Ricofoley

The one time I was dumb enough to fly Spirit they oversold the flight, which is not unheard of, but instead of calmly announcing like an hour ahead of time that they need someone to take a flight voucher I ended up standing around with a group of half a dozen other people watching the guy at the desk stare wordlessly at a crumpled up pile of boarding passes as if he'd never seen a boarding pass before. I think I ended up being the last person they let on once the guy emerged from his stupor.

I think this election is extremely high variance because of how utterly without precedent it is. Biden is not well liked and is old as hell, but Trump is basically equally as disliked and very nearly as old as hell, and oh by the way is about to be sentenced in a civil suit that did not seem to go well for him and awaiting multiple felony criminal trials. I think enthusiasm is going to be way lower than 2020 and polls could be very noisy.

I have no doubt that amongst people in the center, Haley would probably outperform BIden, but I think any prediction of how that election would go would have to factor in the no fact that Trump has no real loyalty to the old guard GOP and would probably be bitching about the deep state taking the nomination from him or whatever and maybe actively telling his supporters to stay home.

Ramaswamy is dropping out, so F for Respects to whatever the hell that was supposed to be

CNN called Iowa for Trump already, so any hope for Haley-mentum in Iowa is absolutely not happening

Amazon Is Selling Products With AI-Generated Names Like "I Cannot Fulfill This Request It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy"

FUTURISM.COM

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Amazon is listing products in which even the title was generated using OpenAI's ChatGPT. Can the internet survive?

There's a huge amount of Amazon listings that all have the same generic ChatGPT "I cannot fulfill this request" message, because companies are trying to use ChatGPT for SEO and not bothering to check if it's actually working correctly. Jesus Christ man. AI is gonna flood the internet with so much unusable crap.

Apparently we gotta wait at least until the end of the month for the ruling to come out

Prices have quietly been creeping back up towards the previous peaks since the crash in 2022. Governments should've finished the job after the crash by regulating this stuff out of existence. We're probably stuck with this shit for a long while now.

Bitcoin (BTC) Price, Real-time Quote & News - Google Finance

WWW.GOOGLE.COM

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Get the latest Bitcoin (BTC / USD) real-time quote, historical performance, charts, and other cryptocurrency information to help you make more informed trading and investment decisions.

I can't imagine there's any way Haley wins outright even if she narrowly wins New Hampshire, but if she does win New Hampshire conceivably Trump might start trying to do Stop the Steal type of stuff, which would both be very funny and also might be a necessary wake up call for people who aren't currently that disturbed at the prospect of a 2nd Trump term.

Right before I stopped logging into Twitter entirely it was around the time of the Mike Johnson speakership vote stuff, and every time a reporter had news about a new floor vote being called or whatever, there would be at least 2 or 3 of those very generic looking blue check accounts in the replies saying with an incredibly banal comment like, "This is a very interesting turn of events! I will keep watching with interest! Perhaps Mike Johnson will get enough votes next time!" It definitely seemed like they were AIs at the time, but I was never entirely sure. I thought there was at least a chance that some of them were people who didn't speak English as a first language and were doing the best they could with Google translate or something. Sure looks like it's much more obvious now and the problem is way, way worse.

Barbarian (2022)

I think the only way this makes sense is that the elective procedure he was getting was something he was extremely embarrassed to admit to anyone, yeah?

Meanwhile, Bears getting absolutely carved up by a Packers QB after it'd seemed like defense had gotten itself together

What on earth is going on with the Eagles lmao

I remember watching ABC's coverage of it starting at about midday when it started becoming apparent that the crowd was getting out of hand.

I remember Martha Raddatz was doing the reporting on the ground and started looking genuinely freaked out after a while. She was never really physically threatened or anything, but people kept jumping into the background of her shots saying shit like "At least we're not destroying property like the BLM riots!" (obviously they ended up destroying a bunch of property). And at some point Chris Christie called in to say that he was going to personally call Trump to tell him to get the crowd to stand down, which obviously ended up doing absolutely nothing. And at no point did I hear anyone in the news studio bringing up QAnon or r/thedonald or any of these online spaces where there were massive warning signs that something like this was going to happen.

It felt like a microcosm of the entire MAGA movment, where the media is just completely blind to where the Republican party is headed and then they're first instinct is "well, we better find someone we can all agree is a Reasonable Republican and see what they have to say about this."

Occasionally I watch my local city council's meetings online, which are very often as boring as you'd expect, but I like to try and have some sort of an informed opinion when I have to vote on them every two years. Anyway, there was one meeting recently where there was a zoning thing where one of these med spa places was trying to open up in a downtown building that'd usually only be for retail stuff.

They gave this whole powerpoint presentation where they kept emphasizing the "medical" part of med spa claiming their treatments were basically a panacea for a whole bunch of different conditions. After they were done multiple people on the council made clear that they were absolutely not going to approve anything that would count as a medical building in that location, and so in response they abruptly shifted to, "Oh no, 'medical' is just a name really. We don't do medical procedures, we're just a spa with treatments like any other spa."

Anyway, I'm glad to report that the city council unanimously told them to go eat shit.

Fun fact, I've been to the hotel where he confronts Tilda Swinton's character. It's actually in St. Charles, IL.

I say, I say, Maine Justice has been served

Update: Tested negative this morning, so got out of COVID jail and was able to have a more-or-less normal Christmas with short stops at both sets of parents.

I've been positive since Tuesday. Symptoms are almost gone, but I've still got a faint line on a test, so I'm currently a home watching a bad and meaningless Bears football game instead of at my parents'.

It's actually wild how clear cut this is. You don't have to bring up anything about racial demographics in districts at all, it just says in plain terms in the Constitution that they're supposed to be contiguous and they draw non-contiguous ones. I'd been assuming this whole time that they'd at least maintained a veneer of following the rules.

It's insane that this article has a whole section about the "synergies" this would create and one of them is just "they would have cop dramas AND cop true crime shows!" It's like the article is cribbed from David Zaslav's powerpoint slides.

Look, I got a lot going on right now

Rudy Giuliani hit with $148M verdict for defaming two Georgia election workers

WWW.NBCNEWS.COM

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An attorney for Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, had urged the eight-person jury to “send a message” with its verdict.

Ya hate to see it