EverythingIsFine's profile

EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 1d ago

I found out last weekend that I apparently have a personal connection of sorts. My aunt, wheelchair bound with a rare and extremely limiting disease, has for years built LEGO sets as her main hobby. I mean hundreds if not thousands of sets. Her dad, my grandfather, died recently, and life is tough. She apparently also does consignment in a local BaM store (franchised) with lovely local owners to resell them after she builds them, which is part of what makes the hobby work. If BaM go under, or even if the bad business reputation spreads, her main hobby might die. Pretty sad. I’m sure there are lots of franchisees that are pissed about corporate’s handling of everything.

But yeah, I think a lot of commentators are projecting. BaM is not some evil mega conglomerate. It’s still basically a mediumish business. And what really gets me about the whole thing is that the GoFundMe for the dude raised probably double what the legos were actually worth, yet the internet mob continued without pausing for even a second to assess things from multiple POVs.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 1d ago

Everyone In This LEGO Dispute Should Have Spoken To A Lawyer Earlier Than They Did says Techdirt and I’m inclined to agree.

The deeper structural problem here — one that Leonard French articulates better than I can — is that the US legal system has a genuine dead zone around mid-five-figure disputes. Too big for small claims (even with Schneider’s claim splitting exploit), too small to justify the cost of a full civil suit, it’s exactly the range where a well-resourced defendant can make a calculated bet that the other side will run out of money or patience before getting justice. That’s a feature of the system Bricks & Minifigs happened to exploit, but is not unique to them.

I found that insight noteworthy. Simultaneously, this range of cases is not only legally/financially a bit of a crapshoot but usually these players are among the least sympathetic so they don’t really have strong advocates for reform

The answer to that structural problem shouldn’t be “find a YouTuber willing to go to ridiculous lengths to get attention on this issue.” Though in 2026, that does appear to be working better than most alternatives — at least in the court of public opinion, where the verdict has already come in decisively on the side of Mansell and Schneider. That’s a real problem for Bricks & Minifigs and every one of their ~300 franchisees, regardless of how the legal cases resolve. You don’t get to un-become the lego store that allegedly stole an old man’s retirement collection. That story is going to follow this brand around for a long time.

None of this had to go this way. A competent lawyer on either side, at almost any point in this saga, probably changes the outcome significantly. Instead, both sides made calculated bets — Bricks & Minifigs that the costs of fighting would deter anyone from trying, and Schneider that going maximally viral would substitute for having an actual legal strategy. The first bet nearly worked. The second is still being litigated, in multiple senses of that word.

I think the police thing is in a certain sense a red herring and just rage bait especially since Mormons as a group are easily hateable and says more about policing than it does Utah specifically. Police being dicks is well known. Police jumping to conclusions and then defending them irrationally is well known. Police being tragically ignorant of laws is well known, and so is the fact that they have pretty idiosyncratic and often infuriating responses to “this is a civil matter”. Police occasionally defending a buddy is well known (but I’ve seen zero evidence beyond the bare basics circumstantial type to indicate this was the case).

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 1d ago

A company spending a crapton of money on Claude is good news for Anthropic, it means they have an addictive product, financially speaking. I don’t get why you’re spinning it as evidence against them.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 1d ago

Meta (Facebook) actually stands out as the one who might lose the most. They’ve invested heavily in AI with almost nothing to show for it and I think it might substantially unbalance their books.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 1d ago

Actually, no! I really like how this article, a book review, summarizes it:

[Goodspeed] wants to see if the data supports theoretical accounts of recessions that locate the cause of the downturn in the preceding expansion. His antagonists are two celebrated Austrians: first Friedrich Hayek… whose prominent account of business cycles rivaled Keynes’s in the 1930s; and second, Joseph Schumpeter, who saw in recessions the opportunity to sort out the mistakes and misallocations of the boom. Goodspeed’s main goal in the 200 or so pages of the book is to ask whether the data supports these theories, or their modern variants, or whether it is consistent with a much simpler story. The short answer is no.

…Goodspeed shows that British and American expansions do not resemble Dorian Gray, looking beautiful but hiding an inevitable accumulation of malinvestments (objectively bad investments that are destined to fail) and distorted decisions (mistaken economic decisions taken on the basis of bad regulation or flawed prices) that make a correction inevitable. If they did so, he argues, one would expect that as expansions get longer they get more and more likely to end. In his data, however, the relationship between the age of an expansion and the probability of death is essentially zero. Nor do measures of increased investment during the boom correlate with the severity of a downturn. Nor do longer expansions have longer recessions after them.

This is why recessions remain essentially unpredictable. Any perceived regularity is likely to be a statistical illusion.

On top of all this, he finds no evidence that recessions are corrective. Reallocations tend to happen more aggressively during expansions not contractions, contrary to the arguments that Joseph Schumpeter famously made. Similarly, he finds that contrary to common belief recessions tend not to be contagious but rather are mostly patriotic, usually confined to a single country like the modest 2001 downturn in the US (which did not spread to the UK).

I also find myself in strong agreement with the reviewer:

Personally, Recession strengthened my prior beliefs that policymakers simply don’t have enough information to even distinguish between a robust expansion and a speculative bubble in real time, let alone the tools to safely tame any bubbles that they did find. Rule-based monetary policy, which allows market participants to form stable expectations about what its response will be, while still allowing flexibility in the event of shocks, might be the best we can hope for. Here Goodspeed’s advice is sensible: policymakers should first do no harm before thinking that they have the ability to entirely tame the business cycle.

In short: crashes happen, but attempting to pop them early can only do more harm than good.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 18d ago

Ah yes, the famous "frontier thesis". Interesting to me that this thesis is not actually a modern invention, it dates back to 1893, only three years after the frontier 'officially' faded into nonexistence.

But I do think it's a decent one. There aren't many places and times in history where you could legitimately say "don't like it? Pack up and leave!" and you literally could just leave to somewhere without much rule of law, but still survive. And like, two of them are intertwined with US history.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 18d ago

Yeah, and furthermore for calculus we all still pay the price because limits are honestly only taught as a holdover from that attempt to prove to other math people calculus was legit. You don't actually need an understanding of limits at all for nearly anything you do in calculus, but the big standardized tests include it so everyone is forced to teach it anyways.

Also IIRC neither Laplace nor Gauss were the actual very first dudes to propose the Normal distribution, that was actually de Moivre as a binomial approximation (who ALSO got robbed of Poisson distribution naming rights). Though Laplace was doubly a reputational victim, since he furthermore got robbed of credit somewhat because he was the dude who did most of the work with Bayesian statistics and inference much like he did for calculus. Sir Bayes didn't even publish his stuff himself. And Laplace did most of the cleanup work for Newton's gravitational theories.

But yeah, naming in math and science is a bit of a mess.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 19d ago

So, since Colbert is now off CBS, first of all he hosted a really quite funny hourlong program on local community access in Michigan, hosting an hour of "Only in Monroe". This reminded me in parts of when he was, well, more funny - on the Colbert Report in particular, which I have fond memories of. So to have a little time capsule, let's go back and watch an episode from 12 years ago! Also two years after a re-election of an influential president now a good portion into their second term, but it's Obama this time around. Link (best I could find) and cleaned transcript

I find it an interesting mini-window into the happenings of the culture war! There's some good stuff here, Colbert Report never fails to get a laugh from me.

First we have a report about Chinese cyperspies who had charges filed after hacking five US companies and stealing solar secrets. In retrospect, China totally got away with this one, which was IMO a significant Obama admin failure. More topically for use, we have a somewhat racist joke! Yes, for those of you know might not know, Colbert plays a parody of a conservative in this show, so sometimes being offensive is part of the joke - honestly I thought he did a really nice job of straddling the line overall to keep both the comedy and honestly offer some criticism along the way (and not all of it hits Republicans, of course!) But it's still interesting that in this era Colbert can still get away with it. 2014 isn't actually peak woke, you might say.

Yes, cyber spies! It's like a regular spy but instead of a tuxedo you wear an adventure time t-shirt with nacho stains. (laughter) The Justice Department has put out this wanted poster to help us identify these dangerous online criminals. So look for it at the post office, when you go pick up your email, (laughter) and it's a true rogue's gallery. For instance, Gui Chunhui -- who also goes by the alias KandyGoo [sic], a clever way to pass for an American, name yourself after our two most popular foods -- and the infamous Wang Dong, whose name in English translates to Peter Johnson, Jr. (laughter)

It is about time they nailed Wang Dong! I get email offers from Wang Dong all the time, and the pills he sold me never arrived. Now how will she call me Mr. Pleasure at sight of extraordinary power manhood? In an attempt to give an edge to Chinese industries, these guys stole trade secrets from corporations like Westinghouse, U.S. Steel, Alcoa, and the renewable energy company SolarWorld. Of course, the Chinese can't do their own solar research since they no longer have access to the sun. (laughter)

Folks, this is a major threat to our financial future. The Chinese already know how to manufacture all our electronics. Now they're trying to learn how to design them. If they also figure out how to buy them and drop them in the toilet when they're drunk, America will have no role in the world economy!

So in a way it didn't age well twice! Or maybe just once. I don't think the jokes were that mean-spirited. And then we have Hillary Clinton show up as a topic! Yes, she's getting ready to run at this point in time. Karl Rove alleges she has brain damage. Some news clips are played alleging that Republicans are scared of her running so they are trying to talk her out of it or throw water on the idea. There's some jokes about how they aren't going to take it easy on her for being a woman, and jokes about TV Republicans hitting their wives. And a dated primary preview!

Point is, if we're going to stop Hillary, nothing is out of bounds. We have to be completely vicious to her, because the only alternative is running a candidate people like. Jim, who do we have on the bench?

[News clip] Senator Rand Paul is the early frontrunner for Republicans in 2016. [News clip] Mike Huckabee jumped to the head of the pack. [News clip] Rick Perry. Chris Christie. Senator Marco Rubio talking 2016 --

[Stephen] Oh, my God... (laughter) We've got to hit her hard!

Thank God the rest of these losers aren't running again, except for, well, Rubio of course. I can't wait to see clips of his debate meltdown circulate again. Also, bit of a prescient call by Colbert about the tone of things?

In a glimpse of Comedy Central's 2014 America, we then have a Tosh.0 ad, a hard cider ad, a $40/mo T-Mobile 4G LTE data plan ad (500MB cap! unlimited talk and text!), an ad for the Edge of Tomorrow movie, an Infiniti car ad, honestly a pretty cool Sapporo premium beer ad, a California Great America theme park ad.

After the break? A news item about Europe proposing a "right to be forgotten" to Google and such. Whatever happened to this? Apparently, Google (heh) tells me that basically it got limited to European visibility, and only for names; so nothing disappears on the US or worldwide side of the Web. But I will say, corporations are much much better at doing this than people seem to be. However, I think there's still a healthy market for reverse-SEO, though with AI stuff who knows how this will pan out in a few more years.

We then have an Inside Amy Schumer ad, a decent lengthy Apple ad for the iPad Air with a Dead Poet's Society tie-in and one with a travel blogger, a Sharpie ad, a Bacardi liquor ad, an American Express bank ad, a Dignity Health ad introducing the ability to wait for your appointment via online scheduling, a Fiat x Godzilla movie crossover ad, and a one second flash of a lingerie ad that gets cut off. Honestly it doesn't seem like ads have changed all that much. Although modern ads maybe lean a bit too hard into overdone, overplayed "skits" rather than more "cinematic" type ads?

Finally, in a bit that will interest some people here, we had the creator of Mad Men hosted, going in to Part 1 of the final season (yes apparently splitting up the second season to milk it was a thing even back in 2014 at least). Although he claims it was a scheduling issue. IDK man. Anyways:

It's been on for seven seasons. Let me summarize what happened: Don smoked, banged everything on the Eastern Seaboard, sold California, sold some soap, was grim about it. And smoked some more. Is he a criticism of the American male? Because I'm an American male, and should I be taking this personally?

[Weiner] I don't think it's meant as a negative thing. I always sort of thought that he was about the sort of split message that the American male gets: that you are told that you -- to be attractive -- on the one hand, you have to be, like, you know, Little League coach and, like, P.T.A. guy, great husband, great dad. On the other hand, you are supposed to smoke as much, drink as much, and get laid as much as possible.

[Stephen] And get the other guy. [Matthew Weiner] And be carnivorous in business. [Stephen] Right. Those two things. I'm always surprised how much people get off on him winning, but I don't judge him at all. None of this is supposed to be a judgment of the audience. I was afraid he was judging me. When the show started, he was a shiny object, fun, sexy, but as it goes on, he becomes an even more complex character. Why present something complex? Why can't I just be kind of fun and sexy, you know, good-looking guy, and then take all that inner life and just keep it down until one day it just kills me, and then, you know, my loved ones read my letters and cry forever? (laughter)

[Weiner] That is the theory. What you just described is a good theory. [Stephen] This is 1969. [Weiner] Yeah.

I never watched Mad Men, but I know it had at least some impact. Some allege it impacted fashion and brought back some of the furniture and suit aesthetic, cocktails, and I'm sure it had some impact on gender narratives, or at the very least promoted a certain view of historical gender narratives. Thankfully I don't think it really brought back smoking as something cool, although it possibly coincided with the Juul vape wave a year or so later. Is there really a duality in male expectations? Yeah, kinda. You need to be safe, but then also randomly dangerous with swagger at other times. And you need to be oozing confidence in business.

So, anyways, what did we learn from our glance into the past? Well it's just a point in time, but an effectively random one. It's interesting to me how evergreen some of these issues and situations are, in a sense. Worries about cybercrime, nation-state hacking campaigns, industrial espionage against the US, the struggles of the social media age and privacy. A Democrat that seems poised to sweep the primary field early on having laid a ton of groundwork (Newsom), against a grab-bag of unlikable Republicans, who might have a dark horse jump in later on and upend things (TBD, but I sort of think there's a decent chance the nominee isn't Rubio or Vance! not a great chance but maybe 30%?). Is there a prominent TV show right now that talks about masculinity in any big sense? I don't really think so. Ted Lasso sort of presented an alternate vision, Succession had a bit to say, Yellowstone maybe theoretically but it's I think too soapy to really count. I think it's fair to say that the media culture has fragmented significantly since the mid-2010s, at least it feels that way?

(Also, is Mad Men worth watching?)

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 19d ago

Well it's probably not the right spot to have this convo/for me to have asked but I appreciate the reply. If I had to concisely respond I'd say that

political hate isn't new and I'm skeptical of "no promise this time it actually is the worst ever"
control of institutional machinery of the state also has historically swapped often (even in the literal political spoils system era!) and we were fine-ish
procedural manipulation is literally inherent in the job of government, for example the entire system where we elect DAs is quite straightforwardly a matter of codified selective enforcement to begin with
I think even in terms of social fabric there's decent evidence that many alleged Woke converts were pressured into it all along and so if it goes even more out of style we'll see some "snapback"
Most importantly I still fail to see how you make the jump from conservatives being like, even at their worst a good 40+% of the population, to "extinction".

Perhaps the best simple question would then be, that would have the most revealing answer, is how do you really define extinction? I do happen to think Trump is dangerous to the system and so by rough analogous positions I don't particularly begrudge anyone who feels threatened by Woke or whatever you call it, but there's a bit of a difference in magnitude between "we're headed for a lost decade politically as the minority party" and "we will go extinct". Apologies if there's some conflation here between bipolar political parties and Woke vs [its opposite or neutral POV] as more general movements or ideologies, but since you framed it as being "ruled" I think that's relevant.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago

As someone with mild technocratic leanings, I think there's a pretty good case to be made that establishment figures do "do things", but the timescales of these actions don't fit with what the populace idealizes them to be. Trump is in this sense accurately depicted as a monkey who wants what he wants right now, and commits stupid mistakes due to this impatience, which is not a virtue but a weakness. And catnip to GOP voters, I think, that they will regret. Most politicians aren't willing to make stupid decisions for temporary electoral success and that's a good thing.

As an example, inflation and housing costs which you brought up. These things very patently cannot be driven down by quick actions, try as you might. One of the most effective tools according to many is zoning policy, and zoning policy has a very strong inbuilt "lag" in how it affects things. For example, a bureaucrat in Florida where I used to live made a law that any apartment building over 3 stories must have an elevator. Notably, any apartment building two stories or less also doesn't require fancy fire-suppression systems. Small rules! Not one that the electorate notice! But fast-forward a decade or two and there is a very characteristic and specific mix and ratio of designs and setups for 2- and 3-story apartment buildings that anyone will notice and has a massive impact you cannot possibly understate on housing affordability and living patterns.

As a trivial and overdone example but one that is nonetheless true, Trump has probably singlehandedly and directly contributed to inflation I suspect on a similar order as the first Covid bailout bill simply due to rising gas prices and their knock-on effects attributable to his Iran adventure. If this is "doing things" I don't want it and I suspect the general populace won't either. I absolutely hate the popular idea of "low-information voters" (I think people are way smarter than they are given credit for even if some of this processing is subconscious and shows up in aggregate only) but in this limited sense I kind of do think it applies to GOP primary voters who are temporarily and aberrantly distracted by shiny "does things" that they might not (yet) realize the backside of it.

Maybe I'm provably wrong here but the upshot of the comments here seems to me to be something along those lines. I guess a somewhat testable point is maybe the next cycle of primaries in 2 years, if not the current generals, but we'll see.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago

Yes but I think it's also pretty compelling to say that having a child has a larger overall impact on your life than going to war (assuming you survive). The unlucky, if you'll forgive me for being blunt, get lifelong PTSD, but the median soldier is able to readjust and have a normal life, whatever that means. Vets aren't usually defined by being veterans, but parents often are. Having a child is a fundamental and ongoing reshuffling of priorities, has a major and durable impact on finances and lifestyle, sense of self-identity, and more. This point is obviously abused by pro-choice people, but they aren't wrong exactly, assuming no adoption option.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago

Obviously the classic liberal case for existential threats is pretty cogent - if elections in a democracy stop working then definitionally the democracy is under existential threat, this works out pretty cleanly. Let's set aside the accuracy of this claim for a second and just say that the claim itself makes total sense. What I'm having a bit of trouble fully articulating and maybe then you can help is what is the model for which Woke is existential in the other direction?

My understanding is something along the lines of "the Government Machinery will grind us into extinction via a thousand cuts if it remains subject to liberal institutional capture" but that's a bit of a vague claim with unclear mechanics, at least to me.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago · Edited 22d ago

I mean yes, I agree and that's my point, I was just invoking the contemporary association of communes with purely left-wing establishments. A strong association as another commenter very clearly demonstrated. Obviously I made my point poorly or else you wouldn't be making this comment and I wouldn't be downvoted. Although I'm pretty sure most of the downvotes are a knee-jerk reaction because they read my comment on a surface level and went "he's booing me! downvote!!"

To be clear what I find hilarious is that many conservatives for many years mocked hippie communes as delusional and bad qua communes, not due to their inherent hippie-ness; thus the current crop of conservatives "inventing" the exact same thing and defending it as "totally not a commune, because communes are dirty liberal inventions". This is called hypocrisy.

More broadly this is because conservatives, if you'll permit me to speak broadly (especially Christian conservatives), wanted to dominate society entirely. Thus from a position of power, local enclaves are a threat or aberration. They now realize they can't (or rather, that they failed, or lost control, or however it's framed), and thus have conveniently changed the goal back to "let's dominate local communities instead" and local enclaves are back on the menu as something praiseworthy.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago

I specifically invoked the rich American history of pre-60s communes on purpose, so it's a bit entertaining to me that you seized on hippie nudist communes anyways. These communes don't always follow a neat left-right divide on that longer timescale. For example, I'm Mormon - early Mormon communities went through at least two separate phases of highly communitarian living in the 1830s and 1860s and also didn't neatly fall into a nice grouping (and obviously religion itself if not consistently right vs left coded historically). Again not all of them are going to be explicitly "we have common property" but developing a tight-knit smaller community that rejects popular standards in various ways inherently requires a high degree of local coordination that is often extremely similar. "Communitarianism" doesn't actually require common property.

For example right now there are a few strains of various types of this "commune" type thought:

You have eco-crazies, who try and find carbon neutral or negative ways to live in harmony with the land and sustainability
You have a strain of modern liberals who want to set up the kinds of super-walkable, livable utopic urban centers, some of which promote "cohousing" and might pool childcare, meals, tools, greenspace, etc.
You have a few offshoots of various Christian hospitality houses, halfway houses, charities, etc. which can in some cases form loose communitarian associations
You have deliberately "trad" Christian and other non-religious conservative communities that pool homeschooling, might generate a local mini-economy, and emphasize physical closeness, homogeneity, or even exclusiveness
You have associated prepper types who gather together for the obvious practical benefits of living off-grid but with a little bit of community redundancy
You have a few libertarian projects that are technically diametrically opposed to collectivism but for practical reasons find it helpful to cluster together in order to consistently enforce (or decline to enforce, lol) norms friendly to libertarianism
You have the liberal-ish (OK I think this is mostly libertarian but I think it draws from the slightly left-leaning crowd within them) aligned "startup cities" like Prospera in Honduras
Some more extreme versions of "polycules" start to look awfully familiar to a longer more historical kind of "free love" society, even if they are inherently smaller-scale

Donald Trump himself suggested selling private land to "Freedom Cities" that aren't necessarily communistic but fit the vibe of "designed community/society" which isn't far off, during the 2024 election.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago

It's an interesting parallel that Republicans might fall victim to very similar forces that have caused historical trouble for the Democrats, where excessive local party control hurts quality and responsiveness

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago

Interesting catch there with the turnout. I'll be very interested to see if the GOP essentially "wastes" its window of appeal to the youth which was much discussed in the last few years.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 22d ago

A quick google was the source for the draft of 1863 yes, which was 3 years or the end of the war (whichever was first), which is obviously the right comparison because we're talking about a draft in the context of forcing men to do things against their will.

If you were a soldier in the North who signed up prior to the draft, it was highly dependent on when. Famously the first wave of volunteers only signed up for 90 days. And yes, many of them went home right after Bull Run when that expired and it became clear this might be bloody (which was a big issue). Pretty soon you could enlist for 3 years, standardized - which meant yes, you were stuck for 3 years (unless discharged) unless you were an officer who could technically resign a commission since you were not "enlisted" in the traditional sense. Still, this was a voluntary enlistment, not a draft, and "you can't leave the military once you join, at least for a while" is pretty normal historically, so I'm not ignoring them, they just aren't relevant to the point being made. Even then, it's notable that the enlistment duration was identical to the draft. If you signed up in 1861 and survived, you could go home in 1864, full stop (although of course, the army offered bounties and bonuses if you voluntarily re-enlisted). Sharp observers might notice that the draft was a thing right as the war was clearly ongoing for a while more and when the initial wave of 3-year enlistments running out would begin to be a concern - thus, a need for more men and obviously volunteers were largely tapped out by then.

The simple fact remains that the only post-WW2 era draft lasted 13 months which is orders of magnitude different from 18 years. Both are arguably full-time jobs.

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