Marc G.

A woman in a fuzzy pink coat confronts a man in a suit about his ignorance. The text reads "The central message of marxism is not 'Every man for himself'"

Whomst among us hasn't felt a little vacuum about snackie all done

A yellow bridge in front of a city background with three banners reading "POST-GAZETTE STRIKERS WILL WIN".

BREAKING: We won!

Today the 3rd Circuit Court ordered the @post-gazette.com to restore our contract it illegally tore up 5 years ago. That’s our health care, PTO, right to a 40-hr. work week, short-term disability and so much more we’ve struck for 3+ years.

pghguild.com/2025/11/10/p...

Abstract We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in fact, they seem to resent high-quality ones, and are inclined to put pressure on or avoid dealing with agents who deliver high quality. The equilibrium among low-quality producers relies on an unusual preference ranking which differs from that associated with the Prisoners’ Dilemma and similar games, whereby self-interested rational agents prefer to dish out low quality in exchange for high quality. While equally ‘lazy’, agents in our low-quality worlds are oddly ‘pro-social’: for the advantage of maximizing their raw self-interest, they prefer to receive low-quality goods and services, provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by the intrusion of high quality. We argue that high-quality collective outcomes are endangered not only by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities.

Gambetta & Origgi on the LL Game, in which agents prefer to deliver and receive (!) low quality.

This paper is absolutely savage but also feels uncomfortably relevant to parts of academia outside of Italy 👀

diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...

they are profoundly unpopular and they are raising the volume and the threats because they know they are profoundly unpopular

ROSENCRANTZ: I mean, just because it's a fire in the same place doesn't mean it's the same fire.
GUILDENSTERN: I think it's different for mountains, I don't think their fires go out.
R: What, someone just keeps chucking wood into them?
G: No, it's geological.
R: Doesn't sound very logical to me.

OK, hear me out...A LORD OF THE RINGS remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:

As the output is a percentage, there are two questions. The numerator is “have made it without becoming divorced or widowed”. The denominator is “*could* have made it without becoming divorced or widowed”. I think the denominator needs to include those who divorced and remarried, and it doesn’t.

Wouldn’t that exclude people who got married 50 years ago, got divorced, and then remarried? I’d think you’d want those in the denominator.

2 cards from the X-Files CCG. The first depicts a man wearing a suit, headphones, and holding some kind of surveillance gear up to his face. He is aptly named Crew Cut Man, and he is an Adversary. The second card depicts an elevated view of a small town street near a body of water, labeled Coastal Northwest Oregon, where you can conduct an Alien Investigation.

X-Files (NXT Games) - Send your FBI agents to mystery locations and overcome threats in order to ask questions of your opponent and deduce which X-File they’re hiding in this game of competitive Clue. Or just keep playing the rare card that lets you skip all that and go straight to the questions.

Two cards from On the Edge. The first depicts a dour woman with short brown hair wearing a leather jacket and white shirt named Fabrissa Melors, who is apparently a Kergellian. The second shows part of a tight ring of people clasping hands with those two spaces away, forming a chain of interlocking arms. This represents a Bolstered Heart.

On the Edge (Trident) - Based on the RPG Over the Edge, assemble a team of hitters, blockers, and power players from every type of conspiracy you can think of, and amass enough influence to control the city of Al-Amarja. Another game where card position matters. Lasted long enough for 3 expansions.

Screenshot of a tweet: British cavalry in the 1850s consisted entirely of twinks who used UwU-speak... [Photo of a book page] "The dash of British cavalry officers was never greater than at the opening of the Crimean campaign in the spring of 1854. These aristocratic horsemen were, in the idiom of the day, "plungers," "tremendous swells." They affected elegant boredom, yawned a great deal, spoke a jargon of their own, pronouncing "r" as "w," saying "vewwy," "howwid," and "sowwy," and interlarded sentences with loud and meaningless exclamations of "Haw, haw." Their sweeping whiskers, languid voices, tiny waists, laced in by corsets, and their large cigars were irresistible, frantically admired, and as frantically envied. Magnificently mounted, horses were their passion; they rode like the devil himself, and their confidence in their ability to defeat any enemy single-handed was com-plete. Cavalry officers were saying in London drawing-rooms that to take infantry on the campaign was superfluous; the infantry would merely be a drag on them, and had better be left at home."

Imagine it's 1850 and you've just been flattened by an elite cavalry officer who just yells "SOWWY" as he thunders away.

Two cards from the Battletech CCG. The first depicts a light, hunchbacked mech with a sideways oval head and short lasers for arms ( a Jenner). The second depicts a mech assembly plant (Earthwerks Limited)

Battletech (Wizards of the Coast) Use factories to build mechs to destroy your opponent’s deck. Faster mechs could bypass blockers unless they were specifically defending your target. Played it a few times, got severely beaten each time.

A few weeks late for the trend, but time is an illusion.

1 like = 1 random CCG I have squirreled away somewhere in this house.

Doing an old NYT crossword reprinted in the Sunday press with @perchperchson.bsky.social
and that’s how I learned that “Marisa Tomei” is an anagram for “It’s a me, Mario.” This feels impossible, correct, and like an Italian American hate crime all at once.

new Date("wtf") How well do you know JavaScript's Date class?

I got 9 questions in before rage quitting

jsdate.wtf

The perfect @amiberger.bsky.social content does not exi-

Ooh, really neat play-by-post wargame, replicating some of the ways that professional war games are conducted (separate rooms, messages and information mediated by referee, etc).

Delightful to see my writing play some small part in the creation of something cool!

this is a cool project!

in addition to automating offsite repo+blob backups, it has a web UI for registering PLC recovery keys (which you keep in a p/w manager, not remote service), and doing the adversarial PLC recovery process (eg, if your "old" PDS is unavailable)

solid step for own-your-data

Good question, it interested me when Krennic said the need was for kalkite specifically, and not the presumed kalkium that it contains. Implying there is something about the structure of kalkite that would be destroyed by any refining process, or similarly by being in an exploding Death Star.

I dug up the dividend payout and share counts for the top 9 health insurance companies by market share (60% of the total market), and their total dividend payouts in 2024 come to about 11 billion. Assuming proportional amounts for the remainder, I think the correct amount is closer to $60/person.

I find this difficult to believe as well. According to the Fed, net dividend payouts to all US companies in 2024 was just under 2 trillion, which roughly matches that 7,000 per person figure you had above.

Looks like they did that in both states.

PA was where Musk's PAC did their big rallies, voting registration "sweepstakes", etc. Questionably legal, but all out in the open. That goofy picture of Musk trying to jump in the air was at a Trump rally in PA. He was all over the state.

Runaway Tren How a Colorado slumlord’s psyop turned into a brand-new ‘forever war’ on Venezuela

This article is a good place to start:

prospect.org/justice/2025...

Got me craving a flagon of ale i tell you what

The new crypto is criming and state coercion, wrapped up into one Liberals and libertarians should make common cause against it

The new crypto is criming and state coercion, wrapped up into one.

www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-new-cr...

A year later, a look back at public opinion about the U.S. military exit from Afghanistan Here’s how people in the U.S. and elsewhere have viewed the troop evacuation and its aftermath, and their broader attitudes about the war.

Support was 54-42 overall and 70% among Democrats. Maybe that's not enough to be called a consensus, but it was hardly just the left and the paleocons.

www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

It’s One of the Weirdest Mistakes in Movie History. I Spent Months Investigating How It All Went Wrong. The story behind cinema’s most mysterious bird.

This is a very fun read.

The state of Utah voted to ban pride flags so Salt Lake City Council decided to make official city flags that incorporate the progress pride, Juneteenth, and transgender flags so they can fly them without breaking state law