BF2S Forums DAST Chat

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Who buying a 3 million dollar classic is going to care about how much it's going to be to fuel it? I mean, you're the one who brought it up as one of the cons. That's your burden to explain.

For the third time, its not the cost of the fuel, its the image it presents and the history it represents.

Golliwog dolls are cute, people don't collect them or have them on display these days.
I imagine the value has dropped quite a bit.


I like to think 'muscle' cars will go the same way, they're mostly shit-heaps after all.
Then again no-one seems willing to address their own consumption so we'll see.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-12-22 18:41:36)

It may come to that, who knows?
In the future it will be seen as very strange that people were willing to burn fossil fuels grossly profligately only to whizz round and around in circles.
Probably the same for personal ownership of transport vehicles.
Maybe parents won't want their children learning about it.

And for the whatevereth time, I didn't say the cost of gas was the issue.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-12-22 19:46:56)

A Kansas officer claimed McDonald's employees wrote a derogatory term on his cup. He made it up, the police chief says
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/30/us/m … index.html

The police chief said the department's investigation concluded that the incident was "meant to be a joke."

He did not release the officer's name, saying the matter was now "a personnel issue." He said the officer was a resident of Junction City and had been with the department for about two months. He is not facing any criminal charges at this time, Hornaday said.

Why wouldn't trying to get someone fired from their job not result in more severe consequences. If it weren't found out, I'm sure someone flipping burgers could afford to go without a few paychecks while they search for another job with THAT in their references.

I guess police get away with far worse. Shoot a guy five times, get facts withheld from the jury, get rehired for a short period of time before retiring on a PTSD pension.

read some of the testimony and spare us the ‘they knew what they were getting into’ rhetoric. he seems genuinely predatory and genuinely manipulative. add that to the immense influence and bullying/harassment and you have a very, very bad situation.

casting couch it was not. the sopranos actor who testified yesterday shared a car ride back with him from a larger event, after he casually offered. she went up from the lobby to her room. evening over. goodbyes had. 20 minutes later a knock at the door and a man 3x her size and strength is there, who barges into her room and immediately begins taking off his clothes.

the guy is a rapist and you should really grow up.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-24 00:13:43)

anyway.

a few years ago, i briefly dated a chinese girl whose dad is pretty high up in the communist party in hangzhou.

she was a little odd, but i put it down to cultural differences, etc. she'd been sent to a chef's selection of schools in america, design and fashion schools mostly, and had ended up in london. i think she had an arranged foster/host family for most of her foreign experience. despite years abroad, and basically being schooled for most her life in the States, she was ALWAYS fiercely patriotic. like i quickly ended up not talking to her about china at all, despite naturally being very curious, because the conversation would just be brickwalled or descend into the usual tit-for-tat curt exchanges. her views on china and the west were very strong and that was that.

typical stuff all round, in short, and she has been well on her way to settling down into an 'establishment' life in china, bit by bit, ever since. she hardly ever signs into instagram or WhatsApp anymore because i guess VPN and effort and awkward associations blabla.

anywaysss, she just signed in for the first time in months to write to me the following:

aaron
don't come to china and beware of chinese tourists
it's a hell here now and the wuhan local government is still hiding the truth
just to let you know, it will be worth than SARS

so for the first time i am starting to see this pandemic event as something that has serious political ramifications for china. all the pre-amble above is to say that i would never in a million years expect this person to express anything even remotely anti-chinese, but it sounds as if a real protest/panic is spreading there.

what's everyone's thought on the coronavirus?

it's interesting to me that china has set itself up as the most technocratic, state-centralised state on the planet, in which the compact between citizen and state has always leaned on ceding privacy/liberty to the government. they have the most advanced surveillance and tracking infrastructure on the planet. at the same time, they have a rigid culture of 'saving face', where they are extremely slow to admit any wrongdoing, firstly for the deep-seated social reflex, and secondly and more obviously because it quickly delegitimises the whole fucking state. that's a very tense paradox in which to throw a virus outbreak.

there seems to be two conspiracies going around: the wild meat videos (eating bats and mice etc) and the bio warfare lab story.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 … ed-chines/

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-24 18:04:33)

I've been following it. The new coronavirus supposedly less lethal than the early 00s SARS. That the WHO hasn't suggested travel restrictions (it didn't for A(H1N1) either, iirc). Scant comfort for more vulnerable people who are hit hard by these things. Where exactly it stands on mortality and contagiousness is still subject to ongoing data gathering.

I don't know about supposed connections to germ warfare. All the more terrible if that were the case.

Related:

4 Vaccine Stocks Making Big Moves Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/4- … d=00000000

uziq wrote:

what's everyone's thought on the coronavirus?

As a Hero of the Revolution and s depressive realist my thoughts are:

We're more than overdue for a pandemic, population is too high, the level of travel is insane. People travelling by train gave us spanish flu, how has air travel in tubes with recycled air not given us far worse? I'd have expected incurable TB or airborne AIDS to have got us by now.

If something horrible is going to come out of anywhere its going to be China, Vietnam or somewhere close by.

The Chinese are an ethicless inhumane bunch of creeps.

A people who believe in eating species which shouldn't be eaten - snakes, bats both of which harbour severe diseases to name two, that the more cruelly an animal is treated the better it will taste, that the best food comes from animals which are killed in front of you, dismembered while alive or best of all eaten alive probably will create a pandemic and will definitely deserve it.

Yum


Lets not forget the ultimate delicacy at a politburo banquet is not birds nest soup but human fetus in amniotic fluid. Fuck them to hell and hope they all die.

Apart from that gruesome farming practices, gross unregulated overuse of human medicines in animals and close proximity of farms to people - plus live markets and home slaughter really make it entirely inevitable that something horrible is going to be transmitted to the human population and spread rapidly.

As the closest western country to China and with a lot of travel between we should be worried and have nothing under control.
In barely the last few months has Australia started to crack down on people bringing in undeclared food.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019- … k/11603336

Not sure why asians feel the need to bring in suitcases full of infected foodstuffs. 27 Tons detected in nine months is a hell of a lot, and thats just pork. They bring in tons of other weird stuff, larks bile in jars, live insect riddled mushrooms etc. Every time its "Velly solly, me not understand form in my language, here wrist - please slap!"

Do they really think of nothing but food?

"Finally I can have a good meal, I feel like I've been starving for two days. When you are in a gourmet city of course you have to eat Michelin [food]," she wrote.

"Just before I left, I had a low fever and cough. I was scared to death and rushed to eat [fever-reducing] medicine. I kept on checking my temperature. Luckily I managed to get it down and my exit was smooth."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51231593

Anyway, we are doomed and it'll be thanks to asians in some overcrowded shithole eating food no human should be eating.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-01-25 04:00:45)

how many viruses cross from cephalopods to mammals? a lot of the videos circulating are just basically racist stuff about ‘other cultures and their disgusting habits’.

and isn’t the west staring down the barrel of a superbug scenario, where antibiotics no longer work, because we pump our food supply full of them?

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-25 04:01:36)

again, all of that just comes across as cultural xenophobia, to me. 'look at this weird food!' there's nothing at all to suggest that bugs on sticks are bad. in fact, insects are a better source of protein, in terms of feeding a global population, than incredibly resource-intensive animal farming.

the video of the man eating half-alive mice, like the video of the bat in broth, have been in circulation for a while and are now re-surfacing with the virus. most of the talk on twitter suggests that the bat video wasn't even taken in wuhan, and was in circumstances of 'here, try this weird local delicacy' (here being somewhere other than wuhan, in this case). but of course these clips are now casually interspliced with footage of people collapsing in the streets to create an alarmist, and subtextually racist, narrative.

i'm not saying i fancy any of this cuisine myself. and it's probably likely that that the virus crossed over from snakes/bats to humans, at least as best as we know (excepting the conspiratorially-minded fact that there's a SARS/coronavirus lab in wuhan). but does it have to become tabloid-level 'look what these people eat!' nobody is getting bubonic plague from eating grubs and insects.

the whole topic of china eating live animals and strange delicacies, bird's nest soup, shark fin soup, etc. is fairly well-trammelled. i don't have any disagreements there. file next to 'traditional medicine' that sees bears in cages farmed for bile and whatever. it's beyond stupid. but of limited relevance to a pandemic.

the one food banned in christianity? catholics observe all sorts of rules banning various meats, according to day or banned by custom.

the history of foods considered clean and unclean is very interesting. but the early church fathers were selling out when they abandoned old testament/torah proscriptions. they were just making a sales pitch, not making christianity somehow ‘wise’ and all knowing. i’m not sure how much relevance it has to food standards in china.

dilbert rambling on about that food stand is funny, yeah. some of those foods are considered a delicacy and ‘posh’ food in the west — hardly an abomination. and i get tired of people playing on the ‘they eat cats/dogs!’ argument. in some countries the population of feral cats/dogs is a public health crisis in itself. and our sentimentality about mammals is not exactly consistent with any health principle. in england to eat horse is monstrous; across the channel the french enjoy horse. india considers cows sacred; anglos mulch them into gourmet patties and post them on instagram. i honestly don’t have much issue with the thought of eating cat or dog. it just seems like a vaguely sub-standard type of meat, not unlike eating rabbit or fowl.

chicken, pork, beef, etc all carry potentially life-threatening pathogens but we in the west don’t blink an eye. so the dog and cats argument puzzles me.

how animals are slaughtered and how hygienic is the food product is obviously a separate, and very relevant, issue.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-25 08:04:07)

blood sausage is only eaten in northern states and northern parts of the UK. this is a bit like associating creole cuisine with someone in maine. the UK is made up of diverse groups of people with very different diets.

the only time blood products are served in the UK as a whole is i guess at christmas time. which is always a hard pass for me.

don’t polish-, german-, dutch- etc americans have blood sausage products?