FriendOfDeSoto

I’m sure some have, especially those who can set their own prices.

Normally it takes about a month at least before the price rise trickle comes through. And I suspect you’ll feel it at the grocery store before while eating out. A lot of companies will sacrifice a bit of their profit margin first. The question will be how long will this genius military operation that is somehow both over and on track to succeed last. A couple of months is something the markets may be able to recover from quickly.

I’m so glad America was looking for a guy to drain the swamp and keep them out of wars to be the president. And they found one convicted of sexual assault, whose name appears in the released Epstein filles more often than God and Jesus combined in the Bible, and who threw a hissy fit after not getting the Nobel he invaded Venezuela and started a war with Iran. Sad.

I have recorded songs off the radio onto cassette. I have made mix tapes. First off records, later CDs. There was a general trade going on at school among friends. Somebody would get a new album on tape or on CD and when the owner had listened to it enough times it would make the rounds so people could record it for themselves. Musical socialism.

I have made Minidisc mix tapes as well. I went as far as recording concerts from VHS onto Minidisc. Adding track names was harder than T9 texting and took fucking ages.

I ripped and burned CDs, some of them are still stashed away in an attic somewhere.

I don’t remember the infancy torrenting service that we used around the turn of the century. It wasn’t Napster. I also made mix tapes of downloaded songs onto CD. To play more easily because there weren’t any iPods yet but everyone had a stereo.

Now I stream the music I used to steal. Can’t feel great about it because I know the artists get next to nothing for it.

I miss having a good stereo. Now it’s crappy phone speakers or compressed Bluetooth shit.

I’d argue he isn’t a great leader; he is a successful one. He gambles, he takes chances, and is swashbucklingly lucky throughout his career, even when he gets punished, until he meets and follows the lead of arguably the better leader between the two of them, Jean-Luc Picard, in the nexus.

TOS was quite woke in its day. There is still an awful lot of sexism on that Enterprise. The treatment of Spock is quite discriminatory. You could argue his unilateral decision that appears to be salomonic more than covered by actual law or regulations to maroon Khan and company on Ceti-Alpha 5 leads directly to the death of his own son, of whose existence he didn’t really know because his mom knew better than to stay in Kirk’s orbit. While you could say that an orderly private life isn’t a prerequisite to being a great leader, I think Carol Marcus knew he’d be trouble at home and at work and that’s why she wanted out.

He was very often in the right place at the right time and only made decisions that were later judged not to be entirely wrong. He had the charisma of a great man right until he oh-my’ed loose his mortal coil. If there had been an HR department between the music room and the colorful food cube dispensary there would have been need for the admiralty to get involved. He is a beloved character for his brazenness and faults.

Humans have no problem holding in their mind simultaneously two fundamentally opposing ideas. Your question stems from the assumption that beliefs and especially religious ones are borne from this sort of unimpeachable internal logic, if A then B. That’s enlightenment wannabe thinking how we should be. And it isn’t like that.

Also, we are herd animals, we want to belong to something. A lot of people want to belong to this or that religious group to fulfill their own needs. Even if they disagree with some of the religious commandments. So they espouse stuff they don’t actually agree with without any or much internal conflict.

I also feel that few people are actually “raised Christians.” They tend to be raised Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Mormons, etc. They have wildly differing views on that carpenter from the Middle East and what it all means.

There world breathed a sigh of relief after Russia and Qatar thinking thank Pele the next world cup will be held in nice, non-contriversial countries! And then time moved forward.

I didn’t have any plans to visit in the first place. But if you ask people who organize conferences or other events these days they all bemoan a significant drop in demand from abroad. I think Mexico making the headlines recently with the cartel starring a turf war will not have helped either. My prediction is the highest percentage foreign visitors compared to local spectators will be at the games in Canada. I suspect the US venues will struggle to put butts in all the seats like during the Club WC.

I also think it is very likely that I, personally, will never travel to the US ever again. I have no money - undoubtedly the bigger obstacle - but I lost all interest.

“Killer feature” is silicon-valley-invrstor-ROI-speak. The fediverse is designed in opposition to central platforms funded by investors looking to make a profit.

I don’t want to go back to reddit because they abandoned third party clients and made another few decisions that made me mad. Lemmy today is - objectively speaking - worse than reddit was circa 5-7 years ago. The user numbers aren’t the same, the way the fediverse is connected reactions aren’t as snappy and the search function is way worse. If I judged this on “killer features” I might be tempted to go back to reddit. I tolerate the shortcomings because I believe centrally operated platforms have a high tendency to enshitify as soon as they realize they need to make money.

I only use my head + the clues some streaming services provide marking shit as viewed.