There's a nontrivial chance I'm going to have to go to Chinook Mall on monday.

It’s not Christmas until this righteous bastard get on the tree. @radiofreetom.bsky.social

Jim Beam Whiskey will shut its distillery for 2026 thanks to plummeting sales amid retaliatory tariffs from the European Union after Trump's tariffs and a bourbon boycott from Canada. www.kentucky.com/news/busines...

And once more, because it MAY be my best post of the year

it is almost Christmas which means it’s Muppet Christmas Carol season and that, in turn, means it is time to revisit this delightful interview with Michael Caine, who loves everything about that movie even more than you do

Universities are seen to be arbiters of truth. That's one reason AI companies are targetting post secondary use cases so hard. Our use of this tech legitmizes it in the eyes of the public. This may come off as egotistical/elitist, and I don't mean it to be, I mean it to be aspirational.

After the dotcom bubble collapsed, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy had this to say about the (at the time) eye popping 10x revenue threshold many frothy companies exceeded:

Yes, but a reminder: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Every journal article that cites a non-existent source should be retracted and the authors named and shamed.

if I was trying to improve consumer sentiment I would simply announce good economic policies instead of bad ones

End of Term advice for anyone teaching: Consider sending pre-emptive notes to Students who you would be willing to write a grad school of job reference for. Students are sometimes too shy/inexperienced to know if they can or should ask for references. But you can always just offer.

Counterpoint: there's some terrifying stuff emerging about AI price collusion.

A former Brown doctoral student in physics has been identified as the MIT/Brown shooter. Some reports that he went to school in Lisbon with the MIT victim Brown victims were in an Econ class that was meeting in a Physics/engineering building

Having to still check on Facebook occasionally for work, I have to say it has really turned into an AI video and photo cessepool. Seeing accounts pop up to peddle fake depictions of real events, like the storm that hit Alberta yesterday:

I agree with Keith even less often than I agree with @maxfawcett.bsky.social , but this rejoinder is also worth a read.

This is a good thread from Max (who I don't always agree with). You should read it. ESPECIALLY if you're the type of person who usually ignores Max (I know you're out there and I think some of you follow me).

Absolutely not. As I said in the piece, I am a connoisseur of Trump speeches, and I think he dictated big chunks of this himself.

Notice that the parts of Trump's economic program that help working and middle class Americans — DOGE checks, tariff rebates, and warrior dividends — are popular, progressive, and non-existent. Tax cuts for the rich are unpopular, regressive and very very real.

Distinct treatment for soldiers. Starship Troopers just entered the chat.

Looking through old debates on floor-crossing. Stephen Harper had an underrated sense of humour.

As an elder millenial, I remember this era well.

In my opinion the only ethical use of AI in Larian games is summarising who I am and what the hell I’m supposed to be doing when I come back to the game six months later

As Alberta completes its first full year without coal in its power supply mix, renewables (wind, solar, and hydro) have reached 22% of total generation and natural gas makes up 78%.

You know how in Terminator 2 they reprogram a Terminator to fight other Terminators...

I also have a business plan that is only viable if I ignore property rights law.

Finally, a workable plan.

The incentives here (particularly for faculty who value research time over teaching) are clear.

The same people who think we need to bring back real standards to academia also want to give all students a “suspend my professor” button if they don’t like how things are going

The best investment I ever made was not realising that I won a bunch of Counter Strike loot boxes in the late 2000's and early 2010's (when I played to deal with grad school stress) and then finding them and selling them just as the market hit it's peak early this year.

Alberta

As he celebrates his 100th Birthday this very day, can we all take a moment to acknowledge that time when Dick Van Dyke won the internet internet. Forever.

Follow up question/comment: There's a self-selection bias going on here too. So this doesn't mean that forced anonymity would lead to a more polite internet or forced ID verification would lead to a less polite one. Need an RCT or natural experiment to figure that one out.

One easy fix would be to eliminate categories based on genre or whatever “indie” means and instead get granular about craft (best level design, best world, best combat, etc) which would probably pose other problems but at least make for more interesting conversations and honor specific people

Also that it fundamentally misunderstands and pretty much inverts the theme of the original artwork

15:26 Dec 10 2025 YELLOW WARNING - SNOWFALL - IN EFFECT for Southern Alberta Expires: 07:26 Dec 11 2025 Heavy snowfall to develop by morning. Rapidly falling temperatures will cause any mixed precipitation to change entirely to snow. The highest snow ac... Visit https://weather.gc.ca for details

Canadian crude on water up ~4-fold since before the start-up of the Trans Mountain Expansion in mid-2024. And Canadian exports to China are surging—more Chinese shipments mean more Canadian barrels on water for longer.

Remember when they took away wired earbuds thinking everyone would adopt blue tooth ones?

Nobody. I do not think you can eat chair

Teaching is often painful but every now and then people have clearly done some work, paid attention, and (as one former student wrote on an exam was one of the main benefits of the course) are now clearly capable of going on monologues that irritate people at cocktail parties.

"I am Spartacus" but for sex pests

Mcluhan/Postmodernist sycophancy. The original source of the meme doesn't matter. It pleases the king so they all replicate it.

i think need to forestall what i charitably call a misunderstanding. “I call bullshit. How do you know what to order if you don’t know what people are reading??” *anonymized circ stats.* we don’t need to know WHO is requesting or borrowing a book to know THAT it’s getting requested & borrowed. 📚