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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • The original comic was rather popular at the time, and as a result, it became an early meme before mass-scale meme culture had really taken off besides doge memes and “I can haz cheeseburger.” So it quickly entered the cultural zeitgeist of the early internet because the kinds of people into memes and gamer culture at the time would’ve been about the size of the terminally online crowd today.


  • Another possibility is that she’s XY, but the Y never activated, so she developed female but with a single “faulty” X chromosome.

    I don’t remember my biology classes well enough to say, but wouldn’t that also mean that potentially neither of her parents were colorblind, since the Y would’ve come from her father while the faulty X would’ve come from her mother? And, if she were XY in this scenario, wouldn’t that mean that she’d pass that trait along to her kids as well?



  • One thing I’ve always hated about these articles (and by extension, this whole topic) is all the factors that are left out of the discussion. Like when people talked about Millennials not protesting like they did in the 60s, they conveniently ignore how things have changed for Gen X and younger - how more economically tenuous and unstable living conditions are, how senior jobs are still filled with Baby Boomers that would’ve retired a decade earlier had they been their parent’s generation, how job benefits have declined (like time off), etc. Older people vote more not just because “young people are lazy,” as so many of these discussions insinuate, but because they have better economic security, more time either through retirement or better job benefits, and more knowledge of the process. We won’t see major shifts in Gen X and younger voting turnouts until we can improve work/life balance, because the Boomers pulled the ladder up after them and left the rest of us to slave away for 50 hours a week with no vacation time.




  • On top of that, it doesn’t even do a good job of preparing kids for work since the majority of jobs will be in a team based environment while schools focus on individual/isolated learning almost exclusively.

    The modern school system was largely developed around the early 1900s with the intent of creating factory line workers: people who could remember and perform 2 or 3 repetitive tasks. This is further compounded by the rise of standardized testing, which provides a good base level for quality of subjects across the range of individual teacher’s skills but has become an administrative crutch that puts test scores above everything else, leading to a cycle where kids are taught only to remember stuff long enough to pass the next test and then dump it from memory for the next set of test subjects.

    Schooling needs a major revision from the ground up for the modern age.



  • Based on what my true-crime cult obsessed friend has said on the matter, option 2 is probably the most likely; though the party at large will always rally behind whoever the nominee is, because that’s how Republicans operate.

    DeSantis already tried to court the cult of Trump, and he failed because these cults of personality are entirely fixed around their leader. As my buddy described it, it’s not like a hydra where you can cut the head off and the cult keeps going. Once the leader is gone, they fizzle out. Even in the case of endorsing a successor, I can’t imagine the group having the same kind of following for the same reason - without Trump, the Flavor-Aid sours. There will be new leaders, but they’ll have to work to sway the core voters in the way that Trump has. And the Flavor-Aid is a perfect metaphor, because Trump sounds exactly like Jim Jones according to my friend.


  • Correction: He lost big time because of mail-in votes. Trump in 2020 got the record high for votes for a Republican candidate at something like 67.2 million, which was just about a million votes less than what Obama got during his first election (which was a record-breaking turnout). Biden got around 80 million votes in 2020, breaking every voter turnout record ever.

    Swing voters are still crucial because that’s how Hillary lost despite having only 100,000 less votes than Obama did in his second election, but I feel like swing voters have probably more or less already made up their minds. If you don’t see Trump for what he is already, the odds of his reaction here being the final straw seems unlikely. I think if people had better access to voting, we’d easily see a repeat of 2020 even if we were to vote right this minute.



  • I hate to say it, but voting against the other guy has been going on a long time, and I think it has a lot to do with why we find ourselves in this situation. “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy” is one of the oldest political strategies there is, and Democrats have been using it for a long time; even going so far as to donate to the campaigns of the most extremist candidates in their race to set themselves up with an easy win.

    However, as my boss when I was a teenager would say - and my grandfather decades before him - “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.” There’s a core block of Republicans who don’t care who the Republican candidate is. They’re gonna vote for him regardless of his policies just because he’s the Republican. He could be Trump, Biden, Putin, or Stalin himself, risen from the grave to destroy the specter of capitalism once and for all. And the Democrats have never accounted for these people voting against them rather than voting for a candidate they like, which has led to this slide further and further towards right-wing extremism as the craziest candidates get propped up by Democrats looking for an easy win - to the point that even the old Republicans have lost control of this core group of voters who became the MAGA cultists, and the party as a whole along with them.

    It’s unfortunate, but all we can do at this point is vote against the crazies and hope that the Republicans clean out their party of extremists. But I don’t think we’ll see that happen any time soon. The rot is rampant.




  • Not blatantly, but there are signs of it even in the first book; and as the books go on, you can see almost in real time her political views shift from criticizing the system to defending it as she started becoming wealthy and benefiting from the system.

    I highly recommend watching Shaun’s 2 hour video on the subject, as it goes into great detail on the subject and makes for perfect podcast material.

    Some highlights include:

    • Obesity as a moral failing - want to make a character seem bad? Just make them fat!
    • Masculine features as a negative trait for women (sound familiar?) - want to make a teenage girl bad (and ugly) but don’t want to make her fat? Just talk over and over about her “mannish hands” and sharp jawline.
    • Token minority characters that are often stereotypes or border on racism - the black kid is named Shacklebolt, the Asian girl is named two single syllable last names (might as well have called her Ching Chong), the 12 year old Irish kid is obsessed with turning drinks into whiskey and blowing stuff up, etc.
    • The defense of the slavery of house elves using the exact same arguments that slave owners used before the Civil War in the US mentioned by somebody else, with a bonus criticism of Hermione as a girl with blue hair and pronouns for questioning and trying to change the system.
    • There are no good or bad actions, only good or bad people. It’s okay for the right people to use the torture spell, because they’re the “good guys.”
    • And a resolution that basically resolves nothing. Harry doesn’t kill Voldemort, he kills himself due to a magic technicality, and Harry goes on to become a magic cop to ensure the flawed system that the early books criticized doesn’t change.

  • Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.

    Then you’ve never interacted with the locals in these other places. Having grown up in a vacation town, I can tell you right now that the only difference here is that the people with water guns have hit their breaking points.

    Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? There’s a small throwaway bit in there where the wife of the chief of police is asking a friend of hers when she gets to be an islander (because the family had recently moved to the island from New York), and her friend responds, “Never. If you weren’t born here, then you’re not an islander.” Having grown up near where that movie was made, that’s 100% accurate to the local sentiment. On that island, they call people who move there “wash ashores” because they feel that they washed up like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach. In my town, we called the rich people who would come up to vacation in their lavish summer homes “snowbirds” because they migrated at the same time as the birds and couldn’t handle the winter weather.

    The most consistent thing I’ve found about tourist areas is the negative impact the industry has on the area for locals and the hatred locals feel towards the tourists.

    Whether these people are acting rightly or wrongly, they’re trying to hit the government and businesses where it hurts most - their profits - because it’s the only way they’ll ever care about the local problems.


  • They didn’t say that it doesn’t create jobs. They said that it creates poor paying jobs. Which it does. All those restaurants and shops and guides are low wage jobs, and often, only seasonal jobs as well.

    In the vacation town I grew up in, up to 50% of businesses were closed 8 months out of the year. In these kinds of areas, tourism isn’t a boost to the economy. It is the economy. It eats it up until there’s almost nothing left. Any industry that doesn’t serve the tourism is pushed out by the high profit margins of only being open long enough to service the seasonal tourism. I used to work at a fish market in that town that stayed open all year, and outside the tourist season, the boss reduced the hours to half of what they were during the tourist season. Because he couldn’t afford to keep the business running full-time. The store ran at a loss 8 months out of the year, and the busiest day of the tourist season largely kept the place open the rest of the year. It would’ve been more profitable for him to close down, but he stayed open because he didn’t want his local customers and employees to go somewhere else.

    Most of the towns in that county are tourist towns, and that county has the highest rates of drug addiction in the state and huge homelessness problems. Because there’s very little to do most of the year since everything is closed, and combine the seasonal labor/low wage tourism industry with the housing stock being bought up by wealthy people for their vacation homes or Air BnBs while apartments prioritize short-term seasonal rentals because of how much more they can charge, and locals can’t afford to live in town anymore. There’s one town there that has a year-round population of 2,000 and can see up to 60,000 people there in the summer. And anybody I’ve ever talked to who has lived in a vacation town has cited the exact same issues consistently - high rates of poverty, homelessness, and drug use/addiction.



  • Because of the American Puritannical values, which dictate what the credit companies and advertisers are willing to do business with and the cultural zeitgeist along with it.

    The Puritans were some of the earliest British colonists in the US, and were either thrown out of England for attempting a coup to replace the king with a puppet to force their more extremist form of Christianity on the country, or left by their own choice because they felt that the Church of England was too liberal. They were basically a bunch of prudes who believed that the human body and sex were shameful and disgusting.

    This has led to the dichotomy where advertisers want nothing to do with sex/nudity, except when it comes to implied sex in advertisements. Because sex is bad, but it also sells, which is good.