After playing laser tag with my kids, I now have serious doubts about the effectiveness of child soldiers.

I taught my kids three jokes. They started "making their own" and sharing them with everyone. The next day, my son asked me, "What does it mean if someone says, 'I don't get it?'"

Let him cook

I told my son how internal combustion engines work, and he thought I was joking.

The best one is a two-parter. "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Why? "To get to the silly person's house." Oh, okay. "Knock knock!" Who's there? "The chicken!"

My 4 yo son, walking into my office, "Are you still working?" "Yeah, bud." "How many more buttons do you have to press?"

Person who just retired: "If you think about it, taxing income is more fair than taxing property."

Apparently, it's my job to train the summer interns. There are four college students and what is clearly our 58 year old CEO with dye to hide his hair color. What should I do?

In my 20s: I would never lie to my kids. They will be strong enough to see the world as it is. In my 30s: That's called Paw Patrol. They only have it at the barber. You can watch it again the next time you get a haircut.

I wonder how much of every, "Ozempic also fixes X!" finding is just "Not being overweight also fixes X!" with an extra step.

I genuinely don't know what field to encourage my kids to study. Programming, law, accounting, I keep telling them about career options that were open to me, but a part of me feels sad as I do. Will any white collar paths let a young person add value in a decade?

Google rots from the bottom up. "I need to work on a new program to get promoted," so old programs are abandoned. Microsoft rots from the top down. Last week, the person in charge of Teams Channels noticed no one saw his notifications, so they moved channel and chat notifs. Great, the notification about multicultural holidays gets the same importance as my associates asking for help. 🙄 I don't have a good model for how Apple rots.

My two part emotional hack for moving: 1. Imagine a fire burned down your old place. 2. Imagine the old place is a store where everything is free.

Your kid is going to kindergarten? Make sure you install the class schedule app, the report card app, the district ISD app, the bus schedule app, and school lunch app. The school app doesn't allow you buy lunch. That actually comes from the district ISD app, which has MFA. Now in

I refuse to believe this is real.

You can really save a lot of money by making your guests not want to attend.

"What about wishing for less wishes?" "Fewer." Spoke the genie. "Yes. Can I wish for fewer wishes?" "I suppose. How many fewer?" "Negative two?" I asked, hesitantly. The genie rolled his eyes. "That's another way of asking for more wishes, which, again, you can't do." "What about imaginary wishes?" "Imaginary wishes?" "I wish I had a chalkboard and some chalk to explain. Ahh! Perfect. Suppose there were two dimensions depicting how many wishes I have..." After twenty minutes of explanation, I told the genie I wanted to wish for four imaginary wishes and multiply them together. "But won't that return your original wish?" "Yes. It's a proof of concept." I felt a swirling vortex of magical energy leave my body and return. The genie smiled a devious grin. "Now, for my next wish, increase the magnitude." Again, magical warmth spread through my body. My posture improved. There wasn't a mirror nearby, but I bet my eyes were glowing. I suddenly felt a need to hide in an enclosed space. "What has happened to me?" "Your wish has been granted." The empty air mocked me from all directions. "Fool that you are, in your greed, you have acted as though wishes can only come from you. Others have wishes as well that lie orthogonal to your own. You have been granted the power of infinite wishes, but they are not your own." I looked down at my hands. The skin shone brilliant blue. I felt a desire to improv character impressions. The genie assumed the stance of Bruce Willis in Die Hard. "Welcome to the party, pal."

Lately we've been doing a lot of riddles. Tonight, I asked my 4 yo son, "It takes 15 minutes to boil one egg. How long does it take to boil 3 eggs?" He talked out 45 minutes, but then I told him the answer was 15 minutes because you could cook three eggs at once. "My turn. Dad, how many tigers have you seen in your life?" "I'm not sure. Maybe four or five." "Nice." We took a happy beat. "What's your riddle?" He stopped to think. "Dad, I don't really know what a riddle is."

Turn off gravity. Open the door. Restore gravity.

"This isn't dogma, just my thought: I like to think of hell as being empty. I hope it is. I hope the demons are all here, where we can hunt them."

I don't get it. Why doesn't the brit just open carry, record the conversation, and see what happens.

Dead internet.

Settlers of Catan is a perfectly named, perfectly German board game. Look like you're winning, and everyone stops trading with you. The optimal strategy is to sit just behind the king like a greasy wormtongue and let the game be decided democratically.

Korean email etiquette is endearing. Suffer a lot. The end.

A disproportionate share of terrorists are engineers. I remember reading this in 2010 and updating from "being smart leads to better beliefs" to "there are traps only smart people can fall for." I am often reminded of this fact.

The children of exceptionally nice people are usually less nice. This process is called "regression to the mean."

How do men cheat on their wives? If I were excited about a new mistress, I'd want to tell my wife about her.

"Sorry, you have to participate in your own survival" is a good response to left wingers who hate that they have to work. It's also a good response to right wingers upset they have to pay property taxes. Best form of taxes. Sorry.

Dude is typing with two fingers. Thinking about saying, "my patience is limited, unlike my authority."

I used to interview college students. One year, the entire crop already had jobs somewhere else. I told my HR contact that we were way too late in the process and needed to start sooner next year. HR quietly dropped me from the pool of interviewers.

That's a fake black friday sale. I have a spreadsheet that tracked the price of some items over the past few months.

Okay, time for a one-on-one. Time to talk about my humble background and dreams for my children. Wish me luck.

We have a huge education system with credentials everywhere and masters degrees for Kinder teachers, and they just DECIDED TO STOP TEACHING PHONICS, and KIDS STOPPED LEARNING HOW TO READ, and EVERYONE KNEW IT, but KEPT DOING IT ANYWAY. Unforgiveable.

The two genders

I genuinely don't get this point at all. Why do people feel this way?

This video on recycling old turbine blades into concrete has a funny twist at the end. Are they doing all this work to make something valuable? That people will pay for? Perhaps as aggregate for concrete? How low is the bar they claim they have cleared? Watch and find out.

It's really fun how dumb young men are. In undergrad, I was on an all-boy dorm floor. In theory, the "honors" college, but we were all dumb as rocks. One day, my roommate bought a taser, and everyone hanging out in our room was taking turns getting tased. "Want a turn, RS?" "Why in the world would I tase myself?" They stared at me like I was an alien. "Tell you what, do you want to tase my keys?" It produced a neat arcing effect. Very cool. Like an idiot, I had ruined my car's remote. The next night, a neighbor was hanging out outside my door tasing himself. A girl walked by toward her boyfriend's room. "Hey, Melissa. Want to tase yourself?" She stared back in confused horror. Out of nowhere, my roommate burst into the hallway and yelled, "Oh my God, Melissa. Do I have to tase myself in the wang to show you this isn't a big deal?" In one fluid motion, he grabbed the taser, shocked his nuts, and doubled over in pain. As he whimpered in pain and crawled into the room, Melissa ran away laughing, eager to share the story. Anyway, dudes rock, even if they are often people who smell bad.

It's far more miraculous than electric engines. That doesn't make it good, but it's a cathedral for those with eyes to see.

Samsung: High school JROTC participant. Plans to remain a civilian.

I have an elementary school friend who is now a professor. He sends me this meme every two years, and I laugh every time.

My kids just started a "why" chain on power lines. I launched into a 20-minute lecture on the uses of electricity, the nature of energy, power generation methods, etc. I have never filibustered a why chain so successfully before. I want to chase this feeling.

You're on a date with this woman but you step into the bathroom and accidentally fall into the mirror universe where all chiralities are reversed. You can still breath, but your metabolism will be unable to digest most nutrients. You have limited time. What do you do?

Tbf, that is a very funny thing to say right before you commit suicide.

Even without AI, my firm rarely hires fresh college grads anymore, preferring to outsource to terrible but cheap workers. Doors are being shut everywhere.

During our covid sanity walks, I told my 2/3 yo daughter that we couldn't go on other people's lawns because they were "someone else's property." She heard this a few times and eventually asked me, "is the world made of property?"

I don't get why people are hating on this. They're firing on all cylinders.

PSA: We're all going to die. There is no escape. Everyone starts falling apart around 90-100, even if science makes it easier to get there. Come to peace with your mortality.

This was one of the three I taught them to say, to be clear.

Good comic. I wish they had cut the dialog, though. The chart title is enough.

"This episode of Undercover Boss was brought to you by Zyrtec. That's Zurr-Tech."

Maybe I'll train them to pivot into grifting.

In my late 20s, my cholesterol spiked from healthy to elevated, and my doctor recommended statins. I decided it was probably the protein bars I was eating and swapped them out. Two months later, I walked into a diagnostic lab and asked for a cholesterol test. The nurse laughed at me. "You can't just ASK for a test. A doctor has to ask for one." "Why?" "That's how it works." Anyway, I was eventually tested. Swapping to a different bar fixed me entirely.

Car-centric cities are obviously the revealed preference. Yes, it was fun to live in a dorm in college when you were surrounded by smart, friendly, attractive people who didn't do crimes. That's not what a city is.

Thinking about writing a sci-fi story where aliens are really good at fire. Their planet is filled with magical liquids that release heat when burned. They generate electricity by boiling water. Transportation via thousands of controlled explosions. Etc. Is this believable?

The father is the CEO. The son is the relationship manager. The holy spirit is the api call.

Some of you should tell education software entrepreneurs about your idea to make a single app that covers all needs. That thought has probably never occurred to them!

Just playtested these. What's the difference between an elephant and a can of beans? "The elephant is bigger," with finality. Well, yes. The frog was a banger.

Yeah. They should all be wearing pads and taking a break between plays to strategize.

Really should have checked this guy's pr more closely

Medicaid spending was $870 Billion in 2023. The largest estimate for the military parade cost I could find was $40 million. If we cancel the parade, we can fund medicaid for an additional 24 minutes.

Absolutely bizarre interviews. One kid said, "I'm really passionate about music. I'd consider switching to your firm if you had clients in the music industry so that I could make connections." I asked him how many followers he had on SoundCloud. He missed the joke.

If you live near a campus, you have the potential to do the funniest thing.

When I was a child, I was told Europe had better race relations than the US because we are backwards and morally inferior. Now, Europe has imported millions of Muslims with bad results. I am told to not worry about the US because we have a history of integrating races. Obviously, some Muslims are "compatible with the West," but I'm against all immigration unless we can effectively filter out the third world attitudes. It's an existential threat. We either need to be better at screening for good immigrants or better at deporting bad immigrants. If you honestly believe "the US is really good at integrating immigrants," your history may have been propaganda doing live-action role play. We had periods of high immigration (especially when there was new land to settle), and periods of low immigration (usually driven by some new-arrivals not integrating well). A US-born Lebanese Muslim Mayor yelling at his constituents that he can only "coexist" with people who are willing to have the government celebrate a pro-Hezbollah figure? Yeah. It's time to turn off the immigration spigot and deport the trouble makers for a bit.

Is the goal of immigration to make America better or to make the immigrant's lives better?

Toy Story 4 is a teleological universe. Toys are sentient and want to be played with. Trash is sentient and wants to be thrown away. We can assume farm animals are sentient and want to be eaten. In this essay, I will discuss whether Veganism is a moral crime in the Toy Storyvers

And the rocket's red glare, The burn bursting in air, Gave proof through the lens That the flap was still there.

Thinking back to Peter Thiel's reddit ama.

"Hey, sous vide instructions, how do cook this meat?" "Precisely 138F. 137 and you'll get infected and die. 139 and it'll taste terrible, you'll get depressed, and you'll use Canadian Healthcare." "Oh, umm, thanks. How long?" "Idk, man. Whatever. 10-36 hours."

This is not a permitted form of protest, and society should not tolerate it.

Good idea. My wife is part Irish. We'll get some traditional green beer.

The fact that Princess Peach didn't execute Bowser after the events of Super Mario Brothers makes me doubt she has the iron will to make an effective monarch.

Yes, exactly.

Can men can get the ick? What's a time you have? A girl lost me by sounding excited to receive her parents' inheritance one day. Ungrateful, ghoulish behavior.

It gets the people going!

This is why we can't have walkable cities.

In my culture, it's very disrespectful to mention the Incident.

Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or a thirty year old who "doesn't have time for kids" what they have built with their precious free time.

Imagine trying to work at Disney while you hate families and young children.

My most sexist belief (against men) is that women have more social agency. I remember the henpecking in 9th grade for the homeroom dance. Well-meaning busy bodies ensured everyone had a date, and everyone went. Something similar must have happened with marriage but stopped.

I was eating ice cream 1-1 with my 5 yo son last night. We talked about his sister being dressed up for ballet. He said that when girls are pretty he just wants to hug them and hug them. I asked who the prettiest girl in his class was. He answered quickly. I asked about the nicest and smartest, and he said two other girls. I told him that one day he'd marry a girl who was pretty, nice, and smart. He said that he was going to marry someone who is the best Mom in the world. He thought about it some more after expressing gratitude for his own Mom. "It's kind of weird that the best Mom in the world is a kid right now."

You are rewarded for building massive infrastructure projects that connect roads to nowhere.

This thread changed my mind. Apparently, much/most of the H1B program is laughable. I'd be curious to see the strongest examples of H1B visas.

Reusable rockets are nice, but space travel was an expensive hobby until that dude swallowed a pill that gave him infinite gravel. Turns out he could specify the gravel's position and velocity. Gravel ejection drives powered our ships. Gravel constructed our megastructures. Gravel radiation shields protected our gravelnauts. Humanity is considering the galaxy. Marvel at our empire of dirt.

I've been informed many don't know what a notary is. A nice old lady looks at your id, gives you a stamp, and records her actions in a special notebook. It's basically a blockchain run on the nice old lady substrate.

Listen up, Cadets. Do not eat or drink anything in the holodeck. The material is a projection, and this remains true after digestion. You do not want to be made of something a machine can stop creating. I've seen redshirts collapse in dehydration after drinking water. The holodeck's inventor didn't know this. He lived inside fictive worlds for months, consuming the fruit of his invention, and satisfying his every desire. When he eventually turned off the machine, he evaporated into empty air and dry bones. Some say his patterns are still in the machine and that parts of his consciousness are expressed in the characters holodecks create. Others say his pattern lies dormant, waiting to be recalled so he can continue his decadent fantasies. Don't believe these ghost stories. Like most holodeck projections, the patterns were probably garbage collected to prevent memory leaks. Probably.

You field an army, but only to send criminals to bother someone else.

The first time I bought a house, I stared at the closing paperwork. There were a lot of numbers printed on it. Total interest paid over the life of the loan. Expected property taxes. Thirty years. So many expenses. So many professionals. Real estate agents. Title Officers. Surveyors. All counting on me to sign and make my payments. I remember thinking "I bet I could demand a sandwich, and someone would go buy me one." I didn't, obviously. But the possibility made me feel powerful. The next time I bought a car, I captured that energy and demanded they throw in puddle lights.

That's actually called a p-trap. People add that if they ever want to pee in their sink.

In college, one of my roommates switched from ChemE to education. He cushioned the change with frequent rants on how ChemE's were all greedy. Hearing about his classes was horrifying. He didn't learn how to teach. He was taught how evil educational inequality is. I asked him, "If there were a button that made rich kids smarter, would you push it?" "No, that would increase educational inequality!" Horrifying answer. When people claim teachers need years of education, I think of this moment. Teachers have to be brainwashed to believe more knowledge is bad if it lands in rich kids' heads.

We're seeing some real detective work from people trying to determine if this is real. I appreciate their service.

You form a "monopoly" by stealing other players' resources.

Another funny thing about this video: Cleaner than coal says so little. Less toxins? Less heavy metals? Less CO2? Per unit burned? Per unit of energy recovered? Lots of ways to define it. All we're told is "they say it's cleaner."

If your boyfriend doesn't instantly know 45*3, I have bad news for you.

POV: I'm giving you a lecture on what POV means.

Things I wish people knew about inflation: 1. Inflation is bad, but deflation is worse. You'll accept cheaper steel, but you won't accept a lower nominal wage. Therefore, deflation makes wages "too high," which leads to unemployment.

The young secretly believe aging is a moral failure.

What inclusionists don't realize is that we need to haze Muslims. Call Muhammed a pedo. Burn a Quran. Say burkhas look like trash bags. If they can't take the heat, they can't handle a multicultural society and should stay in the lovely countries they run. Paradox of tolerance.

Detached from the narrative that makes the rest of his/her life. Incongrously?

POV: You're a married man who wants the best phone and doesn't care about impressing 20-year-old girls.

Remarkably, this is like my third ICE appreciation post.