You can also get custom fitted earplugs from an audiologist. They are wonderful. Extremely comfortable and they don't press on your ear canal, so you don't have any pain or hear your heartbeat, etc.
Unfortunately, in the US, we already have a problem with "ghost cars". I see plenty of cars in California with no plates, fake temporary tags, plates with the retroreflective material stripped off, covers that block the view of the plate, etc.
So those loud motorbikes are just going to bend their plates out of sight of the cameras.
There needs to be some overhauls to fix the damage Disney et al. did to our copyright system. The Copyright Act of 1976 and later Copyright Term Extension Act did so much damage to the concept of public domain. Being able to own exclusive control over a work for up to 120 years is insane.
I think capping copyright at 20 years would do wonders.
After 20 years everyone's gotten paid and can move onto other projects.
I can never imagine this happening though. It's too profitable to keep milking the rare hit IP for decades. For example, Harry Potter has already made JK Rolling a billionaire. She'd be fine if the books went public domain.
So many works will be lost since they're no longer available legally. All that artistic effort, gone.
Of course you'd grandfather in older works. But it's a moot point, in most places money is more important than access to art. I can't imagine such a law ever being passed.
The tragedy here is so much will simply disappear. Original publisher doesn't want to do a re-issue, how will you access it in 30 years?
> Those laws were mostly made before perfect digital copies
There are a variety of arguments used to justify copyright, ranging from philosophical to economical, and I can't think of any of them whose validity or lack thereof depends on whether or not copies are perfect.
It's difficult to turn modern office buildings (where electric lighting was assumed, 1970's+) into apartments. The reason is that most of the floor area has no access to natural light, and the utilities are buried in the core of the building. That means that you can only have long skinny single bedrooms or massive penthouse floor plans.
Older office buildings make great conversions, since natural light was a design requirement.
That's more typical of the "Black Friday special". That TV cuts corners that don't make sense to cut, but the reputational damage that a super cheap low volume TV causes is minimal to none.
Disney only adapted a single Grimm tale, Snow White, in 1937.
Other Disney fairy tale moves were based on other sources like Charles Perrault (Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty). Grimm also have variants of these tales, but they are significantly different.
Well the Brothers Grimm themselves let politics ruin the good stories, e.g by removing sex and turning evil mothers into evil stepmothers.
It is probabaly unavoidable that a retelling of a folktale will reflect the biases of the storyteller. It is just that politics which align with ones own tend to be invisible. Like when having a black stormtrooper is considered political but a white isn’t.
Do me a favor. Go back and rewatch Dumbo (1941) and prepare a few thoughts regarding its treatment of hot-button issues like miscegenation (hint: what kind of elephant has big ears?). Then, comment again on Disney’s recent discovery of “politics.”
That is an absurd level of reading things into a work. Unless you have actual primary sources which say that's what they intended, I'm calling bullshit.
Look, the other elephants start out the stork delivery scene declaring they’re part of “a proud race” and end it gossiping about “what would Mr. Jumbo think?!?” and “Jumbo? More like dumbo…”
We also see what happens to certain black men in the world, during “Song of the Roustabouts” (“when other folks have gone to bed / we slave until we’re almost dead,” “boss man hounding / keep on pounding / ‘grab that rope you hairy ape’”)
Afterwards we see the cruel and arbitrary nature of those who mock the poor kid, contrasted to the universal experience of family (“Baby mine don’t you cry”). Eventually the kid ends up with a bunch of (black) crows, including one Mr. “Jim Crow,” who make fun of him, before his buddy from Brooklyn calls them out on how people make fun of them for being different too, and they feel real bad; after finding friendship there, he earns social acceptance for his athletic feats (flight) and later through participation in the armed forces (“Dum-bombers for victory!!” read the newspapers.)
You sayin’ that this isn’t about race at all, and the whole storyline is just a coinkydink? Ha! Tell me another one. Disney’s been at this stuff for longer than your parents have been alive.
For a good introduction to the problematic social and political content of many Disney films - Dumbo definitely included - I highly recommend Lindsay Ellis' video "Woke Disney" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU1ffHa47YY
Speaking of that, there ought to be a streaming service that uses bittorrent and has only old, public domain movies on it. Like popcorntime, but with only legal stuff on it. Internet archive just isn't the same.
US printing is not the same as everyone else printing. Almost all trade deals worldwide are done in USD. Everyone except the US must export goods and services (i.e. actually work) to acquire the dollars which will finance their imports; US can just print.
Goods and services that are traded internationally are priced in USD. Other currencies do not end up directly representing goods and services; they are relative to the USD. Therefore, the demand for dollars is always very high, and it will be as long as the dollar keeps the reserve currency status.
Goods and services traded internationally are priced in whatever the parties want.
Ultimately they want to exchange for the currencies they need to pay bills, wages, and taxes in.
"Reserve" currency has little to do with it - if anything it's the high volume of trade with USA that makes it worthwhile to keep reserves of USD, because the high volume of US trade means you get many chances to exchange USD for whatever currency you actually need.
You should read "the global minotaur" by yanis varoufakis. It explains exactly why this is the case. This is true only for the US and it is because other countries buy dollars in bulk to keep the dollar high because:
1) not keeping the dollar high will devalue their dollar reserves.
2) they need large reserves of dollars to be able to facilitate trade in dollar denominated resources like oil.
3) they buy us treasury bonds because this will raise the value of their dollars and because it ks historically a safe investment.
That's the key IMO. USA has a long history of being a safe country for investment. It has uninterrupted democracy and rule of law since it was founded. It hasn't had a war on it's territory since the Civil War. It has a lot of free land and natural resources.
It's just good fundamentals first - and then of course you need not to fuck up massively to ruin that, which USA has not.
> It hasn't had a war on it's territory since the Civil War.
American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865)
Black Hawk's War (1865–72)
Red Cloud's War (1866–68)
Comanche campaign (1867–75)
Modoc War (1872–73)
Red River War (1874–75)
Great Sioux War of 1876 (1876–77)
.... 10 more ....
Ghost Dance War (1890–91)
Crazy Snake Rebellion (1909)
New Mexico Navajo War (1913)
Bluff War (1914–15)
Colorado Paiute War (1915)
Posey War (1923)
Take it up with the US historians that call these wars.
Red Cloud's War consisted mostly of constant small-scale Indian raids and attacks on the soldiers and civilians at the three forts in the Powder River country, wearing down those garrisons.
The largest action of the war, the Fetterman Fight (with 81 men killed on the U.S. side), was the worst military defeat suffered by the U.S. on the Great Plains until the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Crow Indian reservation ten years later.
Maybe its all relative (i.e., versus what other central banks have done in response to the same shocks).
In any case the post-pandemic interest rate hikes are recent. There seems to be a much longer term (decades long) dollar strengthening pattern that is not really touched upon in the article.
They're somewhat unrelated, because while there's more dollars, the domestic demand for those dollars is also higher now, for lots of reasons. Inflation, the high amount of American debt (which must be paid in dollars), the looming threat of a recession, which entices Americans to save (and they'd prefer to save in dollars and not some other currency).
It says a lot more about the preferences of Americans that it does about any of the other countries.
> You wouldn't think that printing money leads to a stronger currency
Money isn't a commodity, and that's why the Monetarist view is so off.
Inflation is never caused by a decline in the value of money, but it can cause a decline in the value of money, just not in every conditions (and with central banks raising interest rates when there's inflation, in practice it has the opposite effect)
Also strange that this effect is to the point that the dollar gets stronger as the yen gets weaker, even though inflation in Japan has been weak and strong in the US. So the dollar's buying power weakened domestically even as it strengthened internationally.
The relative value of different currencies is not at all related to "how much is printed". Heck, even internally the actual value of money is unrelated to how much is printed.
Main drivers of exchange rates are international trade of all kinds and its requirement to use specific currencies in specific places (you can accept payment in JPY when your company is in USA, but you need to pay your taxes in USD!), and speculation.
Essentially for FOREX, the exchange rate is essentially determined by entities needing specific currency for something - for example to pay for purchases or services, pay wages, taxes, etc. - when you have money in different currency.
The rest is plain market - you put an offer like "I will buy 100k USD in exchange for 11m JPY", but others were willing to offer more, and thus the averaged (I know, simplification) exchange rate goes up.
But you might be able to catch a trade at lower price because someone might need JPY right now (or other forex-compatible asset you have) quicker than it could sell USD at higher prices, etc.
You can of course also purely speculate on the prices and make money from "nothing", pure financialization, pure capitalism, close to zero value being produced.
Printing money can be used to artificially change the exchange rate by offering "cheap" money for other currencies. The reason why you might want to do is simple - your currency being "weaker" tends to benefit exports (at the same time exports drive currency "stronger"), while stronger currency benefits imports (but imports drive currency "weaker")
And ungrounded US sockets could have worked in the 1910's: https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/NorthAm3.html
Definitely give the rest of PlugMuseum a look. There's tons of info there.
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