Examples of being given access to near infinite resources and doing the least impressive thing with them

In dreams, the only limit is your imagination, right? I had a dream about a horse, when I realized because of a really poor sense of scale, I'd conjured this horse to be the size of a four-story building, and upon this realization, the horse immediately went off to destroy skyscrapers OFF SCREEN.

The Koch grandson who makes ugly Hawaiian shirts.

I didn't know the Koch connection -- it is kind of impressive that he cornered that particular market so effectively that I knew what you were talking about!

pretty much my experience with the internet most days, sadly

from the severance thread:

iirc there was talk of how apple spent $20m per episode on this season, and i was all like, how? it's basically set in an office in a basement

There's an interesting breakdown of how they did the season opener, but ultimately yeah it's just a guy running down office hallways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOeFQ2ghR3U

Tommy Wiseau spent $6,000,000 on The Room. apparently he did things in such a wasteful way that the actors and crew thought he was laundering money.

I'm not sure how to reconcile that with the $10M budget for The Disaster Artist...

man utd

pretty much any Olympic village

oh, and Chinese Democracy

creating this thread

Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

Kamala Harris campaign

there's an old dumb joek

Q: What's the quickest way to become a millionaire?

A: Start with a billion and buy a winery

Mass transit in the USA?

the refrain I keep hearing for mass transit agencies is budgets constantly getting cut, though big infrastructure projects always also seem to be spiraling out of control at the same time.

though in the personal transport realm, i guess the segway was the classic example of a hype and money train crashing into the valley of underwhelm. revolution in human existence turned out to be paul blart: mall cop

Don’t forget the knockoff versions hurting children on a regular basis.

But at least the British CEO of the company succeeded in fatally driving one off a cliff

think self-driving cars are this. certainly generative AI is.

Don’t forget the knockoff versions hurting children on a regular basis
That was swegways, wasn't it? Different thing.

A pretty benign instance, but I'm reminded of self-deprecating geocachers joking (perhaps more so immediately after unrestricted civilian use of GPS became a thing around 2000) about "exploiting zillions of dollars of orbiting space hardware to... find tupperware in the woods" etc.

But at least the British CEO of the company succeeded in fatally driving one off a cliff

― Hongro Hongro Hippies (Myonga Vön Bontee), Saturday, February 8, 2025 11:49 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It was the way he wanted to go.

this gets my vote!

"Just how much food do Americans waste? Here’s some “food” for thought: While the world wastes about 2.5 billion tons of food every year, the United States discards more food than any other country in the world: nearly 60 million tons — 120 billion pounds — every year. That’s estimated to be almost 40 percent of the entire US food supply, and equates to 325 pounds of waste per person. That’s like every person in America throwing 975 average sized apples right into the garbage — or rather right into landfills, as most discarded food ends up there. In fact, food is the single largest component taking up space inside US landfills, making up 22 percent of municipal solid waste (MSW). All told, the amount of food wasted in America has an approximate value of nearly $218 billion – the equivalent of 130 billion meals."

maybe elon can look into that...

i do think of it more now when i watch an american game show/t.v. show/movie where they just destroy a ton of food for a funny moment. there is just so much food here that people have to think of creative ways to destroy it and also put a pie in grandma's face.

I thought about that when the media made such a meme out of Tom Brady throwing down an iPad on the sideline of an NFL game. They seem a dime a dozen to us, but there must be billions of people out there who aspire to owning something like that.

re: TV food waste, at least on Double Dare they took care to only use "stale-dated" food which means the current administration that haphazardly wrecks foreign food aid programs leaving tons to rot in port is less conscientious than a show whose main draw is drenching kids in slime.

While the world wastes about 2.5 billion tons of food every year, the United States discards more food than any other country in the world: nearly 60 million tons

?? 60 million tons = 0.06 billion tons

Seems like other countries are doing their share as well?

US is also the 3rd most populous country in the world. per capita its a different story, US is pretty well below the average

That’s estimated to be almost 40 percent of the entire US food supply, and equates to 325 pounds of waste per person.

The problem I find with these kinds of statistics is that they always trace back to some press release and are intended to be maximally persuasive in a predefined direction. For me, the suspicious piece in this one is what counts as 'food waste'. We buy a lot of fresh vegetables and fruit and throw out a lot of stems, rinds, peelings and other miscellaneous trimmings. Are those considered 'food waste'?

What about food tossed out by grocery stores? That's probably the bulk of what the United States sends to landfills and there's damn little an ordinary person can do about that. But by silently including it the news story leaves the impression that households, not multi-billion dollarcorporations, are dumping massive amounts of food in the trash.

First thing I think of is what most people do with ai image generation prompts

"What about food tossed out by grocery stores?"

restaurants, grocery stores, food service of all kinds, oh the list goes on and on. there are always going to be dumpsters full of food behind any dunkin donuts or fast food place. think of all the half-eaten chicken at a wedding. but individuals DO throw away a lot of food. it just happens. things go bad. but people will throw away food if its, like, a day over its sell-by date. people can be weird like that. there is enough blame to go around. we try to eat any leftovers we have but i know for a fact if something is still in the fridge after a certain point i just have to get rid of it. even if its still edible.

think of all the grain grown to feed millions of chickens that end up being killed because of bird flu. its never-ending. like that story. with the flying dog.

Yeah its very difficult to measure, and a lot of previous studies were simply mass-based, comparing the mass of what went into the production system against what was consumed, which as you point out Aimless doesnt account for nonedible material. There was a big UN study a few years ago that tried a more nuanced methodology, and sorted out household vs retail vs food service. iirc US was a bit above average in the food service category, but Australia and UK were massively ahead of US in the household category.

ange postecoglou

Elon is the epitome of this thread premise.

https://kotaku.com/elon-musk-poe2-diablo-4-paid-boosting-fake-controversy-1851743670

Lol @ YouTubers, including Zach “Asmongold” Hoyt, immediately called Musk out as phony, but the actual details are too nerdy to not put behind a hidden tag:

Several streamers (I think primarily Quin69, and then a chain of people responding to him, I think primarily Kripparian) watched a stream of Musk playing PoE2 at the highest level while seeming to have no idea how certain aspects of the game worked - most damningly, he commented disparagingly on some of his amazing gear in a manner that indicated that he didn't really understand what it did (or that it was largely carrying him). Asmongold (a far larger streamer than either of them) pointedly didn't say anything until his comment section became unbearable, then put out a "well, we don't really know all the facts, but it does look bad...". The next day Musk tweeted some old DMs between him and Asmongold (Musk's been trying to make Twitter a competitor to Twitch because of course he is) where Musk suggests Asmongold might like a second channel, and Asmongold says well I'll check with my editors. Like a lot of streamers, what Asmongold does is mostly stream, just as many hours as possible, and he has employees who cut that up into short and long clips, and those are his editors. But Musk published the DMs with "you all think Asmongold is an independent voice, but he has EDITORS" and then lots of people said lol you are stupid, and Asmongold posted a video saying "oh this seems like a simple misunderstanding", and Elon deleted the tweets, and Asmongold posted a video saying "you all told me that he wouldn't delete the tweets, but he did and so everything is fine" and crawled back up Musk's ass the end

I am consistently baffled that anyone would watch streams of other people playing video games. I'd rather have a bowel obstruction.

i hope i never know who asmongold is. sucks enough that i have to know who elon musk is

What about food tossed out by grocery stores? That's probably the bulk of what the United States sends to landfills and there's damn little an ordinary person can do about that. But by silently including it the news story leaves the impression that households, not multi-billion dollarcorporations, are dumping massive amounts of food in the trash.