Topix Underground

In 1986, I was a kid. I was making like $250 a week take-home and I bought a house for 42k. It was a two bedroom, 1000 sf bungalow in a nice neighborhood.....it was beautiful. Nice lot, nice neighbors, I minted the joint out. Forty-two g's. Todays money, that's $126,500. THAT'S WHAT A GD STARTER HOME SHOULD COST !
...Instead, you get a fckng SUV with a back-up camera that shuts off at stop signs for 120 large!

....but I'm pro-cheap-legal reefer. That's a good law....that almost makes-up for all the bad ones...

...really. None of you have any idea....

I was making like 6 bucks an hour and I owned a house and a new car….oh…and I had zero deductible, go anywhere, prescriptions covered Blue Cross

AI for ordinary people is a net negative. There is not a single real world application for it or tangible benefit derived from it. The menial and time consuming tasks eating up time that could be more productively spent are - mowing the lawn, cleaning, doing the dishes....whatever. AI cannot do any of those. Anything I could possibly ask AI that wasn't purely entertainment would take longer to instruct ai to generate than just doing it myself and  I would be inclined to double-check anything rendered by ai manually myself anyhow.

So for tricking it into funny conversations and making pornographic pictures of your ex-wife I give it two thumbs-up. For anything that actually matters...you tell me where it offsets increased internet and utility costs and destroys the aesthetic of entire regions with these vulgar Brutalist "data centers".

The USA is more important to China than any other nation or group of nations

My second home purchase was in the early eighties for 35,000. A three bedroom ranch. The first one was a small bungalow foe about 15,000. Those days are probably gone.

No one here is building houses under 2500 sf or 500k. It’s stupid. They’re too big for the lots, all the same, poorly constructed. I don’t know why anyone needs that unless you have 10 kids. Instead of making cars that shut off at stop lights and outlawing gas stoves - outlaw houses with two-story foyers and great rooms.

An iconic 1945 photo shows American soldier Ivan Babcock jokingly wearing the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire.

The photo was taken inside a mine in Siegen, Germany, which the Nazis had used as a secret storage facility to protect precious works of art from bombing.
April 1945, near the end of World War II. Babcock wrote in his diaries that he wore the crown as a joke, despite sensing the object's incredible historical significance.

The Crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The relic, also known as the Reichskrone, is one of the most important jewels in European history. It was probably made in the 10th century (circa 962 AD) for the coronation of Otto I.