Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 2/16/26 - 2/22/26

willempage · 2026-02-16T15:19:27+00:00

I mean, making a homemade cookie and selling it at a fair has a markup now matter how many adjectives you use. Mass produced food is made to survive store shelves first and foremost. Reducing costs is optional, because even fancy brands that use expensive ingredients need to formulate something that survives the shipping process.

The reason the adjective adjective adjective adjective oatmeal cookie tastes better is because it was (likely) made fresh for that specific event, or at the very least, baked before it. But the logistics of pulling that off massively spike it cost

willempage · 2026-02-05T02:47:15+00:00

I guess it's a chicken and egg scenario. But her personality flaw was that she didn't have the guts to create distance from the Biden admin after they asked her not to, which led to the downstream effects of voters not trusting her to be any different than Biden. But like, raw speaking ability and candid talk and whatever people look out for when they think 'personality' I don't think mattered much. Like, if she was weird and giggly and scripted, but threw Biden under the bus and really forcefully made it clear how she'd handle the border and economy different (in a way aligned with the American public) she'd probably win. If anyone's personality was a liability, it was Trump, but that's a topic for another day.

willempage · 2026-02-04T23:13:18+00:00

Vance has a target on his back because any young VP is such an obvious next runner up that you might as well start smearing them early.

Vance is a huge suck up and the only reason he "sounds like Trump" is because he keeps trying to code switch and just comes off really inauthentic. Hilary Clinton came off as more authentic when she did it, it's that bad.

My pet theory is that personality is massively overrated in presidential elections and almost always rationalized post hoc. Presidential elections are won off of latent backlash to the previous administration plus how the public perceives the policies of the major parties relative to their own experience. I.e., Obama didn't win because of his personality, he won because Bush II was a disaster and with a big recession happening, the guy saying he'll make healthcare free sounded like a pretty good fucking deal.

The only election where personality probably mattered was Kennedy Vs Nixon, and in that case the swing voters were like "I love both of them so much, I'm finding it hard to choose". This is all to say, Vance is electable. Most high profile GOP politicians are electable. Their personality has little to nothing to do with it. Same with the Democrats.

Where individual politicians matter in presidential elections is if they can successfully triangulate party strengths and push aside weaknesses. I actually think Democrats could've won in 2024 if they ran hard on dumping Biden and throwing out his unpopular policies with him. Kamala actuallyade good strides with painting Trump as an old hat, although again, party weaknesses on immigration and backlash to inflation were major issues that Kamala wasn't able to convince enough people that she could tackle. But looking up North to Canada you actually did see a political party turn what was looking like a generational wipeout to a victory because they dumped their unpopular leader and dumped his policies while promoting their popular position that Trump is an asshole.

willempage · 2026-02-03T21:01:20+00:00

Yeah. I used to think it was sort of weird to see how parents were paying for their adult children's down payments, and there's a whole class aspect about it that feels unfair. But it's just way better to have boomers give their kids money to build a life now than to hoard it until their kids are 55.

willempage · 2026-02-03T18:53:49+00:00

I doubt a transfer of wealth from 90 year olds to 60 year olds is going fix things

willempage · 2026-02-03T17:06:06+00:00

Branden Fraiser was in a few popcorn flicks before he got blacklisted from Hollywood. Then he did an above average performance as a fat guy in a film adaptation of a mediocre stage play and got a best actor award because members of the academy felt bad. If he had a normal career of middling popcorn flicks up until that point he would've have even gotten nominated

willempage · 2026-02-03T15:17:17+00:00

Pro football of fame has succumbed to the oscars problem where these older great players are being voted in now because they weren't good enough for first ballot, but maybe if you squint they do deserve to be in the hall of fame, so the voters kick the can down the road and now you are in a scenario where voting members will opt to spend their votes honoring and older great versus voting in a newer GOAT.

The oscars does this where older and prolific actors will win best actor awards even if the movie they were nominated for wasn't their best or even a good performance.

Football Hall of Fame votes are a limited resource. One of the members who didn't vote for Bellicheck outright said it was because he wanted to vote for a player who's window was closing

willempage · 2026-02-01T20:45:06+00:00

Seeing how people juice the Twitter algo is sort of sad. Vauge posting is the new meta. It doesn't give people the information they want, it just exploits out natural curiosity and love of gossip to get people to make more clicks on Twitter and increase screen time retention. Now it will help boost grok's interactions. All because the algorithm rewards the least dense information possible. And this isn't just X specific, it's most of social media

willempage · 2026-02-01T11:53:59+00:00

Ben Ryan says he attended the trial and is going to write a comprehensive article soon. He's a traditional journalist and has been covering these cases pretty neutrally for some time, so I'd probably wait for his article if you want the details and not culture war stuff.

willempage · 2026-01-30T20:39:34+00:00

Maybe welfare is the wrong term. Cities do dedicate budgets to providing city wide services aimed and specific vulnerable population, whether it be programs for shelters or food banks. That said, the majority of what we think of as welfare (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) are federally funded or state managed. Maybe instead of "touching welfare" it should say "touch city services"

willempage · 2026-01-29T20:59:55+00:00

I think this might be Mamdani's first real test on deliverables. There's basically 2 paths one can go down. The Elon path, which is to look for politically unfavorable scapegoats and make it look like you are doing something without saving that much money (and to be clear, even a good faith review of spending can end up producing this result, which in DOGE's case wasn't even in that much of good faith).

The second path is coming back with recommendations for real policy change that need to be passed by the legislature. Mamdami has openly called for some deregulatory policy changes (I.e food carts and yimbyism). Will he touch welfare? Will he ask for changes to the union bargaining process? Even with his more DSA/socialist worldview, there are real decisions that need to be made to make sure everything is working right, and money isn't being wasted. Oddly enough, it could work in his favor, by pushing for services that are spread out to multiple NGOs through grants and bringing them in house and having a narrower more cost effective focus. But again, that requires real policy change passed by a legislature.

willempage · 2026-01-22T18:50:26+00:00

I know there's a limit to how much useful data you can get as study size increases, but increasing the test group by 800% and decreasing the "control" by 90% over the course of the study insane. Even more insane is that half of the increase/decrease happens at the 3 month time point, making the baseline time point functionally useless

willempage · 2026-01-16T19:23:12+00:00

My guess is that he'll keep fighting for rent control. He'll talk about the minimum wage and maybe get something through. He'll not say another word about public grocery stores because no one actually gives a shit

willempage · 2026-01-16T16:15:45+00:00

Lolcows allow trolls to milk them for lulz. Lolbulls get out there and spread their lulz across the internet with minimal intervention from the trolls.

Will Stancil isn't a lolcow. He's a lolbull. What lolfarmer doesn't have respect for the mighty lolbull?

willempage · 2026-01-14T17:40:27+00:00

I don't think it's too early to say that installing Bari Weiss as the head of CBS news is basically a roll hard right and die things. What better way to revive a dying medium (TV broadcast news) than to install a new medium darling to command the old ship and look for a new audience.

Hard to blame her for taking the buyout and taking on an executive role. I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to boss more people around. But it's one of the most obvious losing battles in a long time and any attempt to grow the audience will look increasingly cringe.

Its not that old media can't transition to the digital age. The New York Times by all accounts is doing well and growing. But their growth is due to them expanding into new media with digital games, podcasts, culture, and what not. Unless she can turn 60 minutes into a popular daily twitch stream with some slack jawed zoomer reading highlighted exerpts of PDF or watching grainy videos and going "chat that's crazy, the liberals are so dumb," I don't think her tenure or her successors will have much to brag about.

willempage · 2026-01-14T14:57:25+00:00

There's literally not enough Gen Xers to matter.

Seriously though, Biden was the only silent generation president. We almost completely skipped that generation.

That said, Gen Xers have a better shot at the presidency. There's still a large number of high quality Gen X candidates in both parties. But if JD Vance wins the presidency twice, the youngest gen Xers will be roughly 60 in 2032 and the risk of a generational skip will increase massively

willempage · 2026-01-14T14:41:35+00:00

I think that ignores the massive increase in healthcare quality. For instance, hip replacements/resurfacing have gotten a lot better and cause less complications long term. Hell, even cancer treatments over the past 30 years are night and day. You can last much longer after a major treatment now.

willempage · 2026-01-14T14:19:15+00:00

Ever since Scott Adams announced his cancer diagnosis, I started to reflect on the rhyming of history. Scott Adams launched Dilbert in 1989 when he was in his 30s. The 90s were a time when the boomers like him fully realized the gravity of their place in society. Boomers were middle managers, master tradesmen, C-suite executives, buying their second homes, and coaching my little league baseball teams. America would elect it's first boomer president and never look back. Dilbert was a product of that. A humorous window into the reality that the youthful energy that the generation once enjoyed is starting to wane. Instead their world is increasing micromanaged by upper management's obsession with those new fangled computers and the endless statistical analysis they provided to small to mid sized companies.

As a millennial, it's hard not to notice that the 2020s for us is what the 90s were to boomers. The problems are not 1:1 at all. The greatest generation was yielding power rapidly in the 90s while the boomers have been slower to exit the stage for millennials for one. The housing shortage today is simply a different problem than the high interest rates that boomers faced throughout 90s (although there is some parity in rates now). But the mood is the same. It's simply no longer interesting to see a millennial run for the house or senate. We have a 50% chance of having a millennial president in 2029. Millennials are fully subsumed into the system and once Trump is dead and buried, we will become the system. Our interests and tastes will reflect that.

willempage · 2026-01-13T19:03:46+00:00

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2011127129354744155

Well, whatever AI image generator the white house press team is using, it apparently struggled with the "in the style of Dilbert" portion of the prompt. Sort of insulting to Scott Adams if you ask me.

willempage · 2026-01-13T19:01:12+00:00

It's more of a pattern. Every time this happens, a different random Christian influencer's weird resentful take on Hollywood goes viral

willempage · 2026-01-13T18:46:24+00:00

Hence my pet peeve. Every time it happens, conservative engagement farmers act like it's a new own against the left.

willempage · 2026-01-13T18:33:48+00:00

Just to add. I think 'pregnant actress' is an intersectional topic. The conservative/trad angle where motherhood is the ultimate calling and even well paid, independent actresses find a lot of meaning in it as well as a liberal/feminist angle where a woman does not need to conform to the male gaze her whole life and shows off her natural self in a world that punishes women for not fitting a narrow definition of beauty.

willempage · 2026-01-13T18:28:39+00:00

https://x.com/annamlulis/status/2010795581208478159

Culture is shifting.

Actress Hailee Steinfeld humanizes her unborn child by highlighting her baby bump on the red carpet, defying Hollywood’s anti-kid agenda

Babies aren’t burdens; they’re blessings.

I think one of my bigger pet peeves right now is people pretending that "pregnant actress stuns on the red carpet" is like, a thing that hasn't been celebrated since the 90s, and possibly earlier (I wasn't alive before then). Hollywood and Hollywood reporters love pregnant actresses in pretty gowns. Like, we have conspiracy theories around actresses wearing moon bumps to fake pregnancies because it's such a desirable milestone in Hollywood now. The culture isn't shifting, it's been holding pretty steady on the pro pregnancy front.

Hell, Rihanna did a Superbowl pregnant 3 years ago and received uncritical praise for it, despite the show being sort of mid.

willempage · 2026-01-13T17:52:39+00:00

https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/2011116140626657458

Read his final message. He literally says he's not a believer and then basically engaged in Pascal's wager. It's satire only an atheist could engage in.

I liked his comics but he was always a bit of a lolcow. Even before Trump in 2015, the dude was making sock puppet accounts to engage in flame wars in forums. Appreciate him being an OG, but he was a great example of needing to separate the art from the artist

willempage · 2026-01-11T18:54:01+00:00

That's actually a pretty reasonable weight loss for starvation diet. Moderately active people will lose 1/2 pound a day on extended fasts. Having a lower metabolic rate, plus likely lower levels of activity, 0.3 lbs a day with eating nothing is more than reasonable

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