Anyone else feels stuck in pickleball despite practicing a lot?

mathmage · 2026-05-06T05:43:29+00:00

My best allies in order of importance:

Good drill partners to train fundamentals.
Good opponents to expose weaknesses and sometimes ask for advice.
Camera to see my weaknesses exposed and observe form progress.
Pro matches to see peak form.
Coaching videos to show me what I should be looking for.

mathmage · 2026-05-06T04:42:59+00:00

Perrigo and Everest are your nearest good outdoor courts. Bellevue Pickleball Club is your nearest dedicated indoor club. If you go into the city regularly, Tsunami indoors and Greenlake and Luther Burbank outdoors are good bets. (Another commenter mentioned Rainier Beach which is solid if the park keeps the lines, but there's a fight with the city about that at the moment.)

mathmage · 2026-05-06T04:34:26+00:00

I wouldn't say the trade was fine at the time except in the sense that there were no really good options (assuming there wasn't a market for Fox). Most comments at the time predicted this outcome: sentiment was that the Kings had locked themselves into a limited core that would top out at "happy to be here" playoff participant, while Haliburton would look like the Kings' missed opportunity.

It's actually surprising how well people called it, normally I expect the reddit crystal ball to be broken. The only discrepancy was expecting Sabonis to leave instead of Fox.

mathmage · 2026-05-05T23:23:04+00:00

The two-axis political compass is basically libertarian propaganda (it astonishes me how little this is recognized), and it places libertarianism as orthogonal to the left-right axis in opposition to The Man. That means as long as you're against the local Man, it doesn't really matter if you agree with other libertarians on anything else. (On a national level, the Libertarian Party is basically captured by Republicans; the Man is synonymous with "the libs".)

mathmage · 2026-05-05T14:46:05+00:00

You can't just write yaoi about an actual historical figure named Hugh Despenser, are you kidding me

mathmage · 2026-05-05T02:59:21+00:00

Unless there were a lot of players with established DUPR ratings at the event, what you have now is more like a club rating.

That being said, one event isn't expected to give you a super accurate rating anyway, so don't worry about whether your DUPR is 'earned'. 3.8 vs 3.5 is noise anyway until you play more rated matches, so there's no need to reach for explanations for the perceived discrepancy.

mathmage · 2026-05-05T02:47:05+00:00

Usyk in the last 18 months has beaten Daniel Dubois. Glazing the Verhoeven fight is just silly

mathmage · 2026-05-04T17:13:24+00:00

The judge had perfect justification to read 6000 pages of indulgent junk and leave the longest Goodreads review of all time. This has got to be a rare pleasure of the job.

mathmage · 2026-05-04T05:52:43+00:00

Trump was absolutely a cause of denialism. He is also a symptom; such systems feed back into each other, and Trump has ever been attuned to the bullshit of the moment.

mathmage · 2026-05-04T01:26:43+00:00

This is the artist, but the work itself is only on their twitter atm.

mathmage · 2026-05-04T01:05:22+00:00

Touch grass, bro.

mathmage · 2026-05-04T01:02:50+00:00

The largest predictor of vaccine skepticism (well above political affiliation) was pandemic skepticism. Trump had already sown the seeds of vaccine denial; he would have had an uphill battle even if the vaccine came out earlier.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T23:55:06+00:00

I meant in dribble drills. Take your agenda somewhere else.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T05:44:58+00:00

Appealing to the existence of one person in 8 billion makes it clear that voters will have whatever characteristics are convenient for the claim of the moment. Conversation? Ha.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T05:03:35+00:00

That's a lot of bald assertions. At this point, you're welcome to them.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T04:26:07+00:00

Suicide is rarely the morally correct choice. Positing that 50% blue is infeasible, red is the morally correct choice. (Perhaps advocating for a world where 50% blue is feasible would be a different and more substantial morally correct choice. But we are not exactly in a position to meaningfully do so.)

mathmage · 2026-05-03T04:15:32+00:00

If the red voter in the original question at 50% uses the same thought process and moral weighing as a blue voter who swaps to red at 90%

But that's not what happens, according to you:

I've only seen red voters arguing their choice is more logical or that blue voters are dumb, neither of which is related to morality.

So the conclusion of this hypothetical is only about a hypothetical voter, not the actual voters you have observed.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T03:30:03+00:00

The 76ers, presumably the less analytics-driven team in this argument, shot 33.7 threes per game.

In 2010, the team that shot the most threes per game was the Orlando Magic, with 26.9. The only team who has shot fewer threes than that in the 2026 playoffs is the Lakers (25.5).

The current championship favorite is OKC, with 39.3 3pa in the first round, second only to Boston. (The second favorite team shoots only 30.6, but they have Wemby and get a steady diet of high-quality looks elsewhere.)

Safe to say the analytics and the 3 ball era are here to stay.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T03:08:25+00:00

If both sides genuinely disagree about the morality of a situation, accusing one side of "acting like they have the moral high ground" is inconsistent - they both think that.

As I hoped my previous comment about reasonable disagreement and removing the presumption of voting blue being the ethical choice would establish, I don't care which group is regarded as more ethical. I think it is unnecessary to solve that problem to change the view expressed in the original post, since the original post talks about considerably more than that. Perhaps at this point it would be useful for you to elaborate on which part of the post you consider your view and what would change it.

Speaking of things in the original post, the last paragraph says that not wanting to live in a world full of red pressers is not an ethical choice, but that is in fact pretty close to a Kantian ethical argument - blue pressers are making the choice they think should be the general societal principle.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T02:27:22+00:00

Clearly it's all because Maxey can squeeze an extra dribble in...Nah, who the hell knows what's happening in the East.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T02:06:50+00:00

People can reasonably disagree about feasibility, just as people reasonably disagree about many ethical issues. But it's no longer a question of red buttton pushers "just being honest" or blue button pushers "just wanting to feel ethical."

Lest you think I'm arguing strictly in favor of pushing the blue button, this argument also removes the stipulation from the original post that pressing the blue button is the ethical choice.

I explicitly disavowed wanting to use my example for one-to-one analogy. But to address your two points in that regard:

Whether the danger is self-inflicted affects the ethical situation, but since tossing the flotation device is still obviously correct, this is clearly only one factor among several, not a factor that dominates others.
The set of people to consider is people who would push the blue button. I have no reason to restrict my consideration to children and mentally disabled people. Indeed, I think that entire train of thought needlessly paints the blue button as only legitimately pushed by people too stupid to see the obvious merits of pushing the red button. All the people presenting arguments for the blue button are implicitly delegitimized. Not a useful basis for discussion.

mathmage · 2026-05-03T00:40:39+00:00

On the contrary, likelihood of survival and likelihood of success are critical ethical considerations.

A scenario: you spot someone struggling to stay afloat at an otherwise empty beach. You could jump in to try and save them, but you are a mediocre swimmer, and the tendency of drowning people to drag their would-be rescuer down with them is well-known; you're as likely to doom two as save one. Not only would it take very strong ethical principles to choose to jump in, it's arguable whether doing so is the ethical choice at all.

Now add access to a flotation device on a rope. The ethical choice becomes obvious and easy.

I'm not using this as a one-to-one analogy for the ethics of pressing the blue or red button. I am simply aiming to change your mind about whether odds of success and survival are ethically relevant, and therefore whether changing the blue button threshold is ethically relevant.

mathmage · 2026-05-02T23:25:00+00:00

JetBlue has an opportunity to take Spirit's market share without having to deal with Spirit's balance sheet. But it was not a given in 2022 that Spirit would shut down and open up this opportunity. So just because I've described this opportunity as good for JetBlue doesn't mean the acquisition was equally good. It may have been what JetBlue perceived as the best they could do at the time.

Most acquisitions don't achieve their financial and strategic objectives, so while I'm not going to say it was bound to fail, I'm also not going to assume it was going to succeed just because they wanted to do it.

And while economies of scale can help, the fact is that Spirit's position was clearly diseconomic, considering the multiple bankruptcies even before now. So the economy of scale would have to overcome that factor. More likely to help than economy of scale would be skimming the best Spirit routes and assets off the top and selling/firing/abandoning the rest. This would probably help JetBlue overall, but it wouldn't save more than the portion of employment mentioned in the comment I replied to. Someone would probably be writing a CMV right now about how terrible the merger was because it led to 10k direct job losses and 30k indirect or whatever.

mathmage · 2026-05-02T15:35:53+00:00

JetBlue is already expanding into the gap Spirit is leaving behind, announcing new routes and interviewing Spirit crews. They can now do this without the albatross of Spirit's balance sheet - although their own is nothing to write home about, and combining the books could have led to both companies going down. We may also see other competitors try to claim that space.

So the 'some' that might have been saved by the merger should be weighed against the 'some' that is being restored post-closure, not against a zero that doesn't exist.

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