They do take some liberties with what counts, but here's a list of Godzilla universe monsters.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2014/05/kaiju-a-go-go-every-godzilla-monster-from-lamest-to-coolest.html

The veracity of the statement has no bearing on the fact that you dismissed/questioned it first, and now agree. Your position changed....and so has your argument now from 'staggering wealth inequality isn't a bad thing" to ' wealth inequality isn't staggering'.
Forgive us if we take the words of economists, historians, reality, and our own senses over a random person's opinion.

Wiki- in 2014 the top wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation's wealth; the bottom 80% own 7%; similarly, but later, the media reported, the "richest 1 percent in the United States now own more additional income than the bottom 90 percent".[8] The gap between the top 10% and the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1,000% for the top 1%. The average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour"
If that's not excessive, I have to wonder what could be in your opinion. My wife, head of her department for 10 years, working 45-50 hour weeks, makes $30k a year working like a dog (at a job that is life and death for her customers, platelet donation, her department keeps our only local blood bank open as the only money making department, she doesn't make fries.)...Warren Buffet makes >10000 times that much doing absolutely nothing...not excessive?! Also, because he only pays taxes on what he spends, he pays less in taxes than we do.
Thpp!....Ack!

https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17854
(pick california durr)
Looks okay to me
---------------------------
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=70&step=30&isuri=1&major_area=0&area=06000&year=2018,2017,2016,2015,2014,2013,2012,2011,2010&tableid=526&
category=5526&area_type=0&year_end=-1&classification=naics&state=0&statistic=-1&yearbegin=-1&unit_of_measure=levels
--------------------------------
^copy/paste whole link
here's more detailed information about industry in California specifically, looks like it's been growing steady for a while.

Also, note the sharp uptick in government spending starting ~2014 -current numbers late 2018

That spending doesn't account for all of the growth, but there's a parallel growth happening in the "All industry total" category, defined as - "The All industry total includes all Private industries and Government."

@bobknight33
I still think you're a russian troll making the rounds.

I understand. I'll grant that it seems a little "helicopter-parent" like to worry about this sort of thing. However, I do not agree that the transgressions are as harmful OR harmless as you suggest.

The Toy Story Examples again.
The one from Sid is itself an allusion to Star Wars where Darth Vader is torturing a soldier for information about the rebel base locations. If I'm not mistaken, that person is force-choked to death after his mind betrays him and gives Vader the info he needs.

Buzz approaches Woody after Sid steps out and commends him after the fact. "A lesser man would have talked under such torture."

Here is the encouragement. It doesn't matter if Sid is a good or a bad guy. Although, arguably, Sid isn't really a villain - just a kid who likes to play rough with his toys. But that's a different argument. I believe the encouragement is in the promotion of the idea that, put bluntly, torture is effective.

It's this idea, whatever the character motivation is at the time, nomatter who the character is, that encourages the use of torture as an acceptable means of extracting some kind of cooperation from the person being tortured- which is simply NOT true.

Why the pattern? why can't he be just ripping apart his toys like he did with the doll earlier?

I'm not fishing for 'micro agressions' - I'm against promoting the idea that torture works.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/08/world/does-torture-work-the-cias-claims-and-what-the-committee-found.html

"Time and time again, people with actual experience with interrogating terror suspects and actual experience and knowledge about the effectiveness of torture techniques have come out to explain that they are ineffective and that their use threatens national security more than it helps."
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an_fbi_interrogator_on_the_effectiveness_of_torture/

I argue that presenting torture as something that DOES work encourages policy decisions that allow for torture as a means to an end. When in reality it's simply just some kind of revenge driven harm propaganda.


https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known-for-400-years-that-torture-doesn-rsquo-t-work/

Back in 2014 I had a job driving Over The Road Test Vehicles.

After putting 25,000 miles on a car I would drive it to Montgomery AL to the Hyundai plant where they would disassemble the vehicle and inspect it. Then they would just recycle it.

When flying into or out of Montgomery Regional Airport you can't miss the plant because they have Hyundai in big letters on the roof. Visible on Google Earth too.

In their showroom they have actual cutaway engines you can look at. Those damn things don't look like any engine I recognize. Amazing.

This video shows what the cars looks like when testing. We only drove them to get the required amount of miles on the vehicle for the manufacture. No test tracks or courses like the video shows.



That was a fun job for me. Got to drive the 2015 Corvette Stingray from Florida to Las Vegas and back to Florida again before they were ever hit the showroom floor.

The Dodge Viper and Dodge Challenger with the Hellcat engine were also nice treat.

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Friday, November 28th, 2014 1:34am PST - promote requested by ant.

Also This:

"Initially the band hat contacted me way back in 2014 to produce and record their live debut album. They had a monthly residency at the well known domicil jazz club in Dortmund at the time. Titled “Filou presents…” the band hosted a show with a guest band every third Wednesday of the month, often sharing the stage altogether for one massive jam at the end of the night. The guest bands included well-known German jazz acts but often bands that push the boundaries of jazz in some way or another (Sommerplatte, Cosmo Klein, Xaver Fischer, among others). The monthly residence gave Filou the chance to experiment with unusual stage concepts. As a result, they came up with the idea to dissolve the barrier between stage and audience for the live show.

So instead of going to the studio to create a regular album, Filou wanted to create a live recording capturing all their energy and live show experience as their debut record. The concept of making the audience become part of the stage setting also sparked the idea of abandoning a PA system and providing headphones for the audience instead. It’s a very unique experience for the concert goer and obviously turned out to be a slam dunk for me to ensure the best possible audio quality without the usual PA and monitor trash in the mics

Lol. Good point.....dirty hippies. ;-)

Um....what? Vegans should want to avoid them almost as much as the hunter's helper and slaughterhouse sucker brand lozenges, not flock to the brand marketed at meat harvesters.

Um...really? You think non vegans fear a vegan culinary takeover or something enough to falsify studies/polls? That's hilarious.
As to the 7% number, even vegan organizations in Britain disagree, as does Wiki....
According to a 2018 survey by Comparethemarket.com, the number of people who identify as vegans in the United Kingdom has risen to over 3.5 million, which is approximately seven percent of the population, and environmental concerns were a major factor in this development.[140] However, doubt was cast on this inflated figure by the UK-based Vegan Society, who perform their own regular survey: the Vegan Society themselves found in 2018 that there were 600,000 vegans in Great Britain (1.16%), which is a dramatic increase on previous figures.[141][142]
United States: Estimates of vegans in the U.S. vary from 2% (Gallup, 2012)[143] to 0.5% (Faunalytics, 2014). According to the latter, 70% of those who adopted a vegan diet abandoned it.

I think this needs to go here for eveyone to watch

https://wgntv.com/2014/08/21/chicago-area-guy-in-viral-kayaking-video-explains-how-it-all-went-down/

Double-Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, September 1st, 2014 3:35pm PDT - doublepromote requested by eric3579.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by eric3579.

"There is plenty of scum to go around on both sides."

Ahh the classic false equivalency that Trump supporters often resort to.

First of all, every child should be taught at a young age that just because other children may act like little shits, that doesn't mean they can. The amount of functional adult Trump supporters who use "the Democrats are bad too!" as an excuse for Trump's behavior is just astounding. It's really just a pathetic diversionary tactic used to avoid discussing the issues at hand.

Second, your claim that Democrats are just as cruel is simply not true. Blaming Democrats for the very thing Trump is guilty of is a common smear tactic employed by extremist right wing propaganda.

Take Trump's zero tolerance policy which separated minors from their families for example. Right wing propaganda outlets like OAN love showing pictures of children housed alone in Obama era detention facilities and cry foul at the liberal media at the lack of coverage. The reality is that Obama faced a huge surge of thousand of unaccompanied minors from south america in 2014 who were detained. So yes, thousands of children were detained, but they were NOT separated from the families in the first place.

And while some families were separated during Obama's tenure, Obama's policies tried to limit this as much as possible. It is a far cry from what Trump's zero tolerance policy accomplished. The "liberal" media did not report this under Obama OR Bush simply because it was not an issue. If you believed that there was unfair media coverage for Trump on this issue, then you were lied to and manipulated. Its part of what we discussed earlier how Trump uses lies to discredit the media and further erode our democracy.

The point is that right wing propaganda and Trump himself routinely uses lies and deception to paint himself as the target of a "liberal media bias" that they themselves manufactured. And his gullible supporters like yourself love believing in his victim complex. If you don't believe me, then just refer to non partisan international sources like the BBC and you'll soon discover that Trump is just as shitty from an impartial view as the "biased liberal media" portrays him.

Both sides are not the same, no matter what lies Trump and Fox News et al. tries to tell you. And there are plenty of respectable media sources which are not CNN which also exposes Trump for the lying scum that he is.

They will admit to the economy at times seeing as they are well paid folks with many plans that are now thriving with Trumps measures.
You can see it in their eyes lol.
The Whitehouse is NOT just any old place it deserves a measure of respect.
I am well aware of how a democracy works and how people opposed to Trump are committing criminal acts in it's name far worse than the crooks Trump so stupidly employed in order to at first keep him out of office and then to remove him once he got in.
I'm telling you folks this stupidity by the media is only turning more and more folks on the fence over to Trumps camp.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/feinstein-urged-obama-in-2014-to-use-broad-power-to-limit-immigration
I know... it's Fox News but sometimes they are the only ones who will look for this sort of thing.
It certainly isn't in CNN's interest to tell the truth when they claim anything Trump does is racist to address the issue of the caravans.
Some see him as a breath of fresh air (despite his shameful baiting of bigots) when he refuses to be a victim of the all powerful media.
Myself included but I wouldn't have voted for him.
I never watched one episode of his show and never will but I think he has demonstrated that people are becoming tired of all the daily outrage at things we haven't yet fixed even though it may be something vague and we haven't even had time to try to adapt.
Maybe I'm just getting old and not as easily manipulated...

It doesn't work because there is an intrinsic group think personality in the Nordic region. Most people in that region that were born and raised there are very sensitive to profit making and ostentatious displays.

Which means that people are glad to simply 'get by'. There is not a mass drive to be better than your neighbor or own more toys than them. Of course there are outliers, but the bulk of Scandinavians are very used to the accepted norm. They are more willing to accept massive tax rates because they know they will be taken care of by the government. They aren't necessarily concerned about 'getting rich'.

Contrast that to other areas, especially the USA, and you will find out that it would never work here because we are an individualistic nation. Even the bluest liberal wants to be rich here. It's more cutthroat, more selfish, than you will find in a Scandi nation.

Another huge reason it would never work is that they do not spend anywhere near the percentage of their budget on defense that we do. Denmark spends about 20 billion per year on defense. Norway, an oil rich Scandi nation that is considered one of our most important NATO allies, spends about 6 billion. Less than 1.2% of their GDP. This is one thing that Trump was actually right about. We spend around 700 Billion, roughly 3.5% of our current GDP.

"Half the alliance — 16 of the 29 countries — don’t even spend 1.5 percent (of gross domestic product) let alone 2 percent that we all agreed on four years ago (at a NATO summit) in Wales,” Michael Fallon, who served as secretary of state for defense from 2014 to 2017, said. In 2017, only the U.K., Greece, Poland and Estonia reached the 2 percent target.

Whether that level of spending is needed is another argument altogether. I personally think we overspend way too much on defense, but regardless it is a huge factor as to why we can't offer the same level of 'socialism' that the Nordic nations do. If we spent the same percentage as Norway, we would be saving close to 460 billion dollars a year that could be applied to other programs. Such as paying for college for qualified students or trade school for ones that are not college minded. Or providing benefits to new mothers that we currently don't.

Actually:

"On August 26, 2014, Burger King agreed to purchase Tim Hortons for US$11.4 billion; the chain became a subsidiary of the Oakville-based holding company Restaurant Brands International on December 15, 2014, which is majority-owned by Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital."

So that would be Brazilian for Burger King too.

Double-Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, November 30th, 2014 6:05pm PST - doublepromote requested by Mordhaus.