1) I question your sources, because some of the earliest writings ever found were business ledgers dealing with selling grains as I understand it. Capitalism has been a thing since before writing was a thing.

2) um...I think those kids in China would dispute that....THEY made the Iphones, which created a smart phone market by being useful and fun (for most people).

3) do you believe capitalism and the industrial revolution started at the same time, or that capitalism has something to do with surfs, civil rights, or secularism? Capitalism applied to people is indentured servitude, what we lazily call slavery. Unfettered capitalism created a situation where civil rights needed to be delineated and codified, it didn't create them any more than wildfires created firemen imo.

Some people do educate themselves before acting or making purchases, but it's not the norm.

Capitalism says your poor neighbors should die, because capitalism says there is no value to human life...I did a term paper on that. Value is derived from a supply/demand equation, and there's such a glut of humanity that human life has a negative value.

The government paid for around 75% of the technology development. "...it paid for some of the technology...." is incredibly misleading, if technically correct (the best kind of correct). Without a healthy dose of socialism, progress slows to a crawl and only the privileged few can afford it.

1 word....flip-phones. ;-) (I don't even have one of those)

OK, I am in the minority that hate the recent Batman trilogy. The stand out was Heath Ledger, but even that movie had some serious issues that his amazing performance couldn't fix. That guy was genius. But this...this... This is on a whole 'nuther fucking level. I can't wait to see this. If it is anywhere near as good as these trailers make it look to be it will be amazing. Phoenix just owns the screen in these trailers. You can physically see him metamorphosing into the Joker and even in the trailer it 'feels' real. The way he cuts that laugh off... damn.

Yes. Fuck yes.

Instant insane theory... Ian McShane is Heath Ledgers joker after years of therapy

“ and here... we.... go!”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_America_News_Network


The formation of the organization was announced on March 14, 2013 by Herring Networks, Inc., an independent and family-owned national video programming company owns and operates OAN and sister channel AWE (formerly WealthTV; the initialism being an acronym for "A Wealth of Entertainment"). When the network began in 2013 it had a limited partnership with The Washington Times.[1]

The network launched with the intention of targeting a conservative-leaning audience with OAN President Charles Herring telling CPAC that, “Fox News has done a great job serving the center-right and independent audiences...But those who consider themselves liberal have a half dozen or more choices on TV each day from which to get their news.”[8] Herring also stressed the network's separation of news and opinion content, with straight news reporting throughout the day and limited opinion commentary from evening talk shows, including The Daily Ledger hosted by Graham Ledger and The Tipping Point hosted by Liz Wheeler. Early advertisements for the channel touted the network's lack of commentary and focus on straight news reporting.[9] The channel was formally launched on July 4, 2013.

As of August 2017, One America News Network reached 35 million homes and had nationwide distribution from DirecTV, DirecTV Now, Verizon FiOS TV, AT&T U-verse, Frontier Communications, CenturyLink PRISM TV, and numerous regional video distributors.[10]

They said it wasn't a gateway drug
My homie was takin' subs and he ain't wake up
The whole while, these billionaires, they kicked up
Paying out congress so we take their drugs
Murderers who will never face the judge
And we dancin' to a song about our face goin' numb
But I seen homies turn grey, noses draining blood
I could've been gone, off 30's, faded in that tub
That's Prince, Michael and Whitney, that's Amy, Ledger and Pimp C
That's Yams, that's DJ A.M
God damn they're making a killing
Now it's getting attention cause Sara, Katey and Billy
But this shit's been going on from Seattle out to South Philly
It just moved out about the city
And spread out to the 'burbs
Now it's everybody's problem, got a nation on the verge
Take Activis off the market, jack the price up on the syrup
But Purdue Pharma's 'bout to move that work

My drug dealer was a doctor, doctor
Had the plug from Big Pharma, Pharma
He said that he would heal me, heal me
But he only gave me problems, problems
My drug dealer was a doctor, doctor
Had the plug from Big Pharma, Pharma
I think he trying to kill me, kill me
He tried to kill me for a dollar, dollar

And these devils they keep on talkin' to me
They screamin', "Open the bottle," I wanna be at peace
My hand is gripping that throttle, I'm running out of speed
Try to close my eyes but I keep sweatin' through these sheets, through these sheets
Four horseman, they won't let me forget
I wanna forge a prescription, 'cause, doctor, I need some more of it
When Morphine and heroin is more your budget
I said I'd never use a needle, but sure, fuck it
I'm caught up, I'm on one, I'm nauseous
No options, exhausted
This is not what I started
Walkin' carcass, I lost everything I wanted
My blinds drawn, too gone to leave this apartment

My drug dealer was a doctor, doctor
Had the plug from Big Pharma, Pharma
He said that he would heal me, heal me
But he only gave me problems, problems
My drug dealer was a doctor, doctor
Had the plug from Big Pharma, Pharma
I think he trying to kill me, kill me
He tried to kill me for a dollar, dollar

More, more, more
Re-up, re-up

Death certificate signed the prenup
Ain't no coming back from this percocet
Actavis, ambien, adderral, xanax binge
Best friends with the thing that's killing me
Enemies with my best friend, there's no healing me
Refilling these, refilling these
They say it's death, death
Institutions and DOC's
So God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change
Courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference
And the wisdom to know the difference

I have zero interest in this film now. They just tossed a cosplayer into what was shaping up to be an interesting combination of characters.

Also, they obviously went to Eisenberg for the role and said "You can do 'Heath-Ledger-crazy', right?" It just stinks of hoping to re-capture another Joker performance.

Easy, the bus guy entered sneak mode, pressed the use button to pickpocket once the biker was close enough. While he looked through the biker's inventory and took probably his gold and maybe some necklaces and rings, he accidentally took the keys. Upon realising his mistake he tried to reverse-pickpocket the keys, got the wrong button and droppen them instead. To gain something from the whole botched thing, the bus dude told the biker in the hope to level his speech skill.
He probably just playing some Thief Guild mission now, forging some ledgers. Unless he's with the Dark Brotherhood. Then he tried to poison the biker.

When I first started volunteering to serve at a homeless shelter, many years ago, I didn't know exactly why I was doing it. Certainly it felt like the "right" thing to do. I was at least confident that I wasn't doing it for personal gain because I didn't wear it on my sleave, didn't brag about it or hang my ego on my personal identity of being a good person. When dissillusionment set in, when I realized just how many of the people I was serving were homeless by choice, I pushed through and carried on...and I still didn't know why. I just trusted that I would get it one day.

Eventually I made a connection to the time I spent living in Sweden. In the town I lived in, every night a group of vagrants assembled in the market square. Every bit as dirty and drunken as the worst homeless person that most people imagine them all to be. Fighting, having sex in the public restroom, vomiting and carrying on loudly all night. But this was socialism, so they went home every night to their government payed for apartments. I realized that no matter what you do, there will always be a segment of society that just doesn't give a Fuck and is happy to take and never give back. We've all known these people. Family members, friends, acquaintances, who use up the good will of everyone they meet until they've got no one left to use and it falls to the larger community to support them. No economy, government or community planning will ever compell them to support themselves. We loathe them and shun them. Politicians with ulterior motives tell us that ALL homeless and disadvantaged ARE them. But it's a lie. There are the mentally and physically ill who have no support structure, who NEED their communities to help them. Most of these people were once functioning members of their communities who no longer have the ability to survive on their own.
And so I came to understand that it's better to feed a hundred leaches to serve a single helpless individual.

Boy was I proud of myself for realizing that.

And then I was layed off and my job shipped to India, followed closely by my wife spending a year in and out of the hospital, with no insurance. A careers worth of hard work, reduced to a data point on a corporate profit sheet. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, when the medical debt comes for me and everything I've built in my life is taken, to become a line in someone else's ledger. Betrayed by the greed in the system. Because I upheld my end of the social contract. I worked hard in school, excelled in my career, had two kids and bought a house in a neighborhood with good schools. But the system is run by the greediest and most power hungry. Politics and business is the domain of the high functioning sociopath. And to a sociopath, you're not a real person like them. You're a data point, a line in the ledger.

Then I came to respect the other segment of the homeless. The ones who rejected the social contract, who don't feel societal pressure to give more than they take. Because they got it right. It's all a lie. You don't earn anything in America. You don't deserve the fruits of your labor. You subsist at the whim of the people with money and power. And when it serves them, you get nothing.

We are all standing in line for food, hoping there's a room for the night.

Chris Farley, Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur, The Beatles (they were all fucked up on various abuses, including physical), Michael Jackson, River Phoenix, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, John Belushi, Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Biggie Smalls, Gary Coleman...

I don't think Chris Farley is the prime example, but he's on the list.

But... that doesn't mean their works are any less for it. Getting famous for having talent brings reward, but it also blurs the lines and stunts maturity...

Most of these people didn't even make it to 30, or were so fucked up by the time they had hit this milestone, there was nothing they could do; they didn't have the necessary life lessons that guide us by constant evolution of being. Too many rewards and too much pressure with few threshold guardians to intercede. It's a gauntlet.

Your video, Heath Ledger's Joker Diary, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

They have "value" the same way all currencies have "value", in that they are a reliable way to determine if somebody else has stored value in the currency market in question.

Calling them "coins" is probably confusing, people don't have bitcoins, people have bitcoin accounts, which you can make as many of as you wish, but new bitcoin accounts are always empty.

To get "coins" the central p2p accounting ledger called the block-chain has to show that some other account transferred coins to your account, that transfer log has to go all the way back to coins generating through mining.

The specifics of how the accounting is verified is some very cool crypto, but suffice it to say it is functionally impossible to forge bitcoin transactions.

Heath Ledger as Joker in The Dark Knight will always win for me.

Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects doesn't belong here because that ending made no sense.

Bane doesn't belong here. Yeah I said it.

I love this movie soo much and Heath Ledgers performance is Fucking Amazing. Goddammit I wish he got some help, leaving behind a daughter and everything.

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..