July 19, 2023

Tickets for Messi U.S. debut cost up to $110,000

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/17/business/lionel-messi-ticket-prices/index.html



To witness Lionel Messi make his US debut might require a payday as big as his. Tickets for his expected first match on Friday for Inter Miami in the Leagues Cup are selling as much $110,000, according to a search on ticket reselling website Vivid Seats. That’s one of the most expensive ticket prices ever recorded for a MLS team.

Prices for some seats soared after the soccer superstar officially signed with the Major League Soccer team on Saturday in a deal reported to be worth between $50 to $60 million per year. Still, there are much cheaper options available for Friday’s game. The average price is $487, and some fans are traveling nearly 700 miles to see the match against Mexican team Cruz Azul, a Vivid Seats spokesperson said. Tickets to last year’s League Cup match between Inter Miami and FC Barcelona cost about half of that.

Prices for Messi’s MLS debut on August 20 against Charlotte are averaging $288, according to Vivid Seats, surging nearly 900% since early June when speculation began that Messi was coming to the US. Ticket prices overall for Inter Miami, currently dead last in the standings , have also jumped about 700% since then.

Messi, 36, is one of the most decorated athletes ever, winning the prestigious Ballon d’Or award seven times and was part of the World Cup winning Argentinian side last year. His deal includes an option for part-ownership of the club and a cut of the revenue from new subscribers to Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass streaming service, according to multiple reports.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Messi#Honours

July 19, 2023

Eric Prydz - Call On Me (Thomas Bangalter, DJ Falcon Live Remix) straight banger

July 19, 2023

The 'Barbenheimer' phenomenon: How a movie meme inspired the 'crazy, weird' double feature

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/07/18/barbenheimer-barbie-oppenheimer-movie-double-feature/70421503007/



This weekend, it’s a battle of the bombshells at the summer box office. Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” finally land in theaters Friday, after more than a year of online memes that have playfully pitted the films against each other. The star-studded projects couldn’t be more different: one is a sweetly subversive comedy starring Margot Robbie as the iconic doll, while the other is a cerebral, three-hour drama about the making of the atomic bomb.

And yet, the two films have become an unlikely double feature, with more than 200,000 moviegoers seeing both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" on the same day, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. “I think it’s the perfect double bill,” says Robbie, speaking to USA TODAY before the Screen Actors Guild strike. “It’s like having a steak dinner, then an ice cream sundae for dessert. I want both!”



The 'Barbenheimer' movie meme has blown up in 'unprecedented' ways

The “Barbenheimer” meme was born early last year when it was announced that Warner Bros.' “Barbie” would be released in theaters the same day as Universal Pictures’ “Oppenheimer.” Twitter instantly latched onto the dichotomy of the two films, cracking jokes about the light and dark nature of the respective movies, and their tongue-in-cheek battle for the soul of America.

https://twitter.com/yannhatchuel/status/1673459916630274051
https://twitter.com/kirawontmiss/status/1674496955517378562
https://twitter.com/SandbergEmmet/status/1674173810948419586
But the internet running gag has become a real-world sensation in recent weeks. Hundreds of handmade “Barbenheimer” T-shirts have flooded retail sites such as Etsy and Redbubble. Fan-made posters crop up daily on social media, garnering hundreds of thousands of “likes" for their eye-popping mashups. Opening-day screenings of both films have already sold out at theater chains including AMC and Alamo Drafthouse, while some independent cinemas around the country are offering movie-themed menus and “Barbenheimer” costume parties.

https://twitter.com/shadowknightdk/status/1680288331693977600
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July 19, 2023

'Social media': the harms to women and girls

Europe needs to address a major factor in the mental-health crisis facing adolescent girls in particular.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/social-media-the-harms-to-women-and-girls



‘Social media’ have become rapidly integrated into almost all aspects of human life and social organisation, from product marketing and political communication to health, fitness and dating. Despite their many positive affordances, it is however increasingly clear that women and girls experience online disproportionate and different harms online, compared with boys and men. These include: sexist stereotyping in online-advertising content and algorithmic targeting, negative body images induced by comparison with idealised images of women, misogyny and gender-based abuse, technology-facilitated coercive control, economic and political marginalisation, and side-effects of the dehumanisation and degradation of women in misogynistic pornography.

Our study, ‘The impact of the use of social media on women and girls’, was commissioned by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) of the European Parliament—to which we are presenting today—in response to growing concerns about the scale of digitally mediated harms experienced by women and girls. Academics, policy-makers and activists have recently devoted increasing attention to gender-based and sexual digital harm, with various large-scale surveys indicating its alarming scale and intensity.

This study uses data, reports and analyses from a wide range of sources—from academic scholarship as well as the European Union, national and other international institutions. It covers sexism and gender stereotypes in online advertising and the impact of pro-anorexia and ‘thinspiration’ content (images and text promoting thinness). It addresses gender-based and sexual abuse and harassment, coercive control and targeted hate campaigns against female politicians, journalists and other professionals. And it takes in algorithmic bias and radicalisation, misogyny in gaming and the general rise of male supremacism and pornography.

Targeted and judged

All these activities impair democracy and civic participation more widely and should therefore be of urgent concern to policy-makers, activists, legislators and educators. Among the most disturbing of our findings are the ways in which women are being targeted and judged on their appearance, subjected to image-based sexual abuse and silenced in public debate. The research shows that internet usage, particularly on image-based ‘social media’ platforms, is associated with increased body-image and eating anxiety, and that adolescents appear particularly vulnerable. Because girls grow up in a (real) society in which women’s bodies are routinely sexualised and used by others to assess their value, women tend to be more self-conscious of how they present themselves.

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July 19, 2023

'Social media': the harms to women and girls

Europe needs to address a major factor in the mental-health crisis facing adolescent girls in particular.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/social-media-the-harms-to-women-and-girls



‘Social media’ have become rapidly integrated into almost all aspects of human life and social organisation, from product marketing and political communication to health, fitness and dating. Despite their many positive affordances, it is however increasingly clear that women and girls experience online disproportionate and different harms online, compared with boys and men. These include: sexist stereotyping in online-advertising content and algorithmic targeting, negative body images induced by comparison with idealised images of women, misogyny and gender-based abuse, technology-facilitated coercive control, economic and political marginalisation, and side-effects of the dehumanisation and degradation of women in misogynistic pornography.

Our study, ‘The impact of the use of social media on women and girls’, was commissioned by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) of the European Parliament—to which we are presenting today—in response to growing concerns about the scale of digitally mediated harms experienced by women and girls. Academics, policy-makers and activists have recently devoted increasing attention to gender-based and sexual digital harm, with various large-scale surveys indicating its alarming scale and intensity.

This study uses data, reports and analyses from a wide range of sources—from academic scholarship as well as the European Union, national and other international institutions. It covers sexism and gender stereotypes in online advertising and the impact of pro-anorexia and ‘thinspiration’ content (images and text promoting thinness). It addresses gender-based and sexual abuse and harassment, coercive control and targeted hate campaigns against female politicians, journalists and other professionals. And it takes in algorithmic bias and radicalisation, misogyny in gaming and the general rise of male supremacism and pornography.

Targeted and judged

All these activities impair democracy and civic participation more widely and should therefore be of urgent concern to policy-makers, activists, legislators and educators. Among the most disturbing of our findings are the ways in which women are being targeted and judged on their appearance, subjected to image-based sexual abuse and silenced in public debate. The research shows that internet usage, particularly on image-based ‘social media’ platforms, is associated with increased body-image and eating anxiety, and that adolescents appear particularly vulnerable. Because girls grow up in a (real) society in which women’s bodies are routinely sexualised and used by others to assess their value, women tend to be more self-conscious of how they present themselves.

snip

July 19, 2023

Taking aim at sellers' inflation

Economists and political leaders at multilateral institutions have finally accepted profits are a primary driver of inflation.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/taking-aim-at-sellers-inflation



Key officials have acknowledged that profits have been a major source of inflation in Europe—a realistic position informed by facts, rather than by the economics of the 1970s. Now that they have embraced a new analysis of what is driving inflation, the policy response should change too. In recent months, the European Central Bank (ECB), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the European Commission have all published studies showing that profits have accounted for a large share of inflation. But the coup de grâce for doubters came on June 26th, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) tweeted: ‘Rising corporate profits were the largest contributor to Europe’s inflation over the past two years as companies increased prices by more than the spiking costs of imported energy.’

https://twitter.com/IMFNews/status/1673287590865412096
What took so long? The ECB president, Christine Lagarde, told the European Parliament on June 5th that ‘the contribution of profits to inflation … had gone a little bit missing’, because ‘we don’t have as much and as good data on profit as we do on wages’. Policy-makers had failed fully to appreciate the ‘transmission of the cost-push that was suffered by many corporate sectors into final prices’. But now, the problem had come clearly into view. While some sectors had ‘taken advantage to push costs through entirely without squeezing margins’, Lagarde explained, others had gone further to ‘push prices higher than just the cost push’.

Firms have been able to hike prices for two reasons, according to Lagarde: mismatches of supply and demand, where bottlenecks have prevailed, and the co-ordinating effect produced by recent mega-shocks. As Lagarde put it, ‘everybody is in the same position, we are all going to increase prices’.

Spectacularly successful

This ‘sellers’ inflation’ happens when the corporate sector manages to pass on a major cost shock to consumers by increasing prices to protect or enhance its profit margins. Of course, not all firms have won equally. The bottom line is that sellers’ inflation results in an increase in total profits. This simple truth led Adam Smith to warn, 250 years ago, that profits can drive price pressures.

https://twitter.com/RoniHHirsch/status/1665278200123908103
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July 18, 2023

Solace and saudade

In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-find-a-strange-solace-in-the-indifference-of-the-universe



An elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a yearning that will never be fulfilled. It is a point never reached. This yearning is the all-too-human inclination for our lives to somehow be different than they are, and for the universe not to be indifferent to our cares and concerns. In her essay ‘The Blue of Distance’ (2005), the US author Rebecca Solnit associates this point never-reached with the colour blue. She writes:



When combined with the longing for something absent, for something that simply can’t be, this is saudade, a Portuguese expression for a state akin to melancholic longing. A complex emotion where a melancholic grey seeps into the distant blue. Lacking any easy English translation, saudade seems to be an emotion that can be expressed only through poetry or other evocations of its melancholic longing. Whereas nostalgia is a longing for something that once existed, a person or place or experience that lives in our memory, saudade encompasses a longing for something that never was, something not attainable. Within the yearning, a sense of incompleteness exists, a feeling of loss for something we never actually had. We want, for example, to connect to the divine, to the universe, in a personal and meaningful way.



We long to find meaning in our existence and our experiences – and the meaning we tend to attach to the confusion and loss we feel when this fails to happen is of some sort of providential punishment or karmic backlash. No matter how we attempt to make sense of what we experience, the indifference lingers, an unsettling realisation that nothing, ultimately, matters. We long for the things we do and say to make a difference, for the universe to respond to our call in a way that is just and kind. But it simply can’t. How can we still find solace living in such a world, where indifference is all there is, to reach a place where our yearning has not disappeared but yet has, in some way, been transformed? In her essay ‘“Saudade” and “Soledad”: Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Machado on Nostalgia and Loneliness’ (2007), the Lusophone scholar Estela Vieira provides a possible solution. She writes:



Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa’s forebear, the poet Luís de Camões. Pessoa grew up in Anglophone Durban in South Africa, acquiring a life-long love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon in 1905, which he would never again leave, Pessoa set himself the goal to travel throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds. He published very little during his lifetime but left behind a renowned trunk containing a treasure trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, mainly in Portuguese but also substantially in English and French. Pessoa wrote poems under a variety of heteronyms, the ‘virtual subjects’ of his imagination; and also, importantly, a novel, or rather the anti-novel, The Book of Disquiet (1982), whose protagonist, Bernardo Soares, ruminates in detail on the meaning of being.

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July 17, 2023

Reversing Course, Biden Invites Netanyahu to Visit the U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/world/middleeast/biden-herzog-netanyahu-israel.html

https://archive.li/0i2dr



President Biden on Monday invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to a meeting in the United States for the first time since Mr. Netanyahu re-entered office in December, easing months of tensions about the direction of Israel’s government.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that Mr. Biden made the invitation in a “warm and long” phone call on Monday evening, on the eve of a visit to Washington by Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president. Until Monday, that visit had been widely seen as a slight to Mr. Netanyahu.

The invitation to the prime minister reversed Mr. Biden’s decision in March to avoid meeting Mr. Netanyahu “in the near term.” But White House officials said the prospect of a face-to-face meeting should not be interpreted as Mr. Biden’s abandoning his objections to some of the Israeli leader’s hard-line positions.

Mr. Biden recently described Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition as “one of the most extremist” since the 1970s and voiced particular opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s decisions to undermine the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, expand Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and retroactively authorize settlements built in the territory without government approval.

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July 17, 2023

Not Your Father's Middle Class

Being in the middle doesn’t mean what it used to.

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/not-your-fathers-middle-class



Many Americans define themselves “middle class.” But what does that actually mean? The Pew Research Center periodically asks Americans to say whether they belong to “the upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, lower-middle class, or lower class.” The answers over time have been consistent:



In total, America’s self-described middle class amounts to 90 percent of the population. Because people tend to live in communities with people much like themselves, they may consider themselves about average. A family with an income of $225,000 living in a nice suburb might think of themselves as core middle class, for instance, and not as in the upper-middle class. Conversely, a family with a $40,000 income living in a low income area might think that they’re in the core middle class and not in the lower-middle class.

The word “class” presents an even bigger problem for many researchers, especially sociologists. This concept knits together multiple factors such as income, wealth, job type, education, prestige, and cultural sophistication. The most ambitious attempt to combine many factors is the Great British Class Survey, designed and data analyzed by Professors Mike Savage and Fiona Devine and their teams at the London School of Economics and the Universities of York and Manchester. They surveyed 161,000 people and asked numerous questions to get scores for economic capital (income, savings, house value), social capital (the number and status of people someone knows), and cultural capital (defined as the extent and nature of cultural interests and activities.)



This is a huge effort with lots of good data. But it remains a one-off study with several uncommon class titles. Studying the divisions within the middle class requires an operational definition. Many researchers use current income to define class because it is closely related to all the factors associated with social class and because data on current income are readily available in many surveys with more than 100,000 participants.

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July 17, 2023

Manchin stokes Democratic speculation for 2024 with No Labels event

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4098396-manchin-stokes-speculation-with-no-labels-event/



Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is causing a stir among Democrats as his extended flirtation with a third-party presidential run is set to resurface when he headlines an event for No Labels — despite concerns that a possible run would boost former President Trump. Manchin will headline an event for the middle-of-the-road group — which has been pushing a potential “unity ticket” as a third option in the presidential race — in New Hampshire on Monday.

The possibility of third-party candidates drawing votes has Democrats worried, but they are especially concerned Manchin, who is up for reelection in 2024, could deliver a double blow to the party: a presidential bid that harms President Biden next year and virtually hands a key Senate seat and potential majority in the chamber to the GOP. “Joe is America’s biggest political tease,” Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, told The Hill. “And I trust that he’ll make a judgment to run for reelection in West Virginia. I hope he will.”

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Polls show a third-party bid by a No Labels candidate could create a real headache for Biden, particularly if Trump is the GOP nominee. According to a survey of swing states released by a group of operatives from both parties who are seeking to derail a No Labels candidacy, Biden leads 52 percent to 48 percent in a head-to-head matchup. However, Trump jumps into the lead over the president by a point (40 percent to 39 percent) when a No Labels candidate is factored in. The hypothetical third-party candidate would receive 21 percent, with 13 percent being drawn from Biden and 8 percent coming from Trump.

“It’s pretty clear that a No Labels candidate would help reelect Donald Trump, and I hope anybody who considers it recognizes that that’s a very possible outcome,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), declining to specifically discuss Manchin. “That path is not a path to winning. It’s a path to spoiling the election for Joe Biden and electing Donald Trump.” Manchin, for his part, has done little to staunch the speculation. He said last month he was “not ruling anything in, not ruling anything out.”

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Even Manchin simply refusing to shut this shit down is damaging.