To summarize: Texas allows itself to be governed via right wing ideology and right wing ideology makes for piss poor disaster preparedness.

Expecting your government to do anything at all to protect people from disasters is literally the opposite of right wing ideology. Disaster preparedness—in the form of warning systems and building regulations—are implementations socialism (and environmentalism).

If you’re a conservative (or libertarian), little girls dying in floods every few years is your ideal scenario. That’s literally what you believe in! That it’s not the government’s job to prevent such things.

And let’s be honest: If you’re conservative you probably don’t believe in global warming either so this is just an “act of God” that no one could’ve predicted (except science did predict this). Clearly, God is punishing those little girls (or their parents) for… Living in Texas?

The US is not “openly bankrolling” any AI companies. The closest thing would be OpenAI’s recent contract with the military:

https://www.theverge.com/news/688041/openai-us-defense-department-200-million-contract

Whereas China is definitely funding AI efforts in their country because they’re communist (sort of). That’s literally how communism works: The government funds stuff.

China isn’t really communist in the traditional sense but they definitely use government funds to prop up business they feel will give the country a strategic advantage. They do this directly (here’s a check to pay people) and indirectly (we’ll subsidize all shipping for your business and make sure you get sweetheart deals with other businesses you rely on).

The Chinese government is in the business of picking winners and losers in the market and they’re open about it. It’s not a secret. That’s literally how their government is setup.

The US has ways of picking winners but they’re not nearly as direct and there’s a whole lot of rules that must be followed or competitors will sue and win. Then the whole process falls apart.

TL;DR: You’re directly wrong and you’re framing the story wrong as well.

Aside: If OpenAI goes bankrupt after wasting billions of rich investor dollars the citizens of the US will not have lost billions as a result. Whereas in China…

Depends on your CPU and whatever else you have in your PC (e.g. is your cooler a beast too? Do you have six spinning disks? etc).

Generally speaking, 750W should be fine if you’re using a boring air cooling setup with an SSD or two.

I know, right? Why send my BBQ data to the cloud when I can just cook with a handful of GPUs, locally? To start the grill you just ask the animated waifu to dance and sing a random, AI-generated song that matches your taste in music. Then the fans spin up and send scrumptious GPU heat into the grill, cooking up a delicious hallucination where your animated waifu sings, “That looks yummy! Yummy yummy yummy! Hai hai hai!”

Flood warning systems are socialism though!

Those schools are heartless!

Arrr! Just say a prayer to the bitch queen of the sea every day and you’ll be safe in your hammock, pirate.

Foam mattresses float. Just keep a bottle of water and a hand axe under your pillow 👍

AccuWeather just uses the NWS data. They’d be lost without it.

Because they probably just took the first image that was generated without even checking it. For today’s generative image AI you usually want to generate great big batches then pick the best ones.

Then if you’re looking for high quality in your meme you’ll also use inpainting and pull the result into Krita or the GIMP to make further improvements (e.g. add text with a proper outline/drop shadow). Then when you’re done you’ll use AI to upscale the image to a great big size so that it’ll look nice when you print it out and hang it on the wall in your cubicle or the stick it to the office fridge or some filing cabinet 😁

So… To save lives in situations like this you need to collect taxes to pay for a socialist weather prediction and emergency management system.

Texas: “Taxes and socialism‽ Forget it! We’d rather die. All we need to defend ourselves from weather or anything else big pickup trucks and guns!”

Any of these people who take the time to learn what any of these policies actually mean quickly become not-Republicans start to disbelieve reality and declare the truth as, “fake news.”

FTFY 👍

No hot dog surprise cereal either, apparently!

The Trump administration—and conservatives in general—are treating oil that can only be extracted from fracking like it’s old fashioned oil wells. They’re not the same. The output from a traditional oil well is easy to predict: They have a specific amount of estimated oil and over (a long) time you need to add more well heads to keep the same level of output but in general it’s well-established science. You can extract from them for decades and decades.

Fracking can extract a lot of oil from a tiny area all at once over the course of just a few years. In theory you could extract oil from the same fracking well for 40 years but in reality it’s just ten years. No fracking (for oil) has lasted longer than that as far as I’m aware. You can still extract natural gas from the same site though (I don’t know the specifics on that).

NOTE: What makes fracking wells only last ten years isn’t that you can’t get any more oil out of them. It’s because it takes too much energy to get more oil out of them. Forget how much it costs: There’s an amount no one will pay to extract a barrel of oil from the ground and that is “more than one barrel’s worth of energy”.

Whereas wind and solar power will last forever, fracking is a boom that will only last another 20 years or so. By screwing over solar and wind power Republicans/Trump/conservatives are screwing our future. It takes a long ass time to replace fleets of vehicles and the time to do that is like ten years ago. We need to ramp it up too if we don’t want to get caught in another energy crisis around 2035 (that’s approximately when the output from traditional oil wells drops to the point where fracking can’t make up with demand anymore).

Wait: Are we sure they’re actually people?

“Ma!”

Also, it has to be shouted. As a kid—coming into the house from who-knows-what adventure where I destroyed an item of clothing—again. Or as an adult trying to reach her over the sound of Fox News with the volume up way too loud.

This is the way.

Trust me when I say that if you do this with that many girls in the bed… Urine trouble!

Get a tortoise and feed the berries to it 👍

(That’s what we do at our house)

I think you mean Rust, old timer 😁

The AI said that trying to reason with you is a waste of precious tokens.