Carcassonne is super fun! I like to play with the variant that everyone has a "hand" of 3 tiles and you draw one at the end of your turn. That way you have more options (for increased strategy) and you can think about your turn ahead of time.

Is that one still a Target exclusive? I think it was when it came out, but not sure at this point. It might also be worth checking out the Dice Tower's 12 Kids' Games of Christmas video. It's somewhat geared towards dexterity games, but there are some good other ones there too.

The only odd thing about the draw was that Carlsen didnt play on until move 38 or 39. Carlsen knows that he's a strong favourite in the tiebreaker. All he had to do was draw all the games in the classical time control. Carlsen was playing black. He had a strong position, but nothing obviously winning. Why take a chance on things going awry in the classical when you're an 80%+ favourite in the tiebreaker? He knew Caruana would be highly pressured to draw if he offered. The draw wasn't good for chess, but it was good for Carlsen.

Wait, I must have missed something. Hubski has tiered userbases now?

Usually just shared common areas (kitchen, living room etc.) although the walls between bedrooms aren't usually very thick.

Heh, I thought about that joke too. My reaction when he mentioned his "gift" was to laugh, because I honestly thought he was joking (not about being able to read people, but about it being a "gift").

I talked to a guy on the subway once who was convinced that he was given a gift from God that let him know what people are like inside after spending 15 minutes with them. Yeah, I also read people. Sometimes it doesn't even take me 15 minutes.

We have a lot of space and no people so... welcome!

This is only true outside of major city-centres, though. If you want to live in Vancouver or Toronto, for instance, you'll need to be prepared to spend a lot of housing.

The podcast version is a pretty good listen. Nothing particularly surprising, but the forensic accounting is pretty neat, IMO.

I mean, I see your point, though I would argue that the asshole levels between being stupidly dismissive of American writers and raping someone are significantly different.

Fair enough

Fun article, if a bit longer than it needed to be (too many examples of restaurants trying to make things super-shiny for critics IMO). My partner is a manager at a big retail chain. C-levels occasionally like to make "unannounced" visits to random stores to see how things are going. Days before the C-level's flight arrives, managers know about the visit and are working crazy overtime to clean things up.

Damn, I was really looking forward to volleyball on Friday night.

I also got a kick out of this:

You know, God spoke to me and told me ‘go check out the Blood Moon’ back in June.

He said ‘you need to find out what’s going on’

You'd think that if anyone didn't need someone else to find out what's going on for them, it'd be God.

Never got into Starcraft. I used to play Age of Empires 2. Even watched some high-level tournaments. I was never a big fan of the emphasis on micromanagement in competitive RTS games, though (which is also why I never got into MOBAs). It seems to mostly be about who can click the fastest to exploit small glitches or gain small advantages.

Shakshouka with Feta. Super easy, delicious, and quite customizable.

FEMA is certainly correct that disasters must be managed at all levels, but the most important lesson of the 2017 disaster season is that weather disasters are becoming more frequent and more damaging.

Things are only going to get worse and FEMA's lack of funding will become even more evident. Best hope that you can afford insurance (and that your insurance doesn't go bankrupt).

A futures market for a highly-volatile, speculation-driven investment?

Thanks, but no thanks.

For American cities, highways are a drug. They’re expensive to acquire. They devastate healthy tissue and arteries, replacing previous modes of nourishment with destructive ones. They force the rest of the body to adapt to their needs, and they inflict pain on those nearby.

There's one other thing that highways have in common with drugs: You'll never have enough. Even if you invest in auto infrastructure at large cost, it'll only be a short time before more car commuters start to prioritize using the new infrastructure, leading to overuse and gridlock all over again.

Roads are there to move people, not cars. Within cities, cars are some of the least efficient ways of moving people. It's time to reprioritize the way we perceive, build, and use roads in major cities.

Yes, the tools aren't quite easily accessible/usable yet, but they are getting better, and I'm sure it won't be too long before it becomes relatively easy to "photoshop" videos in order to make it look like someone is doing something they never did. I expect that at some point in the next 5 years or so there will be a major scandal or two where big news orgs are fooled by fake videos of high-profile figures.

Good on the IOC. With that being said, this decision does put the stature of the olympic games at risk in certain sports. Does a gold medal in figure skating/biathlon/speed skating mean that the winner is the best in the world if no Russian athletes were present at the competition? Or are competitions like the World Figure Skating Championship going to become more prestigious in those sports than the Olympic games?

“Today, 98 percent of the videos we remove for violent extremism are flagged by our machine-learning algorithms,” Wojcicki wrote. “Our advances in machine learning let us now take down nearly 70 percent of violent extremist content within eight hours of upload and nearly half of it in two hours and we continue to accelerate that speed,” she added.

Like most big tech companies these days, YT/Google is primarily interested in automation (in this case of content flagging). It'd be interesting to know if the new staff will be flagging content manually (doubtful), reviewing content that has already been flagged by their algorithms (mos likely) or refining their automated flagging algorithms (also possible).

Not all of them are.

By and large, alt-right men don’t seem to be forcing these traditional gender roles on the women of their movement—the alt-right women are doing it themselves. The women share a profound disdain for the feminist movement, and are eager to claim the supportive, behind-the-scenes roles.

As for female empowerment, there’s nothing that has made me feel more empowered in my life than supporting and being supported by a strong man,” Claudia Davenport, an alt-right activist, said in an interview with The Economist. “I think that men and women are better off when we stop fighting nature and allow our distinct identities to shine through.”

Most alt-right groups are predominantly male, but we should be careful in assuming that there are no women who support their views or that biological determinism is a viewpoint only held by men.

I had to give up on RL when I realized that it just made me too salty. I started doing more IRL sports instead (which also make me salty sometimes, though not nearly to the same extent).

The reddit legaladvice megathread on the topic is certainly worth reading through

You can look at their instagram site. There are a lot of feet. It's mostly just photos of ballerinas doing ballet poses in different locations. I usually prefer ones that are more focused on a landscape or urban scene.

It seems the judiciary is the only check/balance left, unfortunately. I guess two if you count the 4th estate...

Down and Out in Paris and London is somewhat upbeat in parts, at least.

I'm not sure how bad it is for Navalny's reputation. I expect that most of his supporters are entirely willing to accept that the charges are trumped-up/false (which seems plausible to me, in fairness). They may impact his chances of actually winning the election (provided the election is a fair one to begin with) if he is able to run in the end. But for now, I'm not sure that this ruling is going to change much in terms of Navalny's reputation.

Also, funnily enough, I posted this just before Existentialist:

Neat, thanks for the link :)

I agree that the different points of view are pretty interesting to see. It's also interesting to see the difference in approach and tone in rd95's and kleinbl00's replies.