My work phone for my old job, lived at work. When I clocked off, unless management really wanted to go dragging my actual cell number out of my resume, I was unreachable. If it’s that much of an emergency, you can get someone else.

Yeah, I thought the larger body of evidence all but proves that it was a wet market source.

Nah, “conditional approval” is written into the regulation. You might know this wording better as “pay us a large sum and we’ll give you approval.”

Heinlein was…rather directionless on his politics. I think it was Clarke that once remarked that Heinlein’s politics depended on who he was sleeping with - which is why you get weird whiplash from the anti-governance free-love (and incest and racism) in Methuselah’s Children and Farnham’s Freehold to a full throated defense of utopian fascism in Starship Troopers.

The truth is those “career experts” are now long gone. The ones who needed to continue working have either gone into industry or left for greener shores. The ones who could retire, did (a good chunk of them also having left the country). It’s a billion times easier to stop doing science and turn off all the equipment, than it is to turn it back on. Even the agencies that are hiring again, are having trouble - my friend is a PhD physicist interviewing for Los Alamos right now, and normally, there would be HUNDREDS of applicants for these government positions.

They got 60 applications for two jobs, total.

Nobody wants to work for the government when we’ve just learned some billionaire friend of the President can fire you just because Grok told him you were worthless.

Narcotic? Nah, this is good old fashioned blackout drunk. My roommate at college was a heavy drinker and frequently found himself 4+ hours across the state on a Monday, with no recollection of how he got there.

Engineering too. A huge chunk of my company’s design engineering staff are H-1B because you can get away with paying a lot less.

I however, give you Genesis 1:28: ‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”’

Combine this with the Revelation, wherein Jesus shall return and build the perfect Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and you can see where a lot of more apocalyptic, “what does it matter” Christianity comes from really easily.

Nah, that’s a little too savvy for Trump directly. We can infer, from stories given to us, that he literally just sold secrets over the dinner table at Mar-A-Lago in his first term.

This is my thought. The admin (not Trump because I don’t think he can plan more than five minutes ahead right now) is either going to launch a false-flag, or deploy a nuke. Maybe both, so we can say “look, we SAID Iran had nukes!”

The FBI director is a podcaster, the HHS secretary is…whatever RFK Jr did before (the word “failson” comes to mind).

I’m remembering the koan in Bulletproof Monk now.

Because they are.

The quickest way to ruin doing most anything you love is to do it for a living.

Oh that’s easy. Turns out everyone on the board is now a landlord for like 100 properties each, they’re all simply ADMINISTERED through the corporation, for which each board member pays a modest fee.

We have nukes. Trump is desperate for ANYTHING to make his mark. Being the first president since Truman to deploy one would be something I could see him doing.

Plus all the shock absorption for the lense. And the avionics if you don’t plan to just have this thing drop film into a predetermined area (like the old Keyhole sats or the U-2).

No no, Lindsey Graham was pretty clear that this is a war for oil. You can extract oil from a fallout zone, you just need a large amount of workers who you don’t care about. Wonder where they might find those.

Legitimately nothing. I think this is MS looking for use cases, because they have sunk all their capacity into AI. They cannot detangle themselves from their AI, and they’re trying to course correct into SOMETHING that might be profitable and pull them out of their death spiral.

Legitimately the dude is a sociopathic teenager.

“Why would I wanna spend time with Grandma or the kids or my wife or my dog when I can sit and play video games and draw cool stuff in my notebooks.”

I don’t think any of these fucking weirdos know what “genuine human connection” IS. I don’t think any of them have actually internalized a genuine, caring relationship at any point. They know how the steps of the dance, they can do it on command, but it’s soulless.

Getting every episode of Dr Oz uploaded to your frontal lobes.