Lopez Bees

Happy 10th anniversary to the time we convinced my sister there was a zombie apocalypse happening while she was high from wisdom teeth surgery

@svdaedalus @TheCaptainEli And the Chinese EV makers could not exist without heavy support and protection from the CCP.

@TheCaptainEli Let Chinese EV into the US and then let's see how Tesla holds up; they require US protectionism to stay on top

Tesla alone sold 117,300 EVs in the US — more than ALL other EV makers combined (99,099). GM + Hyundai + Toyota + Rivian + Ford + Lucid + BMW + VW + everyone else… still couldn’t beat Tesla’s single-quarter numbers. Tesla outsold the entire rest of the industry by over 18,000 vehicles.

@jarvis_best @physicsgeek As usual, Stelter seems to have the stupidest, most self serving take on any issue. Tater gonna tater.

Boy I tell you what you give the journos 10 years to chase down leads and a half dozen whistle blowers on a silver platter and political expediency and by god they will break the story.

@iamdavidcorwin @ArthurMacwaters Yes, it’s shocking how many people you can “save” from extreme poverty if you starve them to death.

@ArthurMacwaters Bullshit. Nearly all of the worlds poverty alievation was done in China, a socialist country led by a communist party. Meanwhile more and more Americans are falling into povert, in a capitalist oligarpoly.

population has grown ~9x in 200yrs, while poverty trends to 0 people act as though capitalism is a zero sum game, but it’s actually the only system that creates positive sum outcomes the average person today is far richer than most kings in days past

@theripsnorter @ArthurMacwaters You think California is a free market?

@ArthurMacwaters Capitalism alone does not guarantee low poverty. See California with the highest poverty rate (SPM) in the U.S.

Bernie Sanders’s hypocrisy explained by his own posts 😂

A company lost $100,000 after testing a robot on a dog walk, and everything fell apart the second the dog saw a squirrel. In late April 2023, a team of scientists believed they were finally ready to test a robot designed to handle real-life tasks, including walking a dog. After plenty of planning and simulations, they wanted to see how it would perform in an actual everyday situation. At first, everything seemed fine. But the second the dog spotted a squirrel, the whole test went wrong. The dog suddenly took off, dragged the robot with it, and sent the machine crashing hard enough to destroy it. What was supposed to be a breakthrough ended up costing the company around $100,000, all because they forgot one simple thing: real dogs do not care about simulations.

@Felicit96215374 @HuskerStorm @r0ck3t23 If you're advocating for the elimination of public school altogether, I think we can find common ground.

@LopezBees @HuskerStorm @r0ck3t23 Your kid can’t have a choice in a compulsory system.

Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption. That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time. Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.” The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs. That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone. But the education system still runs on its logic. A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait. Neither is being served. Both are being processed. Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.” AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student. One at a time. Every time. It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle. It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done. A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture. The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does. No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill. Because the math doesn’t work. AI doesn’t have that constraint. Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.” The brain isn’t broken. The format is. Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes. That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem. Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.” Four years. Six figures of debt. And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you. The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance. Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.” The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you. Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace. The question isn’t whether the old model survives. It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.

@k1rallik "Sorry, best I can do is our third most beautiful woman...."

🚨 Uganda's general just demanded Turkey's most beautiful woman as a wife and that was the SECOND most insane part of his demands.. $1 billion. 30 days. or the embassy closes. Turkey has F-16s and NATO. Uganda has a general posting on X like it's a wedding registry. no diplomats. no summits. just vibes and a wife request. we are not in a simulation.

@Felicit96215374 @HuskerStorm @r0ck3t23 There's probably an alternative. Your kid could have Sam Altman's AI, or Anthropic. It's not like there aren't suitably progressive choices for those parents so inclined.

@LopezBees @HuskerStorm @r0ck3t23 But a government mandated AI-implemented curriculum is not the way, lol….musk is a transhumanist ya morons. Snap out of it.

@Felicit96215374 @HuskerStorm @r0ck3t23 That solves my animus about having a member of a public employee union teach my child.

@LopezBees @HuskerStorm @r0ck3t23 I propose homeschooling, yes.

@HuskerStorm @Felicit96215374 @r0ck3t23 One human teacher for every eight students isn't working. What do you propose? One to one.

@LopezBees @Felicit96215374 @r0ck3t23 Maybe we should hire more human teachers? Not replace them with Roby the Robot.

The math on this collection should mass-humble every streaming service on the planet. One guy. A Sony cassette recorder. 10,000 concerts over 40 years. 30,000 individual sets from 3,000+ artists. R.E.M., The Cure, Nirvana, Björk, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, Phish, Tracy Chapman, Boogie Down Productions. His first recording of Nirvana was July 8, 1989 at a tiny club called Dreamerz. Kurt Cobain was 20 years old. The band introduced themselves by saying they were from Seattle. This was two full years before Nevermind existed. That tape is now cleaned up and streaming for free. The digitization operation alone is wild. One volunteer drives to Jacobs' house monthly, picks up 10-20 boxes of 50-100 tapes each, runs them through 10 simultaneous cassette decks he repaired himself. 5,500 tapes digitized since late 2024. Dozens more volunteers across the US and Europe do mastering, metadata, and setlist verification. Sometimes they contact the actual artists to confirm what songs were played. The collection went from 171 recordings in January 2025 to over 2,300 by April 2026. At this rate it'll take years to upload everything. Spotify has 100 million tracks. Apple Music has 100 million. Neither has a recording of Nirvana's first Chicago show. A guy with a tape recorder in his pocket does.

𝐍𝐎, 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀𝐈. 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐏𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍. I see it constantly now. Someone reads a post or an article and spots an em dash — that long horizontal line — and immediately declares it was written by AI. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡, 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐆𝐏𝐓. You know who else uses em dashes? People who actually learned how English punctuation works. I don't normally step on this particular soapbox — and I commit authorial malpractice by never trying to sell you my books — but I've authored over 30 of them. Many have been international bestsellers. Well over 𝟏,𝟎𝟎𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐬 in print, translated into 7+ languages, sold around the world. I am, amongst many other things, an actual author. So let me give you a quick education your grammar teachers apparently skipped. The em dash — this thing right here — is one of the most versatile punctuation marks in the English language. It's called an "em dash" because in traditional typesetting, it was the width of the capital letter M in whatever typeface you were using. It serves three primary functions. First, it sets off a parenthetical statement within a sentence — like this one — when you want more emphasis than commas provide but less formality than parentheses. Second, it signals an abrupt break in thought or a dramatic pivot. Third, it introduces an explanation or amplification of what came before it. Writers have been using it for centuries. Emily Dickinson used em dashes so obsessively her manuscripts look like they were attacked by a horizontal line. Mark Twain used them constantly in dialogue. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of them had access to ChatGPT. Now for a bit of trivia most people never learn. There's also an 𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 — slightly shorter, the width of the letter N. The en dash has a narrower purpose: it connects ranges. Pages 12–44. The years 1941–1945. The New York–London flight. It's the dash between two things that are connected but distinct. Most people have never heard of it, and most fonts render it just barely shorter than an em dash, which is why almost nobody notices the difference. Both have been part of formal typography since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. Gutenberg's typesetters used varying dash lengths to organize text. By the 18th century, printers had standardized the em and en dash as distinct glyphs with distinct grammatical functions. This isn't some modern AI invention — it's older than the United States. And if you use Microsoft Word, they're trivially easy to type. An en dash is Ctrl + Minus on the numeric keypad. An em dash is Ctrl + Alt + Minus on the numeric keypad. Word also auto-converts two hyphens (--) into an em dash if you have autocorrect enabled. That's why you see me use them in my books and in my posts — because I know they exist and I know the keyboard shortcut. The reason AI chatbots use em dashes frequently is because they were trained on well-written text — books, journalism, academic papers — written by people who knew the rules. The AI learned proper punctuation from proper writers. That doesn't make proper punctuation a sign of AI. It makes it a sign of 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲. For the record, the only things I use AI for are conjuring up a quick graphic — like the image on this post — or as a shortcut for preliminary research. Think of it as a Google accelerator. The writing? That's all me. It has been for 30+ books and countless social media posts such as this one. If you've reached the end of this post, you now know more about dashes than most people who graduated with an English degree. And the next time you see an em dash and your first instinct is to scream "AI" — maybe consider that what you're actually looking at is someone who paid attention in class. Or someone whose grammar teachers didn't fail them quite as badly as yours failed you. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝟓𝟎𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝. 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐬.

@MichaelARothman And thank you for putting a space before and after the em dash, unlike those barbarians that crowd em dashes in between words.

First, young Canadians don't have shit. They definitely don't have half a mil to pay the boomers in extortion fees so that they can leave the country. Second, how are they planning to enforce this? Charge $500k for a passport? What stops the US from just offering amnesty? Ottawa can't tell Washington what visas it can and cannot offer. Third, and what makes this malicious boomerfap especially piquant, young Canadian professionals don't leave because they especially want to. Wanderlust aside, most would prefer to remain close to family and friends. They leave because they don't have a choice. The Canadian state is set up to restrict opportunity to the point of nonexistence. Canada is a country that strangles ambition in the crib. As the old joke goes, if Musk had stayed in Canada he'd be a mid-level financial manager at CIBC (with any possibility of further promotion eliminated by the all-of-society DEI imperative). Canada invests an absurd amount into educating its youth. It then refuses to allow them to use their training. So they leave. The University of Waterloo is one of the best engineering schools on the planet; virtually all of its graduates end up in the Bay area. Because the alternative is sitting on their hands or trying to get a job in the Ministry. It would be a mistake to see Canadian investment in education as intended for the benefit of Canadian youth, by the way. Like everything else in Canada's political economy, this is a subsidy to a Liberal Party client group, in this case the academics and administrators staffing the universities. The primary purpose of the universities is providing sinecures to liberals; the secondary purpose is indoctrination of the youth with liberalism; the third, to launder liberal ideas through intellectual channels. Whether the kids learn anything, or whether they can use whatever useful knowledge they acquire to (lol) better themselves or (lmao) "build the country", is not a priority. If it were not for the Laurentian Elite running the country into the ground, if young Canadians were not sabotaged at every step of their lives, then there would be no brain drain problem. But as usual, boomerlibs would rather punish the youth to try and fix the problems the boomerlibs caused.

@JebraFaushay Fair point, but the last time was during the Ford Administration.

Once in a while, Saturday Night Live is funny.

This should be headline news EVERYWHERE. A Pfizer insider who was former head of toxicology in Europe has just come out and said something that many "conspiracy theorists" suspected. He estimates that 20 000 to 60 000 people in Germany have died from the c*vid vaccine. This was said at a parliamentary enquiry commission in Germany. So why isn't this massive news being reported everywhere? Is the mainstream media that has recieved millions in funding from Bill Gates deliberately covering this up... 🤔

@travis4nh @MorlockP “Hardest working man in show business”? Obviously a book about Ryan Seacrest.

I get email. I respond.

@Felicit96215374 @r0ck3t23 Found the teacher. If what you say is true, how do I find myself living in a school district with an 8:1 student teacher ratio with scholastic results in the bottom quartile in the state?

@r0ck3t23 Worst idea ever. Kids need to be taught by a teacher and they can accelerate if need be, but absolutely not using AI.