5·
3 hours agoBurn the witch!
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Joined 12 days ago
Cake day: September 6th, 2024
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30·3 hours agoProfessional hitmen don’t actually exist. It’s a ‘business’ that you can’t possibly advertise for and has no way for the customer to assess the quality of the provider in advance. Sometimes killings do happen in exchange for money, but they don’t involve someone that is a professional killer that works with the public as their primary source of income. It just doesn’t exist. But there are some cases where killing does happen for money.
Sometimes two people will conspire to kill another for profit. Maybe one spouse hates another spouse. They ask a close friend or relative to kill their spouse, and they offer a portion of proceeds from life insurance as a payment for their risk and trouble. Or they’re cheating on their spouse with someone else, stand to inherit all their spouses assets upon their demise, and promise to marry the person they’re cheating with, thus sharing all the assets with them. In this case, it’s not a stranger being hired; the killer has known the person ‘hiring’ them for decades.
Some killings-for-hire are gang related. A gang wants someone killed. They don’t hire a random person to do it. They get one of their own members, who they’ve already known for many years and is a full member of the gang. In compensation for the huge risk the person is taking on to perform the deed, they offer a large sum of cash. Again, an unvetted stranger is not being hired. This person has likely already committed numerous crimes on the gang’s behalf in the past. When you’ve already committed enough crimes on a gang’s behalf to get you years in prison, a murder isn’t such a stretch.
Some killings-for-hire are done at the behest of nation-states. Spycraft. The KGB or CIA hire someone in a foreign country who is already sympathetic to them to kill someone the intelligence agency wants taken out. The intelligence agency doesn’t just select anyone, they go through a long vetting process just like they would any other intelligence asset. In fact, the potential assassin has likely already provided good intelligence and assistance to them for years, already risked extensive jail time or worse. If you’re a US military member that’s been providing intelligence to the KGB for a decade and have already participated in sabotage efforts, you’re already looking at treason charges if you’re caught. Offing someone for the KGB isn’t such an escalation. And when a nation-state hires someone to perform a killing, they also offer the person a plausible way out. The CIA can hire someone to kill someone for them in a foreign country and hand that person a US passport along with a few million safely in a US bank account in their name. Hell, they can make sure the assassin’s family has been given US citizenship and is already in the US before the deed is done. The CIA assassin can perform the killing, and as long as they can get to US or friendly territory before the foreign cops catch up with them, they’ll be completely free and clear. And regardless, their family will already be set for life in the US.
These are the kinds of scenarios where killings actually do occur in exchange for money. No one hires someone to kill another that they haven’t heavily vetted. If a random civilian is going to hire someone else to kill someone, they won’t hire a professional assassin. They’ll hire their brother or their lover. Otherwise contract killings only are done by organizations like gangs or national intelligence agencies, and they only hire people to do so that they’ve worked with for years and who has already committed numerous less severe crimes for them in the past.
In short, there really is no such thing as a professional assassin that serves the general public. Maybe if you are the spouse of a high-level violent gang member, you might be able to convince them to use the gang’s resources to pay one of their trusted members to kill someone in exchange for cash. But if you’re just a random average person? Forget it. There simply are not professional contract killers hiding in the shadows that a random civilian can hire if they have the cash. Anyone claiming to be that is simply a cop. Any person who DID try to start a career like this would be caught very quickly and have a very, very short career.
Are you high?
3·5 hours agoWouldn’t that make sense from an evolutionary perspective? Through human history and prehistory, think of all the common tasks people did on a day-to-day basis. I would say the vast majority of them would involve looking at things below eye level. With the exception of picking fruit from trees or hunting birds in flight, most of the tasks we evolved to do involved looking at things below eye level. Most work with crops involves looking at things below the height of your eyes. Tracking prey involves looking at things below the line of the horizon or tracks on the ground. Crafting objects involves working with your hands and looking down at your work. Raising children involves looking down at their shorter stature.
Why wouldn’t our back and neck structure be evolutionarily optimized to look at things a bit below eye level?
8·2 days agoIt’s really rich. The same party that six months ago was apoplectic because a handful of Jewish students were blocked by protesters from using one of many doors at a few buildings when they attempted to march through barricades, decrying it as Hitler returned? That same party is now trying to start a pogrom against Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
At first I read this as “the next generation of buffets.” I was getting excited that someone had figured out how to make a buffet that isn’t a food safety nightmare, then I read the rest of the sentence and was disappointed…
1·6 days agoSo…mostly 18-24 year olds?
As a matter of course, one should not even open a link that goes to OpenAI.
It’s best not to become dependent on these piracy engines. These models are hopelessly unprofitable, and they will not be cheap and accessible for very long. They take such colossal resources to train, billions upon billions of dollars. Currently OpenAI is trying to do the classic Silicon Valley bait and switch. They have a product that is more expensive and inefficient than the previous method. If they charge the real price for their product, they know no one will adopt it. So instead they offer their product at an artificially low price initially. They hope that everyone will become dependent, after which they can jack up their prices.
It’s the Uber model. Start by paying drivers more than they would make driving taxis, and by charging riders far less than they would pay for a taxi fare. This is possible through billions of angel investor subsidies. Then once everyone is dependent, slash driver pay and jack up ride prices. This is the only way for Uber to make back the billions they’ve squandered on market capture sub Silicon Valley execute bloat. If we had functioning anti-monopoly law enforcement, the executives of all these companies would be in jail. But for now they’re able to take advantage of practices that would have seen them in chains two generations ago.
Same with OpenAI. They want to get all the copy-editing companies dependent on their piracy engines. They want all the graphic design companies dependent on their image stealing tools. Then, once these companies fire their real human copy editors and graphic designers, OpenAI will start charging the real price for its services. And considering the literal hundreds of billions being poured into these hopelessly inefficient piracy engines, the rate they will have to charge will be enormous. Someone has to ultimately pay for those billions Sam Altman is sponging up. And even if they didn’t have billions of investor dollars to recoup, their ultimate goal is to gain a monopoly position in the copy editing and graphic design market. They will replace a million competing copy editors and graphing designers with a single provider - OpenAI. They’ll control the market. Once all the real human copy editors, graphic artists, and voice actors/readers have been driven from the industry and been forced to move on and take jobs elsewhere, they will be able to charge whatever they please.
Any executive that lets their company become dependent on this technology is a fool. They’re a sucker, falling for a classic bait-and-switch. Hopefully enough of them are smart enough not to be suckered in by the OpenAI con job, and OpenAI can hastily be driven into bankruptcy where it belongs.
We’re bringin’ back capes and cloaks.
To prevent the obvious reference, the trend will be called, “‘No capes’ only applies to superheroes.”
Exactly. Maybe Steven Hawking is just really bad at throwing parties!
An example of the law in Texas:
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/FA/htm/FA.65.htm
There is no tuition at public schools. (K-12, ages 5-18 approximately.) There are private schools that some choose to enroll their kids in; often these are religious in nature. And these private schools do charge tuition. But children of a certain age are legally required to attend school of some form:
Most states do allow home schooling with various degrees of requirements therein. But yes, school attendance is required. If a 14 year old is just wandering down the sidewalk at a time they should be in school, they absolutely can be stopped by the police.
Shit. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get that surgery? When I got it, insurance didn’t cover it. I had to fly to Thailand to afford it. Even with going overseas it was still about $18k USD including flights and everything. And that was in 2013 dollars. I worked my ass off to afford that. And that’s to say nothing of the endless psych evals, therapist letters, and myriad other hoops you have to jump through. It is NOT something you can just stumble into, even if you had an unlimited budget behind you.
And I’ll tell you, I was pretty young looking for my age. A bit into transition I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day on a weekday, and I literally had a cop stop me, thinking I was a high school student playing hookie from school. Meanwhile I was 24, having recently finished a masters degree.
My point is…if you could just walk into a high school and get surgery covered like that, and done no questions asked? I would have legitimately become one of those weirdos who fakes being a teenager and enrolls in a high school in their twenties. I probably could have pulled it off. I would have claimed to be a homeless kid, enrolled in a local high school, got the surgery, and then disappeared again. Compared to what I did go through to get it, that would be child’s play.
Of course, idiots like Trump don’t even realize how involved that surgery is. This is not some outpatient procedure you do in the morning and are up on your feet in the afternoon. Plan a month off of work. That’s what it realistically involves. Then imagine paying for it and finding a way to arrange such an extended absence from the very job that allows you to afford it, all while also paying your regular bills and keeping a roof over your head.
For those who need it, gender reassignment surgery is literally life-saving. I can say that from personal experience. But to see ignorant fools like Trump make light of a thing that you had to work so hard to get?..I do not have the words to express it.
511·10 days agoNow I really want to see an animation of what the European discovery of the planet looked like. Imagine a time lapse of a Civilization game, as the map is slowly revealed. I want to see that, except actual history.
I mean, I am literally working on a PhD in wood science.
What is likely the cause of this is one thing that people miss about solar panels. Their efficiency is a function of temperature. In the summer, you get more sunlight, but the panels themselves are hotter and thus lose efficiency. In the winter there is less light, but the panels make the most of every photon.
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Nah, I know how to really piss 'em off. The definition of ‘white’ has always been cultural, not genetic. Look at how the Irish or Italians weren’t considered ‘white’ for many generations. So I propose we modify the definition of ‘white’ to deliberately exclude people with strong Southern heritage. Maybe we can justify it with racist psuedoscience. “No one whose ancestors who have lived in such a hot and humid area for so long can really be white.” If you have ancestors who have lived in the American South for more than three generations, you are now a person of color by default, regardless of your skin color. You no longer get to live in the ‘white’ club. If the Irish can be excluded from being white, so can the Southerners. Only people whose ancestors fought on the right side of the Civil War will get to call themselves white from here on out. We’ll even add a question to the Census that asks how long long your ancestors have lived below the Mason-Dixon line. Anyone who says three or more generations will automatically be classified as non-white, regardless of what they list their stated race as. We’ll take the thing from them that they value above everything else, their very whiteness.