I've participated as a guest in several murder mystery type events. As a category, social deduction games tend to succeed or fail based on the enthusiasm level of the players. If too many people are checked out, or not willing to get fully into character, then everyone's experience will suffer. With that, consider crafting your guest list based on how keen they are about this kind of game, rather than just because they're your usual crew.

I think I've seen more new spam accounts than legitimate users joining recently, so it seems like the current open/growth model is not working.

The site is pretty much already a quiet little club in a corner of the Internet, so this seems to be better acknowledging that reality.

I've been playing Caroline Polachek's second album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You on repeat for the last few weeks. It's on quite a few critics' Best of 2023 lists, but I still think she's pretty unknown in the mainstream. Her music is pretty weird to begin with, but you really have to watch the music videos to appreciate just how out there she is. Here's the first track:

There's not nothing in there, but the book is certainly not useful.

Thanks for the heads up. Too many non-fiction books these days would be better as a magazine article.

Germany recently introduced a new visa program that might make it easier for you to get back there. Best of luck while you're back in the US.

So apparently Imgur and Reddit both decided to pick the same week to consign themselves to irrelevance, by banning NSFW content and putting their API behind a paywall respectively. I've been meaning to quit them for a long time, and this will probably be what does it for good.

Nice to know I've got another cozy home on the Internet here, where yelling at the folks in charge still does something.

It really says something about a person who can evaluate this behavior and decide "I'm doing nothing wrong".

That money that should have been going towards student loans was saved, used to pay off credit card debt, and spent on goods and services. If anything, it was massively propping up the economy, because borrowers had hundreds of 'extra' dollars per month to support their consumerism.

Once you've installed a brand new roof, its the perfect time to consider installing solar panels. The incentives have never been better in most places.

Cats are ridiculous creatures. They've really got us tricked. Glad to hear you got yours back safely.

The section about transferable machine guns leaves out the most important reason these weapons aren't used in more crimes: they cost at least $10k to acquire. The much maligned AR-15 can be had for $500. A shitty Hi-Point 9mm can be had for a third of that.

It seems like the author can't help but include a red herring about hollow-point bullets, magazine capacities, and the much-maligned AR-15 (the most popular modern sporting rifle sold in the US). He does later admit that Liberals overemphasize banning 'assault weapons' instead of more effective interventions, but undercuts this point by admitting that he still has it out for the AR-15.

Notably missing from this mish-mash of good and bad proposals is any sort of economic analysis of the causes of (white, rural) suicide or (black, urban) homicide. However, that might engender accusations of racism, classism, and other forms of Liberal intolerance, and distract from the

All in all, his central thesis that we need to come to terms with the reality that there will continue to be 400m privately-owned firearms in the US is key to having a more productive national conversation about reducing gun violence.

This is opportunistic pandering even at companies who didn't make similar donations. My employer made a big deal about a similar travel reimbursement policy, but doesn't even provide health insurance for the majority of their employees, since that would actually cost them something.

Bad housing policy is hurting people (and economies) in every economically productive or growing city. Spiking interest rates are just a small part of why housing is cripplingly unaffordable to most people.

Even the small number of cities building significant amounts of new housing (Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, etc.) are not accomplishing affordability once you take transportation expenses into account. We've forgotten how to build affordable, prosperous, livable cities.

This is a very impressive me-too tech demo that makes the other options on the market look like toys. For all the billions of dollars that have been spent to develop these, they still fail as products, because they don't do anything useful.

You can tell a lot about a city based on its trees (or lack thereof). I recently moved from a wealthier neighborhood to one with half the median household income, and let me tell you. There's not even close to 50% as many trees here as in the "nicer" neighborhood. Before moving, I didn't realize how much it would bother me, but I can feel the difference, even subconsciously.

no fucking parallel between automobiles and guns

Until you try to suggest even modest reforms that might challenge either of them, and suddenly they're unassailable pillars of our culture, immune from any criticism.

The racists might not be lining up to buy cars, but the car-dependent suburbs they live in are founded on racism, and they seem to struggle to come up with non-racist defenses of that status quo.

Not to say something nice about Rupert Murdoch, but it's no surprise that it was the Wall Street Journal that finally broke the story about the fraudulent claims Theranos was making. As you said, anyone who knew anything about blood testing knew something didn't add up. And yet other 'reputable' publications were too busy tripping over themselves to put Homes on magazine covers to do any sort of journalism about what the business was doing.

about 25% of the time ... employees can live anywhere in the U.S. so long as they pay their own way to get to Orrville

This is still grossly exploitative. It would be unreasonable for any job with 25% required business travel to not reimburse employees for all associated expenses. Their own CPO admits that 2 years of work from home was successful, but these facts are clearly being overridden by the feelings of their old-school executives.

If Orrville Mayor Dave Handwerk had his wish, Smucker employees would be back in the office five days a week

Screw this guy. This attitude is unbecoming when it's coming from the mayors of New York City and San Francisco. It is pathetic coming from the leader of a 9000 person company town. He's lucky that Smuckers is still a family-run company, and hasn't been seduced away to a neighboring state with the promise of tax breaks.

Massey ... said she spent much of her time at Smucker in a nonmanagement role, not wanting to take on a leadership position if she couldn’t be in Orrville full-time...

Nicole Massey lives in San Francisco and commutes to Orrville for core weeks.

Good for her for overcoming the backwards corporate culture that was thwarting her advancement. Inflexible policies like mandatory in-office days are known to harm recruiting and retention of women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups. It's no surprise why this lunchroom looks like a bag of marshmallows.

The dating apps are hell. They will make you hate yourself, especially in a city like San Francisco.

I recommend trying to build up your community of friends, and pursuing some active hobbies. Both should give you opportunities to meet new people in a less soul-crushing way.

Part of becoming an adult is evaluating the relationship you have with your parents, and redefining it if you have to. Financial independence is definitely key to being able to stand up for your own interests.

is this what’s it’s like to be actively living the life you’ve envisioned

hoo-rah! Sure is, bud. I'm glad to hear that you've found your climbing crew.

The Song Exploder podcast recently reminded me of the incredible Mohabbet by Arooj Aftab. She won a Grammy back in 2022 for "global music," but I think she's still incredibly underappreciated and deserves more attention for her unique blend of contemporary jazz and traditional Pakistani folk music.

You’re certainly right. The value proposition of high cost cities in blue states just isn’t there for middle class families any more. They’re becoming hollowed out playgrounds for the rich, and those living on social benefits.

It seems like you've identified a problem that Hubski hasn't grown much in its 10 year lifespan. My experience is that there is never enough content (posts & comments) on the site each day. I'm not sure how showing users even less content (comments from new users) is supposed to address this.

The digital marketing growth hacker types like to image a funnel that tracks a user in their journey towards a desired endpoint. Some percentage of users drop off or fail to stick around at each level of the funnel. This makes the higher levels of the funnel the most important places to influence behavior, because you have more users to work with. The experiment here seems to be fiddling with the Retention of users who have already found hubski and registered an account in the Acquisition and Activation levels.

I have no insight into this site's actual traffic numbers or how many new visitors check it out, but that is where the focus should be to grow this community. More potential friends need to be browsing the front page so they can be compelled to register some day. It's hard to see names that we know and recognize leave the site, but attrition is natural. Without a consistent source of new members, this site will inevitably shrink into a devoted core. At that point there probably isn't critical mass to keep a site like this alive, and the remaining few will probably transition to a group chat or other private discussion to keep in touch.

I love this site because of the serendipitous nature of the content and people here. Without that new energy, I may as well just subscribe to the kleinbl00 newsletter and move on.

I recently read Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time, as I somehow managed to avoid any exposure to Vonnegut in school. What a book! It's sad to be reading this 55 years after it was written, in the midst of another ground war in Europe. There's a lot of timeless lessons to be learned from this book, and it's a shame we haven't absorbed more of them.

So it goes.

we're both depressed

is likely a significant contributing factor of

we don't have sex

It's worth doing everything you (both) can to fix that, because it is slowly killing your relationship. Once you're on the other side, you may be amazed just how much better everything is between you two, inside and outside the bedroom.

This morning I just learned that I'll need to fight my previous landlord in order to get my security deposit back. In an unsurprising turn of events, my psychotic hoarder ex-housemate played their role perfectly and trashed the place before skipping town. My lawyer thinks I have a strong case, which is the first good news I've gotten since I was driven out of the house by the aforementioned ex-housemate.

Does anyone know of any quiet, walkable mountain towns with affordable real estate? I suddenly find myself inspired to own my own place.

Figures, thank you for the summary. I attempted a 4 week digital detox after reading Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism and mostly failed because I wasn't able to come up with practical alternatives.

Thankfully most of the companies they back are busy working on B2B SASS and crypto nonsense that is unlikely to have any significant impact, positive or negative.

Gaffes like the ill-timed Sequoia profile of Sam Bankman Fried make it clear that venture capitalists don't have any unique wisdom or insight.

It's almost like Joe Biden is good at politics. He must have picked up a thing or two in all his years in Washington. Imagine that.