Ich auch

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” exists exactly for this, I think.

Yeah fair enough. I probably should have qualified it more.

Old Man Trump doing old man things.

RDR2 was a beautiful game and one of the few that gave me a serious emotional response at the end. But it was a bit long winded along the way, so I’m OK with this.

The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.

This. It was meant to be viewed at 480p.

I agree with all this, but I think it is all to say: ISPs support Net Neutrality when it behooves them.

Yeah, they jumped the shark with that shit a while ago.

Note that it will also have an effect on the quality of reviews. Glassdoor is only worried about number of accounts at this point. It’s unfortunate, since sharing this kind of information is constitutionally protected, but it isn’t necessarily profitable.

Shareholders demand ever increasing return. There is only one way any of this goes, and we are witnessing a total systematic collapse. It is a mathematical certainty.

You cannot squeeze blood from a stone.

It’s certainly possible. I do get ads that don’t seem relevant for me pretty regularly. But this last time I’m referencing: one of the first ads I saw that night was for our discussion topic.

I’m not disagreeing with you, so I’ll just mention it’s safe to say: whether it is digital fingerprinting or mic listening, the surveillance level is absolutely off the charts.

They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to.

I don’t deny that fingerprinting is powerful. But, I also have started to wear a tinfoil hat on the “mic always listening” issue. I have experienced (several times) ads for random things that I have only discussed – never searched for or had other interaction with in any way.

It wouldn’t be in my fingerprint, so the only other possibility is that others with a similar fingerprint to me had already searched for the same thing. Frankly, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, I just find it far less likely that we have such a hive mentality that everyone with similar digital fingerprints ends up having the same “random” discussions. At that point, “they’re always listening to your mic” seems downright practical.

And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.

Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.

Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.

And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.

Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.

Sounds like they want a round of layoffs but don’t want to pay severance.

Good thing he gutted Twitter’s content moderation teams in the name of “free speech”, eh?

If I had a dollar for every time a billionaire loses more money than I could ever dream of because their hubris got in the way or they misunderstood a concept or were just plain dumb – well, I guess I’d be a billionaire too.

At one time it would have sounded like a conspiracy theory, but you don’t get here without a massive disinformation campaign.

Trump’s supporters have been so programmed to accept everything he says at face value or, in some cases, just to ignore what he actually said in favor of the party’s updated spin. In all cases, they believe it is impossible that he could do any wrong, so any semblance of incongruity or poor leadership or any negative aspect of Trump at all must be due to lies of his opponents – even if that means the entire system would have to be rigged against him to an extremely unlikely degree.

The last time the world saw these tactics used to such an extreme extent and with such success required a widespread campaign of so-called “denazification” after a very prolonged war.

I guess that depends on your age. Even for some of the most contested elections in my lifetime (e.g. Bush v Gore 2000), supporters of either side did not have the kind of rabid quality that so many have now.

I wonder how much of that has to do with semantic drift on Elohim, i.e. by the time the oldest extant manuscripts were written, the figure was already considered singular despite retaining the noun plural morphology. The implication there would be that earlier (now lost) manuscripts may have had plural verb agreement for Elohim, or maybe simpler / more plausible, there was a time in the oral tradition where Elohim was still considered a plural figure and would have naturally gotten plural verbs.

I think the fact that the plural morphology exists on the noun at all suggests at least that the figure started as a collective.

Edit: probably also worth a mention that portions of Genesis (e.g. Garden of Eden) mirror portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story which is overtly polytheistic.

Yeah. I think historically it is interesting, because the Hebrew Elohim of Genesis is in the plural, and there is evidence that followers of El believed him to be one deity in a pantheon. In that sense, Elohim and the associated creation myths have their roots in a polytheistic religion.

Yhwh was more likely a figure from a belief system of a different region which ended up co-opting the earlier stories. I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I think it is actually plausible that things like the Catholic Holy Trinity have roots in El and Yhwh technically being different figures.

But is it Yhwh or El?