The most notorious example for me is Spanish cinema, it’s like they’re rapid-fire whispering, then suddenly they burst out screaming. No middle ground. And just what the hell are film sound editors and mixers in Spain smoking, to think that this is the proper way to mix a film’s audio?
What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?
I have to say it’s my virtual assistant I’ve made. It saves me a lot of time with making reminders and such alarms for meetings or interviews, music etc.
Electricity itself is pretty much essential and something I’d have a hard time living without.
Let me agree with you 100% here!
The taming of electromagnetism should be right up there with the taming of fire, agriculture, the alphabet and the printing press, as one of the most significant milestones in human history. And it is still an ongoing process.
There are too many French-speaking people in Africa, even as a second language, to ignore in this map. French being maybe an unofficial, but definitely shared language among different regions and nations across most of the continent. For example, how someone from Nigeria would communicate with someone from Cameroon.
The mental cancer predates capitalism, and has also brutally manifested itself in parallel in socialist nations.
Stalin, Mao, the Gang Of Four, Honecker, Hoxha, Kim Il-Sung, Ceauçescu, Pol Pot… the list is dismayingly long; so many tyrants as fucked up as anything one could come up with in capitalist nations, and even more. They tapped into the bloodlust of the oppressed, to build a new apparatus of oppression, their generals covered in a hundred solemn yet worthless medals, those bastards sure loved the status and pomp, displays and parades.
These nations build walls not so much to keep a potential enemy out, but to keep their own people in. That should tell you enough you need to know about how life was in those places.
Fun at the breakfast table, or at parties even!: “Did you know that fire is a fourth state of matter called plasma, and it’s actually the most common state of matter in the universe… plasma I mean, not fire itself… and the reason why flames burn is because…” Once he starts, he can’t stop.
There was a wide dirt road near my city in Mexico that appeared as “paved” for decades in printed maps, looks to me like some corrupt politicians in power back in the 70s skimmed more than just the cream off the top, all they managed was to scrape the wide road with no budget left over for the asphalt phase.
This road finally got paved around 15 years ago, since then the old map are now correct.
"‘If you get people to lower their shield, they’ll tell you it’s a big game they’re playing,’ he told me." "‘In economics..., if I’m trying to decide whether I’m going to write something favourable or unfavourable to bankers, well, if it’s favourable that might get me a dinner in Manhattan with movers and shakers,’ Pfleiderer said to me."
Nothing new here. Since the 50s and due to paranoid schizophrenic John Nash (A Beautiful Mind), economic models revolved around the premise of the game “Fuck You, Jack”, in which every individual supposedly acts in all-consuming, myopic self-interest in exclusion to the needs of other individuals or the community in general. Basically that all humans are utterly selfish bastards deep in their dark, sinful hearts.
And yet… Every experiment conducted on the subject pointed to how the premise of “Fuck You, Jack” was deeply flawed, to the point of being outright wrong.
But the math! It was so elegant! John Nash! So most economists still deliberately chose to adopt this bullshit model for their essays. They even gave the paranoid schizophrenic a goddamned Nobel Prize.