This is a thing at my university (I work there). I talked to one of the library folks about it years ago. She explained that (a) they would like to keep way more of the books but there’s not enough funding to have the space or staff for it–our school is in constant and recently much more intense financial crisis, laying off all kinds of people (except deans and provosts); (b) a lot of this stuff literally nobody wants, like 4th and 5th and 10th copies of mediocre textbooks rehashing the content done much better by other texts, and © yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.

This is what celebrity culture does to women.

Definitely that everyone should be centrist.

I knew someone who grew up very poor in rural coastal Alaska. Something like this was her idea of a great time: when she and her sisters found a bloated seal washed up in the beach they used it as a trampoline.

Take my upvote, you monster.

I think that is a reasonable take. It is s huge jump, in many ways, so I believe it is much more dangerous than other capitalist “innovations”.

There are lots of things going on at once and all of them are valid. I struggle, too. My life is pretty good, from a global standard, while many, many others’ lives are much worse. Happiness is wildly unevenly distributed.

Well, I guess I was warned.

Thanks for responding. I also feel sorry for this frog, and I am happy to see others in the thread saying that when frogs are randomly born like this they seem to do OK.

Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.

For the non-German speakers (via online translation because me neither)

The sign says “energy plants” (or crops)

The text: A schematic representation (?) of my social skills

I think it’s only 3 of the 4

I don’t think I was ever really a part of either of these trends, but my memory is that it started out as the game, then some white supremacists started to use it as their symbol. My hope is that the second association has broken down a bit for most people; I haven’t seen any pics on social media etc. of white supremacists doing this for a couple of years, so maybe the kids can have their game back.

I say this not as an insult (I promise) but as a genuine question: Were you sober when you made this comment?

I vaguely remember these specific things. I more clearly remember a bunch of stuff in this vein, at secretaries’ desks, on office walls, in guidance counselors’ offices, in feel-good TV programs that only aired on community UHF TV, etc. I found them sweet and meaningful until about age 12, and since then, yes, the urge to slap.

As a sightly drunk person I very much appreciate the people explaining the analogy.

Lived near the US-Mexico border for a while. License plates stolen twice. Apparently it’s a big thing there: slap them on a stolen car and drive into Mexico before anyone realizes.

When this was posted on twitter the first time I got more upvotes than ever before (i.e., like 20) for saying something like “But it’s a massive stadium full of car-sized treadmills with a car on each one. Each car has a 1% chance of solving a sudoku every day, so there are a few thousand constantly running, pouring exhaust into the sky.”

Or something like that.

And now AI makes it look almost quaint. Fuck.

As one billion fangirls (and some bois) have pointed out: he was more fuckable as a beast.

I heard a variant of this joke in 1999 and have repeated it to moderate mirth several times. It is a solid joke.