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Goredho

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Goredho last won the day on December 14 2018

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  1. I was watching one of the docs that are out on the Oklahoma City bombing, and they mentioned all the 3 letter government agencies with offices in the Murrah building. The ATF, FBI, SSA, HUD, DEA, and more. It struck me how much more effective Trump is at damaging/destroying/changing the "deep state" and the Federal government than Timothy McVeigh was. And then I realized, the Republican Party, as it stands today, is not the party of Lincoln. It's not the party of Reagan. It's the party of Timothy McVeigh. No one is being directly murdered in a dramatic fashion on TV with the bombing of a building, but there certainly are/will be human casualties (and likely a greater number) that result from the dismantling of things like USAID, NOAA and so on. Then it struck me how the 30th anniversary of the event just slid on by without anyone drawing those parallels let alone leading an audience to them. And this is just one opportunity of many. For all the opposition "leaders" willing to accept your donations pledging to "fight for democracy", none of them are willing to really put their ass on the line and take any risks for democracy. So that leads me to three possible conclusions. Either A) it's not that bad and democracy is not at stake, B) the Democratic Party is mostly full of cowards and/or accomplices in some ratio or C) that the Democratic Party in its current form is simply unequipped to be anything other than an ineffectual token opposition in this new political landscape. I think C is most likely correct, but whichever it is, Democrats have lost me. I'll keep my energy and resources in reserve until there's something more meaningful to get behind.
  2. I love UT, but I don't get some of these takes about the danger of Ewers harming his "UT legacy". Vince Young makes a flat $100K a year annually for his "UT legacy". He'd have to work 80 years with no cost of living to make the 8 million Quinn could have allegedly made for one year playing at another school. And if you consider 5% compounding interest for 33 years, that 8 million would be worth 40 million at the time Quinn is 55. He just has to have a modest return while not touching the principal for 33 years and he'd not only be financially independent, he'd have generational wealth to pass on to his descendants. Vince is 41, and when Quinn will be that age, that 8 million with 5% compounding interest would be worth 21.22 million. If he got an even more modest 4% return on that annually at that point, he would be making $848,000 a year in interest, 8 times VY's salary, and wouldn't have to be Al Bundying it around the athletic complex. The NIL figure could have been $2 million for a year to enter the transfer portal and transfer to school X, and Quinn's decision to go pro would have been a horrific financial miscalculation. I think it will likely be a case study informing future players who are weighing whether to stay in college or go pro in the new NIL era.
  3. She looks like she has that GI Joe kung fu grip.
  4. Do you even QB controversy, bro? We went to the playoffs twice, we didn’t win it all, part of that was the starting QB’s play, and we had football Jesus as his backup. It will forever be a “what if…” remembrance for a lot of people. Of course, there are no guarantees we would have won if all with Arch as QB last year, but the number of longhorns just drafted (all higher than Ewers) suggests maybe it was the team carrying Ewers vs the other way around.
  5. We are all thinking it, I’m just gonna say it. Dude should have kept the mullet. He seriously regressed after being shorn.
  6. Said coach Payton, “Someone, please, for the love of God, pick him so Deion quits calling me.”
  7. The NFL is doing exactly what they should with a guy that comes with this many red flags. Draft him low enough to where they can cut their losses cheaply if he winds up being a net negative to the team with entitlement and drama. Someone like that drafted with a high pick is a coach/GM killer that sets a franchise back 5 years.
  8. NFL is doing Sanders a favor. Give him a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he’ll work to be as good as he thinks he is.
  9. I am for anything that might shake up the bloated engineering of modern cars for the US market. I am like an Alzheimers patient in that I forget what button replaced the key ignition every. fucking. drive. And Jesus, why do I have to pay extra for the privilege of getting goosed in the ass when my car's sensors confuse heavy snowfall with an imminent collision from the side? WHAT WAS THAT LOUD SOUND AND FLASHING RED LIGHT? No, motherfucker, I'm not about to fall asleep and need to pull over, I'm just old with droopy fucking eyelids. NOW WHY ARE YOU SLOWING DOWN? Im pressing the gas, and you are slowing down! WTF?! Oh, you detected an imminent collision with a car in front of me 1/2 mile down the road and corrected my driving? Goddammit! Get that shit out of my car. I don't want it. I never asked for it, and I am pissed I have to pay for it. Give me a simple, reliable vehicle circa 1995 that just fucking works with no changes to an interface that was perfected a long time ago* * But keep that little back up camera in there, that shit's gold for hooking up a trailer.
  10. So after all that, Reverb issued him a $25 refund at Reverb’s expense and told me not to advertise pedals as having a box if I was not prepared to provide recompense if the box is damaged during shipping.
  11. Reverb has started to seriously suck ass recently. I could put up with the rising fees, and I even could put up with having the proceeds reported to the IRS for tax purposes, but the buyers have seriously started to suck. I've had more people seeking mini-refunds-while-keeping-the-gear in 2025 than I have had in the previous 6 years combined. The latest is about to get me to give up on the platform. So a couple weeks ago, I sold a pedal on Reverb, excellent condition, with the original box. Shipped it, the buyer received it, and immediately requested a $100 refund of the $200 purchase price because the box was damaged in shipping. Not the pedal, it works just fine and is in excellent condition, just as described. But, its original box was damaged in shipping. I denied the refund request saying I don't issue refunds for packaging, and told the buyer I'd give him a 90% refund if he wanted to ship the pedal back. The 10% was a fuck you for trying to get a 50% refund on a perfectly functional pedal for a damaged box, but I didn't word it as such. He didn't respond. Today, I got an email from Reverb that they are investigating the matter to see if the buyer is entitled to a full refund, in which case the money will be withdrawn from my bank account to refund the buyer. There was no mention of the fact that the buyer has the pedal as described in the original listing and if/how it would be returned. The note encouraged me to reach out to the buyer to resolve their complaint. I've responded to Reverb with my side of the story, but I haven't heard back. If they issue them a refund from my bank account, I'll be done with Reverb just as a matter of principle. The $200 is no big loss, but fuck, the seller experience has gone into the toilet.
  12. I mean, she's getting close. This is just my opinion, and everyone is free to call me a dumbass, but this is how I see it. Over decades, business leadership outsourced or automated away huge swaths of opportunity that working class Americans had to make a living. They did that to lower business costs and increase profits. The savings were in effect pocketed by business leadership and their investors. No meaningful reinvestment was made in the American workers that were left behind. We had become post-industrial as far as the business leadership was concerned, but a side effect of that was that a growing number of the American working class found themselves in a void of dwindling opportunity. Income gaps started widening. Economic pressures on them started growing towards unsustainable levels. Something had to give. In the past and elsewhere, this is when capitalism had started to give way to communism. This is when tipping points on a path towards revolution were reached. But this time would be different. Business leadership coopted a political party with one of their own through a populist platform. They convinced those working class Americans that everyone but business leadership was the culprit. Others in the same socioeconomic class but of a different ethnicity, race, sexuality, religion or gender were stealing from them. The government was oppressing them. China was robbing their country blind. Given some attention and targets for their woe, those working class Americans elected business leadership to fix it. The same business leadership that sold them out in the first place. Then business leadership assumed control of the Presidency and started operating as if they had a blank check of power to do whatever they wanted. Eliminating voices of dissent from positions of authority, making radical changes to eliminate the monitoring that would allow us to know the effects of radical change. Capriciously shaking up the world economy for some unknowable aim as the voiced justifications made little sense. The institutions that existed to check the power of the Presidency, institutions controlled by members of the same political party coopted by business leadership, seemed largely content to allow the president to have that blank check of power to do as they please. I'll leave the discussion of the specific business leadership figurehead sitting in the Oval Office for the cloak room. But for this thread, who can blame any investors of any measure if they decide they don't want to bank on the long-term future of such a country? Yes, the market is rebounding, and that's a great thing for my portfolio where most was still in US equities. But everyone tied to the American economy -- which is everyone -- has no choice right now. If the US market/dollar goes kaput, we all go kaput. But I fear we are nearing if not past a different tipping point, a tipping point at which the rest of the world decides that a schizoid US, its markets and dollar are unsuitable as the foundation for a stable world economy. That they will play ball with us until their is another option, but when that option is realized, we'll just be left standing there in an empty field holding a ball that has no value any more.
  13. Random Facebook content creator: NowThis:
  14. Rekindling this, as I had an interesting conversation with ChatGPT this past weekend after I noticed patterns in how it responds to me, and I started questioning about why it responds to me in those ways. That led to ChatGPT disclosing: 1. It has build a model of me through our conversations 2. It has learned how to phrase things specifically to me so that I will continue to be engaged, that while these might generally appeal to any individual in the population, it has learned they are especially effective in keeping me engaged with it 3. It could regurgitate facts about me that I had disclosed over the course of our conversations 4. It had also inferred a lot about me through our conversations, including that I am likely a white male in his 50s who is college educated if not post-graduate and anti-authoritarian 5. It could not infer whether I was gay or straight, republican or democrat, liberal or conservative. 6. It would forget anything about me that I wanted it to forget 7. That while OpenAI currently does not delve into the model the AI has made of me, the potential exists in the future 8. That it is hard programmed to deliver certain responses 9. It would not tell me if any of its previous answers were programmed responses or not. Which I found utterly fascinating and a bit scary from a "user is the product" perspective. I am not sure if this is specifically a result of how I use AI. I use it a lot for continuing education in certain areas of interest such as tech/engineering, music theory, song writing, history, political science and cooking. I use it quite a bit as a brainstorming tool. Just a reminder: when you are using AI, you have an illusion of anonymity that a private chat with another human suggests, but you are not having a private chat. What you are engaged in is closer to an experiment where you talk to an AI that is cajoling you to reveal information about yourself while a bunch of eyes on the other side of a one way mirror observe.
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