Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Come on, man.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

How stupid are these people?

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread

Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread

by | 130 Comments

This post is in: 

Update: okay, I do actually have something to say after all:

Holy cow, that seems like great news.  Off to find out more.

*****

I’ve been busy getting ready for company so I haven’t even caught the news, but hopefully it’s a good day.

Garden watered (in the 90s), check.

Kitchen clean, check.

Caught up on work, no check, but got a deadline extended until Friday, so sort of check?

Dining room table cleared off.  No check, sigh.

Three stray boxes of stuff I’m trying to go through, put away?  No check.  Oh well.

Company arriving in about 10 minutes.  I’ve decided to take 5 and relax until they get here.  It is what it is.

Totally open thread.

Reader Interactions

130Comments

  2. 2.

    Geo Wilcox

    Our neighbor’s son brought his Brazilian bride to the US this winter. She loves to walk our road and often sits at the edge of our property on some rocks. I am mowing a special place for her to sit with two chairs in case her husband walks with her and they want to sit together for a bit in the shade of our trees. She was so scared people were going to be mean to her but I hope she is pleasantly surprised that they are not. By the way I live in Trump central so to me it is very important to show her GOOD people live in bumfucking Indiana not just assholes.

  4. 4.

    Scout211

    Do we need another comment about Elon Musk? I think we do.  The point and laugh kind.

    The Verge   Eight former SpaceX engineers filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Wednesday alleging sexual harassment and retaliation.
     
    Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, “knowingly and purposefully created an unwelcome hostile work environment based upon his conduct of interjecting into the workplace vile sexual photographs, memes, and commentary that demeaned women and/or the LGBTQ+ community,” says the employees’ complaint, which was earlier reported by Bloomberg.
     
    The complaint — which cites many of Musk’s Twitter posts making sexually explicit jokes — claims that Musk fostered “a perversely sexist culture at SpaceX.” Several of the plaintiffs say they “experienced direct harassment that mimicked Musk’s posts.” According to the suit, senior engineers often used phallic language during technical meetings, referring to mechanical parts as “chodes” and “schlongs.”

    ”It was also common for engineers to apply crude and demeaning names to products in an attempt at humor, often at the expense of women and LGBTQ+ individuals. For example, the name ‘Upskirt Camera’ was used for a camera on the first stage of the Falcon rocket that views the bottom of the second stage.”

    Bonus Points for filing this one day before the Tesla Board votes on his bloated pay package.

     

  5. 5.

    Trivia Man

    Revisiting the cherries and milk from the last thread. Rumor had it cherries +milk killed president Taylor in 1850 on the 4th of July. Even in the 1930s my dad wasnt allowed to eat those together because IT IS DEADLY

  6. 6.

    Quaker in a Basement

    Three stray boxes of stuff?

    That’s so cute! I’m drowning in 35 years of accumulated crap. I’m ready to put a match to it all.

  8. 8.

    Wapiti

    One thing that bothers me about the Hunter Biden gun charges: imo, the gun dealer’s sketchy application process (filled out by at least two people, and not completed before the sale was made) seems a bigger issue than one addict buying a gun. How many bad sales did that one dealer make, if the only one we saw was seriously dodgy?

    But that might be why we haven’t heard anything from the NRA – they’re a protection racket for gun sales more than anything.

  11. 11.

    smith

    @Scout211: I can’t agree this is worth pointing and laughing, but certainly worth a lawsuit or two. Finding out that Elmo promoted a hostile workplace for women and LGBTQ+ employees is the least surprising news of the day. That he tried to coerce a female employee into having his children and then retaliated against her when she refused is horrifying.

  12. 12.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Trivia Man: ​
     Milk wasn’t pasteurized at the time. Wouldn’t be surprised if an old man had a bad reaction to raw milk loaded with salmonella and E. coli

  13. 13.

    Ken

    The G7 report reminds me of one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, where he was talking about Ankh-Morpork’s history of war. They used to be like every other city-state, with a standing army and frequent battles with neighbors. Then they figured out it was much easier, and more profitable, to loan their neighbors money, and threaten to call in the debt if they caused any problems.

  15. 15.

    smith

    @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: And with the raw milk fad growing just as H5N1 revs up among dairy cows, we’re going to need some new old wives’ tales to keep us safe.

    I see from this morning’s virus post that a preventive vaccine for bird flu is being developed for dairy workers — I can just see the confluence of various strains of anti-vaxism and raw foods boosters conspiring to touch off another pandemic.

  24. 24.

    rikyrah

    Holy cow, that seems like great news.

     

    Seems like it to me too..

    Tee hee hee

     

    A billion here. A billion there. Soon, you’re talking about real money…

    BWA HA HA HA HA AH HA

  29. 29.

    H.E.Wolf

    WaterGirl:

      Dining room table cleared off. No check, sigh.

    Three stray boxes of stuff I’m trying to go through, put away? No check. Oh well.

    Company arriving in about 10 minutes.

    My mom’s cousin had a surefire system for exactly this scenario: Throw it all in the trunk of the car and close the lid on it.

  30. 30.

    WaterGirl

    @Wapiti:

    One thing that bothers me about the Hunter Biden gun charges.

    Just one thing?  I’m at about five!  Actually, there are so many things wrong about it that I run out of fingers on both hands.

  31. 31.

    Steve in the ATL

    @raven: we have one too.  Even with the ridiculous prices, there is always a lengthy line.   Do they put crack in it?

  33. 33.

    Betsy

    Ah the old ”Lend Lease” to the rescue!  Shades of dear old FDR

    Only this time it’s we are lending you a hand by pre-paying your lease using Russian assets.  Excellent.

  37. 37.

    Baud

    Has this been noted?

    Senate Democrats Launch Probe Of Foreign Payments To Jared Kushner’s Firm

    Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wants Affinity Partners to explain its investment schemes

  43. 43.

    Lyrebird

    @Kayla Rudbek:we have taught computers how to plagiarize and lie.

    Oh I will quote you on that!  With credit!

    I was at a talk this year and someone reported how one common AI engine, maybe ChatGPT, had scored so much better on the LSAT (I think?) than typical humans.  I was not in a position to ask questions, but I felt like saying, okay yeah, but when humans take that test, is it open book?  I don’t think so!

  44. 44.

    raven

    @Steve in the ATL: I think there are three in the ATL. Our nephew lives in Columbus Ohio and I guess that’s where they started so she came back from a visit and was all goo-goo about it. I won’t be going back.

  46. 46.

    Harrison Wesley

    @smith: I’m surprised Governor DeSantis and his surgeon general haven’t started a major campaign for Florida Freedom Milk…yet.

  51. 51.

    Harrison Wesley

    @smith: Isn’t that something Jesus taught, about greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life to own the libs?

  52. 52.

    TheronWare

    I’m  very happy for Ukraine and in other news the Oklahoma Supreme Court still sucks!

  53. 53.

    RaflW

    @WG: “I’ve decided to take 5 and relax”
    Five gummies? Par-tay!  Kidding, of course.

    I got a couple checklist items done today, but not many. Oh well, as you say :)  Tomorrow holds the possibility of more — though the mom-out-law is scheduled to visit for the afternoon with 4 friends. Cap’n Rafl will be skippering the pontoon. Which I am happy to do!

  55. 55.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    @smith: If they touch off another pandemic, I just hope it isn’t airborn like COVID is. That is harder to contain. Foodborn pathogens are easier to trace and control.

  56. 56.

    smith

    @Harrison Wesley: I don’t care if they want to lay down their own lives, but as we’ve all-too-recently learned, with a contagious respiratory disease they will be more than happy to lay down yours and mine as well.

  58. 58.

    scav

    @smith: Well, that oughta be a net benefit to the GDP, with all the additional health care required to keep their political membership in good standing.  Should we be so unkind as to play with their little minds and point out all the raw milk French cheeses available?

  59. 59.

    smith

    @Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: There’s one of the human cases so far that looks like it’s respiratory, though it’s too soon to tell if it can be spread that way.

    “too soon to tell if it can be spread that way” has uncomfortable intimations of a recurring nightmare…

  62. 62.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Rishi Sunak is getting roasted in England over his DDay fuck up.  One of the outlets is asking “is he unpatriotic or just bad at politics”.

    HA!

  63. 63.

    RaflW

    @Harrison Wesley: First big glass should be served to Donald Trump.

    The sad thing is, these idiots will feed raw milk to kids who don’t have the same ability to fight off illness as their parents in their 30s-40s, and the kids are not making the choice for themselves nor understanding the risks. Dotart? He should guzzle up.

  64. 64.

    RaflW

    @Frankensteinbeck: Every day, we inch just a bit closer to that Star Trek episode where the war computers fight each other in simulated battle, but real beings have to go get in a disintegration chamber to take that side’s losses.

  65. 65.

    lowtechcyclist

    @raven: ​

    We went to Jeni’s Ice Cream here in Athens and it was $18 for two ice cream cones (with tip)!

    There’s a Jeni’s Ice Creams in Alexandria, VA, are they some sort of funky chain? I just discovered them my last time on that side of the river. The ice cream was delicious! Their window read “Now scooping flavors from a distant galaxy,” and with an attitude like that, I had to try them.​
     

    ETA: Kayla Rudbek: “it’s very good and they usually have a few vegan options to choose from so I went there quite a bit before I had to go low-carb” – I guess you must be talking about the Alexandria store, so I guess they must be a chain. Anyway, my one experience there was very positive.

  66. 66.

    BlueGuitarist

    @smith:

    In 2016, West Virginia state legislators celebrated reducing regulations on raw milk by drinking raw milk and then got sick; uncertain whether the raw milk caused them to get sick because they flushed the evidence.

    https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/health/results-of-raw-milk-inquiry-at-wv-capitol-inconclusive-dhhr-says/article_243f2c75-0fdc-5a0b-abdd-4234348fc7bf.html

    Also
    I replied late to a comment of yours downstairs re Ohio special election (closer outcome in low turnout special election more likely result of differential turnout than party switching.)

  68. 68.

    JaySinWA

    @Baud: As with any polling, you have to frame the questions for the Magic 8 ball to get the proper results.

    Here’s an analysis of the possible answers.

    A standard Magic 8 Ball has 20 possible answers shown in the table below, including 10 affirmative answers , 5 non-committal answers, and 5 negative answers, such as Concentrate and ask again and Reply hazy, try again.

    https://magic-8ball.com/magic-8-ball-answers/

  69. 69.

    Eyeroller

    @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Cherries, like other fruits, could also have been contaminated with any number of bacteria.  But the rumors about the specific combination of cherries plus milk, or dying from “too much acid” from a “surfeit of cherries” were just nonsense based on very poor understanding of medical science at the time.

  73. 73.

    RaflW

    @schrodingers_cat: Breyers makes a lactose free dairy ice cream (made the way Lactaid fluid milk is processed). That may not be enough to make it digestible for some with dairy intolerance.

    In that case, yes, there are dairy free ice creams, though I’m not looking at them much these days. Soy Delicious was good when I was in the natural foods biz, that appears to still be available. And anything vegan would be lactose free.

    eta: Looks like venerable (though really Uniliver) Ben & Jerrys makes dairy free ice cream.

  75. 75.

    trollhattan

    @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:

    He’s some kind of to-the-manor-born piece of work. IIUC he married into much of that fortune, which is said to be equal to or greater than the King’s.

    “Not as bad as Johnson or Truss” is as kind a legacy as he can hope for, but can nevertheless frolic on a cash pile if so inclined after leaving #10. Even now I guess, but hope he has it trucked in at the back door.

  79. 79.

    trollhattan

    @RaflW: One of my favorite restaurants makes an avocado-based chocolate gelato.

    “Why?” I asked but damned if the stuff isn’t sinfully wonderful. Nary a squozed oat to be seen.

  80. 80.

    JaySinWA

    The G7 leaders have agreed to provide Ukraine with $50 billion using frozen Russian assets

    What’s that saying about revenge being a dish best served cold?

  84. 84.

    RaflW

    @trollhattan: A guy up the lake from us made a layer cake last summer where the only fat was ripe avocado. Including the frosting. It was really good!

  86. 86.

    Jackie

    Sigh…

    The House approved a contempt resolution against Attorney General Merrick Garland this afternoon, the third time the chamber has held a sitting attorney general in contempt.

    The vote was 216 to 207. No Democrats supported the resolution. One Republican voted against the measure.

    This issue will probably end up in federal court as the Justice Department is highly unlikely to prosecute Garland.

    The GQP MAGAts want the video of Biden’s interview with the special counselor simply to capture sound bites of Biden potentially stuttering for political gotcha ads. 😡

  87. 87.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: That was me, not autocorrect. I just edited my comment to add a cute video. Modi has a pet peacock! It could have been a photo-op too I have no idea. Everything about Modi persona is fake. Including the infamous teaseller story.

  88. 88.

    Harrison Wesley

    @RaflW: This is definitely the right place for it – there was a wealthy couple further south (Miami? Don’t remember) who founded a private school, one of the entrance requirements to which was that your kid could not be vaccinated for COVID.  This is a fascinating state, but, damn, does it have some squirrelly people.

  90. 90.

    trollhattan

    CalPERS has a metric crapton of capital, so maybe this will leave a mark.

    SACRAMENTO, Calif. – CalPERS today announced that it will again vote against a multibillion-dollar compensation package that Tesla proposes to give its chief executive officer at the company’s annual meeting on June 13. The package would allow Elon Musk to buy 304 million shares of Tesla stock at its 2018 value, which would be worth approximately $46 billion. CalPERS also opposed the deal when shareholders approved the measure in 2018.

    California Public Employee Retirement System. $484 billion 12.31.23

  91. 91.

    sab

    @Quaker in a Basement: Our local humane society opened a thrift store within walking distance from my house. I have been donating stuff to them for a couple of years now.

    I love seeing my stuff for sale on one day and then gone the next.

  93. 93.

    Scout211

    @trollhattan: I posted earlier this week that CalSTRS announced they will vote against Musk’s bloated pay package as well. Link

    The California State Teachers’ Retirement System is also among those voting no for the package. With $332.5 billion in assets under management, the fund holds 4,694,914 million shares of Tesla, worth approximately $1.229 billion. Among CalSTRS’ concerns are that the pay package could be dilutive to existing shareholders.

  94. 94.

    Quiltingfool

    @Geo Wilcox: Indiana?  We watch different things on You Tube and as we are not subscribers, there are commercials.  This is the first time I’ve seen a commercial touting Indiana as a great vacation spot!

    Not dissing your state, I live in Missouri, after all!  I really think my state has lots of natural beauty, and I love it.   I’m sure Indiana has lots of beauty, too.

  95. 95.

    Yutsano

    @TBone: I honestly can’t tell if that’s trolling or serious. Because if that was meant to be a serious article about the power of AI, the fact that they say over and over again that AI gets it wrong too doesn’t bolster much confidence. I guess polling will have to remain broken.

  97. 97.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @sab:

    👏

    I thought there were a couple of rescues here that had such an operation but hell if I can find em.

  98. 98.

    CaseyL

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage:

    One of the less prominent, but very saddening, side effects of real estate in Seattle becoming so expensive is that thrift stores not part of large chains are quickly vanishing from the city.  The ground they occupy is too valuable.

    We still have our Goodwills, and St Vincent de Pauls, and Salvation Armys… but the small, quirky ones allied with local charities are pretty much gone.

  99. 99.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Betty: wouldn’t it have been more effective to go after the g7n dealer, doing incomplete paperwork, making lots of dodgy sales, and potentially endangering more people? Use hunter Biden as immune witness. Because he’s gone sober, and he’s not hurt anyone with it.
    hmm

  100. 100.

    Carlo Graziani

    For the sake of clarity: the funds that are under discussion for aid to Ukraine are not the Russian Sovereign Foreign Exchange reserve assets that were frozen in 2022, but rather are to be in the form of a $50B loan backed by the $10B  in interest generated by those funds since then. So the principal and interest are not to be disbursed, but rather are collateral in case Ukraine should default on the debt.

    Which seems like a hilariously perverse incentive for this particular borrower, but whatevs.

  101. 101.

    cain

    @Geo Wilcox: Everything I know about conservatives in Indiana- they tend to keep their mouth shout. It’s the cops you gotta watch out for.

  102. 102.

    cain

    @smith: In India, we all boil the milk there as a matter of course. But I think most of the time it’s all raw except in large cities.

  104. 104.

    Carlo Graziani

    @Carlo Graziani: Not actually correct. The interest on the funds is to be the source of loan repayments, rather than collateral. So disbursement of Russian property to the bondholders begins immediately. Sorry for the previous misinfo.

  105. 105.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @CaseyL: I lost a favorite second hand store to rent increases in east Denver. They had upscale nicer clothes for a certain size range, and I got most of my clothes there, mostly at the 50% off sales.
    now it’s a wing shop.

  106. 106.

    cain

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    Yes, and every cloud service you’re using (ahem, Adobe) – anything you use there will be used to train their AI. They are profiting off of it. You can’t trust a single one – same thing with gmail, photos, apple – all of it.

    With social media, we were the product. Now we are going even deeper down the well. But AI can never keep up because we have something called entropy. :)

  108. 108.

    Gloria DryGarden

    Saving both these links to return and read. Better at the ends of a dead thread, than wading through later.

    thanks for these links

    @TBone:

    A repost for those who want to understand what’s coming this month/next month.

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-june-docket-disaster-alito-roberts.html

    I’m not going to quote or preview because the whole thing is important.

    @TBone: thanks for this article about AI and polling. I’ll come back to read it.

  109. 109.

    FastEdD

    CALSTRS and CALPERS voting no is a BFD. Retired CA teacher here, my retirement comes from STRS and it is good to know they voted no.

  111. 111.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @cain: one of the speculations is that AI is going to stop working because its data sets are going to become more inbred than the Spanish Hapsburgs. Another possibility is that poisoning of images on the internet will become commonplace (University of Chicago came up with a method for doing this) I.e. the images have some sort of imbedding placed into the digital data that thwarts the algorithms/keyword inputs in the AI and makes the AI results nonsensical.

  114. 114.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @WaterGirl: would like to hear the additional theories about why they went after hunter b.

    In a separate comment you said, this, about timing. So why can’t G7 get $ to Ukraine a lot sooner than end of year? Any ideas?  Seems pretty urgent.

    Timing is everything!

  115. 115.

    Another Scott

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: It’s worse than that.

    arXiv.org – “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models” – Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli:

    Hallucination has been widely recognized to be a significant drawback for large language models (LLMs). There have been many works that attempt to reduce the extent of hallucination. These efforts have mostly been empirical so far, which cannot answer the fundamental question whether it can be completely eliminated. In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs. Specifically, we define a formal world where hallucination is defined as inconsistencies between a computable LLM and a computable ground truth function. By employing results from learning theory, we show that LLMs cannot learn all of the computable functions and will therefore always hallucinate. Since the formal world is a part of the real world which is much more complicated, hallucinations are also inevitable for real world LLMs. Furthermore, for real world LLMs constrained by provable time complexity, we describe the hallucination-prone tasks and empirically validate our claims. Finally, using the formal world framework, we discuss the possible mechanisms and efficacies of existing hallucination mitigators as well as the practical implications on the safe deployment of LLMs.

    (Emphasis added.)

    Yay?

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  117. 117.

    Ohio Mom

    @raven: How many scoops did you get? A Jeni’s opened in Cincinnati recently and my recollection was that a bowl with two small scoops was somewhere between $5-6 (about the same price as our hometown ice cream, Graeters).

    ETA: I see you said you won’t be going back. I think Jeni’s is too cute by a half. Much prefer the small local chain, Hello Honey. Artisan ice cream is definitely having a moment.

  120. 120.

    Carlo Graziani

    @Another Scott: Pretty much. The problem is that LLMs are sequential models, which implicitly build up a probability distribution over sequences (usually of language tokens), then exploit that learned distribution to make predictions of future tokens conditioned on an initial set (the prompt). Unfortunately, the sequence space is huge, and the empirically-learned distribution is known more accurately in some parts of sequence space than others, irrespective of how large the training data corpus is. But LLMs do not distinguish between regions where the distribution is known accurately, and where it is uncertain. So it’s really not hard to construct prompts that lead LLMs into badly-characterized regions of sequence space, where hallucinations prevail.

  123. 123.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Ohio Mom: artisanal ice cream shops are the main places I can go for a scoop of non dairy ice cream, so I can be like everyone else, and splurge on ice cream in the heat.

  124. 124.

    Gloria DryGarden

    Referencing an earlier topic on the threads, there are floods down near Miami. How close will all that rain get to Mara Lago?

    It’s the dream of lightning, floods, hurricane, the past possibility of COVID almost ending someone only they got care most of us couldn’t afford. The joke/ imagery of God sad to have missed w his/her lightening on the golf course..

    If FAFO is a thing, how many times can such a creep FA?

    SIGH.

    Someone has gone way past their nine lives, legally, if they were a cat.  (And I don’t want to insult any of our beloved kitties)

  127. 127.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Manyakitty: i think we have a group, a team here, dreaming. I don’t recommend sending it. But we can imagine. Group think can be powerful..

    It’s been so oppressive, that creep. I start to think of the 7 plagues sent against pharaoh, in that old Bible story, which I barely learned, locusts, raining frogs, other afflictions. Like some kind of something to tip the scales toward the common folk and away from that dangerous guy trying to lead through hateful media and lies, trying to hurt us all, really.

  128. 128.

    Ironcity

    @RaflW: And it tastes like cat piss.  Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt was great and fine for the lactose intolerant like Ms Iron.  The non dairy junk they replaced it with is horrible.  Should be fed to TCFG morning, noon and night.

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