It took the Nazis two tries as well.

Not blatantly, but there are signs of it even in the first book; and as the books go on, you can see almost in real time her political views shift from criticizing the system to defending it as she started becoming wealthy and benefiting from the system.

I highly recommend watching Shaun’s 2 hour video on the subject, as it goes into great detail on the subject and makes for perfect podcast material.

Some highlights include:

• Obesity as a moral failing - want to make a character seem bad? Just make them fat!
• Masculine features as a negative trait for women (sound familiar?) - want to make a teenage girl bad (and ugly) but don’t want to make her fat? Just talk over and over about her “mannish hands” and sharp jawline.
• Token minority characters that are often stereotypes or border on racism - the black kid is named Shacklebolt, the Asian girl is named two single syllable last names (might as well have called her Ching Chong), the 12 year old Irish kid is obsessed with turning drinks into whiskey and blowing stuff up, etc.
• The defense of the slavery of house elves using the exact same arguments that slave owners used before the Civil War in the US mentioned by somebody else, with a bonus criticism of Hermione as a girl with blue hair and pronouns for questioning and trying to change the system.
• There are no good or bad actions, only good or bad people. It’s okay for the right people to use the torture spell, because they’re the “good guys.”
• And a resolution that basically resolves nothing. Harry doesn’t kill Voldemort, he kills himself due to a magic technicality, and Harry goes on to become a magic cop to ensure the flawed system that the early books criticized doesn’t change.

Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.

Then you’ve never interacted with the locals in these other places. Having grown up in a vacation town, I can tell you right now that the only difference here is that the people with water guns have hit their breaking points.

Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? There’s a small throwaway bit in there where the wife of the chief of police is asking a friend of hers when she gets to be an islander (because the family had recently moved to the island from New York), and her friend responds, “Never. If you weren’t born here, then you’re not an islander.” Having grown up near where that movie was made, that’s 100% accurate to the local sentiment. On that island, they call people who move there “wash ashores” because they feel that they washed up like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach. In my town, we called the rich people who would come up to vacation in their lavish summer homes “snowbirds” because they migrated at the same time as the birds and couldn’t handle the winter weather.

The most consistent thing I’ve found about tourist areas is the negative impact the industry has on the area for locals and the hatred locals feel towards the tourists.

Whether these people are acting rightly or wrongly, they’re trying to hit the government and businesses where it hurts most - their profits - because it’s the only way they’ll ever care about the local problems.

They didn’t say that it doesn’t create jobs. They said that it creates poor paying jobs. Which it does. All those restaurants and shops and guides are low wage jobs, and often, only seasonal jobs as well.

In the vacation town I grew up in, up to 50% of businesses were closed 8 months out of the year. In these kinds of areas, tourism isn’t a boost to the economy. It is the economy. It eats it up until there’s almost nothing left. Any industry that doesn’t serve the tourism is pushed out by the high profit margins of only being open long enough to service the seasonal tourism. I used to work at a fish market in that town that stayed open all year, and outside the tourist season, the boss reduced the hours to half of what they were during the tourist season. Because he couldn’t afford to keep the business running full-time. The store ran at a loss 8 months out of the year, and the busiest day of the tourist season largely kept the place open the rest of the year. It would’ve been more profitable for him to close down, but he stayed open because he didn’t want his local customers and employees to go somewhere else.

Most of the towns in that county are tourist towns, and that county has the highest rates of drug addiction in the state and huge homelessness problems. Because there’s very little to do most of the year since everything is closed, and combine the seasonal labor/low wage tourism industry with the housing stock being bought up by wealthy people for their vacation homes or Air BnBs while apartments prioritize short-term seasonal rentals because of how much more they can charge, and locals can’t afford to live in town anymore. There’s one town there that has a year-round population of 2,000 and can see up to 60,000 people there in the summer. And anybody I’ve ever talked to who has lived in a vacation town has cited the exact same issues consistently - high rates of poverty, homelessness, and drug use/addiction.

I think you were being downvoted because while you may be technically correct, that means little to the daily life of your average person.

The last time I saw data on wages (pre COVID, so sometime between 2015 and 2019), when adjusted for inflation, wages for the average worker had actually dropped about 5% since then. Add to that that prices have increased faster than inflation across the board, even before COVID, and people are losing money simply keeping afloat. The price of a taco at Taco Bell is now twice what it cost in the 90s when adjusted for inflation. College tuition is up something like 1,500% since the 70s (thanks, Reagan). Something like 60% of houses are considered unaffordable to the average American today, compared to 30% roughly 20 years ago.

All this means that purchasing power has dropped, but “purchasing power” and “earnings” means absolutely nothing to people. The number in their bank account dropping instead of going up matters. The fact that people can’t get a mortgage for a house even though the rent they currently pay is more expensive matters. The fact that people have to take on debt to afford essentials is what matters. To the average person, any of that is a clear sign that they’re losing money.

Interesting way of saying “my human rights aren’t up for debate every 4 years.”

Because of the American Puritannical values, which dictate what the credit companies and advertisers are willing to do business with and the cultural zeitgeist along with it.

The Puritans were some of the earliest British colonists in the US, and were either thrown out of England for attempting a coup to replace the king with a puppet to force their more extremist form of Christianity on the country, or left by their own choice because they felt that the Church of England was too liberal. They were basically a bunch of prudes who believed that the human body and sex were shameful and disgusting.

This has led to the dichotomy where advertisers want nothing to do with sex/nudity, except when it comes to implied sex in advertisements. Because sex is bad, but it also sells, which is good.

PG-13 and rated T for teen, respectively

Didn’t it also have something to do with a brand deal? Like the suit got extra funding for the movie by making a deal with Duracell to have their batteries in the movie or something.

Just wait until you learn about Alan Turing, the guy who made the Turing Machine (considered the first computer).

He committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide because the US government chemically castrated gay men like him - forced them to take drugs so that they couldn’t “get it up” to prevent them from committing “deviant behavior”.

And that wasn’t outside the norm 100 years ago for governments to do.

We don’t even need to build new cities. We just need to let our cities increase density like all cities did for hundreds of years before the 50s. More multifamily buildings, midrise apartments, and mixed use buildings would go a long way towards helping everybody.

Besides, much of that land is either already owned by somebody or empty for a reason. It would be a logistical nightmare for sure. You could send them to all the dying towns in the US, but I don’t think that would help either - apart from the locals being rightfully angry about large groups of new people coming in and eroding their local culture, those towns are dying for a reason that runs much deeper than just people moving away.

Considering that Nixon’s cabinet has openly talked about how they made it a federal offense so that they had justification to arrest the leaders of the war protesters (and the same thing with cocaine and the black community), I’d say it’s of a similar level but a different kind of evil.

Welcome to the hypocritical world of Puritan culture.

Some of the earliest British settlers in the US were so extremist that the Church of England kicked them out after they tried to assassinate the king and replace him with a puppet of their own to force their beliefs on the rest of the country.

It was partly these crazies that started the whole sex and bodies=bad and shameful thing in the US that advertisers still believe in today. And swearing is yet another of those weird things. But sex sells, so it’s okay to imply it as long as it’s selling a product and no other time.

I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.

The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.

I wanna say it became a thing from Twitch streamers when e sports was a big thing, but I’m by no means sure that that’s correct.

Because social media exploits the same mental addiction as gambling, “retail therapy,” and adrenaline and exercise addiction. You may as well tell a caffeine addict to just stop drinking coffee every morning and cut chocolate out of their diet.

This is something that people who have never experienced mental health issues like addiction struggle to grasp because they’ve never had the wiring in their brain used against them by companies like this. It takes immense willpower to fight against the physical makeup of your brain and not fall to the temptation of reinstalling social media for the endorphins.

But they are still readily available, despite the extra step. All it takes is one bored day to hit download in the app store and be doom scrolling again. It would be like if you didn’t have the supplies on you, but you drove by your dealer’s house every day on your commute (or had his number in your contacts). Every time you look at your phone, you know the option is right there and have to fight that temptation.

Another example would be having alcohol in a locked cabinet. Sure, it’s locked up, but if you have the key in your pocket, the people that it’s going to stop are the people with a strong will anyways.

The people who really need the help are just going to end up in a cycle of uninstalling and reinstalling Facebook over and over again because that option is right there in your hand every single day.

I think you’re right that they were Apple only for a few years at least.

This is what Tumblr did too after they banned porn. It couldn’t tell the difference between the Sahara Desert and boobs.

Affinity is also on Windows - at least Designer is. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now.