Well, I’m a huge fan of Challengers. And she was a great Mary Jane in the Tom Holland Spidermovies.

Sometimes racism is just a collection of unfortunate priors.

More often, it’s just cultural alienation supercharged with an advertising budget.

In the end, having your own view - even if it’s unpopular or outright wrong - is better than letting your understanding be shaped by someone else’s marketing budget.

It’s a three hour movie. If you need a heuristic to justify why you saw it (or skipped it) do what is necessary.

especially Zendaya

She’s a stellar actress and a smokeshow.

I’m more annoyed that they included Matt Damon in the leading role. That guy’s been washed for years.

I don’t care about the historical accuracy or the racial makeup

I do think it’s very funny to be mad about Elliot Page for being transgender when I’d be more upset that he’s got zero tan in a movie about rugged sea faring people just north of Egypt.

Like so much Sword and Sandal that Hollywood produces, it’s way too white. Maybe make more movies that take place in the Baltics if you want to use this many Brits, Franks, and Nords.

That’s all true. But I’m still firmly of the belief that the correct form of Podcast is some combination of British trans woman, Brooklyn journalism washout, and Philadelphia engineer talking about classic movies, election news, and engineering disasters.

Podcasts are a blight on humanity

They’re just radio shows you don’t need a broadcast station to distribute.

Some are definitely better than others

I don’t relish listening to people talk ad nauseum about inane shit.

Shrug

Nobody is forcing you to

Congratulations, you’ve made Audible weird.

Well, it exists to smooth over friction between staff in order to maximize profits.

Sometimes that means telling a middle-manager to stfu. Sometimes it means pulling up a bunch of bullshit to justify a firing “with cause”. Sometimes it just means putting down a notice of events in a registry that nobody will ever read, on the off chance it needs to be recalled in an employment lawsuit.

I’m sorry, I just read the first part and got excited about pizza.

I mean, individually it’s just a poor investment choice. But individuals trying to live in their investment properties isn’t really the problem.

The modern housing supply crisis is definitely egged on by a handful of mega-funds that can snap up houses en mass at prices which are already inflated. I’m living next to an aspiring AirBnB landlord’s newest acquisition as I speak. Very unlikely she’s coming out ahead after a year of renting relative to just holding NVIDIA or Tesla. She’s definitely not getting any extra houses under her belt at this rate.

But I might suggest that the “supply crisis” is much more an “unemployment crisis”, as the gross supply of housing isn’t in shortage. It’s the location of the housing, relative to the centers of new commerce.

Case in point, Elon Musk is dumping billions of dollars into Bastrop, to rapidly develop an area that’s been overgrazed farmland for centuries. Then, when neighborhoods in Cincinnati and Detroit and even San Antonio have a relative glut of saleable real estate. The… ethnic composition of Bastrop has provided a level of appeal. But so has the pliability of the local government, which has historically been run by libertarian dipshits who spend all their time complaining about the neighboring Austin, TX college kids and granola crunching hippies while insisting deregulation and tax cuts are the only viable pathways to growth.

Now Musk has delivered on the growth, but he’s cut out all the locals from its benefit. He’s standing up his own little Network State of employee-exclusive bars, storefronts, and housing stocks, while driving long-time residents out with the sudden flood of noise and traffic.

Big investors and employers are engaged in all sorts of regulatory arbitrage and capital flight, often for very shortsighted ego-stroking gains, in order to secure an ideological end goal rather than a profitable business model. The end result is massive shiny new suburban development sometimes directly neighboring areas blighted by economic neglect. People complaining about skyrocketing housing costs who live spitting distance from some of the cheapest real estate available, entirely because of modern day redlining and private segregation.

What @gaiussabinus said.

But the math of it is two-fold. Firstly - unless you’re deeply in the know - you’re always going to do better putting money into an ETF than real estate. Especially true since COVID, when the market’s been doing 20-30% annually. Secondly - the real financial benefit of home ownership is the locked-in mortgage rate, with some knock-on benefits when you make capital improvements that pay off against utilities or transportation costs long term.

The cost of flipping a home is enormous - easily 3-6% of the house’s sell-value - so the people who benefit the most from turnover tend to be the real estate agents not the homeowners. And the risk that you’ve bought into a flat or deflating mortgage market far outweighs the anticipated returns from short term housing flips (unless, again, you’re already a real estate agent who can eat the administrative cost of title transfers).

As a general rule, you want to buy a house with a mortgage note you can afford, keep it in good repair to minimize utilities, and then simply enjoy the fact that you don’t have a landlord threatening to raise your rents every year. Minimizing future outlays, not speculating on the future value, makes owning a home an attractive financial decision.

Stop treating your home like an investment. Can only end badly

The crime is failing to pay a landlord to host the image.

neurotypical “sense of justice”

Are we applying biological essentialism to justice?

That’s not really a conversation.

🙄

What is moral for you, what is you ethos based on, if not on a feeling of wrong and right?

There is a difference between having a sense of justice and wanting a feeling of vengance.

You are, people will even listen if you’re not only always being loudly.

When you’re in a loud room, you must shout to be heard. And if you’re gagged in a loud room, nobody is hearing you regardless of your speaking savvy.

You don’t have to agree on anyone to have your own opinions and defend it.

That’s very different than taking sadistic delight at their suffering.

Dude you’re allowed to speak up for yourself and others, just like everyone else.

Setting aside the fact that you’re generally not allowed, either by social convention or strict censorship policies? Just being loudly in opposition isn’t the same as being justice-minded.

questioning the concept of a sense of justice

I’ve seen everyone from Malala Yousafzai to Alex Jones express a “sense of justice”. The problem of “sensing” justice is that our senses routinely deceive us.

you think all other people on the internet you see are friends?

What?

Is it Justice or Just Us?

Easy to recognize that you’re vulnerable, disenfranchised, and overworked/underpaid. Easy to recognize how the system fucks you over specifically or structurally disadvantages you as a member of a demographic or class cohort. Comparatively hard to deal with someone on the other side of the tracks, with radically different experiences and beliefs, and build a sense of collective justice between you.

Idk how many young people come out with a holistic sense of injustice. I see a lot of “if you were just doing things more like me, you’d have a reason to complain” but comparatively little “I’m not here to question your circumstances, I’m just here for the solidarity for the cause”.

The /c/LeopardsAteMyFace channel is choke full of people who get off on the schadenfreude of the modern moment. Meanwhile, on the chud sites, you see plenty of folks who express a personal sense of injustice jerking it with abandon to military snuff films and economic sob stories.

If that’s your sense of Justice, no wonder you’re going insane.

Throw out the cheating angle

At this point, it’s less “cheating” and more “being trafficked by your boyfriend”