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Dennis Rodman Has Secret Message From Kim Jong-un for Trump
Rolls Roil
Racial dispute at beloved bakery roils liberal college town in Ohio
The three students were arrested after punching and kicking the white shopkeeper. The 18- and 19-year-old students said that they were racially profiled and that their only crime was trying to buy alcohol with fake identification; the shopkeeper, Allyn Gibson, said the students attacked him after he caught them trying to steal bottles of wine.
The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery. Members of Oberlin's student senate published a resolution saying Gibson's had "a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment."
Few colleges put the "liberal" into "liberal arts" more than Oberlin, which in the early 1800s became the first in the country to regularly admit women and minorities. But it also more recently has become, for conservatives, a symbol of political correctness gone awry and entitled youth.
News articles in 2015 quoted students decrying the school dining hall's sushi and Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches as cultural appropriation. The divisive, voice-of-a-generation actress Lena Dunham, famously a 2008 Oberlin alumna, was quoted in Food & Wine magazine as saying, "The press reported it as, 'How crazy are Oberlin kids?' But to me, it was actually, 'Right on.'"
Kepler Announcement on Dec. 14
NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery
NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.
NASA and Google are both users of the D-Wave "quantum annealer", ostensibly for machine learning purposes.
Mycroft AI instaaaaaallled!!
Welp, i got MycroftAI installed (should i say, FINALLY installed).
Had to jump through hoops and stand on my head holding the rabbit ears sideways, but yeah....
There are a lot of skills that aren't fully working, but so far it has a lot of things i need, like knowing the date and time, lol, and being able to set a quick alarm ("Mycroft, set an alarm for noon""Mycroft, set an alarm for 30 minutes").
Changed it from "Hey Mycroft" to just "Mycroft" cause saying Hey Mycroft EVERY SINGLE TIME is just a pain.
I think i'll suggest an 'interactive mode' where you can say "Hey Mycroft go active" and then it will just try to answer everything thrown its way until told to go out of 'interactive mode' so you don't have to say Mycroft so often.
Right now, it is telling me what pi is to 1000 decimal points, lol. Fun times!
Playah gotta keep playin'!
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Edit
Was able to open smplayer with Mycroft, but it sees/hears palemoon as two separate words and kaffs, lol.
Was happy to see it open smplayer, and tomorrow plan on trying other programs.
Wonder what happens if I ask Mycroft to open Mycroft? Duelling AI?
Will have to see about changing its default error message to "I can't do that, Dave" ;)
Cheeto Jesus, Speaker of Truth
CNN ran an article yesterday full of butthurt that Cheeto Jesus has been keeping too many of his campaign promises. I figured I'd share it with you lot so the regressive progtards among you could share in the butthurt too.
A politician who actually does what he told voters he would do seems almost unfathomable in Washington, a town of broken promises. For Donald Trump, being a president who delivers is especially crucial, since it's one of the golden keys to his so far unbreakable bond with supporters.
The need to live up to that image helps explain why Trump, who is under ever-increasing pressure from the Russia investigation, on Wednesday recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital despite the widely acknowledged risks.
It was just the latest instance of the President obstinately honoring the bumper-sticker vows he made to his ultra-loyal supporters -- even those that horrify the political and foreign policy establishment, media critics and allied leaders.
Have a nice weekend argument. I may or may not have time to step in and egg things on further, we'll just have to wait and see.
Porn Star May Have Been Cyberbullied Into Committing Suicide
What is August Ames Cause of Death? Porn Star Found Dead After Cyberbullying
Adult film star August Ames was found dead in her California home on Tuesday, according to BuzzFeed. The erotic actress, who appeared in over 270 films, was 23 years old.
The Canadian actress’s official cause of death has yet to be released by the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office due to pending family notifications. However, some members of the porn industry believe Ames, whose birth name was Mercedes Grabowski, may have taken her own life.
Just two days before Ames’s death, the porn star was a victim of cyberbullying after she posted a tweet on Sunday saying she refused to perform with a male actor who did gay pornography.
Shortly after Ames’s comments about working with "crossover performers"—porn stars who appear in gay and heterosexual scenes—she was bombarded with angry tweets accusing her of discriminating against the LGBTQ community and being anti-gay.
Ames defended her stance, writing that she was not homophobic, but decided not to shoot with men who have done gay porn for health reasons. “I’m not putting my body at risk, I don’t know what they do in their private lives,” she wrote.
Therese Dreaming
I Bought $4000 of BitCoin Today
I'm not going to buy any more cryptocurrencies until I get my next paycheck, which will be towards the end of the month.
There are some who regard BitCoin's quickly-rising exchange rate to be an investment bubble, much as the dot-com boom was followed by the dot-com crash, as well as the real estate bubble that crashed in late 2007.
I agree for the short term but disagree for the long term.
That it is a bubble is evidenced by all the BitCoin Get Rich Quick advertisements that I see on Facebook. Doubtlessly they're appearing all over the Internet.
Most disturbing to me is an ad that describes BitCoin's rise as a "paradigm shift". If someone ever says the words "paradigm shift" to you, turn around and run as fast as you can. The dot-com boom was claimed to be the conceptually similar "new economy".
Cryptocurrencies sometimes crash when someone burglarizes an exchange by hacking its website. Just once so far - that we know of - the alleged burglary is an inside job. Mt Gox blamed its burglary on a flaw in the BitCoin BlockChain protocol. A forensic accounting investigation by the Japanese authorities led to the arrests of some of Mt Gox' top executives.
These crashes have all recovered quickly.
The current bubble is the result of naive investors buying lots of BitCoin. The most likely cause of a crash will be sales that are made by sophisticated investors and investment banks that want to realize their gains. There will come a point where even a small drop in price will lead the naive investors to sell as fast as they can so they can realize their gains before the crash.
Those same sales will be the cause of the crash as the naive investors panic.
When that happens I won't sell my BitCoins as I am confident the price will recover for the following reasons:
Each new BitCoin is minted by a cryptographic computational process denoted as "mining". The algorithm described by Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper placed as strict upper limit of 21,000,000 coins that can ever be mined. At present there are about 16,000,000.
The mining process gets more difficult with each new coin. The last coin is estimated to be minted a hundred years from now.
What to me is the best argument for BitCoin's long-term price is that increasing numbers of merchants are accepting it for payment. The first such merchant was a Papa John's that sold two pizzas in return for 10,000 BitCoins. Today there are 100,000 such merchants. BTC 10,000 could buy a vast number of pies.
Amazon doesn't accept BTC because it has its own payment system called Amazon Payments. But its competitor NewEgg has been accepting BTC for some time now.
There is a very simple way you can still buy pizza with BitCoins: purchase a Domino's eGift card at NewEgg then use that card to pay for your pizza delivery. I was doing just that with PayPal when I was working as a Mentor for CodeMentor.
Not long after that CodeMentor provided the option of paying Mentors with BTC. I haven't checked but I expect there are lots of other services that pay in BitCoin.
The IRS has ruled that cryptocurrencies are assets, just like stocks, bond and real property. One pays Capital Gains Tax on the profit one makes by selling one's crypto assets. Sales made from coins held less than two years are taxed as regular income. Assets held for two years or more are subject to the Long-Term Capital Gains Tax rate which for me is just 15%.
While I might buy and sell some of my cryptos I intend to hold most of them for two years. If indeed cryptos are in a bubble, the crash will have already occurred then recovered by then.
I might buy an Antminer S9 BitCoin mining rig but am having trouble making up my mind. My concern is that the fans might be too loud.
An argument for buying the S9 was made by a friend who pointed out that I could resell it. What's really ludicrous about his argument is that a new S9 costs ~$1500 for late January delivery whereas used ones are sold at Amazon for $3999 for immediate delivery.
If I did buy an S9 it would mint roughly one coin per year, as predicted by a BitCoin Mining Profit Calculator that I tried. My next paycheck will enable me to buy ~$12000 worth of cryptocurrencies. There is a strong argument for buying it but I remain uncertain.
I won't have to make my mind of for a while as Bitmain only accepts BitCoin Cash as payment. I don't have any BTC yet, but I do expect to buy some with my next check.
My Winter Weekend Adventure.
As my username might suggest, I love winter. It's been pretty nice outside lately so I wanted to get out to the mountains for a walk with my daughter and wife. There is a nice little lake in the mountains about 50 minutes away. It's got a pretty wide, flat trail, so I thought it would be perfect for towing my girl in a cheap-o sled I bought from Canadian Tire for $12.
We invited a friend and we got all loaded into the car and headed out. As we get closer to the mountains, it became clear that my plan had a glaring flaw... there was no snow. My plan to tow my girl in the sled was not going to work out and we didn't bring a stroller. Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to carry her and we'll go for a short walk.
It was a beautiful day. About -2C, and the lake that we went to was barely frozen. Frozen enough that you needed a fist sized rock with a high trajectory to break though the ice. It was really fun to throw rocks at the ice. If you took a smaller rock and threw it like you were skipping a rock, it would skitter along the top of the ice and travel a LONG way. Several hundred yards. The ice was very smooth and fast.
When you would throw a rock along the surface, it would make an eerie metallic-like sound -- just like this: https://youtu.be/ZIHF5EoEixc?t=227
We finished up our short walk and went into a nearby town for a pizza lunch. I was a little scared that my daughter (who had not had a nap) would be a little shit at the restaurant, but she was an angel! So well behaved. I was pleasantly surprised.
Next week my wife goes back to work. She's only going back part-time (3 6-hour days/week), but I'm a little scared to be left alone with my daughter for the day. I've never had much luck with getting her to go to sleep. I'm going to have to figure something out. I've been able to get her to sleep in the past by reading to her and then cuddling until she goes to sleep, but that hasn't worked in several months. The car also seems to work, but she wakes up when I unload her. My wife uses her boob to get her to settle down.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a father on how to get a 1-year old to sleep?
