I didn’t watch it specifically because of Leto. I was absolutely stoked each time I saw an ad for it (forgetting that Leto was in it) right up until his stupid face popped up in the trailer.
If they had somebody else, even a complete no-name actor, I would have watched it. It is impressive how effectively they pushed away their audience.
I have made the argument to the “think of the economy” Republicans I have known for years, and come at it from a relatively heartless angle:
With automation (and now AI), it takes less and less humans to do the work. Not everybody can “start their own business,” obviously, and when self-driving vehicles that don’t require a human driver become effective and accepted, about 70 million jobs will disappear in a blink. And those won’t be shifted to another industry, because it doesn’t take 70 million people to code and maintain self-driving vehicles. And that is just the people who drive for a living. So either a significant chunk of the population is unemployed and can’t buy things or live anymore without significant help from the government anyway, or everybody works less hours (and still paid a living wage) to spread out the available work hours.
If there is a UBI that effectively covers shelter and food, then people would need to work less to pay for other necessities and what luxuries they can afford. If everybody gets it, it is completely fair.
And you do this by taxing the shit out any automation (enough that the business still gets a benefit, but so does the society they are taking jobs from), and taxing billionaires.
This isn’t about taking care of the sick or poor, or providing handouts, it’s about maintaining society with the rise of automation, and it not being possible without it.
Those I spoke to were remarkably receptive to that argument.
It’s the horn of a goat that Zeus broke off when he was a… child? God-child? Whatever. It was magical and provided an endless supply of food.
I’ll do a lot, but I’ll often start with Wagon Wheel, because it gets people singing along, and once they’re singing, they’re signing up to sing.
Sometimes people need encouragement.
That sounds excellent… i might pitch that to my wife for next year.
I gotta say…
This was a triumph.
I think, and this may be a wild concept that bothers both sides of the discussion, that individual sports governing bodies (specific leagues, NCAA, etc) should be making the decisions and absolutely nobody in government should be involved.
People should be allowed to compete in sports, but it should be up to the individual sports governing body to decide how they slot people. And if there is an absolute ban in the league against use of hormones (aimed at preventing performance enhancing effects), then so be it. Those bans were in place prior to the trans people in sports discussion, I wouldn’t say they are inherently biased. Take up the language of the rule with your local league to allow for medically necessary hormones for specific issues (including gender dysmorphia), but it is ultimately their prerogative on rules for their league. A senator doesn’t need to weigh in.
But any poltician who so much as brings up trans people in sports should be immediately told to stay in their fucking lane.
I had someone straight-faced say that Jeff Bezos should be able to buy a nuke (you can imagine the trajectory of the conversation that led to this, it wasn’t a non-sequitor).
Supernatural’s whole story arc was based on this (and it worked for them). Inevitably, to beat this big bad that the brothers have absolutely no business going toe-to-toe with, they must do something that is bound to catch up with them, but it’s either that or the world is fucked. Then the next thing is even worse, and they have to do something that will bite them even worse in order to stop the world from getting fucked. And it just keeps ramping up, they keep losing more and more of themselves and punching so far above their weight class that they end up… well, no spoilers, in case somebody wants to watch (and I don’t know how to do spoiler tags).
There’s a point when Sam has some injury, like a broken arm or gunshot wound or something, and he’s talking to a nurse or doctor who asks him to rate his pain from 0, which is no pain, to 10, which is the worst pain he could imagine. He gets a thousand-yard stare for a second and says “3.”
I had understood it to mean, like, making an oath (“I swear to God…” or the whole hand-on-a-Bible swearing) and not following through, or making it lightly.
Jesus had a whole thing about it, saying that not only should you not make an oath in God’s name lightly, but that you shouldn’t at all (implying it shouldn’t be necessary, if you’re already an honest person). “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.”
Which, honestly, makes way more sense than some nonsense about not saying their names.
Only if there are no Marine astronauts, otherwise they’ll assume it’s rations.
Linkin Park.
Look, I like them, so I’m not exactly knocking them, but a long time ago I was working an overnight inventory shift, and my manager at the time put on a Linkin Park album, and I predict how every song was going to go because they all seemed like the same song.
Yeah, they could have at least had a picture of Vegeta.
American Civil Liberties Union, and I’m not sure what they’re on about.
I appreciate the write-up, thank you! I feel like a lot of this is semantic differences. I’ve always thought of socialism as any public funds used specifically to help citizens (e.g. social security, medicare, unemployment, UBI, etc) and Communism to be the public owning and running the means of production, and distributing goods thereof, and the stateless, classless, moneyless society to be the ideal utopia it aspired to (similar to Star Trek). From your comment, I see that what I call Communism, you call Socialism (which explains a lot of confusion from discussions in the past with self-described Communists I’ve known), and the nameless Star Trek post-scarcity system you would call Communism.
Do you think it is possible to slow-roll the transition peacefully, though? If, for example, instead of the government bailing out industries, they bought out industries on the cheap, slowly growing and monopolizing like Google or Amazon have? Or do you think the rich would simply block that from happening?
So I will admit that I am ignorant of a method of attaining Communism that isn’t at the end of a rifle, and thus authoritarian by nature (and fully accept that, to a degree, Capitalism is also at the end of a gun, but typically less overt, or often directed without instead of within). The only nations I’ve seen flying the red flag have appeared highly authoritarian (and I’m not going to get drawn into a “USSR and PRC aren’t/weren’t authoritarian, and DPRK is actually a utopia!” discussion, so if that’s the direction this is going, let me know and I’ll politely see my way out).
I’ve seen in the lower comments that Socialism would be used as a gateway to Communism, but I am unclear about the transition from “everybody’s basic needs are met via taxation and distribution” to “personal property is abolished” (as I understand Communism to mean, please correct me if I’m wrong). Plenty of European countries have had (for the west), strong seemingly socialist systems, but they don’t seem to be deliberately angling toward Communism, for example.
So I’m curious what this peaceful Capitalist to Communist timeline would look like.
Much better way to organize. It’s how a lot of my files start:
YYYYMMDD-Name-Document-signed
So much easier to keep track.
the man who has openly declared since the 2000s that democracy is a mistake and that he wants to destroy the United States and European countries to establish city-states, each governed by a different corporation (fiefdoms), on our ruins
Wait. Did dude read Snowcrash and think “yeah, that future, that’s my utopia!”?
Boat.
Saving up for one now, but 20k should get me there.
I think that it is unfortunate that he got shanked, as he was convicted and appropriately sentenced for the murder he committed. That is as it should be.
Shank the ones that get away with it, not the ones in jail for it.