BraveSirZaphod

That's proven to be both unpopular and often having unintended side effects.

I did my first cruise this year, and honestly had an absolute blast. However, the extremely important factor here is that it was a gay cruise (from the company Atlantis), and so it was absolutely nothing like the standard experience. For one week in the Caribbean, it was basically just a giant non-stop party. No kids, no entitled retirees, just you and 5000 other gay men trying to enjoy as much debauchery as can be fit into a week.

There were some port stops as well which were nice, but the main draw was very much the parties that would go on all night and through the morning. The music and production was incredible, and most of the other entertainment options were also swapped out for more gay-oriented options, so instead of bingo or whatever it is the boomers do, it was drag queens doing Britney Spears singalongs and things like that. And because everyone is gay, there's already a shared common experience and identity so people tend to be very friendly and welcoming.

Also, if you're single or otherwise available, the amount of sex you could have is genuinely ridiculous, though I was there with my boyfriend so we mostly just enjoyed the parties and made some great new friends. I had such a fun time, contrary to my expectations, that we've actually signed up to do another one in Europe later this summer, and that winter Caribbean cruise will probably become an annual thing for us.

PPP loans were meant to be forgiven so long as they were spent properly on payroll. So long as those politicians followed the rules of the loans, any hypocrisy on the side scummy, but not criminal.

The biggest issue involves the logistics on the ground, and in places with extremely high food insecurity, there tends to be little to no legitimate government, and so getting anything done involves dealing with local gangs and warlords. It doesn't matter how much money you have if every shipment you send will just be stolen at gunpoint and sold to fund the local thug's next golden toilet. This is not a problem that can really be solved by throwing money at it.

The fact that they deliberately chose to make the sequel to those cringe edgelords' favorite movie a musical with Lady Gaga makes me think that they very much understand how that particular audience reacted to the first movie and have no intention of appealing to them again.

That, and Lady Gaga would not sign on to a male rage fantasy. I'm pretty confident this is gonna be a fascinating movie.

You're correct, but the fundamental blame for that does lie with the voters, at the end of the day. No amount of structural protections can protect democracy from voters that do not care about it. At that point, they're just ink on a page.

To actually give an answer, it's because the Constitution very deliberately does not allow criminal convictions to disqualify someone. This was done because it was, and in plenty of places still is, common practice for a government to simply make up charges and arrest any opposition, thus disqualifying them from running.

You always have to look at this kind of stuff from the other side. Would you really want a Trump to be able to disqualify an opposing candidate for running a red light once twenty years ago?

This guy's inability to fathom that there exists music outside of Rock is bordering on hilarious. Not to even mention the entire world of music before Rock, which is especially hilarious given him citing musical history. Does he think Nat King Cole or Ella Fitzgerald wrote their own music?

Whelp, I had a large response typed up that I lost by accidentally swiping back, so I'll just say that if you're going to call Beyonce a terrible person, I probably wouldn't cite rock stars as paragons of morality, or shall we ask Cynthia Lennon how nice John was to her? I hardly need to bring up Michael Jackson. Of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with whether they wrote their songs or not, which is the actual topic, so I'm not sure why you bring that up at all.

Genres have obviously shifted, but if you compare pop musicians of today to the pop musicians of the 70s and 80s, yes, there is absolutely more songwriting today by the artists. Rock is a very different genre with its own traditions and tends to be based around groups rather than solo artists, so it's not a very apt comparison. Not to mention, it's not like rock artists back then weren't shitting on disco groups for this exact reason back in the day. The Village People weren't exactly prolific songwriters.

It almost feels like your real issue is that rock is dead, and sure, that's unfortunate. But luckily for you, rumor has it that Beyonce's next album will be based in rock.

It’s not like back in the day when an artist got big by their own merit

Sorry, when, exactly, are you talking about? Frank Sinatra didn't write any of his major songs. Elvis Presley literally didn't write anything. Madonna didn't write most of her biggest early hits, though she did get much more involved in writing after the 80s. Plenty of Rhianna's big songs weren't written by her. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Celine Dion aren't songwriters. Meat Loaf didn't write a single song on 'Bat Out of Hell'.

So, what is this time period where every artist got by solely by their own unassisted talent? Because I could also point to Taylor Swift today, who's been heavily involved in the writing of every song she's ever made. Lady Gaga's writing influence is all over everything she's done. Zoomer superstar Olivia Rodrigo wrote every song on her latest album.

Just looking at some top albums from 2023:

• SOS by SZA - She's credited on every song.
• Midnights by Taylor Swift - She wrote everything.
• One Thing at a Time by Morgan Wallen - Writing credits on roughly half the tracks
• Did You Know There's a Tunnel under Ocean Blvd by Lana del Rey - Primary credits on all tracks

The funny thing is that, compared to most of pop music history, it's actually far more common for artists to be involved in songwriting that it was in the past. Up until relatively recently, singers were mostly seen as just that - singers - and there was no real expectation for them to be writers as well, since the songs would be supplied by the large team assembled by the label.

So again, I ask, what was this golden age where all artists wrote everything they performed, and when did it end?

Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It's the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called 'aspiration'.

The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn't have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as "pi" and "phi". Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as 'Ph', 'Th' and 'Ch'.

The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish "Loch". This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French 'phonétique' vs Spanish 'fonético'). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of 'ph' being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.

So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.

The amount of visceral anger in this thread seems to indicate that people seem to actually care quite a lot about what she says.

If people actually didn't care, they wouldn't have clicked on this.