Damn.

Well 2.5 out of 3 years into our time here in Belgium it finally happened. The eight and six year old had a conversation in front of me in French to keep me from understanding what they were saying.

we talked about why there are different kinds of analytics on Antoine Semenyo and what we think of the different teams targeting him here: www.buzzsprout.com/819853/episo...

It isnt a problem necessarily for men’s coach’s to work in the women’s game. But it is a problem when men’s coaches decide to work in the women’s game because they can’t get jobs in the men’s game. Which is like all the men’s coaches who decide to work in the women’s game.

Slop in front of the paywall and bespoke taste-makers behind it is where we’re headed.

Trying to get the six-year-old to bed: Mommy: the sooner you go to sleep the sooner it’s Xmas 6YO: that doesn’t make any sense M: time feels like it goes faster when you’re asleep 6YO: no it’s doesn’t… it’s when you’re having fun! That’s an actual thing people say

Me trying not to comment on a matter central to the discourse out of professional prudence.

Oh my God, they’re posting Zerohedge. If you’re not familiar, ZH is a right wing propaganda operation, ostensibly about financial markets, but more focused on sewing general discord.

So for lots of people who bet for fun, “I’m betting on side xyz” is indistinguishable from “I’m rooting for xyz” and usually smart bettors take advantage of times when rooting interest lets them get great prices on the other side. Sometimes the sports book takes the other side though.

All of these ridiculous contortions are driven by trying to walk a line between owners who want to spend money and owners who think women’s sports are attractive as an owner because you don’t have to spend money on the players.

You can tell NWSL is super pumped about the reaction this new rule will receive because they released it in such a prime news breaking window and not just before a big holiday or something.

It is incredible how unpopular the president is given that the economy remains resilient (despite lots of signs of weakening in the labor market).

If I see one more person spread the "all GDP growth is AI" nonsense.... Avg QoQ ann. % change for GDP in 2025 after three quarters is 2.5%. Avg for consumption is 2.2%. The idea that AI investment is the source of all growth is just completely wrong.

Everybody wants control over who can see their posts and also everybody wants control over which posts they can see.

this claim is entirely based on health care and substantially based on misunderstanding European health care systems

It is such a disquieting experience to get get a flood of replies in your mentions from people who then seem become enraged m that you have read those messages and engaged with them.

It is absolutely excruciating when you have a post break contain and a whole avalanche of people who seem literally unable to read come storming into your mentions.

Elected politicians of the Democratic Party have a real problem in that there is no media organ with reach that amplifies them when they distance themselves from silly left takes like getting mad about Sydney Sweeney. So republicans can lie that democrats believe what the dumbest leftist posts.

The maga divide summarized: does the gutter racism that is the mortar of our coalition apply to Jews or not? And if it doesn’t do we mean that or are we just pretending for the moment?

Ooooooh a legal document how fancy.

What this really is, is “I came to this angry because of the Big Account that wanted me to be angry about it, and then I looked at it and the reason I was angry was wrong, but I’m still angry so there has to be some way to justify it.” Very common on here.

Man. One of the biggest bummers of growing up is fully realizing that mental health and addiction struggles aren’t limited to difficult teenage years but people’s demons follow them to adulthood.

The history of "Judeo Christian" terminology is actually pretty fascinating. It originated as a social justice ("woke") term in the 1920s and 30s as a way to include Jewish and Catholic immigrants and push back against Protestant nativism (including the Klan). But ofc now it's used differently.

The reason I was never a fan of Judeo-Christian is a moniker was that it was always apparent it’s just a placeholder until they feel like they can get away with dropping the Judeo.

It is interesting that “we didn’t use AI” is the claim and not “did AI make the game worse.” It suggests the question of the quality of the thing produced is secondary to an abstract ethical concern. And while being willing to pay more for an ethical product is great. Gamers ain’t those consumers.

And in every generation an appeal to ancestry is a pretty disqualifying first step to claiming the mantle!

Talking to some other dudes my age about how our overwhelming memory about what we learned about the 70s when we were kids in the 90s was high gas prices and scarcity. And, uh yeah, maybe we should have realized that inflation has a long tail in its cultural impact.

Love to pod about how Morgan Rogers definitely can’t keep this up.

Discovered 6-7 has made it to the six-year-olds class. Also discovered she knows how to say it in Hebrew so that’s fun!

Listen content of the message aside, the odds that somebody, even a white man, on Bluesky talking about politics never voted for a woman for president really are quite low! Sometimes people just have bad opinions.

Arsenal gave up five total shots for 0.20 xG. Thats about as dominant as it gets even if it did t quite feel that way in the moment (take it from an Everton fan, it felt that way in the moment on the other side).

There are three dunks in my life I’m pathetic enough to remember and still be proud of years later. One was a comprehensive takedown of Alexi Lalas being an insincere preening prick and the other two were of Conor Friedsdorf. All long since deleted but I think of them fondly.

Man the discourse around art and AI is poisonous. There are lots of super duper valid criticisms of AI but if the one you’ve found yourself making is also one that a sketch artist could have made verbatim in response to the invention of the camera then you’ve probably gone wrong somewhere.

bluesky.jpg

I think you can have a social media site that toxic people can make unusable for normies, or one where it’s very easy to silo off into confirmation bias, but I don’t think you can avoid both at once.

I don’t think this is real (maybe we get there, one can always hope), but I do think that people are undercounting the difference between say a +8 environment and a +13 environment.

If Barnes went down a step earlier he’d have gotten the DOGSO called, but once he takes an extra step and the ref doesn’t call it it’s never getting over turned.

I’m fucking kvelling.

Gordon absolutely drew a soft penalty by being a flop monster and then didn’t have the penalty called because he’s a flop monster.

Healthy Reece James is so god damn good.

obviously criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitism, but there are also obviously people who use criticism of Israel to advance explicit anti-Semitism and it seems pretty clear Vance is intentionally moving into this debate in defense of them

it's interesting timing for Vance to be making these statements exactly as a set of right wing groups and figures (Ben Shapiro, Manhattan Institute) are trying to expel explicit, ideological anti-Semites from the coalition

Putting partisan politics above policy is unironically what republicans have been better at than democrats for years.

this is good tho right? a congressional stock trading ban is -good policy -extremely good politics -more or less wholly without consequence in the short term so why let the issue go away before the midterms when you can run on it? prospect.org/2025/12/19/j...

Ahhhh multipolarity. It stinks!

After years of telling my children to mind their own beeswax, for Hanukkah tonight I got them each a bar of actual beeswax. It turns out they did not find this as amusing as I had hoped.

That’s very good.

Listen man, they gotta officially tell male diplomats “you’re not actually that good looking or interesting” all the time as part of training and some non-zero portion still get honeytrapped.

The problem with discussing the weirdness of people experiencing an objectively decent economy as worse than an objectively bad economy is that your mentions immediately get flooded with people experiencing the current decent economy as bad. And, like, yes you are unproductively proving the thesis.