Professional hitmen don’t actually exist. It’s a ‘business’ that you can’t possibly advertise for and has no way for the customer to assess the quality of the provider in advance. Sometimes killings do happen in exchange for money, but they don’t involve someone that is a professional killer that works with the public as their primary source of income. It just doesn’t exist. But there are some cases where killing does happen for money.

Sometimes two people will conspire to kill another for profit. Maybe one spouse hates another spouse. They ask a close friend or relative to kill their spouse, and they offer a portion of proceeds from life insurance as a payment for their risk and trouble. Or they’re cheating on their spouse with someone else, stand to inherit all their spouses assets upon their demise, and promise to marry the person they’re cheating with, thus sharing all the assets with them. In this case, it’s not a stranger being hired; the killer has known the person ‘hiring’ them for decades.

Some killings-for-hire are gang related. A gang wants someone killed. They don’t hire a random person to do it. They get one of their own members, who they’ve already known for many years and is a full member of the gang. In compensation for the huge risk the person is taking on to perform the deed, they offer a large sum of cash. Again, an unvetted stranger is not being hired. This person has likely already committed numerous crimes on the gang’s behalf in the past. When you’ve already committed enough crimes on a gang’s behalf to get you years in prison, a murder isn’t such a stretch.

Some killings-for-hire are done at the behest of nation-states. Spycraft. The KGB or CIA hire someone in a foreign country who is already sympathetic to them to kill someone the intelligence agency wants taken out. The intelligence agency doesn’t just select anyone, they go through a long vetting process just like they would any other intelligence asset. In fact, the potential assassin has likely already provided good intelligence and assistance to them for years, already risked extensive jail time or worse. If you’re a US military member that’s been providing intelligence to the KGB for a decade and have already participated in sabotage efforts, you’re already looking at treason charges if you’re caught. Offing someone for the KGB isn’t such an escalation. And when a nation-state hires someone to perform a killing, they also offer the person a plausible way out. The CIA can hire someone to kill someone for them in a foreign country and hand that person a US passport along with a few million safely in a US bank account in their name. Hell, they can make sure the assassin’s family has been given US citizenship and is already in the US before the deed is done. The CIA assassin can perform the killing, and as long as they can get to US or friendly territory before the foreign cops catch up with them, they’ll be completely free and clear. And regardless, their family will already be set for life in the US.

These are the kinds of scenarios where killings actually do occur in exchange for money. No one hires someone to kill another that they haven’t heavily vetted. If a random civilian is going to hire someone else to kill someone, they won’t hire a professional assassin. They’ll hire their brother or their lover. Otherwise contract killings only are done by organizations like gangs or national intelligence agencies, and they only hire people to do so that they’ve worked with for years and who has already committed numerous less severe crimes for them in the past.

In short, there really is no such thing as a professional assassin that serves the general public. Maybe if you are the spouse of a high-level violent gang member, you might be able to convince them to use the gang’s resources to pay one of their trusted members to kill someone in exchange for cash. But if you’re just a random average person? Forget it. There simply are not professional contract killers hiding in the shadows that a random civilian can hire if they have the cash. Anyone claiming to be that is simply a cop. Any person who DID try to start a career like this would be caught very quickly and have a very, very short career.

Gather up your neighbors and have them come and strategically park their cars on the church yard, physically blocking the kid’s path. If he can trespass, so can you.

So…mostly 18-24 year olds?

As a matter of course, one should not even open a link that goes to OpenAI.

It’s best not to become dependent on these piracy engines. These models are hopelessly unprofitable, and they will not be cheap and accessible for very long. They take such colossal resources to train, billions upon billions of dollars. Currently OpenAI is trying to do the classic Silicon Valley bait and switch. They have a product that is more expensive and inefficient than the previous method. If they charge the real price for their product, they know no one will adopt it. So instead they offer their product at an artificially low price initially. They hope that everyone will become dependent, after which they can jack up their prices.

It’s the Uber model. Start by paying drivers more than they would make driving taxis, and by charging riders far less than they would pay for a taxi fare. This is possible through billions of angel investor subsidies. Then once everyone is dependent, slash driver pay and jack up ride prices. This is the only way for Uber to make back the billions they’ve squandered on market capture sub Silicon Valley execute bloat. If we had functioning anti-monopoly law enforcement, the executives of all these companies would be in jail. But for now they’re able to take advantage of practices that would have seen them in chains two generations ago.

Same with OpenAI. They want to get all the copy-editing companies dependent on their piracy engines. They want all the graphic design companies dependent on their image stealing tools. Then, once these companies fire their real human copy editors and graphic designers, OpenAI will start charging the real price for its services. And considering the literal hundreds of billions being poured into these hopelessly inefficient piracy engines, the rate they will have to charge will be enormous. Someone has to ultimately pay for those billions Sam Altman is sponging up. And even if they didn’t have billions of investor dollars to recoup, their ultimate goal is to gain a monopoly position in the copy editing and graphic design market. They will replace a million competing copy editors and graphing designers with a single provider - OpenAI. They’ll control the market. Once all the real human copy editors, graphic artists, and voice actors/readers have been driven from the industry and been forced to move on and take jobs elsewhere, they will be able to charge whatever they please.

Any executive that lets their company become dependent on this technology is a fool. They’re a sucker, falling for a classic bait-and-switch. Hopefully enough of them are smart enough not to be suckered in by the OpenAI con job, and OpenAI can hastily be driven into bankruptcy where it belongs.

I would be inclined to agree. Schools themselves have wide latitude to police this type of thing, much wider than general criminal law could do. So I have no problem with the kid being suspended. The criminal charge on the other hand is another matter entirely. That seems like a clear 1st Amendment violation.

Now I really want to see an animation of what the European discovery of the planet looked like. Imagine a time lapse of a Civilization game, as the map is slowly revealed. I want to see that, except actual history.

What is likely the cause of this is one thing that people miss about solar panels. Their efficiency is a function of temperature. In the summer, you get more sunlight, but the panels themselves are hotter and thus lose efficiency. In the winter there is less light, but the panels make the most of every photon.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b50dee412b13f916dbf6993/t/5b8c7b6970a6adae1d34926d/1535933289992/AISC+14th+Ed+Design+Examples+-+Spec+Ch+F.pdf

Ooops. Posted that the wrong place!

deleted by creator

Then use the USB? That seems just as good, no?

I gotta say, I’m really lucky where I am now. I’m in a PhD program right now. My husband and I moved to a college town from the big sprawling traffic nightmare that is Houston a few years back. He’s able to work from home; I’m able to bike or take the bus to campus. We have just one car for the household, and we get gas once every couple months. It’s glorious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Well, then that is truly bullshit. I wouldn’t even buy a car without one. Have you checked your manual? Maybe there’s a hidden wire somewhere that you can attach an extension cable to.

No. It would be robbery if they stole your car. If you had to leave your vehicle and walk away, and your vehicle was subsequently towed, you might be able to sue them in court for the cost of towing and impounding your vehicle and maybe something for your time. But never would it arise to kidnapping or theft as a criminal matter. You are not your vehicle. It is only kidnapping or false imprisonment if you, your own physical person, are prohibited from leaving.

You will if we manage to trigger another mass extinction due to dying seas and you choke to death on clouds of hydrogen sulfide. Or you will care about the environment as you starve to death after our global breadbaskets collapse due to skyrocketing temperatures. We already have WW2-level casualties locked in due to climate by the end of the century. Our efforts right now are trying to keep them merely to WW2-levels, rather than “global nuclear war” levels.

You do not live independent of this planet’s biosphere. You are an animal that exists atop a vast pyramid of life below you, and you are completely and utterly dependent on the services of life below you provides. You are like a CEO saying, “I don’t care what happens to the people I employ. If they die, I’ll be fine.”

Ignorant. Suicidal. Hubris.

Sure. But that assumes police see cyclists as human beings rather than vermin that deserve to be run over. And in my experience, that is usually not the case. It is rare for a driver to get so much as a ticket for murdering a cyclist with their vehicle. Hell, half the time the vehicle parked in the bike lane is a police cruiser. And most cops are so obese they would crush any bicycle they tried to ride.

The point of not being able to take advantage of the screen size is really interesting. I wonder why they don’t design these to fold out into something with a normal phone aspect ratio, just bigger. That way you could actually take advantage of all the screen real estate.

I remember getting horrible feedback in my car’s stereo when I tried to simultaneously charge my mp3 player from the car’s cigarette lighter adapter and run an aux cable. Somehow this resulted in a feedback loop that ruined the audio quality. I had to either charge or listen to music, not both.

It’s really easy to turn a pair of wireless earbuds into wired earbuds with some hot glue and a piece of string.

IDK. I use one and have no problem with it. My car’s bluetooth is rather unreliable at connecting, so I just us a USB C->aux cable. I’ve got no complaints. Is it as good a signal as a properly paired bluetooth digital audio connection? No. But it’s certainly as good as the old aux->aux cables I used back in the day.