throwaway7312

Really what you're saying is "start your own credit card."

Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1]

If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off.

So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition.

So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform.

We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite.

To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?

A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."

People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them.

History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon [2] https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank

I thought I followed climate change issues but somehow did not know that in most people's lifetimes sea levels will rise multiple feet. I would've thought folks would be more... concerned?

According to Sir David King (head U.K. climate scientist) in 2004, all continents other than Antarctica will be uninhabitable by 2100 due to manmade global warming.[1]

I wouldn't be worried about New York. I'd be on the next ship down to Antarctica to go stake my land claim right now before it all gets gobbled up.

I mean, if this manmade global warming stuff is real, and it's as bad as they say it is.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100817023019/http://www.indepen...

Our business was on MailChimp years ago.

We were on a paid tier. In 2012 we decided to try sending our own email via arpReach + SES. Once we set this up we asked MailChimp how to pause our paid account. We wanted to stop sending email and return to a free account until we needed MailChimp again.

Their response was that there was no way to do that... I recall it being something like "we do not like" or "do not allow" customers to return to free accounts. You could either keep paying, or delete your account and everything in it.

We'd already moved our MailChimp-collected emails over to arpReach (on our own server). At that point, I just opted to delete our MailChimp account.

Everything was fine while we used them. But that strange incident left a really bad taste in my mouth; it was one I never forgot.

Won't the term "person" unnecessarily alienate otherkin[1]?

Walter would appear to be safest with "thinking entity's game."

Then he has full coverage for men, women, intersex, asexual, androgynous, and non-human identities. His game will also still be relevant and inclusive once we've made contact with non-human extraterrestrials, and uplifted animals and machines to sentience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin

Major General Smedley Butler on war profiteers back in 1935:

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

My experience hiring women for our company has been 1.) they often don't want the job, 2.) when they get the job, they often balk at how demanding it is, then 3.) if they do stick around, regardless how much training we give them we end up having to let them go. This is not all female hires; we have women in customer service roles, for example, who outperformed our male hires; the females kept the job, the males did not. But for more technical roles, they have consistently either balked at the workload or underperformed and been quickly fired (we fire male workers who underperform just as quickly).

I would love to hire female employees who are every bit as driven, thorough, methodical, and accountable as our best male employees (the ones we don't fire), who are also cheaper. But they do not seem to exist.

The rare female prospective hires who are available and seem good are often priced so high I assume their rates are the result of Fortune 500 companies competing over them to have an effective female on the team. Good for them, but until effective females become cheaper than effective males it doesn't make sense for us to hire them from a value perspective (we don't need the social signaling points).

Censured in the U.S., but relevant:

http://www.magnitskyact.com/

"I have no sympathy for people who want to make a living by making things who then rent space in existing channels to tell users said things are for sale. At this point I'm rooting for anyone making bootstrapping and entrepreneurship less viable."

This memo?

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

Hadn't heard of it. Just read it. Interesting stuff.

It's very clearly a call-to-arms for business leaders against Marxists/communists. Not the working class.

Most Communists, at least in the West, spring from the middle- and upper-middle class, not the working class.

And Communist countries, historically, tend to make their working classes worse off, not better.

Equating a defense against communism with an attack on the working class would seem a stretch.

It's that, + "middle class going broke after being conned by Trump University & the gig economy."

Ever notice how Republican presidents are always portrayed by partisan liberals as blithering idiots (Bush II as a religious fundamentalist warmonger dunce; Trump as an narcissistic ADD loose cannon dunce)?

And how Democrat presidents are always portrayed by partisan conservatives as morally corrupt degenerates (Clinton as a murdering, philandering drug kingpin; Obama as a Kenyan-born Muslim homosexual on globalist puppet strings)?

Usually I just assume this is confirmation bias + partisans being partisan.

But sometimes I like to wonder, "What if it's all true?"

It sounds more like anti-natalism is your personal philosophy, and you make the same assumption the holders of most philosophical, ideological, and religious positions make: sooner or later, everyone else will realize to be true what I realize is true.

The history of man suggests otherwise. The more our civilization progresses, and the more the population swells, the broader the array of philosophical positions those within the civilization tend to hold. We have no evidence for everyone eventually coalescing around one 'right' belief set.

History is also littered with non-reproductive sects, like the Essenes, aesthetics, or, today's answer to these, anti-natalists and child-free individuals. These groups don't tend to be very good at passing their belief systems on to new generations however, as one might expect, and they don't tend to last particularly long once they've emerged on the civilization scene.

Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon likely wonder the same thing. It's such a big Earth, yet only a few hundred humans are known to exist.

Why are there no other detectable signs of human life, like smoke signals, territory markers, or emissaries from any more but a handful of other tribes? Surely if advanced humans existed, they would have contacted these tribes by now, to share technology, discoveries, and medicine. Yet they haven't.

How can the whole planet be so... silent?

> China is based on communism

China is no longer about communism any more than the U.S. is about the Enlightenment. China today is about Gilded Age-type capitalism with a strain of collectivism running through it.

Every Chinese today is caught up in a mad scramble for personal enrichment, often at the expense of his fellow man. Most American Marxists would shrink back in horror at the capitalist fever that grips the average Chinese. Even most of those on America's political right do not have the stomach for the level of Gordon Gecko-ness that animates many Chinese. While many on the American right prefer to retreat to dens, family, and countryside, Chinese capitalists are busily trying to get rich any way they can (ethically or otherwise).

The Chinese Communist Party functions the same way Chinese government has functioned for thousands of years. Anyone can join, if he can pass the necessary tests. Passing tests to gain a coveted spot in the government has been a national priority since before Confucius's day, 2.5 millennia ago, and continues to be today.

China does not have legally enshrined freedom of speech. But at a societal level, the 'real' freedom of speech is greater than what I've experienced in America. In America, you must very carefully watch your words, lest you offend any of a number of easily offended groups. You won't go to jail for it (unlike certain parts of Western Europe - Germany and Britain, for instance), but you will lose friends and you may lose your job. The result is that while speech may be legal in America, it ends up stifled nevertheless. Large chunks of American society no longer value free speech, and there is actual debate in many corners of the country about whether certain speech ('hate speech') should be outlawed. In China, so long as you do not loudly criticize or subvert the Chinese government, you are free to speak your mind - and won't be harassed by the government OR be James Damore'd / Donglegate'd out of a job.

As for the "10s of millions dead", there's extremely good reason to be skeptical of these claims.[1] They become harder and harder to swallow the more older, Mao-era Chinese you talk with - most of whom, no matter where in the countryside they hail from, know of no one who died of starvation or malnutrition. The press is the propaganda arm of a nation's powerful - whether in China or America. Don't believe it just because they tell you to.

[1] http://www.unz.com/article/mao-reconsidered-part-two-whose-f...

It's extraordinarily worrying to me that the American Left uses 'science' as a shield for its ideological positions and the adherents of its ideology lap it up and repeat it.

I don't care so much about the ideological positions. What I care about is the constant, systemic undermining of science.

Take your comment, for instance. You throw about the notion of 'scientific truth', as if this is even a thing. Science does not deal in truth. Truth is for the priests and the philosophers. This 'Temple of Science' American Leftists have attempted to create, where all beliefs of the American Left (like climate change, organic food, socialism, tabula rasa, and Boasian anthropology) are enshrined as 'Science', unassailable to criticism (criticizing them means you are 'not educated' or 'don't understand science') regardless the flimsiness of the papers published to support those positions, makes science a partisan field.

The American Right has been trained to hate and distrust science. They hate it. They think scientists are all frauds. Why? Because 'scientists', they are told, again and again, support all these Leftist ideological bents that are not science, and that those on the Right know, at some level, are not science.

Anthropogenic global warming, as an example, is utter nonsense. Without NOAA, NASA, and GHCN doing heavy manipulation of the raw data before the thousands of scientists who work on it ever see that data, you don't have climate change.[1] Without concealing historical sea ice data, these agencies don't have anything abnormal to report on that front.[2]

Right now, you have a situation in America where a bunch of zealots have claimed science as their own, to push their decidedly non-scientific, partisan ideologies... and the other bunch of zealots on the other side of the aisle have disclaimed science as full of shills and charlatans hoaxing the public for tax dollars.

I don't know if you actually care about science. I suspect you don't - otherwise you wouldn't be using 'scientific truth' (no such thing) as a shield for your ideology.

But I do, and frankly, when I see one side of the most powerful nation on Earth using science as its meat shield and the other side concomitantly coming to view science with hostility and suspicion, when science used to be an apolitical source of wonderment for people from all ideological backgrounds in that same country half a century ago, I am deeply afraid for the future of real scientific investigation.

[1] https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-n...

[2] https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fra...

As an expatriate who has traveled through dozens of countries and lived long-term in a handful, let me assure you: different national personal characteristics are very real. Put an Englishman, a Norwegian, and an Italian in a room together and it is more than their accents that tells you who's whom. Or a Chinese, a Japanese, and a Korean for that matter.

Pick up your suitcase and get outside North America for a bit. The world's a lot more diverse and interesting than the education system might have you believe.

It would seem like the likeliest scenario for a future dark age is neighboring towns (or tribes, I suppose) tell tales about how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after.

Every few generations some brave, ballsy kid shrugs off these old wives tales, goes and camps out in area X, and gets ill and dies not long after. The legends endure... at some cost.

Of course, it depends how strong the radioactivity/toxicity is. If it leads to cancer 30 years down the road, and no immediate signs, then it gets a lot messier.

The simplest way of looking at this is that the more power you divide up among increasingly small segments of your population, the more you divide the house.

In China, there is the objective of China, where there is a singular focus on what is good for the people and the country. Groups that would take away from this to empower their own group are viewed as attacking the collective.

America until the middle of the 1960s or so was like this to a large extent. Various minorities (Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans) entered the country, kept separate identities for a while, but eventually integrated into the whole. The death of John F. Kennedy signaled the end of a unified America and the birth of a far more divided house.

Today, America has fractured into a litany of squabbling sects. In China, you have the Chinese. In America, what used to be called "Americans" are now called whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians, Arabs, gays, straights, bisexuals, pansexuals, transexuals, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, globalists, Christians, atheists, Muslims, Jews. There are feminists and men's rights activists and Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right. Each sect wants the spotlight; it wants advantages over other groups (masked with euphemisms like "equality" or "recognition" or "reparations"); and it views the overall identity of the country as an oppressive enemy that must be fought.

That is not to say one condition is better than the other. These seem to be natural cycles nations go through. John Glubb notes the Byzantines squabbling amongst themselves over their divisions as the Ottomans blew holes in the walls around their city in 1453. [1] Byzantium, like America, had been the world's greatest super power at one time too. It seems likely the slide into infighting and decadence is a natural state of every nation advanced in the cycles of civilizations.

But of course, a people that spends its time tip-toeing around and arguing about what labels to use to refer to this group and who can use that word and who can't use that word and how many of which group you have to hire to not get sued has very different priorities and will achieve very different outcomes than a people that is relentlessly focused on a more singular, unified objective, other things being equal.

In America's case, I suppose the question is: do the benefits of diversity (which has become a sort of national religion over the past two decades) outweigh the costs?

The test case of American "maximum diversity" vs. Chinese maximal industriousness may prove as close as we'll get to a controlled study on how these two very different national priorities stack up against one another head-to-head on the world stage over the coming decades.

Place your bets now folks....

[1] http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

When I was in business school, we had a case study of a large supermarket chain that carried 18,000 or so different items per store. The management team wanted to save on cost and narrow down to just the essentials the chain's customers bought.

So they did an analysis and determined that only 6,000 or so of the products they carried sold in any significant amount. The other 12,000 were niche items that sold in small quantities and made little money.

Before they nixed the other 9,000 products though, the company decided to make one additional analysis, of who bought what in what combination. And it discovered all those little items were being bought in small quantities by people who bought large quantities of the big items.

The analysis further determined that if the supermarket nixed those 9,000 niche products, it would no longer be the "one stop shop" for its customers. Those customers would only be able to buy some of what they needed at the supermarket, and would need to buy the rest elsewhere. If a competing supermarket carried all of what a customer needed, that customer would eventually learn to do all his shopping at that supermarket to save the hassle of needing to journey to 2+ places to get what he needed.

After this final analysis, the supermarket chain decided to keep almost all the products it kept on its shelves, eliminating only 200 or 300 products, instead of 9,000.

It was not so much that the supermarket was very nice and charitable to niche spices and exotic Asian sauces and imported curries and whatnot.

Rather, it was that the supermarket realized that if its customers could not find everything they wanted on its shelves, they would eventually find everything they wanted on a competitor's shelves instead.

In YouTube's case, no good competitor presently exists. But a big part of the reason why is because YouTube has sucked all the oxygen out of the video hosting and streaming niche by being a one-stop shop. If it stops being that, there will be a lot more oxygen in that niche again.

(that said, I do not think demonetizing videos with low view counts / subscriber numbers constitutes injecting oxygen back into the market. "Not letting" niche video creators user their platform, however, probably would)

There is also the "person lives normal life, found to have almost no brain" phenomenon:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...

US citizen here. Haven't visited the US in years. Myriad reasons why, but the CBP policy is part of it. Just don't like the idea of people demanding I let them go through my stuff, but also don't like the idea of sitting around for 8 or 9 hours or having my machine confiscated if I won't give up the password, either.

I should also note that at least as a US citizen, having traveled through some 40 or so different countries, US customs is the third most unfriendly customs I have traveled through. Only ones worse for me have been Canada (last trip to Canada was likely the last I will make after my last customs experience there) and Czech. I feel much more comfortable visiting supposedly authoritarian countries than I do the United States.

Cooper actually says "a people built this", not necessarily insisting it was humans or descendants of humans (though that was my impression too the first couple watch throughs).

The other thing to keep in mind is he does not actually have any way to know who (or what) built the tesseract.

Just like how Brand earlier states the spacetime curvature hand she shakes hands with is "the first handshake" (implying first contact with an extraterrestrial), but it actually just turns out to be Cooper. The characters are confident of things they think are right, without actually being totally reliable narrators.

Climate change isn't a very good example. Individuals who subscribe to anthropogenic global warming and individuals who are skeptical of it have equal levels of scientific comprehension. [1]

It's more accurate to note that either side of the political divide in the United States has its share of unscientific beliefs. On the right, you have things like creationism and anti-vaxxers. On the left, you have things like gender theory and anti-GMO. Dismissing either side as rubes because of deeply held (if unscientific) ideologies doesn't help bridge the divide any.

> In most countries, this problem doesn't exist because parties with ideas equivalent to the GOP don't exist or are marginal.

As an American who has not lived in or visited America for quite some time, I agree there is typically more uniformity in most intranational political ideologies worldwide. Though I would not agree "most countries" don't have parties similar to America's GOP.

I think it'd be more accurate to say most Western European and Western European-descent countries do not have parties like America's GOP. Meanwhile, most non-Western European or non-Western European-descent countries do not have parties like America's Democrat Party.

For example, every major political party in Asia and Africa, with very few exceptions, pursues an ethnonationalist agenda. This is more akin to the modern American GOP than the modern American Democrat Party. On the other hand, in Western Europe, ethnonationalist parties tend to be not only out of favor, but illegal.

America is a rather strange country politically in that regard. Half of it is more like Western Europe. The other half is more like the rest of the world. In that sense, I suppose it is a bit like if you created a country made up half of England and half of China. The result would be a type of tumult similar to that of the U.S. (if a bit more extreme).

[1] https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2016.1148067

> Trump and others don’t recognize is that the American university system is a distributed system of factories that manufacture knowledge, innovation and the future.

There is another side to this. And that is that the American university system has a distinct political agenda that is opposed to the interests of the Trump-supporting half of the American electorate.

It is a bad thing for innovation when there are fewer smart people immigrating into the U.S. However, when you have a system of institutions that adopt adversarial political positions toward a large chunk of the electorate, you should expect that at some point you will end up in a situation where the electorate elects leaders who work, to some degree, against what the winning side of the voting public regard as powerful institutions firmly in the hands of political opponents.

There is not, unfortunately, an easy solution to the adversarial relationship between academia and half of America. The shift toward a mono-cultural academia (from a political standpoint) has occurred over decades; the left is now firmly entrenched in American universities and unlikely to relinquish its position any time soon.

We can't ban politics from universities either; you will never get politics out of any organization in which humans are involved. We are distinctly political animals.

So perhaps the focus should be on returning academia to a more politically balanced setup... that we might no longer end up in scenarios like today, where half the voting public views academia as a shining part of the leadership of progressive society, and the other half views it as a once-great former pride of our country, sadly fallen and increasingly adversarial. So long as the universities remain a bastion of the American left and an enemy of the American right, they will continue to feast during the years in which the left holds power, and continue to starve during the years when it does not.

Do we know what it is?

You seem quite confident.

Americans have 101 guns per 100 citizens. Finns have 34.2 guns per 100 citizens. Icelanders have 30.3 guns per 100 citizens.

America has 110x the murder rate than Finland has. America has 13,000x the murder rate Iceland has.

Whatever the cause is, 3x the guns ≠ 110x the murder rate (or 13,000x the murder rate).

A more interesting comparison might be to examine countries with similar murder rates to the U.S., regardless of arbitrary "developing or not developing" boxes, and ask what the two countries have in common. For instance, countries with similar murder rates to the U.S. include:

• Burundi (1.2 guns per 100 residents)

• Cuba (4.8 guns per 100 residents)

• Kazakhstan (1.3 guns per 100 residents)

• Kyrgyzstan (0.9 guns per 100 residents)

• Latvia (19 guns per 100 residents)

• Niger (0.7 guns per 100 residents)

• Rwanda (0.6 guns per 100 residents)

• Somalia (9.1 guns per 100 residents)

• Turkey (12.5 guns per 100 residents)

• Turkmenistan (3.8 guns per 100 residents)

• Ukraine (6.6 guns per 100 residents)

What about the U.S. makes it more like these countries, murder-rate-wise, than more developed countries with higher gun ownership, like Finland or Iceland (both of which have far and away higher gun ownership than all the countries on that list)?

We know it's not guns. So what's the cause?

Here's the thing with marketing: it is its own unique field that encompasses a large skill set. Copywriting, conversions, media buying. Product launches, if you're into that. Social media marketing or SEO/SEM. Guys who are good at it spend years learning it. Just like good engineers take years to learn their crafts.

If a marketer came to you and said hey, I can market like a champ, but I need a quick way to engineer a killer product by myself on a razor thin budget. Can't start marketing until I've got the product ready, and I also don't know much about product design or what to build. How do I do it and succeed? Same chicken-and-egg problem.

You can hire a professional who is GOOD, but then you're going to pay a lot of money for it. The better quality you want, the more you will have to pay. Or you can learn to be good YOURSELF, but then you're going to spend a lot of time to do it (and possibly still a lot of money).

In marketing, you cannot usually just hire talented marketers for low dollar amounts. If a marketer is any good, he knows how to make hundreds/thousands of dollars a day marketing any number of different things. He can affiliate market something off Clickbank, or take advantage of any of a number of other affiliate channels. Or he can debut his own product and market it himself and keep 100% of the profit. Or he can work for a beefy startup with lots of equity and high upside, or if he's risk averse take a high paying salaried job at an ad firm or mega corp.

So at the lower end, you get a bunch of aspiring marketers who are either brand new or just plain suck. (a few diamonds in the rough here and there, but they're few and far between and they don't stick around in the rough for long)

Best path if you're bootstrapping and have limited funds:

1.) Do your own marketing until you find a few okay-enough channels to get business from. This part sucks at the beginning because it's slow going and most of what you try doesn't work.

2.) Look for free ways to market until you have more cash to spend on marketing. The average paid media campaign takes somewhere between $5K and $50K of experimentation before it reaches profitability. That's $5K to $50K down the drain before you're making money. Don't go for paid until you can afford to absorb the upfront cost of creating a profitable campaign.

3.) Once you have a few okay marketing channels in place (could be search traffic, a popular presence on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe you have a higher dollar offer you can leverage networks and do direct sales for), you'll get more money coming in

4.) Once more money is coming in, you have a few options how you spend it. Hire professionals to boost the conversions of your sales funnel; hire professionals to experiment with new or better marketing campaigns; or hire professionals to train you on these things and make you the expert

Not fun (at first, anyway) and probably not the fast/easy way you might wish you could find. But when you don't have the skill yet, and don't have investment money or high enough sales already to pay for high skill professionals, you've got to grind it out yourself for a bit.

If you'll study marketing, I suggest you pick up a copy of Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula. It's an effective way to get an initial burst of sales and designed for people with low/no marketing experience.

The CIA, FBI etc. act on behest of the people

Ah, I guess that explains it.

As an American, I've wondered for years why we armed, trained, funded, and provided cover for bin Laden and other mujahideen, al'Qaeda, ISIS, and spent trillions destabiizing the Middle East to bring death, terror, and stone age fundamentalist Islam back to the picture.

Now it makes sense. It's because it's what the American people want.

If enough users adopt this, the effect will be advertisers flee whatever websites those users frequent.

The end result being those websites (due to declines in revenue) cut their staffs, reducing the quantity and quality of their content. And then AdNauseum users complain on certain subreddits about the declining quality of the target sites.

AdNauseum seems to be a case of "you destroy what you love."

This is just the latest in a string of examples like this.

The Christian bakers / gay wedding cakes is one example.

But people being booted off services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon are others.

We ought to have the right to exclude people from our own private spaces, our own private clubs, and our own private businesses (freedom of association).

However, at what point (and at what scale) does our private club become so large it is a de facto public space?

There does not seem to be any real precedent for discussions like this. The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.

Ooh! This is fun. The "how someone is just like Hitler game." I know this game.

Here's my entry: 5 things Barack Obama did that were very similar to Adolf Hitler:

1. Assumed a populist mantra of taking back government from corrupt politicians ("change you can believe in" "not beholden to special interests")

2. Employed blitzkrieg tactics against unsuspecting and peaceful nations (Hitler: Poland; Obama: Libya)

3. Armed and funded radical revolutionaries in other nations in hopes of governmental overthrow and replacement by sympathetic new governments (Hitler: Spain; Obama: Ukraine, Syria, Iran; the Arab Spring more generally)

4. Designed a national healthcare system with a close analogue in Hitler's national socialist healthcare

5. Used inspiring rhetoric to distract from policies unpopular among the majority of the electorate (such as Obama's transgender bathroom policies, which almost 2/3 of Americans disliked)

Who should we do next? I'm thinking challenge round: either Bono, Hulk Hogan, or the Dalia Lama.