Halt's Spider

@seconds_0 Someone sell trump on how much he could personally make on real estate if he buys up a bunch and then federally preempts bay area zoning...

Who's working on funding a Chinese Environmental Quality Act?

@constans TIL about the major brands checkbox. Still mad they took away the shipped&sold by amazon filter

@HaltsSpider “Amazon’s Choice” tags and the “major brands” checkbox are a lifesaver when it comes to shopping on Amazon. There’s a pathological amount of garbage when it comes to unbranded items on Amazon

There was a video comparing the quality of tool brands like Craftsman from the 70s with modern ones Modern tools WERE lower quality but cost the same or less in nominal dollars Tools of matching or better quality cost the same in inflation-adjusted dollars as in the 70s

@BecomingCritter Dildo with ruler markings?

why hasn't anyone invented an internal tape measure for women, they're missing out

@constans Issue is 1) market for lemons 2) even where quality is an option, search costs are real. Cheap shit still mostly a net good imo, but ~ premium amazon seems to be an unfilled niche

I mean it is a little demoralizing that the globalization revolution was in part just a process if “price discovery” where companies realized that there was a large market for cheap, lower quality goods, but when I needed a cheap socket set when I was 22, I appreciated that

@FudgeSmith111 x.com/HaltsSpider/st…

Yeah, I think most Americans want a return to 2018-ish pricing and that's never going to happen. Economic illiteracy is a serious problem and politicians exploit it to make empty promises they can't possibly fill.

@goblinodds @owenbroadcast Adults wildly underestimate the % of children who would happily sign up for the children's crusade

@owenbroadcast i feel really split on it, like it's very shitty to just sneak that stuff in especially w/o presenting it in a way the kid can relate to but also people tend to make children consume the most bizarrely sanitized garbage when they want stories with actual gravity

when i was getting children’s poetry together for my last book, i think i looked through over 2000 pages of kid’s poetry books. along the way, i noticed something interesting. occasionally, i’d hit a poem like a speed bump, and ask myself - why is this in a children’s poetry book? several times i actually caught myself going back and checking the title of the book, going over each word, to make sure i hadn’t accidentally misread it and picked up a book intended for adults. the poems i’m thinking of fell far outside of what is typically debated as being “for children” or “good for children”. one example that stands out is a poem about an air force fighter mourning his dead friend who died after being shot down over the ocean. whether a kid should see this or not is subjective, but these were just objectively not poems intended for children. further than that, it was impossible to imagine a human being who would see this poem and think that a kid would relate to it. i became so interested in why this kept happening (not many books, but enough to notice - obviously, modern collections) that i read some of the introductions, wherein another pattern emerged: the same words and phrases, often something circling around the editors desire to “challenge children”. i would often find, in these introductions, the editor gleefully and cryptically addressing these types of poems, saying something like “there are some poems in here that you probably wouldn’t choose for a kid, but it’s important that kids see this stuff”. without assessing this as good or bad (i have my own opinions, as i imagine anyone would), i think you could split people involved in children’s media, of any kind (books, shows, cartoons, movies), along this line: on one side, people who think it’s important to, somewhat openly, trojan horse adult themes into kid’s media - that this is a noble, virtuous thing that ultimately serves the child and is an essential part of their development. then, on the other side, people who would would take issue with inserting a blatantly “adult world” theme into something that presents as being “for children”, for a variety of reasons. since hitting this, it feels like a clean way to delineate people’s various models of childhood and child development. it’s a pretty firm break with people easily able to sort themselves and almost any media they encounter onto either side.

@maiab Maybe you'll have a lightbulb moment

I am just sending a screenshot of every lightbulb on Amazon to Claude and having it explain why it’s not the lightbulb I’m looking for there has GOT to be a better way to do this

@cljack * "The concealer"

Me, holding the tube of MY makeup that I found in HER bathroom: Is it the crime that gets you in trouble, baby? 11yo, resignedly: no mom, it’s the cover up

@justalexoki Explaining exercise to americans: imagine a cheeseburger...

a single cheeseburger is an entire hour of walking. like you are actually doomed if you think you can just exercise yourself to weight loss. it's all about what you eat

@cljack Key-feel is too sponge(-bob)y

@maiab Isn't this the origin story of approximately every non-chain restaurant?

I feel this way about everything there was a whole surge of apps and websites and companies and experiences that were basically only good because the people running them didn’t understand how expensive it was to provide something good

@ouranometrian2 @CovfefeAnon Seems relevant that this isn't the US? x.com/franmanifesto/…

I mean...im not sure how truthful the story really is. Seems to me like everyone is invested in saving mom and baby if you actually interact with obestitricians. I mean what situation would there be where you have to make a choice. Like through the majority of pregnancy if mom dies so does the baby.

This is the kind of thing that women just *say* all the time that demonstrates just how absurdly self-centered their view is about everything at all times The extraordinary part isn't how self-centered they are - it's how unaware of how self-centered they are as the default

@notanastronomer >21

the thing with growing up with American HVAC systems is that I basically believe houses should always be the same temperature, regardless of season. below 21? freezing, unacceptable. Above 24? melting, unacceptable. honestly, really, only 21-22 is acceptable.

@Empty_America Do you know the history of the brazilian Real?

It's the inflation. Americans never really accepted the *inflation based* monetary system. It doesn't matter that the houses and cars and everything material gets bigger and more luxurious every year. They need to figure a way for the nominal prices to stop increasing.

@gewilson04 @angryaboutbikes My bad, I assumed you were making the criticism I've seen elsewhere of institutional investors. What do you have against corps full stop? Maturity transformation (30-year lease -> one-year rental lease) seems like a valuable service to provide to the market

@HaltsSpider @angryaboutbikes About a third of all homes sold in 2025 were to real estate investors, counting both individual and institutional

My wife spent an entire year taking on extra work and smashing all her targets so that she could ask for a pay rise, they actually gave her one and then literally 2 days later our landlord put up our rent by more than the raise because he decided it was time to be paid more money

@VicVijayakumar Kahneman W

toilet training the toddler with bribes. every time she tries going on the toilet she gets 1 jelly bean. if it’s successful she gets 2. unfortunately this didn’t work so I said every time she goes in her diaper I’m going to eat one of her jelly beans. higher success rate so far.

@mjzellinger @bmontxna "Lower decks"

@bmontxna I know, they always want to see my OTHER deck.

“want to see my deck? I am raising a seed round” is a deeply unsettling thing to say as a woman

@gewilson04 @angryaboutbikes It's less than half a percent US-wide for institutional investors ubs.com/us/en/wealth-m…

@HaltsSpider @angryaboutbikes Almost 10%. In some areas it’s way higher though.

@gewilson04 @angryaboutbikes Lmao what percentage of SFH do you think institutional investors/large corps own?

@HaltsSpider @angryaboutbikes Blame the corporations buying up single family homes and boomers who won’t sell their homes for anything less than 540% ROI