Neat. It’s been on my wish list to visit this spot. It’s just that if I’m going to spend money in the south eastern part of the USA, this particular state is pretty high on the list of troubling politics, which is saying a lot given the region. So, it makes me hesitant to go there for a visit and spend my money in a state that seems to overwhelmingly abhor my existence.
There’s a saying amongst us ass breathers in regards to all you nose breathing assholes: “they hate us because they anus.”
Seems like it would depend on the poison.
My best friend has an unnatural talent for this sort of thing and really enjoys toying with conspiracy theory nuts.
When folks start talking about crazy shit, it makes me very anxious and I tend to shut down. Not my buddy. He eggs them on, encourages it, and gets them to say things or agree with things that are even more outlandish than where they conversation started. Things will start at “China invented covid to kill off old people” and somehow end up at “Hillary Clinton paid to have her chromosomes added to the covid vaccines so that DNA evidence can no longer be used against her in the courts”.
I mean, I’m not a veterinarian and my words should not be taken as scientifically valid, but I feel like way too many stories like this are just … veering way too far into anthropomorphism. I mean, I’m fully aware that many mammals are way smarter than we give credit to and in some ways more human than many people are willing to admit, but this just seems a bit incredulous.
Exactly, I don’t get the appeal.
I dunno if it is intentional, but there’s a an additional layer of humor in this for me:
Where I live, there’s a company called Labcorp and they are basically the de facto company for pre-employment and random drug testing. I’m sure they do more than just drug tests, but drug testing is about all non-medical folks know of the place.
Sounds dirty. Will there be cheese?
Earlier this year one of my relatives came for an extended visit. We were discussing what we might have for dinner that week and both of us were on board for the same ingredients, such as asparagus. My relative was also happy with the video services I’m currently subscribed to because I have a couple options they don’t have at home, so they were telling me about how they were rewatching some older Harrison Ford movies. And then there’s the age-old (or old age) conversations about our current health issues.
In the following days, my relative kept bringing up the fact that their phone and tablet are listening to our conversations. Proof? After we had the food conversation, their news feed was suddenly filled with asparagus recipes. They were also getting ads for more Harrison Ford content on the service that they don’t subscribe to. And to top it off, they were seeing ads for a prescription my dog takes but that they had never even heard of before our conversation the day or two before. Isn’t it obvious? They’re listening to our conversations.
To me this was easily explainable by Occam’s Razor. All our devices are on the same IP address. After we discussed the asparagus I went online that night and did a search for asparagus recipes. And when we were talking about my dog’s health condition, I used my phone to look up the active ingredient because I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Plus, when Hulu or whatever random service sees you’re watching a lot of Harrison Ford movies, it makes sense they’d advertise others you might like.
That makes a lot more sense and is a lot less complicated of an explanation than “our devices are always recording our conversations and uploading them to the internet as a basis to send us advertisements”.
Sure it’s technically feasible, but if it were happening, surely they would be a lot more incontrovertible proof than a questionable and likely misinterpreted news source that seems to be more of a “sly” advertisement for a tech solution that the big players aren’t actually using.
As a kid, by the time I started hearing about the system via video game magazines, which were kind of like miniature websites but printed on paper and then distributed via mail and stores, I was convinced it would be the next big thing. By the time it was launched, I knew it was going to be the new top dog in the industry. When I finally got my hands on one, it was (pardon the pun) game changing for me.
The system definitely had its flaws, but it was an evolutionary step up and order of magnitude bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before.
And go figure, it was the last system I owned before I stepped away from the gaming hobby for nearly 2 decades. Life, uh, got in the way.