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Cake day: October 22nd, 2025

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  • “Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”

    The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.

    This is three-quarters into the article and should be at the top. The instructor took care to establish that the grade was not punitive based on the student’s belief but reflective of failing to meet objective criteria established as the requirement for the assignment.


  • AI is going to destroy a lot of software companies in a way I haven’t seen talked about yet: it will give CEOs exactly what they ask for.

    Before you jump in with “AI produces garbage and isn’t reliable by design,” let me say I agree with you 100%, but for the sake of argument, assume for a moment it could produce a high quality product.

    Once a company gets large enough, very often the CEO gets completely removed from how their company actually works. I know I’ve worked at several companies where the job of my boss was to shield me from corporate nonsense so I could make an actually good product. If I and/or my boss were replaced with AI that actually followed the corporate nonsense, the company would go belly-up quite quickly.

    I think many CEOs are looking to replace huge fleets of workers with AI they can directly prompt. Even if it worked flawlessly, since they don’t know how their products actually bring value to their customers, they will speed-run torpedoing their company’s place in the market by their own ignorance, ego, and overconfidence.


  • That would only be true if what people had to spend their money on stayed the same, and the author goes through great detail showing that the individual components of what people have to spend their money on to “exist” (i.e. a minimum cost of economic participation) have changed drastically in 60 years. Not only that, some of those pieces (child care, health care, higher education) have increased in cost breathtakingly faster than inflation. Sure, you could reduce that to a statement that “therefore the inflation metric is wrong,” but the author goes on to show what a better, more representative metric would look like and tell us about the economy, and that’s a good discussion mostly orthogonal to whether the inflation calculation is correct.


  • This is an amazing breakdown of how catastrophically bad the definition of the federal poverty line is in the modern economy. They use sound logic and data to calculate that the value should not be around $31,000, but in fact closer to $140,000.

    With this foundation, they revisit common graphs that economists trot out to “prove” life has objectively improved for the majority of Americans in the last 60 years, and show that they actually show the opposite. Those graphs are built on top of the poverty line, and that calculation is bunk, so the whole argument crumbles.

    The obvious next step would be to calculate the improved poverty line at key points in America’s last 6 decades and generate corrected graphs, but that seems like a monumental effort. I feel like someone could make that into a dissertation.




  • I didn’t say benefits were not cut off. I’m challenging the assertion that the mere fact that the government is shutdown is the cause of funding being cut off, like the phrase I quoted implicitly assets. The shutdown alone is not the reason funds for SNAP were cut off, and my proof of my assertion is the fact that funding has never been cut off in previous shutdowns.

    This means someone must have chosen to execute this shutdown differently on purpose. Republicans are in charge of all branches of government, so they are the most likely culprit.