Grrl Power #1264 – Shadowy figures doing shadowy things
Here’s that smash cut Sydney was waiting for. It’s one reason I forced myself to keep the previous scene with Max and Rowan extremely short instead of having him race off to a 5-story building fire that would invariably invoke “Sydney’s Law of Might-as-Well-Have-Been Intended Consequences.”
Can you tell I just played and beat Horizon: Forbidden West? Yeah, the people who made that series saw J.J. Abrams’s abuse of lense flares in Star Trek and were like, “Hold my Jenever.” Which is apparently a traditional Dutch alcoholic beverage and the national spirit of the country. Cause, Guerrilla Games made the series, and they’re in the Netherlands. I really liked the game, in case you were wondering. I beat it and the expansion, but as with every other open world game I’ve ever played, after beating the main questline, I don’t feel a lot of motivation to go around 100% the rest of the quests I left unfinished. Yeah, I could go and clear out all the bandit camps or upgrade my hacking spear thing so I can override all the mechanical enemies in the game, but it really does feel kind of pointless now.
I don’t normally do color coordinated word bubbles, but since most of these are tail-less, I thought it would help. I probably won’t keep it up after these characters’ initial appearances.
Okay, so, about the accent on this page – if I write Rogue saying “Watch out sugah, don’t touch mah skin!” That’s not racist because, 1) We’re both white, and 2) The majority of white people don’t have that accent. Although I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people with that accent are white. Even more specifically, a white woman. Possibly a flamboyant gay man born on the bayou might sport that accent as well. Come to think of it, Lafayette from True Blood sort of had that accent.
So if I write an asian person (it’s not a spoiler to reveal that) with an accent that makes it clear that English is their second (or possibly 3rd or 5th) language, I don’t think it’s racist. Well, actually, anything that acknowledges someone’s race is probably racist to some degree, in a very technical, literal sense. But in practical usage, I think the term implies a certain intent of disdain. The complication, of course, is that intent doesn’t really matter, how it’s received by the person or group, being, uh… referenced.
Which goes back to why it’s at least a little less racist (and very funny) when Key and Peele make fun of black peoples’ names than if, for instance, Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson did it. You can be sure they’d be saying it in a hateful way, (even though Sequester Grundelplith, M.D. is an awesome name) and you can be sure it’d be received in the spirit it was intended.
So what’s my point? My point is that the short one in the last panel is asian and has an accent. The intent is that sometimes asian language speakers have trouble distinguishing “L’s” from “R’s” because many asian languages don’t make the distinction. If you roll your “R” once, it’s kind of an “L,” and that’s the phoneme several languages over there are coming from. Some people have a significant accent and if I want to convey that, I can either indicate it through phonetically altered dialog, or I could have one of those informative yellow text boxes that says “Word bubbles 1, 9, 11, etc. are spoken with an asian accent.” But that’s just not as interactive, and it makes people go and count the balloons. It’s just bad.
The new one is well underway, I’ll try to have it up with next Monday’s comic.
The new vote incentive is up!
Every so often I get the urge to try and draw Maxima all properly shiny, and this… isn’t my favorite attempt if I’m honest. I’ve been sitting on this for a little while doing little tweaks, and decided to finally publish it cause I’m already behind on these. The next one will (almost definitely) resume the trend of including a little mini comic to extend the scene a bit.
As usual, Patreon has some outfit variations as well as sans flagrante.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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I am getting incompetent hench vibes. I wonder what their plan for dealing with ArcSWAT is given they just committed a supercrime…. super-crime? enhanced crime? how do you say it so it doesn’t sound like just robbed fort know while wearing tuxedos and being ultra awesome?
I am wondering where it stops being “crime with high tech” and becomes “super crime”?
After all, the tech that the aliens have is just something we’re going to eventually develop. And considering some of the people we’ve seen, probably pretty quickly too.
But then Arc-SWAT is not actually just vs. “super crime”. It’s used against threats that are too much for other forces to handle (I forget the actual wording in the press conference and it’s a long way back in the archives).
Rather like with regular SWAT teams I guess? There’s a protocol for bringing them in, a point at which the guy in charge, or his boss, says “OK time to bring in the SWAT team. Gear up.”
Depending on who finds this scene, it may take a while for the whole “guys in power armor” thing to become known.
Assuming it’s power armor and not just cool looking hostile environment suits.
The really big guy, and probably the one with glowing eyes unless the gunman and the Asian have dwarfism or something, are much larger than a typical human (I assume the gunman is around the same height as a typical American male, while the Asian is around the size of a typical East Asian female, perhaps with the first being above-average and the latter being a bit below-average), implying they are either nonhuman (the big guy is reminiscent of the Swole-thulu from Parfait’s friend group) or supers. And the shorter two could certainly be supers as well. I suspect their uniforms are more just advanced (possibly Alari-tech of some sort) armor than actual power armor, but I could be mistaken (or it may be that the ones who lack super strength are indeed wearing power armor while the ones that have it are wearing more mundane armor – I suspect actual supers with strength enhancements exceed what most power armor can achieve).
How do we know the gunman isn’t also Asian? Just because he doesn’t have a heavy accent?
We do not. Their relative heights more-or-less match what I described (again, he may be on the taller side, she may be on the shorter side), but there’s nothing preventing him from just being a tall Asian guy who has native fluency in English and her being a short Nordic woman whose native language is an East Asian one (I don’t think Japanese on account of her pronouncing R’s as L’s – they’re typically the other way around, although it’s possible she’s overcompensating – but maybe Vietnamese or some flavor of Chinese would have that quirk). That’s probably not the way to bet, but it’s entirely possible.
I do think the gunman is male and the Asian is female. It’s hard to tell for certain with their arms folded, but his chestplate looks relatively flat (just like glowy-eyes and swole-man) while hers looks curved for a sort of “boob plate.”
One of the difficult things about powered armor would be that the need to have space to put all the artificial “muscles” would tend to make e.g. the arms much thicker than your arms are. So much thicker for any materials that we know of that it would be difficult to have the same freedom of movement.
One solution would be to make the arms longer, so the thickness doesn’t make them as blocky.
But then you end up with longer arms and legs, which would throw off your reflexes (like learning to walk on stilts, with grabbers strapped to your arms).
The Traveller TTRPG had a penalty to actions if you were wearing powered armor while insufficiently skilled in it. The Fallout computer games (at least until Fallout 4) required special training to be able to use it. I think these are reasonably realistic dealing with this situation.
You can also make the suit enough larger that the pilot fits entirely in the torso, which removes the need to have a space in the middle of the arm/leg to fit that of the pilot.
But then you have a suit that is inconveniently large if you’re e.g. doing house-clearing with it. Rather like trying to fit an Abrams in a typical suburban garage.
I suppose I’m speculating that if these guys are human then the two big ones are wearing actual powered armor and the smaller ones are just wearing “normal” armor. They could be using tactics like the big ones tank enemy shots and the smaller guys shoot around them.
In GURPS, there’s a specific skill, Battlesuit, for using powered armor. It functionally serves as a cap to other skills (or at least to DX-based uses of those skills) while wearing the armor. So if someone has Broadsword 15 and Battlesuit 12, then they roll against (GURPS is a “3d6, roll under” system) a 15 to make an attack with a sword if they aren’t in powered armor, but are at only 12 when they are in it (conversely, someone with Broadsword 12 and Battlesuit 15 rolls against 12 to strike with a sword regardless of if they’re in powered armor or not).
Well, technically, Battlesuit is a subset of Environmental Suit, as similar rules apply to the use of diving suits, HazMat suits, etc.
in fairness to fallout 4, lorewise, if you are a male Sole Survivor, you are explicitly playing as a veteran of the Sino-American Wars who served on the Alaskan Front, so you would have the training that way.
That said, Nate’s wife, Nora, also requires no training in operating Power Armor, and as far as we know, was not directly involved in the military, as, while a male Sole Survivor has his unit specifically mentioned by a robot, during the quest Last Voyage of the U.S.S. Constitution, a female Sole Survivor instead is told her Driver’s License number, and that she’s close enough to being a soldier that the Robot will take her into his confidence and be given a mission to carry out.
That situation in Fallout 4 is due to the collision between the world of the game and the world where we play the game.
The world of Fallout had been stuck in an alternate 1950s, as envisioned by people who in many cases are too young to have experienced them, for 120 years before the bombs dropped.
As far as I know there were no female combat soldiers in the resource wars.
On the other hand, at some point you do have to allow for players of both male and female characters to have power armor training. This has been the case for all Fallout games as far as I know. Possibly in pre-Fallout 3 games it’s optional – I haven’t played those.
Having a quest to obtain the training only for female characters might be controversial. Perhaps they considered it and discarded due to the press of time.
I have it on good authority that the decision to do a 1950’s alternate history setting was something spontaneously decided while in the middle of development, And yeah I get the feeling it was a conscious choice on part of the game dev’s to expand on woman’s role in giving them power suit access- since it would have bypassed the limits in toughness that shunted most female soldiers into support positions. Probably took inspiration from the Women Airforce Service Pilots program in the second world war.
Fyi here’s an hilarious youtube video with one of Fallout’s creators talking Fallout lore and experimenting with trying to bring Nuka-Cola to life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY7yTpeY81c
You don’t know that they used super-powers. That guy might’ve had only one arm before they showed up. Everything else could’ve been done with just ordinary guns.
pretty sure that’s supposed to be his arm on the table
In panel 1? Definitely not, as that’s right arm and he’s missing left one.
The missing arms could be due to weapon wounds. The two guns we see in the panels would likely be smaller caliber, around 7.62 mm to 9mm but the holes in the wall would seem to indicate a large caliber weapons. There may have been implements of aggression in play that we haven’t seem. The big person might just like ripping peoples’ arms off but a would from a shotgun or even a hollow point rifle round can weaken a limb enough to make it possible to rip it off.
Considering they are hitting drug dealers, it may be less of a priority…
You know its funny, I saw the purple speech bubble with the phonetically transcribed accent and my mind filled it in with a French accent. Probably because of Overwatch’s Widowmaker.
You’re not alone. I was also imagining purple with a french accent.
I was imagining a German accent.
R exist in french ,and different from L …
redoutable for exemple
From a french native speaker.
It’s a Japanese accent … not a generic asian one mandarin Chinese have the tone r.
And for german accent a good approximation could be :
Vhat ze ..
Better spoken with a Pickelhaube and Lederhosen…
Nos cousins germains ont laisse des traces aux USA notamment leur “kollossale zubtilitée”.
The standard transliterations of Japanese have the syllables ra, ri, ru, re, and ro, but no syllables shown as beginning with l.
That looks like an Asian-themed restaurant.
(Too much decoration, going back further than what you’d expect for a dry cleaner)
Now, using a restaurant as a front for laundering money is a bit more difficult than a dry cleaners or a slalom slope…
(No one checks that the number of day passes sold is the same as daypasses used.)
Restaurants are under a lot of scrutiny for food safety so there can be sudden inspections, book reviews and so on. Most likely, the laundry is several stages deep, with suppliers ‘selling’ non-existent goods to feed to non-existent guests.
People who can successfully pull that off probably have a few bright blokes capable of hiding surveillance systems, and also have a few not so bright blokes to send after anyone not playing ball.
Why can’t it be an Asian-themed laundry?
Or an Asian restaurant building that went out of business and was abandoned and drug dealers are just using it to hang out in?
I’d imagine the dirty money that is taken it at the restaurant (I assume their dealers come in, order some food, and then massively overpay) goes somewhere hidden, and when the health inspector shows up, they just never show them where that is. They probably also have connections that give them sufficient heads-up anytime the health inspector is going to make a “surprise” visit (a restaurant I once worked at always knew when the inspector was coming). And, of course, it’s indicated here that this isn’t where they do most of their money laundering – “This is where they collect cash from their dealers. I assume it goes somewhere else to get laundered” – although I’d imagine at least some money laundering goes on here (restaurants tend to have a lot of cash go through them, after all).
This group is interesting. Looks like the alien/bot/whatever is primarily interested in hurting their business, the fellow with the short rifle/SMG is primarily interested in getting paid, and the short Asian really wants to kill them. My guess is the first has some sort of scheme going on to either recruit what’s left of their group or at least drive them out of business (which makes me think he/she/it is involved in a rival group of some flavor… although they could just be out for particularly vindictive revenge, or even are a dedicated vigilante who wants to make an example of this group), the second is pretty much purely mercenary, and the last wants sweet, sweet vengeance. The big dude is clearly no dummy (if I’m interpreting the speech bubble properly, he’s the one who estimated the amount of cash they’d grabbed and seems to be considering strategic/tactical factors more than the others), and I wonder what he’s in it for.
Asian-themed restaurant but I see a Škorpion vz. 61 a Czechoslovak machine pistol as defender armement , not particularly Asian appart for North Korea.
A Mac-10 or a Mac-11 is more aviable in U.S , and if they are SOTA a Heckler & Koch MP7 pwd is more efficient
.32 ACP of Škorpion vz. 61 is inefficient against bullet-resistant armor …
Robbing a place while wearing a tuxedo?
That would be the Aristocrats…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gli_Aristocratici
Or Jackie Chan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-W6_USJSLc
getting AIM goon vibes lmao
Jenevers is made in Belgium too, it’s essentially a precursor to Gin and very yummy. When I go to a city comparatively near where I live in England I always go out of my way to visit a pub called the Belgian Monk as it’s the only place I have so far found in the UK that sells them. Also hi….
untill i read that it was meant to be an asian accent, i read the bubbles as jamaican.
reading it back, i think it could be both – funny how those 2 can pass for each other in written language…
Given that we hadn’t seen anybody at the time, I concluded that the speaker was from another planet and had an accent not from Earth at all.
Same, hadn’t even noticed ‘Invaliably’ the first time
I try not to make assumptions of what people look like based off their accents, or vice versa.
I remember seeing news stories the reinforced that, from the Chinese girl with a Glaswegian accent so broad I thought I’d have a better chance of understanding her if she spoke in Chinese, to the white guy with the most Jamaican of voices, right down to the patois, as he’d been born and raised there.
Your accent only tells where you were brought up, not whether you’re indigenous to that place or not.
And that can be used to subvert peoples expectations.
I second this. Accents imply location, and you can infer a probability of belonging to a particular race from that location, but it isn’t 100%.
My best two examples are the guy I met in college from Jamaica with jet-black skin with a perfect British accent. And the vendor I used to talk to occasionally who grew in in England then moved to Atlanta, GA. He had this incredible mix of English-posh southern drawl. It was just fascinating.
You should hear the actor Don Warrington.
Born in Trinidad, his first TV role was playing an ‘African Prince’ in Rising Damp because he had the poshest, most cut glass English accent.
Historically, “racism” was mostly indistinguishable from “culture-ism”, which is actually a judgement of values and (in some ways) character, for the same kinds of reasons you’re mentioning.
But even today, there is still a very high likelihood that someone’s apparent race matches their accent.
It’s lower in the US and in very large cities more generally, but still quite high overall. I don’t actually CARE what race people are, but I do care about what values they have (for instance, “is murder bad?” is one of the values I care about a LOT for people I share geographic space with), so those kinds of things are very noticeable and interesting.
Clerk of Asian descent in a rural Arkansas gas station. Heavy Deep South accent.
The pharmacist my wife and I used to go to was 2nd generation Chinese-American but born and raised in Mississippi.
My wife was born and raised in Hong Kong, and came to the US as an adult. She grew up speaking Cantonese, speaks Mandarin, and can recognize (though not really speak) several other Chinese dialects. And she can often recognize someone’s native Chinese dialect by the way they speak English.
So after a visit to his pharmacy, she commented “He must speak a really obscure local dialect of Chinese – his English is rather odd, and I can’t tell where he’s from.”
That because she heard him say “When ah was a little boy, mah daddy told me …” with a strong Southern accent. He looked Chinese, had a Chinese family name, so she hadn’t even considered that US English might be his primary language.
Like the black guy in ‘Porridge’ with the heavy Scottish accent
Comedian Henry Cho is full-blooded Korean but was born and raised in Knoxville Tennessee, the disparity between his looks and his accent is a core part of his comedy act. With his heavy Southern accent he quips that he’s “South Korean”.
I grew up in SE KY within TV station distance of Knoxville, and I first saw him many years ago. I couldn’t stop laughing at his jokes, especially about his buddies growing up. “What’s that clickin’ noise?”
If I’m being a pedant, it’s less rolling an “”r” once and more flicking your tongue against your alveolar ridge. Neither an “l” or an “r”, really.
Since flicking your tongue against your alveolar ridge is how r’s become ‘rolled’, DaveB’s description is technically accurate, if anatomically imprecise.
Actually, no. Rolling “r”s requires loosely holding your tongue against your alveolar ridge and letting the Bernoulli Principal take place.
After everything with Ingsol, my immediate reaction to the misspelling was “probably a vampire”.
For people who know how difficult achieving and maintaining “having a normal job” can be, planning and executing brutal raids on drug dealers at risk of your life can seem surprisingly attractive.
Related:
“a 4-way split on 200K is like having a normal job” – only if that’s all you do all year, you know?
Comparatively, your hourly rate is ***EXTREMELY*** high.
Yeah, do three of these a year and you’re very comfortably upper middle class or lower upper class depending on location.
Considering that sentence started with “Assuming we stop here,” yes, the speaker was indeed talking about only doing this one job.
Or a third of a normal job in a year. Depending on where you live.
Racist (adj.): 1. characterized by or showing prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically (but not exclusively) one that is a minority or marginalized. 2. having, reflecting, or fostering the belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
Some people significantly expand on those definitions, but then some people are offended by other people simply breathing.
So your use of common speak inflections to indicate English is a second language and the speaker is from a particular location, and therefore is probably a member of a particular race or ethnic group is 100% not racist. Well, as long as you aren’t simultaneously implying that the speaker is inferior by virtue of belonging to that race. Dumb goon that happens to be a particular race: not racist. All members of a race in the comic are dumb goons: probably racist.
All that said, it took multiple re-reads, and typing then deleting a full comment here, before I realized that there are four people in the last panel, which explains the fourth color of text bubbles in the other panels (the big guy doesn’t say anything the last panel).
Thank you for writing this. I agree with every bit it of… including that last bit about not realizing there were 4 of them at first.
Does the big goon holster his weapon with the orange speach bubble goon? I can’t see any way he could use the gun himself with any success.
Depends on the caliber and load on the bullets. It’s that’s some relatively tame (by super comics scale) round, yes, a normal person can use that.
Not with the size of the big goons fingers. Maybe the purple speech bubble goon.
That really does look awkward to try to unholster himself from his own back.
A secondary point being his apparent lack of eyes. I guess he might have an ability to see differently.
… What fingers? The only fingers we see belong to dead people
“Not with the size of the big goons fingers.”
The guy with the weapon actually on his back is normal sized. Just_IDD was the one suggesting maybe it was for the big guy, which I was disagreeing with.
Reporter: “Why do you rob banks?”
Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.”
From their conversation, you can tell it’s not about cleaning up the neighborhood, but about the money. Also, how are the [not really] vigilantes planning laundering the cash anyway? They should probably check the bill for blood splatter.
Self-checkout lanes that accept cash are one way of disposing of hot cash. Locally there are a number of grocery stores and Wal-Marts that have them. Not useful if trying you’re to buy a car or other high ticket item with cash.
Self-Checkout lanes at places like Wal-Mart now have security cameras on them all the time. Even ATMs do. So if say, a fake or tagged bill gets used they can check the video footage and figure out who might’ve been the person to use it there.
Given that some stores are eliminating self-checkout lines because of significant amounts of losses, it may end up with the only businesses retaining them will be the money launderers.
Not quite correct, what we have here is a group of people with different interests working together to meet all of them. The orange speech bubble guy is in this for the money, the distorted voice in the final bubble wants to humiliate them to send some sort of message, the Asian woman wants them all dead, and I’m not sure about the big guy, but his motivation might be almost anything.
So if motivation is the dividing line for whether you consider someone a vigilante, then some of them are, and at least one is not.
Uhm. So the instant I looked at Mr. Lensflare-Eyes I got the feeling he/it is the morphing creature that got away from Arcswat a while ago.
Which morphing creature? The robot thing Sci-fright left in the Wars Warehouse? The one that caused the wardrobe malfunction to both Maxi and Hiro?
The leader… With the blue eyes. Three blue eyes… That’s Sciona’s bot isn’t it? Or blood golem? The one that copy’s powers like AMAZO.
Shoutout to the Vz 61 machine pistol!
So, these guys and ‘gal?’ didn’t get the world wide ARCSWAT message about vigilanteism or don’t care. Kinda ballsy of them given the history of Max and her crew so far.
Hmm, no. Although Dave may have used the Skorpion as a model. Check the difference in the magazine which looks to hold rifle rounds Vice the vz. 61’s .32 pistol rounds. Also the barrel and heat guard is totally different.
I have the feeling at least one of them is Scionas “Nod Nor” – “Not Dumb, Not Robot”.
Y’know, I’m not sure why it never really occurred to me before, but…
I have *no* idea where this comic is set.
I don’t know how far away Sydney’s house is from her comic church, I haven’t the foggiest notion what *state* Archon HQ is in. Am I a fool, are these locations actually quite easy to find on a map somewhere? I always thought that thing Young Justice did where it gave the exact date and location of almost every new scene was a little distracting, but I’m trying to write fanfiction and boy it sure would be nice if I knew the current season and where that Steakhouse-brand steakhouse was. And also if there was a better place to ask questions than the most recent comic’s comment section, given how finnicky it is.
You don’t know the setting because it has not been stated. We have been able to determine that it is in an urban centre somewhere in the contiguous United States. It is probably centrally located in Kansas, but it could be as far south as Texas, because that other David lives there.
There have been hints. Most recently the firemen were wearing shirts with “Dallas Fire Department” logos.
Not to mention Harper’s ID shows she lives in Dallas, TX. *nods*
(See https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1157-max-cant-drive-165/ for the ID in question.)
“You can be sure they’d be saying it in a hateful way”
Really? How can you be sure of that? Circular reasoning is circular. “They are racist, so when they do it, it’s racist. You know they are racist because of the thing they did that we judge as racist, because they are racist.”
That, or racist reasoning is racist. “You know it’s racist because they are white.”
Or Mean Girls reasoning: “You know they are racist because their political beliefs don’t line up with ours.” That’s ridiculously common in the US from one side of the aisle. It’s the generic “You disagree with me” insult, it seems.
Or, you know… any combination of the above, including all three.
To be fair, I’m not familiar with Alex Jones (other than by reputation), so maybe he actually is racist, I don’t know… but there’s no one I can trust to tell me that stuff anymore, due to the **incredibly** high incidence of the issues listed above. It really sucks.
If you don’t know about Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson maybe don’t assume people are full of shit when they say they’re racists?
In the case of Alex Jones, I think he can be safely written off as a loony. After all, his famous “Gay Frogs” rant doesn’t exactly sound like someone who has kept good track of where his Marbles are, does it?
Actually the “Gay frogs rant” sounds like someone who keeps current on science news, as opposed to people who just clap along with partisan hit pieces that say things like “hE sAid GAy frOGs, whAt A LoON!” without double-checking the dispute themselves. I’d heard the “gay frogs” meme myself but didn’t have an opinion because I hadn’t taken the time to come up to speed on it (as one should before taking sides on a controversy), but it only took me five minutes of web searching just now to find the not-so-loony basis for Jones’s rant about chemicals “in the water” turning frogs “gay”:
Excerpts from a Berkeley News article from 1-Mar-2010, by Robert Sanders — Atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used pesticides, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.
The 75 percent that are chemically castrated are essentially “dead” because of their inability to reproduce in the wild, reports UC Berkeley’s Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology.
[…]
“When we grow these guys up, depending on the family, we will get anywhere from 10 to 50 percent females,” Hayes said. “In a population, the genetically male females can decrease or wipe out a population just because they skew sex ratios so badly.”
[…]
Hayes and his UC Berkeley colleagues report their results in this week’s online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In last week’s issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Hayes and colleagues published a review of the possible causes of a worldwide decline in amphibian populations
[…]
Working with the African clawed frog, Hayes and his colleagues showed in 2002 that tadpoles raised in atrazine-contaminated water become hermaphrodites – they develop both female (ovaries) and male (testes) gonads. This occurred at atrazine levels as low as 0.1 parts per billion (ppb), 30 times lower than levels allowed in drinking water by the EPA (3 ppb).
[end of excerpts]
There are plenty of good examples of Jones’s excesses and inaccuracies, but this isn’t a good one.
I find it interesting that the majority of the best-known “hits” against public figures tend to be some of the weakest when closely examined, while the more solid criticisms are often the least familiar to the public. If I were more conspiracy-minded, I’d wonder if there was a concerted effort to sow distrust and division (via a lot of people seeing reasons to doubt media sources, and smeared groups knowing they’re being unfairly propagandized by “the other side”).
Except that the Jones rant isn’t about frogs being affected by chemicals, it’s that the US government was waging a chemical warfare operation to increase rates of homosexuality and decrease birth rates.
(Also the research showing it in frogs is pretty contested and
“I find it interesting that the majority of the best-known “hits” against public figures tend to be some of the weakest when closely examined, while the more solid criticisms are often the least familiar to the public.”
I have noted this for years, wondering what the significance or explanation was. It’s almost like they are TRYING to drive away the critical thinkers and only want the brainless followers.
I think it’s likely both that the assumption is that most people fall under the category of “brainless”, rather than “critical thinkers”, and that that assumption is true. Thus, the optimal strategy for convincing a broader audience is something simple, emotional, and exaggerated. The truth doesn’t matter to most people. It’s too complicated and nuanced and boring.
I really hate that your explanation seems to likely to be true. :-(
Some people find satisfaction in being correct, but most people would like to win. I imagine it gets a bit tiresome being ignored, and so people resort to strategies that work, even if they know they’re not accurate. If people will only listen to lies, then what’s a person dedicated to truth to do? Shout into the wind?
“I really hate that your explanation seems to likely to be true. :-(”
Stop making so much highly-depressing sense. :-(
“f you don’t know about Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson maybe don’t assume people are full of shit when they say they’re racists?”
I have some familiarity with Tucker Carlson and have yet to see or hear anything racist from him, which is why I specified only Alex Jones as unknown.
But even the few bits I have heard about Alex Jones have all been more “generally paranoid/crazy” than racist. Oh, the usual “he’s a racist” claims, sure (that’s the state of everyone to the right of RFK Jr these days), but no actual evidence of it. I’m open to evidence, though, if you wanted to give any.
Carlson has long been accused of pushing racist invective and conspiracy theories during six years as the dominant Fox News primetime host. He has stirred up numerous controversies including pushing the racist “great replacement theory”, saying immigrants had made America “poorer and dirtier” and once suggested a Black Democrat politician spoke like a “sharecropper”.
Yeah, nothing racist there…
“Carlson has long been accused of pushing racist invective and conspiracy theories during six years as the dominant Fox News primetime host.” Example of what I called “Mean Girls reasoning”, above.
“He has stirred up numerous controversies including pushing the racist “great replacement theory”” Same.
“saying immigrants had made America “poorer and dirtier”” Neither of which has anything to do with race and plenty to do with historical example, no matter where they were from (used against the IRISH quite a bit, actually).
“once suggested a Black Democrat politician spoke like a “sharecropper”.” Also not inherently racist, but you’re probably too ignorant to realize that white people were also sharecroppers. Yes, even in the “old south”.
So, thanks for being a great example of exactly what I was talking about, but I’d still like some actual examples.
If you haven’t seen or heard anything racist from Tucker Carlson, you haven’t seen or heard anything from Tucker Carlson. And if you think what he says isn’t racist… well, I think a few people here can finish that sentence for you.
So, so many examples that you… can’t actually give even one. But somehow, that means I’m racist.
This seems to fit the “Mean Girls reasoning” pretty well, but it might be the circular reasoning instead/additionally.
So, since no one would bother giving me any actual examples, I’ve been watching, and Tucker Carlson has provided an example himself! You see, I *actually* wanted to know, not just get more empty claims.
So, here’s an example: Tucker Carlson recently had “historian” Darryl Cooper on his show, who hand-waves away the Holocaust as “they [the Germans] launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.” Among other ridiculous claims.
So there you go, an ACTUAL example. Now, one “bad” guest (out of the many, many guests he’s had) doesn’t mean he’s a flaming racist, but it’s more than I was aware of (**or could get out of any of you!**) before.
When looking at this, I saw a comment how “once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”, and that Tucker was currently on “coincidence”… but they didn’t give the other example, so that was frustrating. I like actual information, so if anyone has more examples like that, I’m still “in the market” for them, so to speak.
Deoxy, knock it off. Nobody believes you’re incapable of googling “tucker carlson racist.” You’re being disingenuous and argumentative for the sake of it. The other posters are right. If you don’t think guys like Carlson are racist, it means you don’t actually want to know, or your personal bar for racism is less limbo and more high-jump. Probably both.
Below are some examples from spending 5 seconds on google, and to preempt any claim of “librul fake news” allow me to just run that through the translator… ah, here we go, “This information comes from outside my usual echo chamber and I choose to willfully disregard it.”
https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-tucker-carlson-jonathan-greenblatt-immigration-3ef70ca8eff84dd2c424288be1cc2f48
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-pushing-nazi-apologias-and-holocaust-denial-he-addressed-rnc-just
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/03/media/tucker-carlson-text-message/index.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tucker-carlson-fired-worst-things-he-said-racism-immigrants-1234722751/
https://www.vox.com/2023/5/4/23709550/tucker-carlson-fox-news-white-men-text-racism
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/tucker-carlson-fired-fox-news-fake-populist-genuine-racist.html
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/tucker-carlson-white-men-text-message
I beg to differ he had said my country is under sharia law in some district of it’s capital…
I’m an inhabitant of one of this districts and my neighborhood is religion speaking more akin to lower East Side in N.Y city.
Tucker Carlson is also a complete delusional moron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cPeZLCVWTw
for him metric system is a mean to export Reign of Terror (ended in 1794) to US.
For racism as a victim of his prejudice , I call him a bigot ..
From a french pissed by his antics..
“I beg to differ he had said my country is under sharia law in some district of it’s capital…”
Which would also not be racism, as “Islam” is not a race, it’s a religion.
The metric system is not a race. Whether he’s an idiot or not is not the question (in my experience, the vast majority of people in the media are idiots).
If you don’t know, and if don’t trust any secondary source, then I would suggest to investigate yourself. Sure, it may cost a bit of time / energy, but if you feel strongly enough about the topic to write a comment here, and if you acknowledge that your message may be moot in the case where the people being talked about could actually reasonnably be labelled as racist, then surely it should be worth it to do this research, should it not?
The trick to checking if someone’s comedy is being bigoted or not is to check if they’re punching down, up or sideways.
Punching down means bigot.
Words have meanings. That’s not what “bigot” means, and you can’t “prove” bigotry by claiming that some other form of behavior-disapproved-by-Illy is taking place, therefore it’s also bigotry. You’re engaging in several forms of fallacy in a single sentence, congratulations.
Comedians are boxers now?
How can a comedian punch in any direction? What the hael does that even mean?
Well done, you have proven that you don’t know anything about comedy.
You’re right. Ignore Ichneumon & Deoxy, they both have a pattern of bad faith engagement.
See, now THAT actually offends me. I put a lot of effort into not acting in bad faith, and I admit when someone catches me doing so (and am annoyed at myself in those few, rare instances, as it means I have missed something in my own behaviour or made unsupported assumptions, both of which are bad!).
I don’t think I agree with that. You can absolutely make incredibly mean spirited and bigoted jokes while “punching up”. And determining the “direction” of a punchline is incredibly subjective anyway. Would some of the less wealthy members of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party making nasty jokes about specific Jewish bankers be punching up, or punching down? And would you consider them bigots, or not? I’m sure the NSDAP had lots of jokes about the subject, even when they didn’t have any power to back them. Did those jokes suddenly become a sign of bigotry when they started making people wear yellow stars? Or were they always a sign that these guys probably didn’t like Jewish people much?
I think it mostly comes down to tone and content, personally. Comedy isn’t something you can use hard and fast rules to categorize, because it’s so subjective. And anytime you do try and make hard and fast rules, it usually leaves something out…which I suspect the people who made up the “punching up, punching down” rules consider a feature, not a bug. I’ve seen it used to excuse some really vile, incredibly mean-spirited “jokes” as not an issue, because the person telling them was “punching up”.
I was _wondering_ when the vigilantes were going to going to start showing up.
I’m neither surprised, nor particularly upset, that they’d be self-funding in this way, either.
I _do_ hope that they turn out to be smarter and slightly more ethically motivated than “it beats having a day-job.”
On the accent question in the commentary, I think you’re doing pretty solid on having it present but not overbearing. That tends to be where things can get into problematic territory.
Like, you mentioned Rogue’s southern belle vernacular, and I’d add Gambit’s Cajun brogue, but if you had someone talking like Boomhauer from King of the Hill or that Cajun dude in Joe Dirt, you could be on the verge of getting insulting and have to move carefully.
Same with having any foreign accent. The thicker it gets, the more you have to be mindful of what you’re doing with it. One of the big theses around this sort of thing is you shouldn’t have a person who has an imperfect understanding of a second language getting mocked by someone who only knows one.
Have seen a few people on TV with accents that thick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds0zZwPXovs
Basically, if you’re going to do a thick accent, get it right.
And don’t punch down.
I tell you hwat man dang ole super man that accent slider cover that whole dang ole planet man talkin bout losing supes man Maxima dang ole
Easy there, Broompower.
Hey man remember that dang old comment third time in Grrlpower man?, just turned loose man just made it, woo hoo dog!, ain’t no goin easy no man dang ole Internet, man. You just go on there and point and click Click Click Click. I’ll tell you what!
No, really, witch way to the gas station?
‘a four way split of 200k is like.. having a normal job’
For maybe 15 minutes of on site time. Subtract overhead like the sodas, beers, and pizza consumed during the planning session. And if you want to look good then the thematic outfits aren’t cheap if they are meant to stand up to whatever their powers and abilities are.
But the next link in the chain will have more cash on hand, so the revenue stream is looking pretty good.
Building on success.
I think it’s more “How many of these can we pull off, and how often, before we end up in a police/military crossfire?”
Most of the money in organized crime is *not* from violence. It’s often from selling illegal things (drugs, prostitution, gambling), and at most it’s from implicit threats of violence (protection).
Actual violence is a pretty chancy way to make money. Even the classic supervillain heist is a smash and grab *and then run away before they call in the army*. It’s why the “driver” (someone who can get you away from the scene in a way that’s difficult to follow) is key in this situation.
Pretty much. Organized crime is a business, and their money is primarily in goods and services. Not that they’ll hesitate when it comes to following through on implicit threats of violence, mind you. Kinda the oppposite. In illegal business transactions, where there are no contracts, and anyone could have a gun, it pays to have a reputation for honoring your word. Their livelihood is built on reputation, and if that starts to crack, things can go south fast. The smart ones know it, and so anyone who steals from a business under their protection is going to be in for a really bad time. Especially since one the illegal services they tend to provide is to fence, I.E. sell stolen goods.
Also, there’s a reason why bank robbers generally try and keep their violence to a minimum, as well. It’s because the cops are typically going to come after you way harder if you commit rampant violence. If only because they figure that if they hesitate to use force on you, they have a good chance of being killed. This is something of a special case, because they are targeting an criminal enterprise, but still, if I were them, I wouldn’t be nearly this blatantly murderous, superpowers or no superpowers. Then again, I wouldn’t be involved in this sort of thing at all, but you know what I mean.
Didn’t even realise there were four people in the last panel, thought Purple Bubble was the big guy, she blends in to his arm
The whole “R versus L” thing comes from languages from Japanese basically not HAVING a differentiation between the two sounds. (A good example is Lum Invader from Urusei Yatsura. Her first name is usually Romanji-ed to “Lum”, but could also be written and “Ramu” (Which is how it sounds when she says it when she first appears, saying “Ucchi no Ramu Da-tcha!”)
This gives rise to the old cliche “Flied Lice” jokes in old Jerry Lewis movies (And mocked mercilessly in, IIRC, “Big trouble in Little China” where the protagonist makes the “Flied Lice” joke, and the villain shouts “It’s ‘Fried Rice’, you Plick!”
I think you mean ‘Romaji-ed’. No Romans here.
When I heard it, it was “‘frried rrice’, you Gleek Plick!”
You mean Lethal Weapon, not BTILC, right?
yeah, it’s been a long time since I saw either one, but I remembered that particular exchange vividly. I don’t remember “Gleek” being in it, however.
Around here you can drive twenty miles and hear a completely different accent from native English speakers, it isn’t any sort of ‘ist’, it’s just the way people talk. The same goes for local french accents, people from France often have difficulty understanding them because it’s ‘Old French’, and the ‘Cajun’ accent comes directly from the ‘Acadians’ in this area.
But people have been conditioned lately to automatically call anyone mimicing any accent a ‘racist’, unless of course it’s a form of English or other European one. Many people in southern Germany on first hearing them, have an accent very similar to the usually copied French one when speaking English. France is just across the river from Germany there which explains that but you still get a trifecta of ‘isms’ for it :)
It’s the Rhine and Strasbourg (France ) is at 5 km (3.11 miles) to Kehl (Germany)
that rifle pistol, how is it being carried there? is it like a technotelekinetic held?
I always assume it’s magnets.
I’m thinking it must be a trophy hanging off a single point sling. Guns really don’t like strong magnets. They attract grit and debris that can foul the gun. It would be a really awkward position for regular carry. The grip would be difficult to reach in a hurry and the gun would easily bang into things. Also, these guys seem to be the sort to go with a black gun aesthetic.
English “r” is a weird phoneme. Most languages have an “r” in the back of the mouth (like most Germanic languages) or in the front of the mouth (like Romance languages), but thanks to the Normans we split the difference.
Then you have people who like to roll their ‘r’s
When they bark at being humiriated?
As a fan of The Wire, it feels wrong to go with the obvious and call this less-than-charismatic bunch “The Omars”. Maybe “The Nomars?
“I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people with that accent are white. ” That’s only because “white” makes up the vast majority of people in the South. I think the last census put “African American” at around 15%.
The vast majority of people in the whole US are white. Well, strong majority now – it’s been falling incredibly quickly, by historical standards. It was about 80% in 1980, less than 60% now.
Personally, I don’t really care about that, but the RATE at which it is changing, the rate immigrants are being let in, means that culturally, we are not assimilating them into our culture. *That* is a problem.
And the drop in “% white” actually doesn’t even show the whole problem, as some portion of the immigrants are white. That doesn’t magically make them part of our culture. The race of the immigrant does not matter.
We have the highest percentage of foreign-born people in the US ever recorded. We need to stop essentially ALL immigration for 20-40 years (as we have done previously when that percentage got high, *regardless of the color of the immigrants* – after the waves of the Irish, for instance).
This is the reason why “replacement theory” gets traction with people. After seeing it **explicitly caught and admitted to** in the UK, this is what it looks like. The race of those immigrants is immaterial, and trying to make it about race is dishonest deflection.
Why does that matter? I don’t think any culture in inherently valuable or worth preserving. And the ideals on which America was founded haven’t been maintained by those born there. In many cases, the immigrants understand American values and civics better than the natural citizens — it’s why they chose to immigrate to America, and they had to pass a test to demonstrate their understanding to gain citizenship.
“I don’t think any culture in inherently valuable or worth preserving.”
So, the culture that views women as property, engages in FGM and honor-killings, and endorses slavery is just as valuable as our current culture? Interesting take. If that’s your considered opinion, I am surprised.
But more specifically, the vast majority of people don’t want their culture to be radically changed (drift over time is inherent, unavoidable, and *mostly* slow enough that people don’t mind too much). Whether it is “more valuable” or “worth preserving” in your opinion does not matter to them.
And at an even deeper level, without some level of relatively unified dominant culture, what even is a country? Largely, it’s a means of ruling/owning people.
A lot of the division in this country causing such political instability is because our “dominant culture” is deeply fractured, but we are still trying to have a democracy (with an ever more powerful central government, even).
” In many cases, the immigrants understand American values and civics better than the natural citizens — it’s why they chose to immigrate to America, and they had to pass a test to demonstrate their understanding to gain citizenship.”
In many LEGAL cases, you mean. None of that remotely applies to a very, very large majority of these “new arrivals” because they came here illegally and don’t follow any of our rules (such as having to demonstrate their understanding of our system).
Border control and limited inbound immigration is a normal part of being a country, both for the rest of the world AND for the US (we’ve closed our border for several decades at a time, more than once). Why does every country do that? Because if you don’t, shortly, *you don’t have a country anymore*. All those other people that showed up have a country.
As an easy example, the vast, overwhelming majority of people want to be able to just speak their native language in their home country. One of the things that makes people feel like things are broken is when that is no longer sufficient. Note that I didn’t endorse any particular language or country, there. It’s normal the world over.
But we have imported so many people that there are now areas of the country where the Xth-generation people living there have left, since they feel like the foreigners there. That’s BAD, in the opinion of a LARGE majority of people everywhere.
(And if you want to bring up the Native Americans and what happened to them… yeah, exactly. The people living here now don’t want that to happen to them. Since they aren’t the ones that did that to the Native Americans, as the people who did it are literally all dead, they don’t “deserve” to have it happen to them, either.)
“Inherently” is critical to that sentence. I do think cultures can be compared, and that some are more valuable or better than others, and that some deserve to die out, and others deserve to propagate.
And I recognize that cultures, like individual organisms, seek to survive, regardless of whether or not they deserve to.
I think that American culture is a shadow of its former self — that the vast majority of American citizens do not understand or believe in the principles the country was founded on. They’re just trying to preserve their own power, and the dominance of people like themselves, those who share their race or religion or some other tribal marker. They don’t believe in freedom, individual rights, or the rule of law, despite claiming to be fighting to preserve those things.
I think countries should certainly have the right to control their borders and citizenship — I think most freedoms depend upon freedom of association, and the ability to exclude others. But I also believe that we should accept a great many more people than we do. The system is too slow, complicated, and expensive.
“The system is too slow, complicated, and expensive.”
MUCH MUCH more true than most people know, even most people who do some checking. It’s completely insane, to the point that “doesn’t work SO THAT people come illegally” appears to be the most reasonable explanation. It’s much worse than mere bureaucratic bloat.
“But I also believe that we should accept a great many more people than we do.”
I am open to discussion on the point of “how many”. As long as it remains under some threshold to maintain assimilation, I’m good.
The problem is that it doesn’t matter, since so many come here illegally – it’s been a large (and almost certainly intentional) part of the system for at least 3 generations now.
My position could be be summed up as something like this: “Make the doors as large as you like, but make them strong and able to be closed when desired.”
Right now, we don’t have the mechanisms to have a decently secure border. Even under Trump, when the numbers were WAY down, it was still not really “secure”. The aggregate security was passable, but the individual security was still very poor.
“I think that American culture is a shadow of its former self”
That whole paragraph… I think it’s both more and less true than you might think. There has always been a significant portion of people that don’t really think about this stuff, that go by the “tribal marker”, so I think the baseline you are comparing to is not as good as you think.
But at the same time, I think the reversion to “tribal marker” thinking is SO much worse than most people do today, because I am willing to look for “tribal markers” other than race and religion, and what I see is the large majority of the self-proclaimed “enlightened” side of the aisle (“the reality-based community”) living utterly by the tribal marker without a thought otherwise. I have referred to them as “sneetches” for some years now (Dr Seuss reference), and it continues to fit painfully well.
Not that the other side is remotely immune, mind you. As I said above, having a significant portion of the group being the “tribal marker” type is the norm. Only that, since the “tribal markers” they are going by aren’t race (or at least, not in the classic ways) or religion, they don’t see it, and thus have no or very little defense against it. It runs rampant. It’s depressing and frustrating.
And security will never be achievable as long as we’re focused on security theater. We need methods that prove effective, but again, nobody’s all that interested in actually measuring anything, just posturing and fighting. And we may never reform immigration, because illegal immigrants actually serve people’s interests better than legal ones do. They’re easier to exploit, have less bargaining power as laborers, stimulate the economy, pay taxes yet are ineligible for most benefits, and try to stay out of trouble and under the radar. They’re useful as political pawns.
Sure, the vast majority of people have probably always been followers, not leaders. They mimic values without really understanding or believing in them, because the people above them or around them espouse those values. But the quality of our leaders has plummeted, and they’ve abandoned even the pretense of ideals or values to wrap their tribalism in. And the kinds of things people value are becoming much clearer. The tribes are becoming less arbitrary, more aligned around certain attitudes about different cultural groups, and who should have power. Those who dominated for centuries have lost their stranglehold on society, and now there are groups competing for power. We can no longer assume that our neighbors are just like us, look and think and act just like us. It was never completely true, but it was close enough for the illusion to survive, for people to trust each other on that false basis. And now the illusion has been shattered, and we know that our neighbors don’t fight for the same things as we do.
The problem is that many people seem to think of democracy as a one-time deal. You vote, once, on which group gets to control the country, and they will dictate how everyone will live, and anyone who doesn’t agree just needs to shut up and conform, or leave. Or die. But the point of a constitutional democratic republic is to protect the rights of those not in power, and to guarantee that the rules will follow the will of the people, not to enshrine a set of rules to which future generations must conform. Government should follow culture, not the other way around. But some people are determined to perpetuate their culture through the force of government.
This is an interesting post. I firmly agree with much of it, but I firmly agree with several bits, too.
Running short on time today. :-( Would love to write another wall of text on this stuff.
Quick hits:
– First paragraph, almost all great points.
– Second paragraph: Starts PERFECT. Absolutely agree. Latter parts… would be interested in a lot of discussion.
– Third paragraph: there are definitely some of those (see explicit quotes from socialists about it, for instance), but I think the real meat of the problem is the stuff from the latter part of the second paragraph, not this.
“Government should follow culture, not the other way around.”
True, but many of course problems right now are because people have tried to influence culture WITH the power of government, and it has (to some extent) worked.
The big problem is that democracy (including democratic processes, since we aren’t actually a “democracy”) don’t work well without some significant cultural homogeneity, some level of bedrock agreement on the foundational principles. Otherwise, you inherently get “once and forever” kinds of attempts, as the things at stake are too basic, too bedrock to be stuff that twists in the wind from moment to moment.
Not sure how to fix things from where we are right now.
Appro of nothing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hooXj36-rE
The scene with Rowan was supposed to be “extremely short”? Dude, that was six pages. The short version would just panel 2 of the first page, Maxima at the firehouse entrance overhearing the people talking inside. Just that one panel, and then the scene’s over. The medium length version would be a whole page. The long version was three pages, and your version was twice that long.
Well, considering Sydney summoning Parfait for a sleepover turned into a 76 page arc, then yes, I consider six pages extremely short.
Look back at how many pages it took to get through the first 12 hours of the comic from the scene in the comic store to Sydney finally hitting the sheets, 6 pages of the comic is practically a blink of the eye.
this feels like they are rolling up a drug network as a cover for gathering cash…. i mean its not a good act … but i struggle to call it “evil”
Huh, glowey blue guy could be Deus’ invisibility guy: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-390-project-overkill/
Really feels like this is more of a training mission rather than a major one.
Make sure you work out the kinks of your teamwork without too much repercussions. If they are evil they could claim to be ‘aspiring’ heroes of vigilantism. If they are good… Better to test yourself against the common crook before having to see if you have what it takes to mess with the major foes.
The lens flares on the baddy’s eyes remind me of Xmen 97. That show did a LOT of random eye glows and lens flares on characters.
JJ Abrams’ Xmen?
I was thinking about that duffel bag and it led me to dimensions of US currency.
Did you know that it actually weighs less to carry gold than the equivalent in US currency, unless you’re using hundred dollar bills?
Current spot price of gold is $74.55 US per gram. A gram is about what a US dollar bill weighs. I’m assuming here that all US currency bills weigh about the same.
Bills were originally used for carrying around amounts of money that would be inconveniently heavy if carried as coins. The pound, the dollar, the lire and the peso were all originally a “pound” of silver (definition of pound varied somewhat).
Inflation is a mother, isn’t it?
I suppose the counterpoint to that is that you can carry much more money electronically. But that requires a lot more infrastructure, and would be much more difficult to arrange in an interstellar economy where communications takes time.
Oh – and $200,000 in tens is 20,000 bills. It would weigh a bit less than 45 pounds and if tightly packed would fit in a cube about 15 inches on a side if I’ve done my math right. It would have to be a pretty sturdy duffel, but you could probably stuff them all in there. I assume a lot of this duffel would be twenties and up.
This portability is the reason why diamonds are an international currency, as they are one of the few things more valuable than gold by weight.
It’s also why you don’t see bills higher than 50 Euros and $100 any more. They don’t want currency moving across borders that can’t be tracked easily. There was some fantastic claim that more than half the 50 Euro notes in existence were kept in bundles by drug dealers for trading back and forth across the Atlantic to South America for drug money.
Ditto the $100 bills for being used for American drug money, but there’s a lot more American bills in existence.
But yeah, historically American money went all the way up to $10,000 for private individuals and $100k for government institutions. That stopped in 1969 and they only go up to $100 printed now. The rest are basically collector items.
It is likely that the $10k notes would all be snatched up by criminals for financing themselves if they existed still.
Diamonds have a massively inflated value, so I suppose that makes sense. And may put a slightly more sinister edge on the resistance to “artificial” diamonds, come to think of it. There are other metals more valuable than gold by weight, but they’re also a lot scarcer/harder to refine. Or, you know, outright dangerous, like plutonium or other purified radioisotopes.
$50,000 per person is not like a normal job. Not when it’s $50,000 for one day’s work. Unless they plan on doing no other heists the rest of the year. :)
“I say we stomp him!”
“Yeah!”
“Then we tattoo him!”
“Yeah!”
“Then we hang him!”
“Yeah!”
“And THEN we kill him!”
“YEAH!”