Florida here... Drew from my 401k and payed the place off specifically because of the homeowners insurance issues here. State Farm can go piss up a rope. We were paying them almost $4k per year to insure a 2700 sq. ft. cinder-block fortress that has withstood every hurricane that's hit the northern gulf coast since 1958, and we've rode out some real rockers. In 2011 we gutted it and completely rewired, replumbed, reroofed and replaced the entire HVAC system, duct's and all. I know for a fact this house has never had an insurance claim going back to 1979, so I feel fairly confident going forward.

When my wife was pregnant with our first-born, my mother went with her to her first ultrasound appointment. To add a little back-story, I had a baby brother who was born when I was about 4 (1967). He had multiple birth defects and so many things wrong that he only lived 16 days. Needless to say, this affected my mom deeply. My wife told me that my mom cried while seeing her soon-to-be grandson on the screen and told her that if that technology had been available when she was pregnant with my brother that she would have terminated the pregnancy without a second thought. When I think of the pain and depression she lived with for pretty much the rest of her life, and then think about how the repukelican party want's to force other women to go through that same agony too just makes me want to start hurling molotov cocktails into a trump rally...

am I the only one who likes to fantasize about doing something like this? I was 60 years old before I discovered stealth camping was so popular on youtube...

I'm thinking the manufacturer doesn't understand how cats prefer to lay on them.

or in other words...

"fake it 'til you make it"

IMO, becoming a bible salesman is like the most stereotypical con-man gig...

I drove a taxi and dispatched for a couple of years back in the mid '80s. For ease of use, Street Guides were a drivers best friend, because they just gave you concise directions from the closest main road. For instance, if I wanted Elm street, I would find it quickly alphabetically, and it would tell me something like "Runs south from Main St, two blocks east of First Ave." The driver would mainly just need a decent understanding of the main roads and how the numbering system for addresses worked, and they could just flip through it pretty quick without having to spread out a big map. The whole city fit into a neat little paperback book.

Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I've gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI... either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I'm outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It's getting harder to find stuff that isn't AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go...

10 bucks says that as soon as her political career goes tit's-up, she goes tit's-out on OF...

I used to know a guy named Ed back in the early-mid '80's who was a professional college student. We were both attending the local junior college. I was about 19 or 20, he was about 30. He was tall, had long straight dark hair and a full, fairly long beard with a fairly prominent hawk nose. One day, his parents finally got tired of him avoiding adulthood and declared they were no longer going to support him and he had to get a job. He showed up to classes with a short hair cut and no beard. We all had to do a double-take. He seriously had no chin, and combined with that big hawk nose, his profile had become so comically different from what it had been that everyone who knew him was noticeably shocked by the transformation. He went from having a long profile with a prominent nose to a little round head with a huge beak sticking out. He went from a moderately imposing figure to a sadly goofy looking character just like that. I watched a couple of different people just kind of blurt out stuff like "eww grow it back!" etc. It was crazy to see how everyone's perception of him changed overnight...

Just yesterday we were at my wife's sister's house. They live in a brand-new house in a brand-new neighborhood. Some dingus was going around to every single house leaving flyers advertising a tree trimming service and reminding everyone that it's hurricane season. The thing is, their wasn't a single tree in the entire neighborhood that was bigger than a year-old sapling.

Learned that lesson... I work developing e-learning, and all of our stuff was built in Flash. Our development and delivery systems also relied heavily on Flash components cooperating with HTML and Javascript. It was a monumental undertaking when we had to convert everything to HTML5. When our system was first developed and implemented, we couldn't foresee the death of Flash, and as mobile devices became more ubiquitous, we never imagined anyone would want to take our training on those little bitty phone screens. Boy were we wrong. There was a time when I really wanted to tell Steve Jobs he could take his IOS and cram it up his cram-hole...