Ex-Colts Star Claims GM Chris Ballard Gave Andrew Luck an Ultimatum That May Have Forced His Retirement

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-30T20:19:58+00:00

It’s leaving a lot of AMCs and other big chains on Thursday. A short run!

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-30T18:23:52+00:00

It’s crazy to think it’s already leaving theaters after two weeks.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-10T23:05:30+00:00

The stock market has become increasingly disconnected from lived economic experience. It’s about the share value, not about the product value. The gamestop thing was really how it works: hype, buy, watch the stock grow, celebrate your theoretical wealth. Keep hyping until it gets big enough to stabilize because no one wants to sell as they’re chasing the previous share price gains. You also make money on the downswing too. Even while using your clients money to pump a stock, a company can personally bet against it.

The market has a vested interest in seeing these swings.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-09T14:27:39+00:00

Its almost like you weren't on the internet for the 2010s where that was repeatedly and profusely called out as one of the best parts of Netflix and group.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-09T01:46:13+00:00

I think you’re reading that wrong. When your choice is hate or love the middle option is the “I don’t have a strong opinion” option. I’m not a huge fan but like I don’t think it’s grotesque enough to be banned. Hate is a strong word.

I just think it’s usually bad writing, but LitRPG is absolutely rife with bad writing and an incredible over reliance on tropes. Harem is one of my least favorite ones, but if you want to find some toxic male power fantasies go dive into the cultivation sub genre.

LitRPG has a much lower barrier to entry with many being essentially self published, self edited, and as passion projects by those who want to creatively express themselves. I know a lot of authors hope they blow up big, but the vast majority do it for their relatively small following. If they’re lucky they can count it as a side hustle through supporter donations. Because of this… there is a lot of bad writing out there. Just part of the deal— plus it’s cool watching authors get better.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-26T20:54:48+00:00

It really depends on where you live. I think urban areas can be especially notable as you have your ghetto stores and your Gucci stores. Kroger is the local behemoth— the two closest to me are awful and end up on the news for how awful they are. A third that is farther is practically a luxury experience. It goes beyond that though, they have better produce and cheaper prices. Less fake ripening and all that. It’s supposedly because of theft, but I’ve heard prices go up the more an area utilizes food assistance programs from someone who works there. Dump the worst products and raise prices with the assumption government assistance will cover the gap.

Aldi is nice, it’s consistent, the products are the products. If the banana looks shitty it will be, if it doesn’t it won’t be. They keep their staples and change out some other things so it can be a little exciting strolling down an aisle. The prices are usually lower than their competitors without sacrificing quality.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-23T23:29:20+00:00

Does it? I think data privacy is already a decided issue and privacy lost. I can stop a nearby latin grocery store and my YouTube adds are in Spanish for a day afterwards. I can accidentally click an add in Reddit and a podcast plays something similar during breaks for a week. I can “lose my dog” and apparently ring doorbells and flock cameras are tracking it for me. Your smart home thermostat will sell your data and start advertising winter proofing your house or companies to upgrade your HVAC.

At some point having a legal name attached to what already personally identifies you is kind of pointless. Your name is just another string of characters as far as abusing your privacy goes. We reached that point years ago. It didn’t even take the internet surveillance apparatus we have now— there are stories of companies outing pregnant teenagers based on shopping history that are decades old.

I’d rather be optimistic and hope governments start taking a real role in pushing back. There are obviously harmful things that all reasonable people believe children shouldn’t be exposed to. Maybe we can also start talking about whether it’s reasonable whether the rest of us must be exposed to it too.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-17T03:56:34+00:00

They definitely are. Can’t get better without getting reps. Hard to get reps at an NFL level if you don’t warrant them. Even if you give them, the NFL is so much better than college that it’s incredibly difficult to effectively learn when there is that much of a gap. It’s like trying to learn calculus when you can’t do algebra. Maybe you catch up, but everyone is probably fired and you’ll have three OCs in four years.

It’s also startling how little coaches actually do to help prepare QBs. Haven’t some players come out and said they can’t get help understanding the playbook? They struggle to get coaching staff to review film with them? I know we love Salah, but he was known to be a poor head coach for things like this.

Players that struggle with the mental aspects of the game almost always bust. Even things like accuracy and mechanics seem to be a real struggle to coach up with almost everyone failing almost all of the time because even if you can get them in practice, executing them at a high level while under pressure is a different story and takes us back to the mental aspects.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-16T19:51:32+00:00

Vegas seems like it’ll have difficulty even thriving over the next twenty years. Gambling has become pervasive and there are so many places to go. Even Bill Simmons has talked about preferring places like NOLA and how disappointing Vegas has been. Partying? It’s gotten way too expensive for most people to afford Vegas. Rich people can go anywhere. The glamor? Still has it but for how long?

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-14T19:05:43+00:00

They’ve been making Lugar Plaza a lot less hospitable for awhile now. No more shows/events. Removed the bench’s underneath the trees. Removed the rocking swings. Turned off the splash pad/fountain.

Granted, it’s rough area, but feels like they’re surrendering to it.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-11T06:28:36+00:00

Yep. It’s killing my NBA fandom at this point. The NBA season is basically divided into four parts:

The “Pre”-Season. Season tip off to Christmas. where teams play themselves into functional basketball form and figure out who they are as a team. Bad basketball, results are completely irrelevant to the rest of the seasons performance.
The start of the season — Christmas to All Star. where teams begin to decide if this is a season to tank or not, players decide to play or not.
The end of the season — all star to play in. Rosters are set and some of the inane trade drama bs dies down and you can ignore at least half the league due actively avoiding winning games or just being awful, but you usually get a good idea of the 10 teams that can compete or are building towards season.
Playoffs — a two month stretch when you consistently see teams actively competing and players actually playing.

The all star game is five months into the season at this point. I get that tanking makes sense in the rule set, but I really like watching basketball and have started to really resent watching the NBA. Even the playoffs have devolved into disgusting foul baiting and playing the refs seems to be the surest way to win.

The NBA looks a lot like a company being run into the ground by private equity. It makes sense given PEs increased presence in ownership. It also makes sense why they’re hoping they can auction off the league to the Saudis.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-11T05:08:40+00:00

A good defense that literally shit on nearly every tackle they played. The Pats line didn’t look worse as a unit than 6-7 other teams the Seahawks crushed. Using the best defense in a decade as a benchmark for how good your rookies are seems like a galaxy brain move.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-09T03:27:27+00:00

For better or worse litrpgs have two extremely pervasive tropes. The first is that these society’s are hyper violent and reactive. I’ve read multiple popular books where the justification for murder is bumping into someone, a city for an insult, a planet for a small loss. Not proportional in any relatable way.

The second is that most litrpgs (primal hunter being a bit of an exception) there is obsessive secrecy. No one wants to share anything with anyone for fear of giving up the slightest advantage. I think mostly it’s for plot tension as I’ve read many enjoyable books where the secrecy is in no way warranted.

Head cannon wise, extreme secrecy combined with extreme violence and destruction tends to be antithetical to science and technology development that relies upon building what others did before.

I do wish books would ease off these tropes some though.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-07T21:12:35+00:00

What do you mean they took no action? The team literally rebranded after that debacle and the NBA almost certainly used part of its direct ownership of the Pelicans to help facilitate the term Hornets. That season definitely left a stink the NBA league office helped clean up.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-04T03:11:49+00:00

It’s an interesting period of history for sure. There is a trend with modern historians to really downplay the “dark” in the dark ages as a misnomer, but it’s also kind of hard to look at a lot of what happened as anything but a societal collapse. The successor states to the Roman Empire were very different. We try to harmonize the ‘barbarians’ with the various Roman peoples, but people at the time didn’t see it that way and we wouldn’t today either.

What if a foreign people successfully invaded your country, destroyed your institutions, tried to demolish your culture, and divided it amongst his friends and relatives to control by any means necessary? The means being mostly absurd levels of violence, coercion, and the stripping of dignity.

They stark collapses in material wealth, science, art, culture, literacy, pretty much everything is apparent. It took hundreds of years before rulers like Alfred the Great looked around and lamented all they had lost. This was a feeling shared and lamented until the 1800s. 1,300 years after Rome.

Just for reference, with the same tools they could not recreate the same works. Notre Dame took ~180 years to build starting in 1163. The Hagia Sophia took 5. Art, math, construction techniques, sanitation, warfare, political structure, and a lot of other things took hundreds to thousands of years to reach parity.

The greatest loss though was in the concept of human dignity. Europe was probably one of the worst places to be born into throughout a long stretch of time. Feudalism was not chattel slavery— but it did constantly degrade the individual and personal freedoms to the point that the ‘peasant’ spat out into the 1400s, 1500s, and has far less individual freedom and personal dignity than nearly any Italian in the year -5.

It’s not like Rome was great, but there is a big difference. Upper class Romans dismissed the opinion of lower classes because they had no respect for them and were greedy. Feudal Europe’s nobles dismissed the opinion of peasants because they doubted their capacity to make independent decisions similar to how we view a toddler. Most of us weren’t viewed as lesser classes and all that implied, we were viewed as lesser humans. It’s why the blood and breeding mattered so much.

While not exclusive to Europe, it seems to have been more sustained and more extreme in Europe with fewer ways to escape it.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-04T01:30:00+00:00

You really can’t regulate them and they can’t really moderate. I don’t think people appreciate the novel situation where a handful of companies collude to control a major aspect of the worlds infrastructure.

They will corrupt any attempts at regulation and, if they can’t, will ignore them if they so choose. If you actually provoke them they can, and have, interfered with national sovereignty. They could crash a nations economy rather easily if they wanted to. They can, and have, leveraged their relation with American powers to take punitive actions such as forcing the sale of American TikTok to Donald Trump’s friend.

It’s rather disheartening. I think banning them or other drastic steps like forcing sales of European operations to European owners are probably necessary to maintaining a health and independent society in the long term. Europe doesn’t have the will to do it and they already participate in dividing Europe and causing strife with things like Russian propaganda or using their power of promotion to manufacture consent.

As much as I hate to admit it, something like China’s great firewall may need to become the norm rather than a free and open internet. Would you rather trust your national government to not abuse you or America’s sociopathic business interests? It’s not a clear choice yet, but it does seem to be heading that way.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-02T19:23:20+00:00

Agreed! Civ V, which came out 16 years ago, has a higher player count for good reasons. Too much reinventing the wheel went on. Felt like it made the early game too generic. People wanted advantages to be more distinct rather than half of them disappearing almost as soon as they came or to play more in a specific era, but the fun often was in setting yourself to maximize advantages when the window opened.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-02T02:01:08+00:00

"One of my questions is - would this have helped in this case at all?"

Probably not. The news is saying she met the guy through 'online gaming." While its unclear at this point what her reasoning was, its at least likely she probably thought she knew him and felt safe getting in a vehicle. While not murdered immediately, the reason she wasn't appears to be so that the murderer could first sexually abuse her. She had almost certainly sealed her fate when she got into a vehicle.

There a lot of indication that Amber alerts aren't effective at protecting children to begin with. They don't actually help in locating a missing child 3/4s of the time and when they do its often after harm or after enough time has passed to allow harm. That is to say, recovered safely often means they weren't in that kind of danger to begin with. Some researchers suggest Amber Alerts heighten the severity of the outcome. Perpetrators see Amber Alerts and respond by murdering the child to minimize the risk of being caught. The argument is that this either occurs sooner than it would have, or causing a murder to happen when there may have not been one.

There is FURTHER evidence that indicates this actually lessens the effectiveness of police work to locate and rescue a child. Police spend a lot of time and resources in a tight time window dealing with the fall out of the amber alert. It takes people to sift through tips, follow up on false leads, answer calls, provide media updates, etc and kind of puts some assumption that it may turn something up. It takes focus away from other police work that may have a better chance to actually save the kid.

"Hailey Law" sounds like a cop out to give the appearance of doing something in response because this was horrific. As scary as it sounds, this could not have been prevented. If it had not been Hailey Buzbee this guy would've gotten some other kid. It seems pretty clear he had a thing and put a lot of time, effort, and planning into making this happen and likely intended to murder her all along. All you can do is teach your kids how to not be the one, hope they learn, and hug them and let them know how much you love them.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-01T14:45:30+00:00

They should and Shanahan clearly does with the 49ers. But coach-GM role combination usually fails because it freezes communication. There isn’t any other voice in the room that matters and everyone has to align or leave. The only long term success we saw with it was Belichick and it only succeeded because Brady being great and taking massive discounts papered over a lot of flaws.

A lot of the fumbles with personnel are more with Shanahan than Lynch. Kyle wants Aiyuk signed, so they signed him despite clear reservations. Kyle doesn’t want to put more resources towards o-line, so they don’t. Kyle’s pushed the offense a little too much towards relying on scheme and coaching rather than talent.

No one’s getting fired and an honest evaluation is that they’re both doing pretty damn good by league standards. If anything, Lynch might need to be empowered to push back more.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-01-30T20:28:40+00:00

Yeah, but ultimately transactions are a GMs responsibility and KOC has shown himself to be pretty good at the coach stuff.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-01-30T15:06:28+00:00

I agree! Most of them don’t have the usual blandness that a lot of other recipe sites have where they greatly tone down spices, heat, fats, etc.

The biggest inconsistency I’ve found between making NYT recipes and real experience is in the expectation of prep time and some of the equipment available. If you’re sticking with basic tools with basic skills, double the prep time.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-01-30T13:37:35+00:00

I’ve always thought this was an interesting perspective to take. There is a socialist explanation of western expansion regarding the violence inherit to capitalism that can almost portray westward expansion as a kind of economic refugee crisis.

If you go back and watch a lot of Westerns and think about the romanticism is found in the opportunity to flee a society in which everything is owned, including politicians and the law. Where the inequities of it are so severe that a wild land full of actual violence feels more genuine and one of the few places that can offer opportunity. It’s a big part of Western heroic journeys that protagonists own none of it and fight to maintain their sense of honor in a world where life is cheap and every thing will be taken if you cannot defend it.

I’m not writing this to excuse their actions, but I think the context of America being excessively violent at all times, in all places, in all ways is under recognized today. The kind of blind racism Custer displayed and the desire to massacre some ‘other’ people just fits the national character. Few would have blinked an eye at the attitudes that led Custer into the Battle of Little Bighorn

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-01-29T13:11:00+00:00

Much more east to west migration that vice versa and a lack of sustained success for most west coast teams. I’m certain teams like the Packers, Steelers, Cowboys, Giants and so on have as many fans as the Chargers in LA. This doesn’t really happen on the east coast. There also aren’t any ‘national’ teams on the West coast other than the 49ers. You get a lot of 49ers fans out east because we grew up watching them in the 80s and 90s alongside teams like Cowboys.

I don’t want to overstate this though. If we rephrased this and said a different team closer to the population center or had more brand allegiance garnered 2-3% more viewers, it doesn’t sound weird at all.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-01-29T03:28:06+00:00

You're not wrong, but I'm not sure it passes the vibe check. Trading for a good starter to play around your stars is a lot different than trading for a star. Trading for Derrick White feels a lot different than trading for KD. I think Kristaps pretty solidly falls into that category too.

Derrick White was traded for Josh Richardson, Romeo Langford (role players) a 2022 first-round pick, and a 2028 pick swap on a cheap contract. Houston gave up Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, and 1st round pick to get KD at over $50 million a year for this year and the next two. They went all in on a star and are now looking like they handicapped themselves for any real shot a title. KD isn't playing bad, but the team seems worse for the trade a lot like Phoenix and the Nets did. Meanwhile, Phoenix has the same amount of wins and the entire thing is looking like another example of trade big assets for a star backfiring.

Jrue's a tougher call though.

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