’s always sideways. She’s always mucking about.” [Inhales deeply] “And all the other muppets are animals too. But get this: there are other animals.” [Exhales] “But they can’t talk.”

Who thought it is a good idea to let George Lucas edit Trek? It’s like an Odo shot first kind of situation. And I think Odo never used a phaser.

Is this is the guy that Scotty shoots in the end? If so, I’ve only ever seen the version with that scene and the bad Mission: Impossible face mask reveal. And I owned this movie as a VHS bought in Europe as part of a set released before VII came out…

II, IV, and VI are all worth a watch. They are a good movie, an entertaining movie, and a surprisingly good movie respectively.

I’ll watch the odd numbered ones as well but I’m a fan and I know I is too long, III is mostly not good, and I enjoy V for its craziness.

I think the Sony hack is not a great example because there is a very good chance it was more politically motivated than financially. It’s one of those cases where we might never know but there is a good chance it was orchestrated by North Korea in response to a Sony movie that made Kim III not look very divine. NK is most likely connected to other hacks as well that were really just a way to get hard currency/to evade sanctions.

Effort and reward are like supply and demand. If I want to steal your credit card number to go shopping, it might take me a long time to get to it. And then it turns out there is only $500 left on it. Too much effort for not enough reward. That’s why phishing, Nigerian princes, texted IRS/DMV fines, missed FedEx deliveries, and all that jazz happens. Low effort to throw a net out and then catch the dumbest of the fish. If you are a person of interest to me though the math if different. Maybe I’m a stalker (look behind you, I’m there right now). Or maybe horny me is looking for your (perfectly legal) sexting thread. Or you’re a pedo, a socialist, a cult leader, or all of the above. Private people get hacked. But it rarely makes a splash in the news like the Sony hack.

Also, hacker ≠ hacker. There are good guys who hack stuff to show what needs fixing or to hold people to account. There are bad guys who do it for money or because they like it. There are those with one foot on either side of that fence. Motivations differ wildly.

Do you let your network set the time or did you do it manually? Could be a hint that you’re off by a minute or so (considering you’ve checked all the other reasonable things already).

Any other apps installed that may want to set alarms? Maybe a sideload? Calendar app you’ve tried and not uninstalled?

They killed Kenny?