There’s something called dynamic range, which is essentially the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds. With a low dynamic range explosions and whispers are just as loud as each other.
There has been a recent trend for filmmakers to want a high dynamic range. This makes explosions, car crashes, and gunshots feel extra impactful. The problem is that that means other things become more quiet by comparison. Those “other things” include dialogue.
This leads to people not in a movie theatre or with a home audio setup that costs more than my car not being able to hear a goddamned word.
Surely this will get people to think and vote the way I want them to. In the mean time let’s work ourselves into a fervor by publicly talking about how everyone who doesn’t agree with us are bigots.
But creativity is hard and risky. Can I interest you in a milquetoast film written by committee instead? I promise it was made with almost no planning or preparation and rushed out the door.
Retailers want to play Christmas music to encourage shopping, but only secular music to avoid causing offense. If you look at all the most popular Christmas songs and take out any that with religious lyrics (Silent Night, Joy to the World, Oh Come all ye Faithful, etc.) you’d be hard pressed to put together a playlist longer than an hour or two.
An employee working an eight hour shift will therefore hear the same song a minimum of four times. In my experience it’s closer to six, but we’ll be conservative here. That means Mariah Carey is telling you that you’re all she wants for Christmas at least twenty times a week. Most stores start up the Christmas music in early November, but we’re being charitable and saying the music will be playing from Thanksgiving through the week of Christmas.
The TL;DR is that your average full-time retail worker is going to hear the same few Christmas songs a bare minimum of 80-120 times during the busiest time of the year. That figure doubles in a worst case scenario where a one hour loop is played starting after Halloween. A ton of people have worked retail at some point on their lives so while you might not be the only one who likes this song you might have a hard time finding people who don’t have a knee-jerk resentment towards it.
It’s something current federal law does and has done for decades. A person who is involuntarily committed to undergo inpatient treatment at a mental health facility by a court of law is classified as a “prohibited person” and cannot own or have access to firearms.
The catch is that a person cannot be deprived of any right without due process - typically a literal day in court. Therefore an individual with mental health problems that have not caused enough trouble to land them in front of a judge can’t be declared a prohibited person.
This thread is full of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I mean the whole thread is based on the implication that the credit bureaus are a government program.
I’m going to catch some flak but I found myself in a position where H&R Block came in handy. It wasn’t for any services they rendered but because they have something akin to a protection plan where you pay a one time fee and they provide legal representation if any tax authority decides to come at you after filing.
The two times I used them were when I made an interstate move and the following year when I purchased a house. The place I moved to has a byzantine regional tax authority that collects local taxes on behalf of most - but not all - municipalities in the county (like I said - byzantine). This regional tax authority is notoriously disorganized and aggressive, opening investigations about years old tax debt that amounts to pennies only to discover that the debt was paid but their records were misplaced.
Both years I filed with H&R Block and signed up for their protection plan. Both years the regional tax authority opened investigations. Both years H&R Block paid for a lawyer to get on the phone and get the stick out of the tax authority’s ass.
This is a super niche case but until I have a year where I basically don’t do anything interesting (move, have a kid, change jobs, etc.) or the regional tax authority gets it’s shit together and chills out H&R Block is actually providing value to me.
The line doesn’t go back to early humans. The line goes back to the the very “trunk” of the tree of life, a microbe known as LUCA - the Last Universal Common Ancestor.
Ancestry doesn’t just run through the history of man, it runs through the history of all life on Earth.