The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.

For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called “sportsness” which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I’d probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.

But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing many different sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some people are just better at handling the pressure of athletic performance tests, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful as a concept at all? You get the idea.

He did the exact same thing after taking over Twitter, talking about “poorly batched RPCs” in the timeline which makes zero sense because that’s obviously not how HTTP works.

The sad thing is Elon regularly shows how much of a very judgmental, “I’m so smart” idiot* he is, but somehow I keep meeting people who think he’s a genius. I guess the assumption that money=smart still holds true in the US, despite being disproven time and time again.

*Do we not have a single word for this concept? I come across this kind of person so frequently there really should be one.

That’s gonna be a big ask. Republicans don’t even get the blame for the things they do themselves. Oligarch propaganda is everywhere and pernicious, look at how the average working class American has accepted the notion that low level bureaucrats are the reason they’re poor.

This does appear to be the state department flag pole (on 21st street looking East from the state department). And it does appear to be winter, and there is construction in that area around the fed building. But that’s all I can say. The photo is weirdly blurry and grainy so be suspicious.

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Unfortunately he sued in the North District of Texas, which is a maga kangaroo court

And get it on video. If this stuff is just text in a news article, no one will care.

This idea originated as a Stephen Colbert joke in 2010. As always I’m sure some will call this some sort of self-aware troll by Trump, but what are the odds of that.

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We completely changed how the algorithm worked, pushing pro-Trump and right-wing posts to the top of people’s feeds.

I thought this was common knowledge. Users have been talking about how everyone is getting flooded with right-wing posts on r/twitter ever since Elon took over.

But it’s less unsuitable than any alternative avenue for contentious information (traditional news media, youtube/podcasts, social media, etc) - for the simple reason that wikipedia encourages citing sources, while every other platform discourages it.

I think he’s sugar-coating it because their bonds are about to go up for sale. From the article:

While equity investors have reportedly slashed the value of their stakes by as much as 78 percent, the Journal reports, “banks hope to sell senior debt at 90-95 cents on the dollar, while retaining more-junior holdings.”

If they were breaking even, the bonds wouldn’t be getting sold at a loss. Keep in mind, the bond holders get paid before the stock holding investors, so if they’re taking a loss, the equity investors are getting nothing (hence the 78 percent cut, basically their share is only worth the odds of a miraculous turnaround). That doesn’t happen with a company unless it’s losing money.

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Perhaps before the 2022 invasion. You can see for example the first round of the last presidential election results here - the light blue supported the pro-Russia candidate Yuriy Boyko, who didn’t advocate being part of Russia but instead wanted better relations with Russia. After the invasion, Boyko himself apparently became part of a new party of ex-pro-russian candidates who now support Ukraine against Russia.

Generally it’s hard to say how many fit into the category of “wanted an independent Ukraine but that is still close to Russia”, but my sense is that it was a pretty large part of the blue group. Consider for example the average American liberal who wants the US to be more like Canada - probably there are some who would rather have their part of the country become part of Canada, but it’s probably not most and certainly nowhere near all. Additionally, it’s likely that many who actually did want to live in Russia changed their mind after the atrocities of the invasion.

The ol’ Ellen Pao

Yes. People still lend Adam Neumann money, despite his record of epic failure. When you have the skills that get other people to pay the bills, failure is not a problem.

He was a first mover on podcasts, and already being a reality TV celebrity he got a lot of big guests early on.

“I have lung cancer? How bad is it?”
“Well let’s just say it’s…non-small lung cancer.”

This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can’t find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions on the park service’s website, but it was using a twitter feed and the top post was “trail is open, come on in!” because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.

There should be some non-profit funded by cities that’s basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.

Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.

I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.