- That photo was taken last week in North Texas.
- In some parallel universe, Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock are married and living in Texas, and their world is pleased. In some other parallel universe, I’m married to Sandra Bullock, and no one is pleased.
- The monthly special at the pub where we play trivia is the NYC bodega chopped cheese sandwich. I had never heard of it, but a little research has told me that it was invented in the Nineties. I gave it a big thumbs up. Basically, it’s made on a grill with ground beef (typically pre-formed ground beef patties), onions, adobo or other seasonings, and cheese, all of which are chopped together on the grill as the meat and onions cook and the cheese melts and put on a grilled hoagie with mayo and ketchup.
- Watching the news last night, it was reported that the judge in the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley only needed 30 minutes. That got me wondering if the judge was convinced and already firmly made up his mind, if it’s a requirement for him to step away, or if he can just save everyone time and make the verdict right then?
- This would totally upend my world as if it hasn’t changed enough over the past four years:
Federal employees could be faced with a return-to-office mandatePresident-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental entity helmed by billionaire Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is expected to make a push for an end to remote work across federal agencies as a way to help reduce the federal workforce through attrition.
Here’s the one thing that you never hear in these stories, and it directly impacts me. Does this include federal contractors? You’ll often hear politicians talk about shrinking the government and reducing the number of federal workers. But, the amount of work stays the same and needs to get done. To get around this, the government will hire contractors to do the exact same work. So, politicians will claim they were able to reduce the size of government because the federal workforce has decreased, but they don’t mention that private contractors were hired to fill those spots. The money intended to pay government workers is now sent to the private sector, government contracting companies, who actually pay their employees more than what the government workers were making. Here’s the part I never really understood. The federal employee who was let go is often hired by the contracting company because he or she meets all the qualifications for the job but for more money and better benefits. It seems like it would be cheaper to eliminate the middleman, the contracting company, and pay the worker directly for a lower wage. I guess it has something to do with pensions and retirement accounts, but that’s one aspect I never fully understood.
- Meet your own personal AI Jesus in this Swiss church’s confessional
A Swiss church is trying a new way of connecting with Jesus in the confessional. It uses AI to simulate the personality of the 1st-century Galileleean for visitors as part of a religiously themed art project called Deus in Machina (God in a Machine). The digital simulacrum of Jesus Christ engages with visitors and offers spiritual guidance based on what people say. The cybernetic savior is also fluent in 100 different languages, enabling it to converse with worshippers from all over the world.If you enter the confessional, you’ll see the AI Jesus displayed on a screen. The decidedly Swiss-looking man from the Roman-run Middle East of two millennia ago listens to people voice their questions or concerns. The AI model underlying the simulation was built by a team from the church working with the Immersive Realities Research Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts using the New Testament as the basis for how Jesus thinks and speaks. So far, it’s performed well.Here’s a video segment of it that other articles mentioned went viral.