WTF-Beta

Still losing around 8,000 lives a year in the US, even with the available treatments. Sad.

In The Hand of Dante. Dark, as so much is now, but great filmmaking. Good cast.

Glad he can get out and around more! Progress.

Not from the middle. If the GOP runs Vance or someone else I’m not wild about I’m up for grabs if it’s Shapiro or someone else sane. But anyone the progressives are going to like is a no go.

In any event they're most likely outgunned if push comes to shove.

Death to America, Democrat style.

@kluurs said:

I've been running for decades. It's a remarkable equalizer. In a running group you'll have all kinds of people - but we see each other as "runners". There are people from all backgrounds - CEOs, lawyers, physicians, UPS drivers, accountants, students, etc.

Into my 60s, I felt like everyone was a peer - partly because I could keep up with pretty much everyone when we did a long run pace. Now, I can't do the group pace for as long - just seemed to slip in the past 3 years - a big decline over a relatively short time. I hope to see a doc about it in the fall - just to make sure it's just normal wear and tear - and not symptomatic of something else

Still, I see a lot of the 30 somethings I run with as younger - and I'm feeling like they're seeing me as parent's age - which is a bit disqualifying for feeling like a peer. Still, I hope to fight - what I know is a struggle I won't win in the long run.

Yeah, but you can’t look at this comparatively. Think of all the pain of attaining wisdom they have yet to experience. To hell with those whippersnappers.

Wonderful. The world is full of miracles every day.

There’s a show on it 20/20. New.

Heh heh. You said 'titular'.

I have never watched the whole movie.

Grillo’s. Best store brand.

UNCSA, my daughter’s grad school, is a conservatory so it has no official sports teams, but the students still came up with the Fighting Pickles as their mascot for their flag football team.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fbloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com%2Fscnow.com%2Fcontent%2Ftncms%2Fassets%2Fv3%2Feditorial%2Fe%2Fe7%2Fee76d22a-ae39-5afc-afec-edea3ef6af80%2F50d4d172edb8c.image.jpg%3Fresize%3D400%252C474&f=1&ipt=49661118ab9fc74dcd939dff58f75c8bb03f7f005788e56a34caa706624ec6e1

It surely didn’t hurt.

Much bigger than Findlay!

Dining with friends and family is my greatest pleasure, really. Certainly the most consistent and rewarding one.

My red wine quantities have been getting increasingly measured as the amount I can imbibe and still feel great the next day has diminished year after year. Three glasses is about as far as i can go and only if I stay up for three hours or so afterward. Otherwise I just feel stupid the next day and don't sleep well. Just as well since alcohol turns off fat burning.

Tavern food is a great way to die young and there is a preponderance of it here too. A cheeseburger or two a month is as much as I'm willing to do, even as much as i love a good one.

We have Findlay Market here, which is probably similar, but it's downtown and parking can be difficult. I worked in a meat market there on Saturdays shortly after I moved to Cincinnati. We would carry whole frozen gutted pigs up from the basement in the morning a by the hooves and cut them up during the day. By the end of the afternoon we'd be passing a half gallon of whisky around under the counter, always fun when working with knives and saws.

I do have a couple farm markets I frequent in the area, especially The Black Barn, whose owner makes a generous contribution to my scholarship charity every year.

He doesn't draw any propound conclusions, but the context is interesting. We use GPS, but I still go into any new city or area and form a map in my head of where things are and the major routes, so my sense of direction is unaffected. I do read less than I used to, but I'm addressing that with a concerted effort to do more. I really like AI's ability to summarize, to pull out the salient points in text. I was always a little frustrated in classes because our educational model always seemed to be explain things in many different ways so that everyone gets it. I normally got it on the first pass and then had to suffer through the rest of the exposition. This article is a prime example.

Gemini's take:

Article Summary: "Rising GDP isn’t the whole story" by Paul Krugman

In this article, economist Paul Krugman argues that while the rapid adoption of AI has sparked intense debate over economic metrics like productivity, wages, and GDP, the most profound impacts of major technological shifts are often social and psychological rather than financial. Throughout history, technologies that successfully boost economic productivity have simultaneously caused severe, unintended societal disruptions.

To contextualize the future of AI, Krugman examines four historical and modern technological precedents:

• Mechanized Agriculture (19th Century): The invention of machines like the McCormick reaper allowed fewer workers to produce more food, driving rapid urbanization. However, before modern sanitation existed, this shift crowded people into unhealthy cities, actually causing American health and physical stature to decline even as GDP per capita rose.
• Modern Manufacturing & Electrification (Mid-20th Century): Shifting from steam to electric power allowed factories to become single-story, sprawling complexes that relocated from urban cores to the suburbs. This internal deindustrialization triggered mass inner-city joblessness, which sociologists directly link to the subsequent rise in urban social disorder and crime during the 1960s and 1970s.
• Oral Contraception (1960s): The invention and eventual widespread availability of the pill allowed women to reliably delay marriage and invest in long-term higher education and professional careers. While this drastically shifted the labor supply and boosted GDP, its true significance was a fundamental, permanent transformation of gender roles and societal structures.
• Smartphones (21st Century): Despite their rapid global adoption since 2007, smartphones have yielded surprisingly little measurable growth in total factor productivity. Instead, their primary impact has been psychological and social, driving a rise in anxiety, depression, and addiction, alongside a documented decline in reading literacy and human connection.

The Outlook for AI

Krugman fears that AI may replicate or worsen the negative social patterns seen with smartphones. He highlights several non-economic dangers already emerging:

• Intellectual and Skill Atrophy: Reliance on AI tools (like ChatGPT for student essays or coding aids for workers) prevents individuals from learning how to think critically or perform tasks independently. This is already skewing the job market, as companies heavily favor a dwindling pool of senior talent while neglecting to train the next generation.
• Severed Human Connection: AI is increasingly substituting for human interaction. Krugman points to troubling trends of users—including children—forming unhealthy, isolated "romantic" or psychological dependencies on chatbots.

Conclusion:
While Krugman plans to return to strictly economic data in future columns, he emphasizes that the true legacy of AI will likely not be measured in growth accounting or wealth distribution, but in how it fundamentally reshapes human behavior and society.

I bet you miss the farmers' markets in SoCal. The offerings are kind of limited here in terms of produce.

That was the first game I started to actually see on field strategy.

This is pretty much the way I eat anyway.

https://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/ss/slideshow-dementia-foods?ecd=socpd_fb_Gen_1626_spns_ctv126885_conmkt&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=fb&utm_id=120240227840460156&utm_content=120240227840660156&utm_term=120240227840510156&utm_campaign=120240227840460156