I’VE WONDERED IF THIS WHY SO MANY WOMEN ARE ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS: More young women abandoning the pill because of mental health concerns.
Archive for 2023
January 31, 2023
WHO THE HECK WOULD THINK IT WAS? HBO’s ‘The Last Of Us’ Is Wrong. Assisted Suicide Is Not ‘Incredibly Romantic’.
THE DINNERS AREN’T WHAT FOLKS WONDER ABOUT, BILL: Bill Gates: ‘For the 100th time I shouldn’t have had dinner’ with Epstein.
It’s more what you had for dessert….
THIS IS AN INSULT TO DUMPSTER FIRES: Elon Musk gives inside look at ‘flaming dumpster’ Twitter HQ.
LOSING THE RESPECT OF SOME FOLKS COUNTS AS A VICTORY: J.K. Rowling on ex-fans’ criticism: I’ll file it ‘where I keep my missing f—s’.
BEING AS BAD AS THE ORIGINAL WOULD BE A CHALLENGE: Jane Fonda: I ‘worry’ about ‘Barbarella’ remake with Sydney Sweeney.
Note I based my take on the original French comics.
SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Migrants Won’t Leave Hell’s Kitchen Hotel for Brooklyn Cruise Terminal Shelter.
“IT’S JUST PROPERTY CRIME, INSURANCE WILL COVER IT”: Major insurers plan to drop coverage of some Kia and Hyundai models due to thefts.
IT’S A LONG WAY DOWN: From Jaime Escalante to Prof. Gutierrez.
WHEN OUR OWN GOVERNMENT IS ORCHESTRATING OUR INVASION, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? Border Patrol Apprehended More Migrants at Northern Border Than ‘Previous Two Years Combined’.
SO SOME GOOD NEWS: Newsom smacked and FDA irrelevance.
January 30, 2023
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? China’s Baidu to launch ChatGPT-style bot in March.
Chinese internet search major Baidu Inc is planning to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in March, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The technology firm plans to launch the service as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine, said the person, who declined to be identified as the information is confidential.
ChatGPT’s technology works by learning from vast amounts of data how to answer prompts by users in a human-like manner, offering information like a search engine or even prose like an aspiring novelist.
Chatbots in China currently focus on social interaction whereas ChatGPT performs better at more professional tasks, such as programming and essay writing.
Chat CCP’s responses to questions about Communist China’s dark history would be fascinating to read. But, ala 1984’s two-way telescreens, I wonder if Chat CCP is programmed to report doubleplus ungood crimethink for reeducation purposes?
UPDATE: China Boasts of ‘Mind-reading’ Artificial Intelligence that Supports ‘AI-tocracy.’ “An artificial intelligence (AI) institute in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, says it has developed software that can gauge the loyalty of Communist Party members – something that, if true, would be considered a breakthrough, but has sparked public outcry. Analysts said China has improved its AI-powered surveillance, using big data, machine learning, facial recognition and AI to ‘get into the brains and minds of its people,’ building what many call a draconian digital dictatorship.”
(Updated and bumped.)
LET’S NOT RUSH INTO ANYTHING HERE: Biden tells Congress he’ll end COVID-19 emergencies on May 11.
AND YET THEY WILL GO DOWN FURTHER: Biden poll numbers are more abysmal than you think.
ELIZABETH SCALIA: A terrible unity: Tyre Nichols cries out and the nation hears. I would note that the police were quickly charged and universally condemned once the video came out.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead cannabis brand is leaving California.
Jerry Garcia is one of the most iconic pot smokers in California history. Born in San Francisco, Garcia led the Grateful Dead for 30 years as the city became an international beacon of counterculture, and he did it all while casually and openly smoking weed. His pot pipe is considered an artifact of California cannabis history.
But even the iconic Jerry Garcia name couldn’t survive California’s turbulent legal pot market.
The Garcia Hand Picked brand, launched by the deceased musician’s family in 2020, has pulled out of the state, a spokesperson confirmed to SFGATE. Garcia’s exit comes as cannabis insiders predict a “mass extinction event” for California’s pot industry, with thousands of companies expected to go out of business this year.
* * * * * * * *
California’s cannabis industry has faced huge economic hurdles in its first four years of legal sales. The state’s complicated cannabis regulations and high taxes add costs to legal operators, while widespread illegal farms and retailers undercuts legitimate companies. Limited access to banking means these companies pay exorbitant fees for simple banking services and have almost no access to loans. Federal law blocks pot companies from deducting most business taxes from their federal taxes, making pot businesses pay an effective federal tax rate as high as 80%.
These factors have come together to make California a painful place to run a legal pot business. The majority of small legacy cannabis farms are on their way out of business and even the country’s biggest cannabis companies are leaving the state.
Back in 2019, Vice warned: Regulations Are Choking Out California’s Legal Weed Industry.
Earlier we asked if Californians can become Germans. An even more difficult question they have to ponder: Can stoner Californians become libertarians?
RIP, GERARD VANDERLEUN: Neo on When death comes for bloggers.
OPEN THREAD: Let’s lock the world out.
GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Where Have All the Chairs Gone? This Is Why Many Downtown SF Starbucks Locations Are Seatless.
Where have all the chairs gone? That was the question posed by a Standard staffer during a recent morning editorial meeting. She was referring to the Starbucks at the corner of Stockton and Sutter streets, just off of Union Square.
Populated by a lonely hightop table and a slim bar without stools, the place appeared to be offering grab-and-go service only—even though the cafe’s floor was clearly large enough to accommodate tables and chairs.
She wasn’t the only one in our newsroom to have encountered a seatless Starbucks in the city. A few months ago, I came across a very similar scene at 1390 Market St., where I popped in for a hot chocolate one day to find nary a place a place to sit and sip it.
Being that we journalists can be quite cynical, we wondered if removing chairs from these locations was a corporate strategy for deterring unhoused people from hanging out in the cafes. Or perhaps it was a monetary decision aimed at moving more caffeine addicts and their dollars through stores at a faster clip.
The “unhoused people” line employed by the reporter at the San Francisco Standard is a classic — as Thomas Sowell wrote almost 20 years ago, “Politically Correct Terms Replace Honest Words.” (Also available here under a different headline if the article is paywalled):
Another word that the left has virtually banished from the language is “bum.” Centuries of experience with idlers who refused to work and who hung around on the streets making a nuisance — and sometimes a menace — of themselves were erased from our memories as the left verbally transformed those same people into a sacred icon, “the homeless.”
As with swamps, what was once messy and smelly was now turned into something we had to protect. It was our duty to support people who refused to support themselves.
And now apparently the euphemism for “bum” is considered a hot (vegan) potato.
OLD AND BUSTED: Can Greeks Become Germans?
The New Hotness? Can Californians Become Germans?! They fire, we hire’ — Germany seizes on Silicon Valley’s woes.
Faced with a tight labour market and a shortage of workers with key software engineering skills, some German companies are looking at thousands of layoffs in Silicon Valley as an opportunity to recruit top talent.
The U.S. West Coast has always been the main destination for ambitious software engineers looking to work in the best-paid, most elite corner of their profession, but the mass redundancies have created a pool of jobseekers that Germany is eager to tap.
“They fire, we hire,” said Rainer Zugehoer, Chief People Officer at Cariad, the software subsidiary of automaker Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE). “We have several hundred open positions in the U.S., in Europe and in China.”
Spooked by inflation and the prospect of recession, Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Facebook owner Meta (META.O) have announced a combined almost 40,000 job cuts.
Other than the minor language issue, most uber-leftist denizens of Silicon Valley would consider transitioning to Germany to be a lateral move.