Sometimes a monopoly can have so much money that it actually does some very significant amount of innovation. Look at Ma Bell.

The problem is to not let them get so big though. Then you’ve got to break it up and that gets hairy. Look at Ma Bell.

And then they might try to get back together. Look at Ma Bell.

And at the end of it, we might just end up with a duopoly of shit. Look at Ma Bell and Xfinity.

“Copilot, order me…uh…us one diet coke”

Ordering -1 diet coke…

…received 65535 diet cokes…

Hey that guy blowing lines off the toilet may, one day, become the US Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I’m a lot of things. But I am not mighty.

Do you have “his & hers” toilets? Or joining you on the same toilet?

GeoCities would like a word.

They had a pretty decent web-based WYSIWYG for the time, iirc.

IT WAS MADE FOR ME!

Seriously those starving children in Africa owe me a little bit of thanks for always finishing my plate. Or something.

The Reynolds Pamphlet.

What’s difficult is keeping with it.

My weight has fluctuated from a low of 180lbs to a high of 450lbs throughout my entire adult life.

I know what to do. I know it’s easy to do it.

The hard part is knowing that the second I stop counting, it all comes piling back on.

It’s incredibly discouraging to know that most people can just…live. They eat when they’re hungry. They don’t constantly have a voice in their head telling them to eat when they aren’t. They don’t use sweets for emotional support or stress relief. They can leave food on a plate when they’re full. And they feel full with reasonable portions of food.

Moreso, they aren’t riddled with anxiety whenever their fat ass is on display out in public doing exercise.

I had an elderly woman at physical therapy tell me I’m the biggest man she’s ever seen. You know how upsetting that is? Like, no shit, I know I’m fat. And sure she likely has no filter because of dementia but man it still burns.

It’s an entire lifetime of learned experiences, eating habits, and psychological trauma. That elderly woman may as well have been one of the bullies in grade school or a douche in a pickup jeering at me on a walk. That’s the hard part.

It’s one thing to cut calories for a few months and lose weight. It’s another to look at the entire rest of your life and know, from experience, that as soon as you fall off the wagon, it’s back to square one. That you now have to change what’s essentially been hard-coding itself into your brain since some of your earliest thoughts. That you will, forever, have to continue counting calories and tracking food.

That’s the daily struggle. Resisting what you’ve known your entire life. And worse, needing it. Because you still have to eat, right? So you’ve got to eat, but you have to control it.

You have to control what, and how much, you eat while the food industry keeps on shoveling chemically-addictive foods in front of your face everywhere you go. Piping delicious smells out their exhaust vents as you drive by.

I don’t expect you to understand. People who never struggled with weight really don’t get it. Good for you.

On paper it’s easy. But our brains and bodies aren’t made of paper.

Imagine telling an alcoholic they need exactly one beer a day for the rest of their life. I would wager that’s harder than completely quitting alcohol, or even developing a healthier relationship with it. It has to be in the house. Eventually they have to go to the bar or the liquor store. And every day, for the rest of their life, they have to maintain that restraint.

That’s what obesity is like.

No, all socks have at least one hole in them.

A potato a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

Latvians hate this one trick.

That’s not courtesy, that’s law. Keep right except to pass.

Done passing? Get right.

Not passing fast enough? Gtfo.

News to me…I pay 20k/yr in premiums and my employer pays an additional 30k.

But Mass drivers do need to get out of the left lane.

We aren’t as bad as Rhode Island in this regard, but at least Rhode Island has a level 1 trauma center within 20 minutes of like 80% of its highways.

Does this mean that tube socks are not, in fact, tubes?

If there is a second hole in the sock, does that change things?

I have a lot to consider now.

That feeling when you finally find someone on your wavelength.

AI is in the tool chain now whether you want it or not.

People who don’t use new tools get stuck behind.

If you find a carpenter who is bashing his nails in with a rock because he doesn’t trust hammers, or because blacksmithing is bad for the environment, you are going to be dealing with a shitty carpenter who is a lot slower and less effective than one who learned how to use a hammer.

The genie is out of the bottle. That much is not changing. Accept it, or be a Luddite. Quite literally, because that term comes from people who refused to accept that machines were taking over textile work.

Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.

What the fuck is this?

We’ll make our own carbon cycle. With blackjack. And hookers.

In fact, forget about the carbon.