We've normalized saying "bless you" after a good burp lol

My wife cannot abide me asking my son to pull my finger so I save that for when she's not around.

The chipmunks were cute and didn't hurt nothing (though their pre-dawn chittering was fuckin loud for how little they are, would wake us up even with the windows closed) but the squirrels were true assholes. We invested lord knows how much money into squirrel proof feeders and they would retaliate by eventually getting around the defenses and then knocking the shit down on the ground so they could empty our feeders in an afternoon. They would rip open the suet cages and just drag the whole block up into a tree and gorge themselves on it, and if they couldn't open the cage they'd steal it in the cage lol

Even my wife, who is like a disney princess and wants to go find a clearing and sing and cuddle all the animals, would chuck hickory nut shells at them whenever she was out there so the birds got something.

I got flamed to oblivion when I said that it's stunning how many people will gladly allow any old app onto their phone and have access to their data and scrape their life patterns in order to get like 2 for 1 fucking McDoubles or something.

Used to be when they wanted marketing data they paid professional firms to go out and perform scientific research and compensated people for participating in the study. Now they just throw a 50% off coupon at someone that they may or may not even use and people are like "Here's all my location data for the last month as well as all my contacts and hell why not be able to use my camera and microphone too fuck it, 50% off a Happy Meal is just too much to pass up"

I've literally gotten up and left a restaurant before for not having menus. A QR code on a stand on the table that takes you to a fuckin PDF download...fuck outta here with that bullshit.

I didnt get lactose intolerance until I was in my 30s. So weird that my body just decided "Nah, Im good with dairy products" all on it's own.

Really wish I would have discovered that earlier in life, before I developed my crippling cocoa pebbles addiction.

Brian Regan called them "Me Monsters" lol

I fucking hate that shit lol

My last house bordered on a big undeveloped green space; we had , as we called them, 'owl years' and 'bunny years'. You could see the pattern clear as day and predict it to a certain extent. If there were a ton of bunnies out in our yard at dusk in the spring, the following year was going to be an owl year, ostensibly because the eating was real good. If there were hardly any bunnies out there, the following year was almost definitely going to be a bunny year because the owls moved on or starved over the winter.

But there was no balance, that's the weird thing. It was almost binary...but it wasn't directly cyclical. We would know by early spring if this was going to be one of those "we need to put fencing around every single flower and plant in our garden" years, or if there were enough owls around to eat all the bunnies and give our garden a break, but it didn't alternate in any pattern we could tell. We just had to wait and see how many bunnies we had out there at dusk. There were far more bunny years than owl years, but whereas in owl years you would hear them out there hooting all night long, in bunny years...nothing.

Tangentially...it was always a squirrel year. IDK if the owls didn't care for squirrel or what but only the bunnies and the owls were locked into this relationship...the chipmunks and squirrels were unaffected. The owls just really only wanted bunnies I guess lol.

In the lord of the rings mmo back in the day you could play an instrument and actually play notes and program songs to play them in game but most people would just post up at the inn, like dozens of people, and just play the most discordant faceroll shit imaginable to the point where you had to disable it in the settings.

Kinda broke the immersion a little bit, unless roving squads of bards performing the medieval equivalent of a yoko ono song in everybody's face was a commonplace occurrence in those days.

I was in the same boat myself about 15 years ago, and it was bad even then, I cant even imagine how it is now.

You know how we used to have to memorize phone numbers but then smartphones came around and now nobody can recall more than a handful from memory? I'm no better, I can recall my wife's, moms, dads, and work, but I couldn't tell you any other relevant number to save my life today.

Now take that paradigm and apply it to general thought. What happens when all our thinking gets reduced to queries and does not grow beyond that?

When I turned 30 I was quite ate up about it.

Now almost 20 years beyond that point, when a colleague turns 30, "oh whatever you're still just a baby lol"

Funny how that works

That's what I've been screaming about AI since the beginning.

Take self checkout kiosks for example. Anyone that is old enough to remember what the grocery store was like before the kiosks would know how much faster a human cashier was then the stupid fucking machine. There was no tabbing through 20 screens of fruit to find the plantains, there was no "sorry you have to scan every pencil individually and place them in the bag one by one because we can't do multiples", and there was never, ever, an unexpected item in the bagging area.

The doctor I go to has replaced all their front office staff with self check-in kiosks. You cannot check in with a person anymore. If you are unable to use the machine you have to press a special button and wait for someone to come from the back and press the buttons on the kiosk for you. The time to check in for an appointment with the person used to take under a minute. The kiosk takes 10+ and has a 25% error rate.

But none of that matters, because the machines don't draw a paycheck, and they don't care about anything else.

"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice"

~Geddy "the GOAT" Lee, Freewill

investors getting nervous?