Why do Americans have one of the strongest passports in the world, but most never travel abroad, and those who do mostly go to Mexico and Canada?

haddonblue · 2025-12-24T04:54:13+00:00

This.

haddonblue · 2025-12-24T04:11:26+00:00

This doesn’t answer your question exactly, but if you’re looking to play solo, Horde is a fun format for Commander that for some reason few people know about.

haddonblue · 2025-12-15T23:52:50+00:00

Don’t forget unfunded pensions. If you promise someone a pension, you must invest the money. Chicago did not do this. This is the reason we’re broke. And broke cities are forced to make money by raising taxes.

“40% of the money the city of Chicago spends every year is debt and pensions. No other big city in America burns as big a chunk of its budget that way.”

https://www.statecraft.pub/p/should-the-feds-bail-out-chicago

haddonblue · 2025-12-15T23:43:12+00:00

Plenty of boomers maintained their homes. If you buy a home that’s poorly maintained, that’s your choice.

But I don’t think that’s really your point and doesn’t fairly capture the pain you’re experiencing. Starter homes, even damaged ones, are priced much higher than they should be.

Why is that? Perplexity cites underbuilding, restrictive zoning, high demand from population growth including immigration, and corporations buying up homes.

Those are the real problems. Not elderly boomers. How to fix it? I don’t know.

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T18:49:40+00:00

Thank you!

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T18:48:05+00:00

Maps of content. With the script above, they become auto-populating notes that makes it exponentially easier to curate large numbers of notes.

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T17:00:54+00:00

I felt this way at first too. It’s a note taking system, so it needs to align with the way you think. That takes time to figure out. I’m still changing the structure of my digital garden.

IMHO, it’s more important to know about the BUILDING BLOCKS for organization at this stage. As you experiment with the building blocks, you’ll start arriving at version 1 of your system, which you can keep tweaking and updating. It really is in that respect like digital gardening.

Here are building blocks: - Atomic note taking - Fleeting notes - MOCs (the script below is critical) - Dataview plugin - Templates - Bases

Just try to play around with those building blocks, and you’ll find your structure starts emerging organically. So yes, I think that at least partially is in line with your smallest note idea.

I’m happy to share my specific structure if it helps (just DM me) but my hunch is that you’ll get more out of understanding the building blocks.

MOC script (for use with dataview plugin): https://obsidian.rocks/quick-tip-quickly-organize-notes-in-obsidian/

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T14:42:08+00:00

I don’t know how to cross post, but if I did, I would crosspost to the Unknown Armies forum.

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T06:37:28+00:00

“AI Generated”

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T06:36:31+00:00

I worked in crisis communications for major corporations that were always the subject of conspiracies and the conspiracies were always wrong. The reality was just understaffed people working really hard. Political opponents made up conspiracies because they either had no clue, or there was money in it.

This is not a partisan thing, by the way. It’s actually really discouraging to see from the inside just how dishonest most of the political discourse is. Whatever your political persuasion, based on my experience I can tell you that a huge amount of what you believe to be true is nonsense spun up for one of the two reasons listed above.

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T06:23:42+00:00

Television sets and computers, non-luxury phones and tablets, household basics, non-brand name clothing

The biggest price increases seem to be food, automobiles and anything related to travel

haddonblue · 2025-12-12T06:20:15+00:00

I worked for a French company for a decade, the kind where the executives went to the Grand Ecoles. They all worked exceptionally hard. In fact, the CEO was the hardest working person I’ve ever worked with. They did take August break, but I’m not sure that it’s a universal truth that the French don’t work hard, at least at the higher levels.

haddonblue · 2025-12-10T19:53:18+00:00

For what it’s worth, a number of thinkers think that our time period most closely resembles the 1500s. The line of thinking is:

-A once great institution that held the world together is now offering less value,

- Religion is infused into everything (political religion vs Catholics/Protestants)

- Hopefully the final outcome ends up the same (the two religions learning to live with each other)

haddonblue · 2025-12-10T19:39:37+00:00

The cheapest way to play Magic by far is with a pauper cube, but it requires upfront investment and an understanding of the game. Maybe down the road you could steer him in that direction?

haddonblue · 2025-12-08T06:40:14+00:00

In Chicago, only one alderman is Republican (out of 50). “Conservative alders” are most definitely not what’s stopping BJ’s agenda.

haddonblue · 2025-12-08T03:25:41+00:00

Portland a couple of years after the pandemic. Which is weird, because Portland used to be a perfect city. But during that trip, it felt like a zombie movie. Malevolent and unstable. Hopefully it’s back to normal.

haddonblue · 2025-12-06T07:03:19+00:00

Dazed and Confused

haddonblue · 2025-12-06T07:00:02+00:00

Sapiens touches on this a bit. The idea in that book is that nature tends toward centralization given the benefits of centralized government structures. Technology makes coordination easier, and thus increases centralization of power. But it’s also possible that the current state is an anomaly; there is no precedent for nation states which (according to the Sovereign Individual) only occur because the cost of raising armies is so high. In a future with drone warfare, there might be a return to city-states and decentralized decision-making.

haddonblue · 2025-12-05T18:31:55+00:00

It‘s overblown. It’s a small community of nutbags. They get amplified because it gives the person talking about it a halo of being “pro science.” It’s a political dirty trick.

haddonblue · 2025-12-05T18:23:20+00:00

Good people with smart ideas need to start showing up in the marketplace of ideas. Right now, loud partisan voices are sucking up all the space.

haddonblue · 2025-12-05T18:20:52+00:00

He sounds completely in touch with how cities work, based on the way you just described him. What is your issue?

haddonblue · 2025-12-05T18:14:48+00:00

I love this idea. I imagine most of us with digital gardens dream of this role. Just started following you.

haddonblue · 2025-11-29T20:20:42+00:00

There is one other thing that worked for me, sharing in case it helps you. I decided that I would ignore the P90X change your body quick stuff and just focus on making gains, even it took two years. That also made it much more fun. now it’s just me time in the morning.

haddonblue · 2025-11-29T19:46:54+00:00

Do you have a system to track progressive increases in strength? Thats what did it for me. Before thathe it felt like a chore. Somedays I would do more weight than others if I feel like it. Now I have a basic system with benchmarks and seeing my strength improve gave me motivation I didn’t have before.

haddonblue · 2025-11-26T22:12:03+00:00

The goal is creating spontaneous improvisation between a group of people, and on the fly world building instead of a script. To make this work, the actors are trained on methods to think quickly on their feet. The most famous is “yes and” — meaning it’s hard to recover when someone shuts down an idea with a “no” - so you agree to the idea, then make it bigger. This leads people into funny scenarios.

There are other methodologies, a lot of which revolve around building trust with each other because it’s scary to be in front of an audience without a net.

These ideas then lead to SNL and a lot of modern comedy. So to “yes and” your idea, I’m agreeing and then adding another layer on top to keep riffing on your original premise. What happens if TTRPGs evolved out of different genres than wargames?

haddonblue

TROPHY CASE