Leafeytea

Yep. Obviously he can go ahead and claim now whatever he wants about this move being all about combating bots but it seems fairly obvious to me that this is not about that. Getting access to registered users payment info is just one more way to loop people into their system and keep track of who.what.where type of users they have. Charges and platform uses for buying marketed products on the platform is just a hop ~~skip~~ click away at that point.

Bots meanwhile will continue to do what they always do; $1 a year to register in is nothing. They will also most likely be able to do this via a one time only use type credit card where user info is irrelevant.

Western media could start by grounding their information in less Islamophobic rhetoric for one.

I mean, I am certainly not a scholar of Islam, but I do know enough about it to understand that at least for Sunni Muslims, the actions taken by terrorists like Hamas are not condoned or supported. Too much misinformation in the West about mainstream Islam's position on "Jihad" is also severely missing, and in the end we end up with extreme interpretations being touted as part of the central tenets of the religion and nothing but assumptions that ALL Muslims are anti-everything-not-Muslim and ready to kill us all at any moment. This is categorically false.

For another, not ALL Palestinians are Muslim. Christian Palestinians have been systematically victimized by Israel's policies every bit as much as their Muslim brothers. For decades now, thousands of them have seen themselves forced to flee Gaza and the West Bank to other countries just survive. So it does get really irritating when you see arguments in Western media squarely blaming Islam or anti-Christian hate for the extremism of terrorist groups like Hamas when clearly, there have been (and continue to be) Israeli governmental pressure and policies in place to discriminate and displace any Palestinian, regardless of them being Muslim or not.

But you know, to talk about any of these facts means you are anti-Semitic so.... it doesn't happen anywhere outside of academia basically. Infrequently at that.

Eirich and any firms like his doing this, along with "Ms Child" (as her surname Baird ironically means...) should take a decidedly long walk off a very short peer. This entire venture on both their parts is obviously motivated by nothing other than financial gain. It's exploitative and harmful to everyone involved. They should be sued by all the families involved if you ask me.

Lovely! Thank you 😊

I agree about the "go big" signature of his scores. Some are just incredibly powerful and evocative.

My taste strays a bit from the "big" aspect since most of my favourite scores are a little more nuanced and in the softer/quieter range (Ryuichi Sakamoto for example, was (still is) one of my all time favourites), but I can definitely appreciate that many of William's contributions are just brilliant.

Bear McCreary. I've been watching Outlander recently; he's been scoring a lot of the music for the series; it's brilliant. 😊

Yikes!! Sorry about that 😂

I guess he is kinda getting up there... bless him.

I do get what you mean, but I would prefer that people do talk about it here where they believe it's a safer environment to discuss views than being exposed to a bunch of toxicity about it elsewhere as they try to make sense of how they feel about what is happening.

I have been reading a lot the last few days. I have seen a lot of pretty ignorant and awful comments, but also a great many that are spot on and some just brilliant. I think all things considered, the admins are doing a great job of allowing people to discuss this without just ban-hammering at first sight anything that is a bit tricky. (Creating the megathread is good move though, so thanks for that by the way...).

For my part, as someone who is now 58 yrs old, the situation in Israel feels like more of history repeating itself over and over. I have spent my entire life watching this kind of news play out. I have also lost many close friends from university who were Israeli and who were Palestinian; many of those had lost their entire families in either the war in Syria or in Lebanon. I had a lot of friends at AUB for example who never came back; During the Gulf War, I was still overseas and had armed soldiers on my campus escorting Israeli faculty for fear they might be attacked since we had received bomb threats at our campus for being "Jew lovers".... I share all that to say that I have some very, very strong opinions on what is happening.

But so do a lot of people here. How can you not?

I still think we are capable of having civil discussions and helping each other through living this moment in time. We have a far easier task doing that bit than anyone else directly experiencing the war and all which that implies.

Statements like this really need to be more clear

Not going to get into an argument about Hamas vs Isreali tactics, but you should be aware that it is far, far from the case that Palestinians inside of Israel let alone in OPT have the rights you think they do:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/

Maybe they should consider showing support for Sudan instead; though I suspect some of the admins at Harvard could not point out Sudan let alone Darfur on a map if their lives depended on it... they would probably not be as offended since... you know, brown people in Africa don't wrack up business contracts in the us.

Sorry. Really irritated with some of these stories. My cynicism is getting hard to contain.

While there are probably tons much more recent, here are some (old and non metal songs) that come to mind: Prince in The Beautiful Ones, Steven Tyler in Dream On, Roger Daltry, in Won't Get Fooled Again.

The things that pass for science these days are truly baffling...

Meh.... I downloaded the actual paper from the link. There are so many holes in it I don't have enough time to cite them all.... not sure for who, why, or for what purpose this was written but I can think of a few high school students in our district (who I have had the pleasure of tutoring in other subjects...), who can write a better than this.

Wealth distribution factors and aging factors in EU, in Japan, and in the US are multi-factorial, each impacted by far broader and systemic issues than what this presents...🙄