You do realize that as recently as the 1800’s the average household had at least one member infected with tapeworm at any given time?

Yeah, the good ol' days. Now we have to simulate having a tapeworm with Ozempic.

Easier to hide body armor under it.

projecting the image of being royalty, important for commanding the awe and loyalty of the subjects

Very important in, um, a republic.

Maybe when the AI bubble bursts, people will buy up abandoned data centers for pennies on the dollar and repurpose them for a better Youtube alternative. And maybe Margot Robbie will see this comment and fall in love with me.

All I want these days is a "Don't show me any fucking AI slop" setting and a button to report AI slop.

When smallpox was eradicated in the 1950s, it was achieved with something like 100 million doses of the vaccine, which was substantially less than the world population at the time (in the neighborhood of 2.5 billion). This is because scientists understood that the vaccine was not something for individual protection but was rather a weapon to protect the population as a whole (and annihilate the disease entirely) when coupled with a full understanding of how the disease spread.

I still think it's possible that in 2016 they told him they were signing him up to play the President in a mockumentary. And that they still haven't told him otherwise.

There's a great scene in Das Boot where the crew ends up trapped on the bottom of the Straight of Gibraltar. One guy starts fingering his rosary beads and praying and another guy punches him in the face and says "cut that shit out, we've got work to do!"

I switched to Mac about 15 years ago because I started writing iOS apps and you can only do that on a Mac. As a lifelong Windows user I was initially pretty dubious, but I soon came around. Now I hate MacOS and Windows equally.

This guy was only a "new co-worker" because I was the new employee, but: my first day on a new job I watched a guy get escorted out of the building by security carrying his shit in a cardboard box. His story ended up on the local news. Turned out he was running a prostitution ring from his office, using his work computer even. He had an 800 number that redirected to his office phone, and he kept track of his girls and customers on an Excel spreadsheet on his Windows desktop. The only reason he got caught was that the company upgraded everybody's computers, and they had techs check through all the old machines to make sure no important documents got deleted, and they found "CallGirls.xls" or something like that right on his desktop. Security through dumbassery.

As someone who was alive and nearly a legal adult at this time, I can say that the Bhopal disaster was widely reported on by mainstream media. It's not all that well-remembered today, but neither would Chernobyl be if not for that miniseries and the memes it generated. It's less the result of capitalist propaganda and more the result of our innate apathy towards what happens to brown people halfway around the world.

Best philly cheesesteak I've ever had was from a hospital cafeteria.