Pink Bow
You could grip it between the center hole and outside edge. A little heavy, but wasn’t too bad. It was basically like an oversized CD or DVD player. One advantage of the large disc size is that they had basically record-sized sleeves, so you could get some great art, especially if it required two discs and folded open. You could hear the player spin up the disc which sounded almost dangerous sometimes (kinda exciting!). At the end of the first side, the laser would physically move to “flip” to the other side of the disc.
LD had the best available versions of Star Wars until the DVD bonus discs, and excellent CD quality audio. Of course now there is 4K77 (etc). After DVD came out you could pick up LD players and discs for cheap on eBay. I had a decent collection, but it was all eventually replaced with DVD and then Blu-ray.
Totally agree. I went to Reddit thinking I could have deep conversations, and realized that actually it was just as shallow as Twitter. I suppose it’s nice if a person wants to throw out controversial opinions and receive validation (in upvotes) from the echo chamber. I’ve had that happen by accident, and it felt nice, for a minute, until I realized it was totally hollow, and the replies to my comment that were being downvoted were probably the ones I should have been paying attention to, because they could broaden my narrow thinking.
Also, I learned early on that I had to be careful that I didn’t offend people that weren’t even present, but who could have been considered part of the group. I once asked a mail carrier sub for help because my carrier kept delivering my mail when I was on vacation, despite placing a mail hold. However, this was a mistake, because they didn’t take it as a request for help, but as a veiled criticism that somehow implied that some of their number were not perfect at their jobs. They were extremely offended, and even claimed it was my fault. It wasn’t, but explaining what I did just brought more downvotes, because now I was the enemy. Whether I tried to defend myself or diffuse the situation, it just provided more comments for them to downvote, more fuel to the fire. And the downvotes and angry comments kept coming in, some even months later. They were so focused on hating me that they never once tried to actually help. After that, I realized if I made an unpopular comment or post I needed to delete it, otherwise it would just continue to drain karma or invite angry comments. Of course that means I basically helped reinforce their echo chamber.
Traditional linear forums might still be the best way to have a focused conversation about something.
I fundamentally question the claim that wealth inequality is bad in and of itself. It doesn’t really harm me that there exist individuals with significantly higher standards of living, or that there exist individuals more capable of effecting large-scale change than me.
I agree with you in the broader context. Individually, it shouldn’t matter how much money a specific other person has. And I’m not a big fan of wealth redistribution (I tend to think of it as theft). However, when there is a limited resource that everyone needs, it can cause problems for those with less money.
For example, many workers in Silicon Valley make good money, and they need housing, of which there is a shortage (the reasons for the shortage are important, as well as attempted fixes, etc, but I’ll skip over those so I don’t descend too much into politics). So the price of housing goes up due to limited supply and high demand. And of course sellers want to maximize their sales or rent price, so they charge what the market can bear. Because people there have money, they can pay a lot and so the price goes up. This is fine if everyone is making around the same amount of money. However, those who do not have well paying jobs (income inequality) cannot easily afford housing and are priced out of the market. So the inequality means they can’t easily afford housing. And that’s just income inequality.
One could certainly argue that the income inequality isn’t the only cause, rather the artificially limited housing supply. But, regardless of the cause of the housing crisis there, or potential solutions, I think it provides an example of how inequality can have a negative effect on someone.
EDIT: cleaned up some terminology.
Not only that, but many therapists will not take pedophile clients due to lack of training, some might report them to police because they assume every pedophile is a child molester, and so they report them in order to protect themselves in the face of mandatory reporting laws, and others might take them, but only have training dealing with offending pedophiles. This makes it difficult and risky for a nonoffending pedophile to get a therapist, and even if they do, the therapist may not actually be able to help them. So, ironically, the current pedophile panic could actually be increasing risk to children.
Only thing they missed is that the helpful answer should have been 2 or 3 years later.
Voyager is the best Star Trek series.