Your sleep paralysis demon should send their resume to a few Hollywood producers if they ever get bored of only traumatizing one human at a time. A+ storytelling.

The anti-gun crowd is also ignorant of the practicalities of automatic vs semiautomatic. What they mean is "civilians shouldn't have mostly unrestricted access to firearms, especially ones with no use for hunting" and getting hung up on technical minutia misses the point entirely.

Yeah and a motorcycle is almost as heavy as a car... if you compare a Honda Goldwing (379 kg) to a Citroën 2CV (475 kg).

I didn't say anything useful, but we sure cherry-picked ourselves out of the general statement that cars 5-10 times heavier than motorcycles!

Capitalism is a system that sustains itself even if literally everyone knows how evil it is. This is part of the fundamental conceit.

Capitalists literally have nothing to gain by "hiding" some truths, as if the masses were living with a veil in front of their eyes that one can just pull back to radicalize them. We were all there in 2008. We all saw behind the curtain. Literally nothing fundamentally changed and no movie is going to come close to having that cultural impact.

Also capitalists aren't any less prone to the tragedy of the commons than any other group of people. One corporation would end capitalism next quarter if they believed it would make them richer this quarter.

The truth is much simpler than any conspiracy theory: Hollywood is largely systematically incapable of competent social commentary. There are occasional brilliant exceptions, but rampant nepotism, incompetent corporate meddling, and a strong history/culture of "character stories" means that Hollywood doesn't know how to make a story about anything other than a character story.

Anyway if the topic interests you here's a one hour essay on how Apple failed to adapt Foundation, with a truly masterful ending on an anticapitalist message.

So all you can come up with is some edge cases where traditional banking can't be relied on? Seems like a very convoluted way of saying that crypto is usually worse than traditional banking.

Also just wait until you hear that if you can buy crypto, you can probably participate in forex as well. I know people who come from countries you describe, and they just use euros or dollars because a highly volatile currency with astronomical payment processing fees is the opposite of what one needs for daily life, no matter how much what the SV techbros wish it weren't the case.

Because Paris is its own jurisdiction.

Paris' mayor, Anne Hidalgo, is incredibly unpopular in the rest of the Parisian Metropolitan Area (whose government is right-wing under Valérie Pécresse). Much of these areas are still car-dependent beyond belief with bad-to-awful public transit, meaning they are progressively getting cut-off from car-hostile Paris. Paris is completely unaffordable to live in, so it is normal for the working class to have a 1h+ commute into Paris.

This understandably breeds resentment from most people who have never heard of the term "induced demand" or think that the lack of rail transit it Hidalgo's fault.

Like you said, 99.9 % of people wouldn't recognize a Patek Philippe if it hit them upside the head. By definition it's not ostentatious. Rolexes are ostentatious (it's the only luxury brand most people know), but also incredibly cheap as far as mechanical watches go.

A Patek Philippe is a status symbol, but only to those very select few already in-the-know. And that is not mutually exclusive with those movements being incredible art. Is a Van Gogh ugly or evil just because some asshole bought the painting for $100.000.000? Art doesn't have to be collateral damage to your class consciousness just because rich people have more access to it.

If all you care about is functionality, a $50 casio with a resin casing will have more complications than most expensive watches, be hundreds of times more precise, will last you decades and you will spend less time and money in maintenance over your lifetime than you would for one revision of a mechanical watch. They're practically superior in literally every way to a $30,000 watch.

But that's not my point, I'm specifically talking about art. $200+ watches are art for its own sake, arguing on the basis of quality/reliability is nonsensical. The only things that matter is esthetics and even more importantly for mechanical watches, the appreciation for the incredible history and intricacy of a well-built movement. There is a lot of craftsmanship to be appreciated there.

And it's fine if you don't care or can't justify the expense (I don't own a mechanical watch myself though I probably will at some point), but the original meme completely disregards the artistry and craftsmanship going into expensive watches and I am trying to expose the glaring cognitive dissonance of the consensus that "quartz watches better" but "AI PFP evil". Both are responsible for the collapse of an industry, so if you think there is a meaningful moral difference there please tell me.

Here's my take: the mechanical watch industry already collapsed, and the "small commission PFP art" hasn't fully yet. We should preserve as much of these artists' livelihoods as we can to soften the blow until a new equilibrium is reached where – just like with mechanical watches – only those with a real appreciation for art or a want for a status symbol will commission a real artist for their PFP. But that's a very different discourse from what I hear which is typically "AI PFP poopoo evil, if you get one you're worse than Hitler".

Someone please tell me what the difference is between this sentiment and "I'll get an AI-generated PFP because it's cheaper". As far as I'm concerned either way it's " expensive traditional art" vs "mass-manufactured knockoff".

Do people have no respect for jewelers or not understand the work that goes into a good timepiece? Or is it that art is contempt-worthy when is used as a status symbol (in which case what about a $500 timepiece?)

My country made it illegal to sell at a loss (for that exact reason) and IIRC wish and/or temu got in some kind of legal trouble for it. So did IKEA when they tried to use their restaurant as a loss leader - illegal here!

Then there's the matter of shipping subsidies from the PRC, ain't no way cross-continent shipping is 0.02 € on a 5 € item for which the last mile is handled by the national postal service which I know for a fact charges anyone more than one euro for delivering a damn envelope.

and set earlier in the summer*

I hate it. I fucking hate it. With every fiber of my being. I spend every winter counting the days until the sun stops setting before I stop working. Our entire lives are scheduled so we are inside under neon light from 9-6, why are we trying to maximize how much of that is during daytime?

On the day that we go back to permanent ST I will turn to hard drugs to make up for the dopamine deficiency. No joke very few things in my life fill me with more dread than having to suffer early evenings for the rest of my life.

oh believe me I am very much into that urbanism shit, but we have to admit that "pure" urbanism isn't as visually evocative to those not in-the-know (though it is true that before/after pictures of rehabilitation projects are nice to look at)

i will also say that greenery on buildings is just a facet of beautiful architecture which is wildly overlooked as a necessary part of sustainable cities. beyond the practical purpose of summer heat management for greenery specifically (and other practical aspects of non-minimalist architecture such as the water stains that appear on "minimalist" architectural designs which forego overhangs), there are psychological and cultural effects to good looking, distinct architecture. used well and especially in poorer areas it also has ripple socioeconomic effects. it's the reciprocal of brutalist architecture in social housing which had its own devastating effect on quality of life by virtue of ugliness alone.

we aren't robots or numbers on an excel sheet, and by god if prehistoric nomadic human tribes had time to make art while hunting woolly mammoths, we can afford to put a some plants on public buildings. i have a dream, and that dream is a city skyline that isn't blue-gray but a vibrant green.

thank you for coming to my tedx