Is this a “learning how to secure oneself for sleep” owlet thing? If that was an adult bird, my first thought would be that it was sick, but I’m not familiar with normal owl stances.

I hadn’t realized some owls had such long tails. Great stance on this one.

As late as the 19th century? Belief in “like cures like” alternate medicines is still widespread today!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7253376/

A European survey conducted in 2014 examined the use of homeopathy and other popular forms of “alternative/complementary” medicine… This survey covered 21 European countries and Israel and provided data from structured interviews with 40,185 individuals.

…the use of homeopathy is highly prevalent (≥10%) in France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

The principles of homeopathy were first introduced in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann… One core tenet is “similia similibus curentur” (like cures like), i.e. the principle of similarity: compounds, which can produce symptoms (at high doses), can cure a disease with similar symptoms (when administered at low doses).

By what metric? Recycling gives a new use to discarded materials, so the material might be 100% not-discarded, but new energy is still consumed in the recycling process. This is why reducing and re-using are more powerful levers than recycling.

There is also the detail of whether a material is truly “re” cycled back to the original use, or is “down” cycled to a use with less rigorous technical requirements.

I hope the AI-chat companies really get a handle on this. They are making helpful sounding noises, but it’s hard to know how much they are prioritizing it.

OpenAI has acknowledged that its existing guardrails work well in shorter conversations, but that they may become unreliable in lengthy interactions… The company also announced on Tuesday that it will try to improve the way ChatGPT responds to users exhibiting signs of “acute distress” by routing conversations showing such moments to its reasoning models, which the company says follow and apply safety guidelines more consistently.

I hadn’t previously come across the printing press as an influence on witch hunts, interesting. It is pretty far down the Wikipedia article, though, and a different book printed almost two hundred years later is also cited as highly influential. I devoutly hope we are not in for two hundred years of unchecked social media and AI driven misinformation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt

…in 1487, Kramer published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (lit., ‘Hammer against the Evildoers’) which, because of the newly invented printing presses, enjoyed a wide readership. It was reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts.

The 1647 book, The Discovery of Witches, soon became an influential legal text. The book was used in the American colonies as early as May 1647, when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663.

And the lab issuing the fake results is based in the US :(

…a single US-based laboratory had certified at least half of the products that had failed Choice’s testing, and that this facility routinely recorded high test results. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-04/questions-over-lab-that-tested-sunscreen-spf-claims/105458458

In the past. Earth no longer has enough of the applicable isotope for them to happen. But it’s cool we found evidence at least one existed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

Anti-intellectuallism is a repeating story in world history. Something about human genetics makes our communities susceptible to this. Khmer Rouge and China’s Cultural Revolution are a couple of examples of these movements gaining control of a government. Witch hunts (any woman with knowledge perceived to threaten church teaching must burn) were a long standing practice often driven from non-governmental actors.

It always passes, but previous iterations have taken decades or hundreds of years.

I’ve occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.

My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don’t have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven’t carved out time to do that.

So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.

The skills of both writing useful minutes and prioritizing actually sending them out are frustratingly rare. An average meeting with five or six people has even odds of not including someone with both of those skills. I can see where reliably having a mediocre AI summary might be an advantage over sometimes having superb human-written minutes and sometimes having nothing.

Amid the racism and misogyny is published work that recessions are when the opposition party is in power. Presumably “economic boom” is when the “correct” party is in power, regardless of “traditional” economic data. Oh, and he’d like to see the US deploy nukes. Bolding is mine.

Antoni’s academic work is also sparse, causing concern from prominent economists. Last year, he co-published a report that purported “the American economy has actually been in recession since 2022,” which economists across the political spectrum have criticized.

Sometime in mid-2019… the account’s username changed to “phdofbombsaway” with the display name “Dr. Curtis LeMay.” The profile image also changed to what looks to be a nuclear explosion. The username and display name appear to be a reference to “Bombs Away LeMay,” a reference to the Cold War general and his controversial stance promoting the use of nuclear weapons. LeMay ran alongside segregationist George Wallace on his 1968 presidential ticket for the far-right American Independent Party.

I do not believe it is possible for cultured meat to ever be cheaper than industrially farmed meat. An animal as an integrated system has too many inherent efficiency advantages over a lab culture, even an industrially-scaled lab culture.

• Animals have immune systems. Lab cultures have to be grown in a sterile environment, which increases costs.
• Animals have digestive systems and can extract only the needed nutrition from common plant materials. Lab cultures have to be fed pre-digested and carefully proportioned nutrients, which increases costs.
• Animals have extensive circulatory systems that efficiently get nutrients to cells and remove their waste. Lab cultures are centrifuged, which doesn’t scale as well.
• Animals have integrated waste processing and excretion systems. Lab cultures have to run external kidney loops, which not only increase costs but are less efficient.

Cultured meat will come down in price, maybe from 10x animal meat to 2-3x, but it’s always going to be a novelty/luxury and will never compete on price as long as industrial animal farming practices are legal.

Insurance might not pay if the person doesn’t meet CDC guidelines. The $140 cost will probably prevent a lot more vaccinations than the extra pharmacy hoops.

Given that kids sometimes play outside, or take some time to get loaded into or out of cars in a driveway, and I am also sometimes outside or driving to or from my house, I feel like I have a decent handle of what kids live where in a one block radius of my house. I may not know the parents, but I would know which door to knock on to meet them.

The article is calling out the logo outrage as a distraction from the Epstein files.

The process of stoking outrage has another effect: It crowds out the news cycle. Most Democrats I know would be shocked at how little the average Republican knows about Trump’s actual conduct and his actual wrongdoing. Republicans can, however, cite chapter and verse about left-wing outrages and left-wing overreactions to Trump.

That creates a reality where they simply can’t conceive of how any reasonable, rational person would vote Democratic or oppose the president and his policies.

There is a house a few blocks from me that, due to the shape of their property, has no backyard, it’s all front. They have maybe fifteen young chestnut trees (bloomed for the first time this spring, but don’t seem to have set), hazelnut bushes between all the trees, and maybe a ten foot by six foot bed of corn. I think other stuff, too, but those are the eye catching things.

I have no idea what they think they are going to do with all those nuts once the trees and bushes start producing, or whether they are growing some interesting variety of corn or just find it entertaining to grow a supermarket variety themselves, but it’s their property and I feel like they should be able to do what they want (garbage crops included) without the city getting up in their business.

Unfortunately many tax payers will support it, because non-standard property appearance drags down property values. Or people just get their panties twisted by stuff. Some of my city’s aldermen are trying to make it illegal to grow corn (technically “vegetable gardens over six feet tall”) in city limits because they have gotten so many complaints from neighbors. Having a food plant visible near a residence? The horror!

The vice signaling at the Fed level such as the “alligator” compound, and the “encampments bother my snowflake sensibility, just move them” shit being done in D.C. is not a carbon copy of whatever California is doing. Success at their self-stated goals is TBD, but the California government is putting actual resources to attempt to provide appealing options to those being displaced.

From the linked article, bolding mine:

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday announced the creation of a statewide task force aimed at dismantling homeless encampments on state property and expanding access to shelter and services.

The State Action for Facilitation on Encampments, or SAFE Task Force, will coordinate efforts across multiple state agencies, including the California Highway Patrol, Caltrans, and the state’s health and housing departments.

The governor’s office stated that the task force will prioritize sites deemed unsafe and collaborate with local governments to connect individuals with shelter, health care and substance use services.

I think you are conflating chronic homeless (less than 25% of all homeless) with people who are homeless for the first time, or have gone in and out of homelessness one or two times. The transiently homeless are absolutely driven there by lack of housing. Chronically homeless tend to have multiple issues that make serving them a challenge, but targeted support programs have been shown to make significant inroads even there.

This page has a lot of detailed breakdowns: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/