Demut

What are you babbling on about, stepee ? Are you alright?

Ostrich eggs? Dodo eggs? Eggs laid by a golden goose?

Urgh, always with these dumb "red lines". What is this, "the USA's final warning"? Cringe. Do they think they'll get China to listen by imitating them or something? They're just gonna set themselves up to get punked like Obama was in Syria. Don't usher ultimatums if you're not 100% prepared to follow through with them.

@b_m_b_m_b_m You're comparing different months there, genius. Again, if you actually wanna compare apples to apples, compare the annualized rate of inflation for each in 2022.

8 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

Wtf is Japan doing right?

Decades of chronic, crippling deflation

I do. Are you sure you do? I'm looking at the respective annualized rate of inflation for 2022, how 'bout yourself?

Ah, I see, that'd certainly aggravate the situation. Not only would he have to cut off contact with her but many (all?) of the people he knew and loved. Or at least that's how it looked like to him. Grim stuff. Was this a recent thing with her husband or did people other than yourself know of this for a while? If so, it's kinda baffling that they'd still take her side.

I wouldn't normally post this but maybe that means that you'll be able to appreciate this as well:

Roman Kim - Dies Irae

Now, I myself am just a humble, passive Classical music enthusiast but I'm told that if you're a violinist yourself then this is twice as amazing. Apparently Roman Kim is kind of a prodigy, a virtuoso, a once-in-a-generation talent. While that was one of his own compositions, he's also playing typical violin pieces like Paganini's variations on the theme of "God Save The King" as well as variations of existing works that he modified himself. Examples include his one-man rendition of Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" (which, let us remember, is actually written for string quartet) and even Beethoven's 5th symphony (and we're not just talking about the original violin parts here but rather an impression of the whole thing).

I must've missed the part where D1P is a party.

5 hours ago, Phaseknox said:

I’m the one who suggested that the thread title be changed to that. 

Good.

Speaking of good, this is a damn good song:

Chris Spedding - Enemy Within

It always reminds me of a relative of mine who unfortunately passed away too early. He gifted me that album when I was a teen. Solid UK rock.

2 hours ago, sblfilms said:

I also learned yesterday that in the suicide note her previous husband left, it was essentially 1000 words on how she bullied him so much he would rather be dead.

I guess it might be insensitive to ask but do you have any idea why he didn't leave her rather than kill himself? I understand it when kids kill themselves for, say, getting bullied in school because they are a) immature and unable to put things into perspective and also b) forced by law to be there. Or when women with abusive husbands do since leaving is often a death sentence as well and they're often financially dependent (especially if they had kids with that person and stayed at home to raise them). But if you're an adult male in the USA and the bully is your wife you can just, like, get a divorce. Were there some additional reasons or am I missing something obvious?

What whataboutism? Worrying about the dangers of propaganda posed by Musk owning Twitter is pretty fucking rich when it's been a mainstay on there for years. Had Twitter been some beacon of neutrality before Musk took it over, sure, you'd have a point. Meanwhile in reality, as I've said like thrice now, all that ultimately changed was the flavor of the propaganda and maybe the methods (boosting content versus deboosting it, although I wouldn't be surprised if both had already been done behind the scences; as is I just know about the latter for a fact).

Me pointing that out isn't changing the topic or deflecting your point, it's honing in on a flaw in the argument. But whatever, suit yourself. No one's forcing you to discuss this.

Indeed, you can

Stepee? More like Peepee.

LMAO, got 'eem.

8 hours ago, SimpleG said:

NSFW

High quality DM 

Reminds me a bit of Jungle Rot and something else. Dying Fetus maybe? That breakdown sounds really familiar anyway.

Jungle Rot - Gasping For Air

That guy's got pretty smooth skin for a grey-haired old guy.

On 2/7/2023 at 4:47 PM, sblfilms said:

He’s being facetious 

Is he? We ain't paying $6 for a dozen eggs at least (or even half that), despite the whole war thing going on. Fuel, electricity and gas prices also returned to nearly where they were before. Not sure what y'all are doing over there.

On 1/31/2023 at 8:07 PM, Dodger said:

How come the price of chicken itself hasn't reallya gone up? Still around $1.99ish a pound for the basic stuff. 

Different chickens? I imagine they're not the same as the ones bred for laying eggs, like how cows bread to produce milk aren't the same as those meant to provide beef (although both get butchered eventually).

11 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

They'd think a password like ygHytb$1 is more secure than horseysurprise+Twitteraccount1 because it's "more random."

Well, websites' insistence on cramming as many different characters in a password isn't helping that impression.  Password length >>> character variety. P$?ai5_! looks secure according to these stupid requirements that websites ask your password to meet and yet it's many, many orders of magnitude more easy to bruteforce than lmaotrycrackingthispwlosers despite the latter having only lowercase letters.

9 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

and that thing nearly obliterated the Catholic Church in France!

Along with nearly any other church

23 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

The notion of laissez-faire capitalism arose well after the arrival of the Reformation and the Renaissance when the influence and power of the Catholic Church had begun to decline, even in states where it remained the dominant denomination.  For example, France had a substantial Protestant Huguenot population who were significantly represented among the merchant bourgeoisie.

Given that this invention took place way after the French Wars of Religion and the Edict of Fontainebleau, it feels weird to attribute it to the Huguenots (since by that time they had already been almost entirely displaced). Similarly, preceding related innovations like mercantilism also took place before the Reformation. Your hypothesis sounds like one of those Grand Narratives to be honest. You know, the kind that seems plausible at first and is satisfying because of its neatness and presumed explanatory power but only works by disregarding contradictory evidence. The ones that post-modernism criticized so sharply. Like Marxism, the Enlightenment or the various silly theories about why empires decline ("muh vitality vs. decadence" and such).

6 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Of course it's a "gross oversimplification", but it doesn't change the notion that "free market economics" found a more fertile ground in Protestant societies than Catholic ones owing to theological differences on how the accumulation of wealth was viewed.

I'm not sure that's even true though, historically, unless you are very peculiar about how you define "free market economics". Just as one counter example, I probably don't have to explain where the very idea of laissez-faire capitalism comes from, right? And that predates thinkers like Adam Smith by quite a bit.

2 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

There really is nothing vague about the valuation of IP rights - it's just as legitimate a measure of wealth as a stock portfolio.

If true then to me that'd just mean that wealth as measured by stock portfolio is illegitimate

7 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

Rowling’s wealth is tied up in the value of the rights to all the Wizarding World stuff in exactly the same way that the various Walton kid’s wealth is tied up in Walmart stock.

Source? If it was vague, wishy-washy guesswork like that I wouldn't call her a billionaire to begin with.

8 minutes ago, TheShader said:

JK herself is an anomaly, and even then has not been able to continuously sustain billionaire status. 

An anomaly how? Just because she's one of the top-selling authors? Duh. Were someone like Tolkien still alive he could probably be a billionaire, too. But fine, Take video game developers like Notch then or musicians like Paul McCartney.

6 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

You can thank the so-called "Protestant work ethic" for essentially legitimizing greed through its implicit stigmatization of the less-fortunate because they don't work "hard enough" and therefore aren't deserving of God's bounty.

Eh, that feels like a gross oversimplification.

2 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

As I noted, even those creatives are not billionaires because they have sold so many pieces of art, but because they create valuable brands based off that IP. 

Even if that were true, how does that make their wealth any more undeserved?

Again, sounds pretty arbitrary. Who functions as investors and allocators of capital in that society of yours? Exclusively the state ?

7 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Why on Earth would Catholics pay any heed to what the Torah has to say anyway?!?

I'm guessing this is a joke? Anyway, regarding "private" accumulation of wealth, for the longest time there used to be a social expectation that it ought to be shared. Especially in the birthplace of Catholicism, that is, the Roman Empire. The rich there often fucked up their own finances because they were expected to fund public works and shit. I feel like it's only more recently that selfish hoarding became no longer regarded as fundamentally wrong. At least in Christianity it was always thought of as sinful. It's one of the seven deadly ones, even.

1 minute ago, sblfilms said:

Are there any billionaires who are such without any unrealized gains from equity they own in a business?

The ones I mentioned? J.K. Rowling for example.

11 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

The identical policy failures that allowed for the existence of billionaire industrialists: the policies that allowed for the accumulation of that wealth, no matter the source.

Where's the issue though? And where do you draw the line? Always seems arbitrary to me to say the cut-off is $1,000,000,000. And it reminds me of Bernie's shift from ranting about "millionaires and billionaires" to just "billionaires" after he himself officially became one

@thewhyteboar To be fair ... should they really ?

1 hour ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Yes, in contrast to the Protestant heresy, traditional Catholicism views the accumulation of private wealth with suspicion.

Weird. I've heard that the prosperity gospel is a protestant thing but I wasn't aware that wealth was viewed suspiciously in Catholicism. Who was doing the suspecting? Surely not the clergy and nobility, given their own riches. Also, biblically the case can be made either way. Jesus preaches poverty in some sense whereas throughout the Torah you find wealth as one of the blessings provided by God.

12 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Every single billionaire on god's green earth is a policy failure.

What policy failure do you blame for billionaire musicians, writers, devs and other creatives? I get Marxist screeching when it comes to this topic to some extent where arguably exploitative industries are concerned. But there are people out there who are rich pretty much just because people love what they individually have done and decided to give them their money (often enough even when they could've gotten the product for free, e.g. via illegal downloads).

Well, God willing this whole episode will truly lead to the rise of what some have already coined neo-idealism and the collective West starts actually abiding by its own touted virtues for once. And you'd probably have to acknowledge previous failures publicly, too, maybe even pay some sort of symbolic restitution. Until then we'll have to recognize that attempts at whataboutism from R*ssia et al. do have a point (although they obviously don't excuse their own crimes). Also, as fucking evil as U.S. foreign policy has been in recent decades, they rarely engaged in genocide for genocide's sake. What R*ssia is doing right now often doesn't even have strategic value. I mean the entire war doesn't (at least in the way it played out, not the fantasy-version R*ssian leadership believed in) but even ignoring that ...

Is that a stereotypically Catholic thing? Seems kinda ironic given the Catholic Church. Not that evangelical mega churches for instance are any better ...

And interesting, it's been the opposite for me. At least socially.