Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts?
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Tech Rich Get Richer
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Most of my post was not directed at you specifically. I was covering a lot of ground in one rant. Try not to be so thin-skinned.
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts?
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Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 1
No one is arguing that these tax cuts are an attempt to remedy the unjust taxing of people.
I am.
Reducing their taxes is thus NOT going to have any impact on the economy because these people have no real incentive to spend more, the extra little bit of money is not going to have any impact.
Really? Huh. I suppose you think we should just wait for the poor to invest in the companies that employ us. Good plan!
By giving them back money (or just giving them money) you are pretty much guaranteed they are going to spend it. If you give $1000 to a person who makes $20,000 a year, they will spend it. GIve $1000 to a person who makes $200,000 a year and has $1.5 million in assets, they might not even cash the check mailed to them by the government.
I am getting pretty sick of this lie. The notion that a tax cut for rich people will just get stuffed into their bed mattresses, instead of spent on soup or whatever. Rich people will do with extra money what they do with most of their money: invest it. Do you know why the.com bubble finally burst? People stopped investing in overvalued companies. Do you know why the NASDAQ is recovering now? People are investing in tech again.
It's amazing how this thread has even become a discussion of tax policy. The reason Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are getting richer again is not that George Bush has handed them wheelbarrows full of cash. Most of the Bush tax cuts haven't even kicked into effect yet. They reason they are getting richer again is because the companies they own are going up in value. Even if you are not a fan of Microsoft and Oracle, this is fantastic news. It means that the tech sector is finally rebounding, and we can all hope to go back to being overpaid BOFH's again. Sure, a lot of development jobs have gone overseas, but those were jobs that were being done by Russian and Indian H1B workers during the fat years anyway. The fact that the biggest holders of technology stocks in the world are finding themselves getting more rich, instead of less rich, once again is cause for those of us who work for tech companies to rejoice.
Ultimately, if you are working in this industry, a multi-millionaire probably signs your paychecks. Only a die-hard marxist could thing that them having less money is a good thing for you.
The Rutles was 25 years ago. Yes, he is washed up (see his guest-staring role on the final, dying season of "Suddenly Susan"... actually, don't. It's every bit as awful as it sounds.)
I have modest hopes for "The Remains of the Piano" to be funny, and I pray that this musical doesn't suck, but Eric Idle has not been very funny in a long, long time, unless you count the many times he's recycled the stuff he and the other Pythons wrote back in the late 1960s. Think about that for a moment. The 1960s. Then a few movies, ending with "Life of Brian" in 1979. Then jack shit.
When you think about it, why should he bother to do anything good anymore, when he can fill up concert halls at $50 a ticket for nothing but him singing "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" and "The Galaxy Song" on a cheap acoustic guitar?
Apple tried enabling the "tap to click" as a default on touchpads once. They abandoned that experiment very quickly, when they found that big lummoxen (hey, I made a new incorrect plural! Check me out, I'm '1337!) like me would damage the touchpad with our thunderously powerful tapping, causing lots of powerbooks to come back to them while still under warranty.
Ah yes, another jackass who insists the war in Iraq is about oil.
Look, if we were willing to fight a war for cheaper oil, it would have been far more efficient, required far fewer troops, and would have yielded far more cheap oil to simply go into Venezuela last spring, and use our troops to end the strife in that country.
Let go of your stupid fallacy-laden nonsense about the war in Iraq being an oil subsidy, and your whole stupid argument collapses. Class dismissed.
Don't the Crown Vics have a problem with catching on fire on rear impact? I may be wrong.
You are. In order to catch it on fire, you need to hit a parked Crown Vic at 80 MPH, and have police equipment in the trunk to puncture it with (or something like it... dead hookers won't do the trick).
To be honest, I wouldn't ever think about driving a hybrid. I think we should be looking at alcohol powered cars.
Burning alcohol produces fewer CO emissions, but more O3 and Nitrogen-based pollutants. It's not an attractive trade-off, unless you have stock in ADM Corporation (or are a politician they gave money to).
At the present ~$1.75 ($1750/yr) a 40 mpg car would save about $850 in fuel costs over a 20 mpg car.
You are exactly right, AC. Anybody who wants to drive a car like mine needs to keep in mind that it means paying an extra $850 or so per year for gas.
Since I'm a very tall person, who frequently carries passengers and occasionally wants to pull a trailer, I am happy to pay the extra cash for a BIG CAR. If you are not, the new Nissans are a terrific buy, and get great milage. (I would say Toyotas, but the high demand for them has caused them to be a little overpriced.)
A bunch of you posted this, and it shows me that you have not been in or witnessed a 30 MPH accident recently.
Almost all modern cars are designed to give up themselves for the safety of the passengers. Even is a relatively slow collision on city streets, the frame (other than that surrounding the cab) will buckle, causing potential damage to engine parts.
My last vehicle was a small pick-up truck. A driver in a full-sized station wagon rear-ended me on an icy road at about 15-20 MPH. My truck was fine, but the front end of her car crumpled up, causing the radiator to spill all over the place and (we suspected) some minor damage to the engine. Nobody was hurt, but her car had to be towed away. Had it been a hybrid car, I am positive that the electric motor would have been wrecked, and there's a good chance the battery would have needed replacing.
Your type of thinking is what prevents automakers from taking chances on alternative technologies
No, engineering that still needs to be done is what prevents them. When hybrid cars are as good and economical, for all purposes, as gas cars, people like me will buy them and companies like Ford and Nissan will sell them. It might not be much longer, but until then they are a niche market. End of story.
Damn! I should look into doing that modification to my car. Like most Minnesotans, I have a natural gas feed to my house for winter heating. I could just tap that and drive on it. Very cool. Thanks for the tip.
Cars that are expensive to maintain tend to have poor resale values, which means that even if you only plan on driving it for two years and selling it, you want to consider that factor.
If you are considering a hybrid vehicle, there are two words you need to examine closely before going through with it:
repair costs
What makes hybrids affordable is that there are massive government subsidies reducing the price of the car. This masks the fact that many of the parts for these cars are enormously expensive. A hybrid Civic that gets into a minor city-street collision with a minivan or SUV is probably going to be so expensive to repair, that the insurance company will want to total it out.
If the long-term potential costs of maintenance and parts doesn't scare you off, and you don't expect to haul a boat trailer or something, then the hybrid cars can be a terrific way to go. Fantastic gas millage and a super-quiet ride. The inventor of regenerative breaks should get a medal.
Personally, I'll stick with my Crown Victoria for now. It may drink gas, (I get about 20 MPG from my highway and city driving combined) but it's safe, it seats six, and has a trunk big enough to easily fit three dead hookers. More, if you chop 'em up and put them in bags. Plus, the V8 is powerful enough to tow a lot of stuff when I need to, and the suspension is so smooth, it's like driving a hovercraft. Best of all, the reputation for being an "old man's car" means cheap insurance in spite of being almost the same car that the cops are tearing around town in.
The Crown Vic LS is like a Lincoln town car for half the price, and is the most under-rated car of the last decade, IMHO.
If you really want to get a hybrid car, consider looking for a used Toyota Prius, perhaps sold by some Yuppie asshole who only bought it to be trendy, and wants to trade up to a Mini Cooper S now that Minis are considered the New Hotness.
The very thought that we are having this argument proves that Reloaded had more thought put into it than 90% of the horseshit that passes for "sci fi" in the movies.
I mean, could we all really ever get this worked up in a discussion about "Pitch Black"? Or even "Attack of the Clones" for that matter?
Well, expressions of stupified shock and flinching at explosions are really the only two acting tasks that Keanu Reeves does well.
It's kind of like how, on an episode of MST3K, Crow pointed out that Kathy Ireland's acting range went all the way from "dull surprise" to... "dull suprise."
Did you see him in "Much Ado About Nothing"? An otherwise delightful movie that ground to a screeching halt every time Keanu opened his mouth!
Interesting theory. My guess that they might go a completely different direction: Neo will actually find himself protecting the Matrix (and therefore, the machines as much as humanity) against Smith.
I think I need to watch it again, though. Weren't Mother and the Oracle the same person?
The plot of Reloaded was better than the plot of the first, and your alternative suggestion doesn't work at all.
Sorry, but Agent Smith has no control over the Matrix. No chance of putting up CGI shields or "coming prepared."
He doesn't work for the Matrix anymore anyway. His maverick attitude was hinted at in the first film when he was questioning Morpheus. He took off his earpiece (symbolically cutting off his communication link to the rest of the machines, the Matrix, his superriors, etc.) before telling Morpheus "I hate this place."
Almost immediately in the second film it is explained that when Neo entered Smith to defeat him, Smith was set free. He is no longer an agent of the Matrix, but is a rogue AI that is capable of breaking the rules in some interesting ways. He no longer has any authority or even any contact with the powers that control the Matrix.
There is no "real" Agent Smith that Neo can kill to defeat him. Every copy is Smith is identical and independent. They are all the real slim shady.
The reason the "burly brawl" went on for so long, even though Neo or Smith(s) could have escaped at any time, is because they were sizing each other up. They both might have been hoping for a decisive win when the fight started, but once they really got going, it became fairly obvious that neither was going to win. Neo could keep outfighting Smith, and Smith could keep coming with more of himself. Therefore, once Neo decided he had enough, he chose to withdraw.
Fighting to a draw is a classic shop-worn convention of Kung Fu and samurai movies. It simultaneously establishes the greatness of the hero and the challenge that he faces.
Besides, it was one of the best scenes in the movie. If I were hired to edit the film, and asked to cut it down for time, I would have kept every last second of the Burly Brawl and the highway chase, and dropped the entire cave-dancing scene. They thought it would be clever to juxtapose tribal dancing with a sex scene, but it didn't quite work, and it's not like nobody's ever noticed the sexuality of dance before.
I find it endlessly amusing that people who found the ham-fisted "explanations" behind the first movie completely missed the clever and subtle nuances of the second one. Look, kid. Reloaded and Revolutions are the movies that the W brothers always wanted to make. The only reason for the first one is that you can't do a superhero serial without an origin story. The first movie established the visual style and feel of the series, but most of what you thought the story was about was simply misdirection. Get over it.
When I saw the first movie, the biggest problem I had with it was that if the machines really did have total control over the Matrix, they should have been able to simply kill -9 Neo, or delete the air around him, or the city block he's running through. Why try to smash in Trinity with a truck when you can simply make the phone booth she ran into not be there anymore? The second movie went a long way to explaining what initially appeared to be flaws in the first one. Specifically, the goal of those running the Matrix was never to kill Neo or Trinity
I'm not Buddhist myself, but I've recently been paging through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." One of the central themes of the book is about how everything, including technology is all part of the Buddha. If you watch Reloaded with that in mind, certain elements of the film tend to make a lot more sense.
When I saw the first film, with the whole "the Matrix is a lie so machines can use us as batteries" story that Morpheus told, I found myself saying, "what a shitty explanation! You could drive trucks through the holes in that story!" From that point on, I chose to simply enjoy The Matrix for the wire-fu superhero fun-fest that it was, and shrugged of the story as typical B-Movie sci-fi dressed up in half-understood Buddhist claptrap.
The story for the second movie, while mostly obfuscated by action sequences that misdirected rather than explained, was much better. Not only better sci-fi, but better Zen allegory as well.
The final scene, in which Neo shuts his eyes and stops the robots with his mind, then passes out, opens a lot of interesting possibilities. It hammered home the point that "Zion", rather than being a wasteland city in the real world, is really just a bit-bucket for storing the minds of those who reject The Matrix. All those people are still plugged in, including Neo. As we exited the movie, a friend of mine suggested that the reason why Neo seemed to pass out was because when he stopped the robots, it was because his mind reached a state of enlightenment which saw through this second layer of illusion, and he woke up, finally exiting the Matrix.
My wild-assed guess: In the third movie, Neo will actually end up protecting The Matrix. It will turn out that the machines are actually benevolent, with the exception of the fallen angel known as Agent Smith, who will threaten to take down the Matrix and all of humanity with it.
By the way, if you have not rented "The Animatrix" yet, I recommend it. About half of the short anime features are really good, and the rest are not too bad to sit through. My favorite is probably the one made by Watanabe (director of Cowboy Bebop) which features a private eye who is hired to track down Trinity.
Bad news... Episode 4 is set about 18 years later, which might be plenty of time for Jar Jar to die of natural causes or retire or whatever, depending on what the life span of Gungans is.
Therefore, we have no guarantee that Jar Jar will die... Apart from the old war-movie cliche which says "the black guy is always one of the first to get killed." Since Jar Jar talks kind of like a Jamaican, he's probably doomed as long as Lucas follows Hollywood convention.
On the other hand, Lando survived the original trilogy and went on to sell Malt Liquor, so you never know.
Emily Litella: What is it with these crazy Indians saying they can use UPS to prevent train crashes. I'm a big fan of UPS and all, but what could a mail delivery company that drives around in little brown trucks possibly know about train wrecks in India!? I mean come on, people! It just doesn't make any sense!
Jane Curtain: Uh. Emily, I think the report was talking about GPS. You know, Global Positioning Systems? Those satellites that help you know where you are all the time?
Not only was DKSA complete horse shit, but the pre-release hype inspired me to re-read my Dark Knight Returns comics... and discover what a quirky product of cold-war-era ennui it really was. Even more that Dr. Strangelove.
Most of the things he was railing against in DKR are no longer around, which makes the propaganda angle of the book really stand out a lot more.
The Watchmen was also very much a product of the times, but it seems to hold up a lot better for some reason. YMMV.
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Most of my post was not directed at you specifically. I was covering a lot of ground in one rant. Try not to be so thin-skinned.
I am.
Reducing their taxes is thus NOT going to have any impact on the economy because these people have no real incentive to spend more, the extra little bit of money is not going to have any impact.
Really? Huh. I suppose you think we should just wait for the poor to invest in the companies that employ us. Good plan!
By giving them back money (or just giving them money) you are pretty much guaranteed they are going to spend it. If you give $1000 to a person who makes $20,000 a year, they will spend it. GIve $1000 to a person who makes $200,000 a year and has $1.5 million in assets, they might not even cash the check mailed to them by the government.
I am getting pretty sick of this lie. The notion that a tax cut for rich people will just get stuffed into their bed mattresses, instead of spent on soup or whatever. Rich people will do with extra money what they do with most of their money: invest it. Do you know why the .com bubble finally burst? People stopped investing in overvalued companies. Do you know why the NASDAQ is recovering now? People are investing in tech again.
It's amazing how this thread has even become a discussion of tax policy. The reason Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are getting richer again is not that George Bush has handed them wheelbarrows full of cash. Most of the Bush tax cuts haven't even kicked into effect yet. They reason they are getting richer again is because the companies they own are going up in value. Even if you are not a fan of Microsoft and Oracle, this is fantastic news. It means that the tech sector is finally rebounding, and we can all hope to go back to being overpaid BOFH's again. Sure, a lot of development jobs have gone overseas, but those were jobs that were being done by Russian and Indian H1B workers during the fat years anyway. The fact that the biggest holders of technology stocks in the world are finding themselves getting more rich, instead of less rich, once again is cause for those of us who work for tech companies to rejoice.
Ultimately, if you are working in this industry, a multi-millionaire probably signs your paychecks. Only a die-hard marxist could thing that them having less money is a good thing for you.
The Rutles was 25 years ago. Yes, he is washed up (see his guest-staring role on the final, dying season of "Suddenly Susan"... actually, don't. It's every bit as awful as it sounds.)
I have modest hopes for "The Remains of the Piano" to be funny, and I pray that this musical doesn't suck, but Eric Idle has not been very funny in a long, long time, unless you count the many times he's recycled the stuff he and the other Pythons wrote back in the late 1960s. Think about that for a moment. The 1960s. Then a few movies, ending with "Life of Brian" in 1979. Then jack shit.
When you think about it, why should he bother to do anything good anymore, when he can fill up concert halls at $50 a ticket for nothing but him singing "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" and "The Galaxy Song" on a cheap acoustic guitar?
If it works, it will be the first funny thing Eric Idle will have done in decades. Here's hoping!
Apple tried enabling the "tap to click" as a default on touchpads once. They abandoned that experiment very quickly, when they found that big lummoxen (hey, I made a new incorrect plural! Check me out, I'm '1337!) like me would damage the touchpad with our thunderously powerful tapping, causing lots of powerbooks to come back to them while still under warranty.
All cows are female, you city slicker, you.
Look, if we were willing to fight a war for cheaper oil, it would have been far more efficient, required far fewer troops, and would have yielded far more cheap oil to simply go into Venezuela last spring, and use our troops to end the strife in that country.
Let go of your stupid fallacy-laden nonsense about the war in Iraq being an oil subsidy, and your whole stupid argument collapses. Class dismissed.
You are. In order to catch it on fire, you need to hit a parked Crown Vic at 80 MPH, and have police equipment in the trunk to puncture it with (or something like it... dead hookers won't do the trick).
To be honest, I wouldn't ever think about driving a hybrid. I think we should be looking at alcohol powered cars.
Burning alcohol produces fewer CO emissions, but more O3 and Nitrogen-based pollutants. It's not an attractive trade-off, unless you have stock in ADM Corporation (or are a politician they gave money to).
You are exactly right, AC. Anybody who wants to drive a car like mine needs to keep in mind that it means paying an extra $850 or so per year for gas.
Since I'm a very tall person, who frequently carries passengers and occasionally wants to pull a trailer, I am happy to pay the extra cash for a BIG CAR. If you are not, the new Nissans are a terrific buy, and get great milage. (I would say Toyotas, but the high demand for them has caused them to be a little overpriced.)
Almost all modern cars are designed to give up themselves for the safety of the passengers. Even is a relatively slow collision on city streets, the frame (other than that surrounding the cab) will buckle, causing potential damage to engine parts.
My last vehicle was a small pick-up truck. A driver in a full-sized station wagon rear-ended me on an icy road at about 15-20 MPH. My truck was fine, but the front end of her car crumpled up, causing the radiator to spill all over the place and (we suspected) some minor damage to the engine. Nobody was hurt, but her car had to be towed away. Had it been a hybrid car, I am positive that the electric motor would have been wrecked, and there's a good chance the battery would have needed replacing.
No, engineering that still needs to be done is what prevents them. When hybrid cars are as good and economical, for all purposes, as gas cars, people like me will buy them and companies like Ford and Nissan will sell them. It might not be much longer, but until then they are a niche market. End of story.
Damn! I should look into doing that modification to my car. Like most Minnesotans, I have a natural gas feed to my house for winter heating. I could just tap that and drive on it. Very cool. Thanks for the tip.
More than offset by the huge gas taxes you pay at the pump.
The purpose of oil subsidies is not cheap gasoline. It's cheap power and heating. (Which means it's also another subsidy for electric cars.)
Cars that are expensive to maintain tend to have poor resale values, which means that even if you only plan on driving it for two years and selling it, you want to consider that factor.
repair costs
What makes hybrids affordable is that there are massive government subsidies reducing the price of the car. This masks the fact that many of the parts for these cars are enormously expensive. A hybrid Civic that gets into a minor city-street collision with a minivan or SUV is probably going to be so expensive to repair, that the insurance company will want to total it out.
If the long-term potential costs of maintenance and parts doesn't scare you off, and you don't expect to haul a boat trailer or something, then the hybrid cars can be a terrific way to go. Fantastic gas millage and a super-quiet ride. The inventor of regenerative breaks should get a medal.
Personally, I'll stick with my Crown Victoria for now. It may drink gas, (I get about 20 MPG from my highway and city driving combined) but it's safe, it seats six, and has a trunk big enough to easily fit three dead hookers. More, if you chop 'em up and put them in bags. Plus, the V8 is powerful enough to tow a lot of stuff when I need to, and the suspension is so smooth, it's like driving a hovercraft. Best of all, the reputation for being an "old man's car" means cheap insurance in spite of being almost the same car that the cops are tearing around town in.
The Crown Vic LS is like a Lincoln town car for half the price, and is the most under-rated car of the last decade, IMHO.
If you really want to get a hybrid car, consider looking for a used Toyota Prius, perhaps sold by some Yuppie asshole who only bought it to be trendy, and wants to trade up to a Mini Cooper S now that Minis are considered the New Hotness.
I mean, could we all really ever get this worked up in a discussion about "Pitch Black"? Or even "Attack of the Clones" for that matter?
It's kind of like how, on an episode of MST3K, Crow pointed out that Kathy Ireland's acting range went all the way from "dull surprise" to... "dull suprise."
Did you see him in "Much Ado About Nothing"? An otherwise delightful movie that ground to a screeching halt every time Keanu opened his mouth!
I think I need to watch it again, though. Weren't Mother and the Oracle the same person?
Sorry, but Agent Smith has no control over the Matrix. No chance of putting up CGI shields or "coming prepared."
He doesn't work for the Matrix anymore anyway. His maverick attitude was hinted at in the first film when he was questioning Morpheus. He took off his earpiece (symbolically cutting off his communication link to the rest of the machines, the Matrix, his superriors, etc.) before telling Morpheus "I hate this place."
Almost immediately in the second film it is explained that when Neo entered Smith to defeat him, Smith was set free. He is no longer an agent of the Matrix, but is a rogue AI that is capable of breaking the rules in some interesting ways. He no longer has any authority or even any contact with the powers that control the Matrix.
There is no "real" Agent Smith that Neo can kill to defeat him. Every copy is Smith is identical and independent. They are all the real slim shady.
The reason the "burly brawl" went on for so long, even though Neo or Smith(s) could have escaped at any time, is because they were sizing each other up. They both might have been hoping for a decisive win when the fight started, but once they really got going, it became fairly obvious that neither was going to win. Neo could keep outfighting Smith, and Smith could keep coming with more of himself. Therefore, once Neo decided he had enough, he chose to withdraw.
Fighting to a draw is a classic shop-worn convention of Kung Fu and samurai movies. It simultaneously establishes the greatness of the hero and the challenge that he faces.
Besides, it was one of the best scenes in the movie. If I were hired to edit the film, and asked to cut it down for time, I would have kept every last second of the Burly Brawl and the highway chase, and dropped the entire cave-dancing scene. They thought it would be clever to juxtapose tribal dancing with a sex scene, but it didn't quite work, and it's not like nobody's ever noticed the sexuality of dance before.
I find it endlessly amusing that people who found the ham-fisted "explanations" behind the first movie completely missed the clever and subtle nuances of the second one. Look, kid. Reloaded and Revolutions are the movies that the W brothers always wanted to make. The only reason for the first one is that you can't do a superhero serial without an origin story. The first movie established the visual style and feel of the series, but most of what you thought the story was about was simply misdirection. Get over it.
When I saw the first movie, the biggest problem I had with it was that if the machines really did have total control over the Matrix, they should have been able to simply kill -9 Neo, or delete the air around him, or the city block he's running through. Why try to smash in Trinity with a truck when you can simply make the phone booth she ran into not be there anymore? The second movie went a long way to explaining what initially appeared to be flaws in the first one. Specifically, the goal of those running the Matrix was never to kill Neo or Trinity
I'm not Buddhist myself, but I've recently been paging through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." One of the central themes of the book is about how everything, including technology is all part of the Buddha. If you watch Reloaded with that in mind, certain elements of the film tend to make a lot more sense.
When I saw the first film, with the whole "the Matrix is a lie so machines can use us as batteries" story that Morpheus told, I found myself saying, "what a shitty explanation! You could drive trucks through the holes in that story!" From that point on, I chose to simply enjoy The Matrix for the wire-fu superhero fun-fest that it was, and shrugged of the story as typical B-Movie sci-fi dressed up in half-understood Buddhist claptrap.
The story for the second movie, while mostly obfuscated by action sequences that misdirected rather than explained, was much better. Not only better sci-fi, but better Zen allegory as well.
The final scene, in which Neo shuts his eyes and stops the robots with his mind, then passes out, opens a lot of interesting possibilities. It hammered home the point that "Zion", rather than being a wasteland city in the real world, is really just a bit-bucket for storing the minds of those who reject The Matrix. All those people are still plugged in, including Neo. As we exited the movie, a friend of mine suggested that the reason why Neo seemed to pass out was because when he stopped the robots, it was because his mind reached a state of enlightenment which saw through this second layer of illusion, and he woke up, finally exiting the Matrix.
My wild-assed guess: In the third movie, Neo will actually end up protecting The Matrix. It will turn out that the machines are actually benevolent, with the exception of the fallen angel known as Agent Smith, who will threaten to take down the Matrix and all of humanity with it.
By the way, if you have not rented "The Animatrix" yet, I recommend it. About half of the short anime features are really good, and the rest are not too bad to sit through. My favorite is probably the one made by Watanabe (director of Cowboy Bebop) which features a private eye who is hired to track down Trinity.
Therefore, we have no guarantee that Jar Jar will die... Apart from the old war-movie cliche which says "the black guy is always one of the first to get killed." Since Jar Jar talks kind of like a Jamaican, he's probably doomed as long as Lucas follows Hollywood convention.
On the other hand, Lando survived the original trilogy and went on to sell Malt Liquor, so you never know.
Funniest comment today. The good ones always seem to come by when I lack mod points. Thanks, sonic a.
Any excuse to bust out an old SNL reference is always welcome. Have another round.
Jane Curtain: Uh. Emily, I think the report was talking about GPS. You know, Global Positioning Systems? Those satellites that help you know where you are all the time?
Emily Litella: Oh... Never mind!
Most of the things he was railing against in DKR are no longer around, which makes the propaganda angle of the book really stand out a lot more.
The Watchmen was also very much a product of the times, but it seems to hold up a lot better for some reason. YMMV.