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• David Baerten, 45, reportedly roped his wife and kids into the ruse, with one of his daughters posting online about her heartbreak at her father’s “passing.” As his wider family came together at his funeral to pay their respects, Baerten made a dramatic arrival in a helicopter—along with a camera crew—and set about comforting his distraught loved ones. “What I see in my family often hurts me,” Baerten said in defense of his unhinged actions. “I never get invited to anything. Nobody sees me. We all grew apart. I felt unappreciated. That’s why I wanted to give them a life lesson, and show them that you shouldn’t wait until someone is dead to meet up with them.” He also said that “only half” of his family bothered to turn up for his funeral.

Guy free-hands embellishments on door panel
by u/purple-circle in BeAmazed

• Impressively, 90 percent have remained in Tulsa beyond the requisite one-year commitment, and 76 percent of all members have been there since the program launched. People are buying homes, starting families, and getting involved in the community. From my conversations with roughly two dozen Tulsa Remoters, it seems that community, not the cash, is the special sauce that’s made the program work.
• But what’s perhaps most integral to building the community is much more quotidian: Slack. This software platform is best known for helping coworkers communicate from anywhere, but in this case, it helps people in the program connect with their new neighbors.

• The cause is a tiny benign nodule, present in one-in-twenty people with hypertension. The nodule produces a hormone, aldosterone, that controls how much salt is in the body. The new discovery is a gene variant in some of these nodules which leads to a vast, but intermittent, over-production of the hormone.

• She explained in a video posted the same day that her students had made the decision to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance by themselves after teaching a lesson about how Adolf Hitler had tried to brainwash German children during Holocaust Remembrance Week.

• The artificial intelligence chatbot asked the believers in the fully packed St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth to rise from the pews and praise the Lord. The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar, then began preaching to the more than 300 people who had shown up on Friday morning for an experimental Lutheran church service almost entirely generated by AI.

• Viewership was slow at first, but then picked up when, during the early days of COVID-19, Jenkins and his team made the show free to watch for the masses.
• Having steadily picked up steam since, the show has become a genuine streaming success, and now appears on multiple services, including Netflix and Peacock. (It doesn’t hurt that, by all accounts, The Chosen is pretty well-made by the standards of TV drama—which means it’s exceptionally well made by the usual standards of Christian entertainment, with much praise being pointed toward its acting, production values, and its efforts to spin a compelling drama out of the lives of Christ and his disciples.)

• Dallas residents need to make more than $72,060 a year to avoid being “rent burdened,” according to April 2023 data from Zillow’s Observed Rent Index.
• The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development considers someone “rent burdened” if they spend more than 30% of their annual income toward rent. Someone can also be “severely rent burdened” if that spending reaches more than 50%.
• I’m guessing that figure is net income as opposed to gross.

• As part of the study, a car was driven around the university’s campus over several days with its driver – research fellow David R. Large – concealed in the driver’s seat.