Nah, but a couple surprised me with how much they saddened me because I’d always thought it was kind of stupid to get genuinely upset about the deaths of celebrities you don’t know. Sometimes your cognitive opinions take a backseat without your permission and you just feel actually mournful about someone who has so little direct connection and who’s worldly contributions are almost always in the entertainment space. For me that was David Bowie and Trevor Moore. Both of these surprised me because it’s not like I was a hardcore David Bowie fan so it didn’t feel like that death should have hit me particularly hard and Trevor, I still can’t figure out why that’d upset me so much. I mean I loved his sketch comedy but I’d largely forgotten about him at the time, I think it might have something to do with him being so young as well as all the laughs he’d given us.

This’d be great since it’s a whole lot less morally compromising when it wasn’t even us bumping them off.

Would they have any money to buy anything?

Do I misunderstand emby or does it just not seem like a good deal on the basis of it being an ongoing subscription? I use the free version of emby and it’s really great. There was at least one feature that required payment to unlock. I like emby already and when I tried using jellyfin, the core features that were on both it and the free version of emby worked far less reliably and the paid feature on emby that was free on Jellyfin, worked extremely unreliably. Obviously resources and development had been spent to make something that worked very well and their paid feature probably would too. I use emby to make it easier to cast media locally to my chromecast and to access media on my computer, from my phone in my bedroom, so for me, it’s a fancy file browser and media player. The feature I wanted was to do with free to air tv streaming and I was thinking I’d be happy to pay for the Emby software to unlock this since they made good software that works. But here’s the thing, it’s FREE to air TV and yet they want me to pay, ongoing, in a perpetual arrangement to use it. I don’t get it. I use it to play media, but the media is my media stored on my machines. I understand software development isn’t free, I was happy to pay ONCE, but why would I keep paying when they don’t actually produce the media I use it to play? That seemed unjustifiable.

Bits of it were good. Seems like something went wrong in production or they ran out of money or something. Some of the effects were really good and there was a real mood to the post apocalypse world but it was very uneven especially the way the entire process of civilization ending was just a montage of newspaper headlines. It’s ok to be post apocalypse of you don’t want to show the apocalypse but that was just cheese. Also there were the odd shots that were of just such a lower standard than the rest of the film. Like this scene where a guy climbs up a watertower and stands atop it getting ready to throw a spear and for some reason after the effects extravaganza up until that point in the film it looked a cheap television blue screen that was super awkward. I guess they wanted it to look taller than in reality and show the desolate landscape but it’s so weird that after all the aerial dragon combat they’d pulled off pretty well for the most part that THAT was somehow difficult. I seem to recall storywise there was some very disappointing ending too but it’s been rather too long for me to recall it now anyway.

Reign of fire. Don’t know if that’s what you were referencing in the picture but it’s immediately what came to mind when I saw the drawing.

That was a pretty great-ass fire.

Stream of consciousness really, for the most part tongue in cheek. I think despite it’s verbosity, it’s a good explanation of why the term is awkward once you give it more than a second’s thought. But hey language is gonna language, people will probably take it as it’s meant despite all that.

I always thought motherfucker was a weird exclamation. At least right now, it doesn’t fit with modern concepts of humiliating put downs because things like “I fucked your mum” are commonly understood phrases of contempt and ways to embarrass or domineer someone yet it creates the uncomfortable paradox of the person calling someone a motherfucker inadvertently placing their opponent in a rhetorical position of dominance and power over at least someone whose mother they have fucked, and quite possibly even the mother of the person calling them a mother fucker if they’re happy to turn the tables and make that claim. Whether the term might once not have had those confusing connotations before common tropes around fucking of people’s mothers being a dominance thing someone might take a chauvinistic pride in; within current culture, it definitely does.

Then you have the fact that statistically, quite a lot of normal people are going to be motherfuckers including everyone’s Dad and especially the father of the person calling someone a motherfucker, so it’s offensive impact is up against the heavily diluting effect of the sheer banality of the status of motherfucker. It’s almost like saying “oxygen breather” and expecting to offend.

Then it gets so contextually muddied by the fact that the word has become semantically very flexible. I think I’ve even heard it used as a term of endearment before, at the very least it can sometimes be a stand in for just “people”, as in “some motherfuckers like to smoke” wherein such cases it’s fairly neutral in affect or at least only mildly negative. It’s also used just as an exclamation of surprise or anger with a situation, this is actually where I most find myself using it. It’s sometimes used with regard to objects, rather than people with which one is frustrated, a usage that I guess isn’t so far removed from the original offensive intent but still broadens the scope somewhat. This flexibility isn’t necessarily bad, after all “fuck” is extremely flexible and people will infer intent from context pretty effectively but again it does seem to me to sort of dilute it’s antagonistic and offensive qualities by becoming mundane.

I guess the term works quite well because it’s rather graphic. It doesn’t just require the word itself to be arbitrarily considered offensive like “fuck” does, but instead produces mental imagery that’s shocking and explicit, maybe that’s how it’s managed to hang around so long despite semantic ambiguity and possible rhetorical backfiring but for me, I still think it’s a weird term. It’s so ambiguous, and so tied up with weird ideas around propriety and women that make it feel strange in contexts where someone wants to be threatening and vulgar. It feels like a strangely dandy and out of place anachronism in the sort of ‘street’ context that I think people want to evoke when they use it. Feels like something I might expect people to say right before slapping each other with gloves. Are they upset with the person’s habit of fucking mother’s because it implies they’re a philanderer? Would that be offensive to them? Or is it the mother they’re supposed to have fucked who’s improper? A “slut” for allowing the mother fucker to fuck them? If so, why is the issuer of the term directing their distaste at the mother fucker and not mother whom they fucked? Are they suggesting the person so-called, fucked their own mother? I guess that could make sense, a bit weird but certainly insulting, yet I’ve really never heard that that was the intended idea.

You know I’m not sure. I sure spend a lot of time here on Lemmy but somehow I’m not sure I even exactly like it. I was going through my feed to see if I could find a kind of quirky counterintuitive answer that I could justify by saying at least it’s not some super depressing news or angry commentary but they’re kinda… all like that.

I guess I cherish all of them equally as much in that I somehow keep coming back.

Ah I knew it’d be something that should have seemed obvious to me only after it’s explained.

What’s com’s?

Haha, did you ever try it out? Maybe it really was your life long calling.

RIP slaveRat’s computer/phone

Woah wtf?

In many ways he’s a unique figure. When he entered the political scene in his first campaign. The establishment republicans and conservatives didn’t appear to think he’d really become a serious force. They were wrong. His ideological opponents also seemed to think he was too silly, and too extreme to be taken seriously and his domination of the right, albeit surprising, was anomalous and would never translate to electoral victory. They were also wrong. He seemed not to know how to play the game properly and was too foolish even to realise it. He probably wouldn’t have been the first whack job to fail to heed his advisors and PR team and would surely fail like all of them. Viewed in that light his somehow successful manoeuvres could seem only baffling than inspired, like watching someone win at roulette by just always betting one colour. This gives his rising successes a spooky and uncanny air and not something his rivals or opponents could simply emulate themselves because when a normal person does this they just lose.

If he’d had that final Big Mac attack in 2015 or maybe even as late as 2016, his brand of politics and the movement it seems to have inspired might have died with him but sadly it looks like now, plenty of proteges will be there to pick up the reigns. For all that can be said of the man, it appears he tapped in to and unleashed something that was waiting for its time and it’s unlikely even his death will put that genie back in its bottle. The next in line might be a shrewd and clever cynic, who’s studied the MAGA playbook and will exploit it to the hilt to grasp power for their own ends with no belief in the irrational or fantastical elements of this new orthodoxy. It might be an actual true believer, straight from the ranks of the deranged and mentally disturbed that Trump previously manipulated, now believing they’re seeing the many real and imagined prophecies Trump used to rile them coming true. Maybe it’ll be something in between, someone more like Trump himself with what seems to be more of an instinctive knack for playing these emboldened fanatics rather than a geniusly thought out strategy, they’ll sometimes believe what they’re saying sometimes not, a value system infinitely malleable, but reliably selfish. Either way Trump being dead will be a relief for little more than a day and after that you can either look forward to an heir apparent who’ll keep it all going or a dangerous power struggle between dangerous people happy to expend lives and treasure to pick up the mantle.

Do you know that they didn’t?

I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I’m also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here’s my take.

I can’t figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur’s understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it’s difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I’ve decided to forgive the loan I can’t find a way to frame that as theft. Who’s been stolen from?

If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren’t stolen from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you already have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don’t like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn’t make the decisions themselves theft if you just don’t like them.

That’s about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher’s justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can’t find a way to make the statement true.

What happened there? I followed the link but it looks mods removed whatever the offending poster had done.

Nah these things are funny like that you can end up just like this with very close friends, it’s not inevitable but you also can’t reasonably predict which friendships are like the ones you describe that can survive a long hibernation and ones that for all the will in the world enter a freeze from which they never fully thaw.