EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
Go on a weekend trip to Puerto Rico!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
12d ago
It does exist! Claude code has plugins and skills: two popular ones along these lines are the “superpowers” plugin for something a bit more comprehensive and the “grill-me” skill for something more specialized, or the “feature-interview” skill for something that I think is built in.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d 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.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d 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).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d 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.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d 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.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d 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.
It’s literally just the very first shot, I think it primed people
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