SuperDuperKev

Spoke a bit at the Black Lives Matter protest in Copenhagen yesterday

An Auntie Anne’s original pretzel cost about $3.50 in 2009. Today it’s $7.29. The pretzel tracked inflation almost perfectly. The pretzel is accidentally the most honest inflation tracker in America. It’s priced in flour, sugar, labor, commercial rent, and energy. Every cost that went up in 17 years is baked into that $7.29. One mall receipt tells you more about the economy than most dashboards. Now do the rest. Gas in 2009 averaged $2.35 a gallon. Today it’s $3.81. Up 62%. The median U.S. home sold for $172,000 in 2009. The latest FRED data has it at $405,300. Up 136%. Average public university tuition went from about $7,000 to $12,000. Up 71%. Health insurance premiums for a family of four went from $13,000 to over $24,000. Up 85%. Every price in the economy moved. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 was set on July 24, 2009. It has not changed once in 6,088 days. $7.25 in 2009 had the purchasing power of $10.47 today. That’s a 30% silent pay cut delivered one year at a time, while the number on the check never moved. In 2009, $7.25 bought two Auntie Anne’s pretzels. In 2026, it doesn’t buy one. The dollar lost 30% of its value. The pretzel adjusted. The wage didn’t.

Parents who have children that are considering college, Take a look at North Carolina Central University. An HBCU Started by a Black Man (Dr. James E. Shepard) and his family. Based in one of the fastest growing regions in the country, The Research Triangle. Go to nccu.edu/admissions and Apply Today!

Kon Knueppel in games LaMelo Ball and Brandon Miller both do not play in: 22.1 PPG 6.5 RPG 4.2 APG 48/40/97 splits 63.2% TS

Kon is 20 years old

Highest 3P% in NBA history by a player with 3+ threes made per game: 43.6 — Kon Knueppel 42.2 — Steph Curry 40.9 — Klay Thompson Great company.

Harden is pretty definitively a point guard to me offensively. Where slotting him gets tricky is that he's a power forward on defense. But I always thought the Kobe/Wade comps were weird. He doesn't really play like them. He has much more in common with the all-time point guards.

@_alice_evans @lymanstoneky And the men aren’t being exposed to feminist media because they don’t have to be

@_alice_evans @lymanstoneky It seems like she’s saying that the feminist movement was fed to both men and women in the 70s because of monoculture - whereas the feminist movement now in conservative cultures is only being fed to women because the people have more control over the media they access

the rise of feminism in the west came alongside the sexual revolution-- from men's perspective, feminism meant more sex. the rise in feminism in the developing world today comes alongside an epochal decline in sex. men prefer more rather than less sex.

I’m more surprised his first nba basket was a 3

The fact that DJs are bigger than ever, yet their job can easily be automated tells you a great deal about how AI will work in practice in the real world

A jury determined that Meta and Google were negligent and failed to warn users of the dangers associated with using YouTube, Instagram in a landmark social media addiction trial cnbc.com/2026/03/25/met…

@DrDiGiorgio How does it work in Japan?

Mark, you are getting close to understanding why single payer cannot work. But I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we could ever just "know" costs well enough to make it work. Hayek was right about this. The relevant knowledge is too dispersed, too local, and too dynamic to ever be gathered and priced correctly by central planners. Take basketball. Imagine single payer basketball. The government is the only purchaser of basketball entertainment in all its forms. Fans are not allowed to just buy a ticket to the Mavs game. Instead, a central office decides who gets to attend and hands out tickets based on "need." The central planners also handle the TV deals, merchandising, concessions, and every other revenue stream. Everything goes through the government, with no out of pocket cost to any consumer. Now teams no longer compete for fans on price, experience, convenience, or innovation. They submit cost reports to Washington explaining what it allegedly costs to run a game. But here is the problem. If there is no market price for tickets, media rights, parking, merchandise, or concessions, how exactly do you decide what the game is worth? How do you decide what players should be paid? How do you know whether a courtside seat is underpriced, overpriced, or priced just right? You do not. You are guessing. So bureaucrats step in and decide the approved reimbursement for a regular season game, a playoff game, courtside access, halftime entertainment, parking, and concessions. What happens next? If the approved rates are too low, teams do not magically become leaner and more innovative. They cut where fans can feel it. Fewer games. Worse arenas. Less staff. Delayed upgrades. Lower quality. Longer waits. Less access. Maybe smaller market teams shut down altogether. If the approved rates are too high, you do not get efficiency either. You get lobbying. Every team hires consultants to prove that its fan base is poorer, sicker, more rural, more complex, or otherwise deserving of special payment adjustments. Soon the league is no longer about basketball. It is about coding, compliance, modifiers, subsidies, carveouts, and political influence. Teams make money not by pleasing fans, but by persuading Washington that their costs are uniquely deserving of reimbursement. And once government is the only buyer, there is no real price discovery left. There is only political bargaining disguised as pricing. The Knicks get one deal. Rural teams get another. Old arenas get subsidies. Favored constituencies get carveouts. Every interest group insists that without one more special adjustment the whole sport will collapse. Fans are told this is fair because nobody has to pay at the gate. But of course they still pay. They pay through taxes. They pay through rationing. They pay through fewer choices. They pay in lower quality. They pay by being told which arena they can use, which game they qualify for, and how long they have to wait. That is the key point. Knowing the accounting cost of hosting a basketball game does not tell you the right price of a ticket. Price is not cost. Price emerges from supply, demand, scarcity, quality, preference, and competition. A central planner can know what it "costs" to turn on the lights, pay security, and clean the arena. That still tells him nothing about what a seat is worth to fans, what kind of experience teams should offer, which franchises are efficient, or where new arenas should be built. Healthcare is even less suited to central planning than basketball. It is more heterogeneous, more personal, more local, and far more dependent on dispersed knowledge. The fantasy is always the same: if only the people at the top had better data, they could set the right prices. No, they could not. They would still be guessing, just with nicer spreadsheets.

@ringer Is Jalen Brunson really taller than Donovan Mitchell?

After three years of sitting at the top, Jokic has been dethroned, and there’s a new no. 1 on our Top 100 NBA players ranking! Full rankings: nbarankings.theringer.com

Why would NIL make them less likely to return?

A banner celebrating Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game was spotted in the Philippines. Except Bam wasn’t on it, Dwight Howard was… 😭💀 (h/t @LeagueAlerts)

does this count? 😂💪🏾

When movies were shot on physical film, the film was measured in feet. This is why any recorded thing is now called ‘footage.'

March 24, 2019: Jeremy Lamb hits a half court buzzer beater to give the Hornets a 115-114 win over the Raptors.

@Daractenus I was fact checking. True story. vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/s…

If there were no idealists, I’d be born on a plantation like my grandmother