I am vehemently anti-anti-sports on social grounds. Sports fandom has allowed me to reignite high school friendships 15 years after the fact. I've had a sports chat of 15 guys and growing for four years now, and like half the chat is in Spokane where I don't live. This is the healthy side of social media, the actual SOCIAL part. So yeah, March Madness rules, sports help bring people together, totally healthy thing. The High Point v Wisconsin game yesterday with the guy who shoots 3s hitting his first layup to win the game was pure cinema.
Unrelated, remember me talking about the acid test of a free society is being able to say "F U" to a public official? The Afroman case is EXACTLY what I was clumsily referring to. If the cops raid your house for no reason, you have the God given right to roast the hell out of them. This is what separates us from Iran or the UK or wherever.
If people don't like sports, that's fine--entertainment is subjective, and we don't need reasons to explain what does and doesn't entertain us. But I do draw the line on people who think that liking sports is bad, and are very vocal about telling people why they think so.
I saw the Daily Show piece on Afroman (yeah yeah my husband still watches that show) and he is a spectacular American. His is the kind of patriotic dissent we need.
After the video shoot was over, he came back upstairs and just started rapping all his hits from behind the cramped ass, dirty ass bar. It was GLORIOUS. I can veritably say I’ve used a karaoke mic touched by the man.
He tried to butt me in line for the bathroom at a music video shoot at my home bar in STL. I called him on it, he apologized, and then took a picture w me.
Back in the day, I could not STAND the triple combo of Chuck Norris jokes, zombies, and epic bacon.
Between that and the 80’s nostalgia fad that *never. fucking. DIED.*, I was introduced to my own curmudgeonliness far too early in life during my late-2000’s college years.
Excellent article, Halina. College basketball is the particular subject right now, but this is also why sports in general are very good for society. They help us bond around a common subject that make for an easy icebreaker for those who are also interested. They create community bonds in having something for those near us to unite about. They also provide a constructive outlet for the tribalism that is innate in we humans, as we can express it over something that ultimately doesn't matter, compared to much more serious things in life that we should not be tribal about.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone had it right (with much particular approval from Ben, Halina, and myself) when they concluded an episode with the declaration of Go America, Go Broncos.
He is spoiled with a reliable Politics Monday. I very much approve of your balance with Culture Friday, be it about sports or whatever else is on your mind.
This subhead was just perfectly tailored to tease Joseph, because he's all about civic duties. What's also good about this is that he's quite knowledgeable about universities. He could have pulled a Diane Chambers and fill out a bracket on completely non-sports grounds on what he thinks about those schools, and he might end up having the kind of luck Diane did. Hell, picking Siena just because they are a top tier polling school came damn near close to paying off big time this tournament!
I saw the finest minds of my generation consumed by March Madness: starving, hysterical, naked.
Hell, I don't care anything about kicking it into the basket for a homerun, and even I sometimes use sportsball analogies and marketing putsches in my work. That one year the 49ers were in the Superb Owl? Whole endcap display filled with red and gold items. (The only time anyone ever buys Boatswain IPA...) Merchandising, merchandising, merchandising, a buck is a buck, and sports fans buy groceries too. I don't think it's even cynical in this case, i.e. that I don't "really care" about the sports. (My, how quickly one forgets the sports.) Everyone's just happy for the excuse to celebrate something, build community, take a load off from the cares of the world with something important yet trivial, without being trivially important. Thus is the power of Stanley's Cup. Although I prefer their thermoses, personally.
> The office pool, the group chat, and the shared experience of watching the same game and suffering the same upset are on-ramps to deeper connection
Anyone that thinks otherwise should read the classic Clifford Geeriz essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight". It's a great read and should rewire how you think about seemingly superficial cultural events, even gambling. If you'll forgive the academese, on top of everything else, they are platforms for people to demonstrate their commitment to various cultural values, competencies, and affiliations (and much more).
Geertz's essay is a legit life-changer, imo. It's available here:
"the imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence" (pg 16) referencing Weber is particularly apt for this site.
And mybe this post is an ode to Weber! Slow Boring folding on itself.
The near-future of AVs is not actually that complicated at heart. There are two basic principles that we should expect to remain true for decades:
1. AVs will soon be better drivers than humans across all dimensions and virtually all edge cases.
2. There are serious limitations to how much they can network and communicate to act in coordinated fashion without vastly better IoT penetration than currently exists or may be possible (absent radical changes like quantum entanglement).
This competence-with-limits can be expressed in two ways, at the extremes:
1. Much tighter headways, higher speed limits, reduced visual cues, and therefore much improved throughput on non-highway streets, at the cost of access to non-AV… well,.. anything.
2. Hugely improved safety outcomes for all with no change in headways, speed limits, infrastructure, pedestrian segregation, and thus throughput.
We cannot maximize both simultaneously, there will be a sliding scale between the two, and it’s very likely that policy choices are going to lean towards the latter, especially in denser areas. Absent substantially better IoT penetration and developing new machine learning tools to enable networked operation at scale, traffic is still going to be a huge problem, only marginally improved by AV performance.
Thus, what’s actually going to happen is:
1. AVs are going to become a commoditized industrial good with an operating cost of $0.06-0.15/mi*, and rental costs will be only slightly higher.
2. This will initially gut transit and rapidly weigh on private vehicle ownership rates.
3. But induced demand is going to bite insanely hard, and gridlock will run mad in even mid-density, mid-sized cities and their suburbs.
4. Municipalities and counties will have no choice but to dynamically price road space and allocate lane space to transit-only surface options
5. Unions will eventually lose their war, allowing transit authorities to inaugurate a mix of high-frequency fixed routes and semi-fixed paratransit using AV’s for very little money by contemporary standards.
6. We will ultimately converge on a much more effective but structurally similar equilibrium; more and better transit, more and safer vehicle operation, similar to moderately reduced traffic congestion, vastly reduced use of public land and space to store cars, and much more pedestrianization in cities and suburbs alike.
*This could be off by a factor of 2-3 and it wouldn’t matter.
I think you're wildly underestimating the resistance to transitioning away from individual vehicle ownership. I might buy a self driving car, I have zero interest in using a Waymo like service for all of my transportation.
Agree, I would be willing to pay a hefty premium for my own self driving car, I have much less interest in having to call for one every time I want to go somewhere.
Clearly this choice will be calculatedly differently the more urban or dense your living area.
Because you want to keep driving yourself everywhere? Or for some other reason?
If I could afford a staff of servants I'd at least consider a chauffeur as part of the crew. I enjoy doing many things for myself, driving is rarely one of them.
The idea of sitting in the front seat of a control-less car and barreling toward an accident I can see coming, with no means of averting it, is 200 proof nightmare fuel for me.
You could accuse me of just being a control freak, and maybe that's right, but I think it's more an assault on my ethos of owning up to one's mistakes. The idea that the robot can pretend to perform the thinking for me, but it has no agency and fundamentally no ability to own its mistakes. It cheerily makes the mistake for me, and then passes the buck--it's "mine". Note that this does not really apply to tools that don't pretend to think. They're deterministic, or close enough to deterministic that it was my job to understand them before using them. And note that a chauffeur (although not really something that interests me) can own their mistakes. It's a very human capacity.
This is presumably also near the core of my attitude toward LLM use, even in casual look-it-up banter but *especially* in the workplace. I can only describe that attitude as utter revulsion.
Do you have trouble with flying? What you're describing is the essence of anxiety about flying (which I, despite my brother being an aeronautical engineer, have).
Not only do I have trouble with flying commercial, that trouble only manifested itself AFTER I got my pilot's license!
Not debilitating trouble--you get on a plane to go places, this is how it works--but definitely sweaty palms in the bumps. *I'm* supposed to fight those bumps. Even if the actual flight crew are miles more qualified to handle it.
Ooh, this is an excellent point that was not broached to my knowledge in today's comments. That could sent the hot takes on Car Seat Discourse to a new entire level.
I commented in today's section that objects that people transport within cars is a hurdle for AVs, but I didn't even think about all the objects that parents transport around for their kids.
Yeah, my husband takes a full carload of stuff to work each day, and he’s just an outdoor teacher. Lots of people have to schlep shit for work that’s way more than a single load in/out.
I don’t think it’s fully insurmountable for parents, clearly people in much more walkable countries figure out how to take their kids places with less stuff. But the car seats is the real kicker since there’s no getting around them in the short term at least.
Once AVs become that dominant, I suspect that clever engineers will come up with amazingly simple and reliable car seats that can be popped in and out.
I bet you'll be able to order an AV with the necessary seats already installed.
I am very adept with taking car seats in and out, since I have two small kids but don't drive. They are already dead simple to pop in and out if you select one with this in mind and have some practice.
The issue is what you do when you reach your destination. Say I catch a ride to a trailhead, or to a busy restaurant. What am I supposed to do with the seats before I hail my ride back home, just leave them by the side of the road? They are very heavy and also very awkward, especially when you are trying to corral two toddlers.
I live in a smallish city that has been actively replacing our fixed bus lines with on-demand paratransit and this has become a big headache for me. But I suspect that with AVs coming I am just a couple years ahead of the curve.
It would be cool, especially given the different stages they’d need to account for (infant, rear facing, etc). I’ve been burned by trying to get taxis with car seats in the past so if they could make it super easy and absolutely guaranteed that would make my life easier.
I have it in the back of my head that I had a debate on here with someone about child car seats in AVs a couple years ago, but I can't remember the details.
I don’t know if it was me, I hadn’t really thought about it until today! We’re expecting our second this summer and I’m already dreading having to travel with 2 car seats.
As someone who takes kids in Waymos and taxis frequently, RideSafe vests are the way to go for older kids (around 4+), and infant seats are usually pretty easy to quickly install. The 1-4 age is the trickiest, but Cosco Scenera can rear face and is relatively painless. Don’t tell any of the hardcore urbanists, but I find Waymos more convenient than busses when transporting kids.
I will for sure check out the RideSafe vests for travel in general, thanks for that tip! I have a 4 year old, so all the annoying years car seat wise are still quite fresh.
I liked the Cosco Scenera for travel, but my daughter outgrew the straps way before she outgrew the weight limit on the seat (which I unfortunately found out once we arrived and were getting set up in a rental). That’s apparently a notorious problem with that model, which sucks because it’s the lightest one you can easily get for traveling.
For everyday stuff, I just don’t know what I’d do with the seats once I get to where I’m going with them.
This may be too late to be useful, but the Cosco Finale is the next step from the Scenera, comparably light and I think easier to install, though it’s forward facing only. My Certified Large kids have both been able to use it post-Scenera and pre-RideSafer.
Agree with you more generally on the car seats in taxi-type AVs problem. We’ve run into this visiting family in Lima, where we’d ordinarily use lots of cabs, but then when you get where you’re going, you’re exploring Chinatown but somehow trying to haul a car seat around with you? The Doona works well for kids still in the bucket seat, and RideSafer when they’re big enough, but that space between is a tough problem to solve. On the bright side, it’s much more pleasant to buckle a car seat or ride safer into a Waymo, where you can take your time and you’re not costing anyone any wages while you do it, than to an Uber, where the driver is impatient and giving you the stink eye.
I’ll keep that in mind for kid two, I appreciate the tip!
I’m not terribly hopeful AV taxis will solve for this in the short or medium term for parents aside from letting parents install their own. In the long term (I’m assuming I’m not going to live to see it) I’m sure car seat rules relax like on buses once everything on the road is an AV.
I almost put in a line about how if you could actually reduce all accidents to near-zero you could maybe finally get a relaxing of car seat rules like on buses/trains but I just don’t see that happening for such a long time!
Serious answer, a kid still young enough to be in a car seat is probably going to be unhappy being shoved into any machine by themselves, and I would find it inappropriate to do so. But assuming they're being accompanied by an appropriate adult the car seat thing seems immaterial. Plus, car seats designed to convert to kid safe car seats doesn't strike me as a big engineering challenge.
Oh to clarify I didn’t mean kids traveling alone, I meant any transport that involves kids with adults as normal.
Are you familiar with car seat requirements for kids of different ages? I swear I’m not trying to be a jerk, I just don’t want to over explain if you are. Kids are supposed to be in a rear-facing seat for the first few years, and for the first like 6 months they need an entirely different style of seat altogether because they need to be at a specific angle so their airways aren’t accidentally obstructed. I wouldn’t want to discount that clever engineering could get us there, but I also doubt it’s trivial.
Huh. I would think my sister would do that bc she’s super safey safey with the kids but their car seats are front facing. Though they’re in the 3rd row seating of a minivan which might have something to do with it
Ah so pro level! Honestly it would be great if they figured it out. I still can’t reliably get a taxi with a car seat, so I’d be happy as hell if this were actually solved for.
I’m imagining strapping in a 3 month old and waving bon voyage for their foray across town with no humans in the car. I wish, man. My first kid was a car screamer.
For my most common trip of just two train stops, that currently costs $2.85, modulo some tax avoidance due to commuter benefits*. Would be significantly less if I bought a monthly pass. (Complexity tax!) I don't know how that comes out on a per-mile basis for oranges to oranges, but an AV would honestly need to be notably even cheaper than this for me to want to switch on the regular. Possible exceptions for inclement conditions, like when it's pouring rain, although in such case I'd expect some form of surge pricing too. All the Waymos also start heading home to depot at the time when I get off work, which makes using them for the return trip dicey as well. Expanded fleets would remedy this eventually, of course...
I don't know, I guess I just like transit, and it's a small enough percentage of budget that the financial argument doesn't compel too strongly? Same with shaving a few minutes off per commute, that time is just not hugely valuable to me. I don't want to do JIT transport between home and job, mental modes don't shift gears that quickly, train time is my time to meditatively prepare for the rigors ahead. Yeah, there's a single-digit number of times per year where there are serious delays, and of course we've already seen how Law & Order can have a low-ratings season when the showrunners get blue religion. But it's just hard to see the median direct value proposition, even if I will of course benefit from traffic being less dangerous. (Man, I love Waymos going through our parking lot, they always let me through when I'm on cart wrangling duty. It'd be so much easier with fewer parked cars too.)
*these currently exclude rideshare, and I expect they won't cover AVs in the future either
Maybe eventually we'll get to a point where nearly every car is autonomous, but for the next 15 years I'd expect cars with drivers to share the road with them. This will seriously limit the appeal of AVs, as many of the benefits (higher coordination leading to higher speeds and lower times) would only be realized if nearly every car in the road is an AV one. Would we really see much induced demand then?
You can start by doubling that number, if not tripling. Autonomous-only roads will be a radioactive third rail until everyone who grew up without them is at least 60.
The nice thing about AV lanes is that with each car separated by four inches from the others, the asshole human drivers won't be able to cut in and use the lane.
It's a totally different question from when we SHOULD get human drivers off the road. I think "when will it be politically palatable" is almost independent of the quality of AVs.
“higher coordination leading to higher speeds and lower times”
I spent a long time this morning arguing those “benefits” are basically a flight of fantasy, lol.
The main benefits are reduced cost and aggravation, and those will be enough that AVs will start eating into urban self-driving, and thus vehicle ownership, very quickly.
Oddly, there are still reasons against the higher speed limits. Notably, you lose efficiency rather rapidly around 45 mph. That said, just reducing stop lights will go a long way to speeding up most trips even without increasing speeds.
I know the numbers better for gas vehicles, of course. I haven't heard that they are much different for electric, though. In fact, I seem to remember early hybrids would tend to gas at the higher speeds because of this.
Actually speed matters far more for EV efficiency than ICEV, precisely because they lose less to other factors. Air resistance is proportionately more important.
I want to be clear that I did not mean my comment as a contradiction to your post. I'm largely agreed. If sad at some of the efficiencies that rail have that will be completely lost to smaller vehicles with tires.
Yeah, ridiculously cheap, abundant AVs might make me not buy a new car when mine dies, but I’d not sell my car to do that. I could see moving to a higher density part of town and getting rid of the cars though in such a scenario, assuming we fixed crime and disorder too.
If you can pay $0.15 per mile to ride a Waymo that goes directly to your destination, why would you pay $1.50 to ride the bus? Or $0.50 per mile to own a car and have to remain sober and put down your phone every time you go somewhere?
Under what circumstance would you plausibly only have to pay $0.15 per mile to ride a Waymo? (Google AI says that Waymo pricing as of 2025 averaged around $18 a mile with a 30% to 40% premium over human-operated Uber and Lyft rides.)
Not sure where you’re living but in many places the train is either much faster (subway or bullet train), much cheaper, or both. Buses have a bit of a harder time having to deal with traffic, but dedicated bus lanes are a thing too that will naturally become more valuable if roads do end up getting congested with EVs.
Yeah I don’t think anyone sells their car because of self-drive. But there are surely others like me who are just hoping their current car lives long enough for the Waymo service area to cover their home.
I was only thinking of the high density areas. And, presumably, if people get their wish, zoning laws will greatly reduce the number of required parking spots for a lot of places. Basic rules of scarcity will mean that those will go up in price.
If it gets to that marginal cost, and we do nothing about housing, we’ll see a bunch more folks living in their cars. Shoot a self-driving electric RV would be pretty dope
When I last looked at this following a conference session on the topic (TRB ‘22, so 4 years ago or so), for AVs to coordinate to substantially reduce headway, increase speeds, and eliminate visual signals would require processing that cannot be accomplished in vehicle and the upper bound on required communication/bandwidth might be higher than the entire 5G spectrum can sustain.
Interesting I was watching something about Waymo's when they return to be charged some guy comes out and swaps their hard drives. Apparently almost all processing is done on the vehicle but the training data is too voluminous to go over the air. It would seem like the coordination data would be that much if the driving is done without significant need to exchange data.
College sports are the great Chesterton’s Fence of American education. Easy to ask at a glance “what does this have to do with school” but we knock down this particular bit of American exceptionalism at our own peril.
Sometimes I'll say 100 million to indicate 1 significant figure, but what happens if it actually is 100 million with 3 significant figures? Highly inconvenient.
You could give a confidence interval in nerdy contexts where people want you to quantify your uncertainty, and not worry about significant figures otherwise. Your listener might not even care about basics like "what's the unit of measurement?" or "is this number per day, per year, cumulative over history? Is it in my state, my country, some other country, worldwide?" and similarly, may not be sensitive to differences of several orders of magnitude. One million dollars? One hundred billion dollars? One zillion, gagillion, fafillion, shabalabadooo ... illion ... yen? Close enough. Why make trillions when we can make ... billions? (DOGE seemed to function on similar logic, at least when it came time to justify their cuts.)
I have apparently failed in my civic responsibility, although just writing a bracket with no info and firing it off on ESPN Dot Com did not strike me as a particularly productive or helpful exercise. I'm exclusively working from home right now so I just don't have any occasion to construct a real pool.
But honestly, to me March Madness produces more nostalgic regret than anything. I've won three bracket pools (Maryland '02, Kansas '08, and Virginia '19) and I used to be a huge consumer of college basketball. I've written posts about the correct way to score a bracket tournament (the doubling-every-round thing is unbelievably awful; the mathematically optimal way to do it is to use a multiplier of phi, or more likely just successive fibonacci numbers, which trend to phi eventually-- something like 3-5-8-13-21-34 would be a good scoring system). KenPom.com used to be my literal homepage.
And the bastards killed it, with all the conference realignments and transfer portals and pay-for-play and greed and greed and more greed. (Important: I'm not talking about NIL here; that's just paying athletes what they're worth.) I do not want to watch the California Golden Bears pretend to be a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. That's a bad joke, not a good-faith attempt at organized athletics.
It's such a damned shame. I'll still while away a few hours, but it's just idle curiosity to me now, not a passion.
The best part of returning to the office is finding new ways to invent water cooler talk. (One reason) I look forward to Friday mornings is that I get to talk with an office buddy about The Pitt Season 2 (an excellent 10-15 min "waste" of time every week). Before that was our Oscar Pool (I lost by one point to someone who saw zero films). We've done the Australian Open, White Lotus Death Pool (huge success), Severance speculation, Pluribus speculation. I'm really looking forward to The World Cup this summer for both personal reasons, but also because talking about shared experiences and perspectives is added fun. I've had friends make fun of me for watching "coworker shows" but they just don't appreciate social capital and the human experience.
The Pitt is such a funny show. Every fifteen minutes, somebody turns to the camera and says “this disproportionately affects trans women of color” like it’s 2016 again. Nostalgia come early, or an unintentional comedy of manners? It’s so good in other aspects that I don’t care.
The traditional World Cup pool (because the bracket can change depending on the group-stage results) is to have a sweepstake. Everyone chips in their stake, and then they get a randomly-drawn team. Usually half the money goes to the winner and the rest gets divided up between various categories so even if you draw a bad team, you still have something to root for.
Typical categories are: "best team from each non-Europe/SA continent" (ie Asia, Africa, North America), "best three seed" (the groups are all seeded 1-4), "best four seed", "losing finalist", "third place" (that way people actually care about the third/fourth place game), "worst team". The organiser is encouraged to be creative and come up with slightly silly categories so people have something to hope for, even when they draw New Zealand or Panama.
I suspect that a few offices this year will have "most players stopped by ICE" as a category, to give you a feel for the sorts of things people will pick as categories. One I've always put in is "best result by a team that has never won a World Cup before"
I'm so glad someone here finally wrote about March Madness! I am of course referring to the NCAA D1 wrestling tournament this month, which I know you are all enraptured by. Can anyone catch Penn State, the defending champs? They have 7 No. 1 seeds and 8 wrestlers in the semifinals. Let's break it down. First off-
[Is banned by Ben for literally all time because no one cares about wrestling]
I was in the same grade as his brother, Mark. Mark was pretty nice for a popular athlete; he'd chat with me even though I was a total Nerd Girl. Dave was *worshipped* by the student body. I never heard anyone say anything bad about him. Terrible what happened to him. And if the movie had any truth to it, I guess Mark's life didn't go so well either, all things considered. :-(
I just cannot bring myself to care about college sports (aka minor league sports).
The playing field is far less equitable than professional sports, the talent is not as good, and teams are evaluated by judges instead of by a formula of some type, which is totally doable nowadays. It's very fun if you are a college student but once you're over 22 years old I don't get the point.
And while pro sports are getting more equitable, through things like the second apron in the NBA, college sports is rapidly moving in the other direction.
I watch a lot of NBA playoffs. I watch a ton of NFL playoffs. I sometimes watch MLB playoffs. But I'm going to stay out of college sports playoffs.
It's rough out there now that every player is on a one-year secret contract with boosters. But the beautiful thing is you don't have to care. I spent five minutes on my bracket. I didn't watch a single minute of college basketball this year.
btw I'm in the 90th percentile of the work bracket right now
I barely watch any sports anymore but if I do it's usually college football. It's gotten more full of itself like pro ball but I love the enthusiasm of the college kids (my nephew said they waited in line for three days for a Texas Tech game last season--that's devotion!). And it goes to the heart of today's post: those rabid college towns are getting all kinds of sense of community and shared adventure.
The last 10 players to win the Naismith Award have been:
Cooper Flagg
Zach Edey
Oscar Tshiebwe
Luke Garza
Obi Toppin
Zion Williamson
Jalen Brunson
Frank Mason III
Buddy Hield
Frank Kaminsky
That team would be pretty good thanks to Flagg and Brunson but it's not a title-winning roster. And that's the best college player in the whole USA each year. It's just not the same sport.
Pickleball, pickleball, pickleball. Young, old, fat, thin, boy, girl, athletic, can’t hit a ball if your life depends on it. There is a large group of people out there dying to play with you.
I would also add climbing gyms, though it skews much harder to the physically fit. But there’s a suprisingly broad cross-section of the population that enjoys it. Kids are naturally excellent climbers, so there are a lot of families. The problem-solving aspect appeals to nerds of all stripes, but the physicality appeals to lots of non PMCs. I meet a lot of people I would normally never cross paths with, and it’s inherently cooperative, because you place your life in your partner’s hands on every climb.
A while back I asked whether any was interested in an Orange County Slow Boring meetup. I got lots of “I wished I could attend, but I live far away” but not a lot of engagement from people living close enough to attend.
Is anyone interested and able to attend a Slow Boring meetup in Orange County? Would a Saturday afternoon work for you?
Also, re: cultivating weak ties, I attended a board game night in my community last night. It was fun!
I am vehemently anti-anti-sports on social grounds. Sports fandom has allowed me to reignite high school friendships 15 years after the fact. I've had a sports chat of 15 guys and growing for four years now, and like half the chat is in Spokane where I don't live. This is the healthy side of social media, the actual SOCIAL part. So yeah, March Madness rules, sports help bring people together, totally healthy thing. The High Point v Wisconsin game yesterday with the guy who shoots 3s hitting his first layup to win the game was pure cinema.
Unrelated, remember me talking about the acid test of a free society is being able to say "F U" to a public official? The Afroman case is EXACTLY what I was clumsily referring to. If the cops raid your house for no reason, you have the God given right to roast the hell out of them. This is what separates us from Iran or the UK or wherever.
If people don't like sports, that's fine--entertainment is subjective, and we don't need reasons to explain what does and doesn't entertain us. But I do draw the line on people who think that liking sports is bad, and are very vocal about telling people why they think so.
I saw the Daily Show piece on Afroman (yeah yeah my husband still watches that show) and he is a spectacular American. His is the kind of patriotic dissent we need.
It’s sooooooooo boring. Why does nobody else understand this????
God Bless Afroman too, for quite literally wrapping — and rapping! — himself in the flag.
I’m pretty sure that wild ass suit is what sold him to the jury.
Fun fact, I actually met him once lol.
Saw him perform twice at frat parties in college. He would just pour 40s for the crowd
After the video shoot was over, he came back upstairs and just started rapping all his hits from behind the cramped ass, dirty ass bar. It was GLORIOUS. I can veritably say I’ve used a karaoke mic touched by the man.
What happened?
He tried to butt me in line for the bathroom at a music video shoot at my home bar in STL. I called him on it, he apologized, and then took a picture w me.
That was a bomb ass party.
Did he go to the back of the line?
Verily, he did.
"And I consider myself a sport for doing so"
I'd wager he got high.
I was sadly unaware of this case until now. Thank you. The good guys got a win here.
And oh man, what a suit!
Yes, in both ways!
Yeah man I watched his trial today this makes me irrationally happy
I've been pleasantly surprised that literally everybody I know is siding with him.
I loved how patriotic it was, too. In the press conference at the end he was like “America won today” and I agree
Celebrate with some lemon pound cake!
It’s a tragedy that sports are so good for society, and so excruciatingly boring to watch.
Username checks out
I’m one of twelve people in the world who hates watching sports. Who wouldn’t be grouchy?
Life is hard.
This needs context:
https://youtu.be/9xxK5yyecRo?si=tstunnbG9OfByLxz
I've been giving to Lemon Pound Cake all day.
Chuck Norris doesn't die. He lies in waiting.
Back in the day, I could not STAND the triple combo of Chuck Norris jokes, zombies, and epic bacon.
Between that and the 80’s nostalgia fad that *never. fucking. DIED.*, I was introduced to my own curmudgeonliness far too early in life during my late-2000’s college years.
Excellent article, Halina. College basketball is the particular subject right now, but this is also why sports in general are very good for society. They help us bond around a common subject that make for an easy icebreaker for those who are also interested. They create community bonds in having something for those near us to unite about. They also provide a constructive outlet for the tribalism that is innate in we humans, as we can express it over something that ultimately doesn't matter, compared to much more serious things in life that we should not be tribal about.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone had it right (with much particular approval from Ben, Halina, and myself) when they concluded an episode with the declaration of Go America, Go Broncos.
They also provide us with shared objects of near-universal hatred, like the Yankees or the Cowboys.
Anyone who hates the Yankees or Raiders is a friend of mine.
Read the sub-head, clicked the 'heart' before going back to read the actual article.
Joseph I’m sorry in advance for the sports content. I’ll be back with politics on Monday.
APOLOGIZE FOR NOTHING
Indeed. *I* can fucking deal with Joseph.
Such impertinence!
I will make sure your nence is quite fucking pert.
He is spoiled with a reliable Politics Monday. I very much approve of your balance with Culture Friday, be it about sports or whatever else is on your mind.
I also enjoy the culture takes from the Slow Boring crew.
I forgive you, Halina. You had to do it. They make you do it. Our evil commenters.
for me the winning subhead was "The real madness is social isolation" :)
This subhead was just perfectly tailored to tease Joseph, because he's all about civic duties. What's also good about this is that he's quite knowledgeable about universities. He could have pulled a Diane Chambers and fill out a bracket on completely non-sports grounds on what he thinks about those schools, and he might end up having the kind of luck Diane did. Hell, picking Siena just because they are a top tier polling school came damn near close to paying off big time this tournament!
It's fun that you are on a first name basis with some commenters. I'm curious, how many commenters do you think Matt could name offhand?
I mean, you can just say "David" and that gets you up to at least a dozen.
We are Legion.
To be fair, "Joseph" is the entirety of his name.
When I die, etched on my mausoleum will be a single word: "Joseph"
They can run your obituary in the sports section!
The obvious solution: write about George Steinbrenner's various political donations https://www.mprnews.org/story/2012/05/16/by-george-these-are-good-times-for-people-influencing-politics
There are tons of excellent intersections between sports and politics if one is willing to seek them out.
(Sports and economics intersections are still better, though. *ducks*)
Trump should fire Pete and hire John Rocker as our new Secretary of Warlording
And--genuinely one of the best articles ever published in my ~5 years of subscribing to Slow Boring.
You flatter me.
After actually reading, I can confirm. This was an EXCELLENT essay.
I can't wait to see the reaction from a particular Slow Borer regarding how awesome this subheader is.
I saw the finest minds of my generation consumed by March Madness: starving, hysterical, naked.
Hell, I don't care anything about kicking it into the basket for a homerun, and even I sometimes use sportsball analogies and marketing putsches in my work. That one year the 49ers were in the Superb Owl? Whole endcap display filled with red and gold items. (The only time anyone ever buys Boatswain IPA...) Merchandising, merchandising, merchandising, a buck is a buck, and sports fans buy groceries too. I don't think it's even cynical in this case, i.e. that I don't "really care" about the sports. (My, how quickly one forgets the sports.) Everyone's just happy for the excuse to celebrate something, build community, take a load off from the cares of the world with something important yet trivial, without being trivially important. Thus is the power of Stanley's Cup. Although I prefer their thermoses, personally.
Let's take a relaxed attitude towards work and watch the baseball match. The Nimets are my favorite squadron.
That had to have been one of Azaria's most favorite lines to voice.
Great article today.
> The office pool, the group chat, and the shared experience of watching the same game and suffering the same upset are on-ramps to deeper connection
Anyone that thinks otherwise should read the classic Clifford Geeriz essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight". It's a great read and should rewire how you think about seemingly superficial cultural events, even gambling. If you'll forgive the academese, on top of everything else, they are platforms for people to demonstrate their commitment to various cultural values, competencies, and affiliations (and much more).
Geertz's essay is a legit life-changer, imo. It's available here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20024056.pdf
Yay anthropology
Geertz is great and underrated.
"the imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence" (pg 16) referencing Weber is particularly apt for this site.
And mybe this post is an ode to Weber! Slow Boring folding on itself.
[EFFORT_POST]
The near-future of AVs is not actually that complicated at heart. There are two basic principles that we should expect to remain true for decades:
1. AVs will soon be better drivers than humans across all dimensions and virtually all edge cases.
2. There are serious limitations to how much they can network and communicate to act in coordinated fashion without vastly better IoT penetration than currently exists or may be possible (absent radical changes like quantum entanglement).
This competence-with-limits can be expressed in two ways, at the extremes:
1. Much tighter headways, higher speed limits, reduced visual cues, and therefore much improved throughput on non-highway streets, at the cost of access to non-AV… well,.. anything.
2. Hugely improved safety outcomes for all with no change in headways, speed limits, infrastructure, pedestrian segregation, and thus throughput.
We cannot maximize both simultaneously, there will be a sliding scale between the two, and it’s very likely that policy choices are going to lean towards the latter, especially in denser areas. Absent substantially better IoT penetration and developing new machine learning tools to enable networked operation at scale, traffic is still going to be a huge problem, only marginally improved by AV performance.
Thus, what’s actually going to happen is:
1. AVs are going to become a commoditized industrial good with an operating cost of $0.06-0.15/mi*, and rental costs will be only slightly higher.
2. This will initially gut transit and rapidly weigh on private vehicle ownership rates.
3. But induced demand is going to bite insanely hard, and gridlock will run mad in even mid-density, mid-sized cities and their suburbs.
4. Municipalities and counties will have no choice but to dynamically price road space and allocate lane space to transit-only surface options
5. Unions will eventually lose their war, allowing transit authorities to inaugurate a mix of high-frequency fixed routes and semi-fixed paratransit using AV’s for very little money by contemporary standards.
6. We will ultimately converge on a much more effective but structurally similar equilibrium; more and better transit, more and safer vehicle operation, similar to moderately reduced traffic congestion, vastly reduced use of public land and space to store cars, and much more pedestrianization in cities and suburbs alike.
*This could be off by a factor of 2-3 and it wouldn’t matter.
[/EFFORT_POST]
I think you're wildly underestimating the resistance to transitioning away from individual vehicle ownership. I might buy a self driving car, I have zero interest in using a Waymo like service for all of my transportation.
Agree, I would be willing to pay a hefty premium for my own self driving car, I have much less interest in having to call for one every time I want to go somewhere.
Clearly this choice will be calculatedly differently the more urban or dense your living area.
I will be deep in the cold, cold ground before a car that drives for me is anything other than an OPTION for personal vehicular transport.
Because you want to keep driving yourself everywhere? Or for some other reason?
If I could afford a staff of servants I'd at least consider a chauffeur as part of the crew. I enjoy doing many things for myself, driving is rarely one of them.
The idea of sitting in the front seat of a control-less car and barreling toward an accident I can see coming, with no means of averting it, is 200 proof nightmare fuel for me.
You could accuse me of just being a control freak, and maybe that's right, but I think it's more an assault on my ethos of owning up to one's mistakes. The idea that the robot can pretend to perform the thinking for me, but it has no agency and fundamentally no ability to own its mistakes. It cheerily makes the mistake for me, and then passes the buck--it's "mine". Note that this does not really apply to tools that don't pretend to think. They're deterministic, or close enough to deterministic that it was my job to understand them before using them. And note that a chauffeur (although not really something that interests me) can own their mistakes. It's a very human capacity.
This is presumably also near the core of my attitude toward LLM use, even in casual look-it-up banter but *especially* in the workplace. I can only describe that attitude as utter revulsion.
Do you have trouble with flying? What you're describing is the essence of anxiety about flying (which I, despite my brother being an aeronautical engineer, have).
Not only do I have trouble with flying commercial, that trouble only manifested itself AFTER I got my pilot's license!
Not debilitating trouble--you get on a plane to go places, this is how it works--but definitely sweaty palms in the bumps. *I'm* supposed to fight those bumps. Even if the actual flight crew are miles more qualified to handle it.
I have no problem with automation that works, lol.
So I share your LLM skepticism but am substantially less concerned by AVs
I'm not saying it's a rational concern. Nightmares have never needed to be rational.
How well do we think AVs will work when you have 1+ kids in car seats?
Ooh, this is an excellent point that was not broached to my knowledge in today's comments. That could sent the hot takes on Car Seat Discourse to a new entire level.
Car Seat Discourse is so real (and often a dumpster fire). But yeah, it seems fairly unworkable for parents, to be totally honest.
I commented in today's section that objects that people transport within cars is a hurdle for AVs, but I didn't even think about all the objects that parents transport around for their kids.
Yeah, my husband takes a full carload of stuff to work each day, and he’s just an outdoor teacher. Lots of people have to schlep shit for work that’s way more than a single load in/out.
I don’t think it’s fully insurmountable for parents, clearly people in much more walkable countries figure out how to take their kids places with less stuff. But the car seats is the real kicker since there’s no getting around them in the short term at least.
Once AVs become that dominant, I suspect that clever engineers will come up with amazingly simple and reliable car seats that can be popped in and out.
I bet you'll be able to order an AV with the necessary seats already installed.
I am very adept with taking car seats in and out, since I have two small kids but don't drive. They are already dead simple to pop in and out if you select one with this in mind and have some practice.
The issue is what you do when you reach your destination. Say I catch a ride to a trailhead, or to a busy restaurant. What am I supposed to do with the seats before I hail my ride back home, just leave them by the side of the road? They are very heavy and also very awkward, especially when you are trying to corral two toddlers.
I live in a smallish city that has been actively replacing our fixed bus lines with on-demand paratransit and this has become a big headache for me. But I suspect that with AVs coming I am just a couple years ahead of the curve.
Hopefully the necessary seats will be clean, not puked in by the last kid.
It would be cool, especially given the different stages they’d need to account for (infant, rear facing, etc). I’ve been burned by trying to get taxis with car seats in the past so if they could make it super easy and absolutely guaranteed that would make my life easier.
I have it in the back of my head that I had a debate on here with someone about child car seats in AVs a couple years ago, but I can't remember the details.
I don’t know if it was me, I hadn’t really thought about it until today! We’re expecting our second this summer and I’m already dreading having to travel with 2 car seats.
Congrats on the future arrival of your second child!
Thanks! I’m so excited to not be pregnant anymore.
As someone who takes kids in Waymos and taxis frequently, RideSafe vests are the way to go for older kids (around 4+), and infant seats are usually pretty easy to quickly install. The 1-4 age is the trickiest, but Cosco Scenera can rear face and is relatively painless. Don’t tell any of the hardcore urbanists, but I find Waymos more convenient than busses when transporting kids.
I will for sure check out the RideSafe vests for travel in general, thanks for that tip! I have a 4 year old, so all the annoying years car seat wise are still quite fresh.
I liked the Cosco Scenera for travel, but my daughter outgrew the straps way before she outgrew the weight limit on the seat (which I unfortunately found out once we arrived and were getting set up in a rental). That’s apparently a notorious problem with that model, which sucks because it’s the lightest one you can easily get for traveling.
For everyday stuff, I just don’t know what I’d do with the seats once I get to where I’m going with them.
This may be too late to be useful, but the Cosco Finale is the next step from the Scenera, comparably light and I think easier to install, though it’s forward facing only. My Certified Large kids have both been able to use it post-Scenera and pre-RideSafer.
Agree with you more generally on the car seats in taxi-type AVs problem. We’ve run into this visiting family in Lima, where we’d ordinarily use lots of cabs, but then when you get where you’re going, you’re exploring Chinatown but somehow trying to haul a car seat around with you? The Doona works well for kids still in the bucket seat, and RideSafer when they’re big enough, but that space between is a tough problem to solve. On the bright side, it’s much more pleasant to buckle a car seat or ride safer into a Waymo, where you can take your time and you’re not costing anyone any wages while you do it, than to an Uber, where the driver is impatient and giving you the stink eye.
I’ll keep that in mind for kid two, I appreciate the tip!
I’m not terribly hopeful AV taxis will solve for this in the short or medium term for parents aside from letting parents install their own. In the long term (I’m assuming I’m not going to live to see it) I’m sure car seat rules relax like on buses once everything on the road is an AV.
[TROLLING]
Who needs car seats when your driver is foolproof?
I almost put in a line about how if you could actually reduce all accidents to near-zero you could maybe finally get a relaxing of car seat rules like on buses/trains but I just don’t see that happening for such a long time!
Serious answer, a kid still young enough to be in a car seat is probably going to be unhappy being shoved into any machine by themselves, and I would find it inappropriate to do so. But assuming they're being accompanied by an appropriate adult the car seat thing seems immaterial. Plus, car seats designed to convert to kid safe car seats doesn't strike me as a big engineering challenge.
Oh to clarify I didn’t mean kids traveling alone, I meant any transport that involves kids with adults as normal.
Are you familiar with car seat requirements for kids of different ages? I swear I’m not trying to be a jerk, I just don’t want to over explain if you are. Kids are supposed to be in a rear-facing seat for the first few years, and for the first like 6 months they need an entirely different style of seat altogether because they need to be at a specific angle so their airways aren’t accidentally obstructed. I wouldn’t want to discount that clever engineering could get us there, but I also doubt it’s trivial.
rear facing? even in the back?
Yes, it’s much safer on their spine in the first few years in the event of an accident to be in a rear facing seat.
Huh. I would think my sister would do that bc she’s super safey safey with the kids but their car seats are front facing. Though they’re in the 3rd row seating of a minivan which might have something to do with it
I once traded in one fairly new car, and bought another, entirely based on the new one having the most up to date car seat LATCH system.
Ah so pro level! Honestly it would be great if they figured it out. I still can’t reliably get a taxi with a car seat, so I’d be happy as hell if this were actually solved for.
Then there is the potential to send your kids in an AV to the grandparents house while you stay home.
I’m imagining strapping in a 3 month old and waving bon voyage for their foray across town with no humans in the car. I wish, man. My first kid was a car screamer.
In Waymos, no one can hear you scream.
For my most common trip of just two train stops, that currently costs $2.85, modulo some tax avoidance due to commuter benefits*. Would be significantly less if I bought a monthly pass. (Complexity tax!) I don't know how that comes out on a per-mile basis for oranges to oranges, but an AV would honestly need to be notably even cheaper than this for me to want to switch on the regular. Possible exceptions for inclement conditions, like when it's pouring rain, although in such case I'd expect some form of surge pricing too. All the Waymos also start heading home to depot at the time when I get off work, which makes using them for the return trip dicey as well. Expanded fleets would remedy this eventually, of course...
I don't know, I guess I just like transit, and it's a small enough percentage of budget that the financial argument doesn't compel too strongly? Same with shaving a few minutes off per commute, that time is just not hugely valuable to me. I don't want to do JIT transport between home and job, mental modes don't shift gears that quickly, train time is my time to meditatively prepare for the rigors ahead. Yeah, there's a single-digit number of times per year where there are serious delays, and of course we've already seen how Law & Order can have a low-ratings season when the showrunners get blue religion. But it's just hard to see the median direct value proposition, even if I will of course benefit from traffic being less dangerous. (Man, I love Waymos going through our parking lot, they always let me through when I'm on cart wrangling duty. It'd be so much easier with fewer parked cars too.)
*these currently exclude rideshare, and I expect they won't cover AVs in the future either
You have a short, one-seat ride to work via transit. Even in NYC that describes like 15% of commuters.
Not knocking it; just not generalizable.
Maybe eventually we'll get to a point where nearly every car is autonomous, but for the next 15 years I'd expect cars with drivers to share the road with them. This will seriously limit the appeal of AVs, as many of the benefits (higher coordination leading to higher speeds and lower times) would only be realized if nearly every car in the road is an AV one. Would we really see much induced demand then?
You can start by doubling that number, if not tripling. Autonomous-only roads will be a radioactive third rail until everyone who grew up without them is at least 60.
Maybe AV lanes will replace HOV lanes
The nice thing about AV lanes is that with each car separated by four inches from the others, the asshole human drivers won't be able to cut in and use the lane.
I very much expect something like that will happen.
We’ll see how quickly the AVs advance, lol.
The insurance companies are gonna have something to say about the “collectible” market after a while…
It's a totally different question from when we SHOULD get human drivers off the road. I think "when will it be politically palatable" is almost independent of the quality of AVs.
I think it’s going to be a fun political battle, indeed.
But I do expect dense jurisdictions to ban human-operated vehicles sooner than less-dense ones
“higher coordination leading to higher speeds and lower times”
I spent a long time this morning arguing those “benefits” are basically a flight of fantasy, lol.
The main benefits are reduced cost and aggravation, and those will be enough that AVs will start eating into urban self-driving, and thus vehicle ownership, very quickly.
If they succeed at clogging the roads then it will be more aggravating!
Hence the above “induced demand is going to be a clusterfuck” point, haha.
Oddly, there are still reasons against the higher speed limits. Notably, you lose efficiency rather rapidly around 45 mph. That said, just reducing stop lights will go a long way to speeding up most trips even without increasing speeds.
I assume you mean electricity consumption when you say “efficiency?”
I know the numbers better for gas vehicles, of course. I haven't heard that they are much different for electric, though. In fact, I seem to remember early hybrids would tend to gas at the higher speeds because of this.
Actually speed matters far more for EV efficiency than ICEV, precisely because they lose less to other factors. Air resistance is proportionately more important.
That V^2 term is a bitch.
Less so when only 10% of the fuel is actually making it to the wheels.
I want to be clear that I did not mean my comment as a contradiction to your post. I'm largely agreed. If sad at some of the efficiencies that rail have that will be completely lost to smaller vehicles with tires.
I’m confused — why would cheap AVs everywhere gut transit and push everyone to sell their cars?
Yeah, ridiculously cheap, abundant AVs might make me not buy a new car when mine dies, but I’d not sell my car to do that. I could see moving to a higher density part of town and getting rid of the cars though in such a scenario, assuming we fixed crime and disorder too.
The former is just the tragedy of the commons; an AV will operate at a price little more expensive than transit.
The latter isn’t to say people are going to sell, but for many, maybe even most, the car their household buys in 2030 is going to be the last one.
I suppose I should have specified “rapidly” in the sense of a demographic/technical change.
If you can pay $0.15 per mile to ride a Waymo that goes directly to your destination, why would you pay $1.50 to ride the bus? Or $0.50 per mile to own a car and have to remain sober and put down your phone every time you go somewhere?
The "put down the phone" part seems increasingly optional these days, AV or no.
Under what circumstance would you plausibly only have to pay $0.15 per mile to ride a Waymo? (Google AI says that Waymo pricing as of 2025 averaged around $18 a mile with a 30% to 40% premium over human-operated Uber and Lyft rides.)
Not sure where you’re living but in many places the train is either much faster (subway or bullet train), much cheaper, or both. Buses have a bit of a harder time having to deal with traffic, but dedicated bus lanes are a thing too that will naturally become more valuable if roads do end up getting congested with EVs.
I mean, a car that you already own isn’t 50¢/mile, but I’m sure BZC would disagree
Yeah I don’t think anyone sells their car because of self-drive. But there are surely others like me who are just hoping their current car lives long enough for the Waymo service area to cover their home.
If by already own you mean you start the calculation by discounting the initial capital cost to zero, sure it's probably under $0.50.
Add in parking costs, and it is probably closer than I'm comfortable with.
Yeah, it’s really seldom that we pay to park these days, but I’m in a suburban part of the city.
I was only thinking of the high density areas. And, presumably, if people get their wish, zoning laws will greatly reduce the number of required parking spots for a lot of places. Basic rules of scarcity will mean that those will go up in price.
If it gets to that marginal cost, and we do nothing about housing, we’ll see a bunch more folks living in their cars. Shoot a self-driving electric RV would be pretty dope
What is your theory that they'd need anything more than the existing wifi cars come with now anyway?
When I last looked at this following a conference session on the topic (TRB ‘22, so 4 years ago or so), for AVs to coordinate to substantially reduce headway, increase speeds, and eliminate visual signals would require processing that cannot be accomplished in vehicle and the upper bound on required communication/bandwidth might be higher than the entire 5G spectrum can sustain.
Interesting I was watching something about Waymo's when they return to be charged some guy comes out and swaps their hard drives. Apparently almost all processing is done on the vehicle but the training data is too voluminous to go over the air. It would seem like the coordination data would be that much if the driving is done without significant need to exchange data.
College sports are the great Chesterton’s Fence of American education. Easy to ask at a glance “what does this have to do with school” but we knock down this particular bit of American exceptionalism at our own peril.
Wonderful, insightful essay, Halina. I loved it.
[Drops the mask and the feckless pedant emerges]
But please don't say "roughly 125.6 million"; four figure significance is no one's idea of "roughly."
Otoh: "There are roughly 9.2 quintillion possible bracket outcomes." Now that's how you do it.
Sometimes I'll say 100 million to indicate 1 significant figure, but what happens if it actually is 100 million with 3 significant figures? Highly inconvenient.
This is known as Heisenberg's Corollary.
You could give a confidence interval in nerdy contexts where people want you to quantify your uncertainty, and not worry about significant figures otherwise. Your listener might not even care about basics like "what's the unit of measurement?" or "is this number per day, per year, cumulative over history? Is it in my state, my country, some other country, worldwide?" and similarly, may not be sensitive to differences of several orders of magnitude. One million dollars? One hundred billion dollars? One zillion, gagillion, fafillion, shabalabadooo ... illion ... yen? Close enough. Why make trillions when we can make ... billions? (DOGE seemed to function on similar logic, at least when it came time to justify their cuts.)
I have apparently failed in my civic responsibility, although just writing a bracket with no info and firing it off on ESPN Dot Com did not strike me as a particularly productive or helpful exercise. I'm exclusively working from home right now so I just don't have any occasion to construct a real pool.
But honestly, to me March Madness produces more nostalgic regret than anything. I've won three bracket pools (Maryland '02, Kansas '08, and Virginia '19) and I used to be a huge consumer of college basketball. I've written posts about the correct way to score a bracket tournament (the doubling-every-round thing is unbelievably awful; the mathematically optimal way to do it is to use a multiplier of phi, or more likely just successive fibonacci numbers, which trend to phi eventually-- something like 3-5-8-13-21-34 would be a good scoring system). KenPom.com used to be my literal homepage.
And the bastards killed it, with all the conference realignments and transfer portals and pay-for-play and greed and greed and more greed. (Important: I'm not talking about NIL here; that's just paying athletes what they're worth.) I do not want to watch the California Golden Bears pretend to be a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. That's a bad joke, not a good-faith attempt at organized athletics.
It's such a damned shame. I'll still while away a few hours, but it's just idle curiosity to me now, not a passion.
The best part of returning to the office is finding new ways to invent water cooler talk. (One reason) I look forward to Friday mornings is that I get to talk with an office buddy about The Pitt Season 2 (an excellent 10-15 min "waste" of time every week). Before that was our Oscar Pool (I lost by one point to someone who saw zero films). We've done the Australian Open, White Lotus Death Pool (huge success), Severance speculation, Pluribus speculation. I'm really looking forward to The World Cup this summer for both personal reasons, but also because talking about shared experiences and perspectives is added fun. I've had friends make fun of me for watching "coworker shows" but they just don't appreciate social capital and the human experience.
The Pitt is such a funny show. Every fifteen minutes, somebody turns to the camera and says “this disproportionately affects trans women of color” like it’s 2016 again. Nostalgia come early, or an unintentional comedy of manners? It’s so good in other aspects that I don’t care.
My feeling about it is that it is so unabashedly overt and self aware that I don’t care and totally accept it. It doesn’t bother me at all.
The traditional World Cup pool (because the bracket can change depending on the group-stage results) is to have a sweepstake. Everyone chips in their stake, and then they get a randomly-drawn team. Usually half the money goes to the winner and the rest gets divided up between various categories so even if you draw a bad team, you still have something to root for.
Typical categories are: "best team from each non-Europe/SA continent" (ie Asia, Africa, North America), "best three seed" (the groups are all seeded 1-4), "best four seed", "losing finalist", "third place" (that way people actually care about the third/fourth place game), "worst team". The organiser is encouraged to be creative and come up with slightly silly categories so people have something to hope for, even when they draw New Zealand or Panama.
I suspect that a few offices this year will have "most players stopped by ICE" as a category, to give you a feel for the sorts of things people will pick as categories. One I've always put in is "best result by a team that has never won a World Cup before"
I'm so glad someone here finally wrote about March Madness! I am of course referring to the NCAA D1 wrestling tournament this month, which I know you are all enraptured by. Can anyone catch Penn State, the defending champs? They have 7 No. 1 seeds and 8 wrestlers in the semifinals. Let's break it down. First off-
[Is banned by Ben for literally all time because no one cares about wrestling]
I went to high school with Dave Schultz. Does that count?
Really?? Wow! Were you in the same grade? Any stories?
I was in the same grade as his brother, Mark. Mark was pretty nice for a popular athlete; he'd chat with me even though I was a total Nerd Girl. Dave was *worshipped* by the student body. I never heard anyone say anything bad about him. Terrible what happened to him. And if the movie had any truth to it, I guess Mark's life didn't go so well either, all things considered. :-(
Today is actually the Women's Frozen Four, thank you very much.
I just cannot bring myself to care about college sports (aka minor league sports).
The playing field is far less equitable than professional sports, the talent is not as good, and teams are evaluated by judges instead of by a formula of some type, which is totally doable nowadays. It's very fun if you are a college student but once you're over 22 years old I don't get the point.
And while pro sports are getting more equitable, through things like the second apron in the NBA, college sports is rapidly moving in the other direction.
I watch a lot of NBA playoffs. I watch a ton of NFL playoffs. I sometimes watch MLB playoffs. But I'm going to stay out of college sports playoffs.
Counterpoint:
Nearest NBA arena to my house: ~330 miles
Nearest NCAA DI arena: ~3 miles
This is why the destruction of minor league baseball is such a fucking tragedy.
Imagine if you'd had promotion and relegation instead of the farm system.
Similar for me: 400+ for NBA, 2 miles for D I-A.
It's rough out there now that every player is on a one-year secret contract with boosters. But the beautiful thing is you don't have to care. I spent five minutes on my bracket. I didn't watch a single minute of college basketball this year.
btw I'm in the 90th percentile of the work bracket right now
I barely watch any sports anymore but if I do it's usually college football. It's gotten more full of itself like pro ball but I love the enthusiasm of the college kids (my nephew said they waited in line for three days for a Texas Tech game last season--that's devotion!). And it goes to the heart of today's post: those rabid college towns are getting all kinds of sense of community and shared adventure.
NFL and NBA athletes have to come from somewhere
The last 10 players to win the Naismith Award have been:
Cooper Flagg
Zach Edey
Oscar Tshiebwe
Luke Garza
Obi Toppin
Zion Williamson
Jalen Brunson
Frank Mason III
Buddy Hield
Frank Kaminsky
That team would be pretty good thanks to Flagg and Brunson but it's not a title-winning roster. And that's the best college player in the whole USA each year. It's just not the same sport.
So does the rest of the NBA fall from trees or something?
I don't really get your argument. Most of the good NBA players played in high school but I don't want to watch 16 year olds play ball on TV
You don't have to care about college sports. But the people who do watch college sports aren't watching only for the Naismith or Heisman winner.
Pickleball, pickleball, pickleball. Young, old, fat, thin, boy, girl, athletic, can’t hit a ball if your life depends on it. There is a large group of people out there dying to play with you.
I would also add climbing gyms, though it skews much harder to the physically fit. But there’s a suprisingly broad cross-section of the population that enjoys it. Kids are naturally excellent climbers, so there are a lot of families. The problem-solving aspect appeals to nerds of all stripes, but the physicality appeals to lots of non PMCs. I meet a lot of people I would normally never cross paths with, and it’s inherently cooperative, because you place your life in your partner’s hands on every climb.
More sports talk, and I'll keep this seriously real: I love the NFL, and the NFL Draft is a huge part of it, but this is super duper not cool, NFL and Pittsburgh: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/48259609/pittsburgh-schools-switch-remote-learning-nfl-draft
Just another excuse to not work and still get paid.
Thanks for the segue!
A while back I asked whether any was interested in an Orange County Slow Boring meetup. I got lots of “I wished I could attend, but I live far away” but not a lot of engagement from people living close enough to attend.
Is anyone interested and able to attend a Slow Boring meetup in Orange County? Would a Saturday afternoon work for you?
Also, re: cultivating weak ties, I attended a board game night in my community last night. It was fun!
I’m definitely up for an OC Slow Boring meetup some time! I also owe you an email about other social events locally.