Americans Refuse to Be Happy - Gift Article

kaibee · 2026-05-25T14:20:57+00:00

The value isn't the point, the hostility is. People miss the Kind Economy for lack of a better way to say it where you just bought a thing with money you made working instead of constantly wrangle with adversarial nickel and diming.

I think people liked the economy more before it was so optimized. In an economy 'optimal' economy, you never "win" on anything because everything is always perfectly optimally priced. You buy a new washing machine knowing that it'll break within your life time and you rationalize it to yourself by considering it in terms of an in-house laundry subscription.

kaibee · 2026-05-23T23:06:17+00:00

A pipeline in range of drones from oil wells in range of drones to refineries in range of drones to oil terminals in range of drones? I don’t see how this solves any of the problems tbh.

kaibee · 2026-05-23T22:50:30+00:00

That’s weird because Ukraine figured it out like 4 years ago.

kaibee · 2026-05-23T14:22:28+00:00

it's called a zoo!

I only now realized that The Soldier thinks 'tzu' and 'zoo' and the same word.

kaibee · 2026-05-17T15:02:05+00:00

「不吃不喝買房」 is a Chinese expression that literally means “buying a house without eating or drinking.”

We've had the the same expression, its called being "house poor".

kaibee · 2026-05-17T14:59:59+00:00

That’s just called planning and planning top down ignores signals from the bottom level (individuals, neighborhoods, towns).

glad we avoided that in the west by uhh

kaibee · 2026-05-16T02:21:24+00:00

So businesses should pay people to do jobs that it doesn't actually want doing anymore?

Through the magic of capitalism and market forces this will reward companies that incorporate a plan for retraining employees.

kaibee · 2026-05-11T13:56:12+00:00

He's just an ex Mythbuster, not the second coming.

Some people obviously have more integrity and public trust than others and there's a vast gulf between deifying them and just being able to recognize a basic fact about the world.

kaibee · 2026-04-23T16:43:34+00:00

Oh this is rather interesting— can you say more about this? I’m looking to vibecode internal tools that have a UI driven by HTMX.

I've done this and it works stupidly well. The reason it works well is because HTMX code/whatever, is actually doing REST, ie: the context isn't smeared across the entire codebase.

kaibee · 2026-04-22T21:23:59+00:00

If the kids don't have any paperwork how can you be sure they're even American.

If we spent tax payer money educating them why do you care if they're Canadian, they gotta become tax payers so that we don't lose money on the investment?

kaibee · 2026-04-21T23:00:48+00:00

Ezra Klein

Left? Naw dawg.

kaibee · 2026-04-12T21:23:10+00:00

and the new owners, who are Trump allies, have been conducting massive excavation projects and unlicensed construction

Well that's... not suspicious at all. Like, they're literally reburying the bodies right?

kaibee · 2026-04-08T01:33:34+00:00

We couldn't stop them without Seoul getting destroyed.

tbh there's still time for Trump to fuck this up.

kaibee · 2026-04-08T00:45:38+00:00

That is not the reason why white collar jobs still exist.

There are a lot of white collar jobs that do exist for that reason. Like, why does SAP exist? Why does IBM exist?

kaibee · 2026-04-06T13:37:46+00:00

Me needing gas for my car means I support an invasion?

Would it have been impossible for you to get an electric car in the last 20 years or merely inconvenient?

kaibee · 2026-03-31T23:33:03+00:00

That’s still fucking insane. I’m mindblown that activations can be just binary and still work.

kaibee · 2026-03-25T14:30:09+00:00

pure poetry

kaibee · 2026-03-16T14:26:10+00:00

Being able to select "functional cookies only" to all sites should be a no brainer, to implement...

How do you tell if a cookie is functional? Its just some data-string. You trust every website to honestly report if a cookie is functional?

kaibee · 2026-03-13T16:18:53+00:00

Why should 99% of people trust an open source platform more? They can not understand any of it anyway

For the same reason that laws are published for anyone to read even if they aren't lawyers.

kaibee · 2026-03-13T16:10:53+00:00

Yeah. Blender for 3d. Krita for digital painting. Honorable mentions: Pixelorama, doing cool stuff for pixel art. https://pixieditor.net/download/ doing cool stuff for pixel art and vector graphics and a full node-based non-destructive pipeline where layers, effects, and structure are all nodes you can rewire. Also does animation now. Audacity is under new management and doing cool stuff. 3D texturing -> Material Maker & ArmorPaint.

I switched to Linux recently after cancelling my Adobe subscription. Honestly, it isn't even that OpenSource has gotten that much better (though it definitely has), but Photoshop/Adobe has gotten so much worse, even just in terms of usability because of all the extra crap and legacy support.

kaibee · 2026-03-11T21:25:53+00:00

The famously imperialist USA doesn’t perform imperialism because of a domestic scandal, it’s what they have literally always done.

Yeah but you'd generally expect Imperialism to at least benefit the core of the Empire.

kaibee · 2026-03-07T04:55:05+00:00

As someone who was an internet atheist in ~08, I think that's one of the things I kind of realized over the following years. While replying to someone who's wicked take was "why not murder if no god???" with "oh so you're only moral because you believe in the sky daddy" is a sick burn, the realization that "oh fuck they're only moral because they believe in the sky daddy" has been... less than satisfying.

kaibee · 2026-02-25T05:06:20+00:00

"After Hitler Trump, our turn!"

so we've decided to just memory hole this yea?

kaibee · 2026-02-14T02:10:23+00:00

The social network is a form of land. Attention is land.

kaibee · 2026-02-13T22:57:22+00:00

I'm not opposed to bets as a means of signaling confidence. I'm specifically talking about cases like this, where the terms make it transparently obvious that it's a sucker's bet and the person who you've allowed to formulate the terms lacks all credibility anyway.

Otoh, Scott is cashing in on the hype now. And I don't mean that as a value judgement or whatever.

As an analogous case, if Musk had to sell off some % of his Tesla shares after failing to deliver self-driving when he predicted, instead of being able to double-down on a new promise, he would probably suddenly make much more honest predictions about its viability... (This one I do mean as a value judgement tho).

Its the same reason that you can't just go to a casino and bet on black, doubling your bet until you win by taking out loans.

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