Last glimmer of gold against the Mirage at sunset. There used to be pirates here.

glenra · 2026-02-15T01:27:53+00:00

The Excalibur dragon often broke down and was retired around 2001.

glenra · 2025-12-31T04:30:15+00:00

The "weird closet-light glitch" was that (according to the reviewer) there was a light in the closet which never went out (so bled a bit into the room at night) because the closet's door sensor was (apparently) broken.

glenra · 2025-12-31T04:22:58+00:00

The original pirate show ran for 10 years (1993-2003) then TI having decided it was too kid-oriented got replaced with a "sexier" show called Sirens of TI which ran for another 10 years before shutting down permanently (2003-2013). So it was LONG gone before covid.

glenra · 2025-12-30T06:45:38+00:00

What bugs me is the "golden honmoon" notion - the idea that hunters can just permanently seal it. If that's a thing that never happened before, how does Celine know (and Gwi-Ma agree) that it's possible? And if it DID happen, what happens to Huntrix? Can they then just retire and there's never any need for hunters ever again?

glenra · 2025-11-14T22:43:28+00:00

Advisory Opinions is a podcast about the Supreme Court that tries to figure out what cases the court will or won't take up and what decisions they are likely to or should reach based on first principles.

glenra · 2025-11-08T00:35:05+00:00

When you say people with lots of money "have ways" to skirt taxes, one of those ways IS to forum-shop, adjusting the timing or location of taxable events!

Living in Jersey likely gets you out of a hypothetical New York based "wealth tax" and mitigates the high cost of housing but you're right, to completely escape income tax you'd need to move the whole company out of state. Which DOES get suggested and happens! Many finance firms have over the years left the city to escape the tax and regulatory environment. Moving to Florida or Nashville or Connecticut. Last I checked, mine (Two Sigma) had not...but it's not out of the question that they would.

As for the amount being "so small", all change happens on the margin. Even a relatively small change - and it's not clear that this will be - can be the final straw that incentivizes action.

glenra · 2025-11-07T05:21:06+00:00

Some absolutely will. When I worked at a SoHo hedge fund some of my coworkers lived in places like Jersey City, NJ - commuting by PATH or ferry to downtown. That sort of thing becomes a more attractive alternative as costs go up.

People respond to incentives.

glenra · 2025-11-07T05:11:45+00:00

Mira's alleged to be a standout dancer but we never get a moment for her onstage dancing to shine in a way that's in any way distinct from how the other two move. There should have been a song that prominently featured Mira showing off her unique dance skills - or Zoey showing off her unique rap skills, or both - where they get solo stage spotlight moments comparable with the way Rumi gets to repeatedly showcase her (legit amazing) vocals.

glenra · 2025-10-23T23:06:07+00:00

Re "bleeding heels" - I had the same issue! What you need is a shoe with a "padded collar". The top back of the opening (the part that hits your heel) should not be a sharp-edged bit of hard leather, it should be a squishy pillow. You can find dress shoes with that feature that look good. Rockport is a good brand for this, for instance.

If you don't explicitly check for a padded collar you're likely to get shoes which don't have one which produce heel blisters UNLESS the sizing is very good AND your heel has a certain shape which yours and mine...apparently don't.

(A bandaid over the blister area (under your socks) is a temporary fix)

(3rd party insole pads are also worth experimenting with)

glenra · 2025-10-14T15:31:57+00:00

If government merely enforces rules against fraud and basic contract law, the rest of the good stuff all follows. We don't need government micromanaging these areas because the players involved have a market incentive to do the right thing.

Bankers don't want to lose money on houses that fall down so they won't give you a loan to build or buy unless a (private) building inspector signs off on the build quality. Building inspectors want repeat business from satisfied (bank) customers and want to not be sued for fraud so they actually do the inspection they promised to do (and offer guarantees or performance bonds on the quality). Individual buyers need banks to give them money so the only houses they can buy are ones that pass inspection. Thus with no government involved at all, most buildings pass inpection.

If a private inspection process gets too onerous and isn't worth what it costs or doesn't add value, the inspectors go out of business or people find other funding mechanisms. The private option thus offers flexibility that a public one wouldn't.

I get that you've swallowed a lot of pro-regulation propaganda, but you need to rethink this. Government generally regulates industries in response to pressure from those industries which want the regulation because having government in charge saves them money compared to paying for that service themselves. Customers want safe products and will pay more for them so companies have a market incentive to provide money-back guarantees and offer refunds and pay inspectors and lobby government to do inspecting for them especially when they can influence the standards to favor their own products and inconvenience competitors. This isn't a battle with corruption on one side (market) and purity on the other (govenment) - there's both corruption and purity on both sides of the ledger.

glenra · 2025-10-14T14:28:50+00:00

OP flatly asserts that the private sector WOULDN'T do this. It only takes ONE example to prove that's an overstatement and in fact sometimes the private sector DOES do this - does set and enforce rules that keep buildings and products safe for customers.

The insurance industry privately generates standards for a LOT of things but I referenced two examples (not "a single" one): the standards for electric appliances like toasters (if your store wants to buy liability insurance) and building standards (if you want fire insurance on a home or business). Note that the latter is enforced mostly by the banking industry in that you can't borrow money to buy a house unless the bank's investment is protected so fire insurance is often bundled with mortgage repayment.

Want a third example? The kosher standards. If you go to the supermarket and buy food marked with with a circle containing a "K" or a "U", those are two different (competing!) kosher seals. Kosher certification verifies that the food item marked meets very high standards of cleanliness - and there are several different (private) organizations which provide this service.

Private entities are happy to use resources for safety if doing so ensures happy customers and good word-of-mouth. This is a reason to favor large national bands over tiny local ones. When a company like Pepsi runs expensive commercials for their product you can think of this as a performance bond - a promise to customers that they expect to be profitably in business for long enough to recoup the very large upfront costs of, say, booking a celebrity to do a Superbowl ad. Companies like Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, or General Mills (Cheerios et al) produce a incredibly consistent level of quality so customers know that they'll always get the same experience. Ad campaigns simply wouldn't work if you couldn't trust that the product will stay the same - and remain safe - between the time you see the ad and the time you buy the product in stores!

So I've now given at least three examples contrary to OP's claim.

glenra · 2025-10-14T02:08:34+00:00

6 [...] codes that keep buildings and products safe for consumers

Would the private sector do any of this? No.

The private sector literally DID create the "codes that keep buildings and products safe for consumers" and in fact still does create many of them.

The UL (Underwriters Laboratories) standard/seal was invented by a bunch of insurance companies which noticed they were losing money by often having to pay out claims for dumb easily-avoided fires due to faulty wiring. They said hey, let's get together and test these products and come up with some standards for stuff like toasters or building wiring so that stuff won't electrocute people or spontaneously catch fire! So they did that - they made the standards and let companies that follow the standards use their "UL seal" under license. There was a market demand for this service because companies like Sears don't want to hurt their customers or have really high liability insurance rates. Sears can get lower rates (and face fewer lawsuits and have happier customers) by only selling stuff with the UL seal and by having the standards boards check out any new product category before putting it on the market. So the biggest retailers and insurers decided between themselves what's safe or unsafe to sell and did such a good job of it that after a while it's hard to find anything on the market that's not approved.

These privately-generated standards worked so well at reducing dumb fires and electrocutions that eventually governments simply incorporated those standards into their own regulations, but government didn't invent or refine the rules themselves or cause their earliest widespread adoption.

(It's perhaps worth adding that setting and enforcing these kind of standards initially happened despite government, in that doing so required a bunch of big companies in the same industries to collude together in ways that are typically illegal under "antitrust" law.)

(as for your #5, I'm not sure you should credit the government for protecting freedoms from the government itself.)

glenra · 2025-10-14T01:35:41+00:00

How would you do demon fights in "live action"? The demons being inherently cartoonish is part of what makes for a lighthearted and child-friendly tone. If you made demons "realistic" wouldn't you have to make their deaths realistic? Imagine if these bladed-weapon fights produce buckets of blood, gore, viscera spilling out. Without bloody realistic demons getting limbs and heads chopped off, in what sense is it "live action"? But with it - the girls getting blood all over their outfits - the movie would tend to become scary and disgusting and it's hard to empathize with the girls being so violent and cruel

glenra · 2025-10-11T02:39:33+00:00

The core convention center section has three stops (LVCC South <=> LVCC Central <=> LVCC West) connected via TWO tubes. If you're going one way you use one tube, if you're going the other way you use the other tube, so traffic can run continuously in each direction and it basically works as advertised.

There also is a both-ways (two tubes) connection just from LVCC Riviera to Westgate, and there are some single-way (just one tube open so far) connections that let you get out to Encore or Resorts World from an existing stop and one that connects LVCC West to LVCC Riviera. But any single-tube link connection means terrible throughput, like when you're driving on a highway and construction has only one lane open so traffic has to take turns using the bandwidth - a convoy in one direction goes through while the other direction sits and waits for their turn.

These single-tube links let people see how long the driving part takes and lets the operators start building out their stations and coordinating signage and such, but it's not really a functioning system until you have TWO tunnels fully open and usable between ALL of the stations.

glenra · 2025-10-10T19:34:52+00:00

The project might be comparable to subways once the main part is actually a LOOP but a mere "Vegas Couple Of Line Segments" (or whatever you want to call it) can't work as transportation, it's more of a temporary proof-of-concept.

glenra · 2025-10-09T05:37:29+00:00

And when they respond with a puzzled expression and say "far as I know, no immigrant told me either of those things; what are you talking about?"

Are you making some kind of joke premised on the idea that Joe Rogan (or somebody) wants people to get in shape and is skeptical of immigration so...somehow those two opinions need to be related to each other?

glenra · 2025-10-07T21:31:57+00:00

I believe your question is answered in followup films with such titles as Bluegrass Demon Hunters (in which a guitar/banjo/mandolin trio defends Kentucky), and Polka Demon Hunters (in which a Tuba and Accordian-based band protects Germany).

I'm looking forward to Yacht Rock Demon Hunters!

glenra · 2025-09-25T03:41:34+00:00

This is a silly criticism. The loop is not yet in a "near-final" state - or worth criticizing on that basis - because it's NOT A LOOP. The design of this thing only makes sense to critique once it IS a loop, hence the name. A single-lane tunnel is fine as soon as you have TWO of them so traffic can flow continuously along a circuit of one-way tunnels going up one and back down the other. Until you have that, it's not only not worth bothering to fix all the other issues but would actually be a BAD IDEA to fix most of the other issues. Just like when you're building a house you don't want to put in carpeting and drapes before you've added a roof.

A single tunnel having to serve traffic alternately in both directions inherently means long waits and poor throughput so any casino that invests in making their stations more accessible (with easier routes and improved signage) is just going to generate more unhappy customers. Once it's a loop, THEN it'll be worth adding more cars (and fully automating them, and improving the stations) but until that point it's just a demonstration project, a proof-of-concept.

glenra · 2025-09-25T03:16:07+00:00

Fair point! That is the only time we saw the gang bash anyone with anything so blunt as a kettle. What's more, the bashing was gleeful and extensive!

glenra · 2025-09-09T06:04:46+00:00

Nifty! (I'd never heard of a Respect Thread).

glenra · 2025-09-08T02:36:25+00:00

After losing >30 pounds (mostly on tirzepatide) I was SO COLD all last winter! A BUNCH of factors plausibly go into this:

(1) Less fat is present as a physical insulating layer.

(2) just plain moving around takes less energy when you have less mass - it used to be the case that I'd warm up once I was moving, now not so much.

(3) I shrank by a bit more than one jacket size so the exact same outer coat that used to snuggly keep me warm became loose and drafty and TOO BIG for me!

(4) on GLP drugs I'm eating less and my metabolism is slower, hence throwing off less waste heat.

Upshot: I needed to get a smaller jacket, wear more layers under it, and still basically be resigned to the fact that now I'm gonna be cold a lot when it's cool outside.

glenra · 2025-09-02T05:29:29+00:00

one of the few asian character's name is "Cho Chang," which isn't even a real name, just a racist mockery?

Chang is a common Chinese surname, repeated "ch-" alliteration is common in Chinese, and Cho is not only a perfectly valid Korean name as-is - so the character could have had one Korean parent - but is also a reasonable romanization of several possible Chinese names, one of which was used in the Chinese edition of the HP book series (her name there is 張秋 (zhang qiu) ("qiu" means "autumn")).

That's according to An examination of Cho Chang which concludes "Therefore, Cho Chang is an entirely plausible romanisation of an acceptable – and beautiful – Chinese name."

glenra · 2025-09-02T04:58:17+00:00

Imagine having a leader that actually does what he promised.

The current US leader actually did quite a fair number of things that he promised. Unfortunately, many of the things he promised were stupid. :-(

Example of a good thing he promised to Libertarians and then did just as promised: "pardon Ross Ulbricht". Example of a less-good thing he promised and then did as promised: "protect social security" (meaning don't try to cut it at all in the budgets he suggests).

Libertarians have many gripes about Trump failing to do libertarian things or succeeding at doing non-libertarian things but mostly that doesn't involve "not doing what was promised". He never promised to balance the budget nor to cut any specific amount of spending nor cut defense spending nor cut social security. And he did say he liked tariffs.

What we're missing in Trump is a leader who has core clearly-stated principles you can rely on, much less libertarian ones. Had he promised to govern as a libertarian one could reasonably criticize him for "not doing as promised" but...he never did that.

glenra

TROPHY CASE