en better off if we just all commit suicide in 1999. Let’s face it, the “aughts” were a fucking travesty, and the only left in the entire world that can even possibly surprise me a little bit is the fact is the fact that Hades still makes bonerific threads of monumental horrendousness.
Anyway, limit each of your posts to 5 horrible things, cause otherwise we’ll never be able to stop, cause there are literally an infinite number of horrible things about this shit-tastic decade. Feel free to post again once someone else has chimed in. Let’s play lol :runaway::runaway:
Aughts - fuckin’ worst name ever.
George W Bush - 'nuff said
2a) Barack Hussein Obama - okay maybe i’m cheating by not making it number 3 but I’m trying to make a POINT with my devious listing. Basically, Obama is exactly the same as Bush and there is literally no difference between the two. In fact, Obama might be even worse than Bush cause he puts a happy smiling face on genociding Brown people around the world and killing off his own citizenry slowly with absolutely disgusting policies.
white and black stripe button down shirts - seriously next fucking hipster I see wearing one of these is getting an extra white stripe in his eye
Yet another Great American religious awakening - hey I know the answer to our crumbling infrastructure and society - let’s put all of our hope behind a giant spaghetti monster in the sky rather than trying to do something about it like elect people with IQs over 90. Also the more religious you are the greater the chance you’re a closet homo sorry but it’s true. Unless you’re a woman than it probably just means you’re in need of a good dicking. :chupon:
Corporate socialism - oh my god. millions of people are out of work, being thrown out of their houses, have nothing to eat, children starving in the streets. I know, let’s give 700 billion dollars to the richest corporations in the history of planet earth.
Sorry if I took your idea folks but there are still plenty of horrible things I know you can think of some come on guys and gals :scooby:
I think somewhere along the lines of this decade I lost all interest in brewing my hatred and thus became unconcerned with such fecal matters. So I can only say that I don’t give a damn about this world the way I did as a child and my hopes for a better day are long forgotten to the abysmal dismay of a never-ending world of shit. The opinions of others no longer entice me. I do not idol my fellow man and look up to no one. This manmade world is a toy to me that I’ve lost interest in playing with and I would much rather live outside of its grasp but there is nowhere to run in the world that is free from the minds of others. So day by day I wake up and deal with it all. Every story on the news and almost all things happening in the world sicken me and I immediately forget it all and replenish my mind with fantasies far from reality. This filthy whore of a world is drifting further and further from my concern every day. I will likely die a bitter old man who amounted to nothing in a world of nothing that people seem to think there’s something to. Of course, I am not a father yet, which may change this shitty outlook on things —but the thought of being a father scares me more and more when I think of it all and why another soul shouldn’t be brought into this world that’s already on fire.
I can’t believe how fast 0.35 billion seconds go by and how I always seem to waste every one of those seconds.
The fact that our generation is going to have to foot the majority of the bill for our parents’ generation’s decadence (at least in the US).
Plus two wars.
Plus environmental issues.
And finally there are far fewer celebrities than there were at the start of the decade.
Not to say that there haven’t been any redeemable contributions from this decade, but in the grand scheme of things we’re worse off than when we started.
Cell phone technology. Not only a phone that replaces land lines, but a camera, GPS device, Internet browser, music player, gaming machine, email client, etc. It replaces all of these things, but it’s not as good as any of them, so it sucks.
HD Television. The picture is essentially the same resolution as what we see in real life. There’s no distinction anymore, and so people can’t tell the difference between reality and entertainment. The violence spills over from the HD screen into our minds, and this is why we shoot up schools, army bases, and ghettos when we get upset.
Advancements in Internet technology: File Sharing. In 10 keystrokes or less, anyone can download any movie, song, album, television show, or porno ever recorded, without paying for it. You don’t even have to pay for Internet access because you can just steal your neighbor’s wireless. This not only rips off your neighbor, but also the copyright holders, which just sucks.
401K plans. I’ve worked for 10 years, and if I never make another contribution to my plan, and it earns 10%, it’ll be worth 1.25 million when i retire. This sucks because it reduces people’s desire to buy lotto tickets, which means less income for the government, which means 401K plans contribute to national debt.
I don’t have a record deal yet. where is my platinum toothbrush and ivory toilet paper? I’m shitting and cleaning myself like a ‘normal’ when clearly I’m not.:ark:
Instead, the major powers gang up on “lesser countries” resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Also, great powers ignore multiple genocides in “lesser countries” resulting in the deaths of many more millions. Though this is nothing special - it’s been the agenda of the major powers since the 1950’s.
2: The enormous progress in computer sciences and biology.
And with it we have the patenting of the very genes inside of our bodies, not to mention religious conservatism intentionally blocking new treatments and research like stem cell research. And sure, computer technology has made many great advancements. But what do we do with it? Now we can update all our friends up to the minute about the color of the turds we just flushed down the toilet without even leaving the bathroom. But you know who is taking maximum advantage of this technology? Governments and police agencies around the world who now have the capability to track our movements wherever we go on the entire planet, with the possible exception of places covered with ice. Hope you enjoy the cold, cause soon that’s where you’ll be going for professing “disagreeable” political ideas :hahaha;
3: The prevention of a second Great Depression.
yet if you look at the REAL unemployment rate, not this bullshit one the gov’t professes, the unemployment rates between now and the great depression are actually quite similar. Sure, we have better safety nets that we had back then, but in the same way people were more resilient back then. When the great depression hit, our society took the steps that were necessary to reorganize itself for a new future. It was a long and painful process, but we had to do it. Now all we care about is instant gratification and the “illusion” of progress. Sure, that mystical number of GDP growth might be positive again, but it doesn’t mean anything. We’re just re-inflating the bubble. Just look at this picture. The second great depression is just starting for the millions who lost their jobs this year and will never get them back.
4: The competition between a woman and a black man for the presidency.
OK fine…but it still doesn’t mean that these candidates stood for policies that were markedly different from the policies that other white men also stood for.
5: The reform in health care and financial regulation.
:booster: You mean the one that provides absolutely no public option, floods the market with billions of dollars of subsidies that go directly into the pockets of insurance companies (you are a smart guy - what happens when you flood a stable market with excess liquidity? that’s right - prices go up!), does not cover abortions, does not open up research for stem cells, does not limit premiums in any meaningful way for normal people, does not mandate employers provide insurance but does mandate employees to purchase insurance, and also PUNISHES the people who need help the most - people with no health insurance! That’s right folks, the people with no health insurance because they can’t afford it will soon be punished with fines every year for not having health insurance! Oh, but you mean the insurance company can’t deny me for pre-existing conditions? Oh thank god - i can finally get that surgery I need for my cance—oh wait my premium is 8,000 dollars a month I guess my money would be better spent on a nice casket.
You mean the one that provides absolutely no public option, floods the market with billions of dollars of subsidies that go directly into the pockets of insurance companies (you are a smart guy - what happens when you flood a stable market with excess liquidity? that’s right - prices go up!), does not cover abortions, does not open up research for stem cells, does not limit premiums in any meaningful way for normal people, does not mandate employers provide insurance but does mandate employees to purchase insurance, and also PUNISHES the people who need help the most - people with no health insurance! That’s right folks, the people with no health insurance because they can’t afford it will soon be punished with fines every year for not having health insurance! Oh, but you mean the insurance company can’t deny me for pre-existing conditions? Oh thank god - i can finally get that surgery I need for my cance—oh wait my premium is 8,000 dollars a month I guess my money would be better spent on a nice casket
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is only the Senate plan. The final one could be better… but probably not.
The aughts were definitely a shitty decade due to the Iraq War(thousands of Americans killed, hundreds of thousands perhaps over a million Iraqis killed); the recession and rampant unemployment, as Zepp pointed out; American troops molesting prisoners of war; the Enron and other corporate scandals; Hurricane Katrina leveling a major American city and killing 3,000 people; the return of public beheadings as political statements; genocide in the Sudan; the rise of worldwide anti-American sentiment; unheralded corruption in the U.S. government, including manipulating intelligence to lead us into war, outing of a CIA agent, etc; the tsunami; etc.
There is actually a Time cover story on this, which is probably where Zepp got the idea for the thread.
c) International politics sucked between the whole international terrorism thing, Bush, the two wars, international organisms & treaties, Berlusconi and EU working in mysterious ways (exceptions: Euro, some fo the expansions).
d) Disappointment over the direction of Greek cinema.
e) No Starcraft sequel.
Do we do the thread on the good points of the zeroes now?
More like you’re going to be a cop because you were picked on growing up and if you become a cop you will feel like you have power over everyone else and its your turn to be an asshole to THEM!
The last decade had an unremarkable amount of military intervention. If it weren’t Afghanistan and Iraq Part II, it would be Kuwait, Iraq Part I, Bosnia, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, or various Soviet affiliates. We could discuss whether each military activity was justified, but your reference to “genocides” suggests you’re not interested in a sober discussion. It also makes light of real genocides, where racial hatred leads to the indiscriminate murder of civilians. If the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are genocide, then every war is genocide. Direct your complaints not at the decade, but at human nature.
And with it we have the patenting of the very genes inside of our bodies, not to mention religious conservatism intentionally blocking new treatments and research like stem cell research.
Most opponents of stem cell research argue that it devalues human life to harvest cells from what would become full-grown humans. It fosters the strange idea that the right to live is qualified by extent of consciousness, ability to feel pain or express it, or some other materialistic criterion. Opponents of patenting genes argue that the human genome has such deep significance that, like the human it came from, it should not be treated as property, even though patenting genes causes no tangible harm.
The arguments are not terribly different. Strangely, you take two opposite positions. Even stranger, you view others’ disagreement with your idiosyncratic views as evidence of a bad decade. You walk a time-honored path: when some people reject your deep views, you misdiagnose their intellectual disagreement as widespread social malaise.
That aside, Obama’s order lifting the ban on stem cell research should console you, about the state of both science and politics.
And sure, computer technology has made many great advancements. But what do we do with it? . . . You know who is taking maximum advantage of this technology? Governments and police agencies around the world who now have the capability to track our movements wherever we go on the entire planet.
Commerce has rapidly moved online, to sites like Amazon and eBay, saving billions of hours for more productive or entertaining things. As families have diffused farther across the country and world, programs like AIM and gchat have made it possible to keep in touch. Free inbox space has become virtually unlimited. Scheduling, note-taking, television-watching, gaming and banking can be done remotely by Internet. 3d graphics have improved from spiky polygons to figures that, with a little squinting, could be confused for humans.
I don’t know what new technology “tracks our movements” across the “entire planet.” Credit card transactions were tracked in the 1990s. Satellites are hardly advanced enough to track an individual person in real time. Is your complaint with technology in general? I suppose in simpler and more pastoral times, poor thieves who stole food for their family could flee to the wild countryside, out of the reach of the local tyrant. Modern petty criminals could also flee to the wilderness, and no police office would waste resources hunting them down. In any event, privacy and technology have been in conflict for the last 75 years. This decade was not particularly remarkable.
yet if you look at the REAL unemployment rate, not this bullshit one the gov’t professes, the unemployment rates between now and the great depression are actually quite similar. Sure, we have better safety nets that we had back then, but in the same way people were more resilient back then. When the great depression hit, our society took the steps that were necessary to reorganize itself for a new future. It was a long and painful process, but we had to do it. Now all we care about is instant gratification and the “illusion” of progress. Sure, that mystical number of GDP growth might be positive again, but it doesn’t mean anything. We’re just re-inflating the bubble. Just look at this picture. The second great depression is just starting for the millions who lost their jobs this year and will never get them back.
You’re speaking in vague and cliched metaphors that don’t illuminate any reality. The crux of the financial collapse was risky lending gone bad. Banks offered non-recourse loans to prospective home and business owners with horrible credit, securing the loans against the property being bought. In other words, if the debtor defaults, the bank gets only the property. When it became clear that land was overpriced, debtors rationally defaulted on their loans: they would otherwise have to pay more for the land than it was worth.
Meanwhile, investment banks were so confident that land prices would increase, and land would stay in demand, that they bought lots and lots of land with investor money. Some banks had up to 27 times as much money being “held” for customers as they had liquid assets to pay back customers. When land prices plummeted, customers began withdrawing money en masse. The banks couldn’t pay them back, because first, nobody wanted to buy their excess supply of land, and second, land prices were so low that banks wouldn’t get enough money even if they could sell it. So banks stuck with these “toxic” land assets collapsed.
Businesses need loans. When a normally profitable business has a cash shortage due to a bad quarter, it takes out a loan to finance the next quarter. When a business wants to expand, it takes out a loan to pay for new land, materials, personnel, and R&D. Banks and businesses negotiate interest rates that, ideally, will end up profiting both parties: the banks because they get free money later, and the businesses because they need money now.
Banks that are collapsing can no longer do this. Healthier banks see customers defaulting on their loans, leaving banks with worthless land, and reasonably decide to keep lending at a minimum until the crisis blows over. As a result, lending stops, businesses can no longer expand, and existent businesses that happen to have bad quarters can’t get cash to weather the bad times. As the economy slows down, this exacerbates the problem, because now no businesses are profitable, so all of them need loans–which banks reasonably refuse to give them.
This is where ordinary people begin to suffer. Businesses need to cut costs, so they fire their low-level workers. They go through bankruptcies to cut off their obligations to former employees, like pensions and health care. They stop hiring. They institute pay cuts and freezes. Here is your unemployment rate.
The Obama administration and Congress responded by seeking to regulate risky lending practices. If you’ll recall, that is where this all started. If banks were not allowed to lend excessively or invest so much that they couldn’t pay off a sudden mass withdrawal, this collapse of the financial system would not have happened. As it stands, many people are still unemployed. At higher levels, business as usual has resumed. As banks gradually regain confidence in the market and resume lending to businesses, businesses will resume their expansion, and hire back the people who lost their jobs. One positive side effect is that obsolete businesses that stopped being profitable years ago have been forced to either modernize or dissolve. This opens competitive room for newer, more innovative businesses that managed to profit even during a financial collapse. This tends to relocate employees to positions where they will do more good for society.
Besides regulating risky lending (the source of our problems), the federal government systematically injected money to stave off total collapse of the financial system. This would have been disastrous for businesses, which need occasional loans to survive and expand. It would have harmed employees of those businesses just as much. So while it is true that ordinary Americans paid and will pay for risks taken by greedy bankers, we are paying for our own future employment. As a short-term measure to prevent another Great Depression, the stimulus was justified.
You mean the one that provides absolutely no public option, floods the market with billions of dollars of subsidies that go directly into the pockets of insurance companies (you are a smart guy - what happens when you flood a stable market with excess liquidity? that’s right - prices go up!), . . . does not limit premiums in any meaningful way for normal people
Money is fungible. The government could spend billions subsidizing a public option, or it could subsidize insurance companies who sell basic plans at far below fair market value. The point is, if we want poor people covered, the government and its taxpayers have to pay for it.
Next you complain that the bills would not limit premiums for “normal people”–those who lack access to the subsidized plans. The government could limit premiums with “billions of dollars of subsidies,” exactly what you castigate above. The government could also take the money from insurers by limiting their profits to a reasonable spread, say, 15%. That’s exactly what the bills will do. The effect is that, if insurers cannot profit by more than 15%, they may as well spend the excess money attracting customers by lowering premiums.
That’s right folks, the people with no health insurance because they can’t afford it will soon be punished with fines every year for not having health insurance! Oh, but you mean the insurance company can’t deny me for pre-existing conditions?
Here’s the problem: Good poor people will get on a federally subsidized plan. Bad poor people will say, “Why buy insurance when the emergency room is free and can’t collect a penny from me?” With no punishment, poor people have every incentive to be bad. Nothing is more demoralizing for good people than a law that rewards bad people for being bad. Meanwhile, middle-class taxpayers will shoulder the burden for irresponsible uninsureds, which should fall on insurance companies.
Yes, it’s harsh to fine a poor person who is trying to save money for failing to buy insurance. But that’s the nature of all civil offenses: violators are most often those who can’t afford to pay fines. If we don’t deter offenses with the prospect of punishment, bad people will profit at the expense of lawful and responsible people. It’s hard, but it’s the reality.
