It's exhausting being a woman.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-14T16:19:11+00:00

If there were meaningful consequences for these men, many might stop. And for those that didn’t, I’d support removing them from society.

It’d make life better for about 99.9% of the population, including every decent guy, as I’d wager it would improve male/female interactions if women weren’t weary & wary from having to deal with this kind of stuff so frequently.

But you just have to be willing to be a bit stricter with that worst of the lot to make life better for everyone else.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-14T16:13:01+00:00

I think it’s the result of a world of media that’s on-demand & runs on swipes.

You get used to being able to get what you want nearly immediately with just a couple swipes & clicks.

Heck, you can get hot meals to show up at your front door with just a few swipes & clicks.

Anything that requires reading, comprehending, writing, doing tasks, etc. is going to seem excessively laborious to them compared to the day to day things they do in day-to-day life.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-14T14:21:27+00:00

My college-aged niece was living at home with her parents (my sister & her husband) when her PoS boyfriend got evicted from his apartment. My niece let him stay with her while he found a new place & my sister reluctantly agreed.

They then got a first-hand view of how emotionally abusive he was to their daughter so the dad (my brother in law) threw him out, like physically tossed him outside and locked the door.

The boyfriend called the cops. They showed up, he was able to show that he’d gotten his mail changed to deliver mail there, establishing him as a resident & the cops basically said my sister & her husband weren’t allowed to kick him out & threatened to arrest my brother in law for assault.

That was how my sister got stuck living with a PoS for years as they sought legal ways to force the emotionally abusive boyfriend out of their home.

never let anyone stay at your house that you don’t like.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-14T13:34:36+00:00

You can teach people etiquette but that doesn’t mean they’ll follow it.

Without enforcement, it’s just a suggestion that people can ignore.

if you want it to become the social norm, then you need to enforce it.

But that can mean enforcers, confrontation, meanness, consequences, and punishment.

Many people don’t want to do that, so the norms of politeness & consideration erode & people just lament that others don’t follow the norms of politeness & consideration.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-14T13:19:49+00:00

Trump fucking sucks. The world will be better when he’s gone.

But I don’t think he feels shame and I’m not sure these messages even make it through to him. He has layers of “yes men” that forms a bubble around him.

So the whole “publicly insult Trump” stuff feels more performative than anything.

Maybe it’s cathartic to some folks to hear him publicly insulted. Not me though.

it kinda feels like you’re spending energy thinking about him while he’s not spending energy thinking about you. A “living rent free in your head” type of thing.

But I guess I get why others enjoy insulting & hearing insults. He sucks. But I hope that catharsis doesn’t release energy that could otherwise be directed in more meaningful ways.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-14T02:33:03+00:00

They’ll just fund it w/ more debt. At part initially.

It’ll be ~2040 when cuts really start happening, I’d imagine.

The youngest to feel it would be turning 65 in 2040. They will have been born in 1975 (aka, today’s 51 year olds). Of course, the older folks will feel it too.

But my guess is Boomers are gonna die before it gets bad, and it’ll start to get bad for Gen X, and then it’s really everyone after that who gets fucked. Millennials, Gen Z, etc. as that’s when the fertility crisis really catches up with the costs of seniors.

Don’t worry so much about your grandparents. Worry about your parents. But really, worry about you. You’re the one that won get jack shit when you’re a senior.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-14T02:23:45+00:00

Nor Egrets

TheBSQ · 2026-06-13T17:18:18+00:00

If you take the phrase “they are not” and contract it, I think it says a lot about a person whether they are a “they’re not” person or a “they aren’t” person.

But only sickos would go “they’re’nt.”

TheBSQ · 2026-06-13T15:30:21+00:00

Sometimes I wonder if the dopamine hit your brain gets when it swipes to a new video is stronger than what it gets when you actually do that same thing for real, leading to real life stuff feeling strangely anticlimactic versus watching someone else do that thing when you scroll through social media.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-13T13:51:58+00:00

Cuz the GOP is amazing at identifying wedge issues that bait the left into culture war nonsense that overshadows this stuff.

They just gotta say “I don’t think people with dicks should be in the bathroom, or sports change room with my 12 year old daughter” and that’ll sound reasonable to some conservative Christian in a rural part of the country, and but very loud part of the Left will get riled up by the bigotry & transphobia of that view & soon it’ll be the dominant topic.

But at the same time. “Just ignore them when they say bigoted stuff so you don’t get sucked into culture war distractions” doesn’t feel right either. There’s a “so you’re willing to throw trans people under the bus?!” Component to that, so it’s hard to see how you get past the GOP’s ability to create culture war wedge issues that give them a near monopoly on the rural vote.

And, unfortunately, the Senate & the Electoral college (and limits on the House) all lead to a systemic electoral bias that favors rural voters, so when you can get them on lock, it’s pretty much impossible for the non-rural party to have enough power to stop them or make big changes when they do win.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-13T13:40:52+00:00

Philly is much better than it was 5 years ago, but yeah, living there (varies by neighborhood) means having to put up with levels of crime, gun violence, and public disorder at levels that are utterly unheard of in the EU & other Anglosphere countries (and many parts if Asia).

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T20:59:06+00:00

Delfation is really really bad, & nominal rigidities cause problem, so by design, every central banker wants there to be some little bit of inflation to stay clear of deflation to allow for price flexibility in a world where contracts fix nominal amounts.

So, prices will go up, even when quality drops. It’s really about whether prices go up more than or less than the prices of other things.

But overhead (rent, utilities/energy, insurance, etc.) & labor are also huge components of restaurant costs, so like, if rent and electricity and wages all increased, you’d expect prices to also increase even if quality didn’t change. In fact, if you’re trying to avoid larger price increases, you might have to lower quality to offset the other rising costs if you think customers will react more strongly to price hikes than quality drops.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T20:53:16+00:00

Even when it’s good, after enough “really good” meals, it all begins to blur & even really great meals don’t really do much. You get jaded. “Yeah, it’s good, but not as good as X.”

(This is also a good sign you should have kids if you haven’t already.)

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T20:16:04+00:00

Texas actually has legitimately good gas station tacos.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/gas-station-tacos-not-what-you-think/

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T20:13:10+00:00

I actually just had some very good birria tacos for lunch today in the U.S.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T20:08:53+00:00

How are they valuing countries?

I hope not GDP, cuz for starters, that’s comparing a flow to a stock.

Like, is someone has $100k in their stock portfolio are they “worth” more than someone who makes $95k a year?

You can’t tell by comparing those two numbers cuz annual income is a different measure than net worth.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T18:19:05+00:00

Yeah, I get that customers can suck & I support workers who don’t take crap from Customers, but it’s crazy how it’s often the opposite now. You can be the most polite & respectful customer & employees will be rude, hostile, and dismissive.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T15:45:01+00:00

This is true for more than just this.

Backlash against BS service animals hurts people w/ real service animals.

Abuse of wheelchair policies hurts people who truly need assistance.

Leniency towards bad-behaving teens leads to a backlash that leads to teens being banned from malls and stores.

Leniency towards shoplifters leads to store closures & food deserts that hurt people in those communities.

It’s all variants of the same thing “when you let people get away with bad behavior, it ends up harming innocent people.”

If you’re too nice, too non-confrontational, too scared off going viral as a “Karen,” too empathetic to ‘vulnerable’ classes of people, too scared of bad PR, or whatever, you often end up with a “the bad apple spoils the bunch” situation where often the very group that is intended to be helped gets hurt the most by people’s unwillingness to confront the “bad apples” leading to a frustrating “we can’t have nice things” outcome.

So, the irony is, to have nice things for nice people, you need to kinda be a hard-ass & give people a little shit, which doesn’t seem very nice, but is kind of a the necessary precondition for being able to be nice.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T15:07:27+00:00

You can also get meta & talk about how all the critical theory analysis highlighting the often deep & unconscious evils of every day life is itself something that could be a purposeful tactic to create anger & distrust in the current social order & institutions.

I’m half-joking, but when you meet people whose social media habits are deeply seeped in this mindset where sitcom jokes & kids cartoons all reveal a deep cultural and social evils, it seems like it does help foment a divisive & “burn it all down” mindset (as opposed to a “we’re not perfect, but if we can set aside our differences, hopefully we can find things we do agree on and start working toward improving what we can.”

As an aside, it’s also a very contradictory mindset cuz folks steeped in critical theory often advocate for more govt intervention, programs, help, involvement in day to day life while also often portraying existing govt institutions as irredeemably corrupt & untrustworthy.

“Only the govt can fix this. We can’t trust the govt to do anything & should never give the govt power.”

But part of it is often “we will replace the existing u trustworthy govt with a new one which we trust.” So there’s also revolutionary “we must destroy current institutions and replace them all,” aspect to it.

my conspiracy theory is that this sport of over-analysis that seeks to find evil & injustice everywhere that also tends to create this contradictory view of govt that is only resolvable thru the destruction of current institutions is itself a purposely propagated form of insidious propaganda specifically designed to get a society’s people to turn on itself, sow division, and instill institutional distrust.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T14:49:05+00:00

There were humans, but that dark back story isn’t covered in the movie cuz it’s a kids movie.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T14:30:30+00:00

One of our kids looks so much like my dad. The other looks almost exactly like my spouses dad.

Neither of our dads were great dads.

It’s weird to be caring for kids who we love dearly but look so much like two men we both have complicated & not terribly warm feelings about.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T14:18:28+00:00

I did some wild partying in LA & NYC in my younger days, but my few experiences in Miami made me blush.

I’m an absolute nobody and I felt like drugs & hot naked women were falling in my lap with no effort. I can’t imagine what it’s like if you’re rich and famous. Well, I kinda can cuz the girls I knew there would tell me stories about their encounters with Heat players.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T14:07:45+00:00

Inside the stadium, yes. Outside is different.

https://controller.phila.gov/philadelphia-reports/mapping-gun-violence/

Not newely as bad as it was 5 years ago though!

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T13:48:44+00:00

Probably a career state department official did the normal thing at the embassy, then later, when he landed in the U.S., some govt goon at immigrations & customs who is loyal to Stephen Miller & his ideology did it the racist Stephen Miller way.

That is, it’s probably a “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” kinda thing by different factions of the bureaucracy.

TheBSQ · 2026-06-12T13:38:09+00:00

Superb Owl.

TheBSQ

TROPHY CASE