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1-800-CHATGPT: How Some Amish Are Using A.I.
An Amish man named Lewis Wengerd needed to research an excavating machine. He didn’t have computer access at the time. His church bans smartphones. So he picked up his flip phone and dialed 1-800-CHATGPT. That’s not the only way the Amish are using AI — but it might be the most memorable. I had never known Chat GPT has an actual number you can call…
School Board Member: The Amish Weren’t “Used” To Vote Down School Budget – They Simply “Did the Math”
Last week we heard from the school superintendent of Randolph Central Schools in Cattaraugus County, New York, who placed blame for a local budget’s failure to pass on both the Amish, and those he claimed “used” the Amish to “flood the vote”. In that post I noted that those Amish living in the district, and thus having every right to vote, were likely motivated by…
Superintendent Claims Hundreds of Amish Were “Trucked In” To Vote Down a School Budget
You’re probably aware that the Amish vote much less often than non-Amish do. But a notable minority still do vote in general elections, and on local matters. So it’s not that odd to hear of Amish people voting. But I’d never seen a story quite like this before. In a new report, a school superintendent in New York is complaining about Amish participation in a…
Indiana Has Over 67,000 Amish — Here Are the 10 Biggest Communities
Indiana is where you’ll find America’s third-largest Amish population, with over 67,000 Amish living across the state. These ten communities rank as the biggest in the Hoosier State, based on the most current population estimates. Note: two communities tie for the #10 spot, so eleven communities appear below. Population numbers via Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College (source link at bottom)….
Amish Fishermen Caught & Kept a Giant 40-Pound Muskie and Some Are Not Happy About It
A pair of videos have been making the rounds showing an Amish fisherman and a boy – who I would guess is his son – hauling away a giant fish after a successful catch. The fish is a muskellunge, better known as a “muskie” – and you can tell by the way the man is lugging it on his back that it is a hefty…
Amish In This Community Invited A 15-Year-Old TikTok Preacher To Deliver A Sermon
This story will make you do a double-take. At least, it did me. Last month, Amish in a community in Eaton County, Michigan invited a teenage social media preacher to deliver a sermon to their community. He ended up preaching to a group of over 100 people, from the Amish and other backgrounds. When I saw this story, I had the obvious questions. Who are…
Why the Amish and English Need Each Other — As One Rural County Discovered
A recent piece by Marjorie Struckle in Lancaster Farming does a good job profiling something that, across the nearly 700 Amish settlements in North America, I suspect is not too uncommon — a rural community where the Amish and their non-Amish neighbors have built something genuinely mutual. The setting is Otsego County in central New York. That county is home to a full three Amish…
For The First Time In A Century, The Amish Now Live In This Southern State
We often think of the Amish as living in the Midwest, and states like Pennsylvania. But Amish communities in the South are nothing new. States like Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee have seen their Amish populations grow robustly in recent decades. However, there’s one part of the South that the Amish have (for whatever reason) not settled — the “Deep South”. The Deep South is most…
County Spent Hundreds of Thousands on Roads — Amish Traffic Is Damaging Them “Almost Immediately”
According to local officials,Amish traffic in Branch County, Michigan has been destroying roads – despite the county spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain them. And unlike in other cases, this goes beyond standard buggy traffic. From the Coldwater Daily Reporter: [Manager Jay] Miller said that despite hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on Ray-Quincy, Copeland, and Hamman Roads over the last three years,…
This Little Amish Food Stand on a Maryland Back Road Is Worth Pulling Over For (24 Photos)
If you’ve followed my stops through the Somerset County, Pennsylvania Amish settlement these past several months – starting at the charming backroad bakery, stopping in at the tiny farm stand, and on to the hidden variety store – we now come to the final Amish business I visited on this wintry mid-December day. And I actually went one state over to reach it. That sounds…
