You know what bugs me? People having unwanted violence done to them or those they value and taking it as the flaw of the doer and not themselves.
The victim is always, definitionally, to blame! Who else, the victor? They wanted harm and got harm! You wanted no harm and got harm! Obviously half of that was wrong.
For all the “America is individualism, Japan is collective”, their popular culture out-obsesses us by a mile on what it means to be the best (X) of your generation.
More than half of the first party to reach the summit of the Matterhorn fell off the mountain on their way down, by all accounts because they brought along a friend who was completely unprepared for rock climbing.
The involvement of Thiel, an eccentric figure in Silicon Valley who has advocated for teenagers to skip college and openly supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump,
adds another wrinkle to a case that has garnered widespread attention
for its implications over celebrity privacy and a publication’s First
Amendment rights. During court proceedings, which ended in late March
with a $140 million victory for Hogan, there had been rumors that
a wealthy individual had funded Hogan’s case though there was never any
hard evidence that surfaced to prove that was true.
On Tuesday, in an interview with
The New York Times, Denton said he had a “personal hunch” that the
financial aid could be linked to someone in Silicon Valley.
“If you’re a billionaire and you don’t like the coverage of you, and
you don’t particularly want to embroil yourself any further in a public
scandal, it’s a pretty smart, rational thing to fund other legal cases,”
he told the Times.
It is not illegal for an outside entity to help fund another party’s lawsuit, and the practice, known as “third-party
litigation funding” has become increasingly common in the U.S.
Typically, the outside party negotiates for a defined share of any
proceeds from the suit.
Women
keep the wedding dress in case they have a nervous breakdown. It’s no
good having a nervous breakdown if you don’t have a wedding dress to put
on so you can smear lipstick all over your face and go wander the
streets in the rain.
So I was talking to someone about livestock futures yesterday and I was like “I know you can get cattle futures and pork futures, but what about chicken? why shouldn’t I be able to buy some chicken futures if I want to invest in chicken?”
And I looked it up and it turns out people have tried to start a chicken futures market three different times! This was in the 60s, 80s, and 90s, and every time it failed.
Apparently this is largely because in the cattle industry beef processors buy cattle from farmers, so there’s demand for futures from people who want to hedge against price volatility. But the chicken industry is more vertically integrated, so no one actually needs to hedge with futures.
Also I learned that in 1958 Congress passed a bill banning the sale of onion futures? It is still a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5000, so be careful about that I guess.
(Of course there’s also the question of whether a vegetarian can even buy chicken futures. But my vegan friend bought cattle futures the other day so I think it’s generally considered acceptable.)
(Though now I am imagining animal rights groups campaigning for universities to be short livestock futures and it feels totally plausible. If you personally would like to be short livestock, there is a short livestock ETF that trades on the London Stock Exchange, but it does not seem very liquid and it might be hard to trade it if you are not British, idk. If you would like to be short chickens specifically, I recommend shorting the stock of poultry producers.)
oh man do you not know the onion futures story
okay, so, it’s the 1950s. there’s an onion farmer named Vincent Kosuga. he’s a pretty successful onion farmer, so he starts speculating in the commodities markets. after an initial disastrous flirtation with wheat futures, he finds a niche betting on onion prices – he is, after all, an onion farmer – and does pretty well for himself.
in 1955, Kosuga gets an idea. an awful idea. Kosuga gets a wonderful, awful idea. he starts building warehouses around the country, and places orders for all the onions he can get his hands on. in addition, he starts buying onion futures, guaranteeing him delivery of the onions that are still in the ground.
by that fall, he’s done what he’s set out to do. he owns 98% of the onions in the united states. he’s cornered the market, and he gets to control onion prices. of course, since he has all the onions, he jacks prices up really high and makes a ton of money.
but Kosuga isn’t done yet. he’s quietly been establishing a big short position in onion futures. then, all of a sudden, Kosuga starts flooding the market with all the onions he owns. onion prices go through the floor – literally selling for less than the cost of the bag they’re delivered in. since Kosuga is short onions, he makes another ton of money.
but everyone is super pissed at him. especially other onion farmers – when the price of onions got driven down to almost nothing, their crops, their hard work, became worthless. some of them went bankrupt, or even committed suicide. so of course they lobby congress. and congress, as always, legislates to prevent the previous crisis rather than the next one – and bans trading in onion futures.
of course, this is probably unnecessary and in fact harmful. it’s really rare for anyone to come close to cornering the market in a commodity, and it’s even harder today (you can’t really buy up all the onions in secret, without other traders noticing) than it was 60 years ago. nevertheless, trading in onion futures remains illegal in the US today.
Wait, wait…. Is that seriously it? How their clothes go?
that genuinely is it
yeah hey whats up bout to put some fucking giant sheets on my body
lets bring back sheetwares
When you’re carding, spinning and weaving everything from scratch, using the big squares exactly as they come off the loom must seem like a fucking brilliant idea. 90% (or more) of pre-14th century clothing is made purely on squares (and sometimes triangles cut from squares).
How did they get the fabric so fine it draped like that? Was that something medieval europe forgot? Or do I just have a completely misguided image of historical clothing?
The way they could get away with pinking and slashing doublets in the 16th century was partially because the fabrics were so tightly woven that you could simply cut a line on the bias and nothing would fray.
Modern fabric machining sucks ass in terms of giving us any kind of quality like the kind human beings produced prior to the Industrial Revolution.
I’m reading this book about anti-religious thought during the era people call the “Classical Age” of Islamic scholarship and holy shit some of these people in the 9th century have such strongly worded polemics like basically calling all religion entirely idiotic. There isn’t too much detailed info about them with the exception of al-Razi because he was a titan when it came to discoveries in other fields like medicine (though most of his anti-religious texts are lost) and to an extent al-Rawandi though the text of his we have most intact is in the context of heavy quotation in a Sufi rebuttal but the descriptions are pretty interesting. Like one response to al-Rawandi has the author going “I realized at this point he wasn’t just attacking only our Mutazalite school but in general Islam and even all people of religion”
Like you didn’t see such forceful and explicit attacks on religion in European thought until the Enlightenment and even then it took until the 19th century for people to be as vehement especially when it came to the topic of God so like when people are like “anti-theism is Eurocentric” that’s just such an ironically Eurocentric view of the world
So about a year ago me and my friend Nathan were walking around the “Pick-a-Part” in Clarksville Tennessee… We were searching for car badges and a spoiler to put on his trashy conversion van. While going through the lot we found what is probably the single greatest car to ever drive on any road in the world.
You are looking at… a Dora the Explorer themed gangster car… I’ve seen spongebob themed cars, Newport themed cars, sports team themed cars, but THIS.
trumps them all.
OH BUT IT GETS SO MUCH BETTER!!!!
You see… there has to be a reason that a car like this…
Would end up in the junkyard… SO me and Nathan did some looking around and tried to figure out why…
I still can’t believe the decals on this…. wait…
HOLD ON ONE FUCKING SECOND!
OH!
OH MY FUCKING GOD!
YES! SOMEONE ACTUALLY GOT SHOT WHILE DRIVING THEIR DORA THE EXPLORER CAR IN CLARKSVILLE TENNESSEE!
And THAT, is the single greatest thing I’ve found in a junkyard to this day.
okay this is totally wild but i RECOGNIZE THIS CAR
and i actually have a picture of it from its functioning days - this is dated 2012 -
You all may be thinking “well that’s so dumb! Making Steve Rogers a bad guy! Yuck!”
But it’s so much more than that. They made Steve Rogers, Captain America, the character Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, two Jews, created as a statement against Hitler, as a statement against American’s support of nazis, and made him hydra. They made Steve Rogers a nazi.
This is the biggest slap in the face to Jews by marvel and that’s saying a hell of a lot coming from that company.
Captain America is like, the incarnation of The American Spirit, right?
If you are writing a meditation on what The American Spirit means in 2016, one that’s quite possibly intended to be read against and cross over with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ meditation on what The Negro Spirit means these days,
“[The American Spirit], which since the 1930s has made a huge show of being defined against Nazis, turns out to have been kinda Nazi-ish underneath all along” is maybe a productive and not-rightist angle to take
alright, looks like I lucked out and I’ll be able to replace Grey Ghost with the same (Honda 919) model. she was a grey 2003 and this is a matte black 2002 but no big changes between those years, and there’s a nice return-from-the-dead esthetic there
dude’s got aftermarket cans and timing computer, one of those things where it’s being run as a naked 900rr i guess, and that bugs me - the exhaust note’s fucking vulgar compared to stock, and whatever it’s giving it gives at high rpm which is dumb with this gearing and it feels like a wet fart in the power band
and then I gotta swap out his clicky-ass Atari levers for stock
buell m2 flyscreen
replace the fork reflectors which I don’t even know how you lose
Nick Denton’s brilliant stroke, going all the way back to Gawker’s
origins as Gawker Stalker, was to not even make pretense to the American
tradition of Sulzbergerian evenhanded postwar monopoly journalism, but
to go the British competitive no holds barred venomous one, all taking
shots at each other, stirring up witch hunts to boost circulation….
There’s a reason British libel law is so strict, and that’s to create some leverage to tamp things down when they start stepping on toes that matter.
