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Cake day: January 19th, 2024

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  • If you were alive (and online) during the 90s, you may remember the banter between Microsoft and General Motors:

    From https://crysa.fzu.cz/ondra/documents/cars_like_windows.html (the only online copy I could find)

    Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five-dollar cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

    In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

    […]

    1. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single “general car error” warning light.

    2. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

    3. The airbag system would ask “Are You Sure?” before going off.

    4. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed a hold of the radio antenna.

    30 years later, some of those jokes are finally becoming reality, thanks to Tesla.


  • Breaking News: border checkpoint doing its job, normal number of criminals encountered.

    Fox News: look at these cherry-picked criminals with cartel associations apprehended at the border. Take a moment to let the worry and fear rise up in you, then watch our next segment, an opinion piece where someone will make allusions to the great replacement theory and falsely claim that the Democratic party wants open borders.

    Joking aside, progressives are aware that criminals exist and that some of them are crossing country borders. The critical part is whether one looks at the big whole through statistics, or whether one lets themselves be rabble-roused into irrational fear and hatred of foreigners.

    Let’s say my name was Mupert Rurdoch and I was running an anti-conservative news channel. Currently, murders per capita (per 1 million people) are around 70, so a population of 300 million people commits about 21000 murders per year. I could cherry-pick murders committed in red state, rural areas and make them my headline every few days. Then smoothly blend into opinion segments where the hosts talk about a “murder epidemic amongst conservatives” and mentions militias executing people and so on.