Damn, I should have gone with this one. I can’t think of many things I associate more with the 2000s than Basshunter. The lyrics of the original Swedish songs are so infinitely better than the English remakes too.

Can’t forget this one either. OG DOTA and IRC chatrooms, what a time to be alive

Numa numa song aka Dragostea din tei

Whether tis nobler to risk the splashback, or to live with your poop perpetually ending up on a shelf? In many ways, this is a microcosm of the human condition.

If you want to embed the image inline with your comment you can format it like this (without the spaces)

! [ ] (URL)

Censorship is always going to exist to some extent, but Lemmy has the potential to balance it out because there is no central authority. So you could have censorship of different stuff on different servers, but if you take the network as a whole you would still get a diversity of information.

I remember everybody celebrating Luigi the whole time, I guess some mods and admins were wary of threats of violence being hosted on their servers but overall it’s impossible to criticize Luigi on this platform without getting heavily downvoted, and celebrating him is free upvotes.

So I feel like you’re being pretty overdramatic and also not really accurate with this comment.

Dangerosity*

Never forget what they took from us

#remember_doggerland

Stupid sexy oxygen

Logically it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that you can. You could simply let someone experience a work of art, and never reveal any information about the creator. Boom, that person can experience the art completely independently of who the creator is, because they simply don’t have any information about the creator. In fact, that’s more or less how most people have experienced art for the majority of human history up until the past few generations.

Basically there were a lot of lawsuits going back and forth in the pre-production that ultimately resulted in Guillermo Del Toro leaving the as director after nearly two years of planning and developing the films according to his vision. Then Peter Jackson had to step in as director with minimal preparation time and he essentially winged the whole thing. It was originally planned as two films but was expanded to three at the last minute. They were also using all sorts of cutting edge technology in the filming process and the sheer scale of the films would have been daunting enough even with adequate time to prepare.

As per Jackson

Because Guillermo del Toro had to leave and I jumped in and took over, we didn’t wind the clock back a year and a half and give me a year and a half prep to design the movie, which was different to what he was doing. It was impossible, and as a result of it being impossible I just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all. You’re going on to a set and you’re winging it, you’ve got these massively complicated scenes, no storyboards and you’re making it up there and then on the spot. I spent most of The Hobbit feeling like I was not on top of it. Even from a script point of view, Fran [Walsh], Philippa [Boyens] and I hadn’t got the entire scripts written to our satisfaction, so that was a very high pressure situation

You can read a slightly more detailed explanation in the wikipedia article.

The article you linked mentions a litany of active lawsuits against UHC, many of which were already initiated prior to the murder of Brian Thompson. UHC was already on the legal chopping block prior to Luigi’s actions; in fact it seems fairly obvious that the preexisting lawsuits and bad publicity were the reason he chose to target Thompson specifically.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the article. Right off the bat, I’d like to point out this tidbit, which perfectly supports the argument I was already making in this thread, namely that nothing has been changed by the murder.

Still, Potter warned that UnitedHealth Group’s own claims about reforms to its denials process should be treated with skepticism. “In my view, I think this is mostly for show,” he said. “It’s mostly for PR.”

As for the lawsuit in question, it was filed by some random shareholder from NY, who has no more access to the hard data than we do. He was concerned that

the company’s new projections for 2025, released in April, forecasted a significant cut in earnings.

And in an attempt to explain said concern, this talking head speculated

Wilkes, in an April media appearance, attributed the stock value drop to “probably United, and maybe the industry, pulling back on prior authorizations” — i.e., denying care to patients less often.

That’s not any kind of proof or data, it’s just speculation. Furthermore,

Shortly after the new investor case was filed, attorneys for CalPERS intervened in the new investor lawsuit, and last week, the plaintiff agreed to drop the suit and consolidate it with the larger case.

The lawsuit in question was promptly rolled into the comprehensive legal action which had already been initiated prior to the murder. And in case you didn’t read the whole article, they also mention that

On Monday, shareholders greenlit a $60 million pay package for the company’s CEO and shot down a proposal that would have increased investor scrutiny of executive payouts.

Bottom line is, your characterization of the legal action as “UHC investors suing to increase the denial rate” is reductive and inaccurate, although to be fair to you, it simply mimics the editorialized perspective of the journalist who wrote the article. The parts of the article which emphasize that interpretation of the lawsuit are basically just the journalist pandering to the lowest common denominator which comprises the majority of their audience. In other words, the writer of the article intentionally sensationalized the nature of the lawsuit, which is really quite a boring legal footnote that doesn’t make any of the claims implied by the article. I.e., it’s clickbait, and it’s obviously working.

I do appreciate you providing a relevant link that at least attempts to answer my request for evidence of the previous commenters’ claim, but unfortunately it’s not a very strong piece of evidence.

Lastly, I’d just like to point out that even if UHC does end up changing its practices and extending more coverage, all that ultimately means is that rival health insurance companies under less legal scrutiny will expand their market share proportionally and it’ll simply be a situation of new boss, same as the old boss.

Damn, you’re a real tough customer, I should have known I couldn’t get one over on you 😂

Where do you stand on Osama bin Laden, pray tell? Terrorist or freedom fighter?

Oh, the world is a better place now, and it’s all thanks to Luigi? I must have missed that part

Keep telling yourself that, it’s a nice story to fantasize about but I don’t personally buy it. I wonder if you have any hard data supporting that claim

The deification of Luigi really pisses me off because he didn’t do shit to help anyone. Robin Hood wasn’t a deranged murderer, he stole from the rich to help the poor. What the fuck did Luigi actually accomplish with his idiotic “plan”? It just shows how dire the current situation is that people are desperately latching onto that assclown as some kind of revolutionary, when in reality he is nothing of the sort.

Future cyberpunk dystopias be like

It’s so frustrating that they will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a series, but they end up basing it on a moronic script so all that money is essentially wasted. And I’m not even blaming the scriptwriters because I’m sure it’s ultimately the fault of the businessmen who have no conception of what constitutes good and meaningful art, but insist on meddling with the creative process anyway.

He passed across the great sea into Valinor. He eventually dies there, but he’s presumably still alive at the time when the movie is set, 14 years after he left Middle-Earth.

Yeah Colbert is definitely a card carrying Tolkien nerd. As am I, and although it’s never ideal for IPs to be milked in this fashion, in the case of LOTR I can’t honestly say it bothers me. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Asoiaf? Those over milked franchises can fuck all the way off.

But LOTR has such tremendous depth and cultural value that I think it’s still got milk to spare. Obviously these won’t stand up to the original trilogy, but if they’re at least decent, they can easily be justified because they will continue to maintain the cultural relevance of LOTR as a whole and hopefully renew the interest of younger fans. After all, a good chunk of zoomers and beyond have probably never seen the original films, given their prohibitive length and release dates.

The Hobbit films were pretty bad but I’m still happy they exist, and after watching the appendices it’s more understandable why they didn’t turn out so great. So if they can at least make something better and more faithful than those, I’ll be delighted. It’s also a good decision to keep the stories rooted to the original trilogy. It seems pretty hard to fuck these up too badly, as long as the writers stay humble. Just fill in the gaps that existed in the original trilogy and don’t try to do too much. It’d be cool to get some flashbacks to the scouring of the Shire.

P.S. Rings of Power is absolute trash, I noped out after the first season. So there definitely is a way to fuck it up, but I’ve already explained why there’s reason to hope for the best in this case.

Everything we think we know about the goddess Ériu (and Irish mythology in general) was written down within the past 1000 years by Christian monks. They purported to be recording the oral mythology of the Irish people, but it’s hard to say how much of it was a faithful transcription and how much was invented/reworked by the monks to fit into a Christian/Greco-Roman worldview.

The etymological root of Ireland as a place name ultimately derives from ancient Greek sources, which obviously predate such mythology by over 1000 years.

The name Ériu has been derived from reconstructed Archaic Irish *Īweriū, which is related to the ethnic name Iverni. The University of Wales derives this from Proto-Celtic *Φīwerjon- (nominative singular Φīwerjō). This is further derived from Proto-Indo-European *piHwerjon- (“fertile land” or “land of abundance”), from the adjective *piHwer- “fat” (cognate with Ancient Greek píeira and Sanskrit pīvara, “fat, full, abounding”).

The Archaic Irish form was borrowed into Ancient Greek as Ἰέρνη Iernē and Ἰουερνία Iouernia, and into Latin Hibernia.

So, even ignoring the fact that a mythical goddess is not equivalent to a human woman, Ireland wasn’t named after a goddess either.