An anecdote in agreement:

The CEO of my company left in September 2025. For years leading up to that, there were 3-4 layoffs/riffs of approx. 5% reductions (edit: yearly reductions). Never hired more US employees except for VP and C-level until we became very top-heavy. What jobs they do replace are primarily India and some in Argentina, many are contractors. They “cook the books” by avoiding taxes and “creatively” avoiding reporting gains/losses due to having a large amount of contractors. 2025 ended up losing a ton of customers due to churn (i.e. leaving or not renewing contracts). Most of our customera are US or North America-based and the contractor teams have such high turnover that customers are sick of us not supporting them well anymore.

Know where that former CEO is now? An AI startup.

You’re right. I was thinking “alphabetic” would resonate more with a general audience, albeit not 100% accurate. Thanks for pointing it out!

As a bonus note, the term “mora” is used to describe a syllabic character.

(edit: typo)

In case you’re wondering, the “Japanese” section of the shirt has a mixture of actual Katakana (usually used for “style” or foreign words) and Hiragana (used for native words and [grammar] case markers). Plus, random shapes that look somewhat like Katakana. Some appear to be backwards Katakana, while some are simply made up (like the “R” character).

Also, the shirt says you need to turn you head to read it… But traditional Japanese, which was written top-down and right-to-left, was readable without turning your head. T L K
H I I
I K N
S E D
_ _ A

(edit: Vertical text is weird in Markdown)

I realize it’s meant as a joke. But if you know Japanese, even if only how to read the non-Kanji, alphabetic characters (Katakana and Hiragana), it borders on lame. Especially since they faked a bunch of the characters.

This is actually false in a literal translation sense. That’s the interpretation/implication of the title. Similar to how you would interpret the title of a biography called, “Abraham Lincoln”, as “The story (of the life) of Abraham Lincoln”, despite the latter not being the actual title.

In this case, the title is literally “Odysseyus” where “-us” is the nomative (subject) case case marker required in Latin. The English literal translation is, therefore, simply “Odyssey”, his name.

Because it’s an epic story, however, it matches English and general writing conventions to translate it as “The story/journey/epic/tale/what-have-you of Odyssey.”

Over time, especially in English, “O/odyssey” has taken on a more generic term, as well. So, adding the extra stuff in an interpreted translation (vs. literal translation) also helps differentiate the title of the book from a generic odyssey that might be a grand adventure by/with a different main character.

Even the Sun’s light can take thousands of years to actually exit the sun.

The wording is not how light from our sun works… Unless you’re simplifying greatly. It’s not in a maze or some container that takes thousands of years to escape. The light is based on photons that are emitted via nuclear fusion then some mass being converted to energy/photons.

I’ve read that photons can bounce around (i.e. be absorbed and re-emitted) an estimated 40,000 years… but we all should understand that is a) an estimate and b) an estimate for the inner-most photons. Photons created via near-surface level areas of the sun may be emitted outward from the sun near-instantaneously.

All this to say that the light/photon(s) don’t/doesn’t start out as light. However, once a photon exists, it may be trapped for thousands of years due to the shear amount of mass trapping it and needing to be absorbed/re-emitted until space-bound!

It was… he just lost the head-butting ability afterward!

Went there in the mid-2000s. Awesome to see it over 100 years ago! Thanks for the share! It’s not a huge walk from the ocean either, iirc. Something like 4-6 blocks.

$150 per hour? I’m in salaried software engineering and barely making a third of that after a promotion.

If what you propose happens, all the prices of everything would skyrocket… It seems good on paper, but it ignores all the greed of capitalism…

For better or worse, (the latter for rich folks…) there “needs” to be tiers of incomes (in Capitalism). Bumping the minimum just bumps the prices. We’ve already experience it with minimum wage bumps in the US. We don’t have an actual solution that works at the moment in the US because minimum wage increases automatically lead to greedier CEOs.

This sounds like schizophrenia to me. Particularly the weirdness and occasional paranoia. There’s no agreement on the causes of it, as far as I know. Whether AI can either cause it or push someone over the edge, I have no clue.

My brother has schizophrenia and is one of the most technologically inept people I know - both before the symptoms and currently. It is known to have existed well before modern computers.

Also worth noting that schizophrenia onset usually occurs in adulthood with and average age between late teens and early 30s. Later onset is less common, but known to occur.

A social security number/card is not exclusive to citizens. Green card/permanent residents, for example, usually get them - particularly, if planning to/already working.

Any kind of national/citizen id would need a whole new process and require it be provided to 100% of existing citizens. Time-consuming and certainly a cost associated with the process.

It’s one of those “in theory” easy things, but a lot more difficult in practice, I imagine.

I would like to see measles, polio, and bird flu (preferably, in that order) spread through members of the executive branch (and those appointed by such) and the oligarchy. I see no concern there.

Interesting fact I learned when replacing detectors is that small humans (i.e. toddlers) are more likely to wake up and respond to human voices/words.

There are detectors, for example, that say “Fire” (in English-speaking countries, of course). And kids are statistically more likely to wake up and respond to the smoke detector alert than the brain-piercing, ear-splitting buzzers that are more standard.

I put the above ones in bedrooms and the horrible, deafening ones in hallways and common areas. I also went the 10yr lithium battery route. Had to search online to order these, because they’re not generally available at retail stores.

I agree with the general sentiment. My thought is that a lot of these can be conceptually equated to “receive”. This includes situations like “fetch” where you you’re saying “Do something, so that I receive X!”

I think you can reformulate a lot of these to be from a different perspective, such that a different verb would work. “Receive” just seemed the one that struck me as the most likely.

Difficult to tell if this was a joke or autocorrect. Being forced to play a game (sudoku) as a loss, sounds… odd.

Seppuku is the Japanese word for a type of honorable suicide by cutting your own stomach in a Z shape (or at least attempting to).

Yes, thanks for clarifying. I typed it out that way because “reserve” was in my head for the remaining sentences. As we both noted, there is a reserve, but it doesn’t back all the minted fiat.

There was a gold standard. Current fiat money in the US is based on an imaginary “base” that the Federal Reserve (itself, an institution notoriously based on an imaginary base). There is a reserve of gold, but it no longer matches the amount of minted coins/printed bills.

Edit: reserve->standard as noted in a reply

While the lucid dreaming comments may work, there is a lot of trial/error/luck to it, I think.

I had accidental lucid dreaming as a kid but have failed to do so as an adult. I have tried numerous times, even with considering suggestions from people online. Therefore, I will come at this from experiences I have had without intentional lucid dreaming. (Possible that I reached a point of accidental lucid dreaming during these, but hope it helps, nonetheless!)

Finding “perfect” hiding places after/during a chase.

Recognizing that waking up from a similar/the same situation very recently (eg the movie Inception) is basically impossible. Even if you have brain damage, the duration of a day and night are fairly difficult to ignore. Brain damage or medicine/drug use is more like losing chunks of time that feel lost vs waking up repeatededly and/or in short order.

I (at least once recently) had a scare that felt like sleep paralysis and/or attempted demonic possession. Basically, I was sleeping but “felt” awake but couldn’t move/make sound and felt like darkness was “hunting” me. It was scary af. I just kept trying to scream or yell “ahhh”. I think I tried it about 8+ times before I woke up finally. Each time I screamed, it got louder…slowly. I knew I was breaking free slowly, but it was extremely scary and I felt like if I didn’t escape, I would be trapped/taken forever.

Depending on the feeling of the dream, you can sometimes play in/with it. This touches on the accidental side of lucid dreaming, I think, but I have had variations of feeling afraid and then treating it as a game, such as hide’n’seek or even flipping it to start finding/hunting the thing that feels like the agressor. Not sure I recall enough details to explain specific examples, but hope this general explanation helps!

Edit: typo

I grew up elsewhere but lived in Canberra (the capital in ACT) for about 4 years. I heard about all the scary, deadly things and was a bit worried also. Long-story, short - it’s very unlikely to be an issue unless you live in certain areas.

The big funnel-web spiders are mainly an issue in an area north and a bit south of Sydney and reasonably close to the coast. I never saw one of them while living there (except in photos). My understanding also is that the spiders tend to live outside of the urban areas and more in the suburban/rural areas.

You’re more likely to get into a car accident with a kangaroo than have an issue with those big-ass spiders, from what I was told. They’re somewhat like deer in the US. But less of a joke because they are known to slash people with velociraptor-like foot naila/claws after being hit by cars and assumed to be dead by drivers who get out and check. Death by disoriented/injured kangaroo is scarier than death by spider in Australia for most, and I say this seriously!

The scariest spider stories I had… 1. out of town for several months and my bicycle had a black widow-looking (the redback, I believe) spider under the seat. and 2. one day, there was some sort of spiders born and sailing on the wind event where little spiders where everywhere (but they weren’t the Sydney funnel-web or redback spiders, luckily).

The last three sentences are not quite accurate. It’s not necessarily that nothing existed before the the big bang. It’s a singularity event where mathematically we can simply not know what existed at/beforehand that moment. It is somewhat comparable with the event horizon of a black hole.

There is something happening/existing, otherwise a black hole would not be able to occupy space or affect light. We simply do not have the ability currently to understand what that is.

By definition, that is not nothing. It is a that we cannot know/understand it, at that moment. Notably, a lack of evidence is not evidence of nothing.

Late reply, but apparently it was also known as “Verse, Chorus, Verse” which rings a bell from that time of life.

I also came across the No Alternative website. Put a lot of this album into perspective for me! Things I sorta knew where going on but make a lot more sense in hindsight and just being old enough to follow it.