Your Most Disturbing Realizations

[tonyb]

… and I've not only never been shot, but I've never had anything more than a squirt gun or a kid's cap pistol aimed at me.

Wish I could say the same. I’ve not only looked at the wrong end of a handgun on a few occasions, I’ve been fired at and tore up my palms trying to wrest away a gun about to be used against a friend.

In all those cases I just happened to find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wasn’t engaged in criminal activity, I wasn’t out looking for a fight.

 

[tonyb]

As to being house poor …

A relative, a fellow a generation behind me, is being dissuaded by his elders from buying a house priced something in excess of a million dollars. His monthly nut would be such that he would have little left over for anything but that house payment. And if he were to miss more than a couple months work? Poof!

My understanding of capital gains taxes on the sale of one’s primary residence is that it is exempt, provided the owner had occupied it for at least two of the past five years. (If we have any tax attorneys or CPAs in the house, I would welcome their weighing in here.) The lovely missus and I got stung for a substantial capital gains tax on a house we HADN’T lived in for such a period.

 

[EngProf]

The plain fact that nobody wants to talk about is that nobody's "prosperity" is real. The whole concept of "wealth" depends on society agreeing that certain things are so, and when those things are no longer so, neither is the wealth -- as, for example, all the "crypto millionaires" are discovering just now. Money is valuable because we agree as a society that money is valuable. Gold is valuable becsuse we agree as a society that gold is valuable. Land is valuable because we as a society have set up a whole network of laws declaring that land can be "owned." But in reality we're all just monkeys fighting over sticks, until we all die, and different monkeys get those sticks. All this vast fiction of "economics" that we've created is designed, in fact, to help us not acknowledge that reality. Especially that part of the reality that says that any of us, with just a few bad rolls of the dice, a few keystrokes not in our favor, could lose everything we think we have.

A stand-up comic from some years ago agreed and made your point exactly:
He is standing on stage with a paper bill in each hand - he says that one is a hundred-dollar bill and the other is a one-dollar bill - then he asks the question: "Why is one worth more than the other - Because we pretend that it is."

 

[tonyb]

It’s all contrived, of course, but it’s easy to make the case that such contrivances are born of a social necessity. Normative values, and all that, be they ever so artificial and arbitrary.

 

[Tiki Tom]

The awkward question is: what comes after capitalism?

 

[Turnip]

A peaceful world, once mankind has grown itself to death.

 

[Trenchfriend]

The awkward question is: what comes after capitalism?

"Los Angeles,
November 2019"

Oops, I´m too late?

 

[LostInTyme]

When the laws are no longer obeyed (we're getting there), the ammunition has all been expended, and all the gender-changer-wanna-bees have changed gender, new births will cease to be, and humanity will end. And, Charleton Heston will return and find the Statue Of Liberty and the Apes will capture him, and that will be the end.

THE END​

 

[Fifty150]

When the laws are no longer obeyed (we're getting there), the ammunition has all been expended, and all the gender-changer-wanna-bees have changed gender, new births will cease to be, and humanity will end. And, Charleton Heston will return and find the Statue Of Liberty and the Apes will capture him, and that will be the end.

THE END​

.....and I had my money on disease, war, and hunger.

Who knew?

 

[Turnip]

As Vladimir Iljitsch Uljanov never said:

„A capitalist will still sell you the rope by which you then hang him.“

 

[Tiki Tom]

We are all just wandering about in a an enormous library with tens of thousands of books in many languages. We really don’t have a clue where to start or what it all means. But we like to fancy ourselves as being literate. More than that, we like to tell our acquaintances how literate we are.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"The beginning of wisdom is understanding how little you actually know."

 

[tonyb]

Benjamin Franklin said, “Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.”

He also said, “I am in the prime of my senility.”

 

[Tiki Tom]

Hmmm. Daughter just introduced me to her boyfriend. Nice guy. Seems like a keeper. Then it dawned on me: when my wife introduced me to her dad, her dad was exactly the age that I am now. Within six years of my meeting him, my wife’s father passed away. R.I.P. (he died of prostate cancer. Age 69.)

I guess the takeaway is “make the most of every day.”

 

[Who?]

The day I realized that my dad was just another guy struggling to do the best he could to make his way through life.

 

[Turnip]

Today’s realization:

We’re scheduled with 38C, I got a date at the barber‘s this afternoon and they got no air condition.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Today’s realization:

We’re scheduled with 38C, I got a date at the barber‘s this afternoon and they got no air condition.

So, fast Mecki??

 

[Edward]

Whenever I watch an old film, something at least pre-2022, that has a pet, especially a cat, in it, I always wonder about that cat and the fact that it will be long in kitteh heaven by now. First time I noticed myself doing this was during a screening of Nosferatu, 1922. It was slightly odd to realise that knowing the cat is long in the great hereafter crossed my conscious mind in a slightly saddening way that I rarely ever find when watching humans I know to be long gone in an old film. Perhaps it's the fact that the humans could speak out for themselves, whereas the cat and their thoughts remain as unscrutable now as they did back then?

 

[LizzieMaine]

My favorite John Barrymore picture, "When A Man Loves," a silent from 1927 based on the story of Manon Lescaut, prominently features a cat in the first half of the picture -- in one scene, Barrymore swordfights a whole gang of rogues *while holding the cat,* who seems perfectly calm about the whole thing. But after about the halfway point, the cat just drops out of the story and you never hear what happened to her. First time I saw the picture I waited expectantly for the dramatic heartwarming reunion scene, but all that happened was Barrymore sailed off on a ship with Dolores Costello without so much an acknowledgement of the cat.

That has bothered me ever since. The cat really did steal the picture, and probably Barrymore demanded that she be written out or something.

 

[Turnip]

So, fast Mecki??

Almost… Growing an old sack I’ve got almost hippie-esque 10mm on rear and sides, long mop on top.

Quick mowing anyway.