Wow, that’s actually a really big deal.

While his point probably sounds logical to a person who only wants to hear things that confirm their feelings, I think it is missing an incredibly important point. Yes, AI will probably not be used to replace plumbers, car mechanics, carpenters, etc. And yes, AI will mostly be used to TRY to replace people in office jobs. But assuming his point is true that all those office people lose their jobs (ignoring the whole sexist part of female voters), then who is going to be able to pay wages to those plumbers and mechanics? Trades people in the US are making really good money right now, and that’s because office workers in the US are making really good money right now compared to the rest of the world.

It’s almost like a rising tide lifts all boats and that helping those around you is better than helping a billionaire who is siphoning up the tidal water to pay for data center cooling.

You are talking about Sea Launch, a subsidiary of Boeing (I think). They repurposed an old oil rig to launch rockets from the equator and had a cruise ship to take rockets and crew to the launch site and back to mainland.

The issue was the logistics of getting everything/everyone out to the oil rig. It isn’t enough to just launch from the equator; you also have to launch far away enough from land that any mishaps won’t rain debris all over people. So you have to put that floating pad REALLY far away from land (plus however far your host country is from the equator). Additionally, rockets require a bunch of consumables to even get ready to fly. Liquid Helium, Nitrogen, Oxygen, fuel, etc. Those have to be shipped out to replenish them, and they can’t be easily replenished if you have too many launch scrubs. Plus the cost of paying/feeding the crew being on a cruise ship for weeks on end.

I feel like porcupines would be more Dewalt.

I started playing just after this, so I missed it. I was there, however, for the opening of the AQ gates. That required a single person on each server doing a huge quest chain, along with the entire server donating war provisions. The only reason to open the AQ gates at that time was for big raiding guilds to do AQ, since smaller raiding guilds weren’t much of a thing back then. The whole server knew exactly what time the gates would be allowed to be open, so any player level 58+ showed up to the gates for a massive PVP kill fest. Opposing players who weren’t on raiding guilds were griefing the single person who could open the gates, since they didn’t care if the gates were ever actually opened. The server crashed so many times. It took hours for the gates to finally be opened.

This is mostly true for CEOs of for-profit corporations. But there are plenty of government orgs and non-profits also going hard on AI. They are afraid of falling behind and are trying to “make fetch happen” even though they don’t really have an answer for what AI will do for them.

I was cheering so much when Sepp Blatter was kicked out. It’s kind of impressive that someone could be worse.

both play in their country’s top division

For now…

You bring up a good point, though. If you ask a fan of a team that has lost a ton of cup finals if their team is cursed, they will say yes. If you ask a fan of a team who has never been to a final if their team is cursed they will probably say no.

Two things:

Most soccer/football club fans lean left. Hardcore fans typically lean even further left. Miami fans… not so much.

Most soccer/football club owners/ownership groups try to stay out of politics for fear of alienating potential and current fans (i.e. their source of money). They’ll do the pride nights and stuff, but they’ll also deny political banners at games. Miami’s primary owner is full-on MAGA. Players are similar. They usually don’t deal with politics or will stay away from stuff like this because they know their fans are typically left-leaning. Miami players… let’s just say this is the first MLS team to go to the White House under Trump.