noonsun

Yes it is. You are a very smart person. I like DeVotchKa a lot... yeah. But it's sort of hard to tell what the singer's saying some of th time. :confused:

post whore (no offence, it's just the first thing that comes to mind :P:P)

See that's the sad thing: he's pretty sure he's getting one for his birthday anyway. And he's STILL thinking about getting an iTouch. With his OWN MONEY. That he EARNED. I have some odd friends.

XD this is turning into the emoticon thread...

haha he's also thinking about getting an iTouch just so that he can stroke it's lovely interactive screen. I think he may have an Apple fetish or something. :P my name is Sara btw. Everyone seems to be on a first-name basis here, so.

sure, why not? Would you color yourself completely black with a sharpie marker?

s... okay, even though that's the first thing that comes to my mind I'm not posting it. umm... breathe

cooooold

:flutterby: mine is cooler so there.

I have a friend who actually has TWO iPod classics he carries with him in his pocket. He has one set of high-quality headphones he plugs into one at a time. One of them is white and contins all his artists (assorted #s)-L (or I think it's L). The other is black and has the rest of L-everything else. That's completely unrelated. I'm sorry. :P

OH MY GOD WANT. Seriously, that is flat-out no-words-for-it awesome. You have to admit it.

It looks interesting, (judging completely from the title) however YouTube has been acting all weird and broken toward me lately. :/ I haven't been able to watch basically anything for the last few days. It's really odd. :confused:

So today my so-elderly father said that he was "down wit Coldplay." :laugh3:^2

:artist:

Strawberry Swing 230 - In My Place 214 +

zoh mah god it talkeths? Better go buy then. Actually the only iPod I would ever get would be an iTouch. And even then I would rather just get the full iPhone an have my iPod and my phone in one easy-to-lose unit.

No. It just means you have distinct musical tastes. :shrug: Wait, exactly what do you mean by "black people music?" Like, do you mean rap, hip-hop, or basically ALL black people music (ie B.B. King, other... famous black singers I don't know.) Because if you don't like ANY black people music, you MIGHT be racist, if you like white people music from the same genre. So I guess it depends.

Don't worry. We're only the obsessed ones, we're bound to meet them more than average random people. :P

waaait... is YouTube only broken for moi?? O.o I thought it's been broken the past couple of days....

YouTube is too, you know, broken, to see any of these. :P

Doesn't this go in the football thread? :confused: edit: kaykay, the thread's been merged. Everyone please ignore this.

I don't know about Spain specifically, and I don't personally think we (the U.S.) are in a depression, but many terrified traders do, and that's what really matters becuase they're the "movers and shakers," so to speak. Saffire and Nick both did better jobs than me. I would follow their posts more than mine, because mine sucked in comparison :D But each of the posts here has value, so read them all. Saffire's/Nick's points about the gold standard are especially important.

Anyone know if there's a Devotchka thread here? :confused:

ahh dear... Ian, you may want to come back now.

My theory/some facts: Every now and again, uncontrolled growth in the stock markets (caused mainly by speculation) reach a point where people realize that a lot of the high prices aren't based on actual substance - for example, maybe Wal*Mart is getting higher and higher with no sign of stopping despite the fact that Wal*Mart has done nothing to "cause this." Then prices go downnnn. (called a "correction") Also, relatedly, real estate markets have been on the bubble that everyone was talking about (that is, they go through a similar situation as the one above) which also crashed recently, related no doubt to the economic "correction." Around this time, Alan Greenspan left as head of the Federal Reserve Board. Alan Greenspan was/is considered one of the best chairmen of the Fed, and if the economy was ever in trouble, he could release any old statment about almost anything, and things would magically get better. It was a very, very rich happy time while he was chairman. However, he ended up using all of his allowed time as chairman, so he had to step down. Historically, the changing of a Federal Reserve Chairman has caused economic slowdowns/ickiness in general, so this also piled on top of the correction/housing bubble. People started getting more and more afraid, because we hadn't really had a correction in a long time, and there were lots of other scary things going on (ex Alan Greenspan being replaced by Ben Bernanke.) The fear and negativity started snowballing upon itself until the stock markets started going down, banks went out of business (again related to the bursting housing bubble), which obviously didn't help. People started officially saying we were in a recession, and now, a full-fledged depression. The fear is making things so bad that it's becoming real; job losses are skyrocketing and banks/retail chains, as you mentioned, are failing. This all relates to job loss in particular -- to explain the "merging" "downsizing," and "offshoring" that you are presumably confused about: Merging is the act of merging two or more companies together, theoretically with economic gain for both parties. For example, when Bear Stearns (almost!) went bankrupt in early 2008, J. P. Morgan bought it out for very, ridiculously low prices -- which is a kind of merging. Downsizing is where companies try to "cut down" the size of themselves -- through any means including cutting employment. This is done to save money. Offshoring is probably the worst part for Americans. Offshoring is where, for example, Hollister will move one of its clothes-making plants, by closing down the one in America and building one in, say, Taiwan, where the people (and sometimes children) have about the same skill level (that is, almost none, since almost none is needed) and work for far, far lower wages. This is a very good advantage to the company because they are now making the same amount or more product at a far cheaper price. This is similar to "outsourcing," though you shouldn't confuse the two, because outsourcing is where you get a third-party company to do the job instead -- however this is also usually done overseas. Anyway, the stock market is complicated and a lot of it is based off raw emotions (mostly fear and confidence.) If you want to know when/if we're getting out of this recession/depression, sorry, I can't tell you; no one can. Anyone who says they can either has no fucking idea what they're talking about or is trying to con you. I really hope that was helpful. That's almost all I know on this subject. If you want to learn more, I would suggest watching CNBC or Bloomberg (I prefer Bloomberg for various reasons, but it's not on all cable/satellite plans) -- while you shouldn't necessarily trust everything some people say on these networks, you'll pick stuff up. That's basically how I got pretty knowledgeable on this subject. Also, Google is your friend.