Rov_Scam
5mo ago
As someone who has been outside every day of his life and spent a lot of time with like-minded people, it's not really even that extreme of an accomplishment. It's basically just a backcountry ski trip with more complicated logistics than doing it in Maine or Minnesota. It's not hard to get an airlift to a spot in the wilderness if you have the money and know where to look; it's a thing people do, and most of them come back okay. The thing is, most of the people who do it go through outfitters who provide gear and provisions and tell them where to go, even if the tours are self-guided. As such, he's not going to get dropped at some arbitrary location, but a spot where the pilot can actually land the plane, which is going to be a spot that people normally use for these types of adventures. There's a decent chance he may even run into other people on this trip.
That being said, as I mentioned in my last post on the subject, most people who aren't in the outdoor world won't know the difference between any of the finer gradations of how badass something is supposed to be. I wouldn't go out of my way to plan such a trip myself, but if a group were going and I were invited and cost/time off work weren't an issue I'd jump at the chance. I have friends who do a ski touring vacation every winter and they love it, though the fact that they have small children they bring along means they usually stick to the kind of trips where you ski between cabins on well-marked trails. To the uninitiated, though, it doesn't matter. Some people — even outdoorsy people — seem shocked that I've backpacked overnight solo without being scared in the woods. Non-outdoorsy people often ask what kind of gun I bring with me. When I tell them that, aside from the weight alone making it a nonstarter, that a pistol isn't likely to do anything against any animal that could do serious damage, they change tack and suggest that the woods is crawling with deranged hillbillies. If Sookum wants to do something other people will find impressive, a few overnighters on a local trail will probably be sufficient without the additional risk and cost.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
The problem for Trump, though, is that he doesn't really have any cronies other than the kind of people for whom ass-kissing is their only skill. Trump's most notable battles weren't with faceless lifetime bureaucrats who refused to follow his orders, they were with people he chose himself. The constitutionally-mandated role of the Cabinet is to advise the President. If he's not willing to take advice when it goes against his own preconceived notions then the Cabinet is basically useless. If he's unable to select well-qualified people whom he's willing to listen to and who broadly agree with him on policy without getting into public spats whenever they give him advice he doesn't like, it says more about his own ability as a policymaker than it does about "The Swamp" or whatever.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
When I worked at K-Mart in college our official training told us that if we suspect a customer is shoplifitng, ask if they need any help with anything. You aren't accusing them of anything and if they have individual contact with an employee that's often enough to make them think that the store is on to them and put back whatever it was they were taking. I'd take a similar tack here. Unless you're seriously introverted it's not too hard to find a reason to strike up a conversation with a stranger; ask for directions, a restaurant recommendation, the time, anything. From there you can ask the tourist where they're from and what they're up to and if they tell you that this gentleman is offering a personalized tour tell them that you have to be careful because there are scams out there though you're sure this gentleman probably wouldn't do anything of the sort personally. Just outline the scam and it will be pretty hard for the tourist to get caught up in it.
I'm not familiar with this particular scam but when I lived in the city people would often pull the one where they claim they ran out of gas in a bad area where their car is blocking traffic and need ten bucks or whatever to buy a gas can. I saw some people about to be taken by it before and I'd intervene by butting in and telling the guy that I had a gas can for my lawnmower just up at my house and if he could wait a few minutes I'd be happy to give him a free gallon, which I would have been had the guy actually been out of gas. This was usually enough to get the marks to walk away thinking the situation was under control while the guy cursed me out after I told him to follow me. Once it happened to me when my roommate and I were walking through a dicey area on the way home from a football game. The guy claimed his car was stuck on a busy four-lane road and we offered to help him push and started walking in the general direction of where he said the car was. This guy pretended to get a call and told me his buddy was on the way and not to worry about it.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Yeah but even if they burn the place to the ground and salt the earth so that even the lot loses all value, you're still no worse off than you would have been if the property had been willed to somebody else. At least then you probably got to collect some rent on it. If you paid for it yourself that's a different story.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
I intended to bring this up the next time someone bemoaned progressive (or really just left-leaning) institutional capture, but I'm lazy so luckily you beat me to the punch. Conservatives have complaining about how left-wing academia has become at least since I was in college 20 years ago, but there's been little introspection about why this is the case; indeed, much of their other rhetoric actually undermined any chance of them having any influence at all. All we heard was that studying English and history and any other humanity or social science was useless for anything except academia, and it was pointless to spend a decade pursuing a PhD just so you could compete in a hyper-competitive lottery where the prize was a low-paying job at small school in the middle of nowhere. Much better to major in business or accounting or a hard science and make real money in the real world. And by hard science I mean major in cell and molecular biology so you can work in the pharmaceutical industry, not, like my ex-girlfriend, get a doctorate in cell and molecular biology from an unprestrgious school and focus your research on hearing in whales.
Government jobs are a little bit different since they're much easier to get. They pay less than comparable private sector jobs, but they usually have good benefits and aren't susceptible to recessions or corporate downsizing. But they aren't the place for over-ambitous young go-getters to make names for themselves. Pay is strictly regimented and promotions are slow to come by. Performance bonuses are all but non-existent. And even if you make it into senior administration you're salary will be capped at about 250k a year, you'll have to live in Washington, and you'll be permanently locked out of executive-level positions that go to political appointees. Unless, of course, you have the necessary connections and don't mind losing your job with the next administration or whenever the current one is looking for a scapegoat.
And then there's the added complication that conservatives have traditionally railed against bureaucracy as emblematic of government bloat and unnecessary spending. You look at the cube next to you at a guy who's been phoning it in for the past 20 years but who makes more than you due to seniority rules and can't be fired, and whose job it is to administer programs you think are a waste of money. Why would any conservative want to be part of this when they can make more money doing essentially the same thing at 3M, or US Steel?
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
That's an interesting argument but I think it misses. There are two distinct differences, though between the casting couch and prostitution:
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Prostitution is explicit. There's no question at all up front what the prostitute has to do to get paid. If casting calls had "Must perform sex acts on producer" along side other requirements, it would be different. But the vast majority of castings, from Hollywood down to commercials and community theater in Idaho, don't require the actors to do anything out of the ordinary. Even when it does happen, there's rarely any explicit demand for sex; the guy usually just hits on the actress and there's an implication that it wouldn't hurt to sleep with him.
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On the other side of the coin, what you get out of sleeping with him isn't explicit either. A prostitute knows that she's going to get paid; that's part of the deal. Since the casting couch is by its nature implicit rather than explicit, there's never any guarantee that satisfying the guy's demands will get the desired outcome. He could think you're a terrible actress but worth a roll in the hay and use his power to convince you that sleeping with him will get you the part even though he knows up front there's no chance in hell of that happening. And when it comes to producers like Harvey Weinstein they aren't even the ones necessarily making the final decision. The director and casting agent are the ones who are supposed to come to that conclusion; while producers have considerable influence and can put in a good word (and even possibly demand it), they aren't technically the ones who get to decide, at least not since the end of the studio system.
So if there was some explicit statement up front that sex with the producer, or director, or casting agent, or half the employees of MGM was required for the role, and it would only have to be done at the end after they'd already been picked, then, yeah, I would liken it to prostitution. But the way it is now is way too vague in comparison.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
That truck is never going to be sold in the US because, outside of you and possibly a few other people, no one is going to buy it. As much as you and other people may complain about the lack of a small, basic truck with a five speed transmission, and 2-wheel drive, there isn't much of a market for one. Most people I know who own trucks they don't need don't own whatever the current versions of the Ranger and S-10 are, they own F-150s and Siverados and Rams and Tundras. Few people actually need a truck, and those who are buying ones they don't need want big penis trucks with huge engines and high towing capacity and 4-wheel drive and and interior like a Cadillac, not some 90 hp puttmobile. They'd sell about as well as those old VW Rabbit trucks that had their fans but didn't exactly take the country by storm.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Not in the least, since I intend to go through legal channels as about the most Westernized an Indian can get, contributing to a valuable profession, and generally being prosocial.
Why should I, as an American, give you the benefit of that doubt? Why shouldn't I just assume that you're some basket-weaver taking a shit on the streets of Calcutta, or fresh from participating in a gang rape in some rural village? There are over one billion Indians and I'd bet very few of them are pro-Western doctors. Why are you privileged to paint all Palestinians with a broad brush, but I'm not privileged to paint all Indians with a broad brush?
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
But is DeSantis more popular with the general electorate? There was a time when this would have seemed plausible, but the headlines he's generated since he became the media's golden boy have all been related to whatever culture war bullshit he's promoting in his state. He painted himself into a corner and now he finds himself running to the right of Trump. Had he focused his campaign on administrative competence that vaguely hinted at effective implementation of MAGA-adjacent principles, I'd say he has a good chance of winning the general election. But the hasn't done that. He's publicly waged an all-out war against wokism and LGBT stuff, not to mention his quixotic war against Disney and the stunt where he sent immigrants from Texas up north. If he'd done these things quietly it may have provoked some kind of backlash but not nearly as much as centering his entire public persona around them. Plus, he seems unwilling to give interviews to anyone who will do anything other than lob softballs at him. It's nice work if you can get it, but he can't do this all the way through a fucking presidential election and expect to win. Remember, he needs to convince people in swing states who voted for Biden that he's the more reasonable candidate than Trump, and those states have all either stood pat when it was expected they may shift right a bit (Nevada, Arizona) or decisively shifted left (Pennsylvania, Michigan).
Trump was able to win in 2016 largely because he was a totally unknown entity running against a lousy Democtratic candidate. Once people knew what to expect, he lost. DeSantis doesn't have that advantage, and simply being a Trump who can wage the culture war better provided he has a compliant legislature isn't going to convince moderates and independents that he's much of an improvement.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
As an aside, here's one thing I noticed about the Bud Light boycott: A lot of people here have pointed out that the similarities among major brands of light beer have made it a relatively easy thing to boycott since alternatives are readily available. I was already inclined to agree with this sentiment, precisely because it underscores why this boycott hasn't seemed to have much of an effect in my neck of the woods. A lot of products are popular by default, and they're usually the products that are marketed by major brands and have a ton of advertising. You don't need to know a lot about soft drinks to know that Coke is popular and that most people will find it an acceptable beverage; if you're having a party and serve Coke and someone doesn't like it, they'll at least understand why you chose it in a way they wouldn't if Cheerwine was the only option. In certain areas Bud Light is like this for beer; it's not so much a choice but the lack of a choice. Drinking Bud Light is staring into the void.
But where I live, in Western PA, it isn't. Among light beers, Miller Lite is clearly number one, followed by a tie between Coors Light and IC Light, the local option. Bud Light is a distant fourth, at least according to my own totally unscientific observations. Actually, fourth might be too generous as Busch Light is pretty common and Keystone and Natty are the go-tos for poor college students. What this means for Bud Light is that drinking it around here is a conscious choice. You don't select it by default, you select it because you've tried the other options and prefer Bud. This means three things. First, the boycott is more something that is on the news than something people are actively participating in, since they never drank Bud Light anyway. Hence, there seems to be little social pressure to jump on the boycott bandwagon, since there is none. Second, Bud Light drinking here is more of a personal thing than a cultural thing. Drinking Bud Light never signaled anything about you other than that you liked Bud Light, so there's no cultural associations with continuing to drink it despite the boycott. Finally, it's much harder to switch to a competitor because drinking Bud Light means having consciously rejected the competitors in the past; you're less inclined to switch if it's a beer you know you don't like.
So I still see people, even those I know or suspect to be conservative, drinking Bud Light in numbers roughly equivalent to what I saw before. As one conservative friend told me today: "I've drinking this beer since I was sixteen. I'm not going to stop just because some guy wants to wear a dress."
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
On a related note, I have a feeling that unless drastic action is taken the entire college football edifice is going to collapse some time in the next decade. NIL deals combined with the transfer portal have turned the entire enterprise into the worst sort of professional sports league. How would the NFL look if there were no salary cap and no contracts, making every player a free agent every year? Since NIL is here to stay, and I don't see the transfer portal going away any time soon, if I were an NIL sponsor I'd make my deal contingent on the player staying at the school all four years, unless I grant him a release. I don't care if it's for the fucking NFL; if I'm committing money to a guy I want to get the max value out of him. I'd also include some kind of liquidated damages clause or prepay the entire 4 (or 5) years so that if he leaves he has to pay the money back. I might not be able to collect all of it depending what the court does, but he'll have to pay something, and he knows he's getting sued either way.
The pipe dream is to come up with some kind of draft system to ensure parity. The NHL from 1995 to 2004 is a prime example of what happens when you can't ensure parity, and even they had more protections in place than college football. No leagues had salary caps before 1993, but no leagues, aside from baseball, had any meaningful free agency before then, either. You'd draft a team and you could trade guys but you could also keep the team together if you wanted to. Some leagues, like the NHL, technically had free agency, but it was restricted enough that building a team through free agency was nearly impossible, as the Scott Stevens fiasco with the Blues demonstrated. As soon as unrestricted free agency was granted, salaries skyrocketed, and even good teams couldn't stay competitive without breaking the bank. The Penguins at the time were going through bankruptcy as a perennial playoff contender with good attendance. 3 teams moved. Ratings plummeted. It took losing a whole season to a lockout to put the league back on the path to stability, and now it's in better shape than ever.
So I propose a draft. I don't know it would work, exactly, but the conferences only stand to make more money if teams like Maryland and Syracuse are competitive every once in a while. If it means Kent State wins a national championship at some point, fine. I never hear any arguments about how the Chiefs don't deserve all of their recent success because they're in a small market with no real national following (yes, they have a national following now, because they're winning, but they aren't like the Steelers or Cowboys who have national followings even when they suck). Because that argument is ridiculous. And will Clemson and Florida State go ahead and lose their fucking lawsuits already?
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
The bat, easily. As soon as the other guy sees the tip of the bat heading directly toward his balls, I guarantee he drops the knife.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
I don't think Twitter has much to do with it. The night before Thanksgiving, I attended a Taylor Swift trivia night that my cousin's boyfriend convinced me to attend because it was at a local brewery. The vast majority of the attendees weren't the typical brewery clientele, but suburban moms and their young daughters. Not too many men. And the place was absolutely packed; there were at least 20 teams. I guarantee you very few of these people have Twitter accounts, or care too much about Elon Musk. I attribute Swift's sudden blowup to the following factors:
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She was already very famous. This may seem obvious but it seems like there's more staying power when an already famous person reaches this level of popularity compared with the meteoric rise of an unknown. She's 34 years old and has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years; there's no sense that she's the flavor of the month.
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She has a history of making risky professional moves that have the potential to wreck her career but end up bolstering it. In 2014 there was some serious discussion as to whether she'd be able to appeal to the pop market in the same way she appealed to the country market. There have long been country stars with crossover appeal, but most of them never stop ostensibly being country musicians, no matter how pop they get. The only other musician I can think of who pulled this off was Linda Ronstadt, but she gets an asterisk because she was at the fringes of the country world; she came out of the more rock-oriented Laurel Canyon scene rather than being a product of Nashville. I think a big part of the reason Nashville artists are hesitant to break out like this is because country is a sort of security blanket. The country world wants something that's ostensibly country, and they will loyally buy it if it's marketed as such. Making a full transition out of Nashville means casting off the last vestiges of this to make it in the wider world. You run the risk of losing your old audience and failing to find a new one. But she correctly calculated that the country fans who were buying her music were probably already buying pop records anyway, and that her pop audience was where all the growth was. And when I say she I mean whoever does her marketing. So she managed to get two audiences for the price of one, so to speak.
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Then — and people often forget about this — she pulled her music off of streaming services because she didn't like the business model. For three years. I'm not going to attempt to quantize the impact this had, but I doubt it did her career any favors in the short-term. However, it probably helped her career long-term, because it encouraged people to buy her albums rather than stream them. This probably fostered a sense of loyalty that she wouldn't have had if she'd been available at the touch of a button to anyone with a Spotify account. And then it was a big deal when she got back on the streaming services, which again increased her audience.
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So at this point she's been steadily consolidating her power for over a decade. This is important in and of itself because most pop stars don't stay on top for that long, especially just by being pop stars. Contrast this with Lady Gaga, who is still famous but more because she did things like movies and albums with Tony Bennett. No one has cared about her pop records since 2011. The fact that Swift is in her mid-30s and has been able to sustain a career since her days as a teen idol without making any major changes is an accomplishment in and of itself and probably feeds into our current moment. She's been around long enough that women who listened to her in high school can take their kids to her concerts.
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Despite her fame, and her numerous celebrity relationships, she's managed to avoid the kind of scandals and tabloid gossip that surrounds other pop stars, especially ones who become famous at sixteen and have to navigate the transition to adulthood while in the public eye.
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She has an uncanny knack for making decisions that are totally about money and convincing people that they're not about money. The whole "Taylor's Version" thing is a prime example. She didn't like the fact that she didn't own the rights to her old recordings. The main advantage of owning the rights to her recordings is that she can collect all the money they generate. Otherwise, there's no real advantage. This is a big deal for most people, but for someone like Swift, who has more money than she's ever going to be able to spend, the schlubs at whatever private equity firm owns the rights to them probably need the money more than she does. But she casts it as a matter of principle, rerecords new versions she owns the rights to, and convinces her fans to shell out money for five different collectors' editions of the same albums they already own. The whole thing was about as transparent a cash grab as you could find, yet she pulled it off in such a way that even people who could care less about her career thought it was a slick move to stick it to those fatcats. It got her the kind of publicity you can't buy while minting her a pretty penny.
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And, finally, in the same vein, we have the Eras Tour. At some point in every pop star's life, there comes a point where they are no longer a "frontline artist", by which I mean a contemporary artist who makes contemporary music for a contemporary audience. At some point, people don't go to your concerts to hear the new album but to hear the old favorites. It's usually the obvious sign that a band is over the hill — there's a new album out and the kind of people who paid 70 bucks to hear you play don't give a fuck. And if your biggest fans no longer care... Becoming an oldies act is depressing. Bob Dylan and Neil Young have defiantly refused to go down that path, regardless of the crap they take for it, and insist on being contemporary musicians who will tour the new album and maybe throw in a few old favorites. Mike Love's insistence on the Beach Boys playing touring their 60s hits in the wake of the compilation album Endless Summer's success in the mid-1970s drove a wedge between the band that they never really recovered from. (And most of the band was younger then than Swift is now.) The huge appeal of the Eras Tour was that, for the first time, Swift would be taking listeners on a musical journey through her entire career. She was becoming an oldies act, proudly and deliberately. At a time when she was still viable as a frontline artist. This is almost unheard of. Sure, contemporary bands usually play some older material at all their shows, but it's unusual for someone to actively embrace what is usually the sure sign of a has-been. Because the dirty secret of oldies acts is that they're very profitable. People like hearing old favorites, even when they're still willing to pay good money for the new shit. And the whole Taylor's Version thing was perfect cover. Combine this with the fact that she hadn't toured in half a decade and the stage was set for all hell to break loose.
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
The problem is that the implicit point of public monuments is to celebrate historic figures. The fact that Lee is well-known is purely due to his decision to take up arms against the United States; the same can be said of almost every other Confederate. And it's not appropriate to celebrate those who opposed us in war. In other words, Lee's stature as a war hero is comparable to that of someone like General Howe or Santa Ana or Erwin Rommel. There may be statues of the former two in the United States, but if there are I guarantee they're somewhere like a battlefield where the context is clear and they generally build statues of every prominent person who fought there. But I doubt anyone would advocate for putting them in a position of honor such as a town square, and if you built one on your own property people would be right to suspect your motives.
Add to that the fact that they weren't seceding because of tax policy or some other anodyne complaint but to preserve an institution that's now globally recognized as a reprehensible denial of the most basic human freedoms, in a country whose founding principles were explicitly meant to advance those freedoms, however imperfect the execution was in its infancy. I don't see any situation where you can have a statue of a person whose entire professional career was at least implicitly dedicated to such an institution on the courthouse lawn or the park in the center of town and excuse it by saying that you don't celebrate it too much.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Summary executions for prophylactic purposes aren't exactly going to endear one to the international community. I'm generally pro-Israel but if that happened I'd have to concede to my tankie friends that yep, they were right all along, Israel sucks. I suspect most politicians with the exception of some on the American right would agree with me, and Israel would lose whatever special status it has in the international community, if not become an outright pariah state. Next you'll have rocket attacks coming from the West Bank with Jordanian support, and the West won't be there to force them to Lebanon, or Tunis, or wherever.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
It doesn't matter what he does because he doesn't matter. I've personally heard of him before but I had no idea what he did nor what his political opinions were. The internet wasn't even much help because the guy isn't prominent enough to have a Wikipedia page, which is, I believe, the bare minimum to consider one relevant to the public discourse. Best I can tell he's a conservative writer with a Substack, who may be more popular than other conservative writers with a Substack but since it doesn't appear he ever wrote professionally he's nothing more than a blogger. The only mention of this incident I've seen in the media is from Huffpost, and they don't have comments so it's hard to even tell what kind of engagement the article got. Besides that no one cares, which leads me to believe that Hanania is the kind of guy who's a celebrity in the extremely-online world but virtually unknown in the real world. There will be no consequences because no one gives a shit.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
A lot of this is more Trump than transplants. Ten years ago Pittsburgh's wealthier suburbs were all Republican strongholds. Now Mt. Lebanon and Fox Chapel (old money) are as blue as anywhere and Upper Saint Clair (new money) is about 50/50. A decade ago this would have been unthinkable. Even wealthier places that still lean R aren't leaning as much as they used to; even exurbs like Peters and Cranberry saw a pretty big swing towards Democrats. The only places that are actually moving right are the poorer white areas where people have a bunch of crap in their yards and smack their kids in supermarket checkout lines. It's almost become a joke around here that if you see a dumpy, unkempt house in an otherwise nice area there's probably a Trump sign in front of it. It's sort of replaced having a dog tied up in the front yard.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
As an aside, the number of townhouse and condo developments I see going up in the suburbs near me suggests that the whole "missing middle housing" thing is a bit of a scam. The problem isn't that you can't build medium density in the suburbs, it's that these places are still going to be car dependent and have huge parking lots or include garages. Unless these urbanists are proposing to completely level the existing built environment to satisfy their aesthetic preferences, changing a few zoning regulations isn't going to have much of an impact.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Another interesting problem is that it seems completely unaware of basic facts that are verifiable on popular websites. I used to have a game I played where I'd ask who the backup third baseman was for the 1990 Pittsburgh Pirates and see how many incorrect answers I got. The most common answer was Steve Buchele, but he wasn't on the team until 1991. After correcting it I'd get an array of answers including other people who weren't on the team in 1990, people who were on the team but never played at third base, people who never played for the Pirates, and occasionally the trifecta, people who never played for the Pirates, were out of the league in 1990, and never played third base anywhere. When I'd try to prompt it toward the right answer by asking "What about Wally Backman?", it would respond by telling me that he never played for the Pirates. When I'd correct it by citing Baseball Reference, it would admit its error but also include unsolicited fake statistics about the number of games he started at third base. If it can't get basic facts such as this correct, even with prompting, it's pretty much useless for anything that requires reliable information. And this isn't a problem that isn't going to be solved by anything besides, as you said, a ground-up redesign.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Sort of both. I was in Trek last week and the in-store graphics had large photographs of bike trails in the PA/WC area accompanied by text describing them and very basic maps. They were obviously decorative but trying to inspire people to learn more. They also require ultra high-resolution photography in order to get the large photos, plus copyrighting for the trail descriptions, and accurate maps. And even then the decor is an interactive experience that isn't fully effective unless the customer gets close enough to read the text and look at the map. But it's impressive, and this kind of thing is pretty common at outdoors stores, as it gives them the vibe of a park visitor's center—you feel like you're already on the adventure you're (presumably) buying.
Of course, recreational equipment has it easy in this regard because the value of photos of Youghiogheny Gorge or even a guy riding a bike down a shady gravel road is immediately evident. But what if your company doesn't sell anything that could remotely be considered fun? What if you're in financial services, or insurance, or (god forbid) tech? Traditionally, you would use stock photos of people shaking hands and sitting at desks and the like, but these are boring and nobody pretends otherwise. They're also expensive. There are two kinds of graphics: Raster graphics and vector graphics. Raster graphics are what most people think of where the canvas is so many pixels by so many pixels and each pixel is a unique color and the higher the resolution the bigger the picture can be without it looking like crap. It's what's used for photographs and most video games. Vector graphics don't store the data in pixels but instructions. If I want to create a vector graphic of a red triangle then the file tells the computer to four lines of set lengths and fill it with a specified color, or even a gradient. The advantage here is twofold; the first advantage is that you can perform as many geometric transformations as you want on the image without loss of resolution. So if your rectangle needs to go on a billboard you just scale it up and the proportions hold. The second advantage is that these instructions take up a lot less data than storing individual pixels.
Vector art has always been the go-to for corporate logos and the like, but actual vector art had its heyday among designers in the '80s and early '90s. It allowed them to take advantage of computer technology at a time when storage limits and memory were low. It was also a new look, and pros paid a lot of money for graphics libraries they could use for their designs. Then computers got more powerful and, more importantly, more ubiquitous. By the mid-'90s, there were plenty of consumer-grade design programs that offered huge libraries and soon everyone was using clip art for office flyers, party invitations, greeting cards, and the like. It got the reputation as something that your aunt would use along with Comic Sans. Even consumers were tired of it; pros wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Computers were now powerful enough that desktop publishers could use photographs at acceptable quality, and vector graphics were largely forgotten outside of pro applications where they were necessary.
But that was 20 years ago, and it's been long enough that if clip art induces any kind of reaction, it's nostalgia, but most people have either forgotten about it, were clueless, or weren't even alive for its heyday. While it went out of fashion, it never experienced any real backlash; it just went away. So by the late 2010s it was primed for a comeback. Logos had flattened out several years earlier, and maybe it was time for graphics to do so as well. Plus, the advantages of vector art didn't go away. If you want to make a store display you can blow it up to wall size without needing to start with a special camera and a huge file size. It would make your website slimmer and more portable. And with all the characters green and purple you wouldn't have to deal with people bitching about how there aren't enough minorities or thinking you're woke because there were too many minorities. If you're a boring company, using whimsical clip art is a way to make yourself stand out from the Getty Image laden masses. Or at least until everyone does it, and by everyone I mean other boring people, because the Yough Gorge will always be more compelling than some flavor of the month design trend, even if it's more expensive at the outset, and soon enough everyone associates the new style with the same boring bullshit they associated with the old style, because, let's face it, your company is boring, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I raise my fees to cover the cost of the assistants. There's not even a competitive disadvantage to that since the laws apply to everyone.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
You're going to have to cite your sources if you want to make blanket statements about American announcers being terrible, especially when Hockey Night in Canada featured the grating Jim Hughson for so many years. The series from the book I was particularly irritated about was the Pens-Isles series from that year. For the Pens you had Mike Lange, possibly the greatest hockey play-by-play man of all time (though I'm admittedly biased), who had a flow that was simply unparalleled. For the Isles you had Jiggs McDonald, who isn't my personal favorite but who you can't argue against personally since he, um, did games for HNIC. And for the national broadcast, such as it existed at the time, you had Gary Thorne, who also had a flow the Canadian guys just can't seem to match and had plenty of his own iconic calls as well, especially on ABC in the early 2000s. The larger point is that nobody who actually cared about the Pens or the Isles was watching the HNIC broadcast, except possibly Ray Ferraro's parents. I want my sports books to capture the emotion of being an actual fan, not the disinterest of someone watching what is essentially an out of market broadcast.
As for Fox and the glowing pucks, I wasn't a fan of them either, but it wasn't because they thought Americans were incapable of keeping up with the game. When Fox started getting major league sports packages in the mid 90s they experimented with a number of broadcasting ideas, some of which fared better than others. They were also the first network that thought fans of any sport were apparently incapable of keeping track of what the score was; now it's unthinkable that this information wouldn't be displayed on screen, along with the time and time left in the penalty and other information we used to just have to guess at. In this respect the NFL is actually worse, since they keep adding more shit on the screen every year, starting with the first down line and going from there. Glow pucks were an early attempt at doing the same thing that wasn't as well-received. There was also NBC's idea to show a football game with just a stadium announcer that everyone hated, and Fox's disastrous decision to put Jimmy Johnson and Terry Bradshaw together as two color guys. The idea was to see what it would be like to casually watch a game with two guys who knew a lot about football, but it didn't work out. These days, though, you have stuff like the Manning brothers broadcast and the Ryan Whitney broadcast so I guess the idea was just too far ahead of its time.
Edmonton won't win a cup in the foreseeable future because they haven't figured out that you can't put your superstars on the same line. Especially when one of them is a center. There's a reason the Pens won three cups — when you have Sid on line 1 and Geno on line 2, it doesn't matter if you're feeding the puck to Chris Kunitz or Ruslan Fedotenko or fucking Max Talbot. But no, they load up their first line with superstars and as soon as you run into a team with a first defensive pairing that can shut them down in the playoffs you're in trouble. And even if you can't shut them down, they can only play 20 minutes a game. Then they've got Nugent-Hopkins on line 2 who's fine by himself but by God why do you put him on your first PP too? To intentionally cut the PP scoring in half? The rest of the team is scrubs and has-beens. Defense and goaltending are decent but not stellar. They might make the conference final, but overreliance on offensive firepower killed many a team. This is why the Penguins traded John Cullen in '91 and Mark Recchi in '92.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Really? The only people in the Trump Administration I can think of who were prosecuted were Steve Bannon, who briefly held a position that was created specially for him, Michael Flynn, and Mark Meadows. So two people in important positions he actually had to appoint. There were a few minor aides indicted in Georgia but nobody of any consequence. Kellyanne Conway was accused of Hatch Act violations but nothing ever came of it. The wave of Trump associate indictments is mostly people outside of government — personal lawyers, campaign advisors, Trump organization employees, etc. Other than those I mentioned above, I am unaware of any high-ranking Trump Administration officials who have been blackballed from polite society because of their associations with him. There are plenty of conservative think tanks and consulting firms out there who are willing to put people from any administration on the gravy train. It certainly beats working for a living.
Nah, as someone who has had heated arguments with people who are so adamant about the US adopting the metric system that they casually toss off metric units in casual speech as if they don't expect people to think they're insufferable dicks, the only calendar change I will support is a metric one.
The only SI unit of time is the second, so we'll start there. 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, 10 hours to the day. 10 days a week, 10 weeks a month,.10 months a year. Of course, we wouldn't use those names; we'd redefine the second in terms of the metric day, so these hours would be decidays, years kilodays, etc.
Obviously, days wouldn't reliably track to sunrise and sunset, let alone anything like moon phases or seasons, but people who cite this as a reason my system is impractical are missing the point — the metric system isn't about making units that have any relationship to our everyday lives, it's about making the units divisible by ten. This is the information age. We have accurate clocks that can track time to a miniscule degree based on the half-life of a cesium atom, why the hell are we concerned about astronomical shit? Are you some fucking 5th century farmer who can't read and needs to count moon phases so you'll know when to plant your crops? Hell, no; the time is whatever the hell your phone says it is. It's time we get this shit in step with the 21st century.
Also, the fact that you'd add an extra month and not call it Smarch is borderline criminal.
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