Joshua Kronengold

Breaking Down the 2025 NYC Ballot Proposals

advocate.nyc.gov/blog/nyc-bal... This is a great breakdown on the NY/NYC ballot proposals by @advocate.nyc.gov, and...I wish it had gone up earlier than the 3rd. Early voting started in late October, and it's important that everyone have a chance to weigh and take in knowledgable opinions like this!

In Phoenix Command, throwing a sandwich would first roll for wind speed and elevation. On hit, you'd roll for sandwitch fragmentation and whether you hit an exposed orifice.

After the basics, you'd then roll for sandwich curvature, allergies, and, of course, spontaneous combustion.

Donald Trump deleted this from the government website.

Let's be clear: there's funding available to cover SNAP benefits next month. Trump is stopping SNAP benefits because he wants to. He is forcing mommas and babies to go hungry.

Now, that in this case it's deployed on a very conservative "poor kids should starve" eugenical result.

But it's hard to change minds (and many conservatives have convinced themselves that cutting snap won't actually kill poor people). So...the math/economics deployed here is -also- terrible.

I mean, clearly not. But making economic arguments that appeal only to a confident grade-schooler are both core to their brand and a key way in which they underestimate the American populace (or, sadly, don't).

That it's motivated reasoning and therefore only applies when they want is, well.

This isn't the first time I've seen post-conservative radicals trying to coast on a gradeschooler's knowledge of economics.

In their minds, as long as it's convenient, spending=costs go up, every time. Same for their logic on inflation, where they try to shoehorn everything into the money supply.

Doing way too much work here is "which obviously will drive up the cost".

-If- the production/distribution of food was constant and inelastic, this would be true.

But it isn't. More spent on food means more food gets produced (and more people don't starve).

SNAP keeps food costs stable and low.

Daybreak (it's clearly a night thing), but which one? Beginning of dawn? Or when the sun finally clears the horizon?

What if you fed a mogwai food at 11:59pm, but it got stuck between their teeth and they only swallowed it after the clock chimed?

#importantquestions #gremlins #genx

Archive October 25, 2025
Connections Puzzle #867
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Really didn't enjoy this one. Blue was fine, but one of the purples was a better yellow than the underwear, so I took the mistake even though I'd sorted purple by that point even though I didn't know what it was.

TJ! Still in fandom, btw, and with kids who -also- like SF.

YES! i have been complaining about this since this puzzle came out.

I've gotten into Astoria Seafood without a long wait, but that was for early dinner. And of course people wait, because it's amazing. But, yes, not a tourist place; it looks way worse than it is.

The pile of neurons is still (for now) substantially better than the spreadsheet at looking at a set of pixels and deciding whether they contain "a cat." Since the spreadsheets are designed foremost at math, it stands to reason that they make math errors infrequently.

JD Vance Trivializes Jewish History by Referring to ICE Criticism as 'Blood Libel' — But Reveals What this Admin Thinks of Jews Last week, in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Vice President JD Vance accused critics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of committing “blood libel” against ICE agents. As Va...

"[By claiming to defend a minority, while] feeding into antisemitic narratives of shadowy Jewish power behind the scenes..., If, in the future, Americans start to miss the valuable research being cut...Jews can be made into easy scapegoats"
religiondispatches.org/jd-vance-tri...

A lot of people seem to have had 'issues' with blue. That said, once that was our leftovers, I nailed it (albeit not in so many words).

Yeah. It's reasonable to call the branch of CS "AI" because it includes study of cognition and the various methods you can make computer thinking more like intelligent organism thinking; it's aspirational.

But current results aren't AIs because they aren't intelligent. Call them what they are.

Yeah, I don't think it's in response to a specific prompt, except possibly the xkcd "lucky 10000", and, of course, the original point.

But the joke on this particular image is that all the red dots are on the places planes -don't- come back from when they're hit. So of course you never see images like this. Non-survivorship fallacy!

Looking over the rules, the only thing I see that could conceivably ban violins is:

* Horns, whistles, large megaphones or artificial noise makers.

Which...I guess a violin is an "artificial noise maker" if you squint?

Notably, -playing music- (without an "artifical noise maker") is not banned.

Er, what? He'd have let you in with it if you weren't, you know, good? Because apparently if you weren't good you had no chance of trying to busk? Nobody ever busks without equipment (as experience in the NYC subway system will tell one, clearly).

Having enemies that can't talk and have animal intelligence is an entirely different thing than "orcs"; they can even use complex tactics. Just don't give them a humanoid body shape because ew.

Heck, I keep going back to my line about hunting. We already have creatures that use complex tactics and that it's considered (by many people) ok to kill -- they're prey animals, and they're smart enough to out-fox us (sometimes literally) but not enough to have for [rather than to] dinner.

Heck, make it Saturday morning cartoons where combat doesn't end in death and you get to face the same foes again and again.

Where sure, you had more earnest fights when things got more serious, but "go out and fight things" were hunts for animals/animal-like monsters you were intending to cook for food.

D&D keeps spawning intelligent enemies that are fine to kill with no motivation; it doesn't feel necessary, and yet.

I believe you!

I'm intrigued by the concept of "cozy D&D." particularly since so many seem to get it wrong.

Cozy RPGs that come to mind (not D&D) are Yazeba's, Briarwood, and Chuubo's, none D&D-like.

If I were to essay cozy D&D, I'd want a combat game where nobody died, or a cooking game,

Opinion: Jimmy Kimmel has Supreme Court precedent on his side. He should sue the Trump administration, writes law professor Aziz Huq.

Read the full opinion piece: ow.ly/Curx50WYXq4

In "entirely trivial but it's what I care about", CNN writes: "[FBI AD] said officials will move from trying to identify the suspect, who killed conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, to building a prosecution case."

...no. If he killed Kirk, what is he a suspect for again?

Ignoring the gimmies... Streetcart Knish.

yep. as well as una naq fbyb, of course. without fbyb, una can only really be one thing here.

No wobniar for us, but we solved it in under a minute. Purple jumped out when we read the puzzle, so the rest fell into place nicely but purple didn't feel like a good fit for purple.

817 had a 60% fail rate, which surprised me.