I know I talk a lot especially about this so I'll give you a recap. For thing- New College, my alma mater, has the College Seal it's founders gave it. You can see it at the top of this Wikipedia page. New College of Florida - Wikipedia https://share.google/lkwNvlmkGUrnkw5SO The Founders create the College Seal. It's been this way since the 12th century. Schools create logos; ...use them for different purposes; ...change them; ... get rid of them, ...create new ones, etc. What you don't do is change the College Seal. The College Seal is the prerogative of the founders. I've never heard of this being done in the US. My alma mater has changed the College Seal three times in rapid succession. So, leaving out the two changes in the middle chronologically (and I know what they look like and where they still exist in "monumental" form on campus. Strangely, the one I don't have an image yet of #2 and #3 yet, although I know where to find one of them ("2") on top of the sigh with schools name on it as you drive past it (technically through it) on US41 (Tampa to Miami). So, now they have a 3rd pretend seal. I'm not making this up. The current "seal" is the logo you see at the top of the link for the campus bookstore. Official New College Bookstore Apparel, Merchandise & Gifts https://share.google/sWbuWQrv9FWpDZTFH The "administration" makes up its own rules as it goes along. It's hard to believe but I know it's true. @andyd This is a national news story here in addition to being a local and state news story. This is for two reasons. New College met metrics that could only be compared with a very small group of other schools in a meaningful way for decades. Then, this should tie it together, DeSantis, a Trump ally, our Governor decided he hated New College with a passion because he said it was "woke". He went about destroying the school and hiding its true history. Here is the reference I was making. I'm sorry is was opaque. This history belongs in a library. Its actual history is being deliberately distorted, flat out lies are being told about it, parts of the history (yes, all in writing) has been scrubbed from the official site, the alumni association was ended because every member knows perfectly well that New College is not, and can never be, a Christian nationalist school. First, he famously went after Disney because Disney was "woke". He didn't have the power to harm them. He tried hard and for a long time. His goal is to turn it into a Christian Nationalist school. He can't do this according to our national Constirition. It was private and non-sectarian when it was founded. It's been a public school since the actual school I attended took it over during the inflation crisis. So, his fantasy violates The First Amendment. His thing about having Four College Seals at one time is so strange it's almost funny. But there bottom line is the whole situation is trainwreck. So, @andyd I'm going to try my hand at writing a history and then self-publishing it.

I reduced costs by cancelling my Spectrum Internet account. No landline. That would be equivalent giving back 25% if what I just saved. Hard no. My mobile phone is Verizon via (Walmart) Straight Talk. $50 My phone was locked to Straight Talk but I think there was a limited period Straight Talk could keep it lock. I don't think it's locked no. I have to double check. So my next step is to lower my mobile bill. I don't know. Tello looks like a possibility. I have to read more. I paid my phone bill today and my goal is to change the carrier before this billing cycle ends.

@Bernard Corporations avoid a lot. Trying to place accountability will draw the opposition of corporations. That is a lot of money. Makes forcing universal healthcare against the health insurance companies look easy.

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Clusterfuck

One more. I promise. Link to video This generation gap (specifically) is a cultural phenomenon at this. What made some of the younger ones so clueless, ignorant, self-righteous, arrogant and entitled? I don't know.

Bump Edited. BTW- This is a great example of the destruction of US education. New College was a public school by the time I went there. It's defacto privatized by now. The money generating potential of New College made it stand out like a lighthouse. The US public education system is generally wing starved of resources. There are charter schools (de facto private) being aggressively supported by policy makers. Then there is home schooling. I only know about home schooling in Florida. The toddler stage of home schooled kids in Florida seems to end between 5 and 6. "Is our children learning?"- George W Bush

As well you should.

@jon-nyc I've started taking Jane Friedman's newsletter, because I trust her reporting. Today's newsletter spoke to your question about whether other big AI companies trained on pirated work: OpenAI’s piracy looks to be worse than Anthropic’s piracy One of the key AI lawsuits I’ve been following is this one in the Southern District of New York—a different district from the one where the Anthropic case was settled, and the home of New York publishers and landmark copyright cases. It involves both the Authors Guild and the New York Times, since the court consolidated the cases. Over the last couple of weeks, a lot of information has come to light from unsealed documents. The New York Times is probably taking great pleasure in publishing articles about what’s in these documents, revealing things like: A Microsoft director calling AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT writing that AI posed an “existential threat” to publishers OpenAI developing a hack to get around the New York Times paywall The disclosures related to books are equally bad. OpenAI, like Anthropic, created an internal library of books from the pirate website LibGen and even shared those works with outsiders. One of OpenAI’s employees testified, “The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon.” And an OpenAI researcher described his mission as creating a machine to supplant human authors."

Is it a 'safe space'? (Sort of kidding) I don't think so myself unless you're traveling in a pack. @jodi I remember your posts about Costco. Yikes. Btw, speaking of warehouse stores, I have an acquaintance who got crushed and mangled by a loading door at Publix. He couldn't work after this. I just want a 'human scale'. My house is a huge, heavy, structure with a cathedral ceiling. This means my bedroom ceiling is 12'. This is 4' higher than my bedroom in my old place. I feel very comfortable with it, but it's talking to get used to... My favorite Martha Stewart quote (during one of her K Mart adds)- "Think of your back your backyard as a living room with a very high ceiling".

Yes, the bittern. And the sage grouse. And the frogmouth!

If you haven't bought it yet, it's too late! https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/its-500-toothbrush-disappeared-from-stores-dyson-wont-fully-explain-why/

That's ok. The Florida choices have been non-existent since before DeSantis. This was a Democrat state when I was born in '67 until the election in 2000.

@AndyD said: And I'd have to change all the furniture, which irks when you're handing over 55 million. That's like 13million per bedroom. Lol!

View from one of our living room windows this arternoon [image: 11850.jpg] [image: 11846.jpg]

"Narcissus can't recognize what he's seeing isn't someone else." Right. He didn't know it was himself. The psychological relationship between the mythological character and narcissists IRL is parallel.