Christopher Long

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." Thomas Sowell

The fact that Jennifer Newsom has killed more people with a golf cart than Tiger Woods is mind blowing 🤯

At the end of Interstellar, Murph is nearly 90 and dying. Cooper is still physically in his 40s. The distance between them isn't years. It's a black hole spinning at 99.99% of maximum angular momentum. Kip Thorne, the Nobel laureate who consulted on the film, spent hours proving this was mathematically possible. A time dilation factor of 60,000x on a stable orbit. Nolan made that number non-negotiable. Thorne thought it was impossible, ran the Kerr metric equations, and found it was marginally achievable. Then Nolan broke two of his own filmmaking rules to shoot it. He filmed McConaughey's reaction in close-up first. Directors never start there. And McConaughey hadn't seen the video messages from his on-screen kids. Those tears were real. First take. Ellen Burstyn was 82 playing elderly Murph. McConaughey was 45. No de-aging tech. No prosthetics. The age gap between father and dying daughter was real because the physics demanded it. Jonathan Nolan's original script had no reunion. The ending was darker. Cooper never made it back. Christopher read his brother's draft, added this scene because he was a parent, and called the father-daughter relationship "the north star of the film." The most devastating goodbye in modern cinema exists because a physicist found a loophole in Einstein's equations and a director became a dad.

@Shabbosgoy That's where the Rams played I think.

This is what they took from us.

Saint Paul budget: +57% since 2018. Population: –0.5%. One line goes up. The other doesn’t.

The New York Times has an article examining how a Nepalese Uber driver named Anup Baniya supports a family on $25k take-home pay. Midway down the article, we learn a shocking fact: Baniya pays $2,400 per month to rent a Toyata RAV4 hybrid SUV. A new RAV4 costs around $32,000 for a base model. The monthly payment on a 60 month financing plan is $629. So why is this guy paying four times that? Because NYC caps the number of licenses it grants for for-hire vehicles, so people with the licenses rent out their cars and plates to people who don't have them for hundreds of dollars per week. But why would anyone take such an arrangement? Why would Baniya pay $30k in overhead to earn $25k? Why doesn't he just walk into a McDonald's and ask for an application? Hourly fast-food workers earn about $40k per year in NYC. According to the article, Baniya drives under this arrangement because he likes being able to choose his own hours, though he complains about the impact of sedentary 10 hour driving shifts on his health. But if you find that unpersuasive, another possible reason someone might work under such an arrangement could be that his legal status bars him from other work (the article does not say whether Baniya is legally allowed to work in the US). Platforms like Uber require drivers to provide Social Security Numbers to set up a driver account, but illegal immigrants routinely circumvent this by buying or renting active accounts from other people who are legally allowed to have them. A recent Transunion survey of gig workers found that 45% of respondents had rented out or sold access to an account. The article mentions "a recent tax return," but that doesn't mean Baniya is here legally. Illegal immigrants in New York file tax returns under ITINs, which enables them to get refunds for taxes withheld, as well as qualify for public subsidies on health insurance and childcare. Illegal immigrants who file this way are protected from immigration enforcement by New York's sanctuary law.

I'll always prefer and frequently wear Hoppe's No. 9

Am I the only one around here old enough to remember "Daily Nightly" by The Monkees?

@Bob_Janke I'm prolly day drinkin' again.

@OctaneBoy Whrn

You think something tastes different because of how it got hot?

Man Watching Golf Realizes TV Has Been Paused For 20 Minutes buff.ly/KDRzmVo

In Dire Need Of Toilet, Artemis Lands At Buc-ee’s buff.ly/WTtDXfO

𝗢𝗣𝗜𝗡𝗜𝗢𝗡: Throwback uniforms are much better than City Connect uniforms.

This is hilarious! Posted by ⁦@DraftKings⁩

When gas prices hit a record high of $5.02 under Joe Biden, you told Americans living paycheck to paycheck to buy a $60,000 electric vehicle.

@PatGarofalo "Anoka couple;" sure, whatever. After all, Alphonse Capone was just an Illinois businessman.

Minnesota used to have a culture of high trust. When somebody asked for financial help, we could usually trust them. That is no longer the case. Minnesota’s culture is now closer to low trust. It is past time for our programs to be redesigned. fox9.com/news/anoka-cou…

"the business model" = using public lands, monopoly power & price gouging to force customers to hand over money up front so they can't get it back when things go bad

@SteveAustinWI Looks like those Lutherans morphed into Global Refuge.

No way will the Lutherans in MN allow bathhouses and live sex shows. Oh wait, the Lutherans don’t run MN anymore.

Lloyd's of London had a $200 million problem floating 210 miles above Earth. So they called NASA and said: go get our satellites back. NASA charged them $5.5 million. For that price, they got two astronauts in nitrogen jetpacks, flying untethered at 17,500 mph, manually stopping spinning satellites by jamming a spike into their rocket nozzles, then having a third astronaut swing them into the shuttle cargo bay with a robotic arm. The first retrieval went wrong. The grapple fixture didn't work. Joe Allen had to hold a 9,600-pound satellite over his head by its antenna for an entire 90-minute orbit while Gardner bolted an adapter to the bottom. His wife radioed from Houston: "Make sure there are no pigeons on your shoulders." They did the second satellite two days later. Ran an hour ahead of schedule. When Discovery landed at Kennedy Space Center, a Customs official (arranged by NASA pranksters) confronted the crew about duties owed on $200 million in imported satellite equipment. Lloyd's awarded them silver medals, flew them to London on the Concorde, and arranged tea with Prince Charles. Gardner held up a "For Sale" sign next to the satellites. The jetpack he used was permanently retired. No human has flown untethered in space since. $5.5 million for a $200 million repo. The best ROI in insurance history came from two guys in jetpacks.

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks. The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people. ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher. My Take The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing. I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all. Hedgie🤗 nature.com/articles/d4158…

"What fuckin' dimension are you in right now?" instagram.com/reel/DW9As21Dg…