He has a simple recipe:

1. Bait crazies with slatepitch on technocratic topic. For example, argue that zoning laws should favor replacing historic victorian townhomes with giant, soulless apartment buildings, because said giant, soulless apartment buildings are handicap accessible and victorian townhomes are not. Bonus points for rhetorical tricks like falsely framing alternatives, addressing minor or unreasonable objections rather than more substantive objections, or engaging in a superficial analysis. Additional bonus points for use of glib cliches to lampshade the difficult policy choices that you are deliberately ignoring:

"I would simply [build more housing | balance the budget | transition to clean energy | improve public transportation | professionalize law enforcement | increase immigration]"

"[describe potential harm of your advocated policy] which ... is a good thing."

2. Nutpick angry replies & act shocked at unreasonableness of said replies. Thereby delivering dopamine hits to your similarly smarmy followers.

3. Profit

It was said of Byron:

"He would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to "The Times" about the Repeal of the Corn Laws."

From his youth, Yig's schtick has involved pretending--with an ironic, self-distancing wink and nod--to be that florid old gentleman.

I would simply not read profiles of people who write for a living whose writing I do not read.

@3 I didn't. I avoid such master baiters.

That really is long. (As noted by BG)

Jeet Heer has been getting his ass for awhile now and I'm here for it

1. I think "nutpicking" is a bit unfair. I don't read his substack, but Twitter strongly incentivizes nutpicking, and he mostly avoids it there.

Yglesias and Ezra have been absorbed by different journalistic/communications institutions, and their work is necessarily going to reflect the readers they have chosen. Both have achieved lucrative mediocrity, and that's not the worst thing in the world. I think I saw Yglesias respond to someone on Twitter by saying, in essence, "You don't have to read me."

That's right, and I don't. But I've got no hard feelings about it. He has become kind of a dope, but I don't think he's actively destructive to the discourse in the way that, say, Greenwald or Taibbi have become.

I skimmed the profile -- is there any news hook? I don't quite get why anyone would profile him now, particularly.

I think the subhed of the profile really captured it: "slightly contrarian, mildly annoying."

8: I've been reading him since he was in college, and I know folks here have interacted with him personally. So there's nothing new in it for us. I thought it was interesting that he has a fan in the administration:

"I don't always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights," says Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, via email. Klain has liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives. Yglesias, Klain adds, "offers 'unconventional wisdom:' He's not afraid to break with others and put his views out there -- a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom."

I think the subhed of the profile really captured it: "slightly contrarian, mildly annoying."

Yeah, I would describe his shtick differently than nope at 1. I think he mostly writes things that are both technically correct (in that the specific point he's making is well supported) and directionally correct (in that his position is superior to the status quo) but irritating and often slightly patronizing.

I like his writing; I think he often says things that are useful additions to my mental sense of the policy landscape. On the other hand, I subscribed when he launched the substack (in significant part because of my affection for that era of the blogosphere) and have let my subscription lapse because I'm not sure I want to financially support him.

That's a very weird usage of "henpecking" in that quote. Does anyone use it outside of the context of marital discord, or is it just a typo/thinko for "nitpicking"?

I've also been reading MY since we were both in college together. In the early days of blogging we directly interacted a few times (mostly when Sasha Volokh was stating some truly baffling views on statistics). At the risk of violating the sanctity of off-blog communication, I met him at unfoggedcon2 and reminded him of our interaction and he said "oh yeah, [my real name], whatever happened to that guy."

@11

Here is the tweet that motivated my example: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1538565082464018434

As with the tweet, the example in 1 is technically correct (victorian homes are not generally handicap accessible) and--if you frame the argument in terms of increasing home supply and ignore alternatives--directionally correct (because razing victorian townhomes in favor of apartment blocks increases the number of homes).

But the whole framing of the argument is absurd because it excludes other, more reasonable alternatives (build on brownfield sites, make interior renovations easier, remove height limitations to allow additional stories, etc.) And ignores costs (can the existing infrastructure absorb "dramatically taller buildings"?). It's a straight troll. And it harms the cause it purports to advance by associating that cause with stupid positions.

I am distracted from your argument by thinking that those aren't townhomes. They're definitely apartment buildings already.

New York City private high school alumni are preppies no less than Ryan O'Neal in Love Story, and the way of the preppy is unearned, undisguised, unmitigated hubris with two smiles, one for those above, another for those below.

Cf. the late Paul Fussell's "leisure sports and games" descriptions of the American upper middle class.

13 is funny.

He benefits from how he engages with the performance of discourse

One of them bastards! I hates 'em!

Can you really be a preppy with his last name?

14: I would agree that the tweet is bad and agree that it's recognizably his style of trolling. I would just disagree that it's a good example of his style in general (as opposed to say, this)

Change is hard, both because of general inertia and also because people are risk-averse and loss-averse.

After all, even if you believe that upzoning is a positive-sum win-win policy change, it would require some heroic assumptions to get the result that it's Pareto optimal and makes literally everyone better off. It is good, on average, for both renters and homeowners to upzone a city. But some individuals may end up worse off. And it's hard to predict exactly who that will be, especially because people differ in their tastes and preferences.

This is made even more difficult politically by the fact that it's easy to mobilize people's identities alongside their concrete fears. Earlier I quoted Bruce Blakeman allowing his suburbanist identity politics to override his normal Republican Party appreciation of free markets. On the flip side, in many central cities, you see leftists allowing their suspicion of markets to override their basic appreciation of density. That's why I increasingly try to talk about this issue in a restrained and balanced way. A lot of YIMBY housing commentary comes from young renters who are trying to impress leftist friends, and that's fine. But as a middle-aged homeowner, I want to clarify that there is an upside for middle-aged homeowners too.

Big Media Matt returns.

19: This is America.

I've generally been pro-Yglesias over the years, but I think he's in one of his relatively bad periods now and I'm not interested in reading a long profile of him. He's a good writer but not a particularly interesting person.

@20 That piece does not improve my opinion of yglesias in the slightest.

He wants to convert his garage into a rental apartment. He can't because zoning. Therefore:

1. Everyone should be able to convert their garages into rental apartments.

2. Don't these idiots see the money that they are leaving on the table by acting collectively to prevent a situation they collectively dislike?

3. The state should pass legislation pre-empting their attempts to prevent me from converting my garage into a lucrative rental apartment.

4. Some econ 101 bs about "Why would you pay $850,000 for a condo in a neighborhood where single-family homes sell for $850,000? It would have to be that the condo units are much nicer than the SFHs in some way." Well yes, chucklehead. Here is an example:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/275-Gold-St-South-Boston-MA-02127/59149608_zpid/

This home will be bought by a developer. It will be torn down and converted into triple decker. Each unit will sell for about the same amount as the original single family house.

There was some loosely-blog related meetup in DC where I think I met both Yglesias and Klein. Not an unfoggedcon, probably around 2009, though I must have been there to meet up with unfogged commenters because I didn't go to any non-unfogged meetups.

Anyway, the point is that I have no firther impressions to give. I do remember someone, who commented formerly, saying "Unfogged, haven't thought of that in a long time." And now it's almost 15 years later.

further

For example, the first floor condo in the house next door:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/273-Gold-St-1-South-Boston-MA-02127/295324730_zpid/

@20 That piece does not improve my opinion of yglesias in the slightest.

I wasn't (necessarily) trying to improve your opinion, I was trying to find a representative example.

My point is that he is correct that (a) allowing the neighborhood to set the standard for allowable improvements will tend to be overly conservative and (b) building more housing is good, even if, in many cases, the new units do not have a cheaper price than the old housing that they replace. It is ALSO true that he can be irritating and that you might not be convinced that his overall vision for drastically reduced regulation on construction is good (I am not fully convinced myself).

This home will be bought by a developer. It will be torn down and converted into triple decker. Each unit will sell for about the same amount as the original single family house.

Is that bad? I don't know the neighborhood, but that sounds like an improvement. As discussed in a previous thread I live in a mid-size city that's seen absurd increases in housing prices over the last 5 years, and I'm happy to see multi-unit infill projects.

For example, the first floor condo in the house next door:

I will say, there are some crazy prices locally in which a newish luxury condo will sell for as much as a lovely old Victorian home with 50% more square footage (and no condo fees) in the same neighborhood. I'm not sure why that is, but since I couldn't afford either I haven't bothered to figure out the reason.

I think they should build shit until a condo like that sells for $500k or less.

Since we're talking about housing I'll mention that I found this (long) article fascinating and a good example of the importance, and difficulty of trying to coordinate policy among multiple agencies with different responsibilities (contra Yglesias).

The government compels and incentivises each of England's more than four hundred planning districts to hit a housebuilding target each year, and there's no exemption for Boston just because it lies almost wholly on a high flood risk area. 'It's this awful thing,' Hugh Ellis of the Town and Country Planning Association told me. 'They've been completely forced into a corner: you either hit the housing target or you don't. If the government doesn't offer any other way of meeting that challenge, what the hell do you do?' Not that Boston's local politicians feel trapped. They're up for growth. Between 2018 and 2021, the government demanded that Boston build - or, to be precise, demanded that Boston allow commercial housebuilders to build - 657 new homes. Boston hugely outperformed, building 1047 houses. The lion's share was in a single development known as the Quadrant, in a suburb south of town called Wyberton, about three-quarters of a mile from the River Haven, which connects the Witham to the sea. It's in what the Environment Agency defines as Flood Zone 3a, land with a high probability of flooding, though this doesn't take sea defences into account. When construction began, the site was, on average, barely two metres above sea level, and four metres below the level the Haven rose to during the 2013 storm.

But that's British.

Yglesias has written about British housing policy: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-uk-really-needs-better-housing

Someone should make him stop.

@28

If you argue "building more housing can be good, even if, in many cases, the new units do not have a cheaper price than the old housing that they replace" then you have my agreement.

If you argue "building more housing is good, even if, in many cases, the new units do not have a cheaper price than the old housing that they replace" and therefore the state should allow me to convert my garage to a lucrative rental apartment in spite of my neighbors opposition ... well that seems weak and amusingly self-interested.

In the piece you linked, Y. attempted to address the criticism that new units are often as unaffordable as the units they replace. The cartoon was the strawman he chose to represent that view. But the cartoon depicts a situation that is often true!

His other argument was that the [potential harm of his advocated policy] was ... a good thing because "you've increased the average quality of the housing stock." This is standard neoliberal cope that ignores distributional effects in favor of meaningless aggregate measures.

And like most econ 101 arguments, it may sound good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. For example, the number of housing units in Boston increased nearly 20% from 2000 to 2022, but housing prices still increased, massively.

You think prices went up because supply increased?

In the example in 1 and 14 MY is just straightforwardly correct. Which gets at the weird thing about MY: people get really really mad when he says pretty banal things, for reasons that I really don't understand.

I still follow MY on twitter and occasionally read his substack free articles. I think he's good at raising some important banal political points, and especially I think he is really the best in the business at understanding Republicans and treating them straightforwardly with the right kind of disdain. I've thought about subscribing to his substack, but 1) $5/month just seems unreasonably high for one newsletter, I feel like $2/month is much more sensible, and 2) I don't think RWM would approve of me spending money on MY because she doesn't like him.

Is a 20% increase enough to offset additional demand? That's close to the rate at which the U.S. population grows.

29: It's maintenance, right? New construction means less random stuff to deal with. (Though a higher risk of catastrophic problems.)

Plus, you can eat the paint chips.

On top of population growth, as people get richer they want more space, and work-from-home has accelerated that trend. Plus we've gone 50 years of building wildly too little housing, so you need not just normal housing build rates but even higher rates for catch up. 20% is nowhere near sufficient. Boston population density is still 3/4ths of Somerville, and Somerville and Cambridge are half the density of Brooklyn and a third of Paris. We should be aiming for something more like a 100% increase in a decade.

Yeah, 20% in 22 years is not meaningful growth, especially in a city that was in the doldrums in the mid-'90s but has thrived in the post-dot com economy. I mean, that's less than 1% a year.

37.1 is somehow the core of the MY conundrum. Haters want the fault to lie with him for trolling or shitposting, but a large portion of his tweets (let alone his proper output) is straightforward policy argument with little or no irony/baiting/whatever. And that stuff gets just as much angry response as obvious trolling.

That said, he does do things like choose straightforwardly, demonstrably incorrect positions and hold to them no matter how much evidence he's shown to the contrary. My specific example is window replacement in old buildings. He's mad bc his historic district won't let him replace his windows*, and says that this is criminal bc of climate change. However, window replacement is basically never justifiable from a climate change POV because the new windows don't save enough energy during their lifetimes as they take to make, and they are not designed to be repairable long term--so every 30 years you install new windows that take 50 years' worth of energy to manufacture. I've pointed this out to him in at least 3 threads, and I know he's seen it because he's argued with me, but her persists.

I don't actually think he's like that in all matters, but on something this concrete and quantifiable, he should never be like that.

*even this is dubious: standard preservation practice allows replacement with new windows of similar appearance. What's more likely is that he wants to replace old windows with crappy new ones. But some historic review commissions don't follow standard practice, so it's possible he's not bullshitting on this point

39: preferring to live in an old house is not exactly a class marker, but it's a mark of a certain kind of person. The average American prefers a low quality tract home over a well-maintained old house with updated utilities, full stop. And if the new thing is actually decent quality, and especially if it's fashionable, then it's quite a bit more desirable.

Anyway, this seems like a good thread to ask: does anyone remember Praktike? That was apparently the nom de blog of Blake Hounshell, who as I'm sure you heard passed. I don't really recognize the pseud, but this was apparently 15+ years ago, so there's a lot I don't remember.

My impression of Yglesias is that he's really great when we're in the oppostition, because he makes the obvious point (Bush/Trump is bad) very cleanly. But when there's not an administration for him to fight against, I don't actually read him so I don't konw what he does. Maybe draw broad conclusions.

That was me.

42: I like Nick's use of the word "shtick" in 11, but I have been a bit dissatisfied with people's efforts to identify the nature of his gimmick.

I think you've captured a bit of it here: His attention to meaningless issues. I know nothing about the matter, but I believe I can still say with confidence that replacement windows are not a consequential contributor to climate change -- in either direction. I find myself reading Yglesias and wondering: Why are we talking about this? And I think the answer is: Because one of his methods for being smart is pontificating on things that nobody* cares about.

Also: I think the Neoliberal Original Sin is related to this. The neoliberals were able to create complicated, logical, plausible, well-thought-through models for the real world in a conscientious effort to solve real problems. And they were just wrong because they'd leave out key variables (like the energy expended in creating windows).

*I do not mean to imply that JRoth is nobody.

@36 No. I think that the demand for housing in Boston increased to such a degree that even a 20% increase in supply was insufficient to moderate prices.

@38 Once we have accounted for natural population increase, what further accounting is necessary?

@37 Ha. He is not "straightforwardly correct." In the example in 1, there are many other ways to provide additional density. In the example in 14, the benefits attributed to a "dramatically taller building" could be achieved through retrofitting without destroying the historic building. Both arguments advance a false choice in a deliberately inflammatory manner. It's a slatepitch.

And the banality of the presentation is rhetorical technique for driving engagement. Consider whatever you personally value. Now imagine a pundit with the following gimmick: they offer banal arguments predicated on a rejection of your values. They do not engage with those values, they simply do not acknowledge them. But unlike Swift's Modest Proposal, the arguments are not satirical. Do you feel motivated to chime in? To read the argument to see whether its failings are ever addressed? To bring to the attention of the pundit those negative effects that they apparently overlooked? Gotcha, sucker.

His main point is that a lot of what he says is the view of "normies" who aren't terminally online but that those views seem radical/incorrect to those who are. I don't always know if he's trying to convince people those views are correct or just pointing out that you need to engage with them when "everyone" on Twitter thinks they're wrong.
I don't get the distinction in 35. He often says people should be allowed to do things and if personal preference or market demand causes them to happen then they should happen. More housing can be good and therefore people should be allowed to build. Separately he thinks people should build but his public policy argument is allow, he's never said anything should be required to be built.

It's absolutely not a slatepitch. He just straightforwardly means it and I just agree. I understand that you disagree, but I think you're wrong and that people with your viewpooint have done incredible damage to the country that will take decades to undo.

48.2- Exploding growth of an industry where the city is one of maybe three hubs nationwide? That's why I'm here.

45 is basically right. The equivalent of his "Bush/Trump is bad" schtick currently is that Manchin is good, Biden is good, and that democrats should be more like President Obama. (But Sinema is bad, and so is Bloomberg, it's not that kind of centrism.)

does anyone remember Praktike? That was apparently the nom de blog of Blake Hounshell

Well, that's super depressing.

@41

1. Somerville is one of the densest cities in the country.
2. 100% increase in 10 years is a fundamentally unserious proposition. That's faster than Shenzhen from 2010 to 2020.

16.1 is pithy enough that I now can't stop wondering about "earned... hubris."

51: Speaking of explosive industry growth, Detroit went from 285K people in 1900 to 1.5M people in 1930. That's what adequate growth during a time of a rapidly expanding industry looks like.

"Somerville is one of the densest cities in the country."

I live in Somerville. This may be true but it's meaningless; this has to do with boundaries and composition, not a noticeably different building style than other areas nearby. Boston is less dense than Somerville but Boston has plenty of Somerville-sized chunks that are denser. It's just that Boston is a lot larger and includes major business districts, big parks, and some less-dense outer-suburb kind of territory. Somerville is almost entirely 2-3 story residential, from edge to edge, without much in the way of open land.

48.1: But then what is your point? What you seem to be saying is that adding density helps but isn't enough, at which point having three available housing units instead of one, even if they're all the same price, seems like an improvement.

I'm not so much talking about Yglesias, as that I don't understand your theory of the housing issues you're basing your critique on.

Agree that Boston has parks and business districts keeping it lower, but as you say Somerville housing is not very tall, and a lot more of Boston (and Cambridge!) could be 5 or 6 stories instead of 2-3, which would make up for the parks. I mean Brooklyn was my example of somewhere much denser, and Brooklyn has large parks and cemeteries and a significant central business district.

Ha, the perfect MY take just popped up in twitter:

"If smoking cigarettes weren't cool you wouldn't have had all these people doing it for so long!
Now as it turns out, smoking is also quite deadly and I'm glad I quit. But it's absolutely cool."

I think this is a great example of exactly the way that MY is slightly contrarian and mildly annoying, or as MY would put it, not contrarian at all.

"I understand that you disagree, but I think you're wrong and that people with your viewpooint have done incredible damage to the country that will take decades to undo."

Of course, you also believe that a 100% increase in housing units in a decade is achievable and desirable. And you still don't seem to grasp the my central point - he is advocating bad solutions to important problems.

There are better solutions. You want to upzone around transit (and you have a plan to handle the consequences of said upzoning). Godspeed. You want to encourage the development of edge cities linked by rapid transit to the city center. Bless you my child. You want to convert brownfield sites to high density apartments, like these:

http://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/235-old-colony-avenue

http://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/776-summer-street-pda

http://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/323-365-dorchester-avenue

http://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/on-the-dot

Hallelujah!

You want the state to make ADUs as-right? That's a fucking terrible idea.

It also gets at the way that MY, who is right at the generational cusp, is a complete GenX stan. I think this is an important part of his schtick and an important part of what annoys so many millennials.

Seconding 53.

Have you said what's wrong with ADUs? I'd believe there's an argument against them but I don't get it offhand.

These things aren't in competition with each other. We need more of *every kind* of housing, and the things that make it more difficult to build one kind of housing also make it more difficult to build other kinds of housing. We need a broad pro-housing movement to push for making building housing presumptively legal, rather than presumptively illegal. There are 22 buildings in all of Somerville that are legal under current zoning (according to, checks notes, Matthew Yglesias). Housing is a human right and people should be allowed to build it without getting special permission providing they satisfy sensible safety regulations.

65: You'll need to start citing some other city for that statistic. Somerville revamped its zoning in 2019 and it's much better now. (Cambridge housing activists are using "you're not going to let *Somerville* be more progressive than us, right?" as an argument these days)

Nice!

I'm confused about under what circumstances YIMBY is considered progressive or not. Like here we have a lot of NIMBY old hippies and I'm not sure they're to the "right" of young people exactly, I think of YIMBY/NIMBY as a second political axis. For example MY is centrist but YIMBY.

@58 Consider the following:

I think that the demand for driving into Boston increased to such a degree that even a 20% increase in highway lanes was insufficient to reduce commuting times.

Is that a sentence that would make sense to you? Would you see that as an argument against addressing any complaint about increased commuting times with a new highway?

People make stupid, extremist arguments. Advocating for a 100% increase in housing units in a decade is a stupid, extremist argument.

What frustrates me here is that I agree that housing is important. And I want to see more of it built. I want to see more of it built near me! But ignoring other peoples concerns about the effect of development on their neighborhoods is a great way to not get housing built.

"Housing is a human right and people should be allowed to build it without getting special permission providing they satisfy sensible safety regulations."

This is a stupid position and you should feel stupid for advocating it.

I think the left position is "housing is a human right and should be cheap and abundant", and where that comes down on the YIMBY/NIMBY axis comes down to a disagreement about the facts of how to get there. I understand the left-YIMBY arguments and am generally baffled by the left-NIMBY arguments, but I believe there are lots of people who believe housing is a human right but YIMBY isn't the way to get there.

Yeah, like 70. Clearly a fervently held position, but I don't get it.

The problem is this is a classic NIMBY strategy, even if it's not your intent to support that movement. Some people think ADUs are bad because parking. Some people think bigger buildings are bad because aesthetics. Because everyone gets a veto, supporting one approach and not the other just means nothing gets built. 65 is correct, all approaches should be presumptively easier so that no subgroup has the ability to block the entire process. Some proposed minor apartment building (4 story/12 unit maybe?) in Boston was blocked yesterday for being "too dense."

69:

1) we have an analogy ban here for a reason.
2) yes a growing city needs to expand its transportation infrastructure
3) highways have a viable alternative, public transit. The alternative to housing is living in tents or vehicles. That's a bad alternative that we shouldn't be promoting with policy.

At any rate, nope things MY and I are wrong about this, but for some reason rather than just disagreeing he wants to pretend it's a troll take we don't really believe. It's not trolling, it's what I believe!

The smoking tweet is a good example.
- Most people who'd read the tweet think it's ridiculous. No one still thinks smoking is cool!
- Many people in the country still think smoking is cool but they are underrepresented on Twitter.
- MY doesn't agree it should be cool but he's pointing out that a lot of people still do, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of people still start smoking every year. Ignoring that fact makes it hard to understand or create good policy.

74: Also, increasing the supply of roads actually increases vehicle miles driven, very quickly. The same number of people drive more. Building housing doesn't increase the population in anything like the same way.

Building housing doesn't increase the population in anything like the same way.

Depends on how you zone your grottoes.

I've accused nope of trolling in the past, but I think he's actually sincere here, the same way Yglesias is.

Great. There can be another Post profile.

I don't have much to say on the substantive issues besides agreeing with the YIMBY side. I can't spend too much time because I'm literally attending a (virtual*) housing summit right now and I think they're about to start up again.

*Technically hybrid but I'm attending virtually. Right now that means watching a bunch of people eat lunch.

Just like Only Fans.

Right now that means watching a bunch of people eat lunch.

Obviously not watching closely enough, if you're commenting here.

The discussion is now about why homeless service providers are reluctant to have their clients sign leases. (Apparently this is a thing; I had no idea.) It's an interesting discussion.

I have been known to troll people -- in conversation -- on the subject of smoking. If someone tells me about their efforts to quit, I might tell them that they shouldn't do it; that smoking is awesome and that despite quitting decades ago, I still miss cigarettes.

(This part is not very relevant for my own work so I'm not paying full attention. That's why I'm still commenting here.)

86: It's ok, teo. I'm only pretending to be your boss.

It's fine, I don't actually have a boss. We've had so much turnover that I think all levels of management above me are vacant except the Mayor.

There are acting people in at the City Manager and department director level. In practice I report to the latter.

Just like Parks and Recreation.

76.last: I think you've gotten that last point slightly wrong. I think he would say something more like it just objectively looks "cool," but some things that look cool are still bad things to do.

Like when you lift your serape to reveal the metal plate that has kept you from being shot and let it fall to the ground, but you still have more gunfight to finish.

80: In 15 years or so.

91: Right. Is there a name for when you misread someone because they are saying something so stupid they can't possibly mean it? Trump benefits a lot from that.

If smoking cigarettes weren't cool you wouldn't have had all these people doing it for so long!

In fact, there is a very satisfying feeling associated with having smoke enter your lungs and expelling it. Cigarettes are nice to fidget with, and smoke is fun to play with. And let us not forget the causal role of Big Tobacco's lies.

I was a 2 or 3 pack a day smoker back when that was possible for the proletariat, and I loved it for reasons completely unrelated to coolness -- as proven by the fact that after a certain point, that kind of smoking became wildly uncool.

But I still smoked for the actual reason that "all these people [were] doing it for so long." Nicotine is fantastically addictive.

In conclusion, nobody should ever quit. I deeply regret having done so and would like a cigarette right now.

Unfogged meetups are the only time in my life I've been around a significant number of smokers.

re: 94

God, yes. I stopped smoking a little over 2 years ago, and I really loved that feeling. I'd smoked off and on for 20+ years, although I was never a very heavy smoker. Towards the end I had stepped up from smoking maybe a pack a week to about 3 or 4 packs a week--work stress, mostly--and I decided it was time to stop. Most of my friends stopped at the same time (it was peak COVID lockdown) which helped.

But, I still really want to smoke. I don't experience addictive cravings like I did when I first stopped, it's just something I really liked to do, and I'd like to do it again.

Merciful Christ, preserve us from whatever dorks on Twitter think is cool.

And from, like, Satan and stuff.

He's been a valuable advocate for immigration for many years.
Smoking is cool and someone needs to invent something better to do with ones hands.

Can we make nosepicking cool? It's pretty satisfying.

... someone needs to invent something better to do with ones hands.

Just like old times today!

I was never a heavy smoker, and was never addicted to nicotine, but I smoked about 1-2 cigarettes a day for a long time, and I loved it so much, and I still miss it. Once a year or so now I'll have a cigarette, even though it makes me kind of nauseated, but I love the smell of fresh cigarette smoke and love being around smokers. (Also, cigarettes are beautiful and cool, and vaping is so lame. GenX 4 LIFE)

61 last You want the state to make ADUs as-right? That's a fucking terrible idea.

Genuine question: why? Other than parking and 'aesthetics/neighbourhood character', what's the worry?

I'd agree that some housing advocates are unreasonably optimistic about the ability of ADUs to make more than a tiny dent in the problem, but I really don't know what to make of the fervent opposition.

Do you know what's really beautiful and cool?

Yes, kitesurfing and that Saharan rock band that Robert Plant endorsed. Fine.

The final session today was a really interesting discussion of the differences between Transitional Housing and Permanent Supportive Housing. There's a big need for both but especially PSH.

People who park in the street for free are really interested in not building any housing that could result in someone else parking in the street.

Of course, I have two off-street parking spaces.

I have way more off-street parking than I need, sometimes I think I should replace it with an ADU, but that's too much work.

I couldn't make an ADU because my house is above my parking.

My lot is too small for me to legally keep chickens.

I also can't legally keep cassowaries.

Were you intending to?

No. I just don't like to be told I can't.

Probably not but everyone knows chickens are a gateway bird to cassowaries.

Until cock fighting is re-legalized, I don't even see the point of keeping chickens.

Just want to note that, while pf is closer to correct about why people smoke once they've started, MY is correct about why people start smoking in the first place. Not all of them, of course, but the vast majority of smokers begin because they consciously or unconsciously think it's cool. Hollywood and rock stars and slightly older teens have spent decades communicating this as clearly as possible. It's one of the reasons anti-smoking activists have tried to show smoking as uncool, for instance with the pictures of animals with cigarettes or old people whose health has been ravaged by smoking.

Incidentally, his initial point that gas stoves look cooler than induction baffles me, but I can't pretend that I understand what anybody thinks about appliances, since I think stainless steel is fugly and should have gone out of fashion a decade ago.

I have a friend who smokes and is definitely cooler than I am. She is also very careful about what chemicals she puts in her body, which is why she smokes American Spirits. They are made with organic tobacco. We didn't have all these healthy options back when I smoked.

I mean, she's obviously deluding herself. But I used to smoke American Spirits too.

Conveniently our gas stove has been having issues so we're going to replace it with induction. Inconveniently this requires installing a 50A 220V circuit. Even more inconveniently this probably requires upping our service from 100A to 200A. Conveniently that will make it easier to install a car charger. Inconveniently we don't have an electric car yet.

since I think stainless steel is fugly and should have gone out of fashion a decade ago.

Yes but have you seen it paired with granite counters? Eh? Eh?

One of the problems with ADUs is that they wind up being AirBnBs. It's a significant chunk of the market here -- so supporting them means one can wind up with lots of tiny shed homes and no meaningful increase in housing. I'm fine with them, mostly, but at least locally they're almost always on the property of someone who is doing short-term rentals, with some renting basements to family, but it's not really helping lower-income people get into stable housing.

Anyhow, MY is fine, but I don't think his line has really changed since he was an undergrad. It's more or less fine to say "hey I noticed this problem, let me armchair a solution" in a dorm room, but less if one desires to be taken seriously.

120.2: Yeah, he's really gotten a lot of mileage out of being a clever but naive undergrad from a privileged background, but there's a reason most people aren't able to make that into a career.

Usually more than one reason.

GODDAMNIT. My favorite local store just posted that their landlord sold the building for cash, with no advance notice, and they're having to close.

I hate how much power wealthy people have to casually destroy lots of hard work or living situations or anything else occurring in buildings they happen to own.

121.1 is a solid point, but the answer is to regulate and/or tax airbnbs like has always been done with hotels. And I'd argue they're still useful, because the airbnb demand is there and if you can't satisfy it with ADUs then it'll be whole houses.

Anyway, ADUs are not the main answer, the answer is letting landowners build what they want so long as it's safe. Sometimes that'll be ADUs, but sometimes it'll be bigger buildings that house even more people.

120.1: yeah, I agree, and that's among the reasons that I think ADUs won't make more than a tiny dent. (A bigger one: not that many homeowners want/can afford to build/convert one.) But it's not a reason to think, as nope seems to, that ADUs are *bad* unless we think that tourism is always bad and we have a bunch of empirically dubious beliefs about induced tourism demand.

I mean, if your town/city draws enough visitors that AirBnB is displacing resident housing, then adding ADUs helps even if they're all all just AirBnBs.

(On preview, I see that Upetgi beat me to it.)

Also ADU airbnbs keep money in the local economy in a way that whole house ones don't.

You mean because whole-house AirBnBs are often owned by absentee investors? I suppose that's probably true.

MY is correct about why people start smoking in the first place.

Again, we see confabulation designed to create something sensible out of nonsense from Yglesias. He was explicitly not talking about why people start smoking:

If smoking cigarettes weren't cool you wouldn't have had all these people doing it for so long!

Yeah, sometimes investors, but more often just vacation homes they don't use most of the time.

I think tourism is bad. On top of the overuse and energy use problems widely documented, I think it's making "sending" cities worse and amplifying the winner-takes-all that's part of the housing problem. No reason to stick around and do the tedious and slightly naff work of culture production in your home town if you can now afford to go see "the real thing" in one of the cool cities.

(I have a friend who is apoplectic moving into despair about how this is killing theater and music by wiping out the venues and audiences for beginners. I mean, maybe TikTok and YouTube can replace it all, but there's maybe some issues there too.)

Theater needs another Urinetown.

That was writing.

Speaking of the culture of cities, I think I saw a former congressman's uncle on my evening walk/Pokemon playing.

Also, apparently I've been saying "paczki" really, really wrong for years.

I decided a long time ago that I much prefer amateur blogging to professional.

Yeah, I'm not opposed to them (and they're all over the place here as mother-in-law apartments, mostly) --- but Ygles' contention was that by doing it he'd help the housing crisis and I suspect that's optimistic. But literally no one I know who wants an ADU wants it for ordinary tenants, so I take myself to be responding to Ygles' contention about his garage. He won't want to be a landlord for less than what AirBnB pays.

My garage has more mice than I suspect is ideal for airbnb guests.

I hate how much power wealthy people have to casually destroy lots of hard work or living situations or anything else occurring in buildings they happen to own.

What if the landlord wants to build high density housing and an ADU and will install, I don't know, HIGH SPEED RAIL as transportation between the floors? And you are OPPOSED to that? Monster.

(Just doing my part to raise the discourse, as the cool blogging kidz used to say.)

In part due to my own effort, it looks as though our city is likely to expand the ADU rules in the near future. I want to get it so detached ADUs are allowed in non-rural zoned residential areas, especially including the high density areas close to downtown. There are so many old garages and carriage houses that are close in and would make great candidates for conversion. I'm sure the AirBnB thing will be a live issue, though. As will, I'm sure, parking.

Like, it would be great if we could get ADUs allowed for denser areas. But do we tempt fate by not including a parking requirement?

Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I'm a monster against infill.

137: I agree some are used for short-term; that can stand to be limited. The California laws that made ADUs by-right also barred their short-term rental - or allowed cities to do so, I forget which. Enforcement is still an issue of course.

But a ton are used for housing one's own family members (which is still long-term housing), and another chunk are for long-term rental from the data I've seen.

There are people on Twitter who try to extend YIMBYism to hotels, pointing out they are also downzoned to squeeze capacity, which is true. I think more hotels at a systemic level could also be a good thing. But long-term housing is still fundamentally a different social thing than short-term, so for now I'm going to prioritize the former.

I remember praktike, how awful.

I think tourism is bad. On top of the overuse and energy use problems widely documented, I think it's making "sending" cities worse and amplifying the winner-takes-all that's part of the housing problem. No reason to stick around and do the tedious and slightly naff work of culture production in your home town if you can now afford to go see "the real thing" in one of the cool cities.

Huh. I can't tell if this is insightful or ridiculous.

116. If she really cared about what she puts in her body, she'd use inorganic tobacco. It doesn't burn.

I think most of the "winner takes all" part of housing is because of jobs. I don't know if the rise of remote work will change that.

118: You may want to go above 200A. If you eventually switch to a heat pump and/or electric hot water, I'm almost certain 200A is insufficient.

This isn't exactly a hobbyhorse of mine, but I'm not sure people, including ones who talk about electrification, appreciate just how much bigger domestic panels need to get in an all-electric world. Stove, pump, water, and car are 40-50 amps each. And while you don't have to size for all 4 happening at once, you do have to size for 100% of the first two, then 80% of the next, then ~70% of the fourth (or something like that; I had to look it up for something a few weeks ago, but it's not my expertise). I don't think local distribution lines are adequate in places that rely on FF for home heating.

149: It did, locally. But it made it worse. We're close enough to California that one (not alll, but one) of the drivers of the housing problem is educated, professional people whose anchors are set at $1.5 million for a flophouse moving in with all cash for $600-$700K for houses that sold for $150K a decade ago. A booming economy is also attracting highly educated, UMC earners. It's not the totality of the housing problem, which is a young and growing population and not enough houses (31,000 short.)

The problem is that for lots of people with roots here, one of the assumptions was that housing was always going to be very, very cheap, so the rough plan to finish high school, do a mission, get married/buy a house/have two or three kids while the man goes to college/works full-time or part-time would work out just fine. shiv has coworkers that are living in their parents' basement with their wife and two kids and one on the way. They are not going to be able to afford a house in this environment (and there's often no family help beyond 'you can live in our ADU.') Or that housing near the universities would be a couple hundred a month (places now going for a couple of thousand.) The income just isn't there, but it's not making demand fall because the rest of the country has money and wants to live near the outdoors. Once the Great Salt Lake dries up that will probably change but the climate catastrophe probably has bigger effects than real estate.

We had an all electric house growing up (no gas or oil, electric furnace and water heater). I don't recall what the panel was like.

He was explicitly not talking about why people start smoking:

I don't think his sentence is explicit either way, and I think you're choosing to interpret ambiguous phrasing in a way that makes his argument weaker. An explicit sentence would read like "The reason people continue smoking after they've begun is that smoking is cool." That is simply not what he said.

What's absurd about your take is that it's completely uncontroversial to say that American culture has generally valorized smoking as looking cool, and that this causes people to take up smoking, which is then addictive. It's an utter commonplace. MY writes something that in is no way in conflict with that statement, and people like you try to insist he said something different that they can disagree with. It's not in his text, but it could be, and that's close enough. And then you double down! Explicit, my ass.

I mean the problem is that not only does your city have a shortfall in new construction, *everywhere* does. Palo Alto should have 1m more residents. There should be a second Denver-sized city on the Front Range, etc. etc. It's true that your city on its own is going to struggle to make up the massive size of the missing housing on its own, but still you need a lot more housing.

Denver is hard to breathe in if it's winter.

This isn't exactly a hobbyhorse of mine, but I'm not sure people, including ones who talk about electrification, appreciate just how much bigger domestic panels need to get in an all-electric world. Stove, pump, water, and car are 40-50 amps each.

Being able to plug in your electric car is also going to take a few amps.

Denver is like cigarettes.

I have a friend who is apoplectic moving into despair about how this is killing theater and music by wiping out the venues and audiences for beginners.

Hooboy, I'm really dubious about this take. Was there really a point in any of our lifetimes that residents of (say) Pittsburgh found NYC and DC just prohibitively difficult to access, and so patronized local theater out of sheer necessity?

I think very, very few people travel primarily to see theater, and I think very few of those people refuse to see anything but Broadway shows on Broadway. People have always visited NYC as tourists, and for at least 120 years a visit to NYC has often included seeing show. I'm going to need a LOT of evidence that this longstanding dynamic has changed in such a material way that it's causing local theater new harm in the present and very recent past.

IMO it's much more parsimonious to say that people have more options for leisure time and dollars than ever before, and that few, if any, legacy entertainments have held on to their former share. I mean, sports attendance, movies, and (I think) live music are all down. Why would theater need its own special explanation?

Once the Great Salt Lake dries up that will probably change

Wait, what does the lake have to do with anything? I thought the outdoor stuff was skiing/mountains, and surely the lake isn't drinking water. Or am I egregiously misinformed?

Once the lake is gone, the salt in the lake will blow all over the city.

153 is a key point. Part of my early skepticism about YIMBYism was that it was very focused on about a dozen outlier cities, but as time has gone on, it's been fairly clear that building new housing is too hard almost everywhere, and so even cities like Pittsburgh, with no meaningful population growth since the '40s, have seen significant increases in housing costs. If the only cheap housing is in completely failed cities like Youngstown or red states like (parts of) TX, then you have a broadly unsustainable situation across the country.

One thing I'm not sure people get is that, when supply is inelastic, it takes only a little excess demand to drive prices extremely high. It's a bit like traffic flow, where it's steady up to ~80% of capacity, then becomes bumper to bumper with just a few more percent. There's a reason 5% vacancy rate was historically a very low, even concerning, number: you need excess capacity to have a smoothly functioning market.

135: POANCH-kee, more or less

Yeah, but that's not obvious from those letters.

Wait, what does the lake have to do with anything?

As I understand it, the Great Salt Lake is becoming the new Aral Sea, complete with toxic wind-blown salt dust. I have friends there looking at moving out before it gets too bad.

It's because the a is actually ą, which is pronounced quite differently.

I guess translations from Polish were done before phonics was invented.

Hence why Lodz is pronounced, infuriatingly, Woodge.

149- thanks, I just called an electrician who said he can put in the stove outlet. I mentioned we only had 100A service and he asked what else we have which is just lights, outlets, kitchen fridge/freezer, basement chest freezer, electric dryer, and it wasn't clear if he thought we needed to increase service. If we do I'll ask about, what, 400A? If we eventually get solar panels how does that work- does it feed into the same box so whether the power comes from panels or outside do you need the same high amperage breaker box?
Our house is so old I don't know if all this electrification is going break something else. We still have old bits of knob and tube running in the floorboards although I'm pretty sure all the feeds to our apartment were de-energized in a previous renovation. The downstairs until (separate electric service) probably still has some active thought.

Oh yeah in summer we have ~4 window AC units, probably should have mentioned that.

Sz is pronounced sh in Polish and s in Hungarian, while s is pronounced sh in Hungarian and s in Polish, yet proponents of both will tell you that they are pronounced exactly the way they are spelled. That's without even mentioning diacritical marks.

And don't get me started on the double-long.

164, 165: Early printed Slavic texts used usually German type with improvised diacriticals:
https://imagines.manuscriptorium.com/loris/AIPDIG-NKCRSKT_57_P_2761_3X893F4-cs/ID0006/full/full/0/default.jpg

Spelling in early Slavic manuscript texts is pretty variable, as with I think other languages-- the cartoon description is that print introduced standardization that killed dialects, though of course events off the page helped a lot also. I know a little more about the French and English versions of this than Czech or Polish, beyond some spelling changes than happened in Czech around then. I bet Spain was pretty interesting, does anyone know much about early Spanish vernacular writing? Was there an Iberian dialect of Arabic?

Kind of related, my grandma always called sauce "subo". But she always said she was saying "supo". But for various reasons, I think her family came from a village is Sicily where everyone had a speech impediment.

Isn't that the same consonant change that turns capocolo into gabagool? Your grandmother just came from the same part of Sicily that also populated Jersey and the Bronx.

This isn't exactly a hobbyhorse of mine, but I'm not sure people, including ones who talk about electrification, appreciate just how much bigger domestic panels need to get in an all-electric world. Stove, pump, water, and car are 40-50 amps each. And while you don't have to size for all 4 happening at once, you do have to size for 100% of the first two, then 80% of the next, then ~70% of the fourth (or something like that; I had to look it up for something a few weeks ago, but it's not my expertise). I don't think local distribution lines are adequate in places that rely on FF for home heating.

Yeah, this is an underappreciated point and part of the reason grid upgrades are so crucial for seriously transforming the energy system. It's really space heating more than appliances or even cars that puts a real strain on grids not designed for that load.

172: Same difference .

I bet Spain was pretty interesting, does anyone know much about early Spanish vernacular writing? Was there an Iberian dialect of Arabic?

There definitely was, and there were also dialects of Spanish written in Arabic script, as well as Ladino, written in Hebrew characters.

Yes, there's poetry we have written in Andalusian Arabic.

Writing poetry in actual Spanish is cheating because finding rhymes is too easy.

Elias Canetti's first language was Ladino. Your random, semi-connected fact of the hour.

167: 400 might be overkill, but if the difference isn't too great, it would certainly cover you for any foreseeable contingency. For the loads you list, 200 is almost certainly inadequate--I'm a little surprised you've never tripped anything running 4 ACs plus the dryer.

You're correct that the solar doesn't change anything: everything runs through the panel, so it's not as if you can dedicate the solar to car recharging without affecting anything else (or rather, you can, with Tesla's battery thingamadoo, but that's an edge case, and the car isn't your biggest draw anyway). Conceivably you could do a smaller service drop from the utility, but I think that's needlessly complicated to attempt (what I'm suggesting is running X from the solar plus 400-X from the utility; should be possible in theory, but unlikely worthwhile and possibly illegal).

As long as all your heavy loads are running on newly wired circuits, the bigger system shouldn't have any impact at all on the old wiring. It's the draw that sets the flow, not the capacity on the other end, just like increasing the pressure doesn't get you a harder shower once you've reached the capacity of the showerhead.

It's really space heating more than appliances or even cars that puts a real strain on grids not designed for that load.

Instant water heaters have astonishing draws. The numbers were so big that I went back and recalculated W=V*A because I thought I must be getting it wrong. In a large family/McMansion situation, you might need literally 100A of capacity committed to nothing but hot water.

In general I find the energy abundance message very appealing (despite being personally committed to a conservation mindset), but we need to pair electrification with some sort of demand reduction* or we'll just never catch up.

*and it's not just, or really at all, "insulate more": the gap between a somewhat retrofitted old house and a new, code-compliant one is much smaller than between the latter and a Passivhaus. That's part of the point of "replacement windows are pointless": triple glazed windows are worth the money if they mean your HVAC really only runs for ventilation, not temperature control, but if it's the difference between running your furnace 12 hours a day or 10, who cares? It's when you radically downsize equipment that your envelope upgrades pay off.

When we had electric water heaters, they had a tank.

173. "Socialism equals Soviet power plus electrification" (Lenin) probably didn't sound so barking mad in 1920. Every generation seems to believe that their new technologies will create Utopia. How long until we can agree that the existence of useful technologies guarantees nothing, but exclusive reliance on them more or less guarantees failure.

Our post office is flying an MIA/POW flag along with the regular flag. This is nonstandard, right?

183: I'll look it up, but I think it's federally authorized if not necessarily required. MIA/POW, despite being the QAnon of its day, got and kept federal recognition.

Required on six specific days of the year! Not today though.

The reg says "The only flags to be displayed at postal facilities are the flag of the United States of America, the Postal Service flag, the POW-MIA flag," and flags related to USPS programs, but never state or local flags. It seems to encompass flying the POW-MIA flag optionally at times other than those six days.

Weird!

My apartment has no heat in the bathroom or kitchen and poor insulation everywhere, and is especially chilly near windows. That's actually not so bad because the bathroom gets sunlight (and is really hot when it's hot outside) and the kitchen is warm enough for cooking, which of course also warms it up. But the poor insulation means that the vent heating in the heated rooms isn't as effective as it could be.

Counterintuitively, the poor performance of the heating might help me save energy because after trying out some high settings* that I would normally choose only when I'm chilled and running a fever I've settled on keeping the heat lower and wearing warmer clothing. Plus I shifted where I work from home to a window that gets a lot of sun.**

* I guess the heater has a thermostat in the sense that the interface shows temperature readings, but the temperature varies so much within the apartment that the numbers feel as meaningful as "high" or "low". I would probably keep things around 70-72 in the winter if I could actually have that level. My tolerance is more for heat than cold so I tend to use more heat than A/C, if I have access to A/C. Anyway, I tried setting the heat to 78 and it was still chilly and felt very wasteful. Whereas 78 or even 80 feel fine for me for A/C and I don't even turn it on unless it's really hot.

** The window seat does get chilly pretty quickly once the sun drops.

One of our bathrooms and our kitchen have no heat which is against code and the inspector when we were buying said that it was considered good enough because you could turn on the stove or run the shower with hot water to heat up the room.

The latter seems remarkably inefficient.

Not if you let it pool on the floor instead of going down the drain.

I've wondered if my building is exempt from code or if it's warm enough here year-round that heat isn't required. The kitchen doesn't have a door from the living room just an opening that's wider than a doorway but narrow enough that the kitchen is still a separate room. I put up a curtain to help retain the heat in the living room but maybe someone would say it's preventing heat from reaching the kitchen.

Code can vary by state and even by city.

Scott Alexander has Yglesias' number

The law changed in 2020. Its required all days now, not just six days.

I'm pretty disappointed in Elizabeth Warren for sponsoring that nonsense.

Whaaaaaaat? Elizabeth Warren made the post office fly the crazytown flag every day of the year??? I'm a little bit horrified. Was this a thing everyone knew about her? Is there some obvious constituency?

Does the flag only refer to the idea that the missing were prisoners kept after the war by Vietnam? There were prisoners of war and it was very harsh imprisonment. And there were missing, just like every other war.

It originally referred to a much crazier and totally inaccurate conspiracy theory, but I think now it's just become a generic "support our troops" type thing.

I think there was a problem but Sylvester Stallone fixed it.

That's the one where he thanked the Mujahideen for help right?

The one before that.

"Walk Hard" is an objectively good song.

Speaking of musicians and the Vietnam War, I just learned that Jim Morrison's dad was in charge of the U.S. naval forces at the Gulf of Tonkin.

"Support the troops" is what most people associate it with, and the law that established its official use in 1990 did hedge plenty and on paper avoid legitimizing the conspiracy, but the same law designated the flag as the National League of POW/MIA Families, which I think used to feed the conspiracy, although they may have chilled at some point (their current website says prominently there are a total 1,581 missing and unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War, which is far below what the big conspiracists would have said).

Oh okay. So in 40 years we can just expect mainstream QAnon-branded stuff opposing human trafficking and encouraging media literacy and research skills. I guess I'll allow it. Never going to stop looking askance at the Thin Blue Line flag, though.

So in 40 years we can just expect mainstream QAnon-branded stuff opposing human trafficking and encouraging media literacy and research skills.

I don't know about expecting it, but if that happens and means that QAnon doesn't otherwise happen in politics, I'd call it a win.

I have been quietly seething over the MIA-POW flag for ages -- there's a NYC law that requires it to be flown in parks. And it just burns me that being floridly, belligerently irrational on a subject for long enough means that reasonable people will give up fighting about it and pretend you had a point. I'm not holding the post office thing against Wareen, particularly, I figure it was probably part of some deal and was worth it. But I hate it, still.

This has more about laundromats than any movie I've seen mentioned as a potential Oscar candidate.

I seethe about that flag every time I see it. We have a flagpole at the geographic center of our city that has the US flag, the POW flag below it, and the state flage below that. How this dumb jolly-roger pirate-ass looking military propaganda flag gets pride of place above the state flag I don't understand.

I see that _My Beautiful Laundrette_ got an Oscar nomination: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Beautiful_Laundrette

(I haven't seen, and reading the description I realize I didn't have a good sense of the movie beyond the title)

Raccoonnie is a nice bit of writing.

Raccacconnie?

210: one of my absolute favorites from my adolescence. I don't know if that's a justifiable position now, as always.

Sorry, raccaccoonie.

Wait. That's Short Round?

I guess the moral of the story is when an Asian American talks about how difficult things are with their parents or children, I should believe them.

211-216: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once?

210 Hanuf Kureishi had a bad fall I think that has left him paralyzed. His Twitter feed is worth checking out.

It's stunning how much damage you can do to yourself just falling down once you're past a certain age. My brother, who just turned 50 last summer, fainted and fell in his house when he was sick last year and completely shredded his rotator cuff and had to have his bicep stapled back on (among other injuries).

219 I'm in a PT session as I type this for recovery from surgery after falling and destroying my PCL and fucking up some other shit

217:: Unless they try to sell a time share.

Jeremy Renner fell so badly he lost a leg.

Too soon?

219 I'm in a PT session as I type this for recovery from surgery after falling and destroying my PCL and fucking up some other shit

How is that going?

In general my wrist recovery has been quite good, but I've definitely reached the point where PT is more work for less results and it's a little dispiriting (even though I know, intellectually, it's important to keep doing it).

I have a similar issue. If I keep doing the stretches the PT gave me, I don't have hip pain. But I deeply resent that on top of everything else I got to do just maintain the status quo, I have to stretch for ten minutes a day just to be without pain. I would like to go back to "no pain" as a default.

217 I assume everyone reading these words has seen it. It's so gratifying seeing this one get attention at awards time, and both the lead and supporting speeches at the Globes were right on point.

225: I have a similar experience with my shoulders.

Great. I didn't even think about screwing up joints in my upper body.

226: Yes, both of the Golden Globes speeches are worth watching. I found Ke Huy Quan's speech very emotionally effecting.

I thought it was O.K. But Walk Hard was better and didn't blur out the penises.

I assume everyone reading these words has seen it.

I saw the first 1/3 of it! Does that count?

230: But did that have competitive anal plugging?

No spoilers.

224 It had been going great until Thursday night when I must have turned in my sleep wrong and done some kind of weird damage to it. Some positions and exercises that I did just fine before now hurt like hell. So no exercises during today's PT session and I'll be seeing the surgeon soon.

If you had a problem after ophthalmological surgery or if you didn't, you'd still say "I won't be seeing the surgeon tomorrow."

225: I am glad I have more or less retired so I have time for all my physical therapy. The latest was caused by deciding to get a bicycle after having not ridden one since I was a teenager. After a month I started having shoulder, arm, hand, and back problems such that I couldn't sleep at night due to the pain so was sent to the therapist again. I told her my symptoms and first she asks if I have a bicycle. Then she asks if I have ever had a neck injury. Well, yes and yes, I had a neck injury way back in 1977 but it has never bothered me. She says, classic symptoms, no bike for you. So I am back to walking everywhere. The good thing about walking versus riding is that you usually don't have to worry about someone stealing your shoes while you are in the store.

I completely bounced off Everything Everywhere All At Once - got about 30-40 minutes in and gave up. Just... stopped caring about what happened.

It's very rare for me to do that, though I notice it's happening more and more with award-winning films - same for The Power of the Dog, same for Don't Look Up. I just realise that I don't care about any of the characters and I don't really want to know what happens next in the plot, and it isn't even particularly visually interesting.

it isn't even particularly visually interesting.

This seems like a strange thing to say about EEAAO, though I suppose it gets more interesting later on.

238: it doesn't apply so much to EEAAO, though certainly in the bit I saw there didn't seem to be anything that absolutely leapt out at you visually. I've seen Michelle Yeoh fight people in films before, she's really good at it?
I was thinking more that there are some films where you keep watching just for the spectacle, even if the plot and characters aren't up to much.

Gosh, I sure did like EEAAO. I've seen it several times. Now I'm at the stage of re-watching where I'm counting obscure bagel references.

But I can't comment any more because I have to go to physical therapy. I am in general a big fan of PT, but my therapist is a bit judgmental.

232 to 237.

I was very fond of EEAAO, which I attributed to it being unusually targeted toward the irascible and often unreasonable middle-aged woman demographic -- I feel like there just aren't many movies that squarely aimed at menopausal jerks. (Redeemable jerks, but jerks.)

I've seen it twice, big screen both times. I've been more interested in the characters and the story, but honestly I'm also not tired of watching MY's dancing/fighting and have been re-watching various of her films.

Some positions and exercises that I did just fine before now hurt like hell. So no exercises during today's PT session and I'll be seeing the surgeon soon.

Eek; fingers crossed that you recover quickly.

I'm also not tired of watching MY's dancing/fighting

Moment of confusion because the thread was originally about Saiselgy.

I bet even ajay could be persuaded to watch a film with Yeoh vs. Saiselgy.

I would probably be a pretty short film.

I liked EEAAO all right, but it didn't grab me in the way that the hype led me to expect. A lot of fun, though - a superhero story with a middle-aged mom as the hero!

It got hyped as a martial arts movie or a superhero movie -- and it was both -- but it was also a movie about how we should live our lives in a meaningless universe.

By being understanding of our children though. That's like a ton of work.

The movie does offer the option of beating the hell out of them.

But it's clearly saying that would be a bad idea.

I mean, Scooby-Doo presents using fake ghosts to obtain cheap real estate. But you've missed the point if you thing that's a good plan after watching.

I dunno. He would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids.

That's easier for them to think than the obvious 'My plan was so dumb that a guy in an ascot figured it out.'