chapotraphouse

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.

I like biting my nails more than I want to stop

I'm an ignoramus and I'd heard Argentina's inflation rate was high but I got around to looking at it and like wtf how do you even have a functioning monetary system at all like this this is so fucked

In fair Bologna where we tell our tale

I don't believe you are legally allowed to call it a Po' Boy if you're charging $18 for it.

Finally passed the statute of limitations.

It was me.

I let the dogs out.

this is driving me fucking crazy, warlockracy on youtube did a joke in their project tamriel cyrodiil video "they have nothing, they get beaten, and they like it" about morrowind and cyrodiil.

this is a literary reference. when i put the exact quotes into search engines i do not receive where it is from.

Most people are concerned about the price of eggs.
I am concerned about the price of oats.
We are not the same.

Thank whatever or whoever, that the news megathread is not in the 1000s of comments

Now that it finally slows down, I can absorb the news.

damn they weren't lying running installers thru lutrix is hella slow. maybe a VM was the move but i don't really understand using one and the only advice anyone ever fucking has is the sentence 'run it thru a VM'

Peter, did you get banished to the lagoon

aww crap

Is Joe Biden still dying of butthole cancer?

The video description for the last Half in The Bag is pretty amazing

it is july 2 and stalin saved the world from fascism

20 min into the latest chapo and two great mispronunciations from felix: "finnit" for finite and "lat-ent" like latin for latent

Apparently, 2024 election denialism is HUGE in lib circles right now. It is amazing that I've barely seen any of it (just some stuff on Reddit). And it seems to be growing more organically than the 2016 "Russia stole the election" stuff, because that was pushed by the liberal media and the DNC itself.

https://thiswillhold.substack.com/p/she-won-they-didnt-just-change-the

whatever man Bo Burnham told me yuor'e a virgin