Article suggests he spent a lot more time than that

he’s made thousands of dollars

Thousands, you say? Curious to know how much that comes out to at $/hr of effort, minus the costs of licensing and marketing.

Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro

he was dismayed to find that none of the content was hitting. He turned to Gemini for advice.

Sam says he presented Gemini with a few possible options to help his model stand out, and the chatbot selected one in particular

This reads more like bait for wanna be scammers than a scam on its face. Just an ad for Gemini.

Under socialism, you will live next to a first generation immigrant from a country full of brown people, you will eat their food, experience their culture, and work side by side in pursuit of a better life.

And you will like it.

The biggest liar I know is still in jail for raping children

I will happily spot you “Don’t hire child rapists” as a rule of thumb. I think “fudging your resume is a slippery slope to sexually assaulting a minor” is a stretch of logic.

My industry and group are weird when it comes to credentials. We don’t have a strict, you need this degree situation.

I know employers who use “college degree” as a proxy for “capable of following instructions” and won’t hire anyone without a bachelors.

I know employers who are much more fast and loose, bringing in anyone with “potential” as they broadly define it.

Idk exactly what the right answer is. But “powers through a MOOC in a few weeks to get a certificate that says I can competently execute a job” doesn’t strike me as a moral failing.

If a hire is open about their credentials I would not care.

Typically, any job that gets filled at my company has to have a competitive candidate to consider. I’ve seen them fudge this a few times (bringing in someone they know isn’t qualified just to balance against), but it’s a hiring standard that you have to consider at least two (preferably three or four) candidates for any position.

If you show up and you don’t have the credentials for the position, you’re simply not getting the job.

I’ve witnessed what happens when people are ok with liars.

Sure. The Enron offices are spitting distance from where I work.

But I also see a lot of people fudging resumes to get feet in the door. And I don’t see people who were honest, but got screened out by a filter. So I’m the victim of selection bias, in many regards.

On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.

Ideally, I wouldn’t hire them. But if they were already on the payroll, I’m much more interested in their work output than their transcript.

This is just the industrialization of “Fake It Until You Make It”.

If an employer asks for a copy of your transcript, what are you going to give them?

That’s half the joke, though. The employers are using automated tools to sift for staff. Why would prospective staff not use automated tools to bump themselves up in the queue for a job?

Or maybe you’ll falsify a transcript, but if you were going to do that then why did you pay $4,000 for your college diploma anyway?

Because then it’s not a “false” transcript. It’s real and true, fully accredited and identical to a transcript issued by a four year school.

Of course it’s partly the student’s fault

This is a structural failure. It isn’t the fault of any single (non-billionaire) individual. As we pull more and more humans out of the bureaucratic chain and dump more and more automation onto lowest-bidder third parties, we accumulate technical debt. That technical debt exposes vulnerabilities in our bureaucratic systems. And then people naturally move in to exploit those vulnerabilities when they can’t get what they need out of a normally functional bureaucracy.

I’ll consult a historian.

I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.

There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.

On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.

Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.

No way the general populace is that stupid.

It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.

He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.

The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.

Idk about the valiance of a bunch of those. A couple - banning bump stocks, rescheduling cannabis, psychedelics - were on rails from prior admins. I really don’t know about Project Warp Speed, given how he immediately tore the wiring of the program out in his second term. I guess I’ll spot you the penny.

If I was going to point to anything during his time in office, it was the Afghanistan withdrawal. Except that… glances at the half dozen other wars he started… idk if that gets to count on the balance.

the cowardice of a draft dodger

Literally the only good thing this man has ever done with his life is to duck out of the Vietnam War.

Reagan had really done us dirty

He definitely kicked the county while it was down. But a big part of the US Golden Age was being the last economy standing after WW2.

The end of America’s economic dominance was inevitable, as old colonial powers re-industrialized and newly liberated post-colonial states gained control of their natural resources for domestic use.

By Nixon, American global dominance was sunsetting regardless of our domestic policies. That’s why we gave up the gold standard and adopted the Petrodollar as a globalized economic strategy. We couldn’t just import everyone else’s gold and sell it back to them at a premium anymore.

Every time I deliver a pizza to the posh kid’s neighborhood, there’s inevitably a pair of 19 year old twins wearing lingerie, covered in whipped cream, whom I’ve interrupted in the middle of a pillow right. And I have to tell them “No no no, there’s no other way to pay me. I only accept cash or plastic.”

The buildup begin in '21. Although I’ve had people yell at me for suggesting the war didn’t actually start in '14.

Age verification that will, itself, be quickly subverted and spoofed. And which they won’t bother to manage internally, because that’s hard

$1500/mo

Only available in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Satisfying two women at once? That’s awful bigamy.

I don’t think it would take a million. Maybe a couple grand.

The sex doesn’t even sound like fun.

It sounds like you’d have to train for it, like synchronized swimmers or Olympic floor dance routines or ballet performances. Get it right and it’s incredible. But you’re spending days, weeks, months mostly just crashing into one another and ending up in a pile of flailing limbs, feeling resentful because the other two didn’t hit their marks.