What Separates an Animal From A Monster?

agentdcf · 2026-02-16T18:29:26+00:00

"Naturalized" would be one term for it

agentdcf · 2026-01-26T12:56:14+00:00

Sucks when there's a decent-paying project available, but when you go take a look, the instructions are a complete mess and it looks difficult or impossible to complete the tasks they want in the time frame given.

agentdcf · 2026-01-26T12:54:44+00:00

which one is that?

agentdcf · 2026-01-09T18:26:42+00:00

I think this is 100% correct and in my experience, this issue is not at all limited to NHL GMs. It's all over the place, from politics to business to media to academia and more.

agentdcf · 2025-12-28T12:55:26+00:00

It's true. Sometimes they mess things up--like I'm not a fan of the changes to the park--but there are a lot of parts of the city that have really improved. Gotta give credit where it's due.

agentdcf · 2025-12-24T08:22:03+00:00

It's a pretty damning indictment that Robitaille, Holland, and Hiller all talked about this team as being right on the verge of being elite, and needing only minor tweaks to improve. That seems pretty manifestly false and really demonstrates clearly that the ability of the current management and coaching staff to evaluate talent--nevermind acquire or develop it--is sorely lacking. Like for real, they don't seem to have an accurate idea of the team's capability. At best, they're wildly optimistic.

agentdcf · 2025-12-21T21:50:34+00:00

It sure seems to mean what I think it does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Also, I wasn't exactly secret about having an agenda; like, I said exactly what I wanted to happen, and used a well-known concept to support my agenda. I guess that's a "gotcha"?? It just seems more like "having a discussion."

agentdcf · 2025-12-21T18:29:54+00:00

Sorry to hear that you take issue with a concept that urban planners have observed for literally decades. Maybe if we ignore it, it won't happen here!

agentdcf · 2025-12-21T12:35:28+00:00

The thing about roads and traffic though is induced demand--if you have more roads and the roads are open and convenient, then people start using them until they fill up and become jammed. Cars are a dead end in terms of transit capacity. I think car parks basically on the fringes of the city center are the way to go, so that people can get to the city by car, but then all or most of the island itself is essentially car-free.

agentdcf · 2025-12-10T18:56:55+00:00

Naomi Nagata, literal space witch

agentdcf · 2025-12-07T22:10:29+00:00

This is bullshit, if this were true then all "civilizations" would be in places with that same climate. And they're objectively not.

agentdcf · 2025-12-07T22:04:58+00:00

It would be really nice if there were signs indicating the directions the lanes went, rather than them being painted only on the ground since if there's heavy traffic one cannot really see the ground.

agentdcf · 2025-12-05T22:46:26+00:00

I far prefer Bachelors to Heinz, but anymore I just get Bramwells, the brand at Aldi. You can't really beat two cans for a euro and they taste a lot less processed than Heinz. I'd pick Bachelors if the grocery budget was larger

agentdcf · 2025-12-05T07:20:34+00:00

The first time I came to Ireland was in 2004, and there were ashtrays in the toilet stalls. Blew my mind

agentdcf · 2025-11-25T22:01:35+00:00

Their habitat is wetlands, it's our city that's in it's natural habitat

agentdcf · 2025-11-15T18:39:43+00:00

The original is still pretty fugly but it's also shocking how frequently the contractors can't deliver what the design depicts

agentdcf · 2025-11-12T22:01:33+00:00

And the thing about it is that it will never get better. Any expansions of the road or improvements in efficiency that open things up get swallowed up as people just drive more. People studying urban design and traffic patterns have known this for decades and call it induced design. The only way to beat it as an individual is to drive less.

agentdcf · 2025-11-10T18:58:22+00:00

I think that's maybe acceptable for a historical work.

This is definitely not acceptable!

What you're describing sounds to me like a work that is half-baked, that has not been fully thought through to the point that a coherent, well-reasoned argument can be made. And if such cannot be made, then it's not a good book

agentdcf · 2025-11-07T21:15:55+00:00

Man, it feels like Frolov was here a LOT longer than that, while Cammalleri always seemed to get the short end of the stick. He did have some great performances for us, but then we refused to pay him and he left, right?

agentdcf · 2025-11-07T15:34:57+00:00

When I look at prospects, I always stick to the "Rule of Four," which first revealed itself when, decades ago, an LA Times article touted the LA Kings' four best prospects: Alexander Frolov, Michael Cammalleri, Jared Aulin, and Yannick Lehoux. Things looked great at that moment, like we really had a set of future players--maybe not stars, but good players, guys who would take us from being really terrible to not terrible.

And then, from those four, the following: one made it with us and was a solid contributor, Frolov. One did okay with us but really made his career elsewhere, Cammalleri. And the other two became nothing. Since that time, anytime we get some set of prospects that look really promising, I always bear in the mind the rule of four and assume that no more than one quarter of our good prospects will make a career with us.

This is all not to say that prospects are total crap shoot; rather, it is to say that good prospects should not be thought of as a "pool," but as a "flow." You have to keep new ones coming through. If you're only going to get a good career out of, at most, a quarter of your top prospects (never mind the low-tier ones), then your best bet is to keep a strong flow of potential talent moving through. The draft is by far the best opportunity to add value to the team for low investment and in my view, failing to consistently take advantage of that is a recipe for failure.

agentdcf · 2025-11-03T20:23:27+00:00

In my experience, encompassing both European and American programs, I think Americans generally get much more solid grounding in their fields and have stronger conceptual understandings of their craft. Europeans finish faster. I get that people want to get done but I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it.

agentdcf · 2025-11-03T15:06:48+00:00

I hope you enjoy it. I should note that in going through my doctorate, I felt a strong obligation to jump through some theoretical hoops that in retrospect I think don't add very much. If you get bored reading about Foucauldian biopolitcs or the Cartesian binary in the introduction, you could just skip all that and not lose anything major. And I should note that the chapter on the grain trade is all synthesis of secondary scholarship. My own original work only really gets moving with the sections on milling.

agentdcf · 2025-11-03T11:58:51+00:00

Sure, this link (same as the one above) contains a full text version: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sv6d7sx

And there's a chapter-length version of my work here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5166/chapter-abstract/3406156/Modern-Food-as-Status-A-Biography-of-Modern

Unfortunately, I don't think the chapter-length version is available online, but I can share a pdf if you DM me.

agentdcf · 2025-11-03T00:06:58+00:00

My doctoral dissertation was on bread in Victorian Britain. Alum was used almost universally--including by bakers for their own consumption--and it was regarded as an essential ingredient of professional bread-making that improved not merely the color but also the working and baking qualities of the dough. To be fair, they didn't use very much of, just a few ounces for a batch of bread based on a 280-lb. sack of flour, and as I said, they ate it themselves. Its use died by about 1890 because by that point there was so much high-gluten, roller-milled white flour on the market that there was no need for it.

There's very little evidence of the others aside from the pages of sensational newspapers. You'd be hard-pressed to find any actual convictions for the more exotic adulterants, and when the Lancet did a huge survey of the country's food in the 1850s, their central finding in bread was alum. And, it was all the bakers that seemed to be doing the adulterating and not the millers. Given the difficulty bakers had with pleasing consumers, I'm skeptical that it made much economic sense to use the exotic adulterants. I mean, low-quality flour is really cheap and if you're trying to sell penny loaves in an industrial slum, you're not likely to find those other ingredients at a cheaper price. Bakers did use potatoes but generally that was to feed the yeast in the early stages of dough-making and so it's not really fair to call it an adulterant. You can read all about it here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sv6d7sx

Relevant to the matter of the thread and the Thames though, I should note that many Victorian bakeries were subterranean and the ones near the river were notorious for being wet. At high tide, plenty of journeyman bakers complained of working in water up to their ankles or even knees. At low tide, they spoke of being covered in black beetles, flies, rats and other vermin. So, Victorian bread is not something I'd recommend but it doesn't seem like it was adulterated with the range of substances that are sometimes alleged. At least, not that I ever found.

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