The Buffalo Journal

There was a time, not that long ago, when buying a machine meant entering a partnership with it. When you bought a car, a tractor, or a radio, the manufacturer handed you a manual that said, in effect: here is your machine, here is how it works, now keep it alive. You got exploded diagrams, torque specs, wiring references, part numbers, and the sacred knowledge of the carburetor. They trusted you with the fire. ...

“Riffing” gets thrown around constantly now: podcasters riff between ad reads, comedians riff off a bad heckle, and half of “prompting” a chatbot is really just riffing on whatever it hands back. The word is more common today than it was in 2013, and it’s still routinely used to mean the opposite of what it actually means. Nobody needs to have read a thirteen-year-old VICE essay to get that wrong. But that essay happens to be the cleanest, most confident example of the mistake ever put into print. That’s what got us thinking about it in the first place. ...

Spend enough time on Instagram or TikTok and you will encounter it: the confident, authoritative claim that American law enforcement — the sheriff, the city police department, the whole institution — was invented in the antebellum South to catch runaway slaves. The videos present it as buried history that the mainstream doesn’t want you to know. It gets shared as proof that policing was never about public safety to begin with, that it has slavery in its DNA, that the badge is just a slave-catcher’s badge with better branding. ...

People talk about the “death of dating” like something ancient and sacred has been taken from us. They blame the apps. They mourn the meet-cute.1 They talk about the lost art of walking up to a stranger in a bar and building a love story out of nerves, eye contact, and one line that could go either way. That whole lament rests on a false memory. Ask that guy at the wedding — every friend group has one — why dating today is broken, and he will tell you about 1994, a bar called something like Malone’s, and a woman named Debbie, with the exact reverence of a man describing the fall of Rome. ...

AI and semiconductor stocks have been on a run. Two kinds of critics show up when that happens. The first group reaches for the P/E ratio. They compare it to the S&P 500’s long-run historical average of around 16, a number derived from data going back to the early 1900s and blended across two world wars, the Great Depression, and the postwar boom. “We’re being disciplined,” they explain. What they skip is that the S&P 500 hasn’t actually traded near 16 in any sustained way for decades. Over the last 25 years it has averaged closer to 22 to 25 in normal years and currently sits around 32. The 16 baseline isn’t modern market context. It’s a century-long average that makes today’s multiples look more extreme than they are. ...

If you searched Tone Tec scam, Tone Tec review, or is Tone Tec legit, here is our answer up front: avoid them. We reviewed what Tone Tec is actually selling, not just what the ads say it is selling. What showed up was not some polished premium American performance shirt. It was an odd, generic-looking shirt with no real Tone Tec branding on it at all. No proper brand identity on the garment. Just a size marker. That is white-label behavior. ...

If you just got laid off in New York and HR handed you a severance agreement, the question gets expensive fast: can you take the severance and still collect unemployment? Sometimes, yes. In New York, severance is usually treated as dismissal pay, which can delay or block unemployment benefits. But the state also says that if your first severance payment arrives more than 30 days after your last day worked, you may still be eligible for unemployment if you meet the other rules. ...

On Thursday nights in the 1990s, millions of American living rooms looked the same. In one house it was Family Matters. In another it was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. In another it was a rerun of The Cosby Show. You were not tuning in for a lesson on identity. You were tuning in because you knew what it was like to have a sibling who annoyed you, a parent who caught you lying, or a family member who could turn a normal evening into chaos. ...

There is a collective hallucination currently infecting our cultural memory. If you listen to modern media or scroll through “revised” history on social media, you’d be led to believe that the slang of the late 20th century was only used by a handful of fringe bigots or “problematic” outliers. That is a flat-out lie. The reality is much simpler, much more pervasive, and much more uncomfortable for the “virtue” era to swallow: for decades, words like gay and retarded were the undisputed, universal standard protocol for every kid in the country. ...

Somewhere along the line, society decided that plain old competence was too cruel a sorting mechanism. We could not just say one person is intellectually sharp and another person is socially graceful. That would leave somebody without a trophy. So we pulled off one of the slickest little semantic scams of the modern self-esteem era: we took people skills, wrapped them in the prestige language of IQ, and handed socially adept mediocrities an honorary genius badge. ...