The discussion turned to other ways you could have gotten here

The rules became more lax as the season wore on

Whenever I see a person with a twitter bio along the lines of “all opinions are my own”, part of me is like “ok cool” and moves on, but another part of me digs in a little deeper and wonders what problem this person is trying to solve, and I can’t find the scenario where having included this phrase in your bio in any way improves a situation you find yourself in.

I think the situation it’s probably in place for is to make clear that you are not issuing official statements on behalf or your employer or university or whatever, and are just saying your own ideas … but that was sort of implicit in the account being your name and not “official university of Waterloo account” or whatever.

I guess there’s a scenario where you say something sort of dumb, and then THE TWITTER MOB pursues you and starts ruffling feathers back at HQ and your boss calls you and is like “hey I heard you said something dumb” and you’re like “yeah but the opinions were my own” and then they just hang up the phone and are like oh ok cool.

A tribute to the city in which from whence it were

One part of securities regulation around publicly traded companies is around “insider information”. As the name implies, there is certain information which those close to a company might come to possess which would give them an unfair trading advantage over those without that information. There are rules in place here to prevent them from using that information, or passing it along to close contacts who could do so.

Putting aside whether these rules are a good idea or not, I think a fun prank to play on someone if you were in an “insider” position would be to constantly drop euphemisms and implications around them which made them believe you were trying to convey insider information to them without explicitly creating a conspiracy to do so … but to do this in a way which was totally unrelated to and not correlated with the actual performance of the company.

They’d hear you say like “the eagle is in the nest” or something, and then they’d go and buy some shares only to watch nothing at all happen with the stock. Then they’d confront you about the lack of MASSIVE GAINS in the position, and you’d be like “no, I literally just saw a cool eagle outside and wanted to tell you”.

Socrates vs Plato in a game of flip cup

Stories about military families who move around a lot will frequently use the term “military brats” (or “army brats” or similar) to refer to the children of the men and women of the armed forces. These kids are raised in a subculture and often move around a lot and have a unique enough experience that we apparently need a term for it. Within the military, there’s not a pejorative sense to “brat” in the same way that there is when you describe other children’s behavior … but still, it’s sort of confusing.

I’d like to see more children of military parents called hot dogs or sausages or bangers or kielbasas. You could cover them with sauerkraut or relish or mustard. You could do a really cool photo shoot where there were tons of flags and tanks and fighter jets being scrambled in the background, and a bunch of kids covered in delicious toppings in the foreground, saluting the flag, but also surrounded in freshly baked breads.