Assignment Title: The Influence of Social Media on Public Opinion and Individual Behavior
Objective: Write a synthesis essay that examines how social media platforms influence public opinion and individual behavior. Your essay should integrate insights from various scholarly sources to analyze the extent to which social media has reshaped public discourse and personal interactions.
Instructions:

1. Research Requirement:
   • Gather and synthesize information from at least five scholarly articles or books. Your sources should include studies on social media's role in politics, marketing, and social interaction.
2. Essay Structure:
   • Introduction: Introduce the topic of social media’s influence and state your thesis about its impact on public opinion and individual behavior.
   • Body Paragraphs:
     • Paragraph 1: Discuss how social media platforms are used as tools for political influence and shaping electoral outcomes.
     • Paragraph 2: Analyze the role of social media in marketing and how it affects consumer behavior.
     • Paragraph 3: Explore the impact of social media on interpersonal relationships and communication.
     • Synthesis: Draw connections between the effects observed in different areas, illustrating the overarching influence of social media.
   • Conclusion: Summarize your findings and restate your thesis, reflecting on the broader implications of social media’s influence on society.
3. Citation Style: Use APA format for all citations and include a reference list at the end of your essay.
4. Length: Your essay should be between 1500-2000 words.
5. Submission: Submit your completed essay through the university's digital learning platform by xx-xx-xxxx.

Assessment Criteria:
Depth of research and quality of sources
Clarity and persuasiveness of argumentation
Integration of multiple viewpoints and synthesis of information
Adherence to citation rules and essay format
Grammar, spelling, and academic writing style
Solution:

The Pervasive Influence of Social Media on Public Opinion and Individual Behavior

In an age dominated by digital landscapes, social media has emerged as a fundamental force shaping public opinion and individual behavior. This synthesis essay explores the multifaceted impacts of social media platforms, drawing on scholarly articles to analyze their roles in political mobilization, consumer marketing, and interpersonal relationships. The thesis posits that social media significantly alters public discourse and personal interactions, reshaping societal norms and behaviors in profound ways.

Political Influence

Social media has revolutionized political engagement, transforming it into a more dynamic and accessible sphere. According to a study by Bond et al. (2012), Facebook's social messaging significantly increased voter turnout during the 2010 U.S. elections. This phenomenon is largely due to the ability of social platforms to facilitate rapid information dissemination, enabling political movements to mobilize supporters with unprecedented speed and scale. Targeted advertisements and viral campaigning on platforms like Twitter and Facebook not only reach more voters but also allow for more tailored political messaging, enhancing the ability to sway public opinion towards specific ideologies or candidates.

Marketing and Consumer Behavior

Beyond politics, social media has a profound impact on consumer behavior and marketing strategies. As per the research by Chaffey (2019), social media influences up to 71% of consumer buying decisions, particularly among younger demographics. This influence stems from the powerful combination of targeted advertising and user-generated content, creating a persuasive environment of social proof. Consumers are increasingly reliant on reviews and social endorsements, which platforms like Instagram and Pinterest readily provide. This shift not only affects individual purchasing behaviors but also dictates market trends and brand strategies, making social media a crucial element in modern marketing ecosystems.

Interpersonal Relationships

The impact of social media extends into the realm of interpersonal relationships. Studies by Turkle (2011) suggest that while social media facilitates more frequent communication, it also leads to more superficial interactions. The constant connectivity offered by social media platforms like Snapchat and WhatsApp reshapes how relationships are formed and maintained, often prioritizing breadth over depth. This shift can lead to a decrease in face-to-face interactions and potentially weaken the emotional bond between individuals, altering the fabric of social connectivity.

Synthesis Section

The political, commercial, and social interactions mediated by social media have collectively engineered a new societal norm, where public opinion and individual behavior are increasingly influenced by online interactions. The synthesis of these aspects reveals that while social media offers numerous benefits, such as increased engagement and consumer insights, it also poses challenges like echo chambers in politics and decreased interpersonal communication quality. Understanding these influences is crucial for mitigating potential negatives while harnessing the positive aspects of social media.

Conclusion

This essay has examined the extensive influence of social media on public opinion and individual behavior, highlighting its role in reshaping political engagement, marketing strategies, and interpersonal relationships. Social media platforms, by virtue of their design and widespread use, serve not only as tools for information dissemination but also as shapers of contemporary culture and behavior. As we navigate this digital age, it becomes imperative to foster awareness and develop strategies that enhance the benefits of social media while addressing its challenges. Further research and proactive digital literacy efforts are essential to ensure that social media serves to enhance rather than detract from societal progress.

References

• Bond, R., et al. (2012). A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature, 489(7415), 295-298.
• Chaffey, D. (2019). Global social media research summary 2019. Smart Insights.
• Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

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This is just an example to illustrate the kind of detailed analysis and structured argumentation expected in university-level synthesis essays. If you have any questions about this assignment or need help with your essays, feel free to comment below or start a discussion here. We're all here to support each other in excelling academically!

Hello dear fellow people,
Another 23589647th post about moving to BC.
Alright so this is the backstory, This is going to be a little long read;
So,
Been thinking about moving to BC from Montreal in the last few months/year, however this post might be different from previous topics posted here because the goal is kind of pretty different and specific;
Looking to experience a different lifestyle in a more quiet area to have some space and lone time while trying to have some social life around from time to time.
It would be a move to some small towns/remote vacant land with not so many people area the main reasons would be not to be around a lot of people and have a peace of mind and to live kind of secluded from the rest of the world and live in semi-autarchy and rely on almost nobody and do stuff like planting /harvesting fruits and vegetables /weed/mushrooms, own a shotgun for self defense and drive a F150, live with a woman and a dog/cat with that comes with it and not be bothered by anybody and be close to the outdoor (parks, ocean, beaches,...) but at the same time as stated earlier be able to participate to some social events from time to time.
It'd be mostly in the Kootenay Lake area which looks pretty nice and can be taken in consideration. The ideal dream would be going to some small towns around Nelson for example with some good communities nearby.
More likely to buy some small vacant land and build a cabin on it potentially. Sadly I don't have a lot of experience/skills in construction but twilling to learn.
About me: late 20s francophone immigrant from Europe who's been living in the country for quite a few years. Single no kids, trying to save as much money as possible.
Jobwise, it would be with a remote job so that wouldn't be an issue regarding bills and expenses but could rethink and reconsider another career path such as trades at some point, there are thoughts about living off the land but that's a whole other level of hardcore living.
Fully aware of the cost living in BC is abysmal (especially real estate) there, however with this lifestyle it might potentially be feasible somehow as expenses would be reduced and it could be the only way to own a home in this country.
There are some concerns and questions though;
People in BC are polite and chill but also passive/passive-aggressive, cliquey and not very accepting to foreigners. How hard is it to make friends there? Isn't there a big NIMBYism mindset in that area?
Since I'm a francophone from Europe, would that cause a problem? Used to live in Toronto and got some snarky remarks at times. Here in Montreal, it's okayish. Also you might find this a little silly, but would it be possible to access some services in French (ie healthcare)?
How is dating overall in BC? For sure options would be limited when you live in secluded areas for sure but how's that different from the east coast?
What about crime? someone from my home country got murdered while on a roadtrip westward to Vancouver.
How about the healthcare situation? Do you have to wait for hours in the ER to see someone? Does it also take months to see a doctospecialist? Is there good quality care though?
And then the wildfires? It really looked completely insane after having looked online and living close to a fire hazard area in the summer would be pretty worrying as it could burn down your house/cabin. With all the health related problems it would cause as well.
Are there any people in this group that are currently living this lifestyle and wouldn't mind sharing a little bit?
For the record, it's still being thought out and this move might happen within the next few years and is subject to change. You still have to learn on how to build and plan accordingly.
Plan on going on a roadtrip and live there for 6 months at least in about a year to taste the water (never been out west before).
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to answer!

Hello everyone here to Alert everyone on Facebook marketplace about this scammer going around as a counterfeit currency seller goes by the name #Maxbeanz u/Maxbeanz he offers to sell you 20K Canadian for 500$ USD and then when you send that amount in BTC to his wallet he does request for another $300 as "insurance refundable fee" money or threatens you with a block. He's a scammer I wasn't even interested in buying but heard some dude got scored for 700$ Canadian from him + over 0.10 in BTC from other victims so it made me want to lure him in to get info about what area he's from but had no luck..
Everyone Be alert !! This post is to warn Facebook users
that's his wallet address for proof he's still scamming as we speak :
35WQeup6f6hkunE9CDrRTsBAptk3r2LzZW
He could have changed it but that's the one with over 20+ victims. Telegram : Maxbeanz
Canada #Currency #Notes #fraud #alert Vancouver police is a joke on the otherhand, mentioned they don't even know where he lives and they aren't interested in wasting resources on this but "Next time be careful online when u shop" what a joke

I've been looking at homes online in Edmonton and Calgary and can't help but imagine what a better life I would have there compared to Vancouver.
Older homes in Edmonton listed for $350-$400k. Same would be $1.4m anywhere in the lower mainland
Decent newer homes listed for $650-700k in Calgary. Easily $2 million in lower mainland
I could sell my 2 bedroom condo, buy an older home in Edmonton for cash and still have few hundred thousand in savings. I might need to change jobs but at least I won't have any mortgage either.
Am I missing something? Nothing is really tying me down to Vancouver. Im single and in early 30s and don't have many friends here anyways.
Are the property taxes extremely high? Insurance ? Utilities? Are there other fees or hidden costs I'm missing out on? This seems like a no brainer?

Edit: If you are going to comment on the length of this post, please don't. This is not a simple snark but rather an actual critical think piece about feminism and Taylor Swift.

Introduction

Pertaining to Taylor Swift, "Female Rage" has deviated from its intended meaning after Swift debuted a new performance of The Tortured Poets Department during the Eras Tour. Now, according to Swift's use of the phrase, female rage is interpreted as public backlash against Swift's dating choices rather than as a response to the broader injustices against women and women's rights. This post examines Taylor Swift's flawed feminism, philanthropy, branding, and the controversial trademark petition for the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical". Swift's background as an entertainer, indeterminate politics, and alignment with capitalism over feminism pervades her legacy, again threatening her public tolerance as not just an individual but as a brand.

Once Upon a Female Rage...

If you were cognizant in the early 2010's, you've heard countless jabs at Taylor Swift in the media. Magazines, radio, or online. Music critics did not take her seriously as a songwriter; parents put a woman on an unrealistic pedestal as the ideal role model for their children; she dated too much and used men as lyrical fodder. No matter the story, it inevitably spread, conjoined with everyone's respective opinions, and you'd be left to wonder, "Why does everyone hate this girl so much?"
Taylor's target demographic has always been young or adolescent girls, more so when Swift herself was one. She made music that spoke to the awkward misfit, cultivating a para-social relationship with fans on MySpace, then later twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, where Taylor posted relatable vlogs showcasing the life of a homegrown American girl. Taylor had a delayed public "growing up" and, compared to her female pop contemporaries, Swift never "gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy" (and, apparently, never even had a sip of alcohol until she turned 21). She was more than happy to spin this narrative to allude to an inherent moral superiority above other women in the industry (Better Than Revenge, heard of it?), engaging in the very slut-shaming that she herself endured (the Madonna and Whore archetypes). The victim complex arose with the need to prove Taylor as a different type of pop girl. Based upon her holy and clean image, Swift had been dubbed "a feminist's nightmare", and that "[To Swift] other girls are obstacles; undeserving enemies who steal Taylor’s soulmates with their bewitching good looks and sexual availability." Feminism and Tennessee-Christian country values don't exactly mix, it seems.
Years later, Swift befriended Lena Dunham and thus experienced white feminism osmosis, where Dunham taught Swift that real feminists defend rapists, makes insensitive jokes about rape and abortion, and prioritize all-white casts. Swift then declared herself a feminist in 2014, saying,

"Becoming friends with Lena – without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for – has made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so."

I suppose the male-centric songwriting subject that permeates Swift's discography contained covert feminism and that we just didn't see that. Perhaps, the "Bad Blood" song and music video were written only in jest and not about poor Katy Perry, for Swift, as a feminist, would "never make it a girl fight" or tear other women down (though all Katy did was date your terrible ex-boyfriend and allegedly steal three backup dancers from your tour). In 2013, Swift said, in response to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's joke towards her serial dating, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
There was that time in 2015 Taylor said that Nicki Minaj was "invited to any stage [she is] on" (as if Taylor expects to have access to every stage, award, and platform that Nicki might not otherwise have as a black female artist...yikes!) in response to Nicki's criticism of the white + thin VMA nominations. Later, Nicki responded with confusion, as Swift continued, "It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..". Of course, this 'beef' was 'squashed' when Nicki performed with Taylor at the VMAs, with Nicki quite literally only having 38 seconds of stage time without Taylor. Maybe all that parading around with a legion of famous white women - similar to the way Taylor might've done with her numerous 1989-era handbags - was in fact a stance against gender inequality, and that this display of "girl power" should be enough to constitute Swift as a feminist icon.
Even while Swift says that Dunham informed her feminist outlook, she dances around the exact contents of those beliefs: "what she believes, what she says, what she stands for" is not exactly insightful towards what beliefs Swift might have inherited. Taylor never broaches women's rights topics such femicide, FGM, forced pregnancy & marriage, sex trafficking, women in slavery, women's financial and political oppression, women's educational rights, women's health, or women's autonomy, so we can assume she only gives a fuck about "girls supporting girls" (whatever that fucking means).
Despite some questionable (and sometimes vindictive) behavior, Taylor as a young woman did not deserve every media lashing that she received. We cannot deny that most headlines and criticisms perpetuated a misogynistic rhetoric which has plagued Swift for a majority of her career. Acknowledging events such as the development of her ED, her sexual assault trial, "Famous" lyric and MV depiction of Taylor, and the explicit Twitter deepfakes, for example, as both disgusting and unfortunate things that happened to a young woman in Hollywood does not negate the fact that Taylor is mostly a performative feminist.

Get Your Fucking Ass Up and Be a Philanthropist, It Seems Like Nobody Wants to Be a Philanthropist These Days

In 2013, Taylor Swift cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. The donation amount - $4 million - was the largest individual artist gift ever donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is, of course, mentioned on Swift's website. The two-story facility features three classrooms, an instrument room, and an interactive children's exhibit gallery. Swift also performed at "All for the Hall" charity shows and has donated numerous artifacts from her career (such as notable guitars, tour costumes, etc) to the museum.
This was over 11 years ago, and it is still the only notable philanthropic contribution Taylor Swift has made.
For a woman of her net worth and stature, and a woman who recognizes the difficulties for women in film and music, you would think that Taylor Swift might establish a scholarship program for women to study the arts or something. Perhaps Swift might even consider becoming a member of organizations that support female artists, or one that supports LGBTQ+ causes (since she is now proudly an ally), yet she remains superficial with her graces. Broader philanthropy, such as donating relief aid to Palestinian women or women impacted by violence and discrimination will probably never receive any financial support from Miss Swift because then she'd be using her money towards philanthropies involving anyone but white entertainers.
She even says herself in Miss Americana, "My entire moral code as a kid and now is a need to be thought of as 'good'." Well, she's certainly thought of as good, though her actions say otherwise. She's more than happy to do a vaguely altruistic song and dance for a clip-worthy interview quote and mass appeasement, then fuck off to one of her mansions on a 20 minute private jet flight, rather than actually contribute to anything pertaining to the causes she has endorsed. Yet, far too many people continue to give a woman such as her their money, time, and energy, and she hoards these resources to herself.

I Like Some of the Taylor's Songs, But What the Fuck Does She Know About Feminism?

Swift continued with her self-proclaimed feminist campaign, positioning herself as a political activist and LGBTQ+ ally in the Miss Americana documentary. The primary focus of the documentary consists of the sexual assault trial, Andrea Swift's cancer diagnosis, Taylor's ED and body dysmorphia, media scrutiny, and, largely, finally speaking up about her politics publicly, mostly her opposition to the 2018 Tennessee Republican senate candidate, Marsha Blackburn, and Blackburn's beliefs. Swift says, following a scene discussing her experience during the trial,

"I just couldn't really stop thinking about it. And I just thought to myself, next time there is any opportunity to change anything, you had better know what you stand for and what you want to say."

We must ask ourselves, though: when has Swift ever spoken up to change anything? Okay, pulling her entire catalogue from Spotify because they didn't pay their artists enough and similarly pulling her catalogue from Apple Music are changes that she leveraged due to her revenue potential and power, but they are not pertinent to the average woman's rights. Moreover, these are issues that directly impacted Taylor's income, which was enough reason for her to protest in the first place. Swift has sold the most units for a female artist in first week sales, is the first female artist with 100k monthly Spotify listeners, is the first female artist to win the Album of the Year Grammy 4 times, and is the first female artist to do X, Y, and Z, all while being inoffensive and family-friendly to boot. The actual Taylor Swift seems unwilling to compromise the brand of Taylor Swift by contributing in meaningful ways to feminist causes, especially if it is for women outside of America and Hollywood.
The reason political anthems such as "The Man" and "Only the Young" of the Lover era feel disingenuous and corporate is because, well, it is. Taylor has taken every opportunity to advance her career or public image at the expense of other women. What is truly genuine to Taylor's outlook on other women is vying for male attention, taking down female competition, and vocalizing feminist injustices only if they directly impact her and her money. Some will argue that it's satisfactory for a woman with such a huge platform to even TALK about feminism, but that just isn't enough. It's even less impressive when you candidly look at the scope of her feminist lens: "If I was the man, then I'd be THE MAN", or "I really resent the ‘Be careful, buddy, she’s going to write a song about you’ angle, because it trivialises what I do", and, of course, "We all got crowns". Feminism, but only when it happens to me. It gets worse when you look at Taylor's track record of copying other famous women and removing other female artists as potential threats to her pop prowess.
It's good for PR to align yourself with certain blanket feminist and political beliefs, therefore good for branding, therefore good for ticketing and merchandise sales, therefore good for business. And Taylor Swift is a business.
She's not a feminist. Taylor Swift is a capitalist.

I Can't Pay Those Sweatshop Workers a Livable Wage or Benefits! How Else Would I Make My Billions?

Recently, Taylor's team filed to trademark the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical" after Taylor said during Paris N1 of the Eras Tour,

"So you were the first ones to see The Tortured Poets at the Eras Tour...or as I like to call it, 'Female Rage: The Musical'."

This trademark petition was filed last week on Saturday, and news comes about just as numerous unofficial fan-made merch designs have cropped up with this phrase plastered on Fruit of the Loom basics. I'm of the opinion Swift's team motioned for a trademark so that they can send out cease & desists to all those that make knockoff merch, which disrupts potential sales for Bravado, UMG's choice merchandising company; however, since it was filed earlier, perhaps Swift has bigger plans with the bizarre use of the gendered phrase. One Swiftie referred to the phrase "female rage" as "a funny Eras Tour joke". Could it be a possible fourth version of the Eras Tour Movie? Whatever the reason, the motion to capitalize off of such a concept is disgusting, but not unsurprising, for a woman that profits on her vain feminism.
Swift, through her company, TAS Rights Managements, has also trademarked over 200 phrases, including "1989", where she owns the property rights to this calendar year on keychains, phone cases, sunglasses, stationary, bags, beverage ware, clothing, entertainment services, your subconscious, and, of course, Christmas ornaments.
The vapid consumerism in Swiftie culture is, frankly, disgusting. Bravado's sustainability statement is non-existent, the quality control is abysmal, and the materials they use are horrible. The materials, such as acrylic and polyester, are made from petrochemicals. This means they are non-renewable, shed microplastics, and are quite toxic in production. The manufacturing process to make all of those lazy-rushed Eras Tour logo graphic tees is a huge blow to environmental well-being. Apparently, though, Swifties don't give a fuck. They sell out products in seconds and either have to face the manufactured scarcity or buy from a scalper that resells for 200% of the already ridiculous retail price. This doesn't include the environmental impact of vinyl records, CD, and cassette production, of which Taylor produces many variants that sell unsustainable amounts.
If we're talking about women's rights violations, why is no one acknowledging the women that work in the inhumane sweatshop conditions that have to pump out fugly t-shirts and hats? The millions of plastic microfiber dander they are inhaling, or the toxic dyes that touch their bare skin? Are they being compensated fairly for their skilled labour and are they in safe working environments? Do these women have minimal bargaining power, and do they have authority over their worker's rights? Is Taylor Swift female raging at their injustices? Does Taylor Swift ever feels bad that her wealth was built on the backs of women of color, disadvantaged by the demands of the global economy and garment industry? Do you think she ever says a little white feminist prayer for them before she goes to sleep at night?
What's even crazier is not that Taylor herself doesn't care, it's that Swifties don't care. There CANNOT BE ethical billionaires. You only make a billion dollars if you are exploiting other human beings for capital gain. Based on public perception of the possible "Female Rage: The Musical" trademark, it seems like Swifties are already asking for merch with this phrase. "If Taylor made it, I'd buy it." Oh, cool. So not only do you champion Miss Swift's avarice and billionaire status, but you also are unashamed to admit to your blind consumption of her music and merchandise, no matter where they might originate in production or sincerity. Just as Swift takes and takes and takes, Swifties' consumerism of Taylor Swift cannot be quelled.
The tortured artist's most vulnerable and sincere poetry...available now in 21 different versions!

I Am Tortured Poet, Hear Me Whinge

Look - even if Taylor's intention is to characterize TTPD as more "tortured" and "angry", the main thread of the album is "I was ghosted by my decade-long situationship with a controversial indie boy and my fucking stupid fans wrote a 'Speak Up Now' open letter prompting me to drop him" anger, which is adequately expressed in the lyrics and performances. The extent of Taylor's "female rage" on TTPD is on tracks such as "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?", which contends with relentless media scrutiny; "But Daddy I Love Him", where Swift firmly states she'll date whoever she likes no matter how "Sarahs and Hannahs" may react; and "The Albatross", a track mythologizing her reputation and the consequences of dating her. Of course, these coincide with deep psychological wounds that formed during Swift's early years in the media, and so, from her feminist perspective, these subjects tackle the misogyny and double standards that she faced.
Yet Taylor Swift still has no grounds to be claiming that TTPD best exemplifies female rage and therefore she, in the context of this album, is female rage incarnate. As the daughter of a stock broker and mutual fund marketing executive, Taylor was born into wealth and allowed privileges like trips and subsequent relocation to Nashville all so that she might get a record deal. Her father even invested at least $120,000 into the then-fledgling label, Big Machine Records, which ensured Taylor's place with Borchetta after leaving her dead-end development deal with Sony. The fact that her parents were able to buy her a fucking brand new guitar for Christmas and pay for music lessons says so much about the financial security and safety of her childhood.
Money is privilege and protection, and despite Swift's experiences with misogyny and loser boyfriends, she does not know what female rage is.
Her rage is derived from her frustrations with her obsessive fans pulling the moral superiority card on Taylor in response to her rebound with Matty Healy. That's literally it. She's just pissed that the monster she created is no longer obediant, it's become a feral, sovereign entity that depletes the world of its natural resources and thinks it is more intelligent than it actually is because it's mommy has started to talk to it with big words. Apparently, 'illicit', 'elegy', 'nonchalant', and 'precocious' are considerably big words for the oafish monster, and I find it strange that this level of literacy is present in a group of fans that allegedly have GPAs of 3.5 or higher, but I digress.
Taylor Swift has never been one paycheck away from destitution. Taylor Swift has never experienced racial discrimination. She may have instances of gender discrimination, but she possesses the ideal white, blonde American beauty standard and therefore reaps the benefits of being a conventionally attractive woman. Taylor Swift has sufficient social capital. Taylor Swift is a billionaire woman prolonging her victimhood though she, as a woman, has mostly had control over her image and music (unlike her contemporaries). Taylor Swift is NOT entitled to be championed for her "female rage", nor should she be. Taylor Swift has never even been the struggling artist, for fuck's sake. I don't give a fuck if she's trying to fill the empty lunch tables of her past. Taylor Swift purporting herself, her unpolished album, and her lukewarm feminism as a musical bleeding with female rage is asinine.

Sigh Try and Come For My Job, Poors

Out there in the world right now is a 23-year-old woman, a recent college grad, who works as a barista. She has to wake up and get ready to go into a minimum wage job because she cannot get a job in her field. She doesn't have healthcare benefits or sick time, so she has to go into work no matter how she's feeling. All day long she is berated by vicious customers and creepy men, and, exhausted from being on her feet, she knows she has to go home to her shitty roommate that never does the dishes and her roommate's shitty dog. To comfort herself, she considers getting a treat, but thinks against it when she remembers that matcha lattes cost $15 and they taste like milky dirt. She knows that she needs to buy groceries this week, and so the woman resolves to go home, but notices that her gas tank is low. She goes to put gas in the car, but the pump stops at $27.86 because that's all that she has in her checking account. The woman, bereft and reeling, sinks into the driver's seat. "Well," she thinks, her head in her hands, "at least I don't have Taylor Swift's job. I just couldn't imagine."
Fame is somewhat of a choice. If at any moment Taylor feels that she is misunderstood, misconstrued, or overwhelmed by public opinion, she can LEAVE the public eye - Lord knows she has the retirement fund and residuals to do so. In "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart", the TTPD song about meeting the demands of your career-zenith mega-tour while in the relationship trenches, Taylor ends the song by rambling,

"You know you're good when you can even do it with a broken heart...you know you're good...and I'm good, cause I'm miserable, and no one even knows!...try and come for my job."

Yeah, obviously we wouldn't know, you recently passed the billionaire threshold and are the most famous and in-demand performer in the world right now. Taylor Swift makes an estimated $10 to $13 million dollars A NIGHT on the Eras Tour. Furthermore, the Eras Tour movie grossed $261.6 million globally, (which, as the producer, Taylor takes home 57% of the ticket sales) not counting the streaming revenue from Amazon Prime Video and the estimated $75 million deal that Disney paid to have it on Disney+. We're not even considering the income from cheap plastic popcorn buckets and drink cups plastered with colored squares in her Era-specific likeness.
It's funny. Taylor Swift often said that being famous wasn't hard, that she "isn't complaining". I'm sure it is difficult to always have to present in a good mood, else you'll end up misrepresented in the media, and I'm sure it's invasive to virtually have no privacy or semblance of anonymity. Still, Taylor Swift shows up each night of tour and performs. For a majority of her career, she has penned her sad songs while on the road. Most of "Red", her breakup album, was written in the thick of the Speak Now World tour. Now, some Swifties say they almost "feel bad" for attending the Eras Tour with Swift's revelations in this song, that they have had a 'dimmed experience' upon hearing Taylor's misery whilst performing. Despite the fact that Taylor said that "this was the happiest she's ever been" at Gilette Stadium in May, the lyrics "boohoo, woe is me, smile for the cameras and make the fans happy!!!" are jarring for Eras attendees.
While Taylor Swift was making double-digit millions a night in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and feeling miserable, Ana Clara Benevides Machado passed away due to heat exposure. The concert promoters, Time For Fun, are now the subject of a criminal investigation due to their lack of adequate hydration and safety. Taylor Swift cancelled the Sunday show that was to follow and offered VIP tent tickets to Benevides Marchado's family, which was a kind gesture, but perhaps incongruous to the incident of which they were offered as consolation. Everyone grieves differently, of course, but I'm not sure attending the very show at the very same venue that my daughter or sister passed away in two days prior, where the singer CONTINUED the show despite her death, would be healthy for closure.
There was no female rage at the show as Swift never saw Benevides Machado pass out. There was no female rage towards the disregard for fans as humans while Swift elected to proceed with her Brazil tour dates despite the country being in historic heatwaves (at risk of overheatting herself). If Taylor Swift was so shaken by touring with a broken heart or a fan's passing, she wouldn't have added an additional North American leg of Eras just two months after the Matty breakup. She's brokenhearted but willing to mend the cracks with your money and move onward with her worldwide female rage induced pillaging.
No matter what happens, even if you die at a Taylor Swift concert, Taylor collects a big fat check and flies away. She doesn't know you as anything other than a conversion rate or earning potential despite what her nearly 20-year long parasocial relationship with fans might otherwise indicate. She knows that, while some Swifties are without disposable income, they feel obligated to spend on a "48 Hours Only!" exclusive vinyl variant instead of necessities because they are so entrenched in Taylor Swift's intoxicating celebrity, they'll prioritize materialistic fandom before their needs. This is good enough for her because this means she can expand her real estate portfolio and finance her cat's lavish lifestyles. They're worth an estimated $100 million dollars. Her three cats could pool their net worth and solve world hunger.
While you and I might be denied bereavement leave and barely surviving the current political and economic climate, Taylor Swift has to, instead of gets to, perform for stadiums at full attendance for three nights in a row across the globe. You and I might be replaced by AI at our longtime jobs, but Taylor Swift is threatened with losing more and more money each time you listen to a "Stolen Version" of her songs. If we don't buy every variant of all of her albums, then who is going to pay for the fucking cats?
It is tone deaf to spend as she spends and lives as she lives in this economy, but this is her reality. She was able to donate $100,000 to all of her tour truck drivers, and that's wonderful, but it leads me to wonder about the ethos of the 2020s where one woman can hoard such life-changing amounts of money. Remember in 2014 when she gave a fan $90 ($120 in today's money) to get Chipotle because she had no fucking clue how much it cost? This is a 34-year-old woman who is increasingly out of touch with the reality for working class people and women in general. Normal everyday adults must wake up and go to their thankless jobs, and yet Taylor Swift, despite all her riches, incessantly references the lows of her life and career as a public figure and entertainer to farm sympathy and drive sales. And still, the corporate women have latched onto "I cry a lot, but I am so productive! It's an art!" as their cubicle battle cry.
Do you think that, from up in her private jet, Taylor Swift gazes at the world through her poetic, tortured eyes, and thinks, "All the little people, in their cars, walking, going about their lives...all those girls that don't support girls...do they know that I've made an album about female rage?"

Conclusion/TLDR

Thank you for reading. I would love to hear your critical insights towards this entire ordeal: TTPD, the trademark, the implications of it all.
TLDR: Taylor Swift is a bad feminist and is delusional to think that the TTPD eras set exemplifies female rage at women's injustice.

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Hey everyone, amidst the thousands of rants, in light of Nick's movement, I think it's time for me to say something, maybe no one cares, I don't have a major platform to get my word out, but I still think that it's good to get these things out here and perhaps the best thing all of this can do is change the way we perceive the game as a player base. This will be long, so those of you willing to, bear with me.
Let me tell you something from a point of view of someone who loved the game for a long time. We're a bunch of very versatile people from all over the place and maybe it can also teach us a lesson or two. On one hand, you have kids who play it for the same reason I played it some good 15 years ago, and you've got us, the older players, who loved the game for what it was growing up because it was the best football themed game out there in many aspects, although FIFA entries weren't the only good thing about that era (shoutout to PES 2006 and 2010). It's a game that I used to enjoy because I love football as a sport, I used to play it basically on a professional level, this is the best "active" form for me to engage with the game. I'm probably too stupid for Football Manager though I believe it's only a matter of watchin a few videos to get into it and understand the in-depth mechanics. I always tried playing it and got lost in the menus within 5 minutes. But for what it's worth, I understood FIFA, I understood FUT and the shell of what it once was, the grind was fun to me, using players from past and present that I like, well, until it all got burned to the fucking ground within a year. I was never an Elite div or Rank 1 or even Rank 2 player. But I had certain results, I would get 9 to 11 wins most of the time and with enough free time I could always climb to atleast div 2 in Rivals. Sure, many of you are better and I realize that, but it's not about that. To me it was always about getting better at the game for myself, on my own terms, there would be some progression to it and getting better throughout the years always made me happy. Adult life is adult life and it's very individual, some of us have more free time on our hands, others don't. In my case, I barely have time to do my daily play matches, some SBCs and play Champs on the weekend because of work.
But the question is - how can I consistently enjoy the game if:

• a) every single thing and tactic that I figure out, gets nerfed within a few months - and I'm not talking about ratty shit, I'm talking things like finesse shots, trivelas, some useful passes, just gameplay stuff
  
• b) they don't do shit to fix broken things in-game, like OP cutbacks, I came to peace with them, but still, it's too OP, or doing things to somehow nerf or balance situations when people pass between the GK and CB from the 70th minute onwards. Idk how many of you were around when they banned Kurt, but they pulled up a whole statement about policies regarding in-game toxicity for building towards a fun experience for everyone, yet they don't do shit with the game itself.
  
• c) the game itself wants you to feel bad about your gameplay and even tries to pass off DDA as skill issue. Of course, at times it really comes down to your skills, but how often do you hear the commentators praise you? At times even when you're leading, they keep repeating how it's a matter of time until you concede an equalizer. You know those graphics on the pitch itself? The win probability stuff. It shows up only when you're losing, even if you are let's say one goal behind and it's the 65th minute, they'll show you a whole statistic all over the fucking pitch, telling you that you have a 2% chance to win the game. To demoralize you. To make you feel like you need to keep upgrading and upgrading and upgrading and once you run out of fodder and luck, to go dump your money into store packs. And even that doesn't help you, the pack weight is shit, you just get quick fodder for unreasonable money, and the theories that spending money on the game improves your gameplay, it's all bogus. To put it simple, if you achieve something, you will not see anything positive. No congratulations screen, just infographics, but when you do something bad, God forbid, you will get fact-bombed about how shit you are. From a psychological point of view, this game is toxic to it's core and it's very, very, very unhealthy for one's mental health. If you're an adult, trying to relax after tons of stressful shit in your daily life, this is not the place for proverbial relaxation. If you're a kid who's going through your teen years, those years are stressful for many reasons and once again, this cannot possibly help you. I hold no grudge towards many players as I am aware that many players are very young (less than 18) and perhaps that generation is simply like that and there's nothing we can do about it. I'm talking only about FUT, I believe that Pro Clubs are probably way more lighthearted and fun and I treat Career Mode which has been abandoned, as a separate game basically.
  
• d) Obvious gambling issues. Enough has been said. I am one of the minority in thinking that there is nothing wrong with buying a pack here or there if you're an adult and if it doesn't impact serious aspects of your life. If you earn money, it's entirely up to you how you spend it. Some people like fine dining and dump money on food. Some people collect stuff and dump money on collectibles. Some people overspend to impress their s/o. So, in theory, there is nothing wrong with spending money on or within a game as a concept. But what is wrong is how it works in this game in particular. You get new packs over and over again, the store is full of things to spend money on, but the core game itself is neglected gameplay-wise. Content is okay, SBCs are okay, with exchanges and stuff, it's really good actually. I am one of those who actually enjoy both the menus and the gameplay itself, equally. All of it is a part of the experience. But you have really bad things going on with your games and the only thing that you do as a dev is dump packs? And even those packs, the pack weight is absolute shit, it's turned into a casino, a slot machine, because it's all rigged towards you ending on a loss, thus having the psychological effect of you not getting your dopamine shot of packing something nice, often you're not in a situation to buy another one, so this will linger in the back of your head, that you didn't complete the process and you need to see if next time you'll finally get something good. Or, you bought it with coins and now you lost a good amount of coins, so you think of buying the next one with FP, or even worse, you can afford it and you just successfully gave them twice the intended amount of money. This is a serious, self-destructive behavioral pattern, take it from someone who has some education in a field very close to all of that. Teach children that and you can legitimately ruin their lives. Say, if you knew what you're getting, exactly what, or atleast if you knew that there is a smaller pool of what you can pack, or guaranteed something for a symbolic amount of money, I'd say it is what it is, since we truly do live in an era full of microtransactions and that's just something that's a part of online gaming nowadays. The bad part is overspending on something that will just not reward you anyhow or grant you any sort of benefit. Even games with battle passes have better options in this regard. You're getting better progression in exchange for a symbolic amount of money.
  
• e) The game itself doesn't work properly! You're getting DNFs left and right, you can't even navigate through SBCs and your club without the game freezing multiple times. EA keeps fucking up with "unintended rewards" first it was Messi, I did the SBC, got nothing, life goes on. Several times I had issues where objectives didn't count, whatever, life goes on, it's a game. Or some rewards got bugged and fucked me over multiple times, whatever, life goes on. This most recent L1 red pick stuff, that was honestly the last straw, not even the fact that I didn't get them simply because I have a life and don't camp in front of my console each Friday to sweat my ass off for the very start of the Champs Finals, but because they finally spilled the beans, told us we were never supposed to get good cards out of it with a decent percentage and on top of that, they ruined the small amount of fun I had playing with Paletools between meetings at work (by that I mean killing the droprate and nerfing pack weight).
  

The whole situation is very stupid, because there is no viable alternative in terms of football games, and frankly, playing FIFA is a habit and something I've been doing for one half of my life. It's tough for me to get invested into an online competitive game, though I used to play League, Overwatch, stuff like that, but those games became shit over the years as well. That's why, though I'm only one of way too many, from my point of view, my actions bear some value, because as of today, I just don't want to feel like shit because of a game anymore atleast on a weekly basis. As things stand, dumping my time into this game is simply pointless. If I want to play Weekend League, I'll get shat on by the servers, or the gameplay will be horrendous and my cards will feel like freezers getting dragged across the pitch by a rope. Cards with great finishing, will feel like bronze cards, whatever. We're not supposed to get good rewards, and the game will call us out for being "bad" when we get DDAd. At this point, there is nothing positive about it. I will perhaps return for Futties, not that anyone cares, but building fun cards is kinda fun and good, so I'm looking forward to that. Otherwise, I will return only if all of this actually changes something. If the assholes from EA release a statement and actually change something, then I will return earlier, and even then, I'm not giving them a single euro this year. And maybe, for the first time in way too many years, I won't even preorder, maybe I'll play it later on, if it turns out to be better and different. Other than that... there's no point playing if the game is like this. I'm done with feeling negative emotions because of a game designed to gaslight and manipulate us into feeling like shit.
Sorry for the long post, I guess I just felt like I needed to tell someone.

The global inflation trend
Recent data shows inflation slowing slightly in major economies. Though the downtrends of inflation seem to emerge in areas like the US, it still remains above the target of 2% set by central banks. According to the IMF, global inflation rate is forecast to 5.9% in 2024 and 4.5% in 2025. Even as it declines steadily, consistent high inflation globally remains a primary concern for the economic and market outlook.
How does it impact investors?
As for Investors, they are usually not huge fans of inflation since high inflation shrinks the buying power of savings and assets. Your house and real estate holdings become less valuable. The bonds you’re holding are less favorable. As high inflation continues, wealth preservation is a real thing and investors should take it seriously. Without proper management, pensions and long-term savings plans also face inflation risk. That’s why finding investments that outpace inflation has become critical for protecting your wealth.
How to protect and increase your wealth against inflation
Several ways of investments can inspire investors to adjust their portfolios and generate returns against inflation.
· Contracts for difference (CFDs) trading: CFDs allow investors to profit from price movement without owning the underlying assets. Investors with high-risk tolerance can profit whether markets rise or fall and potentially make significant returns during inflation.
· High-yield savings accounts: Earn higher interest than traditional accounts by exploring different options and finding the best rates.
· Reallocate bonds: During high inflation, readjust bond holdings to equities. For example, 35% of the S&P 500 is in tech and communication sectors, which are capital-light businesses. Generally, they tend to outperform during high inflation.
· Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS): TIPS are a type of bond designed to adjust in value based on inflation so returns keep pace with rising prices.
· Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs): REITs offer higher yields than bonds and growing income streams through rents and leases. Unlike real estate, REITs are more liquid investments and normally their prices are resistant to inflation.
For safe, secure CFD trading, JRFX can be one of the options among investors. Founded in 2010, JRFX is a regulated online broker offering a wide range of trading assets and advanced trading tools. With 0 commission fee, competitive spreads, and 24/7 customer support, it empowers investors to explore their potential gains and provides an effortless trading experience. The transparency, the ability to deposit with $1, and the accessibility via desktop and mobile app make it one of the best user-friendly trading platforms.


Trading CFDs carries a degree of risk, and it may not be suitable for all investors. It is essential to conduct thorough research, seek professional advice, and understand the risks involved before engaging in any investment activity.

Gonna try and make this short. I was an avid COD player starting around 2010-2011. I played every release leading up to about 2017 when my PS4 bit the dust and i just thought of using my time doing other things. fast forward to xmas this past year my lady and i decide to buy a ps5, shortly after the new mw3 remaster came out and i purchased that. i do not play the campaign ever i only play multiplayer, more specifically i basically only play TDM or hardcore TDM. My kdr MAY be at 1.00 but honestly its probably is lower. i can get in a match and go 3-24 easily depnding on the map lol, im a middle aged man. im out here trying to have guy time not go pro.
In april i noticed i had random friends on my friends list that were in chinese/japanese characters, at first i was like how did those get there, but then i thought maybe someone switched the name on their account from my old friends from my playing days. to be safe i deleted the old friends outside of who i play with currently, including the strange accounts.
Well last week i try to log on and i do not get online. so I assume the serve it down, but after 3 days still not connecting. this lead me to investigate. to which i find i have been banned from MW3, Warzone, and MW2. I appealed it, trying to explain the situation withint the 1000 character account but that did not work and now i have no more appeals. I aslo noticed my activision account was connected to a random steam account. i have no idea what steam is, as i am a middle aged man as i have said. activision has not seemed to care.
Oddly enough i went to vent on twitter and to my surprise hundred of bots came trying to get me to pay this account or that account to regain my account back. which im definitely not doing that. I assume that is a hustle for hackers.
My question is, is there anything i can do or anyone i can actually contact outside of the appeal form? LIke an email or someone to actually explain the situation and not rely on AI to make a decision on the status of my long running account? I literally just purchased the 420 cheech and chong bundle too.
I have screen shots and more via my facebook post i made last week about the situation that shows the freidn requests and my appeal band. The other interesting this is i stopped getting activision emails, so i was unaware of the punishment until i researched it.
https://www.facebook.com/iamlurk/posts/10161545608546473
twitter links with the bots trying to scam me:
https://twitter.com/lurkcity/status/1788056855865876968
https://twitter.com/lurkcity/status/1788071385069228455/
twitter.com/lurkcity/status/1788209225916637622

Isa akong batang laking mahirap. All the kinds of bullying naranasan kona and kahit I am on my adult stage na bakat na bakat padin sa ala ala ko kung ano ang mga napagdaanan ko during my years of schooling.
During my elementary days way back mga 2004-2010, baon ko 2 pesos a day pero hindi pa araw araw may baon. Minsan nag aabot sila mama at papa ng 5 pesos ng monday and that's it for the whole week. I am too innocent in those time kasi Im proud to say na never ako nag cocomplain to my parents regarding that,siguro dahil alam kong wala din naman magbabago if I ask them kasi I know na walang wala din naman talaga sila. Minsan yung mga kaklasmayt ko pa noon tinatawanan ako pag tinutulog ko lang ng recess time namin kahit yung tiyan ko tumutunog sa gutom, while them enjoying their meals and have money on their hands to show off. They don't wanna be friend with me either kasi di ako nakakasabay sa kung anong meron sila kaya ako yung typical na batang PAPASOK sa skul ,UUPO,TAHIMIK at magsasalita lang pag kinakausap. Ang tanging alam ko lang non is disiplinado ako ng mga magulang ko kaya naman never ako nanlimos ng kahit ano or nainvolve sa gulo or na guidance sa skul, if my conflict man non sakin at sa klasmayt ko, umiiwas nalang ako at mananahimik kasi takot akong magkamali eventhough sinasabihan na nila ako "DUWAG" "LAMPA" etc.... One time may pinapa project si teacher sakin that requires money to buy it. Sinabi ko din naman kila mama pero they can't provide so pagpasok ko ng umaga sa skul, sobrang kabado ako kasi lahat sila may maipapasang project and ako lang wala. Then when my name called by our teacher sinabi ko yung totoo but the teacher just say "Baka gusto ako pa magprovide para sayo" sabay tawa. Until then naging hobby na nya akong pagtawanan infront of his co teachers at sa mga students at ako lagi inuutusan taga bunot ng puting buhok nya.🤣 well nakakatawa nalang sya sakin now pag naaalala ko
Fast forward... 2011 Highschool days... I enter highschool like elem na walang wala din. All my things are old, from bag to notebooks, yung lapis ko parang nasa 3 inches nalang ang haba kasi di ko napapalitan. Even my slippers have butas na which is naging reason ng bullying din. Yung ibang klasmayts ko laging kinukwestyon bakit daw ganun di ako mabilhan ng mga magulang ko pero di ko sila sinasagot. Just like elem days, ako yung tipo ng stujanteng tahimik lang sa upuan, kaya ang tingin ng guro namin sakin "MABAIT" pero may mga guro padin na hindi talaga ako nagugustuhan dahil sa bagay na wala ako na meron madalas mga klasmayts ko. Malayo ang skul namin sa mga bahay namin kaya nagbabaon kami ng pang lunch namin. Madalas baon ko araw araw is itlog,pancit canton na isang piraso tapos ginagawa kong pang recess at lunch na yun. Even that thing I was questioned lagi by my klasmayts but I don't answer them. I was so lonely nun kasi wala naman gustong makipagkaibigan sakin, even if may groupings, I was left alone and doing my activity alone. If you guys are wondering how's my marks in school? I was a regular student and never ako na fail sa subject ko kasi yun din habilin ng magulang ko sakin. I was so obedient to my parents even those times na pinag aabsent nila ako para magtrabaho sa bukid at para may baon ako sa school.Then the next day, I will be punished in school for being absent without telling them my reasons. I know how hard my life is kaya nangangako ako sa sarili ko na I have to finish my studies kahit anong mangyari. There are some teachers who love humiliating me in front of many students for the things I have, such meron daw ako shoes na old pero walang socks, butas ang pantalon, and ngilaw na ngilaw ang puting uniporme signs of it being old enough. One thing I am struggling about is yung yellow pad paper, yun kasi gamit namin ng highschool and most of them have it tapos ako pag humihingi ako ayaw din naman ako bigyan, kaya ang ending I'm using notebooks as alternative for it. My teacher would question it again pero same thing, my silence is my response. In those years, teachers are allowed to beat students as sign of disiplina and I was beaten as a punishments for not providing projects and unattended classes dahil sa need ko kumita ng pera para may pambaon. Pag binabalikan ko siya, awang awa ako sa sarili ko. And those people who treated me that bad, I still remember them but I forgave them. Masakit lang pag naaalala ko😭 I just can't imagine na nalagpasan ko siya na ako lang magisa at walang nasandalan even my parents. All those bullying I have received from my society, inako ko lang magisa yun at none from my siblings and parents knows about it.
Fast forward...2015- 2019 College... This one is the most legit na sobrang hirap. Pero bago pa mag umpisa ang semester nun I confront my self na kahit anong mangyari " I have to be a regular students,walang bibitiw at wag na wag babagsak sa kahit anong subjects
1st -2nd year college ko, I tried everything I can, to provide for my own tuition fees and allowances. Yes nagbibigay sila mama at papa pero hindi kasya, minsan 150- 200 lang kaya nila iabot for a week allowance, ang bording house ko laging delayed ang bayad, and my tuition is always on hold kaya laging suki ako ng special exam. Pinasok ko mag work as taga dilig ng halaman and care taker ng isang bar and grill for the night and study in the morning. I have no choice but to do it cause ayokong mag stop sa pagaaral. Kaya naman pag sumasahod ako sa part time ko, binibili ko ng mga sapatos sa shoppee and then I resell it on facebook market online around the city. After my class ng afternoon dun ko sila minimeet up sa city and there I earned money. Tho, of all the efforts and hardships na ginagawa ko still my studies is my top priority. I was so payat sa sobrang pagod, puyat at stress.lagi pa akong nag nose bleeding and I was so worried for my health pero tuloy ang laban. Again, none from my siblings and parents knows about it. I kept it all alone and di din naman sila nag tatanong kasi they thought I am doing fine dahil wala din naman silang narerecieved na reklamo sakin. BULLYING? ofcourse di padin ako nakaligtas jan, I was called "EWW ANG ITIM, MUKHANG MATANDA kasi di nakakapag ahit ng balbas at nakapagpagupit" minsan sasabihin pa nila "Huy kumain ka naman para ka nang kalansay" without knowing my whole story. One time I cried inside the confort room kasi I couldn't help myself na mainggit sa mga classmates ko nun na after class they will be having a talk about san sila mag lulunch if sa Jollibee ba, mcdo or sangyup. Samantalang ako, after class I was so busy meeting people with their orders. Minsan nadadaanan ko pa sila sa fast food having a good time while ako may bitbit na malaking basket puno ng sapatos na idedeliver.🙂 If my mandatory na event sa skul na need attendan, I used to ask people I don't know if may pwede ba akong mahihiraman ng susuotin tapos sasabihin nila try nila hanapan ako pero they then laugh at me afterwards. I feel so ashamed of doing it but I have to. So ayun na nga iniignore ko lang yung mga moment na tinatawanan ako sa looks ko, sa mga bagay na wala ako na meron sila. Basta focused ako sa acads ko nun at sa pagkita ng pera.
During my 3rd yr college. Yung part time kong work nagsara so I was forced to stop working with them na. And so yung pagbebenta ko ng sapatos nalang ginagawa ko. I was so lost that time kasi diko alam ako gagawin ko. Malaking tulong yun sakin lalo na 2yrs nalang kailangan kong tapusin sa pagaaral at mas malaki ang expenses ko na.Isang araw papasok ako ng gate sa skul and there are posters around our campus about scholarships and yung minimum qualified average. I have know idea if abot ba ng average ko dun sa offer ng scholars. so I run towards our registrar to request for a certificate of my grades. My world just stop for a while and I'm in tears kasi naabot nga. 86.04 yung average ko and the asking is 85.0.lang. moving forward, I got the scholarship and it helps me with my tuition fees. Kaya ang pinoproblema ko nalang non is bording house ko. Until meron na namang ibang offered na scholarships sa city so kahit sobrang haba ng pila,tiniis ko kasi I know it will save me. Luckily God is so good to me kaya I got them. That's why sa huling taon na pagaaral bago grumaduate, everything goes well and smooth because of those 3 scholarships. I Gave up selling shoes and focus sa exams nalang until I manage to graduate.....
July 2019.... FINALLY GRADUATED AND A CERTIFIED DEGREE HOLDER OF PSYCHOLOGY....
2024 update about me? I am now in a good path, I took a career that is relevant to my degree and still want exploring more things...

SO and I have been together for 14 years. Engaged, but never married (ala Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn). We are both in our mid-50's and have a child each from a previous marriage.During our time together, we have had some pretty good blow-ups. Most notably was one in 2013 (we started dating in 2010) when we were at his house in a different state, we got into an argument and he literally kicked me out with no where to go. I had to get an earlier flight back home. We ended up getting back together and throughout the years have had some fights, but that one has stayed with me.
Fast forward to January 2023 and we had another huge blowup. This time he completely moved out and to another state 5 hours away. Among other things, I wasn't making him happy because I had stopped sending him love letters. He said I stole money from him (I didn't -- he offered to pay off a $3k credit card for me and said I never paid him back which means I stole from him). I never asked for the money. He OFFERED and then turned the whole thing around. He said I didn't bring anything to the table. Then he got mad at me because he went back and read very old Yelp reviews (from before we even knew each other) where I was clearly dating someone else based on my review. One was a review for a hotel and the other was for a waxing appointment. He said I should have basically deleted everything from my past that didn't have to do with him and what kind of person am I to even put that stuff out on the internet to begin with. During that argument, I ended up deleting my entire Yelp profile at his request.
Over the last 18 months, we have tried working on things. He still lives in another state. His biggest thing is he needs the ooey, gooey love letters like I used to write to him in the beginning of our relationship. But for whatever reason, those things just don't come naturally to me anymore. I do love him (and tell him so), but I am not the super gushy person I was 10+ years ago. And he says he NEEDS that to be happy. He needs me to tell him regularly how much I love him, how great he is, how I want to spend forever with him. In my head, all of that is assumed. We are together. We talk about future things, but I don't gush.
He, on the other hand, is overly over-the-top with compliments. So much that it sometimes makes me uncomfortable.When I say something nice to someone or do something nice for him, I want it to come from my heart. I don't or say things because I have to, but it seems like this is the path we are heading now. I do love him. He has trust issues with me even though I've never done anything to create those issues. We are not friends on any social media (never have been - he's not an online kind of guy) and he will occasionally ask me, "So, who is Jim Smith? I see that you're friends on FB/Insta/etc. How do you know him? Have you ever dated him?" This has happened 3 times in the last few months and it's frustrating for me. He's free to ask me whatever he wants because I am not hiding anything, but it doesn't feel good to not be trusted when I KNOW I've not done anything for him to feel that way.
I feel like I am being a jerk for not giving him what he wants (the ooey-gooey love letters), but I just can't bring myself to do it because it feels so forced. Aside from telling him that I love him, I do other little things to show I care like buying him his favorite foods or sending him surprise treats in the mail (since we live a few hours apart).
TL;DR: For those that have been together over 10 years, do you still regularly tell your significant how wonderful they are?

Hi all- I have checked online but I can't seem to find what I am looking for so maybe it does not exist. In Bremen, is there a weekly or monthly craft market to buy/sell handmade goods? Handmade soaps, handknit mittens/hats, jewelry and the like.
Sorry that this is in English, my German is only at A2 as I am learning. All my Google searches end up with lots of recommendations for craft beer but that is not what I am after. haha.
Thanks in advance.

TLDR: med student/landscape photographer seeking low key advice for a car in 3-5 years - would like it to be hybrid, AWD/4WD, have lane assist, and of course, be reliable. Looks are a plus :)
So I'm a second year medical student that already has quite a nice second hand used car owned by my parents (2010 Toyota Corolla LE: https://images.app.goo.gl/BBtNQ8kYvxRbUMNn9). It gets me from A to B very comfortably, and even has Bluetooth (I realize how antiquated that sounds). While it is still going strong at 130K, I obviously want to EVENTUALLY get a car of my own in like 3-5 years. I thought it's never too early to test the waters, ask questions, and learn a few things about buying a car.
Mandatory:

• Great mileage and flexibility (hybrid)
• Maneuverability and safety for light off road photography trips (4WD/AWD)
• Comfortable for long distances (superior lane assist, Bluetooth, infotainment)
• Comfortably fit me at 6 ft but not too big/bulky (medium size sedan - SUV)
• Reliable, easy to maintain (probably means Toyota, Honda, although I'm hearing nice stuff about Hyundai and Kia lately)

Ideal:

• Northern Ohio tends to make your butt cold (heated seats, remote start)
• Semi-sporty look, variety of color options 😬

Cars that have peaked my interest so far:

• Toyota: Corolla, Camry, Cross, Venza
• Honda: Accord, Civic, CRV,
• Hyundai: Sonata, Elantra, Tucson
• Kia: Sportage

Also feel free to share your personal tips as far as dealerships, online shopping, used vs new, etc goes.
Thanks in advance!!

DISCLAIMER: I'd like to note that I do not consider myself an expert on many of the topics he talks about or even economics in general but a lot of what I'm about to say is pretty easily verifiable and basic, and I'll try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so. Given my lack of expertise, none of what I say here should be considered as the final authority on these topics, it's a reddit post for fucks sake, I encourage everyone to search up the relevant data and information on the topics they are interested in or claims they find dubious. It's really not that hard and all the links and data I'm gonna cite here took me less than five minutes to find for each piece of information. If you're not familiar with where to find this data it might take you longer but I promise that anyone with access to the internet can do the same thing I'm doing. Finally, for those looking for some opinionless, academic argument, that's not what this is, this is gonna sound like a rant because it is, I'm posting this for nothing more than my own satisfaction, take from it what you will.
Ok I'm writing this after I finished the whole thing and I said that I'd try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so and the basically entire second half of this is my opinion and I don't make that very clear so sorry about that.
Honestly I'd love to be wrong because I really do think that younger people are at a disadvantage compared to previous generations at the same age but the arguments he makes and the data he uses throughout his talk just sound like such bullshit to me.
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott\_galloway\_how\_the\_us\_is\_destroying\_young\_people\_s\_future?
https://www.profgalloway.com/war-on-the-young/
Scott Galloway recently did a Ted talk titled "How the US is destroying young people's future", as well as an accompanying blog post. He's made some fair points about how young people have been put at an inherent disadvantage and that they have it harder than previous generations. That's most likely true and I personally support that point of view, but the a lot data and numbers he makes this argument with seem to be cherry picked, misleading, or just straight up wrong. So let's break his talk down. u/JustTaxLandLol made a pretty good post about him comparing median wages to the S&P500 (https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott\_galloway\_compares\_median\_wage\_to\_sp500/) but I think that Galloway's mistakes are much more comprehensive than just that particular slide.
The first slide with data makes a claim about how pre-tax income, adjusted for inflation, has decreased across generations from grandparents to parents to kids, and that cost of public colleges and home prices have increased significantly across generations too. First of all, categorising generations by whether they have children or grandchildren is kinda nuts. That's a very wide, overlapping, range of ages. If he has actually fixed age ranges for each generation that don't overlap and just made these categorisations for the sake of understandability to a nonacademic audience, I still think that's the wrong choice but fine. However, his claim that real income has decreased across generations is weak at best. This working paper (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2024007pap.pdf) from the Fed Reserve was published February 2024, and from the figures that start at page 35, shows that by almost every categorisation they could think of, GenZ earns more at the same age than every previous generation before them. There's some conflict here with Raj Chetty's work but I don't have the time or knowledge to reconcile the two perspectives but at best, the pre-tax income numbers Galloway presents are questionable at best. Furthermore, he doesn't provide anyone a chance at even checking the sources he gets this information from. Not once in his entire talk does he cite a single source. He couldn't even have some tiny text at the bottom of his tables or diagrams saying what organisation he got this data from. Ok so that crossed out bit is wrong, he does have sources they're just very very faint and you can see them if you squint hard enough at the bottom left corner of his graphs. But the source he gives for this slide is a joke. Here's the link https://www.profgalloway.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Table-01.png
His "source" is his own analysis. Ok so by his analysis, the average cost of public college is 56000*0.43 = 24080. I'm gonna use numbers from this US News page (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/paying-for-college-infographic), which might not be the most reliable source in the world, but it's probably somewhere in the ballpark. So according to US News, average tuition for the 2023-2024 school year for out of state students going to a public school is 23,630 and 10,662 for in state students. If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, the only conclusion I can draw is that Galloway has cherry-picked his data by only including the cost for out of state students in his analysis. First of all, public schools in the US are there to provide affordable access to higher education FOR RESIDENTS OF ITS STATE. Using only out of state numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Secondly, even if he used only the in state numbers, 10662/56000 is approximately equal to 19%. So if I use his very very questionable pre-tax income numbers, cost of public college for in state students has still increased across his categorisation of generations. It's not like his point would have been invalidated if he had used the in-state numbers, a trend of tuition increasing as a percentage of real income across multiple generations is still very bad. This is my opinion but I guess that he just wanted to find a nice shocking number. I didn't catch this but in their post, u/JustTaxLandLol notes that later on Galloway says "real median income from labor is up 40% since 1974" so he's also contradicting himself in the same talk.
I couldn't be bothered to look into the house price to income column he has so I don't have any comments on that.
His next slide is a point about how the percentage of 30 year olds earning more than their parents did at 30 has been decreasing very significantly over time. This is from a paper in 2016 by Raj Chetty (link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617). I've seen some counterarguments about the methods used in the paper but there are counterarguments for basically every inequality paper in existence so I'd take them with a grain of salt. Those points are more complex than the scope of this post and I lack the expertise to be making them anyways so I believe this slide. I'll admit that Galloway makes a good argument for this slide.
Right after this slide he says "As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary, righteous movement...". He supports this with data on the percentage of US adults who feel "extremely proud" to be American.
Before I talk about the data on this slide, I'd like to be a little anal about things and pick apart his wording and causal claims he makes. When Galloway says "as a result" he's making a causal claim about the relationship between a young person's earning ability and their national pride. Leaving aside the econometric issues of making random causal claims, this is a ridiculous marginalisation of all the other critically important issues in the US. It seems pretty clear to me that reduced national pride amongst younger individuals is a combination of a lack of social mobility (or however you want to word your version of the fading American dream), the continued existence of systematic racism and sexism, US response to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, bodily autonomy (abortion), and many other issues. Not to say that the economic disadvantages of young people doesn't play a role in causing this lack of national pride but come on. He also says "this creates an incendiary righteous movement...". Ok if the "as a result" from the last sentence could be interpreted as the economic disadvantages of young people play some part in their dissatisfaction with the government, it should be obvious to anyone not living under a rock that many of the political conflicts and movements that have erupted in the US over the past few years have little, if anything, to do with earning ability. In the slide after the poll data he shows three photos, one of a MeToo protest, one of a BLM protest, and another of a pro-Palestine protest. I can only interpret this as him making the claim that the younger generations economic difficulties are causally linked to those movements, which is totally bananas.
Now lets talk about the data. He got this from the Gallup polls (link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394202/record-low-extremely-proud-american.aspx, there's a link to download the pdf with the poll numbers at the end of this article). There are 5 options for the Gallup poll: "Extremely proud"; "Very proud"; "Moderately proud"; "Only a little proud"; or "Not at all proud". So Galloway is cherry-picking again. To be fair, it's true that even including the rest of the answers, a quick glance at the data suggests (very strongly) that young people are less proud than older people. There are also more young people who choose "Not at all proud" (11% for 18-34 and 1% for 55+). Though there is probably some argument to be made about whether "extreme" pride is a good thing. Furthermore, "pretty good" and "very good" do not reflect the extremity of choosing, well, the most extreme option.
As an introduction to his next slide he says that "a decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage". I've never heard of this before and am very very skeptical but I'm willing to attribute this to my own ignorance so I'll leave that sentence alone. So on this slide there's a graph with two lines, one is minimum wage across time adjusted for inflation, the other is whats supposed to be minimum wage if adjusted for productivity (also adjusted to inflation I assume). Galloway got this data form the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/), which shows that this gap between productivity began around 1979. This was when Carter was president and right before the Reagan administration. Those who know about the economic history of this time probably won't be surprised since a lot of the policies of this time were rather inegalitarian and heavily favoured the wealthy. I agree that many of the policies of the time contributed heavily to the inequality America faces today and though I haven't read any studies about how this affects minimum wage workers, I believe that minimum wage workers or low income workers in general today have significantly lower purchasing power relative to a few decades ago.
What I have a problem with here is the idea that productivity and minimum wage should increase in tandem. According to the EPI, "Productivity measures how much total economywide income is generated (i.e., for workers, business owners, landlords, and everybody else together) in an average hour of work" and "pay is defined as the average compensation (wages and benefits) of production and nonsupervisory workers. The pay for this group is one appropriate benchmark for 'typical worker pay' because production and nonsupervisory workers have made up roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce over the entire period shown in the figure and because the data for production and nonsupervisory workers exclude extremely highly paid managerial workers like CEOs and other corporate executives". Before I try to break down my complaints with the measures used, my immediate reaction when I saw this was that it seems rather stupid to compare the relationship between average productivity and minimum wage in an industrial economy against the same relationship in a service oriented one. There are just more jobs now that let you make an impact on the economy far beyond what you are paid and it is so so difficult to quantify this change. Using a similar argument, I really have no clue how macro people make models or do estimates for things like productivity but I'm quite skeptical about the reliability of using such a measure of productivity because of the increased prevalence of second, third, or n-th order effects that would be present in a measure of something like total gdp but pretty much impossible to identify for any employer. For those who want to read more about this difference between productivity and compensation I think this is the most relevant paper from EPI (https://files.epi.org/2015/understanding-productivity-pay-divergence-final.pdf). There are some points I'm not satisfied with in this paper like them attributing the entirety of the difference between median hourly compensation to average consumer hourly compensation but that would take more time than I want to spend on this.
Now we're still on the same slide. Galloway says "we've kept it [minimum wage] purposely pretty low" twice in three sentences. Now he's suggesting that there's some collective out there that has the political power and desire to keep minimum wage low. By "we" I think he means to suggest that the old-timers have banded together to screw the young people over. Ok buddy. I'm stepping outside the bounds of what's considered strictly economics here a little but pinning the injustices of society on some ethereal enemy whose existence can never be disproven is the same as taking "advantage of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts, and godlike technology" (Galloway's words, same TED talk) to me. Maybe there really is some cabal of scheming geezers out there who have some twisted desire to keep the minimum wage low, but I'm more inclined to believe that a lot of these "injustices" are a result of our existing political and societal institutions being poor and inefficient aggregators of our desires as a society, rewarding selfishness instead of cooperation. This certainly makes the problem harder to solve than if there were just some evil 'others' we could get rid of and be done with. Having a target to direct our outrage at, believing that I am good and they are bad, is easier than facing the reality that everyone is born with the selfishness that creates the injustices we live with but that's not gonna make people more agreeable. As an economist, I study the theory of incentives to use the same human selfishness that creates all the problems Galloway talks about to create solutions that hopefully improve our quality of life. This is what I believe is the beauty of being human, all the good and bad that happens stem from the same desires, it is our job to create institutions and systems that allow us to channel our desires in a way that benefits everyone, but I digress. The point is, this enemy that Galloway creates is an effective tactic at convincing people of his argument, but I don't believe such a perspective benefits society at all. Mistakes should be corrected, that doesn't mean they're always the result of ill intentions.
His next slide compares the difference between percentage increase in median household income against percentage increase in median home price, as well as a comparison of the median monthly mortgage between 2019 and 2024. I have nothing to say about the graph, I agree that over time, home prices have increased to an unacceptable level. The Fed funds rate went from 2.4 percent in Feb 2019 to 5.33 percent in Feb 2024 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds). To his credit, Galloway does attribute this increase in mortgage payments to "an acceleration in interest rates" but what's the alternative? Don't increase interest rates? Then if I was Galloway I'd make the same TED talk and talk about how the continued low interest rates contributed to rampant inflation that made all the poor people even poorer. It seems like he's decided to take whatever bad economic event that seems somewhat relevant and made it to be the result of some group's dogged determination to keep the younger generation down. Why is the increase from pre- to post-covid prices on anything surprising. I'd like to meet the genius who saw covid coming and intentionally created this increase in home prices.
He also says "the most expensive homes in the world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? Because 60 percent of the cost of building a home goes to permits...". I have no idea what point he's making here. Based on what metric, median home price? Monthly mortgage payments? Why do I care about Vancouver, a Canadian city, being number three? Then he talks about how "the incumbents that own assets have weaponized government". Either he's switched to talking about oligopolistic lobbyists in general without saying so or he's still talking about Canada. I dunno. Someone please explain. Then he says "this is the transfer I'm going to be speaking about". Also, everything he just said is talking about how there exists a group of people trying to PREVENT transfers of wealth to new entrants. And there was huge applause after that sentence. Nutsos, all of them.
Ok next slide. Galloway presents two pie charts, comparing the share of household wealth by age in 1989 to 2023. So he's talking directly about inequality in wealth now. Inequality in the US is really really bad, that's a fact. I'm a big fan of the work of Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty. These people have been at the forefront of research on inequality for many years now and though their work is not flawless, I'm convinced by the data they present and the methods by which they have aggregated the data and what they show is that inequality is worse than even what the pie charts Galloway presents suggest. However, this is not to say that Galloway makes a valid argument. Please note the grey bits in the pie chart. If Galloway has shown the numbers for everyone under 40 and above 70, the group that's excluded are those between 40 and 70. So those in the age range of 40-70 owned 100 - 19 - 12 = 69% of household wealth in 1989 and 100 - 30 - 7 = 63% in 2023. I could probably go and find how the age demographics of the population have changed over time and I think that with declining birth rates, the percentage change in age demographics would be pretty close to the percentage change in household wealth but I'm tired of beating every slide to death so I'll leave that to someone else if anyone's motivated enough to do that (if my hypothesis is wrong here just comment and I'll make that change). My first thought when I saw this though was again, this guy has paid no regard to structural change in society. Given the increased accessibility of buying stocks over the past three decades is it really that surprising that older people who have had more time and cash at the start of the digital age to invest in companies that are now massive mega-corporations have experienced a higher return on their capital. This is not to say that none of this change in the share of wealth held by those under 40 is due to some inherent unfairness in our society and I have neither the time nor knowledge to separate these effects out but to say that this was a "purposeful" effort to cut their wealth in half is complete and utter bullshit. Also, this guy makes another causal claim WITH NOTHING BUT A CHANGE IN SHARE OF HOUSEHOLD WEALTH. Congratulations everyone Scott Galloway has just made every econometrician in the world redundant, I always knew my professors were just trying to confuse me with funny symbols and Greek letters, someone get this guy a Nobel Prize.
Then while introducing his next slide Galloway says that his analyst's presence in the audience "brings the average age of the entire conference down in 11 days". So he's saying that TED knows exactly who's showing up to their event before it happens and that they have the exact birthdates of everyone in the audience too and that they've given this information to one of their speakers. A friend of mine has told me he's just making a joke and that I should let this point go because I'm being too anal about things but yeah I become anal about things when someone suggests sweeping institutional changes in a talk viewed by millions of people so thought I'd include it anyways just as another example of the bullshit this guy has been spewing.
When he moves on to the actual content in the slide the first point he makes is about lower acceptance rates in schools. So I don't have data on this because I couldn't be bothered to go find any so again, I'll change my statement if anyone has reliable data indicating otherwise but I think its pretty safe to say that way less people used to apply than before and combined with an increase in international student applications and enrollments the competition is just way higher than before. The most obvious explanation would be that higher education institutions have made the mistake of not increasing enrollments at a rate quick enough to meet demand. However, according to US News (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-many-universities-are-in-the-us-and-why-that-number-is-changing) there were 3982 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the US. and UCLA is ranked 15th in national universities. So why is it surprising now that university education is becoming more popular that higher ranked universities are harder to get into. So instead of expanding enrollment I think that a well thought out plan of affirmative action would be a much better option of giving "unremarkable kids and giving them a shot at being remarkable" (what this well thought out plan may be I don't know, I honestly didn't even search up any statistics about affirmative action this was just the first solution I thought of that didn't involve ignoring the crowning achievement of statistics). To his credit, Galloway does include a point about income-based affirmative action at the end of his talk, though he overwhelmingly emphasises increasing enrollment in schools. I don't have any data about that but I think that class sizes at public universities are large enough as it is.
The rest of the slide gives numbers on college debt of house price compared to first year income. College debt is ridiculously high and many people struggle because of it. I don't have the solution and neither does Galloway because he doesn't really mention it. I think that house price-to-first year income is a poor comparison because it doesn't take into account average rate of income increase and no normal person from any generation is looking to buy a house with first year income but there's probably a more appropriate metric out there that shows a similar change anyways so I'm ok with that.
Then he talks about him and his "colleagues" who "artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity". I would like to meet the professors who have control over enrollment rates because none of mine did. Then he says "to my colleagues in higher ed: we're public servants, not fucking Chanel bags". The marketing professor from NYU says he's a public servant...ok.
The slide after that compares Harvard's increase in endowment compared to their increase in enrollment and he calls them a "hedge fund offering classes". I see no issue with this point, he made a great argument, can't really criticise anything here.
Don't worry though he makes up for it by immediately making one of the most egregious statements in this whole talk. We're looking at his next slide, the one titled "Grand Bargain" now. He says that the government should take some of the money that's supposed to be used to forgive existing loans to about 500 of the top public universities to reduce tuition by 2% and year, expand enrollments by 6% a year, and increase vocational programs to 20% of the degrees granted. Then the slide after that, claims this will double freshman seats and cut costs in half in just 10 years. Ok so he thinks that most of the money "earmarked to bail out the one third of people that got to go to college on the backs of the two thirds that didn't" should go to future students instead because, I assume from the tone of his words, he doesn't think they need or deserve all that loan forgiveness. So why bring up the increase in college debt previously (the slide I talked about three paragraphs ago)? Anyways that's not the crazy thing. Let's see what happens if you reduce tuition by 2% a year for 10 years. So the calculation goes like this 0.98^{10} is approximately equal to 0.81. So with the number he puts up, tuition decreases by 19% in ten years. If everything before this slide could be attributed to cherry-picking, stupidity, or lack of good data, then fine he's just ignorant even though he shouldn't have been if he went up there to make that talk. But now this is just a FUCKING BAREFACED LIE. I cannot think of a greater insult to the audience's intelligence than the fact that this guy didn't think anyone would pull out a fucking calculator and do the calculation themselves. I won't blame the audience for not saying anything because I'm not sure I would have wanted to do that either but at least from youtube and reddit comments there are a decent number of people who didn't realise this. A similar calculation shows that expanding enrollment by 6% per year increases seats by about 80% total (1.06^{10}). Not sure how that translates in terms of freshman seats but at least this is closer than the tuition claim.
Then his next slide compares wages to the s&p500. This is the point of u/JustTaxLandLol's post and I think his post and the discussion in the comments covers most if not all of my thoughts so you can just read that. https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott_galloway_compares_median_wage_to_sp500/
Ok next slide, "The Transfer: Purposeful". Oh yay he's about to make another causal claim with nothing but a graph on the change in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals. And if we skip ahead to the next slide we'll realise that this claim is that the gradual decrease in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals results in lowered senior poverty and child poverty either remains constant or increases. Yes everybody the newest advancement in economic research has just been released. Lowering top tax rates decreases senior poverty and increases child poverty. And Scott Galloway made that argument in 24 seconds (transcript on TED website has time markers).
Man I really set out with the intention to keep the tone of this post as neutral as I could but I'm just writing out my internal dialogue with less swearing now. I apologise to those who would have preferred a more careful and less emotional knee-jerk response of an analysis but this is a reddit post, its not like there are standards.
Now he moves on to talking about social security. Galloway says "it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill". So zero explanation about why it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit, why not more or less, no comment about how many children it would affect, how much money it would mean for each child or family, just some number that you have to accept. Most of the time there's no why to the amount of funding that the government allocates to policies but at least there's some breakdown to how its going to be used, Galloway doesn't even have that. This is before we even consider the fact that child tax credit was expanded this year (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-tax-credit-2024-who-qualifies/). Maybe he's talking about some other issue that I'm not aware of but I don't think so. He says he got the social security spending data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which is a think tank. I don't want to sort through their website to fact check so I'll accept it as the truth but as far as I know the actual social security administration releases their facts and figures for the year August of next year so I'm not sure why he didn't just use the 2022 numbers from a more reliable source.
His next few couple slides are about the increasing age of politicians. I think this is a great point but he probably should have used a better example of a younger politician than Justin Trudeau.
Then at around the 10 minute mark, using his slide titled "Generational Theft", Galloway claims that "we pumped the economy" during covid so that the Nasdaq would gain value, causing "intergenerational theft". I don't know if he thinks it was intentional or not but how is he going to completely ignore the fact that the stimulus checks were primarily for households that were struggling due to the greatest unemployment rate we have seen in our lifetime (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/06/11/unemployment-rose-higher-in-three-months-of-covid-19-than-it-did-in-two-years-of-the-great-recession/). I'm really kind of tired of this so I'll let those at the CBR make my argument for me. "Within the first 10 days, households spent an average of 29 cents from every dollar received. The bulk of this spending was on food, rent, and bills" (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-effective-were-stimulus-checks-us). Damn so turns out struggling families did need these stimulus checks pretty urgently. Shocker. I also think that most people in finance would agree that tech stocks surged over covid because people needed fucking technology... People built PCs to play video games, used online shopping services because they couldn't go to malls, all that.
The next slide is supposed to support his point that the increase in stock prices doesn't allow young people to find "disruption". What. The only thing that matters to any investor is the percentage increase in value of the stock price after you've invested. It doesn't matter if 7 dollars is 1 share of apple or 0.04 of a share of apple. Its stock price going up by 100% means you get 14 dollars either way. I think this guy's arguments are getting dumber as the talk goes on, I actually had to go and find data to refute his points earlier on. Now arithmetic does the work for me, I should have hired a grade schooler to do my analysis.
His next point is about how algorithmic content selection is bad. Yeah its bad. Its bad for everyone, turns everyone into psychos. Though I think there's a very good argument to be made about how such content could affect developing brains. He makes a point about age-gating social media at the end of the talk. This is actually the only drastic measure he proposes that I agree with so I'll leave this alone too.
After a couple slides about Zuckerberg and TikTok (which I agree with, though I think Zuckerberg's damage probably leans more towards older people than young now), he gives a bunch of graphs showing upward trends in all sorts of terrible things happening to young people. Every single one is an issue of critical importance in the US, but importantly, no comparison to older people. For all we know, the trend on every graph could be the same or even worse for older generations. If I had written about this first then I'd go and find the data for it but at this point I just want to be done with this but can't stop without getting to the end so I'm just gonna slap this slide with lack of comparisons and move on.
His next slide shows the difference in 30 to 34 year olds who have at least one child, some of that is probably due to family planning but I still think its a great indicator of people not wanting to have children because its not affordable. Great point, I believe in it.
Next slide, oh god it's a happiness report. I think happiness reports are a fun conversational tidbit but I see no way for it to be reliable enough to be used as an argument in any semi-serious setting. That said, I have no idea how they do these measurements so maybe I'm wrong.
As if the happiness report wasn't bad enough, Galloway is gonna compare the biggest one-day market cap gain (in an unspecified time frame) to the budget of several policies implemented by the government. Oh man. This is too stupid, there's so many things to pick from it'd take too much effort to sort through them. Someone else please make the argument for me.
Then he says universal basic income should have been called negative income tax. Wow the frequency of good points is going up, though I think this is accompanied by an increase in the frequency of absolutely idiotic arguments.
Then he says we should eliminate capital gains tax deduction. The issue of taxing capital gains is a very serious one, but I don't think it actually matters that much how much we tax realised capital gains. Again, not an expert but here's my understanding. If you have a high net worth with a lot of it in stocks and you need cash, you don't have to sell them and get taxed on the realised gains. You go to the bank and say I want to borrow money, I'm going to put these stocks up as collateral so if I can't pay you back you can take these stocks which are somewhere around the value of the principal amount plus total interest over the course of this loan. Because the bank is now convinced they'll get the money back regardless of if you make the payments or not, they say ok here's the money you asked for at a nice low interest rate. Then you take the money, you keep your stocks, which will probably gain value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate by a pretty decent margin, and you can probably make your interest payments pretty easily because hey, you were rich to begin with. If you're really strapped for cash a couple years down the line, you can sell some of the stocks that are now worth more than they were before and cover your payments and not have to pay taxes on the rest that you don't have to sell. Free money. There's plenty more ways to avoid taxes if you're rich but you get my point by now. Now that's a lot of problems without a solution. Luckily we have some economists far more skilled than I am who work very hard to find solutions to these problems. Here's one example of a policy that may help (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html). This is an opinion piece written by Gabriel Zucman (famous economist), for the New York Times. If you don't have an NYT subscription, sorry for giving a link you can't read but if you search Gabriel Zucman billionaire tax, you could probably get a decent idea of what this talks about. Here's Zucman tweeting his proposal for his suggestion (https://twitter.com/gabriel\_zucman/status/1763253132572729623). It probably requires a little more thinking than the NYT article but he did present this at the G20 so that might sound more exciting to you than some news article.
Then Galloway says "we need to remove 230 protection for all algorithmically-elevated content". Zero mention on what 230 protection is so here's an explanation (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230). Basically that was a fancy way of saying that companies should be held accountable of the content on their platform, even if it's posted by an unrelated third party. I'm not sure getting rid of it in its entirety is a great idea (though I have no arguments against that except Orwellian ones) but I certainly agree that most if not all social media platforms have abused this protection and it should be at the very least restricted. To what extent? Again, I have no clue.
Then he goes "break up Big Tech". That's the whole suggestion. This is a terrible idea but the fact that he doesn't elaborate more on how to do this, the ramifications of doing so, or really provide any explanation at all makes me automatically ignore this. Then he makes his point about age-gating social media, like I said before, I agree with it.
His next suggestions are universal pre-K, great idea, then "reinstate the expanded child-tax credit". Not sure what he's going on about here, child tax credit exists and like I said before, was just expanded. Then it's income-based affirmative action. I don't know what kind of affirmative action is best and that sounds like an interesting idea so I won't criticise it. I think the rest of his suggestions are pretty normative arguments so I'll leave those alone too.
Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree with the overall theme of his talk. I believe that young people in the US (and many places worldwide) are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to accumulating wealth, buying homes, inter-generational transfers, etc. But you cannot go up on a popular platform like this, make claims as sweeping as he has, and make suggestions as radical and drastic as he has, with garbage arguments and data like this. Saying the right things for the wrong reasons is arguably worse than just saying the wrong thing because it makes it easy for those who want the status quo to remain to make counterarguments. Given how divisive opinions have become over the past decade or so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how many people are eating this up but it kinda scares me how easily people will eat up this shit as long as its for a cause that sounds like its going for some kind of radical change for the good of all and has some imaginary "them" as the common enemy to everyone.
So that's it, I've finally covered all his points. I'm free, thank fuck. I should really proofread this but this has been my past eight hours and my back is breaking from all this sitting, I'm just gonna post this and read it over tomorrow. Maybe do a tl;dr, fix some formatting.
EDIT: As u/myphriendmike and u/Mordoci have pointed out, my dummy corp example was just tax fraud, that's illegal and so it's a bad example, I've removed it. Zucman has some estimates on the "real" tax rate wealthy people (mostly billionaires) pay, maybe I'll include that at some point.
I also corrected my wording in some places.

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He doesn't mind installing whatever parts I buy but his words were "you usually dont get the same performance you would with factory. Probably would save $100 or so but would not be as cold."
In this case I'd be saving $400 getting the parts online than thru him. Is it worth it?

I need an evap core and temp sensor for my 2010 f150 king ranch. just had the AC compressor replaced. My mechanic at the ford dealership quoted $550 for both parts and $600 labor. I know they need to pull the dash. I was looking at parts geek and they have the evap core for less than $100 and the temp sensor for $60. This isn't my daily driver but I'm wondering if not getting the parts thru the mechanic will cause me issues?
He doesn't mind installing whatever parts I buy but his words were "you usually dont get the same performance you would with factory. Probably would save $100 or so but would not be as cold."
In this case I'd be saving $400 getting the parts online than thru him. Is it worth it?

🪞 “It's much easier to get in that it is to get out,” Emilie Autumn used to say. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.1 - Part 4.2
She was not wrong. Welcome back to the Asylum write-up!
In this installment, we're finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of the enmity between EA and her fans.
It's time for war. It's time for blood. It's time... for tea. 🎵

THE PRESENT DAY: “ASK ME ANYTHING (WELL, NOT QUITE)”

​

"Ask me anything" titles are catchy, and that’s why I’m using one. But, obviously, don’t ask me anything, by which I mean that, if you think I wouldn’t answer it, you’re probably right. Ask me something really good. I’d love to answer you. I’d love to have comments on these posts, in fact, so that I could answer questions there regularly and ask you things as well, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so Einstein is supposed to have said, and attempting to create yet another interactive online venue after every previous attempt has ended in heartbreak—forums, facebook groups, social media accounts—it would indeed be insanity to think that this time would be any different. So there are no comments. This too is heartbreaking in the sense that, and you may not realize this, but I desperately want to connect more completely with you—to be able to intelligently converse and share and exchange. We can do that in person, of course, because the wrong people never show up in person. Isn’t that funny… So, perhaps we’ll have to arrange that;). I’ll start you off with an example question I’d want to know if I were you (I can almost guarantee that you do not want to know this). Q. Hey EA, how do you keep your wireless bodypack transmitter secure when you are leaping about in skimpy costumes and doing frequent costume changes? Also, dye your roots. A. Fantastic question, EA, and I just dyed my roots thank you very much. ... (Deleted blog post followed by a year of radio silence, 2022 📝)

Sooo. For the past five-ish years, the vibe in the Asylum has been that of a protracted Christmas dinner where everyone is tensely moving their food around in their plate, bracing themselves for whatever will trigger the screaming match. Wondering what it's going to be this time. Weary old-timers make small talk about the food because no other topic feels safe. Every glance, every forced smile, is fraught with eons-old grudges and unspoken regrets; every nervous pleasantry sounds like a thinly-veiled accusation. Aunt Emilie always insists on hosting, but not-so-secretly hates having people over. Sooner or later, she finds a way to get all of these assholes out of her house. Most of the adult children are daydreaming about going no-contact.
Everyone ready for some dysfunctional family history?
CW for discussion of bullying, online harassment, mental illness stigma.

YE OLDEN DAYS: CUCKOOS OF A FEATHER NEST TOGETHER

In the beginning, it was beautiful.
EA had the excellent instinct to start banking on her online presence📝 long before MySpace was even a thing. She had a website, several online stores, an active LiveJournal and a ProBoards forum right from the turn of the millennium.
In 2004, she attached an official forum to her website; the earliest archive shows 74 registered users. By the time Opheliac came out in 2006, that number had grown tenfold. And it was, by most accounts, a pretty dope place to be! (I should specify that this write-up focuses on the anglophone side of the fandom: there were also thriving fan-run communities in at least German, French, and Spanish. Because EA doesn't speak any of those languages, the lucky bastards were mostly left alone.)
Forum users enjoyed interacting with some of EA's closest IRL friends and associates – and with the mistress of the house herself (user flair: PsychoFiddler), when she occasionally responded to comments under her own posts. But that wasn't even the main appeal for many. For a long time, on top of all EA-related topics, the official forum had very active “Off-Topic” subforums, with lively and friendly conversation on a variety of subjects. (There was even a “Filthy Libertines (18+)” sub for a while, which was closed due to preemptive concerns about minors.) Swear words (not slurs) were allowed and encouraged, and moderation was overall pretty loose beyond basic enforcement of civility. There was a lot of mutual support, creativity, and solid banter going around.

It wasn't just about Emilie on the forums. People could chat about almost anything with near free reign, making connections and lifelong friends. ... This community mattered SO MUCH to people. They felt included, accepted, and understood within the walls of the Asylum. People invested their time and creative energy into keeping the forums a vibrant, active community, and made sure that carried over into the real world. ... I've never seen anything like it in a fan space. I doubt I ever will again. (@Asylum_Oracle - “Fandom History” Instagram highlight 🔍📝, which contains most of the sources for this segment.)

And it did, indeed, carry over into the real world. There were numerous meet-ups – a few organized by EA, many more spontaneous. People who didn't know any other EA fans in real life, or were just excited to add new Plague Rats to their friend group, would regularly connect with other forum users from their area to meet up and hang out before EA shows. “Who else is dressing up??”
In 2008, for instance, EA held an afternoon meet-up at Lincoln Park in Chicago. 📺 The event was free to attend; it featured live acoustic music and a reading from EA's upcoming book, the intriguingly-titled Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
On the appointed day, EA rolled up in a fabulously tousled red wig, bedazzled white corset and steampunk-altered wedding dress. She had brought friends alongs. Sporting blue hair and a pink bustle and corset was her Chicago bestie, the main forum admin. Rocking a guitar and a top hat was EA's sound engineer, the soft-spoken wizard behind the Victoriandustrial sound, who was also a forum mod. The photographer from the original Opheliac cover art was there as well; he was formally introduced by EA and got his own round of applause.

People who would never normally be involved in an artist's fanbase were in EA's world. And not only were they known – they were respected and incredibly active with the fanbase. These people who managed an online message board were willing to engage in real-world meet-ups (with no security??) because of how tight-knit the community they had built was. People turned out to this event. People traveled to go to this event. It was a short reading of a book that hadn't been released yet, and wouldn't be for some time. Why? Because not only was it a chance to meet Emilie and listen to parts of the new book, but it was also a chance to hang out with their friends from the Asylum. ... The fandom really was a family for a lot of people. (@Asylum_Oracle)

“SERIOUSLY, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.”

It all started with The End.
The End Records, that is! Quick refresher: in 2009, after three years or so with Trisol, EA split from the label over allegations that the owner was embezzling money from ticket sales. A few months later, she signed with The End Records. Understandably, EA still wanted to sell the album that had made her famous, and to which she had smartly retained the rights – which meant a brand new, “Deluxe” release of Opheliac. (Remember, from part 3? The one you could pre-order as a bundle with the book? Some projects are just cursed, I guess.)
At that point, Opheliac had been released three times already, as recently as the year before, with only slight variations in format and tracklist. (Yes, that is a theme in this story.) The End Records version would feature new cover art and a handful of new tracks, but overall, it was... you know... the same album.
(The following paragraphs are largely sourced from this excellent recap 🔍📝, which also provides potato screenshots for all quotes.)
One fateful day of August 2009, a user started a thread entitled “Opheliac US edition deluxe re-release??” in the “EA News” subforum. In the thread, some people were kind of balking at the re-do, pondering whether to buy the “new” Opheliac or sit this one out. Some expressed that after three years, they were jonesing for a new album. Others shared what B-sides or dream covers they would have liked to see included on the bonus disc. Just... fans being fans, in a fan discussion space.
And then EA jumped out from behind the curtains.

Fan: Okay. Before I start, I just want you to know that I think it's very good that EA is getting more popularity, and that she can release lots of albums, but - are 5 editions of the same album really needed? You may say now “ah, it's not the same, it has 2 bonus tracks” or whatever, but I mean: it's not new material. Now don't get me wrong. I'm happy for it, maybe I'll even buy it, but I'm just wondering if she shouldn't keep herself busy with other (maybe more important) stuff? * hides * EA: Nobody's forcing you to buy it. Thanks.

Record scratch.

Fan 1: is this Opheliac release version number 4? lol If she's recording NEW tracks, then surely they deserve to be sold by themselves, otherwise people are going to have to buy an album that they may have already bought twice (like me!). But... alas, I am a fool and adore everything this woman does... im buying it lol Fan 2: exactly – if it was just reissuing the last version of Opheliac to tap into new markets that would be fine (...) but if they start adding extra bits of material to albums people already have then the true muffins are going to feel obliged to buy new copies (...) EA: How exactly are you obliged to buy anything? Nobody is forcing you to spend a fucking penny, my dears. I suppose it would make more sense to you to simply not have my records available any more as the old label I just escaped from will no longer be distributing them? Forgive me for adding extra tracks. No obligation necessary.

...Okay, so I'm pretty sure that we can see both sides of the argument here. Fans are annoyed at the idea of spending money on barely-anything-new, because they love EA and buy every single CD she releases. EA is exasperated by fans acting like she's twisting their arm and somehow resenting the inclusion of new material, when she was just ensuring that her album would remain available for purchase and trying to keep things interesting.
But maybe we can also agree that those replies should have been screamed into a pillow rather than typed out on a keyboard.
EA was getting increasingly (and, I'll just say it: disproportionately) sarcastic and defensive in her replies. Enter poor FantineDormouse.
FantineDormouse meant well, I think. Maybe she thought, she's spiraling. Maybe she thought, friends don't let friends go down that road. Granted, FantineDormouse probably should have known better than to phrase it the way she did. Or to assume that EA perceived her as a friend.
Either way, at some point, FantineDormouse jumped in and posted the comment that finally made EA lose it. THE comment which, overnight, ended the honeymoon period of the Asylum, triggering a doomsday domino effect from which the fandom would never truly recover. Are you comfortably seated?

FantineDormouse: Uhm, Emilie, love, I don't mean to sound rude or anything... but maybe you should have a cup of tea and relax a little.

...
* sound of archduke getting shot *

EA: Excuse me? You can throw this onslaught of absolute cruel bullshit at me and those I work with in my own space that I own, and I can't say anything back? How fucking patronizing. Relax? Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? FD: I'm not trying to piss you off even more, Emilie. And trust me, I have to deal with it myself, and as much as I would really love to punch the cunts I have to deal with in the face, I don't. You're pissed off, I get it. You're bipolar, which makes it 10x worse, I get that. I'm just not the person to stand around and do nothing when a fight where I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of regret is going on.

Famous last words. Literally! Immediately after EA delivered her irate closing statement – which includes one of my all-time favorite EA zingers, bolded...

EA: I cannot believe this... You just don't stop, do you? So just because I've shared the personal information with you all that I happen to be bipolar, I can't get pissed off at all of you being perfectly awful in the very space that I pay fuckloads a month to have up (has it ever occurred to you all that I pay dearly for this space you play around in?) Why not just tell me that I must be upset because it's my time of the month? Seriously, get the fuck out of my house. You are unbelievable, and your level of patronization is almost criminal. Don't make me write another book. With muffins like you, who needs enemies? Nothing I say or feel is legitimate, not ever ever ever because I'm bipolar... discredited before I begin... unbelievable...

...FantineDormouse got permabanned.
Jaws dropped. After days of infighting between white knights, detractors, and crossfire negotiators, several mod resignations, and general mayhem surrounding the ban, EA made a post entitled “In Which: I Invite You to Make a Fucking Choice.” 📝 For brevity's sake (cue laugh track), I can't reproduce it in all of its righteous splendor, but it's quite a read. It runs the gamut from fair and articulate points about how mental illness shouldn't be used to discredit someone's legitimate anger... to histrionic commands that “deserters to the cause” should “turn in their weapons” if they can't handle her way of doing things.

To those of you who appear not to understand why said posts, most especially those of the banned party, were offensive to me, I give you the option to either educate yourselves on your own time and in your own space (because please never forget that this is my space that I share with all of you at my own expense, and in which I generally give you all the freedom I would wish for myself), or to resign your posts in the Asylum Army – this is not the place for you, and I humbly suggest that you turn your attention and support towards other artists of a more placid, non-controversial, and less opinionated nature; there are more than enough of them out there, and I’m sure they all have forums of their own.

Some fans did leave. Most stuck around, whiplashed. Soon, the storm quieted down, and business as usual resumed on the forum. But something had been damaged beyond repair. The FantineDormouse fiasco had erected walls and drawn lines in the sand, both around EA and among her fans; its sad specter would haunt every Asylum crisis that spiked up forever after. “Fucking Patronizing Fucking” or “FPF” 🔍 became memetic shorthand in the fandom for overreaction and self-righteousness. 🐀
...And now you understand why, in the following years, some fans were so delicate and diplomatic in voicing their very legitimate complaints about messed-up orders, unsigned books, and puzzling lies... while unofficial platforms like Tumblr flourished with pent-up resentment and snark. 🦠

A NOTE ON HARASSMENT: “MAD GIRL, CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO YOU?”

Wouldn't they stop When you asked them to leave you alone? (“Mad Girl”, 2008 🎵)

Now, let's be clear, because it should not be minimized: EA has also been the target of genuine online harassment. Based on the simple fact that she is a woman with a public presence on the internet, I have zero doubt that EA has received (and perhaps continues to receive) more than her share of truly vile, bigoted, creepy and threatening messages – and, knowing what I know about the darker recesses of the Asylum, a terrifying amount of emotional blackmail and obsessive projection from people who hold her to punitively high standards. I'm also inclined to believe that it started way before she ever did anything that warranted any backlash. And that fucking sucks. It's repulsive and inexcusable, and the people who harass her should crawl into a hole and live among the worms.
Notwithstanding. In my decade-plus of following EA drama, the public comments on EA's own platforms (where people knew she was likely to be reading) have been, for the most part... civil and nuanced, and relatively mindful of the human? Even very confrontational comments (some clearly written from a place of anger and desire to shame) rarely resorted to outright name-calling or cruelty. When abusive or bigoted language did crop up, it was often promptly shut down by other fans as gross and uncalled for. In short: I have, with mine own two eyes, in real time, read some of the comment sections that EA described as cesspools of blind rage and odious attacks, and... I just couldn't see it.
If anything, for a long time, a lot of the angry comments directed at EA during any given controversy read more like break-up letters to an ex-best friend: harsh, curt and targeted in a way that cuts deep.... but also kind of screams how much love you still have for this person, against your better judgement.
Not that it wouldn't mess a person up to get hundred of those in a matter of hours, even if they don't individually qualify as “abusive”.
It's worth noting that prior to becoming semi-famous and regretting it, EA was also (by her own account and among other forms of abuse) a victim of intense childhood bullying. It feels like the two situations are closely connected in her mind when her focus seamlessly transitions from one to the other. 📺 I don't think that tremor in her voice is put on.
Based on her writings, I get the feeling that over the years, EA has developed a very black-and-white view of two monolithic groups of people. There's (an idealized vision of) her “real audience”, well-dressed, well-read, kind-hearted, and Asylum-savvy, who she fully trusts to “get it” – and buy it, and love it, unquestioningly, whatever “it” may be at any given time – because that is the true measure of love and loyalty. These are the people she makes art and merch for, the people she writes heart-emoji-filled newsletters to, and desperately longs to see in person again.
And then there's the lynch mob, those who really don't “get it”: the trolls, the faceless creeps, the basement-dwelling mouthbreathers, the ones who stalk her every move obsessively, waiting for any chance to spam her with vicious abuse and slander and obscenities. The latter only exist online (they are manifested into arbitrary existence by the internet itself, not by anything EA said or did), and there is zero overlap between the two sets of people. That seems to be the official narrative.

The "public eye" isn't an [enviable] place to be, and the closer I've come to it, the more horrified I've been. Because, for starters, who is "the public?" Is "the public" my audience? Hell no. My audience is special. They are not the general public. If they were the general public I would be a lot wealthier. The "public eye" means getting stalked, harassed, viscously judged, and put in danger. If I do things in the future that gain notoriety, I will do them in spite of fame, not because of it. I am out for world domination, but not fame. (Interview for The Moaning Times, 2014 📝)

In real life (well, mostly online, but I mean: on this shared plane of existence), things play out slightly differently. The Venn diagram of “true blue fans” and “people who criticize EA" and "people who know way too much about EA” is a circle. The call is 100% coming from inside the Asylum, and I think EA rationally knows that. But here's the thing: no matter how many shows and meet-and-greets you've dressed up for, how many loving and supportive comments you've left, or how many family heirlooms you once pawned to purchase a copy of the not-for-sale 2003 DJ pressing of Enchant... the instant EA feels attacked, everyone is a saboteur and a bully until proven otherwise, and suspected treason is dealt with on the spot. One strike, you're out. Unfortunately for everyone involved, her threshold for bullying seems to be “any remotely thoughtless opinion from any stranger on the internet”.
It makes for outstanding human-interest entertainment... but it also sounds an awful lot like the unhealthy patterns of a person suffering from all sorts of PTSD. 🔍 So, please bear that in mind as you read through this write-up. It's easy to make EA out to be the sole villain, a paranoid and delusional drama queen, based on her extreme reactions to things that often “weren't that bad”. Anything can, in fact, be “that bad” when you're thrown back into the very worst moments of your existence every time your brain decides that the situation is even remotely similar.
PTSD takes over your rational mind and actively distorts your perception of reality. That can be how a person ends up impulse-reacting to “a few people expressing an unfavorable opinion” as if the entire internet had just ganged up on them with knives. Which makes their audience feel unjustly accused, which makes them hostile, which gives the person actual good reason to feel attacked... and so the cycle of hurt continues.

You know the games I play And the words I say When I want my own way You know the lies I tell When you've gone through hell And I say I can't stay You know how hard it can be To keep believing in me When everything and everyone Becomes my enemy, and when There's nothing more you can do I'm gonna blame it on you – It's not the way I wanna be I only hope that in the end You will see: It's the Opheliac in me... (“Opheliac”, 2006 🎵)

And YES, it is extremely regrettable to have this as a trigger, when you're a public figure and you're bound to receive more negative feedback than the average citizen. “It's what she signed up for”, “it comes with the territory” and all that jazz. I really don't think EA was unaware of that fact when she decided to become a musician, share her personal life, and form an intense parasocial bond with her audience. But maybe she underestimated how hard it would be to process and recover from.
Just because you expect something unpleasant to happen, doesn't mean your psyche will be ready to handle it when it does – or that you'll pick the best and most effective strategy to deal with it.

A MADHOUSE UNDER MARTIAL LAW: MARCHING INTO THE FORUM WARS

There are two sides to every story... except for this one! (“If I Burn”, 2012 🎵)

You may have noted the military imagery in EA's “Make a Fucking Choice” response post – “resign your post in the Asylum Army”! What do psychiatry and the military have in common? They're both institutions of top-down social control. 🔍 EA's mixed metaphor may be a bit clunky, but it did foreshadow the evolution of the Asylum – in terms of aesthetics and power dynamics – in the years that followed the FantineDormouse incident and the release of The Book.
EA's next big release after the Asylum book came in 2012. It was a new album, an outline of the soon-to-be Asylum musical, called Fight Like a Girl (FLAG for short). As the name suggests, the main mood was bellicose. Incidentally, in the interim years, EA's communication style generally became noticeably more combative, incendiary, and (within her own spaces) controlling.📝 You remember those quirky word filters on the forum, that would change “fan” to “muffin” and “bra” to “teacup holder”? They kind of took on a Nineteen-Eighty-Four-burlesque flavor when you realized that one filter automatically changed “Fischkopf” to “Liddell” - and that circumventing the rule to address her totally real last name would get you banned, as would any discussion of her family. (“Wikipedia, random internet sites and heresay are not credible sources.” - Mod reminder of forum rules, 2010.)
Also, you try sustaining a serious, grown-up conversation among concerned fans about how Emilie Autumn should “take ratsponsibility for her mistakes out of ratspect for her muffins”. Thus, the official Asylum forum kept a tight grip on overt criticism of EA's claims and actions.

The Emilie Autumn forum is a dystopian hell. Truth be told, when I decided to leave you could not do anything but gush about Emilie. Otherwise all of her extremist arse kissing fans will be down your throat, ripping you apart in seconds, if you so much as questioned her behaviour. So much for freedom of opinion, let alone the idea of creating a harmonious community for ‘outcasts’. Hahaha. (2014 🐀)

The word filter thing really wasn't a big deal – I'm just pointing it out as one goofy expression of EA's need to control the narrative and rhetoric, which became especially noticeable in those post-book, pre-FLAG years. By that point, EA's fuse had been shortened by near on half a decade of non-stop touring / recording / writing / promoting / adjusting to the pressure and demands of an ever-growing fanbase, while also dealing with a horrorshow of personal turmoil and health issues behind the scenes. In other words: she was done taking any shit, in any form, or humoring anyone's ridiculous feedback regarding anything.
To be fair, it was never her forte to begin with. Will it come as a shock if I tell you that EA doesn't have the greatest track record for successful collaborative work? Let's do a quick-cut montage!
EA's very first corporate sponsor was her mother's “Enchant Clothing & Costume” online store 🔍; she went on to claim that her mother was dead. She sessioned for Billy Corgan, that went super well. 🎵 She liked Courtney Love for a minute, but that didn't work out because she felt that Courtney only valued her for her pee. 📝 (It probably didn't help that in early 2006, while EA was recording her post-break-up-tell-all album about Corgan, C-Love was recording her post-rehab-redemption album with Corgan. 🔍 Either way, EA didn't seem to like Courtney anymore after that. Courtney likes her, though! 📝) The one artist EA has ever approached for a duet (and by approached, I mean she recorded a demo and threw the CD on stage when he played Chicago in 2004) was, of all people, Morrissey. That never came to pass, thank mercy 🔍 – this fandom has suffered enough. In 2005, EA recorded some haunting vocals and violins for a potential collab with the frontman of Attrition. When, three years later, they were used on one track 🎵 of Attrition's All Mine Enemies Whisper, she alleged 📝 that the recordings had been obtained from her under the false pretense of a different project, then hideously altered to sound “out of tune”, and used without her permission. She enlisted her fans to boycott the album and the band, and threatened legal action. Meanwhile, on LiveJournal and Attrition's message boards, band associates were appalled: according to them, EA had been aware of the project's nature from the start... and had been completely unreachable, even through her label, during the months of its development. (Besides, Attrition is a semi-obscure English darkwave band from the 80s, whose micro-distributed albums don't even have their own Wikipedia pages... so I wonder what EA was hoping to get out of that theoretical lawsuit. These people own nothing but vintage gain pedals!) The song “Cold Hard Cash” 🎤 by Angelspit (who contributed a remix to one of her EPs in 2008) may or may not be an EA diss track. 🐀 Back when indie jewelry brand RockLove (which now has licensing deals with Disney, Marvel, and DC) was still someone's bedroom project, their first drop was an EA-inspired collection 🔍, which appears in many early Opheliac photoshoots. The partnership was terminated on bad terms, for unclear reasons; the RockLove owner shared in a statement that EA had “drunk the cool-aid” of Trisol Guy's shady business practices, and that the two of them had been spamming her with “crazed angry message[s]” for days.
Why am I talking about this? Because it was precisely one such ill-fated business partnership that triggered the Great Asylum Secession.
One fine day of spring 2010, the owner of vegan make-up brand Aromaleigh popped onto the Asylum forum to announce that they were cutting ties with EA, with damning receipts of copy-pasted emails (lost to time). Basically, the brand had been sponsoring her for half a decade, and while Aromaleigh had been actively promoting her music and tours, EA hadn't exactly been returning the favor. (Indeed, the extent of EA's sponcon seemed to have been a banner link to their website on her front page, and a single “random drunken endorsement” LiveJournal post that kind of reads like satire📝, from 2005.)
EA responded by banning the owner's account, deleting the thread, and posting this flippant statement a few days later:

Dearest Plague Rats, To be honest, I have no idea of what the hell happened with Aromaleigh, and I don't care to find out – the whole drama is a complete mystery to me, as I've been away for months touring and have not been in contact with anyone. All I know is that I've been promoting the company for ages and have not asked them for anything in years. (...) Please focus on more interesting things. I am. (“Save the Drama...” forum post, March 2010)

Posts questioning her good faith in the conflict were deleted from the forum. Shortly thereafter, citing how prolific and labor-intensive the Asylum forum had grown, EA shut down all non-EA related subforums – which, among many other topics, included a pretty active thread about Aromaleigh products.
So one Plague Rat decided to create a separate, members-only forum 📝, where users could recreate some of the now-defunct off-topic threads... and also freely voice their critical opinions of EA's behavior without fear of backlash from mods or rabid stans. Thus, “The Reform” was born. (Reform [n]: amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.)
For a few weeks, the two-state solution seemed to work fine. And then word spread among forum mods and other diehard fans that there was this horrid other forum, where obsessive haters gathered to spew disgusting lies and vitriol about EA... and soon enough, it was bedlam in the Asylum.
Any explicit mention of the Reform was forbidden on the Asylum forum. Suspicion of participation in the Reform would get you banned. The party line was that The Reform was the enemy 🐀 – even though a number of people were active on both forums, because they liked freedom of expression almost as much as they liked EA. Double agents would lurk on the forum and report back with snark material; sycophants would infiltrate the Reform to identify traitors – much to the amusement of the “haters”, who mocked them and their ilk for “licking EA's pink sparkly boots”. There was no containing the seething, or the sass, among Asylum ranks.
Pretty soon, the insubordination spread to Tumblr. There was the “Ask the Reform” Q&A blog, where questioning fans could interact with “Rebel Rats”, get more details on past drama, and make up their own minds about the people EA called bullies.
And then, there were the “confession blogs”, which published anonymous submissions about EA, positive, negative or neutral, with little censorship. Finally, you didn't even have to pick a throw-away username on a private forum to voice your hottest / strangest / most controversial EA takes. Fans could vent, rant, lament, wonder, shitpost to their heart's content, anonymously. Obviously, given the context of frustration and censorship in the fandom, a lot of the first waves of confessions were EXTREMELY negative.
EA's acolyte Veronica managed to get the first one shut down. If memory serves, she misunderstood the confession blog format, and may have believed that all the posts on “Emilie Autumn Confessions” came from one or a small group of individuals. She was genuinely devastated, and wrote the blog admin to let them know that they were a terrible person who said terrible things. The admin was mortified, apologized profusely and deleted the blog of their own initiative. (Which goes to show that the concept did not come from cruel and malicious anti-fans, as detractors often claimed.)
But a new blog sprung up almost immediately, with a different mod team, and did not surrender. And much like in EA's own book, once the Plague Rats found out that they possessed the gift of speech... well, they really took to it.
Established in 2011 and passed on through generation after generation of mod teams to the present day, Wayward Victorian Confessions would turn out to be the longest-lived institution in the EA fandom. For over a decade now, through all the bleakest nights and dankest debacles of the Asylum, and despite its initial reputation as a troll den, WVC has acted as a kind of neutral ground and vox populi for the active fanbase and anti-fanbase. (The last nominally-active EA fansite to date, She Fights Like a Girl, is actually an offshoot of WVC: one of the old admins created it as a database to answer “frequently asked questions” about EA.)
Wayward Victorian Confessions has now outlived every other EA platform, official and unofficial. Were it not for the continued existence of the “troll den”, what little fan community survives in 2024 would be non-existent, plain and simple. To quote from late 20th century Canadian philosophy: isn't it ironic?

I feel like [WVC] is the only place I feel any of that old Asylum community kind of feeling I felt before EA got so focused on the book. It sucks that it’s so full of unhappiness, and I wish she hadn’t poisoned the sanctuary she claimed to have built. It’s just kind of fallen apart, like a crumbling building. (🐀 2016)

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

Hi! I'm Alex (30) and after years of wanting to go to Bali, in March 2024 I decided to do just that but by train and boat instead of flying.
Why? First, I love trains. Second, more than going to Bali it's the countries and cultures along the way that I want to experience and explore.
Now I won't be going from Paris to Bali directly, but I'll be stopping along the way for 1 or 2 months in cities as a homebase to work from (let's be honest, working non-stop on the move is impossible - at least for me).
Backstory: I'm from Paris and used to work in the french banking industry, but 2 years ago I decided to start building my coding skills on the side and just recently quit my job and launched my first SaaS: sharekit .co With the upcoming Olympic games in Paris, I thought it was the perfect time to leave the city and start digital nomading.
March 6, 2024: Paris to Berlin 🗺 Paris - Brussels - Aachen - Düsseldorf - Berlin ⏰ 12h 💶 85€ / $91
I first planned on taking a night train, but it got cancelled due to strikes in Germany. So had to switch to day trains. I stayed in Berlin for 6 days to visit uni friends and explore the city.
March 12, 2024: Berlin to Budapest 🗺 Berlin - Nuremberg - Vienna - Budapest ⏰ 12h 💶 54€ / $58
Was supposed to take a night train again, but ongoing strikes in Germany had my train cancelled so took a series of trains to reach Budapest.
Budapest was my first homebase on this journey, I stayed there for 1.5 months in an airbnb for 500€ in Ujlipotvaros a residential neighborhood yet close to the city center. I loved my time in Budapest, people were so nice, spoke perfect English and the city was just great in terms of public transport, culture, food and activities! Honestly had a blast there and my airbnb was perfect to remote work from.
April 24, 2024: Budapest to Bucharest 🗺 Budapest - Brasov - Bucharest ⏰ 18h (could have been 15h with a faster train) 💶 76€ / $82
Took the Corona night train from Budapest to Brasov, it was honestly a great experience! Had a whole compartment to myself and the ticket included an English breakfast in the restaurant car. Also had dinner in the restaurant car which had full Orient-Express vibes! In the morning I arrived in Brasov where I caught a day train (2 hours) to Bucharest. The original plan was to stay in Brasov and visit for the day but in the end was too tired so went straight to Romania's capital where I stayed there for 2 days exploring the city before going to Istanbul via Bulgaria.
April 27, 2024: Bucharest to Istanbul 🗺 Bucharest - Ruse - Gorna - Plovdiv - Istanbul ⏰ 26h (+1 day in Plovdiv to explore the city and taking a break from train travelling) 💶 85€ / $92
Ok so this leg of the trip is long and sloooooow! Left Bucharest on Saturday morning, with a series of connecting trains through Bulgaria to catch the night train from Dimitrovgrad... But it didn't go as planned! There's a direct night train running every night of the year from Sofia (Bulgaria) to Istanbul (Turkey) that goes through Plovdiv and Dimitrovgrad (both in Bulgaria)... BUT this train cannot be booked online, only at stations in Bulgaria and Turkey. Normally it "never" sells out but I travelled at the height of Orthodox Easter ... so when I arrived in Dimitrovgrad, I was told at the station that it was full for tonight but there were a few stops left tomorrow. I booked a bed in a 4-bed compartment for the next night. So I decided to sleep in Dimitrovgrad for the night and go explore Plovdiv the next day before catching the train from there! (Highly recommend it! It's a gorgeous city!). Boarded the train that day from Plovdiv at around 9pm, crossed the Turkish border at around 3am and arrived in Istanbul Halkali station at around 9am.
It was a very long journey, but from June to October a direct Bucharest - Istanbul night train runs which could make things easier, as you can directly buy a train ticket from Bucharest Gara de Nord train station at the international desk.
April 30, 2024: ISTANBUL 📍 I'm currently in Istanbul for 1.5 months. Booked an AirBnB for 700€ (bit expensive for what it is tbh, will book something a bit further away from the city and cheaper for the last 2 weeks), in a great and central neighborhood called Cihangir (European side).
The city is beautiful, food is great! So much history and museums, I mean I think I fell in love with the city. People speak quite good English (not as good as in Budapest, but still more than enough to get around and learning a few basic words and sentences goes a loooong way!). The area I'm staying in has lots of nice bars and cafés, highly recommend it!
Now, my next step will be going by train (and a short bus ride) to Batoumi in Georgia, but that's for another time!
Biggest challenges: So far so good! Haven't had any major issues except for the night train from Bulgaria to Turkey. But the biggest challenge I'm starting to feel now, is travel fatigue. It's starting to get quit exhausting moving places, learning a new language, getting used to new customs and environment, meeting new people etc.. As much as I love it, I think 1.5 months is still too short of a time so I'll see maybe I'll stay longer in Istanbul or just stay 3 months in Georgia.
Anyways, hope this inspires you guys to take on a similar journey! I find it highly rewarding and motivating, energy levels are through the roof!
👉 I share everything on Twitter, feel free to follow me there: @ alexatsoc
Happy to answer any questions :)
https://preview.redd.it/grjoqdtj8lzc1.png?width=1764&format=png&auto=webp&s=0fc37fa6e3f62ca9c45f0a150b81b603f754d533