debating working tonight. like I really need the money but on the other hand fuck it you know?

edit: alright I'll compromise and do a half shift

update: I moved my trash to the dumpster, filled the dishwasher, and called it "good enough"

shit my parents are landing in a few hours I gotta clean their house before I go pick them up

twenty fower karat gowd labewbew

the transparent/translucent electronics trend of the 90s and early 2000s

I've been feeling nostalgic for this look lately. I really like how it emphasizes the artificial nature of the device in question and invites you to think about how it works and how it was put together - while minimalist electronics do exactly the opposite, almost as if you're embarrassed about owning it and want to pretend that it's not there.

Iranian man still supports Trump despite wife and entire ethnic group being targeted by ICE

It's got to be a cuckold fetish.

It was Biden's advisors immediately after being brought onto the Kamala campaign IIRC. The line between incompetence and sabotage is thin

The postwar vision of suburbs in America was basically trying to adopt farm towns to Americans who were urban professionals for all intents and purposes but still had Jeffersonian brain worms. So many problems could have been avoided if all of the money spent promoting that version of the American dream had instead been spent moving people into then-modern condos and mixed use urban developments, but then I suppose we wouldn't have sold as many cars or destroyed as many black neighborhoods with highways.

Woke up this afternoon, learned that basically every societal problem is about to start getting worse faster than it was before, just another day in what I hope will be referred to by historians as the late Amerikkkan empire.

Credits going bad is one solution to wealth accumulation, I feel like there's probably socialist movements that have experimented with putting expiration dates on their labor vouchers or something.

I can't really explain why but I fucking hate the Simpsons. I hate the golden era, I hate the trash era, I hate the modern era. I hate hate hate this show so much just looking at that particular shade of yellow puts me on edge.

The best reason I can come up with is that it's ugly and I don't like looking at it, but even that doesn't really explain it because most American cartoons are ugly as sin but I only feel this way about the Simpsons.

Maybe there's a Star Wars book that explains this that I haven't read, but in my head it works like this:

In Episode 1 Qui Gon says that he has "twenty thousand Republic daltarits (?)", which Watto calls "Republic Credits" and dismisses, saying he needs "something more real." This clearly communicates to me that the Republic officially uses a digital currency that merchants on planets like Tatooine don't trust. It being a digital currency also tracks with the fact that we know Qui Gon isn't carrying more than can fit in his robe pockets/tool belt, so it's probably some kind of credit chip that gets loaded with operational funds and given to Jedi who are on assignment, secured by some cryptographic measure that can only be decrypted at an officially sanctioned Republic bank.

now I'm imagining a Jedi Master having to fill out an expenditure form when they get back from a mission, lmao.

But what about the physical currency in Andor and The Mandolorian? Well, the distrust for Republican digital currency in the Outer Rim might be more materialistic than it initially seems. Hyperspace Travel is known in-universe to be somewhat unreliable, with ships needing to calculate their travel vectors right before launch and hyperspace lanes needing to be trailblazed in highly dangerous scouting missions. Those barriers form the physical limits of the Star Wars universe and make a centralized galactic banking system impossible to establish.

So how does a galaxy-spanning economy do business when banks on different planets can't reliably synchronize their books? Specie. At the end of A New Hope, we see Han Solo loading metal boxes onto a cart to take to his ship, boxes which the conversation implies to be his payment for helping to rescue Princess Leia. Someone like Han Solo, who travels from planet to planet and mostly in the Outer Rim, probably doesn't trust Republic/Imperial digital credits any more than Watto does, and both he and the Rebellion also have a preference for transactions that don't get logged in any digital ledger, so a payment in specie was the obvious way to go.

We see multiple kinds of hard currency in The Mandolorian's first episode, there's bricks of precious metal and squishy blocks of alien gelatin, and then there are Imperial credits. Imperial credits "still spend", but Mando clearly doesn't trust them, implying that their value has plummeted. What could account for this? Perhaps the Empire was trying to unite the specie-based outer rim economy with the digital core worlds economy by issuing its own physical currency that was directly tied to the digital currency's value.

Presumably, Imperial credits derived a certain amount of their value by fiat, likely because the Empire accepted them as payment for taxes, but with the Empire's collapse the value of Imperial credits dropped to their floor, the value of the metal that they were made from. We also know that the Empire minted multiple kinds of metal into currency, since Mando is paid for one of his jobs with imperial credits made from beskar which are clearly much more valuable than the normal ones, so some people left holding the Imperial Credits bag got shafted harder than others, further contributing to their reputation for volatility and unreliability.

Of course there's also the vault of physical currency in Andor Season 1, which is the payroll for every Imperial soldier and official in the sector. Since this planet's in the outer rim it fits with the model I've constructed, because Imperial workers stationed outside of the core worlds would prefer to be paid in a currency that they can spend on the local economy, and it's the height of the Empire so the credits have their full fiat value and not just their metal value. Another major plot in Andor is Mon Mothma's difficulty moving her money without attracting Imperial attention, a subplot which also fits in perfectly with my model of transactions in the core worlds being mostly done via digital ledgers.

All of this eventually leads to the New Republic which... we don't see. The only economy we see clearly depicted in the Sequel trilogy is on Jakku where salvagers like Rey are paid in "portions" by their boss. There's what looks like a marketplace near where Rey gets paid, so it's possible that the "portions" have a cash or commodity value and can be traded. It's also possible that the marketplace is owned by the same people reselling the salvage and it's essentially a company store. It definitely gives "third world workers doing shipbreaking for pennies" vibes, whatever the details are.