The idea that this is a problem with a bipartisan solution is naive. The problem isn’t that the left doesn’t understand guns/doesn’t have coherent, workable policy solutions. The problem is that the right consistently refuses to allow any discussion of the issue, period. Sometimes the left responds with asinine policie…

Thank you!

Interesting take but that point—“the central lie of the American Dream is that achieving it will make you happy”—predates the 90s.

Like i said, I’m just repeating the critical re-evaluation I’m already seeing. Not saying my analysis is new or groundbreaking. But thanks for the video! Always interested in reading/watching stuff like that.

Yeah American Beauty has aged like a dumpster in the sun.

This is actually a gendered skill! Or at least it was the last time I looked into the research. Men tend to be taught (or are biologically predisposed to) navigate via “dead reckoning,” i.e. keeping track of the vague general sense of where some reference point is at all times and using that to orient themselves. This…

Asbestos litigation produced some of the best and some of the worst lawyers I’ve ever worked with. Unfortunately, by now it’s more the latter than the former.

Excellent video. As a side note, it’s infuriating to see the fallout of the “video game violence” discourse to have ended up with a huge swath of 18-34 year old men believing that media has no effect on how we think at all. Like, just because video games don’t cause you to shoot up your school doesn’t mean that the…

Office Space is an absolutely fantastic movie, but I think it’s going through a bit of a(n appropriate) critical re-evaluation now that millennials are coming of age and Gen Xers are aging into the management roles the movie vilifies. Office Space exists in the same space as American Beauty and Ghost World and a ton…

As a fellow miles-hoarder, I think it’s worth pointing out that miles are mostly worthless to most people. While close to half of Americans fly once in a year, the statistics I was able to find suggest that for most of them that’s their only flight. Travelers that fly enough to rack up points and use them before they…

I think it’s pretty weirdly confrontational to call me delusional for...agreeing with you. I’ve got no delusions about how capitalism works; I know airlines aren’t reducing ticket prices out of the goodness of their hearts. My point is that unlike a lot of other industries, airlines compete on price primarily and on…

I’m a big defender of a lot of airline practices because for the most part these practices don’t cause any headaches and reduce the cost of everyone’s flight. Routine overbooking is one such practice; it sucks if they guess wrong but most of the time they don’t and that lets them shave money off my ticket every time I…

Assuming progress is just as much a fallacy as underestimating it. Neither technological achievement nor social infrastructure follows a straight line from where we are to where we want to be; there are plenty of blind alleys and reversions. Hell, while we’re more advanced technologically now than ever before we’re…

Echoing many others in saying that seasons 1-4 are phenomenal, seasons 5 and 8 are terrible, and there’s some really high highs and some really low lows in seasons 6 and 7.

This is such a standard take on Seinfeld that it literally named the trope of “when the original feels unoriginal when revisited (or visited for the first time by a new audience) because everyone copied it”: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny

In fact “Seinfeld has been copied and improved on so much it’s not really funny on its own anymore” is such a lukewarm take that it named the trope for “original now so thoroughly supplanted by the things it influenced as to no longer hold up on its own,”: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny

You’re making a looooot of assumptions about why you’re not being picked for juries here. There are a lot of very good reasons attorneys don’t want people with the mindset that “know better” on a jury. I’m a lawyer and I never get picked despite being potentially the most capable of understanding the process, etc. But…

Pedantry alert: “Punitive damages” and “non-economic damages” like pain and suffering are different things, and are available in different circumstances. You wouldn’t get “punitive damages for emotional distress,” but you get get both “punitive damages” and “pain and suffering” separately. Not in this case, but…

I agree this story is bullshit.

Technically it’s the San Joaquin Valley, or colloquially the Central Valley.