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The MCU was the height of films because it managed to wrangle more than half-a-century of comic book lore (much of it previously deemed unfilmable) into a coherent and compelling multi-film epic that was both entertaining and (lightly) philosphical and political. Through Endgame, it was an unprecedented undertaking involving the hard work of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of talented artists and technicians across the globe, marshalling untold resources over the span of a decade. And they actually pulled it off, producing a series of critical and commercial blockbusters that form (more or less) a single, sprawling narrative. It's unlikely we'll ever see anything like it again in our lifetimes.

The day when the project would lose its luster was always coming - as anyone who knows the history of Hollywood westerns and action flicks and blaxploitation could tell you - and you may gloat now that it's arrived. However, for a shining moment, literally billions of people had something special to share, and no amount of elitist posturing can take away from it.

(Citizen Kane's cool, too, of course. Gave us that clap meme and a baller Simpson's episode.)

I dunno. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once was widely praised, and I saw it twice in theaters; and while I can remember a few key moments, I couldn't tell you the full plot from beginning to end. I still feel like I took something away from the experience of watching it (particularly the second time, with my mother). I'm beginning to think that there is an overemphasis on the breaking-down, atomizing, and overanalysis of fictional works. There's a place for that, of course, and such endeavors can bring you great insight. But maybe a work is an experience unto itself. You can take away something useful and meaningful from just being there and engaging with it as a viewer and reader as it streams through your sensory experience, and sitting with the emotions it brings afterwards. If that aspect of it didn't matter - wasn't of principal importance, even - wouldn't you be better off just saving time by reading Cliff's Notes/watching CinemaSins/a Youtube Essay, where the Important Parts are chopped up and fed to you in a most palatable manner?

Myself and the other poster are asking you politely to stow your ego and self-interested focus, and to think about why sweeping, nationwide changes in policy might have come about. I don't deny that you've experienced those issues firsthand; I'm saying it doesn't matter.

Put yourself in the time period: babes born after MLK was assasinated aren't even in elementary school yet, and we're at the height of white flight and the Marlboro Man and asbestos-infused flooring. You can't seriously hold that the shift to SFH-only zoning was predicated on smoking and mold concerns, can you?

If you honestly believe that such concerns, wholly divorced from racial and class politics, were the impetus for this shift, you're being irrational, and selfish. I apologize, because I know saying so can be considered rude, but it is the crux of our disagreement: it's not about you. Your personal concerns do not, by themselves, define the scope of a national problem.

You say that as if the prospect of such disturbances weren't used as a pretext for discrimination - because, of course, "those people" are loud/smoke/have rotties and pitbulls/don't take care of the property they're renting. /s The characterization also ignores that the reason those things (lax maintenance, smoking indoors as sequela of tobacco company propaganda/anti-marijuana laws, etc.) do occasionally happen are closely intertwined with social disregard for marginalized groups. In other words, treatment of a symptom, not the cause.

GP's point is that it's difficult to solve the issue without acknowledging that we made a stupid policy decision predicated mostly on class and racial hysteria. If we recognize those decisions for what they are and stop making them, maybe we can get somewhere. It's quite unlikely that your local zoning board forbade duplexes and low-rises 50 years ago because they were concerned about mold.

I dunno. Thanks to big corpo shenanigans (and, er, racism?) a lot of people have turned away from big brands (or, at least obviously brand-y brands) towards "trusted individuals" (though you might classify them as brands themselves). Who goes to PCMag anymore? It's all LTT and Marques Brownlee and any number of small creators. Or, the people on the right who abandoned broadcast and even cable news and get everything they "know" from Twitter randos. Even on this site, asks for a Google Search alternative are not rare, and you'll get about a dozen different answers each time, each with a fraction of the market share of the big guy (but growing).

I've never noticed those issues, and your link seems to say otherwise. But your post does read like the whinging of plumbers that I mentioned. You wouldn't happen to be, or be affiliated with, one, would you?

https://www.12ft.io/https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff-waterle...

I mean... The very existence of wealthy cities is a sort of proof. Remember that for America to temporarily be one of the few examples where dense cities were less wealthy than spread-out suburbs and exurbs, we had to combine massive subsidies and financing with good old-fashioned racism.

What I don't agree with from GP is the idea of real increases in housing costs for those already in cities. The rising tide lifts most boats, if density isn't being unduly suppressed. So, density increases housing value but also the wealth of city-dwellers, relative to everyone else. Supply keeps up with demand, except where we won't let it.

>the increase in demand comes from having, presumable, more amenities

Not necessarily. It can also come from the increased opportunity for exposure to people and culture.

Devil's advocate: induced demand. Density increases interactions which are the economic point of cities, and why cities are wealthier than suburbs/rural areas (when suburbs/rural areas aren't juiced by subsidies and loans). Wealthier cities attract migration, migration increases demand for units.

That said, my personal belief is that prices are completely decoupled from demand and are more reflective of a desperation to keep them high for... other reasons.

I've never hard that they were. Only that they had the lobbying muscle to mostly get their way.

It's also short-sighted; present-thinking to a fault (unfortunately, all-too-common). As an example: many of the Gilded Age mansions that helped revitalize Newport, RI tourism (and, essentially, the local economy as a whole, after the Navy mostly left) were basically abandoned for many years. Nobody cared about preserving the decadent detritus of robber barons (because, as you said, people were more concerned with common economic troubles). Attitudes change and lines go up; the jazz fest brought deep pockets and people remembered you could summer somewhere other than the Hamptons. On the other side of the coin, before Enes Yilmazer and after LOTRAF, they served as a publicly-accessible view into filthy rich-itude. Maybe we head towards another depression at some point, and people decide preserving these iconic relics isn't worth it anymore. But that's not an absolute state, just a product of shifting dynamics which we can't really scope out fully without some distance.

Reminds me of the hissy fit plumbers made over no-flush urinals.

Nope. Had to take one for BB, CVS, T-Mobile, as late as 2022.

Twitter was useful when you didn't know the source. Keyword searches brought you everyone talking about a topic, and trending showed you topics people were talking about (and, by extension, the people talking about them). Not everything that might be significant to you is necessarily going to be discussed within your close networks or covered adequately by media-of-record.

If CNN has decided not to cover the protest happening outside your downtown office and you don't want to go up to a rowdy crowd to figure out what's going on, Twitter would (have) be(en) the place to drum up intel (with which to decide if you need to go home early that day or not).

Trivial, but salient: sale drops for things like electronics or tickets. The only reason I got Pax East passes in 2014 is because I got a Twitter alert. They were gone 10 minutes later. An email alert showed up a half-hour later. I'm sure people have had similar experiences with more significant events.

People are working through their grief, knowing that a utility that is essentially the modern postal service was sold to someone who is essentially the modern Hearst.

If this works as I expect it to, it'll be something I've been hoping to see for a long time. Thank your for sharing it with us!

They're servicing loads of cheap debt, they don't have the capital.

Stock issue dilutes ownership and lowers share price. Why would people paid in stock do that when they can just offload labor? Also, they'd be competing with market makers, winkwinknudgenudge.

>Implying gunbarrel consolidation isn't the plan.

How else do you prop up the S&P 500?

The board and its interests will make more money with a bankrupt and disappeared Macy's.

There need to be investigations into corruption and conflicts of interest wrt American corporate boards.

Oh, that's good to know, though I'd love to see someone other than Card take a swing at it.

>What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one?

You got it!

In my most Hotep-y daydreams, I've sometimes wondered if this is the timeline where a group of scrappy, persecuted white dudes traveled back in time to make sure that Western civilization would become the primary world power (instead of, like, an expansionist ancient China or Egypt or Persia).

(inb4 GGS rec)

Worked in an appliance warehouse. We had two types of fridges coming back as carry-outs for new purchases: ancient models that were probably as old as I was, and models from a few years before the pickup date. Very little middle ground.

Also, without being an engineer or technician, it did always seem to me that fridges were like cars in that you had "luxury" models that were standard frames with fancy (often less-than-useful) features, and then actual luxury with brand names most people had never heard of, which had normal features implemented to a high standard and with excellent support.

Dead middle-of-the-band for US household income, in Mississippi (particularly historically) makes you the scion of a posh suburb indeed. Note that a common characteristic of people of unusual means relative to their locality is that they insist that they're average; in-and-of-itself, it's not convincing.

I think my point still stands, regardless. No one has yet explained how they know that consultants make up the bulk of supercommuters.

When I was briefly homeless and living out of my car, I didn't have any trouble parking at a highway rest stop for the night (where all the truckers did the same thing).

Well, we've established that HN posters consider their experience with supercommuting consultants to be the norm. However, knowing that HN posters are also likely to name some multiple of the median income as "middle class" because of their experience living lives of relative privilege in HCOL cities, I'm inclined to suspect that your dad and all his coworkers and all the people you know are less representative of the average supercommuter than, say, your last example. Because my understanding is that the typical person with 2hr+ commutes is someone who is forced to take inefficient public transit, or who has to live far from their jobs in HCOL cities.

Thank your for your perspective; I am now asking you to be intellectually honest in questioning if it's correct.

Is it typical? How do you know?

I'm saying that I'm not convinced that consultants are appropriately representative of supercommuting as a practice.

West Virginia is an odd case with the same chewy nougat center as racism: the exploitation of labor and resources, and the extreme punishment of anyone who fights back, or who even simply truth-tells (hence GP being flagged), up to and including multi-generational blood libel becoming ingrained in the culture, enabling all kinds of long-lived atrocities.

As for GP, one might expect his case to be bolstered if you had examples of his contention. And, well, gentrification exists. Should probably be unflagged and discussed civilly.

Stop all the superdownloadin'.