How long did they do this?

hourly positions between Oct. 3, 2021, and Oct. 27, 2025.>

Oh, so 4 years of labor violations should be a nice payoff to employees, right?

Class members are guaranteed to receive at least $50 from the settlement. Higher wage earners will receive a larger share of the unpaid wages settlement fund.>

Wow! Amazon’s giving them enough to go purchase a nice dildo so they can fuck themselves sigh

Methode: Wait, I don’t even have to give you a mostly-useless grimoire? How do you feel about hugs?

My thoughts, ended up being longer than I meant, but here:

Paying attention to the loudest voices, you will think we’ve split into two societal groups: those who use AI and think it’s absolutely perfect and will save humanity (“sheep”), and those who deny it has any uses whatsoever, is morally abhorrent, and is going to end mankind, either through war or through decay (“luddites”).

Most people will be in the middle. We will slowly learn what LLMs are good at doing, and what’s it bad at doing, and it’ll be messy. People will lose their jobs, but then some companies will realize that AI can’t actually replace those people, and some services/products will get dramatically worse/enshittified. Others will begin making a living through the use of AI, some adding great value to society and others just creating slop that a small but big enough fraction of the masses will consume to keep it around. People who are smarter at separating the good from the bad will laugh at both the luddites and the sheep.

One or two AI companies will fail and there will be massive turmoil and fallout for them. But most will either slowly reduce expectations or succeed moderately over time. Generalized AI will turn out to be way harder than some thought, and consciousness a way bigger leap from LLMs than predicted. There will be a loud push to implement safeguards, and it will be mostly ignored by politicians. However, there will be some progress on energy and water concerns, leading to large differences between countries/US states in terms of regulation. AI will turn out to be mostly bad for kids.

There will be several huge successes - a huge medical cure/vaccine, or an amazing technological invention/improvement, probably some kind of multi-disciplinary discovery. The people who drive it to completion will acknowledge it wouldn’t have occurred without AI, but humans were mostly responsible, but the media will claim that AI invented it out of whole cloth. There will also probably be some high-profile failures, like car crashes or critical server outages, maybe even leading to deaths. Luddites will seize upon them as if they’re apocalypses, and sheep will dismiss them as anomalies. The truth will be in-between. Most people’s lives will not change drastically.

Thank you!

I suddenly want to go out and buy Jersey Mike’s…

“Happiness is a warm gun”

In the US, tipping is such a trash fire. The problem is that you’re practically trapped in the system. It’s being implemented all over the place now, but restaurants are the classic example. If you go to a restaurant, the tipping standard is now about 20%, but 25% is not uncommon. You can technically choose to not tip, which allows the restaurant to pay your waiter less than minimum wage for that service. (technically the restaurant has to pay them more to make up for undertipping, but it’s average, not per-hour)

So your choices as an individual are to: tip the standard 20-25% (participating in an awful system), not tip (enabling criminally low wages), or never eat at restaurants. There were a few no-tip restaurants that popped up in my area a few years ago that I tried to support, but they all went out of business, likely because people can’t do math - “these restaurants cost 20% more! I’m never gonna go there and instead I’ll go to that other place and tip 20%!” It fucking sucks and everyone hates it, but there are basically no proposals to ever change it.

One of my favorite down-to-earth celebs. Hoping he gets through treatment and beats cancer back hard. Hail to the king, baby!

ME TOO -Grandma Sweetie

They’re minerals, Marie!

Strong agree on Dead Like Me! I’ve rarely met anyone else who’s seen the show. It’s not perfect, but some moments were absolutely adorable. The plot of the movie wasn’t bad, but the recasting was awful, because Mandy Patikin was half of the heart of the show.

He moves slightly faster than your walking speed, but slightly slower than your running speed. Every few minutes, he will get stuck at a tree root.

What is the charge? Eating a succulent meal?

Rocket is another name for arugula, the leafy green veggie. I only know this from watching British food Youtubers, so I think it’s a regional name

I have a rule as DM that I will never fudge rolls against the players, but I will fudge rolls in their favor if it fits the narrative. Three players consecutively miss an enemy? Oh no, next turn it got a critical fail and then failed a Dex save, slipping and landing prone. I guess the players get advantage on melee attacks! Don’t do this often, but I’m the right spot it’s fine.

Monsters can just be dumb, too. INT of 6 means those Blobby Blobs are gonna fight poorly, attacking the tank and splitting up attacks. Also, the players don’t know your monsters’ stats, so you can make an attack that would get it to 1 HP instead kill an enemy. I also don’t do this often, but sometimes they just get unlucky, and no reason to TPK.

Speaking of TPK, you can let them fail forward. Monsters rarely have reason to attack downed/unconscious PCs, so let them roll death saves, but it usually takes a while to die. Everyone’s unconscious? Stop combat, no more death saves. Instead, they wake up as prisoners and have to escape. I had a particularly fun one where my players would have died to a trio of night hags (if you’ve played Curse of Strahd, you know the ones). Instead, they woke up and were given a mission, but the bags also stole parts of their “souls,” taking Max HP from one player, speed from another, giving one a trait that they would lose all hope, stealing another’s eye (disadvantage on Perception), etc. Then they had to fulfill the mission, but later came back at a higher level and beat the hags, gaining their souls back. Everyone loved getting revenge!

If you like jazz at all, go listen to this. Its album cover is completely accurate, because it is an absolute banger. I had a CD of this when I was younger, and would listen to it all the time!

Forbidden chicken nugget

Okay, this is funny because it’s usually right. People are partly products of the environment they grew up in. But also, in this silly comic strip community, here’s a happier story.

My grandma grew up learning and believing that black people were inferior, that being gay was unnatural and a sin, and that poor people had simply not worked hard enough. She also voted for these values and campaigned for them. By the time she died at 86, her best friend was a lesbian woman, she had marched as an ally in several Pride parades, she had left her lifelong church to join one that strongly supported social justice and allowed her to become an officiant to perform her lesbian friend’s marriage, she proudly supported Barack Obama, she regularly volunteered as a cook in a soup kitchen and later did paperwork when she couldn’t easily stand, and she left most of her money in her will to charities that supported disadvantaged families, civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and other social justice causes. People can change.

I use DDG, which works for about 90% of my searches, but when it doesn’t work, I go back to Google, often in a private window. I do agree that Google is still just, I dunno, better?

Gotta trap him in the pantry