I’m lucky enough to work for an organization which furnishes me with up to 4 hours of paid leave to vote. Plus, my polling place is on the road home, and I’ve never waited longer than a couple of minutes to vote. Finally, doing it in person feels more impactful, even if that’s just a perception thing.

Jury’s out on this one, but I’m told he’s got top men working on it.

I think you’ve got an admirably optimistic outlook. I hope you’re correct. However, I am afraid that you may be underestimating human greed and selfishness. Those aren’t unique traits to any generation. Maybe it’s human nature, maybe it’s learned through existence in a capitalistic / hierarchically organized society. In any case, I am not confident that youth alone will prevent people from seeing the kind of country and world that was left to them, as you put it, and not desire to possess as much of the remnants as possible in an outburst of self-interest.

For every person that sees the ice caps melting and wants to fix it somehow, I’m afraid there’s almost certainly at least one other person who thinks, “Hell yeah, new oceanfront property just dropped, how can I own/sell it?”

COULD be a big deal, assuming a lot of “ifs” wind up coming to pass. Nebraska awards it’s electoral college votes on a piecemeal basis. Each of the 3 congressional districts gets 1 vote awarded to the winner of the popular vote in that district, and 2 “at-large” electoral votes are given to the overall winner of the statewide popular vote. This has only been relevant in two elections, 2008 and 2020, when the second district (which is basically just the Omaha metropolitan area) awarded 1 blue vote among a sea of red. Now, the state Republican party (no doubt assisted by national) did their damnedest to try and make things Winner Take All to prevent this situation from occurring again, but were unable to court the votes necessary in the legislature prior to time running out. In fact, all around town I see folks with signs in their yards with either a 🔵 to represent our district, or a silhouette of the state all in red, to represent the electoral voice of this district being silenced (probably not how they look at it, but my biases are what they are).

I’m too far removed from electoral news to understand exactly how this all shakes out, but there is a possible path to it being decided by a singular electoral college votes, and the influx of 100,000 potential voters with a possible (I’m speculating, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable) blue bias in primarily CD-1 and CD-2 could help secure that vote.

Cool picture! Looks like it would fit right into the Kenshin universe, if you’re familiar with that game.

I am highly skeptical that anyone expected this to make it’s budget back. Coppola financed it himself, and, apparently, marketed it himself. Honestly, were I in his position, I’d throw anyone seeking to provide “more oversight” off of my movie set. Not to say that that makes for better movies or anything, but when the artist provides the money, they get to oversee themselves for better or worse.

I see this response with some degree of frequency here on Lemmy (and Reddit before) when a movie/game bombs, or a show is cancelled, and I have to wonder how valid it is. Like, I would suspect that the population that uses Lemmy regularly and the population that takes steps to remove corporate advertising from their lives form an essentially circular Venn diagram.

At a certain point, easy though it is to blame marketers for not getting the word out, folks need to acknowledge the fact that, when advertisers come knocking at their door, they’re turning off the porch light and closing the blinds.

Which is not to imply that people have anything approaching an obligation to open themselves up to advertising. I’m just saying that blaming a lack of ads while running an ad blocker seems disingenuous.

For the record, OP, not an attack on you or anything, just voicing some thoughts that have been percolating since reading about a couple high profile flops and cancellations this summer.

Gives me Bill Watterson vibes, like a previously unseen Spaceman Spiff comic from Calvin and Hobbes. Love it.

Continue to be thankful. I made some boneheaded choices in college which resulted in my throwing away a full ride, and I left school with like 80k in debt. Thankfully, I am much more fiscally responsible than I was academically responsible, and I managed to pay that off over the course of like 7 years (aided in no small part by the forbearance periods Biden forced through during COVID). Which is good, because more boneheaded choices were made which resulted in a significant change to my financial situation. If I were still making payments at this juncture, I would be in a position where I’d be moving back into mom’s basement just to make ends meet.

Not that there is anything inherently shameful in that (it’s fucking hard out here, and if that’s a resource that you have available, it should not be turned away simply because of pride), but it does cause me to wake every morning pleased I didn’t listen to any “financial gurus” out there who talk about shit like “good debt”.

As neat and tidy as your explanation is, I think you are vastly oversimplifying the concept.

You say the moon is real because you can see it, and you can prove it’s there by telling other people to just go look at it. Alrighty then, I’ve seen bigfoot. In fact, lots of people say they’ve seen bigfoot. Therefore he must exist too, right? The photos “prove” his existence just as much as you pointing to the sky saying the moon exists cause there it is.

Now, I realize that there’s probably some degree of hyperbole in your statement, so I’ll walk this back a little. If the defining metric of your separation between these concepts is whether the hypothesis can be proven through experimentation, that’s all well and good. However, I would argue that, in 99.9% of cases, it’s still a belief statement. Let’s continue with the moon example, but, rather than “seeing is knowing”, let’s apply the same standard that you applied to God. So, you “know” the moon exists, not just because you can see it, but because it’s existence can be empirically proven through experimentation. What sort of experiments would you conduct to do that, exactly? Have you done those experiments? Or, like the rest of the rational world, do you accept that scientists have done those experiments already and decided, yup, moon’s there? Cause, if you’re taking someone else’s word for it, do you personally “know” what they are saying is true, or do you believe them based upon their credentials, the credentials of those who support the argument, and your own personal beliefs/knowledge?

As another example, let’s imagine for a sec we’re philosophers/scientists of the ancient world. I have a theory that the heavier something is, the faster it will fall. You may know where I’m going with this if you remember your elementary school science classes. I believe in the power of experimental evidence, and so, to test my theory, I climb to the top of the Acropolis and drop a feather and a rock. The feather falls much more slowly than the rock. Eureka, I’ve proved my theory and therefore I now KNOW that an object’s weight affects its fall.

Now, anyone not born in 850 BC Athens in this thread will point out that it’s a flawed experiment, since I’m not controlling for air resistance, and if you conducted the same experiment in a vacuum chamber, both objects would fall at the the same rate. However, the technology to test my hypothesis with all of the salient variables controlled did not exist at that time. So, even though it’s now widely known that my experiment was flawed, it wouldn’t have been at the time, and I would have the data to back up my theory. I could simply say try it yourself, it’s a self-evident fact.

Finally, your statement about subjectivity of definition being an obstacle to functional language is so alarmist as to border on ridiculous. If this question were “how do you personally define the distinction between ‘yes’ and ‘no’”, then sure I can get on board a little bit more with your point. However this is much more like ‘twilight’ vs ‘dusk’. Crack open a dictionary and you’ll find that there is a stark, objective distinction between those terms, much as you pointed out that belief and knowledge have very different definitions. For the record, since I had to look it up to ensure I wasn’t telling tales here, sunset is the moment the sun finishes crossing the horizon, twilight is the period between sunset and dusk when light is still in the sky but the sun is not, and dusk is the moment the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon. So, I know that these are unique terms with specific, mutually exclusive definitions. But let me tell you something, I believe that if I randomly substituted one term for another based purely on my personal whimsy, people are gonna get what I mean regardless.

I mean, Burton was a producer on this film, not a director. Coming up with the idea and then hiring great people was the extent of his involvement as far as I know.

More a piece “inspired by” than a direct translation, but, if you have any affinity for classic metal music, Savatage has you covered.

The takes on Megalopolis I’ve come across this far all seem to align with my expectations for a movie 40 years in the making: i.e. it’s a mess, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

I go to Subway with an upsetting degree of regularity, but it’s the only place where I can get fresh vegetables as part of my meal in under 30 minutes. The cheapest footlong on the menu is the Spicy Italian (or whatrver their latest menu refresh is calling it) for $10.99. Any other sub is $11.99 and up.

Whatchu mean your Bible ain’t got the Gospel accordin’ to Charlie? You one of them freaky-deaky Catlicks? Come on down to the First United International Church of the Resurrection of the Lost Cause and we’uns gonna show you how to praise the Lord CORRECTLY!

I’m looking to reenter the dating pool in the near future and this has been on my mind, especially in light of Roe and my location in middle America. Would you be willing to share your personal experience with the procedure? Everyone says it’s very easy, but I gotta be honest, it makes me nervous.

My interpretation, though I do not understand the greater context of this character, is that he is referring to homelessness in general in the first panel, but dealing with a homeless person in the second. Which is to say, that ignoring the systemic problems which result in homelessness does not preclude acts of charity for the rich to make them feel better/tax write offs/a genuine belief in doing good/image rehab. The rich get whatever benefit they sought from the exchange, the specific recipient of their charity gets a hopefully life-changing boost, and down the road a landlord evicts a family after raising their rent 100% over a few years, thus replenishing the pool of the underclass. In fact, by demonstrating these acts of philanthropy, the wealthy provide ammunition for ideologues who want to gut social welfare by pointing to these generous acts of the elite.

So, I don’t see the split or twist that occurs between the two panels that others have commented on. To my mind, both of the panels tell a consistent story. A wealthy man is determined to ignore homelessness when he sees a beggar. He then gives the beggar a pittance and continues along his way, wilfully ignoring the systemic issues that allow homelessness to occur (and which, as a wealthy fat cat type character, perhaps he could do something about if he had the will to do so).

Idk if that was the initial intent, but it’s my headcanon now.

Fwiw, in the US, you do have a right to represent yourself in court proceedings, but, in order to exercise that right, the judge must determine that you are competent enough to represent yourself. Here is a link to the department of Justice website which nearly summarizes the case law surrounding this issue, if you want to educate yourself.