Socrates was famously called the ‘gadfly’ because he would pester elites by challenging their supposed wisdom. People that would be highly knowledgeable craftsman, financiers, politicians, etc. would then over estimate their knowledge outside of their realm of expertise and claim to be wise in all things. They would know just enough to sound knowledgeable, but really know very little about what they were talking about (related to the Dunning-Kreuger effect). The takeaway of Socrates’ gadfly work is that sometimes wisdom is acknowledging when you do not know something.

AI can have a lot of “knowledge” (it doesn’t actually know anything itself, but rather has pattern training and access to data references). But what it doesn’t have… like at all… is wisdom. It doesn’t understand, literally, anything at all. It might have some guard rails up to limit is hallucinations. It might even say, sometimes, that it doesn’t know. But it is just as happy to ramble on with pure and complete nonsense that is all just a stream of patterns training and probabilistic guesswork. If it has a nugget of data or even an entire library related to your prompt, it will present it to you. But it can 100% just fill any gaps or take the response into tangents that are nothing but guess-the-next-word, probability, looks-good-to-me word salad that can contain several “facts” that are nothing but random word associations from its training with no reference for its basis.

It is a glorified autocorrect. You cannot trust its information blindly, and using it as a tool in this way, especially while staking your fucking law career on it, is goddamned moronic.

My point boiled down to the fact that someone cannot justify their stance that trans Healthcare isn’t necessary while thinking their cosmetic care is. That those two things are not comparable in either importance or their life-saving outcomes. Again, I’m not reducing trans gender affirming healthcare down to cosmetic care by drawing the comparison to it. The point is that there is no comparison between them beyond the superficial.

You working with a micro twig? Sometimes trimming back the foliage can help make it seem longer.

Nothing. Is as bad. As THAC0.

I get what you are saying. Certainly many do treat it as cosmetic. And insurance companies will do anything they can get away with to not pay for care, no matter who you are.

My counterpoint is that these people that are getting elective cosmetic treatments and surgeries to affirm their gender expression see that as important for themselves. But there is no way to justify that importance and not see that it is no where near as important to them as actual gender affirming care is to a trans person. To minimize or reject the later while choosing to seek the former is outrageous. That is the kind of hypocrisy that I’m saying can shine a light on the actual importance of trans healthcare.

gasp! clutches pearls

How dare you imply such vulgarity about my branch measuring device.

This is a silly take. The point is not to compare someone to something they hate, as if that is an insult in itself, to propagate their hate. The point also not to say that things that affirm the gender of cis people is the exactly the same as trans care. The point is the hypocrisy. The point is that their hate is baseless and irrational and they often share more in common with those they hate than they will even acknowledge. They don’t have to be hypocrites for their hatred to be irrational bigoted, but when they are, it make it all the more apparent and easily seen as egregious. There is value in highlighting the hypocrisy and those commonalities for them and others to see, and in normalizing things that affirm ones gender identity, cis, trans or otherwise. Why are we pretending that pointing out those things is somehow a microaggression against trans people or a sign of sharing in that bigotry?

For a much less loaded comparative example, If someone made fun of someone for liking comic books while wearing a batman/punisher tee shirt, you aren’t shitting on comic book fans by pointing out the contradiction. Yes, I’m aware that is a reductive comparison. It’s for illustrative purposes, not to reduce the plight of trans people to a hobby. Don’t come at me.

The correct way is to see how deep into a Pringle can it can go. For an accurate measure, you’ll need to prevent angled entry. You can help it slide in straight by using a couple guiding sponges on either side of a latex glove attached to the rim pushed up inside it. Put a bit of Vaseline in the glove to prevent tearing the glove with the rough bark. For maximum safety, put the jar of Vaseline in a warm water bath for a few minutes beforehand to make the viscosity better for smooth entry and exit.

It’s not impossible. It’s actually pretty simple. You just don’t give it access to credentials or resources or sensitive information of any kind. Does that make them basically useless? Yep. But then you don’t create massive security risks and legal liabilities with gross negligence either, so… gotta weigh those things against each other.

God spent millenia damning every single person to hell for eternity. Because even if they weren’t sinful themselves, and had absolute faith in him, they were still responsible for the sin of their fathers all the way back to Adam, which is a very fair thing. Sorry, guys, he didn’t make the rules… oh wait.

“OK, so I have decided that damning every person to hell forever is a dick move. Seriously, my bad. But I made a new rule. If I create a person without a human father, he won’t inherit original sin. Then he’ll also be a cool sinless human being too, cuz he’s my son and all. So if I kill that guy in a pretty brutal way to make him suffer. A. Lot. (And, spoiler alert, I’m totally gonna do that), then since he didn’t have sin, he can take on all the sins of everyone in the world himself from then on through forever. This essentially makes those people sin free and able to enter heaven.”

“And yeah, I could also just have him do that freely for all humanity. You know, to make up for the billions I damned and will continue to have tortured for eternity despite giving them no means to avoid it until now. All because a couple ignorant humans ate some fruit at the dawn of the universe that I explicitly told them not to eat. But anyway, he’s not going to do the whole sin eating thing unless you swear eternal fealty to us. Because that’s also part of it, I decided.”

“I created an inherently unfair system. I barely patched it to fix it way after it should have been fixed, but also added a big requirement to get this fix, and I will still eternally damn otherwise good people that do not actively kiss my ass. I’m a perfect and benevolent being, btw.”

Someone ought to ask Cynthia M. Masters a couple fucking questions.

Beethoven: Huh? What did you say?

On the one hand, I don’t really care about the name or have any sentimental attachment to Volts over Voltas, and I can totally get behind naming the unit 1:1 with the guy’s name rather than anglicizing it for no real reason.

On the other hand, it was two British scientists that coined the term, honoring the Italian scientist more than 3 decades after his death (though, interestingly, they originally used it for units of resistance, a.k.a. ohms, rather than the unit of electrical force it is now). It is not as if Volta himself wanted to name a unit in his own honor, or that he or anyone else initially called it a volta and then it was bastardized later.

So it really seems like this has nothing at all to do with Volta himself and honoring him, which the current name still does. Rather it seems it’s stupid nationalistic posturing about rejecting the international cooperations and influences of science and proping up Italian scientific achievement in particlar.

Also while it’s true that the vast majority of units honoring scientists’ names are 1:1 to their namesake, including some that probably could’ve done with some abbreviation (looking at you, goeppert-mayer), volt is also not the only unit to have been abbreviated from their namesake. Farad (Faraday), bel/decibel (Bell), poise (Poiseuille), baud (Baudot), neper (Nepier), torr (Torricelli), Cartesian coordinates (Descartes), bark scale (Barkhausen)… probably more. He’s got company.

I don’t think Talarico is cool in general. He seems like a pretty campy christian dude with decent morals and a good attitude. But the bar is set really damn low. Compared to the alternative, Ken Paxton, he’s LL fucking Cool J. That evil moron has done more damage to the integrity and trust in our election system than most, and worked constantly to thwart good policy making under Biden. Talarico. May not be exciting, exactly, but he’s young, he’s more progressive than the establishment, and Ken Paxton doesn’t need to be in any office, let alone a federal one.

James Talarico is a cis man. Not trans. Stephen Miller was intending to A) suggest that he looks like a biological woman dressing as a man, meant to be an macho insult, and B) probably mislead Trump’s idiot base into actually believing that to be true so they automatically hate him. Stephen Miller is a literal nazi in all but (maybe) name, and he hates anyone that is not white, not straight, not cis, not biologically male, or not pro fascism. If you are any of those things, he believes suggesting that you are other of those things to be inherently an insult. Whether or not you consider being trans bad, he does, and so him saying it is still an insult, particularly where it’s not remotely true.

Thanks. My stupid phone’s autocorrect likes to ruin things.

It’s a perfectly valid strategy. If there is an outside chance that the political opposition takes control and forces an end to the war or removes Trump, it is in their interest to wait if they can.

He said ‘outwait’ but you’re also not wrong.

“President Trump’s fundraising on behalf of the Center is exemplified by the tens of millions of dollars already raised,” Floca wrote. “Further, the President has committed to raise $150 billion on its behalf from private donors over the next two years.”

Three things.

1. What in the world would they ever need $150 billion for? The entire complex was built in 1959 for $61 million or $687 million adjusted for inflation. They could build 218 new Kennedy Centers with that money. Upkeep, renovations, and marketing for a theatre do not take that kind of money.

2. We’re giving Trump personal credit for fundraising "tens of millions’ for the center since the name was added 5 months ago… sure. And he has promised to attract donations for $150 billion in 2 years. The difference between “tens of millions” and $150 billion is basically $150 billion. $100 million, which he’s apparently not yet fundraised, would be .07% of that goal. He’s not even made a dent in his full 2 year commitment in 5 months. If he raised $100 million A DAY for two years he wouldn’t even be halfway to that goal. This money already fundraised “exemplifies” absolutley nothing in relation to this commitment made.

3. The guy making these arguments is a personal insert by Trump to serve this exact purpose. He’s been in this position for 2 months. Trump fired the entire board to replace them with his people that would let him do what he wanted with the Kennedy Center. Trump’s name has been on the building since December. The center wasn’t about to close down then. They didn’t have a fundraising issue then. If there is suddenly a lack of funds coming in apart from those Trump personally solicits, it’s because Trump decided to turn this decades old theatre into a vanity statement for himself, exert control over the events and shows the theatre puts on, and make it a part of his political propaganda wing instead of the mostly independent arts theatre that it was before. Shocking that that may have caused previous investors/donators to decide to spend their money elsewhere.

He made a theatre a partisan entity in his own name. If it fails because of that, all the more fitting of a metaphor for the taint and rot that Trump’s very touch causes.

Why would you hire the guy who performed at a Trump rally where he called Puerto Rico an Island Of Garbage? Why would you ever give that guy a single dime or second of screen time in general, let alone on a show you are producing, featuring yourself, with you name on that, to be forever associated with you? Kevin didn’t say the words, and almost certainly didn’t personally approve the joke ahead of time, if only because that’s how roasts work. But he knew, or should have known, exactly who he booked and what that entailed.

You don’t get to say, “Yeah, I invited a controversial comedian whose primary claim to fame was performing at a rally for the far right candidate, now president, where he made blatant anti-immigrant and racist remarks about Latino, black and Jewish people, but how can I be held responsible when that guy said similar racist stuff at my event!?” Like inviting Jeffrey Dahmer to the potluck and being shocked at the dish he brings. Kevin, you’re either a complete moron, or wanted the controversy. So actually, you’re a moron either way.