Notices by Kim Scheinberg (kims@mas.to)

Perhaps one of the nicest things about having moved from NYC to Las Vegas?

Friends are landing at the airport right about now. I can leave my house in ten minutes and be pulling up curbside just as they arrive at the pick-up area.

Sure they could Uber it for $40, but I have an audiobook to listen to on the way there, and look forward to some nice chatting on the ride back.

All that, and I can still be in bed by 10pm.

On its best day NYC airport retrieval is a minimum three-hour commitment

@jalefkowit
I know this is some metaphysical bullshit that a lifelong atheist / rationalist like myself could never believe, but money earned doing ugly shit is tainted.

And yeah, you can give it away and uncontaminate yourself while doing some good in the world, but it never really quite washes off. Not all the way.

@infobeautiful
Bezos and Musk doing a lot to skew the wealth of Gen X here

There is an app on my laptop that is Michigan J Frogging me. About once an hour I can see it out of the corner of my eye doing ... something. Something appears or scrolls or blinks or changes. But when I look directly at it, it's still and silent

Alito: One the parties here is the owner of pornhub… Is it like the old Playboy magazine, you have essays there by the modern day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr?

Why yes, Sam. In order to access the hot stepmom-on-stepson action, you must first read essays by Catturd2 and LibsofTikTok then answer capcha questions proving you understood them...

https://www.newsweek.com/justice-alito-porhub-playboy-articles-supreme-court-2015993

So it turns out there are two acceptable answers to that question. As a child of the '70s in suburban New Jersey, this was what I understood to be a Maratthon Bar.

Cadbury in the UK calls this a Curly Wurly, and boy are they delicious

But also... Snickers? Really?

We put in a decent showing at trivia tonight, finishing third, just two points behind first. We changed a couple of correct answers which is always irritating, but we also switched out two wrong answers for correct ones at the last minute so I guess it balances out.

Fave question: the US famously discontinued the popular candy known as the Marathon Bar. What is this candy known by in the UK?

I think we were the only ones to get that one right.

@blogdiva @scalzi
I had this happen and the grief of betrayal was unbearable. And it wasn't just the loss of the friendship, but the loss of trust in myself.

For two years after the revelations I found myself saying, "How could I not have known? I must have known. Am I sure I didn't know? Was I willfully blind? I vouched for him. What's my complicity here?"

I withdrew from most of my friends because I carried so much unearned guilt and felt infected by my ex-friend's toxicity.

It's awful.

I grew up in an abusive household and, like many such kids, gravitated toward abusive people in adulthood. I've never been naive about sadists and sociopaths.

But I don't think our psyches were built for the never-ending assault of how persistent the need for cruelty is for some people, and how pervasive it is.

I know "the cruelty is the point" is nothing new. But I was unprepared for just how many people unapologetically feel that way. That I no longer see them as outliers is soul-crushing.

Last night my kid tried to persuade me that toast was something *other* than a transport mechanism for butter.

Where do they get these cockamamy ideas?

@matildazq
I went back and finished it and REALLY wish I hadn't. What I excerpted was in the bottom quintile of horrible. Even if 50% is lies and 80% is embellished, I think this bit says it all.

Imagine saying to your (then-ex) partner, "Not this one. She's too fragile." What are you confessing?

Maybe she's trying to prove to herself that he is redeemable, but a part of her has to know his kink is dominance and betrayal. Her ask is worse than meaningless, it's practically a dare.

I knew Gaiman was a monster, but I had to stop reading the Vulture piece after he rapes the 22-year-old virgin Amanda fed to him within hours of meeting her:

"Afterward, [she] crouched down in the water and tried to clean herself off. Gaiman looked at her and smiled. “‘Amanda told me I couldn’t have you,’” Pavlovich recalls him saying. As soon as he’d heard this, he “knew he had to have” her. “‘God,’” he continued, “‘I wish it were the good old days where we could both fuck you.’”

My friend Bob Stein submitted the following question to Claude, Google Gemini (2 different versions), Perplexity, Meta and Microsoft.

After asking the basic "please tell me what you know about the role of German industrialists in supporting Hitler and the Third Reich" he followed up with "can you draw any parallels to today, especially the roles of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in relation to the coming Trump presidency"

Claude and Google refused to engage but... props to Meta for honesty?

"I am all for Greek philosophers, but they lived in a sort of pre-scientific age, and many of them left no writings and are best remembered mainly for their most outrageous claims.
Actually that sounds a lot like us."
— Matt Levine 1/13/2017

It sounded almost charming when I sent it to a friend eight years ago. These days it's some mix of ominous and depressing. The discourse around the fires has reminded me that there is no love affair as potent as the one with the imagined moral high ground

pattern is one word for a system of relationships that somehow repeats itself across time or space. if we understand a pattern we know how to react to its various permutations, and won't keep getting fooled by its surface presentations. we also can look at the feedback loops of that pattern for strategic places to shift it.

for example, those of us who understand enshittification already blocked meta, lol. we don't have to wait for bad results, we understand how the pattern works

Ordering a New Yorker gift subscription for Mar a Lago immediately

@Holberg
David Linley? Or did you mean Lindley?

I'm 14 chapters into Fredrik Backman's _Anxious People_

The dedication page sets the tone and the book holds up nicely so far

Another day, another trip to the infectious disease doc. My BP is a concerning 84/65 but the hair is a perfect 110/70

@kjhealy
Please don't make me read past "My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein"

In 2011 I read the prospectus for his hedge fund, which went out of its way to note that he doesn't hedge. This was after finding this quote from a private wealth advisor in a Bloomberg piece:

"If he was Joe Hedge Fund Manager, he would have to live and die by his track record, but that's not the case with Peter ... Peter is not in the hedge-fund industry to get rich, he already is."

Clearly just a hobby...