Make your own! ThatDudeCanCook on youtube has a great video on making your own kebab meat.

I quit smoking pot five years ago. Altman’s not wrong re: me.

Hire to create the illusion of growth, fire to create the illusion of competence. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

I “retired” (fancy way of saying “was laid off”) from programming seven years ago and I haven’t written a line of code since. I’m happy to have completely missed out on the AI experience, although since I spent the last few years of my career mostly managing a team of offshore developers, I feel like I got close enough. Now I own my own small house and I drive a school bus and I couldn’t be happier. At some point AI will be driving the school buses (so that the kids can still go to school and have AI do all their work for them) but hopefully I will have died a painless death by then.

Do they matter to cops? If they get paid, they get paid by tax money, no?

As I mentioned in another comment, apparently the PD splits the ticket revenue with the school district after the camera company gets their installation and profit margin covered. Cops get paid their salaries from the PD budget which is mostly from tax revenues but also from other sources like tickets and these cameras. A higher PD budget means more perks including higher salaries and paid overtime and more benefits, so while they can’t just stuff the money in their pockets (usually) they do benefit from these alternative revenue sources.

does that make you a roving part of the survailance system, too?

Probably. There’s nothing I can do about this without losing my job.

The cameras are from a company named Bus Patrol. They haven’t really told us much about how the program works, but as I understand it the district pays nothing in upfront costs. Supposedly Bus Patrol pays for the installation and then they get all the revenue up to the point where the cameras and their profit margin are covered; after that the ticket revenues are split evenly between the local police department and the school district. A figure of a million dollars as the cost for installing cameras on our 40 buses was thrown up by somebody, but that seems a bit unlikely as that means the cameras cost $25,000 per bus. Maybe that’s correct, I dunno.

I have nearly no info about the legality of this, but they’re pretty common at this point. I know one difference is that if you’re caught by an actual cop speeding past a bus’ red lights you get a fine and points on your license, but if you get a mailed ticket from one of these cameras it’s just a fine. Presumably it’s because they can’t always tell who was actually driving the vehicle. It might be a case where they can’t really take any action if a person just refuses to pay the fine, and they just send out tickets because some or most people will just pay it.

I’m a school bus driver and a few years ago I had a cop pass me while my red flashers were on and the stop sign was out and kids were about to get off the bus and cross the street. He was driving with one hand and looking at his phone in the other hand. He could have easily run a kid over. And then they probably would have found some way to blame me for it.

We have cameras now that automatically detect this and send out tickets, but we didn’t at the time. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway since the cops have to review the footage before any ticket goes out.

they found a guy who looks exactly like David Byrne

You may ask yourself
Why the big bomb?

It was sorta a military base. They did have POWs there.

We had a meeting with my mom’s broker and my brother and I brought up the AI bubble. The broker responded with the most ridiculous nonsense. He basically said that corporate CEOs are smart people with a legal responsibility to keep their companies financially healthy and so they wouldn’t be using AI if it weren’t viable. It sounded like something handed down to him from Raymond James HQ which I’m sure it was, and it was surely written by AI in the first place.

My preparer randomly told me that he had invested money with a guy who was developing a “reactionless space drive”. He then mentioned that the guy had solved all the problems he was having with it by asking ChatGPT about it. I asked him if the guy had a working prototype yet and he said no but it was sure to work.

Time to find a new tax preparer.

I had a coworker go on an insane rant about his hatred of EVs after somebody mentioned Teslas. I wound him up even more by saying I’m fine with EVs just not ones built by Nazis.

I prefer lobotomy, but then I always did idolize the Kennedys.