lol, got my wee joker up to 1776 chips before beating the final boss blind. Yay Abandoned Deck.

I’ve been fond of Barkley ever since elementary school when I had a friend who was a big fan and was visited by Sir Charles in the hospital when he had open heart surgery, so stuff like this is extra nice to see.

There’s actually a whole area of study in welfare economics that deals with this: theory of the second best. If certain activities have negative externalities the socially optimal outcome can be to throw some sand in the gears without wholesale abolition. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_...

Feel like I have a lot of lawyer moots, so, boost?

Alright, gonna try this slay the spire sequel thing. Wish me luck, hopefully I don’t perish of malnutrition.

So, I’m going to be driving about 20 hours in the near future, what podcasts should I binge? I’m all caught up on Normal Men, Patrick Wymann, and Mike Duncan’s stuff.

Road trip coming up so I’m buying oil etfs to hedge against further gas price spikes, like airlines buying jet fuel futures. (This is a joke, please don’t do this)

Supply and demand being mom/that harpy in HR coded because it ends up being a constraint on the ability to just run hog wild and break shit makes perfect sense in retrospect, but I have to admit I didn’t see it coming.

Mines in the Strait of Hormuz was featured in a Far Side comic, FWIW. Not exactly the most obscure of possibilities.

Bluesky (laudatory)

Ok, but hear me out. The ability to distinguish between good and bad sources of information, or to otherwise put yourself in a good information environment, is a necessary skill to have in order to be a good parent.

I don’t think Israel ”controls” our foreign policy in a conspiratorial sense, but I don’t think it’s just another state either. I think our FP elite have come to implicitly see it as essentially an autonomous province of the American Empire, like the dominions under the British Empire

I continue to have the strong conviction that I would come out of a Choitner interview looking just fine, thank you, and no level of hacks getting aethered will change my mind.

@3cblue.bsky.social can you open your DMs? I can’t message you even though I’m following. CC @proptermalone.bsky.social

This is what people mean when they talk about negativity bias on bsky. Good news struggles to break through the noise.

Fish don’t realize that they are swimming in water, and reactionaries don’t realize they are swimming in successful prog cultural sculpting imposed from the top down.

The Joker, becoming etc.

Me, complaining about there being turtles on the arctic continent of Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King.

*finally* beat jokerless. They key was pretty straightforward: open a polychrome red seal ace in an early pack, then just duplicate to your heart’s content. By the final boss I had 9 mult polychrome red seal aces, top scoring hand of 6 million something. Only 2 total sicko achievements left.

Not regretting my anti-Ring stance so far.

In that case, I can’t guarantee that me and a million of my closest friends won’t be taking a day off work on a Tuesday in November in order to give some brownshirt fucks headaches.

liquidating 100% of my Bitcoin holdings just so I can feel like another snowflake contributing to an avalanche.

Can’t believe they are letting Kamala announce that there’s another Bridgerton prequel series coming out next year.

Fireflies, Owl City. It’s not the worst song, but the first time I hear it I briefly got so excited because I thought The Postal Service had dropped a new song, followed by melancholy because clearly they were just phoning it in now, then anger that someone was blatantly ripping them off.

New season of Bridgerton is good (turns out smutty Downton Abbey is compelling TV) but I can help but feel like the main plot is a little derivative, for some reason.

At this poinI think I’m a Jonathan Haidt and George Borjas away from every elite academic that I hate being in the the Epstein files…

Not only is Glonzo real and eating the power lines and driving up electricity costs, but it turns out he’s also behind lawsuits to prevent the construction of new wind farms and masterminded Enron’s manipulation of the California energy crisis and blocks energy efficiency standard adoption.

Huh, I wonder if this post from 7 hours ago ends up being important.

Bsky has the (fermented grape) juice

My entirely uninformed, Not A Lawyer opinion is that the DOJ didn’t have to play around a pocket pardon for Trump, because they aren’t valid, and if SCOTUS tries to rule that they are you make it moot and actually pardon those who made it so.

If I want to start reading sone feminist IR, where should I start?

Jokerless really is the most sadistic Balatro challenge. You need to grab arcana and spectral packs, but so many of the cards are definitionally useless.

People complain about lack of engagement on here and don’t make posts that appeal to bsky. Try something like this: “Is psyllium husk always slimy when you drink it with water, or did I just choose a weird brand?” That’s how you get engagement here.

One of my least favorite Boomer tendencies is their general inability, no matter how woke, to imagine that the father is capable of, let alone could be expected to, taking on a substantial portion of the child raising responsibilities.

Vibe check: reasonably well informed but generally apolitical coworker now thinks ICE are Trump’s gestapo, is outraged by Renee Good’s murder, and is freaked out by Miller’s Sephirothpostin.

Getting my PhD in quantum probability by demonstrating that the Space Joker both does and does not have a 1 in 4 chance of upgrading the hand you play, until observed.

Trying to decide if my prohibition against intentionally letting my children beat me in games extends to internationally stalemating my kindergartner.

we have no alternative but to say “fuck it, we ball”

I don’t think this is true? While the sex of a given child is ~random, the number of children one chooses to have is not, and couples will make different fertility decisions based on the sec of their existing children.

Clap push ups have to be like the very worst exercise from a joint stress vs actual workout benefit perspective in existence, right? or do my elbows just suck?

I cannot stress this enough: if you or your child or you on behalf of your child treat admissions as a validation exercise rather than what amounts to a lottery you are begging for a massive hit to your ego. No matter how exemplary or impressive an applicant is it's just numerically punishing.

I still occasionally come back to how this year one of the biggest hit movies had the dual themes of 1) you must accept yourself for who you are. 2) boys are ontologically evil.

Laura Kelly looking at these numbers and wondering if she has one last job in her.

Electoral hedonic treadmill in full force. Is a 16 point over performance a disappointment? What about 18?

Sometimes I’m reading a thread about AI and kind of nodding along and suddenly I feel like I’m at “ape holders can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape” level comprehension.

remembering a Bush era protest sign: Support the Troops. Bring them Home.

Other than a bunch that are wayyyy too personal to post into the aether, probably when some coworkers were arguing about who got to have me on their squad when the zombie apocalypse happened.

Lot of thoughts about That Article, but one thing that made me scream. The cost of childcare was not zero! That our system devalues feminized care labor doesn’t make it actually free. Opportunity costs are a thing, childcare is more expensive because of Baumol, not because it was free before.