I’m lucky because I cannot tell the difference between the $500 mattresses and the $7,000 ones, nor can I discern any meaningful sonic distinction between the $1,000 speakers and the $10,000 ones.
That has saved me untold amounts of currency.
Month: December 2024
Buzzkill
It turns out launching into an explanation of how the Canadian residential school mass graves are fake news is not the best way to set a nice vibe at a holiday party.
— Wally Nowinski (@Nowooski) December 29, 2024
Someone just as fun of parties as I am! There are a few of us. They call me the “death of the party” for a reason.
Marginal
Same. Personal experience shows me this is the case. During the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s I told my friend this directly: “If you keep doing this, you will piss away all your money. You will go bankrupt and lose everything.” I did not mince words. I put it that bluntly.
A few months later, he was way overextended on margin as the NASDAQ crashed 60%. His broker did the expected margin call and in addition to losing his principal, he owed Datek tens of thousands that he did not have. He squandered everything he had and more chasing a few lousy bucks. He couldn’t even make rent. If he’d listened to me he would’ve been up well more than a hundred thousand dollars (around $200K in 2024 greenbacks).
Listening to my advice was the easy and obvious thing to do as it was clear the market was unsustainable and that being so far out on margin was dangerous. But it didn’t matter.
Runover
It looks like the future of Europe is to be a stagnant backwater where the standard of living slowly declines. It’s likely to be overrun both by Russia and by mobs of economic migrants with Enlightenment-hostile values and cultures.
My guess is that the region will deteriorate for 200-300 years and then as those mobs aforementioned and their terrible cultures cool out, it’ll flourish once again — after some brutal wars and genocides.
Good times, good times.
Siege
Bird flu might be coming. So won't somebody please think of… the gain-of-function researchers?!
I'm baffled by how often big newspapers advocate for actively bad stuff, even when it won't get many clicks. It takes hard work to be so consistently wrong; how/why do they do it? pic.twitter.com/zfyPOkzCwI
— Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) December 24, 2024
Especiallly since it was those poor, besiegned GoF researchers who almost certainly caused Covid. Insanity.
Runway
Atrocious piloting leading to mass death here most likely. Bird strike, but the plane was not incapacitated. There was what appeared to be a single engine failure. The pilot seems to have panicked and made a series of terrible and fatal decisions. Flaps weren’t lowered. Speed brake was not deployed. Didn’t attempt a gravity drop of the landing gear. That airport has a short-ish runway (2,800 meters) and even with all that, he still would’ve been ok if the runway had been longer.
My personal guess is that the pilot turned off the wrong engine (the working one) while attempting to land, in addition to all those other probable fuck-ups. It’s also likely the pilot didn’t realize the landing gear was not extended in what was obviously a panic situation they were unable to deal with.
The investigation will reveal more, but that seems like 100% pilot error to me. A bird strike with a single engine failure simply cannot cause all those problems with the triply-redundant systems on that aircraft. It is just not possible.
Cattack
Same, same. Or I’m being attacked by the werewolves again. Or I’m launching nukes on aliens from the space station.
How U.S. Household Incomes Have Changed (1967-2023).
The 2010s are glorified by gen Z. But the ‘indie music’ of that era was unoriginal.
Tech worker movements grow as threats of RTO, AI loom.
Has Russia’s Shadow Fleet, Built to Evade Sanctions, Added Sabotage to Its List?
Surviving on $1,800 a Month in Social Security, She Died Looking for a Place to Live.
AI Write Right
This is already happening. One of my team members did his year-end self-review. I read it (am his manager) and it seemed like it sounded AI-ish. I asked him if he’d used AI to create it and he said he hadn’t, though I know he uses ChatGPT for other things. He’s honest and I believe him that he didn’t use AI for this particular item. But the review is written in that style, likely because he has been using AI for other mundane tasks so it has lodged in his brain. I’ve also seen the same in emails from other people that I’m pretty sure were not actually AI-generated.
I do not like this.
He Atacc
Raccoon attacks infant inside his Idaho home.
What the hell was the infant doing in the raccoon’s home in the first damn place? Seems justified to me. 😉
Forced Morality
In so many areas of life, as in that video from the 1980s I linked below, we used to have a level of freedom that people who did not live through those times quite literally cannot even imagine. When you tell them about it they deny it was real and claim it only happened in movies. That’s how far-removed we are from human flourishing now.
We’ve all descended disgustingly into slave morality and have no will it seems nor desire to transcend as we once did. We used to have so much more, be so much better. Now we click and drool and laugh at anyone who says anything else is possible.
The Age of the U.S. Housing Stock.
U.S. Supreme Court sides with Nebraska man who lost his home over $588.
Squeezed by high prices, a growing number of Americans find shelter in long-term motels.
Post-Luigi, the “extremist” threat is you.
Russia has a history of downing passenger planes — and covering it up. It does seem to be a bit of a hobby for them.
Oops! Consumers finally realize that Trump could worsen inflation. FAFO.
Health Insurers Gave $120 Billion To Shareholders While Denying Your Claim.
Germany Opened Its Doors to Migrants. Now It’s Struggling to Cope. Another colossal mistake of theirs.
U.S. homelessness rises 18% amid affordable housing shortage.
Count Me Out
If you are looking for something merely countably infinite in something uncountably infinite, then you will never find it — and the reason is that the uncountably infinite is so incomprehensibly vastly larger than the merely countably infinite that your search time would also be infinite.
And that’s pretty trippy.
Losses
She’s the only person I’ve seen who actually admits they went insane during Covid. Most who did never recovered and if they did get better, never admitted they were once lost to nuthood It’s so weird that the Covidians still fervently insist there were no lockdowns anywhere and that nothing was different because of Covid, while bleating about how terrible it all was a few seconds later.
I don’t know if therapy works (probably not), but they need some very badly.
1989
What an awesome fucking time capsule. I remember that world; I was about the same age these kids were in 1989. It was so very different than now, in ways that are hard to describe unless you lived it. Younger people cannot believe a world like that truly existed:
But it did. In important ways, it was a lot freer — there was far less surveillance. Kids were allowed to roam, and have their own lives. There was no social media (except BBSes, which few used). I would not want to go back, but this is one of the few examples I’ve ever found of what it felt like to live in that time. I knew kids just like this dude and his friend who did things just like they are doing in the video.