Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
12hr ago
If a Danish company wants to tell me how to use English plurals, they are welcome to put their flag on the moon whenever they want.
Quantumfreakonomics
13hr ago
Alright, lets talk about the LEGOs.
In case you have been living under a rock, here's the story so far:
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Elderly man has $200,000 LEGO Star Wars collection.
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Elderly man enters into a consignment agreement with the local Bricks and Minifigs franchise.
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Said franchise undergoes a messy ownership change mediated by Bricks and Minifigs corporate. The new owners stop honoring the previous consignment agreement and refuse to give the LEGOs back.
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Elderly man's son gets the runaround trying to get his father's LEGOs back. Corporate tells him to deal with the franchise owner. The franchise tells him to deal with corporate.
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Frustrated, the elderly man's son turns to YouTuber Reckless Ben. The resulting video goes viral.
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The situation escalates into a wild goose chase as Reckless Ben attempts to serve legal process onto the store owners, aggravated by encounters with the suspiciously hostile American Fork, Utah police department (oh yeah, both the new franchise owners and the Bricks and Minifigs CEO are Mormon)
All of this is complicated by the fact that Reckless Ben is, well, reckless. He wears hidden spy cameras. He uses false pretenses to get into situations and locations. At one point he gets arrested for stalking. Despite this, it's hard not to root for him. He seems to have the franchise owners dead to rights for conversion (aka stealing), and Bricks and Minifigs corporate seems at best lackadasical that one of their franchises is defrauding counterparties, and at worst complicit.
I don't see how Bricks and Minifigs survives this as a company. This story is everywhere and nobody is on their side. This is not a particularly lucrative buisiness to begin with, and right now their name is mud. They did, finally, two weeks later, sort of admit that they were wrong and that Brian will get his LEGOs back. It's been radio silence from the principles since that last message went out. I would be surprised if we've heard the end of this saga.
Quantumfreakonomics
17hr ago
Why is Trump going to the Knicks game tonight?
Quantumfreakonomics
19hr ago
”In medieval Scandinavia, it wasn’t uncommon for a group of people to actively observe a newlywed couple having sex in the bridal chamber”
This makes a surprising amount of sense when you think about it. At its core, what a marriage is is a public announcement that these two specific people are having sex, and that the community is okay with it. There is no better representation of these values than for the community to literally watch the consummation of the marriage.
Quantumfreakonomics
22hr ago
Be the change you want to see in the world.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/contact-and-directory/anonymous-tip-lines
Quantumfreakonomics
22hr ago
Also her ability to not get caught. That is where most of the value add is.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
This question hits differently having just returned from a date with a woman who would be well into her mid-30s at motherhood on any reasonable projected timescale. I’m pretty sure it’s not even legal to abort downies in Texas. I can’t imagine traveling hundreds of miles for the sole purpose of killing my own child. The thought has me physically sick. I also wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life babysitting my infertile dead-end offspring.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
If there is one thing we know about California, it's that they would never take a well-meaning but poorly-thought-out policy and stick with it despite increasingly absurd consequenses year after year.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I feel bad for the lady’s husband. One day you’re married to a tradwife influencer, and the next day your wife’s sexual history is printed in the New York Times.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Slow news week. The current thing is still Graham Platner.
NYT: Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior
That's right, the New York Times hunted down as many of Platner's ex-girlfriends as they could to dig up dirt on this guy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the entire article is irrelevant high school-tier personal gossip, but gee there sure is a lot of irrelevent personal gossip. The one anecdote with teeth comes from a woman active in Republican politics.
But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.
“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”
There are a lot of ways one could interpret those paragraphs.
He had what she described as a “warrior ethos” and would fantasize about killing people he deemed a threat, she said. She said he told her that rape was about power.
It was something that stuck with her through the years, Ms. Fifield said.
“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”
“He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” she said.
Ladies, never ask your man what he would do to a home invader. Unless you're into that.
This article confirms my earlier suspicion that Platner is getting the kind of hostile media coverage usually reserved for Republicans. The elephant in the room is that this is because Platner likes Nazi imagery (it is beyond serious dispute at this point that he knew for years it was a totenkopf) and dislikes the state of Israel. I am 90% sure that both of the authors are Jewish. It feels icky to break out the calipers for this (though I am not basing my assessment solely on their names and faces. I was able to find old articles linking them to synagogues), but I really do think it is relevant.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I know that, but why? Does Britain allocate immigration slots by lottery? Is it just whoever gets on a British Airways flight in Mumbai? Did they consider a merit system and decide against it, or did the issue never come up at all?
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Violent crime committed by Indians in the United States is almost unheard of (even the people who hate Indians only ever accuse them of fraud or reckless driving). I know that the difference with the UK is almost certainly due to differing selection effects, but what specific policies cause that?
I don’t think we are ever getting an immigration moratorium, so that makes it vital to ensure that we never end up with European-style immigration to the United States. The first step to that is figuring out what European-style immigration even is.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Argentina is out of range of most land-based balistic missles from countries other than the United States (I think Russia has some brand new models that can do it.) There's a lot of ocean where a balistic-missile submarine would be able to hit both Argentina and the United States from a single position, but I don't think anyone expects an isolated submarine crew to faithfully execute Plan Exterminate Human Civilization.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
The thought was prompted by seeing public figures on Twitter who everyone here knows posting their new arrivals and being oddly consumed by the thought that I don't even know if it's their real child.
I figure that I ought to sort this out before I find myself in such a situation IRL.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
It hits differently when it’s your oil futures that get rugpulled by Axios.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Argentina is one of the best places to be if the world goes to shit. There are no nuclear targets in South America. Prevailing wind patterns would prevent significant fallout from crossing the equator. Argentina has better demographics than Brazil and more space than Chile or miscellaneous Southern Hemisphere island nations.
Always good to be one step ahead.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
When a gay couple has a baby, how rude is it to ask which one is the biological parent?
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Barbeque-loving voters need to know where he stands on the Black's vs Terry Black's Lockhart feud in order to make an informed decision
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
"I'm not a vegetarian. It's just that my girlfriend is a vegetarian."
Oldest trick in the book. Texans will see right through him.
This is an image of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner's profile pic on the messaging app Kik. Notice anything?
I know the real story is supposed to be the fact that he was sending sexually explicit texts to women while married, but I can't stop laughing at the picture. It's obviously no coincidence that his hand perfectly covers the giant totenkopf on his chest. This is art.
It is certainly enjoyable to see a Democratic candidate get run through the wringer the way a Republican would, but I must confess that I find his scandals to be endearingly relatable in a way. Prediction market odds for Platner in the general are collapsing, but I think this is less of a reaction to this specific leak and more of a realization that he is the kind of candidate who will have a scandal every other month all the way up to election day, and then a scandal every other year for his entire term if he wins.
EDIT: Additional unverified reports that I cannot vouch for but would be hilarious if true.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
I have only seen the film once, but I think the Wikipedia summary is an overly literal interpretation. In the context in which the monster is first fully revealed onscreen, it is a metaphorical extention of the frustration and aggression of Male Lead towards Female Lead.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
Weighted by screentime, the majority of the film is about the aesthetics of 90s furniture stores. It's hard to convey this feeling by text, so I focused on the thematic subtext of class and relationships.
Having thought on it more, the one healthy relationship in the film is between Male Lead's two employees. They are both lower-middle class. They even have the exact same job!
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Kino Review: Backrooms
Spoiler warning obviously.
Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.
Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.
It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.
The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
It takes two people for that.
I'm not the one saying no.
I don't think people realize how risky mom-and-pop shops are as counterparties. FinnaSkipTown LLC can just shut down and not give you your money, stuff, or services at any time.
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