Movie theater ceiling collapses during screening of 'Captain America: Brave New World'
submitted by https://thelemmy.club/u/realcaseyrollins
Texas Official Warns Against ‘Measles Parties’ Amid Growing Outbreak
submitted by https://slrpnk.net/u/silence7
Trump supporters who got fired by DOGE: ‘This is just going completely off the rails’
submitted by https://lemmy.ca/u/imvii
Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don't work anymore
submitted by https://feddit.uk/u/UKFilmNerd
I’m a huge fan of old movies. Now, when I say old I don’t mean movies from ten, twenty, or even thirty or forty years ago. I love movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, specifically the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I’ve always loved this period, and given how hard it is to find many of these movies on streaming, I’ve made an effort to buy as many of these movies on physical media as possible. As such, I have thousands of old movies on DVD, and among my most treasured titles are a few dozen DVD box sets Warner Bros put out in the mid-2000s, as they control the best library of classic film.
A few months ago, I dug into an old Humphrey Bogart box set to watch a favorite of mine, Passage to Marseille. After about an hour, the disc simply stopped working. The same thing happened with another movie from the set, Across the Pacific. I actually thought my old Blu-ray player was to blame, and given that I was in need of an upgrade anyway, I bought a new UHD player and just forgot about it.
Flash forward to about a week ago, when I decided to throw on an old Errol Flynn movie called Desperate Journey. The same thing happened. This was more concerning to me, as, unlike the other movies I mentioned, this has never gotten an HD release and was unavailable digitally. I did a little research online, and to my horror, I landed on several home theater forum threads (and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ovUB-OavE&t=2083s
) confirming this was no fluke.
It turns out that virtually every Warner Bros DVD disc manufactured between 2006 and 2008 has succumbed to the dreaded laser rot, where discs simply stop working due to a rotting of the layers. Once it happens, it can’t be undone. This was a frequent problem with laserdiscs back in the 80s and 90s, but it wasn’t a huge problem with DVDs. The issue comes down to the way the discs were authored. Many of the titles affected, which range from classics like The Wild Bunch and The Shawshank Redemption to TV collections like The Dukes of Hazzard, have been reissued on Blu-ray or digital HD. Some of the titles, such as many of the titles in the Looney Tunes Collections and many of the Golden Age of Hollywood movies, have not, making them, in a lot of cases, lost media.
So, what can be done about this? Nothing. As stated in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ovUB-OavE&t=2083s
.
So far, Blu-ray Discs aren’t affected, although all HD-DVD discs put out by WB in this period are basically expensive coasters.
While it would be great of WB was to try to make good to consumers by at least offering us replacement MOD discs from the Warner Archive, I’m not holding my breath. Given that the discs only went bad after fifteen years or so, I’m sure they feel like we got our money’s worth – which we certainly didn’t in my opinion. Special shout out to https://www.youtube.com/@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader/search?query=warner
, a superb Home Theater YouTube Channel that was way ahead of this story.
UPDATE: According to one of our readers, FilmFan-89, WB will replace some discs if you contact them directly, with a catch. They will only replace discs that are currently in print, and sadly, many of the defective titles are not. Reach out to them through the https://help.wbshopsupport.com/hc/en-us
and keep us posted in the comment thread if they come through with replacements.
https://www.joblo.com/hundreds-maybe-thousands-of-your-warner-bros-dvds-dont-work-anymore/
Across the world, we're rejecting American goods and it's working!
submitted by https://lemmy.world/u/Lauchs
The central bank’s GDPNow tracker of incoming metrics is indicating that gross domestic product is on pace to shrink by 1.5%.
Ukrainians rally around Zelenskyy as defender of Ukraine's interests after Oval Office blowout
submitted by https://biglemmowski.win/u/Cephalotrocity
Summary
Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy had a heated argument during an Oval Office meeting that ended with Zelenskyy leaving without signing a planned bilateral agreement.
Despite the diplomatic breakdown, Ukrainians rallied around Zelenskyy, praising him for standing firm on Ukraine’s interests against pressure from Trump and JD Vance, who criticized him for lacking gratitude for previous U.S. support.
While Moscow officials were delighted by the apparent rift, many Ukrainians viewed Zelenskyy as defending their country’s dignity during the 3-year Russian invasion.
I am once again asking...
submitted by https://discuss.tchncs.de/u/squirrel
https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/30a4929c-169e-4fb0-828e-023a66bdc49a.webp
Schwere Sicherheitspanne: Zwei russische Agenten verschaffen sich Zutritt ins Weiße Haus
submitted by https://feddit.org/u/RmDebArc_5
https://www.der-postillon.com/2025/03/sicherheitspanne-weisses-haus.html#more
let's try this again...
submitted by https://lemmy.world/u/scheep
sorry about crossposting the same thing 17 times, that was my bad. That was definitely spam and I won’t do that again! Apologies for possibly making a mess out of anyone’s feeds.
Not a very good introduction to myself, so let’s start again (without the spam).
Hi, I’m sbird, and I like to make fun projects in my free time. I enjoy programming, 3D printing, and photography. My favourite food is rice. The best Harry Potter book is Prisoner of Azkaban, and I joined the fediverse a few months ago and Lemmy very recently.
My thoughts on the fediverse so far have been positive. Pixelfed has been very nice, and Mastodon has been pretty good too. I love that there’s so many different third-party client apps for all three of them!
anyways, I have exams to study for, cheers!
Boy surprised with gift made from thousands of tubs he saved from landfill
submitted by https://rss.ponder.cat/u/free
Connections #629 2025-03-01
submitted by https://lemmy.zip/u/DailyGameBot
https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/6bd9cb1c-e105-4ebd-910e-0e8aa102195f.webp
1956 Oldsmobile Rocket 88
submitted by https://lemm.ee/u/perishthethought
Love those fins.
Found on: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bsabarnowl/2558533083
xfce logo remade by me using inkscape and gimp on gnu/linux mint!
submitted by https://lemmy.today/u/adrianhooves
when other graphic designers say “gimp is not good” or “inkscape is not professional”, or say bad things about linux, i have to show them that even linux can be awesome!!!
Assessing new allegations that Trump was recruited by the KGB
submitted by https://lemmy.ca/u/floofloof
The former head of Kazakhstan’s intelligence service, Alnur Mussayev, recently claimed in a Facebook post that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987, when the 40-year-old real-estate mogul first visited Moscow.
The allegation would, if true, be a bombshell. Mussayev provides no documentary evidence —but then how could he? He alleged that Trump’s file is in Vladimir Putin’s hands.
Mussayev isn’t the only ex-KGB officer to have made such an assertion. Several years ago, Yuri Shvets, a former KGB major now resident in Washington, D.C., served as one of the key sources for Craig Unger’s best-selling book, “American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery.”
Just after Mussayev made his claim, another ex-KGB officer living in France, Sergei Zhyrnov, categorically endorsed the allegations in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist. According to Zhyrnov, Trump would have been surrounded 24/7 by KGB operatives, including everyone from his cab driver to the maid servicing his hotel room. Zhyrnov said that Trump’s every move would have been recorded and documented, and that he could have been either caught in a “honey trap” (“All foreign-currency prostitutes were KGB — one hundred percent,” he said) or perhaps recorded bribing Moscow city officials in order to promote his idea of building a hotel in the Soviet capital.
None of these former KGB operatives has provided evidence, but the fact that three KGB agents located in different places and speaking at different times agree on the story suggests this possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the first Trump administration and from the initial weeks of the second, it is that everything, including what appears to be impossible, is possible.
Also lending credence to the allegations is the fact that kompromat on Trump would easily, simply and convincingly explain the president’s animus toward NATO, Europe and Ukraine, his admiration of Vladimir Putin and his endorsement of authoritarian rule. One could even invoke “Occam’s razor,” the philosophical principle that claims that simple explanations should be preferred to complex ones.
We could then dispense with contorted explanations that focus on Trump’s mercurial and narcissistic personality on the one hand and American party realignments on the other. Indeed, even if true, these explanations could be accommodated as bells and whistles adorning the central narrative propounded by three KGB agents.
Naturally, Trump and his supporters will bristle. Surely, the three KGB agents are on somebody’s payroll. Who wouldn’t want to discredit the U.S. president? It could be the CIA or FBI, except that these are now firmly in the hands of Trump loyalists. Besides, would they have the ability to buy or coerce residents of Kazakhstan and France? Ditto for other Western intelligence services.
Perhaps it’s Putin? But he surely has no interest in undermining a president who supports his policies toward Ukraine, NATO and Europe.
Somewhat more plausible would be an officer or officers within the Russian intelligence community who oppose Putin and Trump’s designs. This version seems unlikely, but only at first glance, since we know that Putin’s seemingly impregnable regime is actually riven with cracks.
But why would a clandestine opposition make up a story and convince Shvets to spill the beans several years ago? Wouldn’t the dissidents know it’s true?
Perhaps all three ex-KGB agents are simply lying, in the hope of attracting attention and bolstering their fame? A resident of Washington might have this motive, but a Kazakh and Frenchman?
What leads me to think that there might be something to the allegations is the fact that an acquaintance had a very similar experience at just the same time. A left-leaning ladies’ man, he was wined and dined in Moscow for several years in the late 1980s, courted by the ladies — by his round-the-clock interpreter, as well as by a woman who approached him in a department store and invited him home.
We’ll probably never know the truth. But even with no slam-dunk evidence, the allegations should be, to say the least, disturbing, especially for the genuine patriots in the MAGA camp.
Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
submitted by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/cyrano
Tap for article# Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
## More wealth means more money for baby-boomers to pass on. That is dangerous for capitalism and society
Feb 27th 2025
Work hard, children are told, and you will succeed. In recent decades this advice served the talented and the diligent well. Many have made their own fortunes and live comfortably, regardless of how much money they inherited. Now, however, the importance of hereditary wealth is rising around the rich world, and that is a problem.
People in advanced economies stand to inherit https://archive.is/o/M5kId/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/27/how-to-get-rich-in-2025
—about 10% of GDP, up from around 5% on average in a selection of rich countries during the middle of the 20th century. As a share of output, annual inheritance flows have doubled in France since the 1960s, and nearly trebled in Germany since the 1970s. Whether a young person can afford to buy a house and live in relative comfort is determined by inherited wealth nearly as much as it is by their own success at work. This shift has alarming economic and social consequences, because it imperils not just the meritocratic ideal, but capitalism itself.
In part, the inheritance boom is a reflection of a wealthier and ageing society. As economies have become richer, they have accumulated capital per worker—capital that someone has to own. But because the pace of economic growth has slackened and housing markets have boomed, the scale of this wealth relative to incomes has ballooned. Nowhere is this combination of towering wealth and enduring sclerosis more evident than in Europe, where productivity growth has been dismal.
More wealth means more inheritance for baby-boomers to pass on. And because wealth is far more unequally distributed than income, a new inheritocracy is being born.
You can see this in the shifting fortunes of the super-rich. For much of the 20th century vast estates were often broken up by bad investing, or by war and inflation. https://archive.is/o/M5kId/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/how-to-avoid-a-common-investment-mistake
, if America’s rich families in 1900 had invested passively in the stockmarket, spent 2% of their wealth each year and had the usual number of children, there would be about 16,000 old-money billionaires in America today. In fact, there are fewer than 1,000 billionaires and the vast majority of them are self-made.
These trends are being overturned, however, perhaps because billionaires are both amassing wealth and are better at preserving their riches. In 2023, 53 people became billionaires thanks to inheritance, not far short of the 84 who made their own fortunes, according to UBS, a bank. That may be because it is now easy to park wealth in an index fund, and the principles of wealth management are better understood. Moreover, many governments have obligingly cut inheritance taxes.
The most striking thing about the inheritocracy, though, is that it is not just about the uber-rich. The typical heir is someone inheriting a normal house, or the proceeds from its sale, not a superyacht or a country pile. And housing wealth has rocketed in recent decades, especially in apex cities like London, New York and Paris. Those who were fortunate enough to buy property before the long boom have made lots of money, passing on a windfall to their heirs. As a consequence, bankers and corporate lawyers now fight bidding wars over houses from the estates of deceased taxi drivers. As housing has become ever more unaffordable in places like New York and London, so a 90th-percentile income has become too small to pay for a 90th-percentile life. You must have significant capital, too—if not from your parents’ estate, then from the Bank of Mum and Dad.
If you consider this as a whole, the growing importance of inheritance starts to become clear. In Britain one in six of those born in the 1960s is projected to receive an inheritance that exceeds ten years of average annual earnings for that generation. For those born in the 1980s, the ratio rises to one in three. The inequality of what people inherit, meanwhile, is startling. A fifth of 35- to 45-year-olds are expected to inherit less than £10,000 ($13,000), whereas a quarter are expected to inherit more than £280,000.
For supporters of free markets, the rise of the new inheritocracy should be deeply disturbing. For a start, it creates a rentier class that faces a series of bad incentives. A loophole-ridden tax system means that the wealthy spend a lot of time gaming the rules; it would be better used to direct their capital to more productive uses instead. To protect their assets, homeowners become nimbys, blocking building and making housing unaffordable for those without inherited wealth. Knowing they can rely on their inheritance, moreover, the new rentiers may face little incentive to work or innovate.
More worrying still is how a underclass of non-beneficiaries is becoming increasingly left behind—and increasingly disaffected. If property becomes ever harder to buy, and a comfortable life harder to achieve, the incentive of young, aspirational workers to strive will be blunted. And when they believe that the system is stacked against them, their support for mainstream political parties withers.
## Family fortunes
That is why fixing the problem is urgent. It would be mad to wish that inflation and war destroy fortunes, as they did in the 20th century. This newspaper has long argued that inheritance taxes are the fairest tool to deal with inheritocracy. Yet the taxes are so unpopular that, instead of enforcing them, governments have introduced loophole after loophole, raised the threshold at which they apply, or dismantled them altogether.
Fortunately, there are other remedies. Building enough houses in the right place is the single biggest action governments can take to restore the link between work and wealth. Levying sufficient annual property taxes, especially those that target underlying land values, would also help, because the tax would be capitalised as a fall in house prices, bringing down house-price-to-income ratios. And anything that boosts economic growth, so desperately needed in Europe, would bring down wealth-to-GDP ratios. The heyday of meritocracy brought with it social mobility, growth and prosperity. With a little hard work, those days can return. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/02/27/inheriting-is-becoming-nearly-as-important-as-working