Yes, absolutely they should have rights.
In some countries (like France, iirc), chimps are recognized as having civil rights. They don’t have identical rights to humans of course. They don’t have the same rights as a human, but they are recognized as having rights as individuals.
Although the US hasn’t recognized that, yet, it has effectively banned chimpanzee research. You basically cannot get funded for chimpanzee research unless you a) demonstrate they are necessary for the research and b) you pass a review board similar to a human subjects review board who are charged with maintaining ethical research standards. I don’t do primate research, so I’m not sure of all of the details, but with human subjects boards you have to show that not only does your research. avoid harming humans, the subjects themselves must benefit from your work, if it is health related. When the new rules were passed, most research chimps were retired to preserves
So if there was a l other animal with fully human intelligence, there’s legal precedent to recognize that they have inherent dignity and rights.
I had a friend who was very self-conscious about her nipples. She used to wear band-aids over them whenever she was wearing a tee shirt or something that might let them show through or even just poke out a bit.
You can get them in various sizes, and as far as I know they stay on pretty much all day. If you have chest hair, maybe look for something a bit less aggressive when it comes to removing them.
Unless you’re into that.
You can’t trademark a letter and you can’t copyright a font - I believe the courts have ruled so due to first amendment concerns.
I think you can, however, trademark a logo that consists of a letter. I’m thinking specifically of the McDonald’s M logo. I might be wrong, but I have seen Coming to America multiple times.
It was 1979. The Bakshi Lord of the Rings rotoscope movie had come out, and I was in love with it. I had already read LotR a few times and, as terrible as it might look in hindsight, it was fantastic for very young me. It was part of a small collection of action figures released in support of the movie. I probably should have wanted Gandalf based on the character, but he made for a pretty crappy action figure.
It was literally the only thing I wanted that year. Honestly, I’m not sure I wanted anything quite so badly before or since. Christmas morning came and went and although I got any number of presents I’ve since forgotten, I didn’t get the ringwraith.
My parents pulled a Christmas Story on me more than a decade before that movie came out. I was doing the complete Ralph thing where I was trying not very hard to hide my disappointment. Then they sprang on me, and the day absolutely transformed.
Not only did the Nazgûl wade through Star Wars action figures like a farmer in a field of wheat, but I convinced my friend that it was a limited edition figure of the yet-to-be-seen Emperor from Return of the Jedi, which would not come out for a few more years.
TWTR had about 765M shares outstanding. I didn’t follow them throughout the entire run up to the Muskening, but it looked like they were averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/share, meaning their valuation would be about $25-30B. I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that they went into the 60s and 70s for an extended period in 2021 because I’m not sure what was driving that apart from cheap money and higher online activity during covid.
I still think he overpaid by a factor of about 1.5.
He’s the largest shareholder and it’s a private company, which is why we depend on companies holding his debt for guesstimates about the valuation. There’s no market forces that are punishing him for bad decisions, other than him not being able to service his/twitter’s debt based on twitter’s dwindling income.
Jack Dorsey and his Saudi partners agreed to hold onto their shares (ie, not force Musk to buy them) and together they held about $3.5B out of the $44B valuation when it went private. Dorsey just started offering some super gentle criticism while saying it’s a very hard job.
I don’t know if they’re under NDAs, or if they’re afraid of crashing their investments further by criticizing him in public, or if they just don’t care because what’s a few billion between friends. Maybe they’re sending him angry texts.
I’m just hoping that someone comes out with a tell-all that ends up being a movie called The Anti-Social Network.
I don’t think twitter has $30B in valuation left. Musk bought it for $44B (which was beyond its value at the time, but okay). Since his takeover, it’s lost between 50-60% of its value. That was as of several months ago, so I have to imagine it’s even less now.
With the loss of brand equity, they might be sliding towards the single digit billions very quickly.
He’s just setting money on fire at this point.
I’m choosing to ignore the idea of sticking to categories as I think it makes it more limiting than it needs to be, and because some of the best films cross or defy genres.
I’m also going to say in passing that these questions inevitably get dominated by recent films. Whenever someone asks for a list of the greatest movies or albums of all time, we tend to respond with the ones we remember from our teenage years. It’s interesting as a social question, but there’s a definite recency bias that’s driven both by our memories and by the fact that tastes change.
With that all said, I think that the Jaws poster is probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. It is simple and immediate. There is no way to see it and not get the point of the movie.
Pulp Fiction and The Graduate were both great with their dirty book cover style aesthetic. Sort of similarly, Star Wars reproduced a very iconic book cover/movie poster format but executed it brilliantly.
Full Metal Jacket with the “born to kill”/peace sign helmet is more toned down, but captures the film very well.
Fear and Loathing also had a brilliant poster - that one where it looks like an acid trip.
You cannot define medical terms to suit your need to feel like you are not irrationally prejudiced. Acrophobia, which I suffer from, is an irrational fear. As an evolutionary biologist, I can explain in a great level of detail how acrophobia can emerge in an evolutionary context and how it can have a physiological as well as a conditioned component. That doesn’t mean that it’s not irrational for me to feel fear while standing at the edge of a perfectly safe bridge.
Feeling uncomfortable around trans persons is transphobic, full stop. Feeling uncomfortable around black people is racist, full stop. If people are acting in a threatening manner - physically or verbally abusing people around them, for example - then it’s perfectly rational to feel uncomfortable because it is rational to fear for your own safety. If you’re uncomfortable because Bob the Drag Queen is wearing a dress and kissing a man, though, that’s on you.
Homophilia - the tendency for birds of a feather to flock together - is literally one of my major research areas and I have literally taught entire courses on it, where we study the origins and causes of the tendencies, how the base attribute is confounded by contagion of ideas between people, and why it is toxic and destructive in modern contexts.
It is irrational. Just because you believe that various forms of xenophobia (writ large) are “human nature” does not make them rational. Phobias are irrational (that is ‘without reason’) by definition, and attempting to redefine a phobia from a clinical diagnosis to a justification based on your perception that people are inherently prejudiced is itself irrational.
Racists use exactly the same arguments. Racists argue for ethnostates on the basis of segregation being natural. They globalize their experiences and prejudices as universal rather than swing them as maladaptive opinions fueled by a cultivated hatred and distrust.
People are more than welcome to participate in LGBT communities, but they should recognize that those people are, in fact, people. They should recognize that they may come across like that scene in Blast from the Past where Brendan Fraser says “Bless my stars, a negro!” if they’re going to be like that, but there’s a world of difference between an ignorant but well meaning person and someone who both has embraced and propounds phobic talking points.
Substitute a race-based term for trans in your statement - that “normal” people don’t feel comfortable around black people because they just want to avoid them - but it’s not racism.
You might not feel comfortable around terms that have a specific meaning - like transphobia - but you should at least recognize that you’re redefining them to make yourself feel okay about them. What you’re describing is, in fact, transphobia. It is exactly analogous to feeling uncomfortable around black people but not wanting to label it racism.
Substitute a race-based term for trans in your statement - that “normal” people don’t feel comfortable around black people because they just want to avoid them - but it’s not racism.
You might not feel comfortable around terms that have a specific meaning - like transphobia - but you should at least recognize that you’re redefining them to make yourself feel okay about them. What you’re describing is, in fact, transphobia. It is exactly analogous to feeling uncomfortable around black people but not wanting to label it racism.
Hello Tomorrow was aesthetically brilliant in addition to being well constructed social criticism. It sucks that it was cancelled. I really love the mid-century futurism look and mid-century modernism in general.
I’m looking forward to Asteroid City.
No.
Transphobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny, and other hate-driven viewpoints do not thrive in darkness and get disinfected by sunlight. They thrive by being promoted and normalized when people have the opportunity to be hateful in public.
These are not intellectually assumed positions. They’re not something that can be defeated by debate. The publishing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not contribute to the elimination of anti-semitism - it fosters it. It’s not like someone publishes Protocols and Jews cry out “At last we can debate whether or not we’re engaged in a plot to destroy civilization!” Trust me on that one.
It wasn’t archive. It was a site that was specifically storing reddit threads in a queryable manner. Unfortunately, I didn’t explore the particular site enough. Ideally, I’d like to be able to pull an arbitrary month’s worth of /r/politics, and ideally only select posts with more than 30 replies or some upvote/downvote threshold.
As an aside, was it confirmed that they were restoring content? When I was doing it, I was using a python script that just grabbed all posts and comments for a given user name, overwrote the data with some ipsum text, and then deleted it. Sometimes, even when I’d finally get the post count down to zero, I’d find I still had some posts the following day.
It turned out that the api wasn’t showing posts from subreddits that had gone dark. So if a sub you posted in was dark when you were running your script, it wouldn’t be able to see/delete those posts until the sub opened back up. It made it look like there was something sketchy going on, but at least in my case it was just two types of protests clashing.
I played the hell out of Subnautica a few years ago. I loved it, and it’s one of the few recent games I played up until the end, even though I spent 90% of my time just exploring and not worrying too much about the main quest.
That said, back then the VR experience for the game was considered pretty bad - like a pasted-on layer that was largely ignored by the devs. If that has changed, I might think about getting a headset.
It’s generally not taught by default in US schools, but some schools offer it as an elective and/or as a competitive sport. Maintaining a swimming pool is an expense that many schools, especially in poorer districts, cannot afford. Outside of schools, there are sometimes community swim classes at places like the YMCA, but those require the parents to be actively involved (like with many extracurricular activities) and usually are an additional expense.
Physical education is usually a mandatory part of US schools through high school (where students graduate at around age 18), and schools often offer students a selection of sports for PE - I did fencing one year and wrestling, gymnastics, and archery other years - but swimming requires more infrastructure than a basketball court and some padded mats.