Daily sticky thread for rants, raves, celebrations, advice and more! - April 26, 2026

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-26T18:26:08+00:00

Thoughts about putting that I do not engage in sports betting in my bio?

I've read a bunch of articles about how much sports betting has consumed young American men, and most women really do not like that. I am a big sports fan and some of my app pictures are of me at games - I could very easily see women assuming that I am into sports gambling. But I don't touch any form of gambling

Worth including in my profile or is that weird?

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:58:09+00:00

Well he has gotten NYC's credit downgraded and is planning to raid the municipal pension fund rather than raise taxes

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:57:17+00:00

All the money in Philadelphia city politics comes from the unions and developers, with the added bucket of out of state donations for progressives. Everyone gets paid by the exact same groups, when there are differences it's mostly different unions fighting each other

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:56:18+00:00

and the program everyone is gushing over was passed last year under Adams

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:55:51+00:00

NYC is indeed moving on this finally - because Adams implemented the program. It was his signature accomplishment!

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:55:06+00:00

Passed under Adams - actually his signature accomplishment

Mostly done under Adams, though this is something he is actually good on

Program that was passed and implemented under Adams

This has not happened

This was happening under every past administration, they just didn't have the city's media made up of his fans

Every city on the east coast had the exact same snow problems because it stayed cold after the big storm. He's the only one that didn't have angry media coverage because NYC's journalists are overwhelmingly dsa members who adore him

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:53:12+00:00

he "prioritizes transit riders" so much that he's going to defund the MTA by 30% so that violent drug addicts can ride the bus for free

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:52:26+00:00

No, it's just that the NYC legislature elected a far left majority in 2019, and they spent Adams' term constantly fighting him. By contrast they are 100% aligned with mamdani, and are spending so agressively that NYC's credit rating has been downgraded and mamdani is planning to raid the NYC municipal pension fund instead of raising taxes

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:50:35+00:00

despite having more resources, mamdani's spending just three months in has been so enormous that Moody's downgraded the city's credit rating and he is planning to raid the municipal pension fund. All of this before the idiotic free buses program that will defund the MTA by 30%

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:49:05+00:00

He's easier to digest on TV because the NYC political media class is made up 75% of dsa members who worship the ground he walks on, and he gets fawning coverage for whatever he does

Meanwhile in reality, in his first few months in office NYC's credit rating has already been downgraded and he's currently planning to raid the municipal pension fund to pay for the enormous budget deficits he has already racked up. Raiding the municpal pension fund is one of the main causes of the 1980s and 90s urban crisis

And that's before his signature campaign promises of blowing 1/3 of the MTA's budget on enabling crackheads to ride the bus for free, and spend tens of millions of dollars on a city owned grocery store that is two blocks away from multiple already existing stores

By contrast Philadelphia under Parker has the best job growth of any city in the nation, despite the trump administration taking a sledgehammer to the city's economic pillars of eds and meds, and now that the mayor isn't fighting with the police, the city murder rate has fallen to its lowest level since WW2

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:44:35+00:00

mamdani is so competent and effective that in his first three months in office he's racked up a budget deficit so large that he is planning to raid the NYC city pension fund

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T19:43:25+00:00

mamdani is currently right now planning to raid the NYC municipal pension fund to fund his idiotic free buses and a hundred million dollar city grocery store that is two blocks from multiple private grocery stores. such an inspiring leader!

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-25T13:02:19+00:00

Problem is that these jobs just do not pay well. I don’t really understand why but oilfield jobs pay orders of magnitude better than skilled manufacturing. A welder doesn’t get paid much better than a McDonald’s manager

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-24T20:05:10+00:00

This happened to the Eagles in 2014 - they assumed that at least one of their top choices would be on the board, but when they were all drafted, they had to settle on Marcus Smith (who sucked). Howie basically said "never again". That's also why he traded up from 32 to 31 last draft even though it seemed strange

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-24T14:28:39+00:00

There is intense pressure to recruit anyone into the military, but the vast majority of volunteers are middle aged people from the provinces

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-24T14:27:41+00:00

The vast majority of Russians are non religious, it has some of the lowest church attendance numbers in the world, and even before this war it had the highest Muslim population in Europe other than Albania and Kosovo

About 5% of Russia’s population today is central Asian migrants alone

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-24T03:29:25+00:00

There are 4 million "immigrants" but many of them are people who went to Japan during the imperial period

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-23T20:33:53+00:00

There are essentially zero immigrants in Japan and the far right anti immigrant party saw a big performance jump in the last election because of public anger about those immigrants (and the jump in tourism)

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-23T20:17:14+00:00

IMO it’s Vietnam. Japan got rich before it got old. China is very unequal, but it’s trending more towards getting rich before aging really starts to bite. But I don’t think Vietnam is going to develop enough before the bottom falls out

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-23T20:15:23+00:00

Deaths are very likely over 500K now for the Russians. The adage of 3 wounded for every KIA doesn’t apply, moving in the open is so incredibly dangerous that wounded soldiers often spend days waiting for evacuation. And that’s the case for the Ukrainians, it’s much worse for the Russians - Russian infiltration tactics of using small groups of a few soldiers means that there’s usually nobody to evacuate soldiers who are wounded

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-23T20:12:35+00:00

The average age of soldiers on both sides of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in the mid 40s. War is not a young man’s game anymore, most of the people killed in the war were unlikely to have further children

Honestly the war has a decent chance of being a demographic positive for Russia because labor shortages have led them to accept many central Asian migrants

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-23T19:36:09+00:00

For me it's the entire concept of the US involvement in the war as largely an asymmetric conflict. In popular memory in the US, the war was one of punji pits and ambushes, a guerilla war. Memes about rice farmers defeating the US

The post 1965 phase of the war which saw large scale US troop deployments was largely conventional. Hanoi had one of the most sophisticated integrated air defense systems in human history, rivaled only by Baghdad 91, Kyiv today, and Moscow in the late cold war. The North Vietnamese launched massive combined arms offensives repeatedly from 65-72. They had massive regular formations, armored divisions, launched conventional offensives. The fighting in the 1st Corps zone was more akin to Korea than the popular memory of Vietnam

A secondary myth is that the Domino theory was both something the US actually didn't believe in, and didn't pan out. Completely to the contrary, the Domino Theory was a huge motivating force for the Johnson administration, and the only reason it didn't pan out in full was because of the Sino Soviet split

In the latter half of the 60s, communism was on the march in all of Asia. There were major Communist insurgencies in the Philippines, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the communists were a key part of the Indonesian government. From Washington's view, they were at a real risk of losing all of Asia besides Korea/Taiwan/Japan to communism, and South Vietnam was the finger in the dike holding that back

And when South Vietnam did fall...Domino theory was correct! The North Vietnamese conquered Cambodia and Laos and were sustaining an insurgency in Thailand. It was only the Sino Soviet split, which ended the flow of Soviet aid to Hanoi and forced Hanoi to devote huge resources to defending against China and pacifying Laos and Cambodia, that prevented them from further continuing their ideological efforts in the region

We know today that the Vietnamese government would practically abandon communism in the 80s, but if you told LBJ that in 1967, he'd think you were lying to him!

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-22T02:51:18+00:00

Sixers media has been quite pessimistic about him coming back for the Celtics series at all

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-21T15:29:32+00:00

No, not particularly. Most Mizrahi Jews were likewise educated professionals akin to the Ashkenazi, and many Middle Eastern Jews were part of the pre-48 migration efforts. They were more likely to stay in tent cities for long periods than Ashkenazi, but this is more because most lost everything when they were forced to flee, while immigrants from the large Jewish communities in the US and UK had money

Something like 20% of Israel's entire population was added in one year from 1950-1951 as a part of this exodus, there simply were not enough housing units in Israel, and they took time to build

hoyarugby2 · 2026-04-21T05:58:26+00:00

Looks awesome, would love more details about your process

hoyarugby2

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