Carl

It’s basically this meme in another format:

I’ve said that taxes should increase drastically after you own two residential properties. Allow two for the people who own things like a home and some separate farmland, or maybe a lake house. The point is that companies shouldn’t be able to buy and sit on vacant properties, just to drive up costs. We’re not targeting the people with two houses, we’re targeting the people with two hundred.

After those two allowed properties, taxes increase at a scale, so nobody will want to sit on dozens of homes for long periods of time. And (here’s the important part!) if an owned house is vacant for more than 4 months (120 days) in the calendar year, the taxes on it skyrocket. Hell, make it exponential. This Vacant Property tax should fucking hurt. It should be the thing that keeps Zillow executives awake at night. This will encourage people/companies to sell or rent their vacant houses, instead of sitting on them indefinitely and passing costs onto the few people who they’re renting to. And that “owned property” count used for the property tax calculation should also include residential properties owned by subsidiary companies, shell corporations, etc… Don’t allow companies to spin up a thousand shell corps just to hold two properties each.

This will drive down purchase prices and rent prices, because it would be financially smarter to have a cheap renter when compared to paying the exorbitant taxes on a vacant property.

And then take the funds collected from these additional property taxes, and put it towards firsttime homebuyer incentives, rent assistance programs, homeless/displaced/battered/etc shelter funding, etc…

I actually enjoyed the Pattinson Batman movie. It was a callback to the Detective Comics origins. Hollywood tends to focus on the action, but Batman in the comics is first and foremost a detective. So the Battinson movie was focused on that. And for most of the movie, he was basically just a dude in a hoodie with a bike, riding around town looking for clues. The Riddler was a great villain for that kind of movie, and doing it any other way would have reduced Riddler’s entire character to just another punching bag.

It’s an old meme, based on a series of Facebook screenshots:

Once the screenshots went viral, people started memeing about it, like so:

As for why the 5/7 was posted here? Probably because OP was asking about the Nolan trilogy, which is mentioned in the original 5/7 meme.

Oh, I agree. My point was simply that if a restaurant is trying to ditch the “mom and pop” vibes and get professional photos for their menus, it’s not something that is done on a whim. It’s not just a “snap a pic with your phone and post it on your menu” type of thing if a restaurant is trying to look like more than a family owned joint.

And that’s before we even get into the actual menu design, because a well-formatted menu is designed to draw customers towards the most profitable items. All of those highlighted and “chefs special” menu choices that are in big bold bright letters in the center of the menu, with accompanying pictures? Yeah, the restaurant has done the math on the raw ingredients and prep time for each menu item, and those featured choices are the items that are most profitable for the restaurant to make. The goal is to encourage people to buy the things that make the most money. Those small menu options that are tucked away in the bottom of the menu like a footnote? Those are the least profitable. A good menu layout can increase dine-in profits by upwards of 10-20%, simply by encouraging people to order the most profitable items.

And while I don’t agree with using AI for the food images, I can see how a restaurant manager would balk at a $10k professional food photographer bill. Especially when that also requires closing the restaurant for a day, (meaning a day of lost profits) so the photographer can work with the cook staff for the photos during a dedicated photography session. Why would they eat that massive cost, when they could generate a “good enough” (meaning the majority of people won’t notice or care that it is AI) image for free in a few minutes? Again, I don’t agree with it, but I can see why a restaurant manager would see it as an attractive alternative.

Food photography is actually an entire branch of photography, and a lot of the photos you have historically seen haven’t been real edible food. For example, the milk in the bowl of cereal on your cereal box? That’s usually white Elmers Glue. Because real milk won’t sit below the cereal, and will be too watery. It also allows them to precisely set the individual cereal pieces (rings, flakes, etc) in place and the glue will help prevent it from floating around.

The ketchup on a burger is usually thick red paint, applied around the edges of the rubber pickle with a syringe. Because they want to make sure the ketchup looks like it’s squeezed around the pickle (rather than being squished into the burger bun), and they want to make sure the ketchup is showing around the pickle juuuust enough to be obvious, without obscuring the pickle.

The funny part about food photography is that the methodology is largely regional. For example, Japanese audiences largely expect a burger photo to have the bun sliding off of the burger, like so:

Originally it was done to prevent the bun from obscuring any of the ingredients. But now it is a sort of cultural thing, where lots of menus do it simply because that’s what the other menus do. But it also means that Japanese burger photography is done using different materials and methods than western burger photography. But to use the second image as an example, that runny egg yolk on the right burger is probably some sort of inedible yellow paint. Because the photographer wants controllable color and consistency, and cooking is rarely consistent enough for that. The glaze on the meat is probably some kind of clear-coat rosin or spray. The egg was probably cooked hard and then sliced with a scalpel to create that perfect wedge slice for the yellow paint to be added. Etc…

Hey, always glad to see the MECFS guy in the wild. My wife is suffering from major chronic fatigue, (it’s seriously life-altering), so I wanted to let you know that your posts don’t go unnoticed.

And yeah, the whole “jury vs grand jury” and “indicted vs convicted” thing is a pet peeve of mine. Because authorities prey on the public’s lack of knowledge about the legal process, to shift blame away from themselves. Once you know the difference (and understand the relationship between a prosecutor and the grand jury) you’ll consistently see news stories of prosecutors hiding behind grand juries to shift blame away from themselves. But it’s always framed by the news as “the prosecutor brought the case to the grand jury, who refused to indict” because the news is complicit in keeping the cogs grinding.

Worth noting that indictments are laughably easy to get, because there is no defense lawyer. An indictment isn’t a conviction, it’s just the prosecution going “yeah we probably have enough evidence to bother with a trial.” The old joke is that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich for murder if the prosecutor wants them to. The prosecutor has full control over what evidence the grand jury sees, and the rules around evidence are a LOT more relaxed than they are in court. The prosecutor could basically scribble out a “yeah I did it lol” note on a napkin and present it to the grand jury as evidence. It wouldn’t stand up in court, but it doesn’t need to if the prosecutor just wants the indictment.

The grand jury is just an arm of the prosecutor, and is used as a political tool whenever a trial would be politically inconvenient. Because the district attorney is typically elected, which means they need to pander for votes. So if it would be politically inconvenient to prosecute someone, they can simply refuse to bring any evidence to the grand jury. Because (again) they have full control over what evidence the grand jury sees.

For example, let’s say a cop murders someone in the street. It’s on video. The public is out for blood. But the prosecutor has to work with the police to do their job, and the police union is threatening to stop collecting any evidence at crime scenes if they prosecute this cop. Prosecutor is between a rock and a hard place, because they’d be torching future trials just to appease the public. So instead, they simply don’t bring any evidence to the grand jury. The grand jury is a faceless shadowy organization that can’t defend itself. It’s the perfect scapegoat. So when the grand jury refuses to indict (because they weren’t presented with any evidence) the district attorney can jump in front of the news cameras and go “I tried to prosecute them, but that big mean grand jury refused to indict. But remember, I did my best! Vote for me!” Cops are happy because the prosecutor didn’t indict, the public is placated because the prosecutor “tried” to indict them, and the cogs of the legal system keep grinding away as intended.

So with all of that being said… If he wasn’t indicted, it’s because the prosecutor didn’t want to bring it to trial.

The TL;DR is that gold prices spiking is a major sign that people are completely losing faith in the dollar, and are attempting to buy assets that will hold value better. People expect major inflation, and are attempting to buy gold (which will hopefully hold its value) instead of keeping all of their funds as dollars (which will lose value when inflation happens). But this sudden surge in gold demand has caused the recent price of gold to drastically spike.

Yeah, pretty much this. In regards to tech, the fediverse often suffers from the average familiarity problem:

The average user barely even knows how to check their email.

Two beers (as stated in their post and the comments) is overdosing? Maybe for a four year old. But two beers shouldn’t get an adult anywhere near proper OD levels.

The alcohol isn’t the only ingredient though. For instance, the gut absorbs alcohol more readily when it is more diluted. So shots are good for efficiently getting alcohol into your stomach, but then your stomach won’t be able to absorb them very quickly. Whereas a beer is mostly water, so it will be readily absorbed by your gut.

The only reason shots are the go-to for getting drunk quickly is because nobody wants to slam a six-pack right at the start of the party, then feel bloated all evening due to the carbonation and carbs. But doing six shots is easy in comparison.

You do actually absorb alcohol faster when it is watered down. And beer has more water, so you would absorb the alcohol from it faster. The reason shots are typically associated with getting drunk quickly is simply because you can drink a lot of shots faster than you can drink a lot of beer. Doing four shots back-to-back would have people in a good mood, but slamming four beers would have most people uncomfortably trying to keep it down. Simply because the volume and carbonation in beer makes it harder to drink quickly.

All of this is to say: If you want to get proper sloshed, chase your shots with some water. It’ll water down the shots you just took and make them hit you faster.

No alcohol is carb-free, because alcohol is a carb. It’s an oxymoron like “acid-free vinegar” or “no-sodium table salt”. But yes, beer has a lot of carbs in comparison.

The TL;DR is that there is a voluntary system that tracks court cases and will alert CSAM victims when it suspects images of them (either known images, or new ones) are the topic of criminal investigations. A Jane Doe was repeatedly raped in the early 2000’s to produce copious amounts of CSAM, which was broadly shared among pedophile groups. Her images were apparently very popular and prolific. Doe was alerted that Grok was producing new explicit images of her as a child. The images in question are novel (generated by AI, and not matching any known existing images) but are undoubtedly of Doe as a child. Meaning it was using Doe’s images as part of the training data for the images it generates.

Essentially, if Grok was trained on CSAM, Doe’s popular images were almost certainly included. And now Grok is producing new images of her. It would be like asking Grok to make an image of a popular egirl, and getting an image of what is undoubtedly Belle Delphine. And then X goes “no no no, we didn’t use any images of Belle Delphine in our training data. We promise!”

I think you’re actually the first person to notice (or at least the first to mention) the reference! Always good to see another crawler in the wild.

Tight hip flexors can also cause back pain. There is a group of muscles that run from the inside of your hip joint to your spine. They’re called the iliopsoas muscles. They’re basically impossible to reach with regular massage, because they’re fully surrounded by your pelvis. And when those muscles are too tight, it causes lower back pain.

If you get lower back pain from sitting too long, or from laying on your back for too long, you may have tight iliopsoas muscles. There are technically ways to reach them for manual massage, but they’re not easy nor comfortable, (and they basically require a physician to do safely.)

Super weird it’s basically College Humor legally, but they’re doing a really good job.

Yeah, the transformation from College Humor to Dropout is honestly a masterclass in business (and marketing) management. I fully believe that it’s the kind of thing that college marketing majors will be writing papers on in the future.

Let me save you some trouble: It costs $20 to make an account.

Similarly, I heard a kid call the Xbox 360 “vintage” the other day. I started to argue that it’s not that old. It only released in… (Checks release date)… 2005? Oh shit it’s over 20 years old. That’s the same as child-me considering the NES vintage when I was playing my PS1.