You can't fix stupid/rev L

 

Photo by Brandi Alexandra on Unsplash

Yours truly has often said you can't fix stupid as stupidity's built-in, it's genetic and one cannot remove that sad state of affairs in the unfortunate unless ubiquitous genetic engineering goes mainstream. With what's happening around the world and ... in the good "ole" USA, it seems stupidity's gaining the upper hand, a most dangerous trend indeed.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian. Penning this sentence ten years after the accession of Adolf Hitler to supreme power, these words reflected tough lessons soaked in blood. Bonhoeffer formed part of a small circle of resistance to the dictator in Germany, risking his life for an ideal.

End game ...

For you can fight against evil. Evil gives people a queasy feeling in the stomach. As Bonhoeffer continued, “evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction.” To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. Against stupidity you are defenseless.

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

He's right

You can't fix stupid/rev XX

As often said, you can't fix stupid. As an example, consider Gov. Greg Abbott unilaterally declaring Texas is 100% open for business, an edict pissing off leaders in that state and for good reason, the virus is mutating.

Mayors and county judges in some of Texas’ largest urban areas criticized Gov. Greg Abbott over his decision to lift the statewide face mask mandate next week, saying it contradicts health officials’ advice as infections continue to spread throughout the state, which averaged over 200 reported deaths a day over the last week.

Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price, a fellow Republican, called Abbott’s order “premature” and asked him to allow more people to get the vaccine.

“I am calling on Gov. Abbott to open up additional vaccine tier categories so that more people are eligible to get a vaccine if they want one,” Price said in a statement. “As the state’s directive has changed, so must our response. Now, more than ever, vaccines and testing must be readily available.”

It gets better ...

But officials lambasted the latest order because it does not allow local leaders to enforce their own mask mandates. The latest order also removes a previous option available to local leaders: compel businesses to require that customers wear face masks.

Why Abbot's ruling is really stupid ...

After a month of falling coronavirus case numbers in the United States, President Joe Biden's CDC director warned that the rise of mutant coronavirus strains could wipe out all of the gains made so far in fighting the pandemic. 

"Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who Biden appointed to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters on Monday. She noted that new infections increased by 2% last week compared to the week before that one, a stark contrast to how numbers had been declining over several previous weeks.

Any questions?

What's Hitler's last name?

 

Credit: Giovanni Battista Recco, Annelisa Leinbach

Stupidity, an all too common human condition, not only can be humorous but also dangerous as the stupid can be led as seen by the rise of Hitler where the big lie was fed to the great unwashed with skill and precision by Joseph Goebbels, the propagandist elite who channeled Edwin Bernays in enabling the Nazis to attain power via the ballot box in 1933. 

Edwin Bernays                                Joseph Goebbels

When we know something or someone is evil, we can take steps to fight it. With stupidity, it is much more difficult. Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil. He also argues that stupidity tends to go hand-in-hand with acquiring power — that is, being in power means we surrender our individual critical faculties.

To whit ...

There’s an internet adage that goes, “Debating an idiot is like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.” It’s funny and astute. It’s also deeply, depressingly worrying. Although we’d never say so, we all have people in our lives we think of as a bit dim — not necessarily about everything, but certainly about some things.

Most of the time, we laugh this off. After all, stupidity can be pretty funny. When my friend asked a group of us recently what Hitler’s last name was, we laughed. When my brother learned only last month that reindeer are real animals — well, that’s funny. Good-natured ribbing about a person’s ignorance is an everyday part of life.

Stupidity, though, has its dark side. For theologian and philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the stupid person is often more dangerous than the evil one.

You can't fix stupid  - Trump or DeSantis 2024.

What part of no don't you understand?

Law enforcement officers head into the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, campus after reports of an active shooter, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2023 in Las Vegas. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP, File)

What part of no don't you understand in terms of licensing guns? Incredible! It's easier to get a gun vs a driver's license. WTF!!! Between the supremes and the not understanding of the the 2nd Amendment in terms of people owning weapons boggles the mind. As said so many time before, you can't fix stupid.

A shooting Saturday at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, left two people dead and at least eight other critically injured. Authorities were still searching for a suspect in the hours afterward.

Here is a look at other deadly shootings on U.S. college campuses in recent decades:

KENTUCKY STATE UNIVERSITY: December 2025, 1 dead

UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY: September 2025, 1 dead

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY: April 2025, 2 dead

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, LAS VEGAS: December 2023, 3 dead

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY: February 2023, 3 dead

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: November 2022, 3 dead

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY: October 2015, 1 dead

UMPQUA COMMUNITY COLLEGE: October 2015, 9 dead

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA: May 2014, 6 dead

SANTA MONICA COLLEGE: June 2013, 6 dead

OIKOS UNIVERSITY: April 2012, 7 dead

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY: February 2008, 5 dead

VIRGINIA TECH: April 2007, 32 dead

WTF!!! Again, what part of no don't you understand?

Lastly, we haven't even discussed elementary, middle or high school atrocities, have we?

ICE yet again ...

A placard during a weekend protest against ICE in Minneapolis
Photograph: Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Ah, another partial shutdown. This is SOOOOOO tiresome. As stated so many times, you can't fix stupid. Yours truly can't watch the "nooze" anymore as stupid shit is everywhere. From vaccine denials to transgender issues to Epstein, the insanity just continues ever onward. In A Must Read ...  Nixon, the NSC and the spying done by the military on Nixon and the National Security Council is most illuminating as one saw not only the paranoia of Nixon but also his brilliance. Smart, incisive and astute in terms of politics and the thirst of power, the contrast cannot be any more stark versus the demented menace residing in the White House as we speak. And now another shutdown over the rightful push to eliminate ICE, the Brown Shirt equivalent of ill trained thugs masquerading as federal agents, complete with masks, in order to cover up the ids of these incompetents while they abuse and murder people without consequences. 

SA insignia

An Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for five months despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record says he fears for his life and has appealed for help from Ireland’s government.

Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.”

Any questions?

Isolated and ... without power

This should not happen but Texas, via ERCOT, decided to isolate and, in effect, privatize their electric grid with emphasis on profits, which means equipment not being hardened against the weather while not connected to the nation's power grid because "you don't want the government messing in your affairs." Ask the folks who are freezing their asses off to see how they feel about this sorry situation now, especially when Terrible Ted splits for Cancun even though his state's frozen emergency from hell started long before the esteemed senator left for balmier skies.

One key reason for this is because Texas maintains its own power grid largely in isolation from those of its neighbor states. In North America, most customers are served by two major grids that operate on the same alternating current frequency—one serving the eastern half of the continent (including the US, Canada, and parts of Mexico) and the other serving the western half. However, Texas—along with Quebec—both maintain power grids that are largely separate from these larger networks.

As we mentioned above, the natural gas market saw power generators competing with home users for a limited supply of natural gas. That gas supply ended up being even more limited by the fact that as much as half the state's natural gas production may have ground to a halt. Natural gas doesn't come out of the wells as a pure gas, and one of its major contaminants is water. As temperatures dropped, that water froze in inopportune places, choking off the flow of gas.

Why not harden the tech?

In addition, the Texas grid, like the rest of the US, has become increasingly reliant on natural gas supplies over the last decade. According to the FERC report, in 2011, Texas lost over a million Megawatt-hours to frozen hardware and mechanical failures; it lost only 120,000 Megawatt-hours to fuel supply problems. The reported problems with natural gas supplies this time around suggest that those numbers will now look very different.

The typical polticians' answer ...

So far, the signs for change aren't good. In addition to Perry's quip about Texans being willing to suffer through blackouts to avoid any oversight, the present Texas governor, Greg Abbott, is busy blaming renewable power for failures that disproportionately affected fossil fuel generation.

It's all about the money, and ... you can't fix stupid.

Natural Immunity ...

Ralph Abraham on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Credit: Getty | Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

You can't fix stupid, rev XX. The brain hurts when thinking about RFK Jr's approach to medicine as his move back to the dark ages regarding health continues unabated with his selection of the new CDC head believing in natural immunity over vaccines.

To whit.

RFK Jr.’s new CDC deputy director prefers “natural immunity” over vaccines

Ralph Abraham is “dangerous,” but somehow not the worst among those considered.

Under ardent anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has named Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham as its new principal deputy director—a choice that was immediately called “dangerous” and “irresponsible,” yet not as bad as it could have been, by experts.

Physician Jeremy Faust revealed the appointment in his newsletter Inside Medicine yesterday, which was subsequently confirmed by journalists. Faust noted that a CDC source told him, “I heard way worse names floated,” and although Abraham’s views are “probably pretty terrible,” he at least has had relevant experience running a public health system, unlike other current leaders of the agency.

But Abraham hasn’t exactly been running a health system the way most public health experts would recommend. Under Abraham’s leadership, the Louisiana health department waited months to inform residents about a deadly whooping cough (pertussis) outbreak. He also has a clear record of anti-vaccine views. Earlier this year, he told a Louisiana news outlet he doesn’t recommend COVID-19 vaccines because “I prefer natural immunity.” In February, he ordered the health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations, including flu shots, and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns.

It's the mushroom theory of business.

Keep them in the dark & feed them bullshit as needs warrant.

Willy Stöwer - Magazine Die Gartenlaube, en:Die Gartenlaube and de:Die Gartenlaube

Titanic Sinking, engraving by Willy Stöwer.

Titanic sinking.

Mushroom management can also occur during the handling of one-off, individual situations. When the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg, only a few members of the crew were aware that the ship was going to sink. Most of the crewmen were not informed about the seriousness of the situation by the captain, which resulted in chaos and disorganisation. The captain attempted to act on his own, without incorporating the officers into his decisions.[9]

And they didn't have enough life boats.

Letter to the Future

Kurt Vonnegut, da morto by Daniele Prati | Flickr | CC BY 2.0

A wise and very funny guy, K. Vonnegut's quotes permeate BRT to no end as he is one of the very few people who really understands what it means to be human. His work always details the plusses and minuses of reality as per the two laws of thermodynamics as there's always a cost to any activity involving the use of energy. To that end, here's some excerpts from his wonderful essay titled Letter to the Future.

Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088:

It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn’t do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms:

1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it,
   how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
7. And so on. Or else.

"Apurpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it,

is to love whoever is around to be loved.” - K. Vonnegut

Speaking of Ron ...

 

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum

What's Hitler's last name? a blurb posted by yours truly, discusses the fact you can't fix stupid when it comes to the great unwashed electing monsters like Hitler thanks to Goebbels and the art of banning/burning books in 1933. Well, we now have a wannabe fascist in Ron DeSantis using the same Nazi playbook in order to "protect" kids from dangerous ideas in the year of our lord 2023.

To whit ...

On May 10, 1933 student groups at universities across Germany carried out a series of book burnings of works that the students and leading Nazi party members associated with an “un-German spirit.” Enthusiastic crowds witnessed the burning of books by Brecht, Einstein, Freud, Mann and Remarque, among many other well-known intellectuals, scientists and cultural figures, many of whom were Jewish. The largest of these book bonfires occurred in Berlin, where an estimated 40,000 people gathered to hear a speech by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he pronounced that “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and endorsed the students’ “right to clean up the debris of the past.”

Let me say it again. One of the very first things the Nazis did was burn books, by authors they considered dangerous, subversive, antithetical to their ideology. That’s the difference between us and them. Nobody’s burning books — LOL, “books” — by Tucker Carlson or who have you. They’re right there for everyone to read, as absurd as they are. Who does things like burn, ban, cover up books? It’s a pretty good sign you’re dealing with actual, real deal, bona fide fascists.

Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right),

the leaders of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, respectively

Pump & Dumps

You can't fix stupid as we all know but there's a significant minority of people ignoring this truism at their own peril as seen by numerous Qanon followers getting scammed by crypto traders ensconced in the Qanon system.

A Logically investigation can reveal that, for the past year, two QAnon-affiliated influencers have been persuading their thousands of followers to invest in a portfolio of cryptocurrency tokens marked as fraudulent by the Stellar network — a major blockchain, alongside the better known Bitcoin and Ethereum — causing their followers to collectively lose millions of dollars, one of whom died by suicide after losing more than $100,000.

Combining conspiracizing with bad investment advice, the WhipLash347 and Quantum Stellar Initiative (which has no relationship with the Stellar network) Telegram channels coordinated to produce a weekly curated list of cryptocurrency assets, claiming that they had access to secret military intelligence and knew which assets were going to succeed. The leaders, WhipLash347 and PatriotQakes (also active in the community under her real name, Emily Tang), capitalized on distrust in both financial institutions and mainstream media to lend credence to the assets they promoted, and bombarded their tens of thousands of followers with misinformation about crypto ventures.

“I am without doubt that WhipLash347, Emily, and QSI are scam artists,” Rocky Morningside, a former admin of the QSI chats, told Logically. “[They] were promoting pump and dumps, and this appeared to be a very large and well organized Ponzi Scheme.”

"Night wind hawkers" sold stock on the streets during the South Sea Bubble. (The Great Picture of Folly, 1720)

Any questions?

Slow-moving poison

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic.
Sources: Tareq Saifur Rahman / Getty; Akaradech Pramoonsin / Getty.

All empires end, including this one but in this case, Agent Orange is hastening the process in ways not thought possible until now. For this take, the emphasis is on tech and research, the two essentials required for any country to maintain relevancy in a most uncertain world. 

Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison.

Fast forward to today.

I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump’s second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she’s not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad. (She declined to be named in this story so that she could speak openly about her potential plans.)

Not since the Red Scare, when researchers at the University of California had to sign loyalty oaths, and those at the University of Washington and MIT were disciplined or fired for being suspected Communists, has American science been so beholden to political ideology. At least during the McCarthy era, scientists could console themselves that despite this interference, federal spending on science was surging. Today, it’s drying up.

You can't fix stupid.

Cloud Line

I am not a doctor ...

French physician and biochemist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, in 2008. Baulieu developed RU 486, the first safe, effective abortion pill. Photographer: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images/AFP

As said so many times, you can't fix stupid, a characteristic in full display for all to see when a Texas judge, without medical training, made a blanket judgment call on a safe drug adversely impacting the lives of millions of women living in the land of the brave and home of the free. But it's even worse than that as his ruling opens the floodgates to dubious challenges to other drugs by judges having issues when deciding upon cases based on questionable findings like the one made in Texas when Kacsmaryk issued an unqualified decision resembling, in indirect fashion, to how the inquisition operated in enhancing the powers of the church under the rubric of god.

Legal scholars say Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk could have rendered a decision that would have limited the impact to just mifepristone. That would have been a terrible blow to abortion access, but it would have left alone the question of FDA’s authority, and limited the potential impact on other medications. Instead, he rendered a 67-page opinion that cherry picks evidence regarding the safety of the drug — ignoring dozens of studies and over two decades of its safe use around the world — in order to overturn the approval, says I. Glen Cohen, faculty director at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics.

Think about that: a single judge without medical training decided his read on select data on a drug was more sound than the FDA’s vast expertise. That should make the drug industry — not to mention their patients — very nervous.

The breadth of the ruling and the judge’s clear willingness to second guess the FDA’s own expertise could breed similar lawsuits in jurisdictions with similarly sympathetic judges. “It really could become a roadmap for people seeking to challenge the approval of a wide range of other drugs, vaccines and healthcare products,” says Rachel Sachs, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in FDA and health law.

 The war on women continues unabated.

Good for cleaning and disinfecting ...

Sen. Ron Johnson speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee hearing titled "How the Corruption of Science Has Impacted Public Perception and Policies Regarding Vaccines."
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

You can't fix stupid, rev XXX or, I am not a scientist nor a doctor but will support findings
no doc or scientist will support.

To whit.

For years, Sen. Ron Johnson has been spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation about COVID-19 and the safety of vaccines.

He’s promoted disproven treatments for COVID-19 and claimed, without evidence, that athletes are “dropping dead on the field” after getting the COVID-19 vaccination. Now the Wisconsin politician is endorsing a book by a discredited doctor promoting an unproven and dangerous treatment for autism and a host of ailments: chlorine dioxide, a chemical used for disinfecting and bleaching. 

The book is “The War on Chlorine Dioxide: The Medicine that Could End Medicine” by Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist who practiced in Wisconsin hospitals before losing his medical certification for statements advocating using an antiparasite medication to treat COVID-19. The action, he’s said, makes him unemployable, even though he still has a license.

Kory has said there’s a globally coordinated campaign by public health agencies, the drug industry and the media to suppress evidence of the medicinal wonders of chlorine dioxide. His book, according to its website, contends that the “remarkable molecule” works “to treat everything from cancer and malaria to autism and COVID.”

The book jacket features a prominent blurb from Johnson calling the doctor’s treatise: “A gripping tale of corruption and courage that will open eyes and prompt serious questions.” 

Chlorine dioxide is a chemical compound that has a range of applications, including as a disinfectant and deodorizer. Food processing plants apply it to sanitize surfaces and equipment. Hospitals use it to sterilize medical devices, and some municipalities use low levels to treat public water supplies. Paper mills rely on it to whiten wood pulp. Safety experts advise those who handle it to work in well-ventilated spaces and to wear protective gloves.

The FDA warns against purchasing or drinking Chlorine Dioxide but it's being touted for prevention and treatment of coronavirus disease.

Chlorine dioxide solution is a diluted version of sodium chlorite. When citric acid is added, the mixture becomes chlorine dioxide a powerful bleaching agent. Both sodium chlorite and chlorine dioxide are the active ingredients in disinfectants and have additional industry uses. They are not meant to be ingested.

Chlorine dioxide kits are sold online under various names: Miracle Mineral Solution, Miracle Mineral Supplement, Master Mineral Solution, Water Purification Solution and Chlorine Dioxide Protocol.
They are often referred to as MMS.

Black Mirror ... for real

@mattxiv via X

Futurism's on a roll. 3 articles showing Black Mirror logic applies ... for real.

San Francisco is plastered with billboards advertising AI tech, all in varying degrees of in-your-face dystopic. Even so, a new crop of them has managed to stand out from the pack by being shockingly upfront about the industry’s attitude toward regular humans.

“Our AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her,” reads a billboard asking you to visit a website called Replacement.AI. “Don’t worry, it’s totally legal [winking emoji].”

Visiting the website finds an even more overt message: huge text proclaiming that humans are “no longer necessary.”

“Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It’s time for a machine solution,” it reads. “At Replacement.AI, we believe that building AI tools to fix the world’s most pressing challenges is an unprofitable waste of time.”

There’s also an actual quote by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

Before you get your pitchforks out: it’s satire. The ad was highlighted in a now-viral tweet by makeup artist and influencer Matt Bernstein, before being reshared across the internet in places like Reddit, where the joke was lost on many users.

& this ...

Getty / Futurism

Pattern recognition anyone?

An AI-powered gun detection system hooked up to a Baltimore County high school’s cameras mistook a bag of Doritos chips as a weapon — and called the cops on a 16-year-old student.

As local news station WBAL-TV 11 News reports, Taki Allen was enjoying the snack while sitting outside of Kenwood High School after football practice.

Twenty minutes later, he was visited by a small army of heavily-armed police officers.

“It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us,” he told WBAL-TV 11 News. “At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?'”

“They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me,” Allen added. “Then, they searched me and they figured out I had nothing.”

Lastly ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

But they always need money ...

To whit ...

The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, might be the world’s most valuable private company on paper — but in real life, it’s hemorrhaging money faster than it can ever hope to pay back, at least for now.

According to Agence France-Presse, OpenAI is ordering hundreds of billions of dollars worth of AI semiconductor chips at a time when investor confidence is being stretched to its limits. Those chip investments include deals inked with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, units AFP estimates would consume power equivalent to “20 standard nuclear reactors.”

In order to pay off just its recent shopping spree, OpenAI will have to make “hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to Gil Luria, managing director at financial consulting firm DA Davidson. Indeed, another analysis by the Financial Times pegs OpenAI’s total financial commitments at over $1 trillion.

With this much capital involved, the exact number is almost meaningless, because the prospects of OpenAI paying off even a fraction of its debt is looking increasingly dire. Though OpenAI is now valued at $500bn, the company is only pulling in about $13 billion in annual revenue, the vast majority of which comes from ChatGPT subscribers, per TechCrunch.

In short, there’s an astronomical amount of money up in the air — so much so that the rest of the US economy now depends on the AI industry not dropping the ball. Or, as Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon put it in a note to investors, Sam Altman “has the power to crash the global economy for a decade or take us all to the promised land.”

“Right now, we don’t know which is in the cards,” she added.

Some financial types have posited the possible entire loss of monies if AI totally vapor locks.

The $7 trillion figure likely reflects the total projected investment needed across the entire AI ecosystem to keep it going, including players like OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and potentially Apple. It represents the staggering cost of trying to scale and run AI in hopes of generating real revenue in the months and years ahead. A crap shoot for the ages applies.