You can buy with cash if you want, but certain types of transactions are regulated, yes.

You could use them to get a big stew going.

I mean, this is explicitly illegal. So if you want to do it, you’ll have to go through people who don’t mind violating the law. Finding a drug dealer would probably be your best bet. Find some drug dealer that has some crypto. Give them the cards for crypto with a substantial transaction fee. (Like give them $100 in gift card for $80 in crypto. That’s pretty much your only option. It’s illegal to sell without CYK. That pretty much requires you to work with pretty shady characters if you want to obtain crypto without having it tracked to your identity. I would recommend not doing it. But if this is really something you’re set on, your best bet would probably be to talk to a dealer.

If you sold your soul to the Devil to obtain something, wouldn’t you be afraid of losing that thing?

What if I use tens of thousands of light-up drones flying in the sky to create a virtual display, and then I use that display to create a 3D image of a fireworks show?

Some people find religious rapture from seeing the Virgin Mary’s image on a grilled cheese sandwich. The human brain is a strange and wonderful thing.

The key in my mind is that this technology cannot work independently. A bucket excavator can replace the work of many people digging by hand. But the operation of the machine truly replaces the laborers. Some hand labor is still required in any excavation, but the machine itself is capable of operating just fine without the workers it is replacing.

But LLM image generators? They are only possible from the work of artists. They are directly trained off of artists’ work. Even worse, the continued existence of LLMs requires the never-ending continual contribution of humans. When AI image generators are trained off the results from AI image generators, things rapidly generate into literal static. It’s making a copy of a copy. If all art becomes made by LLMs, then the only recent data to train future models will be the output of other LLMs, and the whole thing collapses like a snake devouring its own tail.

This is also the crucial difference between how image generators and actual artists work. Some will say that how LLMs work is simply the same learning process that humans learn through. The image generator trains off pre-existing art, and so does a human artist, proponents of AI will say.

But we can see the flaw in this in that real artists do not suffer generational decay. Human artists have trained off the work of other artists, in a chain unbroken since before the rise of civilization. Yes, artists can learn technique and gain inspiration from the work of other artists, but humans are capable of true independent creation. Image generators OTOH are just blindly copying and summarizing the work of others. They have no actual sense of what art is, what makes it good, or what gives it soul. They don’t even have a sense of what makes an image comprehensible. They’re just playing a big blind correlation game of inputs and outputs. And so, if you train one AI off another AI’s output, it decays like making a copy of a copy.

This is a crucial difference between AI “art” and human art. Human art is an original creation. As such, new art can be endlessly created. AI “art” can only blindly copy. So unless the AI can get continual references from actual real human art, it quickly diverges into uselessness.

The ditch digger replaced by an excavator has no real means to legally object. They were paid for their previous jobs, and are simply no longer needed. But real human artists and AI? This software is going to be a never-ending vampire on their creative output. It has only been created by stealing their past work, and it will only remain viable if it can continue to steal their work indefinitely into the future.

Happy Day of Odin to you today!

They’ll just claim illegal immigrants represent an “invasion.” They’ll use that as casus belli to invade Mexican territory, and then simply claim occupied lands as spoils of war. They’ll also be able to make a practical argument, “well Mexico clearly can’t manage the border regions. Look at the anarchy there!”

I don’t see MAGA trying to seize all of Mexico. They wouldn’t want to take the heavily populated core around Mexico City, that’s for sure. But the more lightly populated border states? That would be much more tantalizing. Also, they could justify intervention in the border states as “protecting American investments,” referring to all the factories US companies have built right across the border.

Relocating an entire industrial plant is hard and expensive. One of the quickest ways to “bring manufacturing back to America” is to simply move the border to encompass already existing factories.

Canada would be a lot harder to justify, but casus belli can always be found. It just takes one person fleeing to Canada to escape charges for getting or performing an abortion. Suddenly Canada is “harboring fugitives.” Or attempt to relitigate the US/Canada border disputes of the 1800s. Or just claim fentanyl is being smuggled in from Canada. Etc. A casus belli can always be found or manufactured.

New Trump conspiracy just dropped:

It turns out Trump actually does have a superpower. He can Groundhog Day himself at will. He can create a save state of reality and load it at will. Or he can set up time loop of up to say, 6 months in length. He won the election because he literally ran that campaign hundreds, perhaps thousands or tens thouands of times before finally getting it right. He’s save scumming reality. Though, this is also the reason he talks so oddly and is all screwed up. Thousands of subjective years giving political speeches just fries your brain.

A third term really isn’t that much of a stretch. The 22nd Amendment was poorly drafted. Or perhaps more specifically, poorly drafted for our political era.

In order to approve a Trump third term, SCOTUS really wouldn’t need to come to an incredibly stretched conclusion. According to the letter of the Constitution, the requirements to be president such as term limits only apply to being elected president. Read from a strict literalist perspective, these requirements don’t apply to achieving the powers of Acting President through the line of succession.

So Trump could get a third term through being appointed Acting President through the line of presidential succession. He would have two flunkies run for President and Vice President. They run promising to immediately resign after being sworn in. MAGA arranges to have Trump appointed Speaker of the House. When the two flunkies resign, Trump would immediately become Acting President and serve the remainder of the flunky president’s term. In terms of actual powers, there is virtually no difference between being President or Acting President.

Again, it really wouldn’t require a super stretched interpretation of the Constitution for SCOTUS to rule this as a valid method. The writers of the 22nd Amendment wrote the amendment to say, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President…” They should have written it, “No person shall be elected to or hold the powers of the office of the President…” They didn’t consider that someone could try to deliberately become president in a way that doesn’t involve being elected president.

There’s never been case law on this, because no one has ever been vain enough to try and use this loophole to get a third term. But according to a strict reading of the Constitution, someone can absolutely serve a third term this way. Hell, this would also be a path for someone like Elon Musk, who is not a native-born citizen, to become president.

Feel free to reply to this after you give it a try. It worked for me, but I’m curious if it works for anyone else.

It’s doubtless an artifact of history. Rubber water bottles like that go way back. Before the days of electric blankets, space heaters, boiler heating, gas furnaces, etc, heating was often provided by wood- or coal-burning stoves. With a rubber bladder like that, you could boil some water on the stove and take it to bed with you. If all you have is a fire to keep you warm, it’s hard to use that fire to directly heat your bed. For someone sleeping in a cold bedroom in an old drafty house, a hot water bottle and a pile of blankets was how you often got through the cold winter nights. And stoneware versions of the same concept go back at least half a millennium.

But ice available in the home? Some homes in the late 19th century and earlier sometimes had ice boxes - literally just insulated boxes that you could put ice in to keep food cold. The ice had to be cut off of frozen lakes in the winter and stored in big insulated ice houses for the rest of the year. But such ice would be too expensive and precious to fill a water bottle with. Maybe someone really wealthy could afford to do that. Maybe you could do it if someone was severely ill and needed a fever cooled. But pre-WW2, even if you had access to ice, it was too precious for most people to be able to justify using it just as a sleep aid.

To make something like this practical, you really need a modern freezer. Even in the days of ice boxes, you wouldn’t be able to pull something like this off unless you were willing to use up two liters of expensive bought ice every night. That’s just not something most people could afford.

The first domestic freezers as we know them now didn’t appear until the 1940s. And it took decades for them to become ubiquitous in the homes of people in wealthy countries. It’s only in the last 50 years or so that you could just assume a random person in a developed country has access to a freezer. And there are certainly still people who don’t have such access.

So yeah, we’ve had hot water bottles for many centuries, but the concept of a cold bottle or cold pack is only something that’s been feasible for less than a single human lifetime. We were doubtlessly calling these things “hot water bottles” generations before the freezer was invented. It turns out they can also be used as ice packs, but the name was already established.

It doesn’t leave wet patches. If you used the bottle without the cover, it would. But the cover makes it so that heat energy only slowly leaches into it. In other words, the surface of the covered bottle is probably around 60F/16C. And the surface is fluffy, not smooth.

The covers do mostly prevent it. They sometimes do get a little bit of condensation, but it’s not significant. The cover mostly takes care of it. You can get a little condensation near the sealed end of the bottle. It’s less than the amount of moisture you would generate via sweating.

Do you suffer from hot sleeping? I do. I sleep best with a big pile of blankets on me. I sleep with a weighted blanket among others. But that combined with a prediliction for hot sleeping, and I have trouble waking up in the night in a sweat.

I got so desperate, I actually almost bought one of those expensive cool water circulation systems. But then I realized a low tech solution. It takes a lot of heat to melt water. The amount of energy required to melt two liters of water is of the same magnitude as the amount of body heat given off by a human over the course of a night.

Specifically, I learned that those old timey rubber water bottles for bed use? They works just as well as cold packs as hot packs. So I got a few of those and tried it. And it’s helped immensely at improving my sleep.

I have two cheap Amazon special rubber water bottles with felt covers on them. I keep them in the freezer. Each night I grab the bottles, which freeze solid through the day. I simply sleep with them under the covers, and it immensely improved my sleep. The felt covers on the bottle act as insulators to ameliorate the temperature of the bottles. You can sleep with one against you and it just feels mildly cooling. It doesn’t feel like sleeping on a block of ice.

I would say this method is about 90% as effective as one of those expensive bed water cooling systems. I researched those, and they cost $500 and up. Plus they required regular maintenance and had all sorts of problems with leaks and mold. This? This system cost me about $20 and requires no more work than taking something in and out of the freezer.

If you have problems with hot sleeping, try the stupid solution first. Buy some big rubber water bottles and freeze them, or try other cold pack solutions or similar total heat capacity.

Wait, is the big “Why,” with a capital W, just us personifying nature? We’re such social animals that we need to personify everything. People looking for a WHY are ultimately just expecting nature to act like a human being! We’ve evolved as social animals. We need to be used to thinking of actions having causes. Nothing just happens in a social community. If your food stores are suddenly and unexpectedly low, someone stole them. Oh, that nice tool/weapon? You got it from your brother-in-law. You owe him. We have evolved in environments where we need to keep social scores and disperse responsibilities. It’s in our literal, social, and cultural DNA to attribute actions in our environment to people.

But then we also end up applying that to nature. It’s pareidolia at a cultural level. And so we ask Why, with a capital W. Some might make fun of the ancients for personifying forces of nature and raisin them up as Gods. But we’re no different. We do the same damn thing. We’ve just replaced the Gods with “Why.”

Ultimately, it is extremely rare in nature for there to be just one of anything. Phenomena rarely occur alone. Why should this not extend to the very existence of Universes, independent Big Bangs? Maybe the Big Bang is some incredibly rare quantum fluctuation in the vacuum that occurs by odd chance once every “ten to the ten to the ten to the ten…” years. Some freakishly long length of time. But who cares? There’s no one around to count the empty years. But once in a very blue moon, in some random patch of the vast infinite, infinitely expanding space time, a Big Bang occurs. It has its course and eventually decays down to nothing, returning to the quantum foam from which it sprung. In time, everything decays down to photons, those photons are stretched beyond the cosmic horizon. A Big Bang happens, a Universe thrives, and it decays to nothing. Awhile later, another Big Bang, etc.

So while a Universe is a rare thing, it is not unique. But in turn, it does give a sense of meaning. Suddenly we are now a part of a grand infinity of time and space. The concept of the Wheel of Time is made literal! And that is the thing that whole religions are built on. There are ways to find meaning in an infinite circle.

Interesting bit of trivia. Microwaves don’t actually have “high” or “low” settings. The magnetron, the microwave’s core component, only has two states - on and off. It can’t power the magnetron at 10% power level.

Instead, the “power” settings just control how often the magnetron is activated. So maybe at full power it’s on 100% of the time. At medium it’s 10 seconds on, 10 second off. At low it’s 3 seconds on, 10 seconds off. That kind of thing. The “power” setting is just a glorified timer.

That might be usable. But still, well within the range of reversible transactions and court litigation.