It spreads blatant lies. Not all rumors are lies, though.

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But also, they turned out fine. One of them is right outside my window eating suet at this very moment.

Granted those that realize this already are not perhaps even a majority now int eh US.

Yeah, that’s the thing.

There are pockets of people who are clued in and take the time / have the time to process what they read/see & hear. Those people seem to be fewer and harder to find.

I don’t think people are generally just plain dumb (I know unpopular opinion), but I think a good majority of us are in sensory and informational overload and human understanding of the world has likely never been so complex nor moved so quickly.

This is all happening during a modern renaissance period for malicious misrepresentation (i.e. convincing lies). And even if people are too “dumb” to tell truth from lies, they do recognize that the lies are coming in rapid fire and from every direction. Easier just to tune out and not think too much about all that, otherwise it’s depressing.

Don’t forget that older folks are aging into cognitive issues, younger people have only known this as their reality, poor people are struggling to make ends meet with no time to stop and think, and so many of the ones who’ve “made it” are doing their best to keep it all conveniently compartmentalized away and out of sight.

So, yes, sometimes you do have to be direct and spell otherwise obvious things out for people. The struggle is real.

This is a case where it’s obvious there’s no direct causation, but so often it’s not this clear, and even the really smart people sometimes mess that part up – intentionally or otherwise.

Dead, there was no baby.

Mofo, it’s 2026 ain’t it and you just read one!

Sting Jesus, while obviously a joke, doesn’t really make sense does it? Wouldn’t it be Sting Mary? Or Sting Jesus’s Mom? I’m not a Bibleologist of course, I only play one in the internet.

Big wheel keep on turnin’. Sting Mary keep on burnin’.

I’m extremely surprised ‘’‘’‘they’‘’‘’ would think there’s any species of shark could father babies with a ray, though but then maybe I’m just a big ole dumby for thinking they would be in reference to the keepers and support staff who cared for and/or studied Sting Mary.

Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.

At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.

As an old person who knows a lot of old people and has to deal with a lot of other old people, you’re in a bubble. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and you may already be aware.

By and large, early gen X and older have a very difficult time discerning what materials are AI generated. Then when you get to a certain age range, maybe 70+, AI to much of that crowd is just another buzzword they know nothing about.

Now, in the pedantic sense of the word “increasingly”, if literally one more old person is against AI or doesn’t trust AI compared to last year, then that’s increasing. But on the whole, I’m not seeing it. In fact, as AI gets “better” and harder to detect, I’m finding that more people just go with it. You basically end up with camps of “the person who accuses everything of being AI”, “the person who has no clue what’s what and doesn’t care”, and “the person who can’t tell if something is AI regardless of how obvious it is”.

When I was young, I agreed with the pedants.

When I am old, I simply no longer give a fuck.

Call them what you want. The words are all made up anyway, and the pedantry doesn’t matter.

AIneOneOne: I understand your concern that you had an accident and hit a tree — a lost limb hurts, but did you know that oak trees are are hosts to more caterpillar species than any other species in North America?

So many comments in here, I haven’t read them all. I have some conjecture.

First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit’s most valuable content … their “virgin” data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.

Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.

Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.

Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

According to Ebay, Amazon, Walmart, Temu, Etsy, and so on, you can buy blue rose seeds.

I can’t view the article, so I have a perfectly valid excuse for living my life like a Redditor – making a comment based on the headline only.

I don’t know if I’m one of those netflix viewers who has abandoned shows after one season. I’m not even sure how I could know. Netflix is by far the worst of the major streaming platforms in terms of obscuring their library. Their user experience choices are so heavily focused on making sure everybody’s watching the same 20 or 30 movies/shows that they tune literally everything else out. I’m not on Netflix 24/7 and I don’t tend to keep up with showbiz news. I know lots of people rotate streaming services. It’s very easy to see why folks would not be aware of additional seasons of a show being out.

The other issues that stifle my interest in shows applies to other services as well. The modern era’s long-ass gaps between seasons kills the inertia. Sure, I liked the season that came out 2 years ago, but I hardly remember it and I just don’t have time to try and go back to catch up. Of course there are recaps, but those by nature leave stuff out. Most likely unless that first season was really damn good, I just won’t bother.

Even so, it seems like a lot of these shows peak in their first season, lose the plot in the second, and then by the fourth or fifth season you’re essentially watching a headless male mantis clinging to life just long enough to finish the job. So, a lot of times if the first season isn’t absolutely stellar, I end up putting the show on my abyss of a watch list, likely never to return.

I have none of those traits but I do love to watch tiny little critters going along doing their thing without a care in the world. Except for the invasive ones and the parasites.

Reminds me of Shelly Lowdry’s cat named Precious. She swore up and down it was the cutest thing ever. I’m not the type to be hurtful so I just kept it to myself, but that thing was the ugliest cat I ever seen.

Pretty flowers they remind me of my dearly departed Harold.

Ya’ll joke but I’m old enough to remember how fucking annoying it was when the dinosaurs were around. The fuckers shat everywhere, just like a gigantic gaggle of geese, but some of those assholes were big enough that their poop was basically the size of a goose. Sometimes they’d poop right where we made our stone tools and we’d have to spend days depooping, just absolute days wasted doing that.

We’re all bony fish on this blessed day.

Finally, the scales are tipping in the right direction. And while we’re on the subject, can you go ahead and stop using “crappy” to imply any sort of negative connotation? Crappie are beautiful, vivacious, and gregarious fish who have fascinating behaviors and are important members of their native aquatic ecosystem. That they also taste delicious, well, maybe that’s a different discussion for another time when we’re not talking about how there’s nothing crappy about crappies. If anything, it should be a tremendous compliment to have a crappy day or make a crappy meatloaf or watch a crappy movie.

Another power issue in some areas is that these and many other enormous energy hogging facilities get cheaper power rates than residential customers.

They should be paying at least as much per kwh as I am, and in fact, I feel like they should be getting charged way more to encourage them to reduce their power consumption and/or convert to renewables. And in the meantime, use that “way more” to lower my bill or offer real financial subsidies for residential solar installations.