I bought a new truck already this weekend. The old truck got rear ended by a literal actual Mack truck, and despite appearances the insurance company decided a clean check was better than messy repair.
I started to apply my usual opening gambit with the dealers... and second call landed on a deal that was really surprising. On top of that they offered their 'concierge' remote buying option -- which is just a digital link to eSign all the paperwork without the finance guy asking if I'd like the undercoating. The other awesome benefit was that we didn't have to drive an hour to 1) Have the sales manager attempt to renege on the deal, or 2) sit for 2-3 hours waiting for the finance guy (because you wouldn't renegotiate the deal).
Anyway, not sure what happened, but got a great deal on the exact same truck I had before and didn't have to negotiate (much) or deal with dealership nonsense... just picked-up the car with all the paperwork signed via an app. The payoff is kinda small because my other truck was new-ish... so doesn't feel like an upgrade or that whole new car experience. But after the horrors of trying to buy cars during the Pandemic chip shortages? Nirvana.
Almost feels like we don't really need dealerships at all ... just get a reasonable price and eSign all the paperwork.
Sure, but it becomes a defeater to the argument that it's impossible to have good 'ideological' art.
What if you can have good ideological art, but most art that is ideological is terrible. We're looking for causal action that's separate from simply 'ideological'.
Like, why is post Big Idea Veggie Tales so much worse? That, to me is the question.
Hold on a second... I'm gonna start a Veggie Tales internet feud with you.
OG Veggie Tales (before Big Idea went bankrupt in 2003?) made veggies delightful -- literally and metaphorically. People (grown-ups) could watch a Veggie Tale movie or short and think, 'man... if I'd had veggies like this when I was a kid, maybe I'd like veggies now.' A comp might be Shrek the original.
After about 2004, I'll agree that Veggie Tales(TM) without the creators was simply unfunny and mostly terrible. So sure, I'll grant your point with that caveat.
Phil Vischer wrote a really long article about his failure at business which was a great read; I tried to find it again, but it looks like he pulled it and instead has a book out. Which I'm guessing will be worse for the polish that's now been put into it.
However, you have to watch Season 1 as if it is the set-up to the joke... a long set-up that isn't very funny. The show the network thought would be successful.
But, after Season 1... well that right there is some of the weirdest meta-farming sh*t ever aired on network TV. Some parts of which are funny in ways you've never seen funny coming.
Yeah, I certainly don't have the finger on the pulse of, of, well, anything.
But I think back on Trump's claim that he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any votes and I always thought he'd lose some votes. Maybe not all the votes, but some.
Now as I ponder whether he could do misdemeanor accounting fraud in connection with another unprosecuted felony on 5th avenue and not lose any votes? Well, maybe.
Honestly you folks are so deranged on this. An OBGYN can perform a legal abortion, if needed. An 'abortion clinic' isn't needed in any way shape or form.
"Regina and Ashley reported the rape to law enforcement "
2010 Mississippi Code
TITLE 41 - PUBLIC HEALTH
Chapter 41 - Surgical or Medical Procedures; Consents.
41-41-45 - Abortion prohibited; exceptions.
(2) No abortion shall be performed or induced in the State of Mississippi, except in the case where necessary for the preservation of the mother's life or where the pregnancy was caused by rape.
This is a sad story about a girl who was raped in her yard by a stranger ... there's no real legislative matter at issue here.
You can keep trying to play the 'golly gee willicker, how can MD's possibly understand this complex Legal terrain' but no one is buying it once you get past the bad advocacy journalism.
They made some good quality of life changes... loot is a little too optimized... but at this point it's more of a crafting game than a loot game. Loot serves to provide you recipes which you then craft on to gear. I'm ok with that.
Ultimately, though, none of the classes are fun to play... the only ability that's fun/useful is your 'core' ability -- which is heavily gated by punishing resource requirements -- supposedly we're supposed to use our builders to build resources, but that gameplay doesn't work because your builders suuuuuuuck. Everything else is gated behind timers -- most of which are *at least* 15 seconds upwards of 70 seconds. Just really bad game design.
If they completely rebuild their skill/resource management a'la POE and Last Epoch they might have a fun game.
This is just the internet historian in me wanting to tell a story... please indulge me: Trump's drug of choice was Hydroxychloroquine.
I remember *very* early (before the great polarization) reading about promising compounds that scientists were exploring. What struck me at the time was the list was a bio-pharma list of things like GS-5734 and about 15 other compounds with one or two that had a name, like HCQ... and HCQ turns out to be the malaria pill and the US has stockpiles of them.
Very shortly thereafter, Trump started talking about how the scientists had a list of possible treatments and he immediately started talking up HCQ as a possible treatment. Which was *true* ... at the time.
And, at that time, Trump was desperate for this thing to just go away before it wrecked his economic numbers going into the election. IMHO, he saw the same (or similar list) that I did -- saw that we had HCQ ready to go and simply wishcasted (manifested?) HCQ as a ready made way out.
Of course it turns out that HCQ wasn't effective, but GS-5734 better known as Remdesivir was.
I won't claim to be a Trump whisperer, but in MAR/APR 2020 I felt I could see the hamster wheels in his brain turning on the hope that this ready-made malaria drug, HCQ, would make this all go away.
I couldn't find the paper I read that had the list of compounds plus HCQ, but here's an APR2020 reference of the 'promising' treatments for contextual 'way-back' memory jogging:
The Biden administration also quietly suspended WIV in JUL2023 from all Funding for 10-yrs owing to what it (NIH) perceives to be false reporting on it's mouse experiments related to COVID.
“There is risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate, protocols of the NIH on biosafety.”
Basically this is the correct outcome that most of us who noticed something was 'off' about the Lancet 'conspiracy letter' signed and orchestrated by Daszak (et al.). It would be nice if we could've done a full forensic analysis of all possible origins; but that was not what the Lancet Letter wanted: remember, it claimed *without any evidence of zoonotic origins* that any 'other' scenario had to be a conspiracy theory. They were never team science.
At this point the crime scenes are so muddled and tampered with that I doubt we'll get much more clarity... maybe future historians will uncover 'smoking guns' in FOIA-proof communications or somewhere in China after the CCP falls to Sino-Glasnost, or something.
The suspension of WIV and Daszak can be seen as either (or both) the quiet inevitability of the bureaucratic accountability; or the bureaucratic process quietly moving inevitably onwards, disposing of real accountability.
It's probably in the realm of time, death and historians now.
Edit: added the time duration 10-yrs. Not sure what the process might be after the term expires.
Heh, yeah there are a lot of likable scenes in the movie... that was funny.
My absolute favorite scene? When she lights him on fire and throws him against a rock while working out their relationship ending in front of a crowd of interested cast memebers.
*That* was a novel take on Love/Relationships with good dialogue and using stunts (and behind the scene stunts) to move the plot and build the characters. That's what I mean by a having a higher ceiling as a RomCom. I they could've kept the quest and used the stunts as part of his woooing her back... A+
Steam sale: Fantasy General II for $11 for those of you who loved the original.
Which is kinda funny because the original was 1996.
I haven't finished it, but it plays true to form... the idea is to mass forces and kill units before they retreat... but in doing so you always have edge units that the enemy will attempt to overwhelm.
What makes it fun is that you keep your units from mission to mission and they get better -- well the ones that don't die when you need to make that last attack to kill the enemy's unit -- so the goal is to try to make an elite army by gaining experience *and* giving them upgrades along a skill tree (this is new, I think? I mean, it has been 30yrs and all).
There's some light branching where you can chose to attack Clan Green or Clan Red, but if you attack one, you can't do the other path. It doesn't feel like it adds anything because you can't really tell what you'd get either way, so you just pick one and go.
Mostly just a good old fashioned turn based hexagonal fantasy army game with some DLC.
(One thing I remember from the original is that it had a really good instrumental version of Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silent playing ominously in the background. They did not keep this to my chagrin).
As I said in the previous post, I thought it had a higher ceiling as a RomCom/Pen&Teller/MacGuffin/Metamovie than the direction it went with mid-point plot twist and dropping Penn&Teller for car chases and stunts unironically. And the last twist, for me, was a twist too far. Finally, Blunt was ok, Gosling was good, but Blunt/Gosling was bad.
But yeah, good enough to see; not good enough to do anything more than eat popcorn, chuckle for half the movie, then endure the bang-bangs.
Maybe some NGO's to tackle the issue of Greed? Could probably get corporate funding for programs teaching an anti-greed message. When you think about it, do we really want to employ greedy people? Do you want to work next to greed in the workplace?
I jest, but as a distributist, I'm genuinely open to new business modes/structures and trade laws.
Also meant to say, that yes, I agree... what's winning and for whom are buried ledes. Tyler Cowen, of all people, had an interesting article the other day: Labor’s Declining Share Is Worrisome and Mysterious
I get that it seems to be consistent with the principle of 'Free Trade' as an axiomatic economic principle. That is, Free Trade is so unambiguously good that sometimes we have to prevent that good from being shared with our rivals.
But if we can stop 'Free Trade' for political reasons, then that's defining 'Not Trading' as 'Free Trade'. Which is fine... we're free to use free ambiguously. We're free to apply rules to 'Free Trade' and the rules we think are good are part of the 'Free Trade' regime, and those rules we don't like aren't.
Free Trade isn't an axiomatic economic principle, it is a rhetorical device we apply to the rules based system (or game) under which we act. And that's ok.
The 'things' modified by 'equal' aren't what you're discussing... or maybe they are. But that's what I'm getting at... 'Free Trade' is a totem or fetish or goblin that doesn't mean what people say it means.
Also... I'm not sure your last sentence parses? Missing a word somewhere?
This is one of those perennial things where we can all agree that 'all things being equal, fair and free trade is a win for everyone.' Then we realize we don't agree on the terms, free, fair, equal or trade.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Settling into the Summer”
I bought a new truck already this weekend. The old truck got rear ended by a literal actual Mack truck, and despite appearances the insurance company decided a clean check was better than messy repair.
I started to apply my usual opening gambit with the dealers... and second call landed on a deal that was really surprising. On top of that they offered their 'concierge' remote buying option -- which is just a digital link to eSign all the paperwork without the finance guy asking if I'd like the undercoating. The other awesome benefit was that we didn't have to drive an hour to 1) Have the sales manager attempt to renege on the deal, or 2) sit for 2-3 hours waiting for the finance guy (because you wouldn't renegotiate the deal).
Anyway, not sure what happened, but got a great deal on the exact same truck I had before and didn't have to negotiate (much) or deal with dealership nonsense... just picked-up the car with all the paperwork signed via an app. The payoff is kinda small because my other truck was new-ish... so doesn't feel like an upgrade or that whole new car experience. But after the horrors of trying to buy cars during the Pandemic chip shortages? Nirvana.
Almost feels like we don't really need dealerships at all ... just get a reasonable price and eSign all the paperwork.
On “Safe Nerdy and the Early Adopter Problem”
You had me at Virtue Ethics.
/end feud.
"
Sure, but it becomes a defeater to the argument that it's impossible to have good 'ideological' art.
What if you can have good ideological art, but most art that is ideological is terrible. We're looking for causal action that's separate from simply 'ideological'.
Like, why is post Big Idea Veggie Tales so much worse? That, to me is the question.
"
The gatekeepers of sexism have lost the plot. Increasingly, people don't see them as reliable gatekeepers.
"
Hold on a second... I'm gonna start a Veggie Tales internet feud with you.
OG Veggie Tales (before Big Idea went bankrupt in 2003?) made veggies delightful -- literally and metaphorically. People (grown-ups) could watch a Veggie Tale movie or short and think, 'man... if I'd had veggies like this when I was a kid, maybe I'd like veggies now.' A comp might be Shrek the original.
After about 2004, I'll agree that Veggie Tales(TM) without the creators was simply unfunny and mostly terrible. So sure, I'll grant your point with that caveat.
Phil Vischer wrote a really long article about his failure at business which was a great read; I tried to find it again, but it looks like he pulled it and instead has a book out. Which I'm guessing will be worse for the polish that's now been put into it.
"
You should watch community.
However, you have to watch Season 1 as if it is the set-up to the joke... a long set-up that isn't very funny. The show the network thought would be successful.
But, after Season 1... well that right there is some of the weirdest meta-farming sh*t ever aired on network TV. Some parts of which are funny in ways you've never seen funny coming.
On “NYT: Trump’s Georgia Prosecution “Effectively Froze, At Least Through Election””
Welp... I guess you go into battle with the felonies you have not the felonies you want.
On “Donald Trump Found Guilty on All 34 Counts”
Added bonus, no State of the Union speech!
On “Trump Guilty On All Counts”
Yeah, I certainly don't have the finger on the pulse of, of, well, anything.
But I think back on Trump's claim that he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any votes and I always thought he'd lose some votes. Maybe not all the votes, but some.
Now as I ponder whether he could do misdemeanor accounting fraud in connection with another unprosecuted felony on 5th avenue and not lose any votes? Well, maybe.
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/27/2024”
Honestly you folks are so deranged on this. An OBGYN can perform a legal abortion, if needed. An 'abortion clinic' isn't needed in any way shape or form.
"Regina and Ashley reported the rape to law enforcement "
2010 Mississippi Code
TITLE 41 - PUBLIC HEALTH
Chapter 41 - Surgical or Medical Procedures; Consents.
41-41-45 - Abortion prohibited; exceptions.
(2) No abortion shall be performed or induced in the State of Mississippi, except in the case where necessary for the preservation of the mother's life or where the pregnancy was caused by rape.
This is a sad story about a girl who was raped in her yard by a stranger ... there's no real legislative matter at issue here.
You can keep trying to play the 'golly gee willicker, how can MD's possibly understand this complex Legal terrain' but no one is buying it once you get past the bad advocacy journalism.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Elden Ring is going to be releasing DLC on June 21st”
Revisited Diablo IV with their Season 4 updates.
They made some good quality of life changes... loot is a little too optimized... but at this point it's more of a crafting game than a loot game. Loot serves to provide you recipes which you then craft on to gear. I'm ok with that.
Ultimately, though, none of the classes are fun to play... the only ability that's fun/useful is your 'core' ability -- which is heavily gated by punishing resource requirements -- supposedly we're supposed to use our builders to build resources, but that gameplay doesn't work because your builders suuuuuuuck. Everything else is gated behind timers -- most of which are *at least* 15 seconds upwards of 70 seconds. Just really bad game design.
If they completely rebuild their skill/resource management a'la POE and Last Epoch they might have a fun game.
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/27/2024”
"Ashley qualified for an abortion in Mississippi under the law's exception for cases of rape"
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/20/2024”
This is just the internet historian in me wanting to tell a story... please indulge me: Trump's drug of choice was Hydroxychloroquine.
I remember *very* early (before the great polarization) reading about promising compounds that scientists were exploring. What struck me at the time was the list was a bio-pharma list of things like GS-5734 and about 15 other compounds with one or two that had a name, like HCQ... and HCQ turns out to be the malaria pill and the US has stockpiles of them.
Very shortly thereafter, Trump started talking about how the scientists had a list of possible treatments and he immediately started talking up HCQ as a possible treatment. Which was *true* ... at the time.
And, at that time, Trump was desperate for this thing to just go away before it wrecked his economic numbers going into the election. IMHO, he saw the same (or similar list) that I did -- saw that we had HCQ ready to go and simply wishcasted (manifested?) HCQ as a ready made way out.
Of course it turns out that HCQ wasn't effective, but GS-5734 better known as Remdesivir was.
I won't claim to be a Trump whisperer, but in MAR/APR 2020 I felt I could see the hamster wheels in his brain turning on the hope that this ready-made malaria drug, HCQ, would make this all go away.
I couldn't find the paper I read that had the list of compounds plus HCQ, but here's an APR2020 reference of the 'promising' treatments for contextual 'way-back' memory jogging:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764727?guestAccessKey=d26e67ea-de1c-43de-91cf-fd5afe0ef099
And that's how I learned to think like a Trump. Thanks for coming to my TedHistory talk.
"
The Biden administration also quietly suspended WIV in JUL2023 from all Funding for 10-yrs owing to what it (NIH) perceives to be false reporting on it's mouse experiments related to COVID.
“There is risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate, protocols of the NIH on biosafety.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-the-us-has-banned-funding-for-chinese-lab-at-center-of-pandemic-origin-dispute
Basically this is the correct outcome that most of us who noticed something was 'off' about the Lancet 'conspiracy letter' signed and orchestrated by Daszak (et al.). It would be nice if we could've done a full forensic analysis of all possible origins; but that was not what the Lancet Letter wanted: remember, it claimed *without any evidence of zoonotic origins* that any 'other' scenario had to be a conspiracy theory. They were never team science.
At this point the crime scenes are so muddled and tampered with that I doubt we'll get much more clarity... maybe future historians will uncover 'smoking guns' in FOIA-proof communications or somewhere in China after the CCP falls to Sino-Glasnost, or something.
The suspension of WIV and Daszak can be seen as either (or both) the quiet inevitability of the bureaucratic accountability; or the bureaucratic process quietly moving inevitably onwards, disposing of real accountability.
It's probably in the realm of time, death and historians now.
Edit: added the time duration 10-yrs. Not sure what the process might be after the term expires.
"
Rude.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Fall Guy (2024)”
Heh, yeah there are a lot of likable scenes in the movie... that was funny.
My absolute favorite scene? When she lights him on fire and throws him against a rock while working out their relationship ending in front of a crowd of interested cast memebers.
*That* was a novel take on Love/Relationships with good dialogue and using stunts (and behind the scene stunts) to move the plot and build the characters. That's what I mean by a having a higher ceiling as a RomCom. I they could've kept the quest and used the stunts as part of his woooing her back... A+
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Dragon Age: Inquisition – Game of the Year Edition is Epic Game Store’s Free Game this week.”
Steam sale: Fantasy General II for $11 for those of you who loved the original.
Which is kinda funny because the original was 1996.
I haven't finished it, but it plays true to form... the idea is to mass forces and kill units before they retreat... but in doing so you always have edge units that the enemy will attempt to overwhelm.
What makes it fun is that you keep your units from mission to mission and they get better -- well the ones that don't die when you need to make that last attack to kill the enemy's unit -- so the goal is to try to make an elite army by gaining experience *and* giving them upgrades along a skill tree (this is new, I think? I mean, it has been 30yrs and all).
There's some light branching where you can chose to attack Clan Green or Clan Red, but if you attack one, you can't do the other path. It doesn't feel like it adds anything because you can't really tell what you'd get either way, so you just pick one and go.
Mostly just a good old fashioned turn based hexagonal fantasy army game with some DLC.
(One thing I remember from the original is that it had a really good instrumental version of Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silent playing ominously in the background. They did not keep this to my chagrin).
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Fall Guy (2024)”
Heh, I thought you'd like it.
As I said in the previous post, I thought it had a higher ceiling as a RomCom/Pen&Teller/MacGuffin/Metamovie than the direction it went with mid-point plot twist and dropping Penn&Teller for car chases and stunts unironically. And the last twist, for me, was a twist too far. Finally, Blunt was ok, Gosling was good, but Blunt/Gosling was bad.
But yeah, good enough to see; not good enough to do anything more than eat popcorn, chuckle for half the movie, then endure the bang-bangs.
On “Will the Real Free-Trade Party Please Stand Up?”
Maybe some NGO's to tackle the issue of Greed? Could probably get corporate funding for programs teaching an anti-greed message. When you think about it, do we really want to employ greedy people? Do you want to work next to greed in the workplace?
I jest, but as a distributist, I'm genuinely open to new business modes/structures and trade laws.
"
Also meant to say, that yes, I agree... what's winning and for whom are buried ledes. Tyler Cowen, of all people, had an interesting article the other day: Labor’s Declining Share Is Worrisome and Mysterious
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-13/labor-s-declining-share-of-the-economy-is-worrisome-and-mysterious
"
Got it, thanks for clarifying the last sentence.
I get that it seems to be consistent with the principle of 'Free Trade' as an axiomatic economic principle. That is, Free Trade is so unambiguously good that sometimes we have to prevent that good from being shared with our rivals.
But if we can stop 'Free Trade' for political reasons, then that's defining 'Not Trading' as 'Free Trade'. Which is fine... we're free to use free ambiguously. We're free to apply rules to 'Free Trade' and the rules we think are good are part of the 'Free Trade' regime, and those rules we don't like aren't.
Free Trade isn't an axiomatic economic principle, it is a rhetorical device we apply to the rules based system (or game) under which we act. And that's ok.
"
or 'being' and 'is' my personal favorites.
"
The 'things' modified by 'equal' aren't what you're discussing... or maybe they are. But that's what I'm getting at... 'Free Trade' is a totem or fetish or goblin that doesn't mean what people say it means.
Also... I'm not sure your last sentence parses? Missing a word somewhere?
edit: for less clarity.
"
This is one of those perennial things where we can all agree that 'all things being equal, fair and free trade is a win for everyone.' Then we realize we don't agree on the terms, free, fair, equal or trade.
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/13/2024”
That's a good one too because it cross-threads our cultural awareness module.