The New Coffee Room

My dinner order tonight included the phrase, "Thai spicy and yes I'm serious about that."

They delivered as promised, which is why I started drafting this in the bathroom.

@Horace said in This number surprised me:

@Aqua-Letifer said in This number surprised me:

@Horace said in This number surprised me:

I've never been able to quite swallow the notion that joining the military constitutes a selfless personal sacrifice.

Watching you share that opinion at your local post would be interesting.

Unimpressive response.

Geez, tough room today.

Is it to say you disagree with my point, or just that you would find it interesting to watch me get beat up, or whatever your imagination projects onto that thought experiment? I mean, I don't plan on driving down to the local fort and bullhorning about how troops don't care about their country, but I just bet there are congenial ways to introduce the economic motivations into conversation without getting punched out by big bad soldiers.

I think it's weird that you're talking about "joining the military" as an act of singular motivation. To me it indicates a lack of understanding about veterans, either academic or personal. Some of them are indeed desk jockeys who wanted to be so, and personal sacrifice was in no way a motivating factor. They would agree with you about how ridiculous that assumption is. Others join up for very personal reasons and the possibility of sacrifice absolutely factored in. I would have thought that was obvious.

@Jolly said in How wealthy are the wealthy?:

I'm not sure it's do-able...

It absolutely is when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps live in your parents' basement until you're about 30.

People are finding weird workarounds. In my neck of the woods, there are a couple of families, entirely unrelated, who are living together to share expenses. I don't know any details beyond that, but it's an interesting solve.

@Horace said in This number surprised me:

I've never been able to quite swallow the notion that joining the military constitutes a selfless personal sacrifice.

Watching you share that opinion at your local post would be interesting.

@89th said in Is anyone tracking DOGE lies?:

What if Elon has a falling out with Trump in the summer?

When, not if.

@Mik said in How wealthy are the wealthy?:

Bah. Commie propaganda. As far as I can see there are a whole lot more relatively affluent Americans, and the poor do not look nearly as poor as they were when I was growing up.

Depends on the metric. Amenities like TVs and such have plummeted in price when adjusted for inflation, but necessities have blown up. So while you can furnish your apartment with extras your parents could never afford just starting out, you ain't getting a house anytime soon—and going without a wifi-enabled Roomba and foregoing Starbucks isn't going to get you there.

It's a good litmus test for the level of understanding people like Dimon have about their employees' jobs and how they work. Which is to say he has no understanding whatsoever.

@jon-nyc said in Egg price watch:

So enough of my high end eggs at the gourmet store. I went to stop and shop today and looked what they had.

Cheapest in stock were store brand XL for 8.29. There was space for L store brand but sold out at 7.99.

Cheapest in my area was $10. Although there are myriad farm markets nearby that we're going to hit up over the weekend, see if the prices are better.

If that doesn't work, we have a handful of friends like 89th's SIL that we could buy from.

@jon-nyc said in Hey Aqua and other DC area folks.:

They have diplomatic plates and wouldn’t get the citation in the first place, no?

I think the hangup with diplomat plates is that they still get the citations, but they're sent to a special part of the state department that historically did nothing with them. At least I'm pretty sure that's how it used to work (and perhaps still does).

@Jolly said in Most interesting part of your day?:

@Aqua-Letifer said in Most interesting part of your day?:

@LuFins-Dad said in Most interesting part of your day?:

I’m sick and tired of political debates… So what was the most interesting thing that you did, today?

Wrote a sonnet.

A good one?

Eh, so far, serviceable. No out-and-out blunders, so now it's a matter of "how good can I get it?" Gonna try to get it into a good place here and there over the weekend.

@LuFins-Dad said in Most interesting part of your day?:

I’m sick and tired of political debates… So what was the most interesting thing that you did, today?

Wrote a sonnet.

True story.

So I'm at this annual Board meeting about 10 years ago. (I have no idea why I was there; I think some shit pertaining to the annual report. I'm easily the youngest person there.) At around 10 or so there's a coffee break, and I'm getting mine beside this old guy. I had never met him before but it turns out he's the CFO. Kind of a gruff, type A kind of a dude. He sits down and he starts talking to me about bikes. Finds out I ride bikes, too.

He says he was kind of new to it, and just this past year he did his first century ride.

"You ever do a century?"

I tell him I have.

He said, "well, that was my first one. And I didn't train for it. Just showed up on the day and thought it would be no big deal. So we do the ride and honestly, I'm feeling fine. Great in fact, I was keeping up with my buddy who signed me up, and we made it all the way through to the end together.

At the end, there was this nice dinner they provided at this brewery. It used to be the town post office, but it was repurposed some years back. Anyway, I get my food, but I'm still carrying my helmet, my gloves, you know, and my water bottle and stuff. I sit down by the picnic tables outside and I sit on something. I get up, check my stuff, put it all down in front of me and sit down again. Again I sit on something. It feels like a helmet, like I'm going to fall down if I shift too much in my seat. But my helmet was on the table, where I put it.

Do you know what it was?

It was my ass, [Aqua]. It had swollen so damn much on that saddle that it blew up like a fucking balloon and now I couldn't sit straight. I looked about a foot taller sitting down."

Lewis's is misleading because the room surrounding it is much larger than the room he actually wrote in.
And Tolkien's is a bit misleading because the guy wrote just as much at work as he did at home.

@blondie said in Trump and your expectations:

@LuFins-Dad said in Trump and your expectations:

I think clear pardons for any non-violent offenders and case by case beyond that. I actually don’t mind the Gaza stuff, I think I see where he’s going. The Canada thing is weird, but as much as I love Blondie and Renauda (in a hunting and fishing kind of way), I don’t mind the reminder that even our close allies are still competitors and that not all of our goals line up.

To me, our countries have always had a symbiotic respectful relationship.

That's how I see it, too. 'Murricans are often quick to say something like "Canada wouldn't be anything without America." Yeah, well, the reverse is just as true, and Canada needs to be able to be Canada.

We've been playing the equality of outcome game long enough now that the cracks are starting to show. Things simply don't work like they used to. I'm hoping from this administration we get something like a return to competence as a leadership metric. (I'm not saying the administration is going to supply that in any way—it would be ludicrous to hope for that. Rather, I'm hoping that it's the dismantling of race-based leadership that trickles down.)

Other than that, if I'm able to pick up my car keys, leave my house that's still standing, drive to an existing Starbucks, afford a cup of coffee and then drive back home on roads that haven't been bombed in four years, I'll be very impressed.

I watched Sharpe movies all day.

@Renauda said in Perhaps even a little more:

@Jolly said in Perhaps even a little more:

Always pay attention to what politicians do, not what they say.

You'll have a better, less stress-free life that way.

I, along with 40 plus million other fellow citizens here, pay very close attention to what that bastard Trump threatens to do to our country economically, politically and even culturally. Yes, it can be stressful but as a nation we are not going let people of such low class and mental acuity such as Trump bully us.

A lot of Americans feel the same way.

@jon-nyc said in For bike peeps.:

@Aqua-Letifer said in For bike peeps.:

Watts aren't a bike thing. They're a training thing. Just sayin'.

It’s not a training thing, it’s a power thing.

Still, I can’t think of an activity outside of biking where humans regularly measure their power output. As a guy who rides you can probably imagine how amazing that level of output is, especially with your heart rate low enough that you could carry on a conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple things about bicycles that are just damn fascinating—that is certainly one of them. (Another, which is a favorite of mine, is that there are a handful of physical laws that govern what happens while on a bike based on its geometry, but we can't measure the interplay between those laws. That's wild to me.)

My gripe actually isn't with the lycra-clad type A Tour-following wannabes—one of the things I like about bikes is that the hobby takes call comers. My gripe is that the MAMILs do everything they can to undermine that very thing. "If you aren't pushing 300 watts then what the fuck are you even doing?" That kind of bullshit.

Watts aren't a bike thing. They're a training thing. Just sayin'.

How far down the chain you wanna go? For example, a lot of cleaning services work directly and exclusively with contractors who work for the government. Nothing they do is government-related, but without the industrial complex there'd be no cleaning company.

@jon-nyc said in Jesus H:

I just sat through a land acknowledgment

They were interested to sit through in Oz. Because the aboriginal councils legally did own the land, thanks to the Mabo case.