That’s great. I hope he’s basically able to pick and choose his roles these days, and not work if there’s nothing he’s interested in.

If he was smart about investing it, he probably earned enough to retire and live at a middle-class level for the rest of his life. But, he’s probably not loaded. He wasn’t ever one of the main stars of a show, he was always a side character. Plus, lifestyle inflation is a big problem for actors. Say he was making $400k per year on Hawaii Five-O, he probably wasn’t living a modest $80k/year lifestyle and putting away 80% of his earnings.

I would bet he’s still out looking for work so he can live in a house in LA with a pool up in the hills, not in a 1 bedroom apartment in the city.

The irony is that this spending is mostly needed because the US is causing NATO to collapse.

this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble

The end of the AI bubble has been beginning for years. The end of the beginning of the end of the bubble might take a few more years.

Basically, yeah. He asked Levar if he’d mind if he (Wil) continued the podcast, and Levar gave him his blessing. I think Wil is focusing a bit more on unknown authors though.

I want to believe this is a world where there’s more than just those 2 options.

They can be, or they can be very dense. It depends what you listen to. Many podcasts are just radio shows that actually do go out over the air, but are also repackaged as podcasts. For those, they tend to keep the information dense. The other kind are the stuff that could never be a radio show because it’s just a few guys chatting for a few hours. But, IMO, those can be valuable too because it’s not being rushed to fit in a certain time slot.

but those awful 80s morning shows were still better than these podcasts.

No way. I’d listen to just about anything rather than slide whistles, fake laughs and sound effects.

My most listened to podcast genres are:

• Fans of a sports team celebrate or commiserate
• Cheerful people look at the world through the lens of economics
• A professional voice actor reads me cool short stories
• A science reporter lets scientists gush about their cool discoveries
• Science myths are investigated and sometimes debunked, in an entertaining way (with citations)
• A storyteller tells true stories about mistakes and what we can learn from them
• BBC Foreign Correspondents talk about the stories behind the stories
• The current world is examined from a perspective of how the media delivers the message

They’re saying “There ought to be no gods other than the one I believe in”, despite the fact that other people believe in other gods. They think that those people are delusional and believe in a god that isn’t there, but that they’re perfectly reasonable to believe in theirs. They think it’s absolutely absurd to think that Lord Vishnu had a flower growing out of his navel which he separated into three parts, creating the earth from one of them. But, they think it’s perfectly reasonable that Elohim created the heavens and the earth in six days.

Not only that, but they don’t even believe that this “Lord Vishnu” exists. It’s not that the Hindus got the story wrong and that he was just standing off to the side while Elohim did the work, they think that Hindus are suckers for thinking that he even exists, and that it’s only their god that exists.

If there’s a presumed need for a deity to exist to explain the world (which is absurd), then why restrict it to just one deity? Many believers throughout time have believed that there are many gods, just that theirs are the strongest. But, modern monotheists somehow believe that it’s a fantasy that other gods exist, but not that theirs exists.

What point is that, laughing your ass off?

Some religious people still have a problem with that, but this explanation seems to work for me.

Me: “Do you believe in Ra, the sun god?”

Them: “No”

Me: “Do you believe in Zeus?”

Them: “No”

Me: “What about Odin, or Quetzacotl, or Shiva?”

Them: “No, I only believe in the one true god who–”

Me: “So, you’re basically almost as much of an Athiest as me. Throughout history there have been many cultures who have believed in their gods. You don’t believe in any of those gods, and neither do I. The only difference is that there’s one god that you believe in that I don’t. You’re 99.9% towards being fully Athiest, you just have one remaining god that you still believe in.”

This also helps when they start giving reasons for why what they believe is real because it’s in their bible. You can ask if they’ve read all the holy books of the Aztecs or the Hindus. Why would their holy book be true and not those other holy books? If we’re going to say something is true because it’s in a holy book, then you also have to believe the books that talk about Thor and Odin. If they start saying that everything around was created by god, again, which god? The Hindus have a story for how their various gods created everything, so do the Egyptians. Basically every religion has that story. It’s also useful to ask them what they’d believe if they’d grown up in India, or in ancient Egypt or in Denmark 1000 years ago since almost everybody gets their religion from their upbringing.

For real though, the only way to deal with pervasive surveillance is to give them too much noise to surveil.

The dark spot is only an issue if you’re using a laptop or something. Pen and a pad of paper is fine outside. Loose stacks of paper is obviously not ideal.

Unfortunately, most of us need to work using screens these days. I have hope for the future with these smart AR glasses. With the screen on the glasses, it shouldn’t be a problem to use them in bright light. And, feeling the sun on your skin is one of the best parts about being outside when the weather is good.

I don’t even like Hawaiian shirts. What’s the point of that collar? Why is western wear so obsessed with putting that style of collar on absolutely everything.

The same thing would work with e-ink. It works fine in super bright sunlight. Unfortunately since it physically spins little balls with electromagnets the refresh rate is very slow compared to conventional screens.

It seems to me like the world has had 3 phases:

• Phase 1: People own media on records, tapes, etc. because that’s the only way to listen to what you want whenever you want. The only alternative is radio, where you listen to what the DJ thinks you should hear. If you buy something once, you can listen to it whenever you want forever. (Or at least as long as the medium holds up)
• Phase 2: It was relatively easy to get the media you wanted on demand, but it wasn’t always legal, because the copyright cartels were used to a certain way of doing business and didn’t like disruption. During this phase people still bought read-only media in stores. But, they also sometimes bought blank media and filled it up from their computers at home.
• Phase 3: Everything is now online, and you no longer own media. In this phase you can listen to / watch whatever you want, but you don’t get to own anything, and you have to pay monthly if you don’t want your media viewing / listening to be interrupted by ads. In this phase, media you love can just disappear if someone loses the license to stream it, or the copyright owner decides to pull it or modify it. In this version someone like George Lucas can decide that the version of Star Wars you grew up on should change, and you now have to accept his new version.

Unfortunately, long-term storage hasn’t kept pace with short-term storage and bandwidth. You can make someone a “mix tape” that’s a USB stick, but if someone puts it on a shelf it might not be readable in 5 years. You could save the original version of Star Wars to a NAS. But, if your friend wants to borrow it, it’s not as easy as grabbing a case off the bookshelf and handing it over.

I keep hoping that one of these “crystal storage” mechanisms takes off. Then we can much more easily be data hoarders, keeping everything, and not relying on a continued subscription to a streaming service for our favourite media.

If Jesus was truly the son of god / some aspect of a god and hell exists, that’s where Chuck Norris is.

Which is a representative sample.

And that was before the Strait of Hormuz situation.

He can’t convince former allies to help out of goodwill and solidarity because he’s done everything possible to destroy that goodwill since he came into office.

He also can’t convince them to help out of fear of the consequences either, because he has already imposed those consequences.

In addition, even if he had a threat or a reward that was meaningful, the one thing that’s clear about Trump is that he never keeps his word. He doesn’t even adhere to treaties that are legally binding. So, if he promised something extremely valuable, he probably wouldn’t deliver. OTOH, if he threatened something extremely dire, he would probably chicken out.