There are two components to this question. Did many in the working class feel that Democrats had abandoned them? And is Trump’s economic policy actually better for the working class than Harris’s? I think the answers are “yes” and “probably no”. However, voters don’t listen to economists. If they’re not happy with the status quo, they vote for disrupting the status quo even if experts tell them that that’s a bad idea.

I suppose Sanders thinks that the working class would have supported a Democratic candidate who proposed a leftward (as opposed to Trump’s rightward) disruption. My guess is that that isn’t true and socialism is still a dirty word in America, but who knows?

Do people want to play Warcraft 2? I have a lot of nostalgic memories of when I played it as a kid but unlike the other remastered old Blizzard games, it isn’t very good by 21st century standards.

Why would you pay to make your Rhino’s bulge smaller?

Also, how is Warframe now? I last played eight years ago and I’m a little surprised that it’s still going strong.

Always remember to wear a steel codpiece.

They better hope they’re not in New York state.

The dip only lasted a few months. By August of 2020, VTI was back to where it had been before the dip in February.

Another thing to consider is that Melkor was never known to show understanding or mercy to his servants who failed him. I would have to think that any balrog who failed to come to his aid would have been killed (or worse as you postulate) as soon as Morgoth was freed.

Hah, now I’m imagining an alternate, sillier Arda where the balrogs had the same conversation as the villain’s abused lackeys did at the end of Disney’s Hercules. (A really underappreciated movie, IMO. Just don’t watch it expecting it to be about the Greek myth.)

He’s not going to be happy when he gets out of there.

You mean if he gets out of there!

If. If is good…

I think you know much more about the legendarium than I do, but I want to nitpick one point:

Also, there were no more than 3 or 7 balrogs ever according to later writings by Tolkien, which indicates that no balrog was weak or cowardly.

I think I should have phrased what I said differently. No balrog was weak or cowardly in an absolute sense. Durin’s Bane attacked and defeated all the dwarves of Khazad Dum at the height of their power. It wasn’t initially afraid of Gandalf. However, Ungoliant was another matter. She had consumed the light of the Two Trees and overcome Melkor himself. She might also have been capable of doing something far worse to a Maia than destroying its body and banishing its spirit. I think that though the balrogs were able to drive her away, their victory was not inevitable and I can imagine even a balrog faltering when called to face such a foe.

A house can’t literally be branded, so the use of “brand” in that context must be metaphorical. People, however, can and historically often have been branded quite literally.

As for othering: it is irrelevant to the point I was making, so your reference to it here is a good example of how people make a false and inflammatory statement, and then when challenged about it, those people retreat to a much weaker, uncontroversial claim. Meanwhile the public has seen the original, false, and inflammatory statement but not the challenge or the retreat.

No one would care if the headline said “Israelis see Palestinians as fundamentally different from themselves” or even “Israelis sometimes don’t treat Palestinian prisoners with respect.” However, what the headline does say is that Israelis physically mutilate Palestinian prisoners. Here in the comments you make a pitiful argument that the claim of physical mutilation is in fact just a metaphor, although even then you try to sneak in a comparison between Jews and Nazis. Jews aren’t tattooing anything on anyone, but apparently they still have less decency than Nazis according to you.

I think they’re almost certainly deliberately using ambiguous language to push an agenda. (Either that or both the author and the editor are incompetent.) And I would add that the language isn’t even actually ambiguous. It’s simply deceptive. “Brand” in this context would be interpreted literally by a normal reader and claiming it’s a metaphor is disingenuous.

Speaking of “data is beautiful”, IMO a 2D scatter plot would be very useful for visualizing this relationship. This chart does provide the distribution for each language, as opposed to just the average, but at the expense of making correlation (or lack thereof) difficult to see.

Also, the ratio of the largest to the smallest value for syllables per second and for bits per second appears to be fairly similar. I have to eyeball values but it looks like Japanese : Thai is 8.0 : 4.7 for syllables per second (so 1.7) whereas French : Thai is 48 : 34 (so 1.4) for bits per second.

For each language, the distribution of syllable rate looks very much like the distribution of bit rate. I would like to see a chart of bits per syllable. Oh, and I wonder how this affects reading speed and the rate of information transfer via reading, especially for different spoken languages that use similar written characters.

Finally, a day when it is acceptable for me to lure children into my van!

That’s true in a trivial sense: there’s no law of nature that enforces verisimilitude in any work of fiction. However, most authors aim for verisimilitude, and the good ones achieve it. I’m not talking about the top speeds of balrogs because I think there’s some objective answer, but rather because I think that Tolkein does achieve verisimilitude (at least in some regards) and therefore there is a foundation for discussing the traits of his fictional beings. He easily could have given balrogs rocket skates, but he didn’t.

The balrog in Moria was chasing the fellowship. If it could move at 400 mph (by any means) then it would have caught them immediately. We know that some balrogs are weaker than others since it is said that Gothmog was the mightiest. My conclusion is that if the balrogs literally flew by mundane means to Melkor’s aid, then the balrog in Moria was particularly weak (and cowardly) and did not participate in rescuing Melkor. I presume that’s also why it hid deep underground for so long rather than fighting and being banished along with the other balrogs.

With that said, I think Melkor summoned the balrogs to himself by magical means (but they can’t teleport on their own). None of them could go 400 mph. That’s just silly. They’re not Sonic the Hedgehog. I also think that balrogs can’t fly. The word “wings” is a metaphor for the way flames spread from them.

(I don’t claim that the text rules out the possibility of wings and flight. The balrog might have fallen with Gandalf because they fought a metaphysical battle, dragged down by the “weight of its sin”.)

Edit: I think we actually agree. I’m just elaborating.

Edit 2: I found a picture that shows what I think a balrog’s “wings” look like.

If you’re a billionaire intent on becoming even wealthier, that usually implies that you really enjoy being a successful businessman. I don’t see why business success for its own sake would be inherently less satisfying than other sorts of accomplishment.

My problem with Windows is that when I want to eject a USB drive, Windows refuses to do so, refuses to tell me what program is apparently still using the drive, and certainly refuses to kill that program. I am removing the drive. I can’t just not remove it!

Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.

Most financially secure people still work full time. I suppose that in theory, they’re able to quit their jobs without suffering immediate, catastrophic consequences but if they actually did that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be financially secure for long.

(In my experience, many financially secure people actually work much more than full time. I think they would be better off if they didn’t because at some point time becomes more valuable than money, but they have the sort of personality that compels them to. This is often related to starting out without financial security.)

The very rich can do crazy stuff without consequences but they’re such a small part of the population that I don’t think comparing oneself to them is useful.

There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies

(I’m not picking a side in the “Are fetuses people?” debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)

Heh, I walk around naked with the blinds open because where I live, people would need binoculars to see me and if they choose to, their resulting suffering is their own fault. One advantage of being unattractive…