i live in dayton, which is right next to xenia, and let me tell you johnny cat-- they is sum speshul peeple up der. for some reason all the white-trash good-for-nothings moved to xenia and decided to raise families... my friend grew up there and she said i would not believe how trashy that place is. just to give an example of how "family friendly" they are-- when walking home from elementary/junior high school, she always passed an all-male prison. as she walked, the prisoners would be playing basketball outside and would hootNholler at her and her friends. a large majority of their parents were alcoholics or drug addicts. i'm pretty sure xenia is where the term "wife-beater" was coined for white tank tops. they're about due for another dabilitating tornado...
oh ha.. i got off the handle there.. the ARTICLE! it's terrible. but don't worry-- as soon as the invisible sky man swoops down and high-fives the middle east, i'm sure we can all return to our normal level of hedonism.
i'm sorry Idil.. our houses aren't stacked on top of each other and our cities aren't an easy stroll down the street. we are a little more spread out than a lot of us would like to be, but what the hell are we to do about that? move closer to our jobs, ride our bikes, stop contributing to national habits and form our own, yunno. be ethical. but wait-- have you heard? americans have driven over a billion less miles in the last year! people are changing their habits! the private sector is growing again! fortune 500 companies are changing thair habits too! and despite these temporary morale boosters and habit changes , our economy is falling and people are struggling. in my local economy, the DHL distribution plant in Wilmington and the GM-Moraine truck/suv plant are both closing. that is over 10,000 LOCAL jobs. because those companies are closing, other places are closing/struggling due to severe drops in traffic moving through those areas. people have no other choice but to move out of the area because why should they stay? it's a little easier to complain about high gas prices here because we don't have that many choices as far as transportation diversity. but we have bigger internal problems that we're not facing, and gas prices are just the tip of the iceburg. tell me i'm a lazy american to my face and hope i don't rip it off. i may not be proud that my fellow americans aren't exactly setting a great example for the rest of us, but dammit-- i love this country. my government may not be any smarter than a can of beans, but i bet i can thank them for keeping our gas prices as low as they are.. and you can thank your government for the prices YOU have to deal with. don't blame us. we're in this together. and the only way we can get passed it all is to stop bickering and f-ing DO something about it. what are YOU doing?
JamesM is right, but I would like to add to it.. along with the whole remastering thing-- not only are they compressing the audio, but when you remaster something, you do not have the original tracks that layered into the mix, so you can't adjust their individual volume. as a producer myself, the most important part of my job is to make all the levels mix well, so no one is higher than the other. this is especially important when putting together commercials and promos. but music is the same thing, only you're TRYING to emphasize certain levels to get the dynamics of the music and the sound of the band itself. when you remaster it, you take away the dynamics in the sound and make everything a little more flat. that's why older music on vinyl was so much better, because they didn't do individual track processing. now they DO individual track processing, making the sound a little more diluted because it all runs together. that's the fall the music industry has taken as technology has swept our culture. it's true in all industries, though. once you saturate a market with technology, stores, and/or resources, you're giving people too many options, thus making it more difficult to get something simple and genuine. that's what we get, i guess.
no, gender does not matter in this realm. the internet is the only working example of the free market, and it should remain that way. there is no telling WHY male bloggers are taken more seriously, but if they are, then they are; it has nothing to do with their gender. there will ALWAYS be a majority of SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE. it is impossible to have a fair share of everything, especially when it's the people who are doing 100% of the voting.
the reason i believe men are taken more seriously is because they generally don't write solely about their feelings. women do. feelings do not generate populatiry, because EVERYONE has feelings. i think women might write more for personal benefit, where men write more for an audience. when you write for an audience, you try to get them involved with the content. now i'm not saying men are better writers, i'm just saying that they don't let their feelings generate their content. and that's OK with me.
the world may (still) be dominated by men, but women will always be better at balancing the checkbook.
it is pretty bad though, Martijn. i mean, you can't say that they're not cutting fuel. and you also can't say that people aren't going to freak out about it. fear is a government tactic carried out through the media, and it works. it has been working for decades.
MW-- what do you mean "somehow?" along with decreased demand, gas prices ARE the reason for higher ticket prices.
if we did not make the effort of learning our own language, there would be a LOT of teachers out of a job, along with many other skilled professionals. i think what makes language so unique is that we have so many grammatical/spelling variations. i mean, there are people out there who have jobs DEPENDING on their ability to mock our language. sometimes called satire, or puns, or jokes, or humor.
also, like many others mentioned, it would completely devalue what evolution we humans have gone through (and please spare me the religious debate against evolution... evolution is not just a theory related to species origin.) part of who we are is the language we speak. if we let our language dissolve, our intellect will soon follow. then we'll all be grunting and making sounds at each other, and maybe we can bring the dinosaurs back. if our species can go backwards, why can't others come back?
the fact that it's a social faux-pas to leave your pet's poop on the ground is ridiculous to being with. it's POOP. leave it there.
and the fact that there are LAWS regulating where your pet can poop is even worse. you can face up to a $1000 fine for leaving feces on the ground. now THAT is a bunch of crap.
oh holy crap... sometimes i gotta prepare for things like this at work. the sound effect is what makes it for me, and it just reminds me of the "canada on strike" episode of south park. (haven't seen it? all the episodes can be found at allsp.com. go watch it! and love it!)
yes, kdp.. but a cool fellow named ben franklin once said 'one who gives up liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.' and he was right. the only "primal" needs we have are food, shelter, and clothing. THREE and ONLY three. the other things (security, cars, laws, nicotene) are things we WANT. although clothing could be debated in some regions of the planet...
otherwise, i could have told you this. material items do not = happiness. duh. we're exactly like the romans, except with iPods. some great sociologists wrote about this exact thing back in the 18-1900s; therefore, this is not a new concept. but we haven't ALWAYS been like this.. just in the last 100 years since the industrial revolution and the model-t ford. we actually had some morals and values, none of which involved electronics, hummers, and credit card debt.
what makes me happy? saving money. friends. the fact that i can afford my bills. NOT being in debt. the fact that i bought my car with cash. the fact that i graduated with a bachelor's degree all by myself. my boyfriend. and sleeping. i actually get more joy out of giving away my material possessions. i've also been known to be a little weird and non-traditional. but moral of the story: yes. we know this stuff. and this is just ANOTHER example of wasted research time, money and resources. how about research on how to get us away from all of these social anxieties? that may be a start...
how many times do we have to tell you to keep paris hilton out of this? i mean, 75% of her weight comes from her sunglasses anyway. don't mock the girl!
and then pigs will fly out of my butt.
the reason i believe men are taken more seriously is because they generally don't write solely about their feelings. women do. feelings do not generate populatiry, because EVERYONE has feelings. i think women might write more for personal benefit, where men write more for an audience. when you write for an audience, you try to get them involved with the content. now i'm not saying men are better writers, i'm just saying that they don't let their feelings generate their content. and that's OK with me.
the world may (still) be dominated by men, but women will always be better at balancing the checkbook.
MW-- what do you mean "somehow?" along with decreased demand, gas prices ARE the reason for higher ticket prices.
also, like many others mentioned, it would completely devalue what evolution we humans have gone through (and please spare me the religious debate against evolution... evolution is not just a theory related to species origin.) part of who we are is the language we speak. if we let our language dissolve, our intellect will soon follow. then we'll all be grunting and making sounds at each other, and maybe we can bring the dinosaurs back. if our species can go backwards, why can't others come back?
and the fact that there are LAWS regulating where your pet can poop is even worse. you can face up to a $1000 fine for leaving feces on the ground. now THAT is a bunch of crap.
otherwise, i could have told you this. material items do not = happiness. duh. we're exactly like the romans, except with iPods. some great sociologists wrote about this exact thing back in the 18-1900s; therefore, this is not a new concept. but we haven't ALWAYS been like this.. just in the last 100 years since the industrial revolution and the model-t ford. we actually had some morals and values, none of which involved electronics, hummers, and credit card debt.
what makes me happy? saving money. friends. the fact that i can afford my bills. NOT being in debt. the fact that i bought my car with cash. the fact that i graduated with a bachelor's degree all by myself. my boyfriend. and sleeping. i actually get more joy out of giving away my material possessions. i've also been known to be a little weird and non-traditional. but moral of the story: yes. we know this stuff. and this is just ANOTHER example of wasted research time, money and resources. how about research on how to get us away from all of these social anxieties? that may be a start...
http://www.oceana.org/north-america/what-we-do/stop-cruise-ship-pollution/