trip1ex

@ESPNNBA @chiney @KendrickPerkins What 1st pick odds does the loser get again?

Two legends go into the play-in tournament tonight, who will reign supreme? 👀 @chiney and @KendrickPerkins break down the matchup between the Warriors-Clippers ✍️

@jdalrymple Porch pirate!

Just went to the door to grab our Amazon delivery. I expect he’ll just carry off to his home.

@BillSimmons Way to go Blazers. Congrats on losing to the Spurs in the 1st round.

This has been an awesome game despite the awful officials. What a play in night!

@ID_AA_Carmack So this isn't a kick starter for the clay tablet edition.

A Canticle For Leibowitz is a classic early (1959) post-apocalypse novel where an order of monks preserved the last remnants of learning (the memorabilia) after a nuclear exchange turned the remains of society into book and scientist burners. I first read it in the 80s as a mass market paperback that I somehow lost along the way. Other paperbacks from that time are yellow with age and getting brittle, but still readable. I read it again in the late 2000s on a first edition Kindle. I eventually migrated to iPads for Kindle reading, but every couple years I would come across an old Kindle in a drawer, charge it up, and check out what I had been reading on it. They eventually stopped working entirely. I’m just finishing reading a new Folio Society edition, printed on heavy, acid-free archival quality paper. If it doesn’t get soaked or burned, it could still be in good shape for centuries. The ephemeral nature of digital storage does give me some pause. We can still read Sumerian tablets full of administrative trivia from four thousand years ago, but there are no known copies of some important software products from just fifty years ago. I am a proud supporter of the Internet Archive!

@jonathanmaze Recently I got a wrong Walmart order. I even called them up. But they wouldn’t give me the address so I could deliver it. Take too much research. Wouldn’t be sending someone to pick it up either. Oh well wife discovered Biscoff cookie butter was tasty.

Walked out my door this morning to find this misdelivered McDelivery on my doorstep. Two hamburgers and three cheeseburgers. On my doorstep all night. Particularly funny because I just wrote this piece on the problem with third party delivery: restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/thir…

@McFranchisee Went into a BK this weekend and they had a small free style machine like in the last pic. Nice and shiny. Delivered a good water.

8/ Coke’s sole focus for the last two decades has been making Freestyle a success. I remember meeting with Coke over a decade ago, asking them for a dirty soda, and their response was: get a Freestyle. Freestyle was always the answer to any question. While Coke thought Freestyle would leap-frog beverage innovation, I actually think it hindered beverage innovation for over a decade. If you want to know about a perfect Coke👇 x.com/mcfranchisee/s… What’s your take - am I wrong?

1\ Let me take you through my version of the history of the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine and perhaps how the R&D to make it happen hindered innovation for the next two decades 🤔

@davidhenkes I went to the local one a few years back and it seemed they had 50 employees too many. And couldn't help but think it was a fad/novelty concept that would be wise to not think the initial reaction is going to be the norm.

I've been a fan of Crumbl; while snack concepts have generally been doing well as consumers look for affordable indulgences, at some point the economic realities catch up with them. Crumbl isn't going away but the cracks are starting to appear.... #restaurant

@FeedbackRobust @mattyglesias Yeah article even points out the Knicks couldn't keep Hartenstein due to salary cap.

@mattyglesias Get rid of the draft. The salary cap is hard enough to prevent major msrkets/favorable cities from excessively stockpiling talent.

Allowing teams to read “protected” draft picks sets up scenarios where the incentive to tank is insanely large slowboring.com/p/the-nbas-pro…

@1kyletaylor @DKThomp He's pointing out how to make the regular season be as meaningless as possible. #1 was seeding wouldn't matter because homecourt adv wouldn't exist. If there is no homecourt adv then teams are incentivized to rest players even more.

@DKThomp I know you're exaggerating on #1, but the NBA regular season has been *extremely* predictive of postseason success. Much more than MLB for example. First round winners very often have better season-long net ratings. Champions basically always have 53+ wins and a top-3 seed.

I think one way to get at the NBA's problem is to start w the question: What would it look like for a professional sport's regular season to be the equivalent of a pre-season exhibition period—that is, something that genuinely, truly does not matter at all? 1. For starters, seeding wouldn't matter ... bc home court advantage would barely exist, in which case the best teams could win the championship as an 8th seed just as easily as they could win as the 1st seed. 2. The playoff series would be long enough that (a) the best teams had ample opportunity to prove their superiority [unlike in March Madness, or the NFL playoffs, where 20 bad minutes can end the best team's season] and (b) you're giving casual fans a LOT of basketball to watch so they don't feel bad about skipping most of the regular season. 3. Also, you'd let the vast majority of the teams make the playoffs -- maybe by adding a "play-in" that extends potential playoff qualification to, like, 2/3rds of the league. 4. You'd have several teams that recognize (and practically celebrate!) the futility of the regular season by spending much of this period *actively and flagrantly trying to lose* bc the draft is so much more valuable than the outcome of any particular week, or month, of regular-season competition. In fact, you'd have fans actively rooting for about 1/3rd of the league to throw away most of the regular season bc they only really care about getting a high draft pick. 5. Finally, you'd have a sport where it was basically impossible to win a championship without a top 10 (or, really, top 5!?) player, in which case many franchises are rationally fixated on throwing away regular seasons to maximize their chance to draft or trade for a top 10 guy. ... okay, I think you get my point :) I love listening to basketball podcasts in the autumn and winter, and I love watching playoff basketball in the spring. But I think there are very deep structural reasons why the NBA regular season, for many casual fans, feels like a prolonged preview of an actual sport that begins in April.

@Dennis_Ramen @DKThomp It's not the seed that matters tho. If you wave a wand and make the Warriors the 1st seed, they aren't going to win the championship. Their odds don't go up.

@DKThomp I find it highly curious that in my life I’ve seen 83-79 teams win the WS, seen 10-6 and 9-7 teams win a SB, multiple 8 seeds make and win the Stanley Cup, and yet the one league where a high seed matters is the one where everyone acts like it doesn’t!

@mattyglesias An easy fix for too many games is play 2 seasons every year. 2 playoffs. It's also a better fix for whatever the NBA cup was fixing.

@mattyglesias AS for tanking, yes eliminate the protected draft picks. Hell eliminate trading draft picks. Eliminating the draft isn't far fetched given the salary cap given, as you highlighted, it already works to prevent good teams from keeping their players.

The crisis of the NBA regular season is a lot more than “tanking” — the whole thing is constructed to feel low stakes and frustrating because neither home court advantage for contenders nor barely making the playoffs for middling teams is very valuable. slowboring.com/p/the-nbas-pro…

@McFranchisee @CaryKelly11 Wife picked up a big bag of Boulder Beef Tallow potato chips. Meh to me. Maybe an acquired taste. Wife really hates them.

@CaryKelly11 We didn’t change for cost reasons, in fact, the change probably cost more to switch. It came down to saturated fats levels. Theres no snitch either, we openly say we add amino acids into the fry to replicate the umami flavor of tallow. Been this way for over +30 years

I'm old enough to remember when McDonald's french fries didn't need an ingredients list because everybody knew they were just potatoes, salt and tallow. When they switched to 4 kinds of industrial fat to save money, they lost their world famous taste so they added hydrolyzed wheat and milk derivatives to try and get back the beefy flavor. They never did. This is science.snitch demonstrating what's really in McDonald's french fries today.

@vibebuild @McFranchisee @BradRTorgersen They were fun at first. But choice is no choice when they don’t deliver your cherry coke properly.

@McFranchisee @BradRTorgersen Speaking of quality how on God’s green earth did the breakfast “steak” EVER make it on a national level, it is GOD awful.

These are a wretched pestilence. They are never calibrated correctly. You cannot get a simple Coca-Cola anymore. It will taste like fizzy garbage, flat garbage, or some Frankensteinian combination of flavors other than Coca-Cola. I am done with them. They are fast-food Satan.

@McFranchisee @ryan05124 Have they ever done limited time fountain sodas. LIke Cherry or Vanilla coke for a month once a year. I don't see anyone doing that. Maybe it's not exciting enough or too hard. But it seems like something they could do in addition to the usual ~monthly limited time items.

@ryan05124 I’ve talked about freestyle extensively, if you search that term in my feed, you will see probably 50 posts about this subject. It’s an awful product.

It’s crazy some of the things I see restaurants lease or rent: Rugs Plants (yes, plants) 🪴 Registers / credit card terminals Trash compactors 🗑️ Ice machines 🧊 Fountain dispensers Cleaning towels Some items I can accept due to ROI. Others, money is going out the window. I was helping a buddy one time who was struggling at a wings place when I saw someone bring in a new rug he rents 🤦‍♂️. It’s all about the pennies at the end of the day. I bought a McD one time and a lady came into my lobby and started watering my plants. I found out the previous operator rented the plants & paid her to water them - cancelled❌ How have you seen some restaurants blow any potential profit?

@VicLombardi @nuggets It makes sense because why would you try too hard to hang onto 3rd seed when lakers injury depleted and when you’re going to have to go thru OKC and SA no matter.

Clearly, the @nuggets are choosing health over playoff seeding. Or maybe there’s something else to it. But this much we know: both OKC and Denver are sitting their starters tonight.

@SandyofCthulhu I always preferred Basic/Expert D&D back in the day for this sort of reason. I didn't think getting bogged down in the rules or details added to the fun. I had all the AD&D books and read them as a kid. But in the end simple was better. But I haven't played for decades so $1.273

One of the reasons for RuneQuest's creation was to add the "hit location" thing. (The other reason was to allow for parrying.) In D&D, I assume you'd say something like, "I'm aiming at its wing" and if you hit the DM would have the wyvern tumble out of the sky or something. He'd basically invent an effect. But the problem I see is if just hitting the monster after you say you're aiming, then every single player will always say they're aiming for the eyes or the leg or the sword arm or whatever with every single attack they make, and suddenly combat is slower, and the DM has to make up a bunch of extra stuff, and you're moved away from D&D, no?

@VicLombardi Be funny if Nuggets and Rockets try to lose to play the Lakers only to meet each other in the 1st round.

OKC going with their C team tonight. Their C team is better than whatever that Memphis team we saw Wednesday night. Nuggets need to win to secure the 3-seed (if they want it) so I’d expect their guys to play.

@Andy_Bryant @GerberKawasaki Yes YOU will take your FSD anywhere in the country. Not the other way around. Which is the problem.

@GerberKawasaki But Tesla can take you anywhere. Waymo is confined to the geofenced playground. I’ll take my Tesla FSD anywhere in the country. Waymo can’t even get me outside the city limits.

I take Waymo and just marvel at how much better it is the Tesla FSD. I wish my Tesla drove like a waymo but it doesn’t. No question we’ve hit a wall. What will it take for it to actually move from level 2 to 3-4? I want it to work but I think Tesla has to rethink the approach. $TSLA