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Monday’s Forum
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31 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
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I have a question for frequent flyers. I don’t fly a lot so I’m curious about all of the AI slop that shows up in my various social media feeds on the topic of people trying to scam better seats on airplanes. Like I said I don’t fly a lot but in all my life I have never ever seen any kind of ridiculous nonsense from people trying to scam the window seat or a first-class seat.
So is this really a problem? Or just some kind of AI slot meme. Frequent flyers let me know in the comments
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Hi Rick –
I’m Executive Platinum on American and Diamond on Delta. And I’m a “Million Miler” on American. So I qualify as a frequent flyer.
The AI stuff is bullshit. Here’s the truth. If you’re shitty to a gate agent, your profile is marked in their system. If you’re rude to a Flight Attendent, your profile is marked in their system. If you create any kind of drama, your profile gets marked in their system.
If your profile/name is on that list, you can forget about anything except the pure basics. Kiss goodbye forever the idea of a free upgrade, regardless of status. Kiss goodbye the opportunity to get a standby seat without a fee. Kiss goodbye the help you’d normally get if you’re late and miss a flight. They keep very, very, very strict records on every passenger, and the more you cause a problem, the more you’re likely to end up getting the worst seat on the plane, unless you’re paying more.
The AI stuff is bullshit. Sure some people might try it, but it doesn’t work out for them. I’m in Georgia now, and on my flight out, I had a fairly empty red eye flight. I flew Economy Plus, and most of the Economy Plus section was empty. After take off, a regular coach passenger tried to move into one of the plus seats. Flight attendant told him to move back because he couldn’t move due to weight balance issues on a somewhat empty flight. He didn’t move, even after the flight attendant told him three times. Flight attendant then let him sit there. When the plane landed, there were two ATL police officers waiting for him at the gate. Guy was taken away in handcuffs. I secretly clapped. Flight attendants take way too much shit from asshole passengers.
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How to destroy a military career.
‘You gotta be kidding me’: Hegseth used these four things to decide on senior officer promotions
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth short-circuited a merit-based process for promoting senior officers and instead relied on newly invented criteria that disproportionately removed from advancement women and people of color who had already been approved for promotion, according to three military officials.
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The senior official also described how Hegseth intentionally scuttled the promotions of senior officers who were perceived to support DEI initiatives, played a role in implementing the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, were involved in the evacuation from Afghanistan, or had a connection to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as President Trump’s senior military officer but after retirement publicly criticized Trump’s leadership.Let’s not leave paper trail.
The senior official described to MS NOW how Hegseth’s executive office led a planned and deliberate process that involved creating paper-only files filled with printouts from internet searches that were inaccessible to the officers under consideration. Hegseth’s office gave instructions about the new criteria over the phone instead of in writing.
BTW, apparently this methodology is against the law.
By law, Harnish said, the secretary of defense can only remove names from promotion lists below the one-star level. A secretary of defense can only delay or withhold a promotion for specific reasons, such as being professionally unqualified, failing “exemplary conduct” standards, pending charges or substantiated adverse information. According to the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act governing military promotions, the officer facing a delayed promotion gets written notice and a chance to respond.
Impeachment, anyone?
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President Trump’s unpopularity was clearly the main engine of Democratic Party’s resounding midterm victory. But his unpopularity alone did not deliver the scale of the Democrats triumph. To win in places like Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, Democratic candidates needed to persuade many voters who had previously considered their party unacceptable. The candidates’ success offers a road map to a sensible future for the party.
How did they do it? The simplest summary is that they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.
That’s pretty obviously correct. We didn’t win Texas with ‘they/them’, we won Texas with Jesus is Love.
Economic populism: Citizen vs. Oligarch. I’ve been beating this drum. We have an array of cartoon villains, horrible, creepy, out of touch and sometimes just plan evil men. Musk is their poster boy, and bless the political gods for that insufferable twat. Data Centers are just the gateway to drawing clear lines between Americans and the Money Hoarders. Not Left/Right but Up/Down.
As for cultural moderation, slow the fuck down, we’ll get there on trans rights. It took 46 years to get from Stonewall to Obergefell. The opening gambit was not, ‘give us everything right now,’ the opening gambit was, ‘leave us the fuck alone.’ Push too far, too fast, and all you end up doing is losing allies and powering a backlash. And for God’s sake, let go of the trans athletes, the issue is poison. Everything else is achievable, this is not.
Open borders? Seriously: STFU. Not just for this cycle or the next, but forever. This is never, ever, ever going to be policy in any nation, anywhere. A nation has a right and an obligation to establish and maintain borders. Let’s do it without masked vigilantes shooting people, or shipping people off to Uganda, FFS. Let’s take a serious look at our demographic situation, at our legitimate labor needs, at our humanitarian obligations, and write a law. If Congress still does that sort of thing.
Economic populism: the little guy vs. the tech overlords. Cultural moderation: aim to win, not just demand.
And one more thing. Let Democrats win in Texas with what works in Texas. Win in Los Angeles with what works in LA. James Talarico is not Nithya Raman. Fewer litmus tests, more localism, more flexibility, adaptation, patience and persistence.
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Kansas’s Dem senator-elect Pastor Adam Hamilton on the phony trans panic distraction tactic:
“…I don’t think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them. I look at people, and I understand one thing really clearly when it comes to transgender, and that is Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor as I love myself. So I’m gonna love the trans person as well as the straight person, as well as the male or female. I just think we have to do better than picking on small groups. And what’s happened is we’ve turned a group of people into a campaign issue because it polls well.”
Senator-elect James Talafreako:
…Talarico attempted to clarify what he’d said during the Fox News interview, telling the crowd that he still stood by his 2021 vote against Texas’ ban on trans athletes and that his position was “exactly the same.” Instead, he argued that policies on the issue should allow trans athletes to participate on a case-by-case basis. This is a similar position to that adopted by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger during her election last year, and recently, it was reported that she did away with her state’s restrictions for trans athletes.
Talarico also added that he’d “stand up to politicians who bully students, who bully kids to score political points.”
…“The way I fought for trans kids in the legislature,” he continued, “is how I will fight for [them] in the U.S. Senate.” Like before, he told her that his “position hasn’t changed” and that he “still thinks these should be local decisions.”
“I know things are getting clipped and stuff, but my position hasn’t changed, and I’m gonna have your loved one’s back,” he concluded.
In my lifetime, there’s not been a Democratic campaign or legislative battle focused on “they/them” and open borders. Not in Slick Willy’s era, not with Al Gore or John Kerry, not under Obama, or Hillary, or Biden. It’s Twitterbrain fake news, spoon-fed to the gullible by the Republican propaganda machine.
Conservatives go from insisting Democrats support open borders in one breath, to defending Pedo Trump’s violent and inflationary mass deportation scheme with graphics showing Obama and Biden deported more. So which is it? Are Dems for open borders or do Dems run up the deportation score? Just contradictory bullcrap to scapegoat poor, powerless migrants for problems called by greedy billionaires.
Dems who ran up the score in 2025 and 2026 did not do so by dignifying the right’s trans scapegoating. They didn’t win by turning away from open borders, because Dems never supported open borders in the first place.
They told voters we’d been lied to and manipulated, reminded us we gained nothing from it except chaos and corruption and financial disaster, and asked we’d suffered enough to belatedly wake up, cut the crap, and focus on real issues and real enemies, not the right’s psychotic obsessions.
Voters changed. Dems’ platform did not; they are still focused on healthcare, justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, civil rights, the general welfare, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, no matter their identity.
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To win in places like Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, Democratic candidates needed to persuade many voters who had previously considered their party unacceptable.
Is there any evidence that we persuaded any significant number of voters who thought Democrats were unacceptable?
The wave was far more likely Democratic turnout, Republican turnoff, and winning over some in the mushy middle who think both sides are pretty much the same.
We elected a freakin’ Muslim. That didn’t come from people who two years ago were ranting about “Democrat Socialists trying to impose transgenderism and Shakira Law.”
I question the base “facts” from which the conclusions are being drawn. There’s always some centrist shithead happy to advocate for centrist shitheadism in the New York Times anytime Democrats win anything.
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I think I hear the bubble popping.
Democrats are already being blamed for it, of course. L’affaire Huang aside, the mere prospect of regulation had already given the market conniptions. This needs be seen alongside the ridiculously high levels of money spent on datacenters and chips, much of it borrowed, vs the actual results of the technology.
This is not going to be pretty.
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Democrats will absolutely get blamed for it, but that of course doesn’t tell the whole story.
AI companies went too hard, too fast, in building, and the results of their efforts are easy to see: water problems, noise, higher utility costs, etc. And the only things most people see as a result are AI slop flyers for local businesses, and ways to cheat on homework.
I find it hilarious that they are blaming the fear of regulation for this…weren’t these same people just recently BEGGING for regulation? (Yes, I know it was likely to hamper competitors, but still, they were asking.)
Whatever. If you don’t want to be heavily regulated, don’t act like an industry that needs to be heavily regulated.
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I’ve developed more of an interest to see if the LLMs can help out at work. I mentioned unprotecting a protected excel sheet, which was a huge help (and then the agency cancelled the request, but that was not attributable to the LLM; no matter how hard one tries).
But earlier it did something even more amazing. We had a PDF file with several long tables with many columns and rows, which included images mixed with text in one column. Converting it to Word kind of helped, but converting from Word to Excel was impossible.
Then one coworker took the Word file and tasked ChatGPT to make it an excel sheet, and somehow it did just that.
Now, there was one way I could have turned it into a workable excel sheet myself: copying each cell individually one by one from the word version to an excel file. I estimate the job would have taken days (It was like 600 rows overall, in like 7 columns per row), and I could think of nothing more mind numbing that this.
So maybe it can be sued productively in my work. I’d welcome it.
Now, would I pay for a subscription? No. But I would urge my employer to do so, if we can make it perform like that regularly.
On my writing, I like to bounce off ideas off LLMs. Sometimes I can think of what comes next, sometimes the bot will even ask a pertinent question or point out something useful. But I won’t ever let them write for me.
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Oh, I get that LLMs have uses. Important ones, in fact. That’s the reason I specifically used what “most people see“–it’s the visual AI slop that is most apparent, and with the least value.
I’m in PR, and I think one of the biggest mistakes that AI companies made was launching AI as though it was another social platform. In other words, give everyone access, get them using it, and soon enough it’ll be embedded in so many things rolling it back will be unthinkable–then start charging for it.
If they’d rolled it out to upper-tier users first (medical especially) they would have all of these significant use-cases, and presumably a better handle at containment. Oh well.
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I don’t recall seeing anything about this here, but Salon.com is shutting down. Back during Web 1.0, when Salon got started, I was a regular visitor at least through the time that it was owned by the WaPo. For some reason I stopped visiting the site, most likely it went behind a paywall. Occasionally I’ve been linked to interesting articles their, but mostly they became indistinguishable.
Loss of an outlet is never good, but the winnowing will continue.
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AFAICT el-Sayed was the only Dem Socialist to win in the senate. I dont think that there is a need to go towards the radical left. OTOH a number of more moderates like Talarico won. I still think this mostly a rejection of Trump but I think it helped that these more moderate candidates pushed economic issues, health care and ending the war. That needs to be the focus, not culture wars.
As an aside I have listened to el-Sayed quite a bit during the general and I think he is bright, speaks well and not as radical as portrayed.
Steve
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Reply to @Jen
All that, and I’d add without sufficient instruction, too open-ended a goal, and not much in the way of guidance through emails, blogs, etc.
I would never have thought to get ChatGPT to convert a word file to excel. That’s not exactly “generative.” I’d experimented with Copilot built into word to use a word document to format a spreadsheet, with poor results.
Some people lack the imagination to get an LLM to do something useful. Not necessarily a lack of imagination per se, but for such things in particular.
The AI Slop has been pretty bad, especially coupled with social media. After all, if “engagement” is the metric, then producing tons of content of bad quality helps, right? I see a lot of this on Youtube.
I also see it in audiobooks now and then. I downloaded one from Everand (formerly Scribd) that was marked as “read by AI.” Ok, it might be a tolerable performance. But then it was clear the whole “book” was written by AI. It was about space travel. It had a decent enough introduction for a few minutes, then it began repeating the same things worded differently.
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LOL. Massie is completely out of f*cks:
Massie: “I hope Hegseth addresses the 8 articles of impeachment, and doesn‘t get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion and do some pull-ups and call everybody fat and gay. I may have just given you half his speech, I don’t know.”
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France has directly accused Iran of being responsible for the refrigeration hacking which caused millions of pounds of spoilt foodstuffs.
In addition to the French supermarkets hit, at the same time similar attacks were carried out on French transfusion blood-banks, and on supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, and Finland.It is highly unlikely France would have made this claim without being certain about the culprits.
Iran seems determined to adhere to its long-standing approach to winning friends and influencing people. -
BTW, the next Democratic president should get serious about breaking gup oligopolies. There’s been too much consolidation in too many industries, that now even the Bork test, whether it has negative effects on consumers, is like ten light years behind the status quo.
Tech, to be sure, but also airlines*, and most of all agribusiness and other food producers, distributors, and retailers.
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Yesterday’s recipe:
about 1 kg of cuete (eye of round, according to ChatGPT, or any other beef cut that shreds well), sliced
1 medium onion, quartered then sliced
5-7 cloves of garlic, minced
1 small knob of ginger, grated
half a stick of celery, sliced
2 medium potatoes, diced
2 sprigs of rosemary
some cilantro (no idea how you measure it), roughly chopped, or torn, or even whole
about 2-3 liters of beef broth, enough to cover the meat
Peanut butter
paprika and cinnamon to tasteSo, brown the beef on both sides in the instant pot and set aside in a bowl. Then add the onions and potatoes and sauté for a few minutes, then add the garlic (I did this time!) and ginger (I overlooked it this time!) and cook for 2 more minutes. Deglaze with some beef stock, making sure to scrape all the fond at the bottom.
Next add the beef back, with whatever juices flowed from it in the bowl. Add beef stock to cover the meat. Add celery, rosemary, and cilantro. Pressure cook on high for 25 minutes, with 20 minutes natural release (I don’t think anything releases, but the temp has to go down if you switch off the keep warm function).
After releasing the pressure and removing the rosemary, take some of the liquid and whisk with the peanut butter in a bowl or large glass measuring cup, and add it to the stew. How much peanut butter? beats me. Taste and adjust, which is what I did (I overlooked the ginger because I was cooking something else on the stove. I still grated it and added it along with the peanut butter).
Remove the beef, shred, and add it back
Turn on the sear/sauté function on the pot and bring to a simmer to let it reduce. Add paprika and just a little cinnamon to taste. I then added about cup of plain white rice already cooked. It can also be served over rice.
When I opened the pot after depressurizing it, I got a strong whiff of rosemary. I concluded perhaps two sprigs were too much. Same upon tasting it. it was fine, but the rosemary dominated over everything else. After adding peanut butter and ginger, reducing, and adding paprika and cinnamon, it tasted a lot better. I’ll try just one sprig next time, but I think 2 are fine. Maybe 1.5 is the right balance.
And it definitely needs a sachet d’épices. One sprig came out whole. The other had lost some bits, which I did my best to fish out and remove.
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I’m unsure about the utility of impeaching Hegseth but I do think he deserves it. By my understanding it was illegal for him to not approve many of the promotions approved by the boards. The extra-judicial killings in the gulf should also be enough. The bad news is that I dont see it passing in the Senate.
Steve
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IMO there should be hearings streamed live and repeated in broadcast and cable news, to air out all the high crimes and misdemeanors Kegseth engaged in.
It won’t move the needle with the MAGAts, but it might for everyone else, even any remaining normal Republicans.
For now, if El Taco had planned to fire him, we can be sure he won’t, but instead double down on him.
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If you don’t like KFC, don’t eat KFC. Seems simple enough.
And I don’t get the high altitude stuff, complete with elevation like 2.123 meters. Plenty of KFCs in Mexico City, at 2,240 meters. So there.
I actually like it, as a very occasional treat. It’s very high in fat. And once you’ve eaten the skin and breading, the rest is just the same as any other chicken. I really liked the coleslaw. The mashed potatoes were terrible, but the gravy on them was rather good.
Offhand I can’t recall when was the last time I had it. possibly over five years (that’s veeeeery occasional, yes?) Really, since I took up cooking seriously back in late 2011, I hardly ever eat out except on vacation, and family meals and celebrations I can’t get out of.
Anyway, I could see this type of animosity against a restaurant in Italy if it were Dominos or Pizza Hut, and I think Dominos has tried to crack Italy before.
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