I’ve never seen the Final Destination movies, but the one with the tanning bed scene came out when I was in high school.

…Interestingly enough, that was right around when the cliquey “cool” girls stopped going to tanning salons in the winter.

It’s from an SNL skit from ages ago - I only know it because my high school band teacher referenced it enough that he had to show it to us so we’d get it.

Chris Farley plays a motivational speaker whose whole schtick is basically “[don’t fuck up your life] or you’ll end up LIVING IN A VAN, DOWN BY THE RIVER!” Over the course of the skit, it becomes apparent that his angle is less “don’t fuck up your life and have to deal with a tough recovery,” and more “don’t fuck up your life and end up living in a van like I currently do.”

It’s a touch larger than my apartment, too, and with no upstairs neighbors…

Everyone’s throwing out weird mnemonic with alliterative desserts… But it’s just “stressed” backwards.

If you’re stressed, you should have some desserts to calm down!

Okay, so I’m not a big AI guy. It kind of sucks at everything we try to do with it, and it’s basically a huge waste of resources right now.

But… Sometimes it’s fun to play devil’s advocate.

AI consumes shitloads of electricity and water, and produces nothing but slop. Even if they’re not using evaporative cooling, that water use impacts the availability of usable water downstream of the data center. Also, it’s a huge money pit - last I saw, AI companies weren’t really turning a profit.

The article addresses electricity (Altman specifically called out a pivot to nuclear, wind, and solar), but doesn’t say a ton about the other issues… Which could all be addressed with coastal data centers.

Don’t worry - I’m not about to suggest hearing the ocean up to cool data centers. Instead, why not pivot back to evaporative cooling, but with seawater?

Build the data center, and put some cooling pools around it - twelve seems like a good number. Make the pools big enough that the center can be cooled without the use of all of the pools (this is important). Heat sinks are made of metal, and saltwater is bad for most metals, so slap on a few sacrificial anodes like they’re metal-hulled boats. Boom - the data center is now cooled using non-potable water without warming the ocean.

Now, as water evaporates, salt deposits will form in the cooling pools. When a pool gets too salty, it can be drained (or allowed to fully evaporate), and the salt can be knocked off and collected. Boom - losses reduced, data center is now a salt farm. Salt’s not really worth much, but it could probably be marked up and sold to tech bros as fancy “AI powered sea salt.”

And then, once we’ve done that, we can train the AI to do something useful, like… Uh… Clean it’s own salt pools with a little robot, I guess; it kind of sucks at everything important.

IIRC, the guage running from “very nearly empty” to “almost full” is an intentional thing, weirdly enough.

On the upper end, it’s because supposedly people feel better if they fill the tank and the needle doesn’t start going down immediately.

On the lower end, it’s to give people an earlier warning that their tank is (very nearly) empty, so they don’t run out of gas on the road.

Gonna come at this from kind of a scholarly angle here… Yes. Yes absolutely.

And just for fun, I’ll use the Bible to argue in your favor.

You raise the point that even the New Testament (the half that pivots from “follow these rules” to “don’t be a douche”) shouldn’t be taken literally. Some might argue that that’s the only part that should be taken literally, but let’s take a look at how Jesus chooses to illustrate that message: by doing miracles and relating parables. He’s not regaling crowds with true tales of history, he’s telling them made-up stories to convey a point about morals.

Hm… Made-up stories to convey a point about morals…

Stories, perhaps, like someone turning into a pillar of salt because they chose to dwell on the past instead of moving on? Or about the value of perseverance and solidarity in the face of continued adversity? Not giving up hope, even when you’ve lost everything? How murder is just straight up bad?

Lot’s Wife, Moses & the Pharaoh, the entire book of Job, Cain & Abel; all from the Old Testament, and all far less believable than the Good Samaritan… But somehow, those stories are to be taken as truth, while a story about a nice guy existing in Samaria is an allegory for the goodness in all of us? It’s all parables, all the way down. The New Testament is just parable-ception - it’s a made-up (or at least, very heavily embellished) story about a nice guy who tells stories about nice guys.

I mean, they could just turn one of the warehouses into a big communal shower, and that would…

Oh.

Wait.

Oh no

Yeah, lacking an amaro, I feel like it might be a touch unbalanced.

That said, you could probably make a toned-down version at home. My wife commented recently that Dolin vermouth has some notes that are reminiscent of tomatoes, and they definitely show through when I make negronis with it. Gin, Campari, and Dolin, with the herbal garnish from this instead of an orange peel might work pretty well!

It’s more of a public speaker thing than just a politician thing, but… Well, politicians are all public speakers, so it makes sense that that’s the context you’ve seen it in.

It’s literally a practiced gesture - public speaking makes use of some gestures that telegraph well to crowds, but seem unusual otherwise. IIRC, that fishing rod grip is an alternative to gesturing with a fist - it looks less aggressive, but gets the point across.

all those chilly willies

Yeah, I heard the weather was pretty bad this year. Ngl, though, I feel feel like my fragile sense of masculinity would be much more threatened by a bunch of massive flopping songs on a hot day, than it would be by a bunch of tiny chilly willies on a cold day.

…Hold up. Poor/middle class guys with small schlongs drive huge trucks and loud cars. Does this mean that rich guys with tiny tallywhackers go into politics?

Yeahhhh… I took a class on the history of the Bible, but that was about a decade ago, so I’m spotty on some of the details. Thanks for fleshing it out, though - I knew my take was probably missing something!

It’s because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.

That might be a bit oversimplified, but that’s really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.

Idk about that…

When you practice something, you’re actively changing your technique to elicit better results. You’re not making huge changes, but rather a series of miniscule ones that add up.

For instance, I could sit down with a flute and a piece of music, and play it decently. It wouldn’t be great, but it wouldn’t be terrible. If I play it the same way every time, it’s always going to sound decent - but it’s always going to have the same wrong notes, the same rushed passages, the same intonation issues… If I practice it, I can make changes over time that fix those things. I can fix my fingerings, even out the rushed bits, adjust my intonation… But then I wouldn’t be doing the same thing anymore, I’d be doing something slightly different.

Well, yeah - before you’re born, they want you have a life; after, they tell you to get a life and quit whining. Sounds pretty “pro-life” to me!

(/s, because tone doesn’t carry well in text)

Training isn’t a bad option, though, especially since some jobs will pay you for it. Some trades do paid apprenticeships - the pay isn’t great, but it’s better than paying for training.

Alternately, manufacturing jobs can be pretty good. I had a friend who got a job working in a factory right out of high school - he started at $20/hour, with a sizeable raise after the first year.

So, uh… We have the same thermostat at my job. It’s not great. You can’t just tell it what temperature you want the room to be, you actually have to tell it if you want it to heat or cool to that temperature.

Yours is set set to 65, but if you look to the left of the current temp, it says “heat.” Someone likely forgot to change that when the weather warmed up. IIRC, one of the three unlabeled middle buttons will fix that.

Actually though, can we get some malicious compliance? Schools banning the Bible based on rules written by Christian conservatives would be hilarious.

“We have considered several excerpts, and deemed this book unfit for schools. The book opens with everybody naked, and goes on to feature violence on a massive scale, as well as some weird incest, and a man who collected two hundred foreskins. Frankly, we believe that this book should have never been on the shelves here at Li’l Tykes Elementary.”

I always assumed the same… Turns out, a wastewater plant and treatment plant for drinking water look a lot more alike than I thought.

I’m pretty sure you could drink it, you’d just want to do it far enough away that you don’t have to think about where it came from.

It sounds like you’re probably good.

The slope itself shouldn’t matter as long as the drain hole at the bottom of the sink is still higher than the drain hole in the wall. You can also angle the p-trap itself a little bit, but it still needs to be able to hold enough water in the bottom to block the pipe.