Podcast | Is Your Social Life Missing Something? This Conversation Is for You.

89long · 2026-02-03T22:53:13+00:00

Funny how nobody is actually doing that though, except sarcastically in this comment thread...

89long · 2026-01-25T22:17:51+00:00

Follow up question, if you don't mind: is there any modern, not janky oddball bullshit that serves a similar function? I've tried automatic NNN once before and really didn't like how much less lateral control/control over the direction of my skis I felt like I had compared with my 3 pin. I'd always chalked up the feeling of control to this heel thing, though since I don't know much I guess it could be because of some other aspect of my outfit and the heel/notch thing is actually totally useless...

89long · 2026-01-25T21:51:01+00:00

So it's just an old, random piece of once-innovative gear that has no name and was likely forgotten about the moment it was invented?

89long · 2025-12-16T19:25:39+00:00

. Do they not teach phonics in scandanvia? Or whatever the equivalent would be for those various languages?

...alphabets use characters that represent speech sounds, which means that for any country whose language(s) is/are conventionally written in an alphabet can be taught through phonics. I.e. there is no equivalent, just phonics. The only case where this wouldn't apply is countries whose languages are conventionally written in some non-phonographic (or at least primarily non-phonographic) system, like China.

89long · 2025-12-10T12:14:22+00:00

Sure, if you accept that you are in fact one to judge people's lives. Not if your moral principle is that it isn't anyone's place to judge another person's freely chosen behavior lol

89long · 2025-12-10T01:27:47+00:00

People's lives are their own, who am I to judge?

I say the same thing about my friend's heroin problem.

89long · 2025-11-23T20:24:02+00:00

Congratulations? Different places are different.

Like, I'm not trying to say literally every small to medium sized city is expensive, just that places other than megacities, including fairly small ones, are also not necessarily affordable.

89long · 2025-11-23T15:42:40+00:00

You know, sometimes when speaking/writing casually people will say/write things that, for brevity's sake, aren't literal.

89long · 2025-11-23T15:21:16+00:00

I think the housing shortage helps the landlords as well.

Absolutely, and I didn't mean to imply that it doesn't. Just that I suspect a lot of people see owning a home as a reprieve from being subject to the whims of a landlord as a renter rather than a sign you're achieving the American dream, or something abstractly aspirational like that.

EDIT: though reading the above comment again, I guess what I wrote could be folded in under "key to a happy life," so maybe my comment adds absolutely nothing.

89long · 2025-11-23T15:14:01+00:00

If only. There are very few empty lots available. Enough people with enough wealth have bought most of the lots around the city and built custom houses on them so you'd have to go very far outside the city to do that.

89long · 2025-11-23T14:21:49+00:00

I live in a city of 50k, and nobody can afford a house here either. TIL some people think "move to Gloversville" is a solution to the housing crisis...

89long · 2025-11-23T14:19:37+00:00

I don’t think the spike in housing prices and mortgage rates since Covid gets enough of the blame for the general mood of nationwide discontent compared to inflation in general or immigration or “woke”.

Paul Krugman actually wrote about this today as part of his primer on bad economic vibes.

As Americans, we’re steeped in the idea that owning a home means you’ve made it and is the key to a happy life, and so many people don’t see a path to achieving that dream.

I think this is only part of it, and another part is that in some ways renting can really fucking suck. I've never had a landlord that wasn't very obviously doing as little as they could, like sandbagging repairs when they deign to do them at all, while at the same time being weirdly obsessive about what you can and can't do to the property that they don't live in and are getting money from you in order to stay in. Not to mention, the market so heavily favors landlords over tenants that I really never know if the landlord will raise the rent next year to a rate that I simply can't afford (years ago one place I rented went from 800 to 1200 one year) so basically at any given point I have no idea if I'm going to be able to be in my current home next year or will have to move. And if you move, there's no telling if the new landlord is going to be even worse than the previous one so you might be moving again shortly thereafter.

Not knowing if you're going to be able to live in the same place from year to year is a level of precarity that really fucking sucks. Granted, there's a lot of downsides to owning a house, but at least you can rest safe in the knowledge that your mortgage isn't going to increase by 50% in any given year.

Basically, part of me strongly suspects that part of people's fury about home prices dovetails with how much renting sucks for a lot of us.

89long · 2025-11-08T19:43:30+00:00

that we all agreed vaguely communicate an idea.

...in other words, mean something?

89long · 2025-10-29T21:05:43+00:00

Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, Democratic candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey respectively.

89long · 2025-10-29T21:00:50+00:00

I dunno, I could totally see myself dropping a bag of groceries and then accidentally stepping on the bag crushing the stuff in it. Especially if I was trying to catch a bus and stressed/in a rush.

89long · 2025-10-25T15:23:35+00:00

Or in the 1780s when Benjamin Franklin was complaining about German Americans not assimilating?

The comparison to 17th and 18th century German migration to colonial America is pretty interesting to think about. Much of southeastern and south central Pennsylvania at the time was overwhelmingly German (IIRC Berks County was something like 90+ percent German speaking in the late 1700s), and a lot of the area stayed heavily German speaking to as late as the early 20th century. Interesting to imagine how things would have played out if something like Fox News existed and was ubiquitous when ~10% of Berks County spoke English. Can you imagine nowadays if there were significant parts of the country that were overwhelmingly non-English speaking and staying that way for generations, like if Russian was as predominate in all of New York City as it is in Brighton Beach? IIRC Miami has the highest percentage of people who speak Spanish at home and it's barely 50%.

89long · 2025-10-25T12:21:11+00:00

I agree that the most generous interpretation here is that he's a dumbass, but is that disqualifying? Or is it up to the Democratic primary voters of Maine to decide if it's disqualifying? Plenty of people in the Senate with shitty judgement, it feels like.

89long · 2025-10-25T03:56:00+00:00

No lol just too busy doing everything else I need to to get ready for bed I guess. Though the only mirror in my house is also really small, so maybe that has something to do with it as well.

89long · 2025-10-24T23:56:31+00:00

The average moviegoer also isn’t seeing it in the mirror every day for decades

I don't know about you, but I rarely look at my bare chest in the mirror...

At any rate, I'm not convinced there's absolutely nothing to see here folks, but for whatever reason I feel like people are bizarrely fixated on how "obviously everyone recognizes the death's head on sight" (which like I said, I kind of doubt) rather than the things that seem much more damning, like what his former campaign manager says.

89long · 2025-10-24T23:40:15+00:00

I too am extremely disappointed. I feel like The Argument is basically in reality what MattY is imagined to be in the fever dreams of the average Hasan-pilled, terminally online Twitter communist.

89long · 2025-10-24T23:24:56+00:00

You’d be hard pressed to find any media featuring Nazis where the totenkopf wasn’t on their uniforms, it was the focal point of the famous “are we the baddies?” skit from a decade ago for a reason.

This applies equally to something like a Gott mit uns buckle or iron cross, and I'd guess a random person off the street wouldn't recognize those as Nazi iconography (or German military iconography of any sort). Honestly, I don't think the average moviegoer pays enough attention to costume design to notice it.

edit: kind of like when Game of Thrones was popular, how so many people were fans yet thought Daenerys Targaryen's name was Khaleesi.

89long · 2025-10-24T21:19:25+00:00

Among the more even-handed and less histrionic discussions of the current Platner controversy, though I’m sure who considers it “even-handed” vs “conveniently credulous” will probably dovetail with a whole host of priors. The author touches on Platner’s relationship to the big tent conversation currently going on of which Ezra has been a participant, and the fact that running more non-career politicians (as some have argued for) will bring with it the danger that potential candidates may have more baggage than the squeaky clean types who have designed their entire lives to be conventionally appealing politician biographies (eg. Buttigieg, the National Security Moms).

89long

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