FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4m ago
Explanations that have been mooted in my home:
-- It's a fetish. He wants the dirtiest, cheapest trailer park whore he can find. He can't really let himself be free with a woman of his social class. He can be totally free with trailer trash. It turns him on. I've known men who liked their women a little on the trashy side, though this is another level.
-- He's cheap, and that's how you end up a billionaire.
-- He made the utterly stupid calculation (see: Coldplay couple) that no one would catch him in an East Palestine trailer park. The problem being that when you are caught in an East Palestine trailer park, there is no possible innocent explanation, even after the charges are reduced.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
7m ago
I didn't want it to format as a list, which I find annoying, I wanted it come out the way it did.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2hr ago
What is going on with sports team owners?
In the space of a few weeks:
-- The owner of the Los Angeles Lakers has been forced to sell (to a Kushner brother) the team because of an SEC investigation into financial irregularities at insurance companies he controlled. (((I'll leave the questions about the Trump admin investigating a businessman who then is forced to sell a prized asset to a Trump-family-affiliated entity to Pablo Torre to unwind)))
-- The owner of the San Francisco 49ers was arrested in an East Palestine, OH trailer park in a human trafficking sting, apparently trying to hire a $140 prostitute. He plead guilty to some minor misdemeanor charges and spent a night in jail.
-- The Los Angeles Clippers have effectively been neutered for the next 5-8 years by the NBA's decision in their salary-cap circumvention scheme, in which Kawhi Leonard was paid extra money outside his contract under the table through no-show endorsement deals from affiliated companies.
-- Investigations into the Los Angeles Dodgers are coming to the forefront, involving financial irregularities in their ownership group.
It could all be a coincidence, but it feels weird astrologically.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
3hr ago
I don't think it's ridiculous to consider that Bin Laden, who whatever your opinion of his morals was clearly a very intelligent and capable person, could view two closely related terms in shades of meaning outside those of the official translation. Bin Laden likely had some competency in English, though he was not known to speak it fluently in public this may have been a political rather than ability based choice.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
3hr ago
It'd be funny if Bin Laden actually had read the first Foundation book, and only the first.
In all honesty, I believe that Bin Laden was influenced by Hari Seldon-via-Quranic-End-times and viewed terrorism as creating the forces that would eventually create a caliphate, rather than viewing himself as a likely future Caliph. 9/11 wasn't the moment the Foundation reveals itself as a power, but closer to the Anacreonian revolt that goes off at the right time to set things in motion correctly. You can see this kind of management strategy in Al Qaeda's internal documents, for example their insistence that while it would be very useful to kill Obama or Patraeus, no one should under any circumstances kill Joe Biden, because Joe Biden was incompetent and if they killed Obama and left Biden in charge it would doom the American war effort.
With a few significant divergences.
I see more similarities than differences. Both used altered mental states and a free-love ethic to draw followers into cults which promised their followers an altered state of being that would ultimately make them rulers of the earth. Both professed their own humility as part of their claim to power.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
One of my favorite factoids: Osama Bin Laden was a huge fan of the Foundation series. And a possible English translation of Al Qaeda is "The Foundation."
Which actually makes a lot of sense out of Islamist political philosophy viewed through that lens. Al Qaeda was so angry at ISIS because they were worse than wrong, they were early.
Curious result, the two greatest titans of early SciFi both inspired legendarily evil murderers: Manson was a huge fan of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and obviously modeled himself after the main character.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
I don't think it should be humiliating to join the metropole. That doesn't mean that it can't be made to be humiliating. Having sex with a woman isn't humiliating, but her demands can make it so.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
I'm a firm believer in the CanadAnschluss, and think it should be offered in a brotherly manner. Canada should be ten states. There is no purpose to the border.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?
I read an essay once that described the use of slurs as a speech act primarily intended to communicate that I can use a slur to refer to you and you can't stop me. It's a verbal act to demonstrate power relations.
Forcing others to take moral responsibility for their co-ethnics is similarly an act of power relations. Who has to apologize for nothing and who gets to just live their life is a pretty clear example of power dynamics in action.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Are you under the impression that Puerto Rican citizens are prevented from migrating to America?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
And if we use North Dakota as the referent, twenty states wouldn't be enough!
I do think the funniest outcome to Trumpisme is the incorporation of Venezuela into the Union, resulting in an end to illegal immigration, as we'll simply have 25 million broke venezuelan citizens who will suck up so many low-end labor jobs and drive prices down so far that there will be no gap in the market for the illegal migrant to fill.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
The oddest thing to me is the repeated insistence that Canada will be the 51st state, when Canada would clearly be states 51-61.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
That's exactly my point! Americans feel perfectly comfortable saying that America's economy should remain the world's largest! We feel that it's the natural order of things! We don't reflect on what we're saying and what it means!
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
The other angle of this argument is typically that our wealth was sent to China to enrich the elites. But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good. The successful ones work crazy hours and there's a much larger precariat than here without a social safety net. If your father's generation was so much better off, where did the money go? Or did we just globally become less productive?
Not calling you out in particular, but "China is a big country inhabited by many Chinese." This may seem obvious, but I think China vs USA discussions often ignore or elide this point. China has a population about four times the size of the United States'. I think this is the most important fact about the world to consider when discussing such comparisons.
When we say "We want the USA to remain the biggest economy in the world, and not to have it surpassed by the PRC." We aren't just saying we want to be richer than China, we're saying we want the average American to be at least four times richer than the average Chinaman. That's an insane level of arrogance and privilege to state!
I can imagine my richer friend saying: "FiveHour, I hope my two kids are as wealthy as I am, and that your two kids do a little better than you did, but in my heart of hearts I hope that my two kids are always richer than your two kids." I could accept that.
If my richer friend said: "FiveHour, you have four kids and I have one, I hope my son is so much more successful than all your kids that he is richer than all four of them combined and it is important that this remain the case, it would deeply upset me if your four kids combined made more than my son." I would be dumbfounded by the weirdness of that position and assume he kind of hated me.
If China and America are equally wealthy as states, all the wealth that is in America can go to China, and just bring China's standard of living up 25% from where it was. (obviously this is a ridiculous economic concept, wealth and income are different and neither China's nor America's economies will make any sense with the other eliminated)
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
30d ago
The "choice" in a local planning sense for a municipality choosing where to zone for AI, if you have a site for a 1,000,000sqft industrial building, is between a data center that might have two dozen or so permanent employees and a warehouse that would support a thousand unskilled jobs or a factory that would have 800 skilled workers.
So yeah, rounds down to zero.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
30d ago
Strong disagree. Bikinis were at least mildly riskee when I was a kid, and twenty years later they are the default, to the point where the tyranny of the bikini is (in my mind) a women's freedom issue that isn't discussed enough.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
30d ago
I might grant you the Dodgers or Red Sox, but probably not the Pirates, who generally only draw national attention when they have a star that's on the trade speculation stage.
At this point crypto is a known, if poorly understood, thing. The Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles is mentioned on national sports coverage more than the Pirates. Any financial investment news covers crypto at least in part, WSJ local business section CNBC etc. Most (substantial) Americans are involved in investing in some way. They're all aware of crypto, and at least peripherally involved in it but the way it correlates with other assets.
I'd say that more people follow the Pirates than invest heavily in or understand crypto (not a perfectly overlapping Venn diagram). But people are aware of crypto and know it impacts the world.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
30d ago
Better still: large forested buffer around the building, reduces noise and makes it invisible from street level.
My father strongly believes that the future of data centers is in placing hydroponic greenhouses around them.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
30d ago
I think the AI bubble is uniquely confusing, because the real estate pros building them out are treating it like musical chairs and the companies commissioning them are treating it like the Rapture. Real estate pros figure it's a bubble, in the sense that eventually they will be overbuilt and stop building, so if I want to cash in on it I need to do it right now before the music stops I can't wait around. AI companies treat it like the Rapture, it doesn't matter if they overspend now because AGI is right around the corner and then money doesn't matter. They're unconcerned with the idea that the music will stop, they're concerned with controlling the playlist because whatever song is playing today will be on repeat forever. Combine the two and you're getting a toxic bubble.
It's also a problem in my town because of prior government interventions to subsidize the construction of new office buildings, creating a glut of new office space, which in turn makes building office space impractical. So you have sites that would be perfect for an office park being turned into data centers.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
30d ago
This is...not true. CNBC reports Crypto prices far more prominently than ESPN reports on the Pirates.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
30d ago
I'm not anti-data-center as a general idea. But somehow every data center plan in my town is absolutely moronic.
My particular town has one main commercial corridor. On this corridor you have stores, movie theaters, banks, offices. People moving back and forth across it throughout the day. Now there used to be a major company headquartered there, they since moved to new offices down the road. Developers want to convert the old offices into data centers, a few million square feet.
My first thought upon looking at the plan was, you'd never do this in Sim City. You have one of your most prime pieces of commercial real estate in the region, and you want to turn it into a box that no one uses and nobody goes to. You want to give away that access, that site with easy walkability and simple drivability to literally everything in town, and turn it into a box that hums. You're going to take this prime real estate away from people.
It's just a stupid development choice. And I get that the market doesn't owe me Sim City type optimal decision making, but it's a weird thing. I'm not anti-data-center, but there's obvious good places and obvious bad places to put them, and so many of the choices made seem to be obvious bad places.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
I’m…fairly sure that’s neither oedipal nor reverse-oedipal.
I'm, like, dead sure you're wrong. The Oedipal plotline is one in which the father is surpassed by his son, the psychological tension of "killing" the father metaphorically by defeating him is the source of the psychological drama of the plot. It does not literally require that the son fuck his mother (though this is a joke within the show we're talking about, that's kind of irrelevant actually).
The John Wick villains, and something like Succession, are examples. But a) they're recent examples, so would support my point that it's a weird modern Boomer affectation and a corruption of historic plots. But also it's distinguishable because, b) these are clearly examples of failed bad villainous fathers, whose failsons are the anchor around the neck of their legacies. Longshanks in Braveheart, the elder Roy in Succession, whatever his name was in John Wick, they're all evil. And part of their evil selfishness is that they raised shitty sons who will not be able to carry on their legacy, because they were too focused on things like conquering Scotland or the American news market. Having a failson ultimately undermines all your achievements as a man, rather than defeating your failson crowning those achievements.
What distinguishes the new "Old guy is just better than the young guy" plot in something like The Hawk or the Top Gun sequel is that it's presented as good that the old guy is better, that the old guy is still in touch with some cthonic way of being that makes him permanently superior, but that he can't pass on to his son.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
The prosecuting attorneys, who wrote the damn motion and are more familiar with the facts of the case than we are, despite their clear incentives both personal and from above to prosecute, thought that the shoddy workmanship undermined their case to the point that it was unprovable. The prosecutors publicly embarrassed themselves rather than proceed with the case. Because there was no possible way they could prove a crime here. Do you think that they put themselves in this position for fun?
Based upon the initial reports provided by the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) and the USS. Park Police (“USPP”), the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (“USAO-DC’) presented the grand jury with evidence that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn, However, it was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result ofa botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO-DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn, Because these recently-produced materials significantly undermine the evidentiary basis for the indictment initially supplied by the DOI and U.S. Park Police, the USAO-DC respectfully moves to dismiss the indictment without prejudice.
The motion consists of the prosecutors outlining at length why they think that the issues with the construction mean that the multiple eyewitness accounts are either incorrect or irrelevant to the indictment handed down. To defend the original indictment means asserting that one knows more than the prosecutors, or assuming that the prosecutors appointed by Trump, who were willing to work on the original indictment, have suddenly become part of a TDS conspiracy for...reasons.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
1mo ago
Charges have been dropped, by the Trump administration, in the most publicly embarrassing way possible, and we still have people in the comments endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope saying that it was definitely vandalism.
The tide is going out and we're finding out who was skinny dipping.
It's probably the best example of a glow up I've seen from pure journalism in years.
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