Lurker > WastelandCowboy

That's a lot of angst over an advertisement.

WastelandCowboy posted...

Renraku_San posted...

WastelandCowboy posted...

Renraku_San posted...

TES_Nut posted...

No one knows who you are

Wait...wait...are you saying that I should feel bad because no one knows who I am on an anonymous video game internet message board??

Man, theyre just letting anyone troll these days.

IKR? TES_Nut should close his account forever.

Since clearly it went over your head, I wasn't talking about TES_Nut.

I was talking about you.

No you weren't.

no they make the UK a lot of money and don't cause any harm it'd be silly to get rid of them at this point

although i wish they'd come to Australia more often

In a case involving the rights of tens of millions of private-sector employees, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote margin, delivered a major blow to workers, ruling for the first time that workers may not band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act trumps the national Labor Relations Act and that employees who sign employment agreements to arbitrate claims must do so on an individual basis and may not band together to enforce claims of wage and hour violations.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the four dissenters, said that the 1925 arbitration law came well before federal labor laws and should not cover these arm-twisted, "take-it-or-leave it" provisions that employers are no insisting on.

The inevitable result, she warned, is that there will be huge underenforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the well being of workers.

She urged Congress to correct the court's elevation of the arbitration act over workers' rights.

Notably, Ginsburg's dissent is five pages longer than the majority's opinion. And Gorsuch spends time in his opinion to respond point by point to the minority's arguments.

The ruling came in three cases potentially involving tens of thousands of non-union employees brought against Ernst & Young LLP, Epic Systems Corporation and Murphy Oil USA, Inc.

Each required its individual employees, as a condition of employment, to waive their rights to join a class-action suit. In all three cases, employees tried to sue together, maintaining that the amounts they could obtain in individual lawsuits were dwarfed by the legal fees they would have to pay as individuals to bring their cases under the private arbitration procedures required by the company.

The employees contended that their right to collective action is guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act. The employers countered that they are entitled to ban collective legal action under the Federal Arbitration Act, which was enacted in 1925 to reverse the judicial hostility to arbitration at the time.

A study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows that 56 percent of nonunion private-sector employees are currently subject to mandatory individual arbitration procedures under the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act, which allows employers to bar collective legal actions by employees.

The court's decision means that tens of millions of private non-union employees will be barred from suing collectively over the terms of their employment.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I had that video pop up in my recommended videos yesterday as well.

It's nice to know the OP is digging a little deeper than the front page of reddit now, though.

WastelandCowboy posted...

NightMareBunny closed a topic because it wasn't going his way?

SAY IT ISN'T SO!

Yep. He started bitching about how horrible and hopeless his life is and people started giving him very simple and common sense advice that he never addressed.

"I've been very clear with President Trump about my expectations for the next VA secretary, not the least of which is an unequivocal opposition to privatizing or in any way degrading the VA system," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), a senior member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. "I look forward to reviewing Mr. Wilkie's record and hearing more about his values and his vision for the position in order to determine whether he is up to the task."

While the VA has always relied on some help from private doctors, there are concerns that spending on the more expensive private care could put the department into a death-spiral, where it starves its own health budget, resulting in worse care at VA facilities, and leading to more private care spending. Currently the VA is rated to deliver as good or better quality care than the private sector in most states.

Wilkie, if confirmed, will guide the VA through this question. This month Congress is expected to send the president a bill to revamp the way the department pays for private care.

It has overwhelming support from veterans organizations, but even some of them are deeply concerned that it could be implemented in a way that puts VA on a path to privatization.

The pick wasn't surprising, but the announcement was President Trump will nominate Robert Wilkie, the acting secretary of Veterans Affairs, to become the department's new secretary.

Trump was speaking at a meeting on prison reform when he introduced Wilkie to the room, praised the job he's been doing at the VA, and then gave everyone a surprise, including Wilkie.

"Acting secretary Wilkie, who by the way has done an incredible job, and by the way I'll be informing him in a little while he doesn't know this yet that we'll be putting his name up for nomination," Trump said.

Veterans are hoping that is the only surprise twist in what appears to be a safe pick.

"The VA has been without Senate-confirmed secretary for 51 days and we urge the Senate to schedule a confirmation hearing quickly," Denise Rohan, National Commander of the American Legion, said in a statement welcoming the news. "The department deserves strong, competent leadership at every level to ensure our veterans receive the benefits they so richly deserve for their selfless service to our great nation."

Trump fired his first VA secretary, David Shulkin, by tweet in March, after weeks of uncertainty.

He then nominated his White House physician, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, to the post. Critics say it was ill-advised, since Jackson had never run a large organization. Some basic vetting soon uncovered numerous allegations of misconduct. When that nomination sank, veterans organizations feared the VA could be rudderless for a long time.

But Robert Wilkie, who still holds his job as undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, has been acting like more than an acting VA secretary. He's helping shepherd a major piece of VA reform legislation through Congress and signed a $10 billion contract to reboot the VA's electronic health system just the night before he was nominated by the president.

Wilkie has been running a large government bureaucracy within the Pentagon, and he already breezed through a Senate confirmation to that post.

He's 55, has served in both the Navy and the Air Force reserves, and worked for several Republican administrations and lawmakers. While he's known within the federal government, he's a relative unknown in the veterans' community, which has seen 10 secretaries or acting secretaries for VA in the 17 years of war since Sept. 11.

"Our members have been really clear about what they need from the next leader of VA a committed focus person who's going to put veterans above politics," said Paul Reicoff, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

But political intrigue continues at the VA. Former Secretary Shulkin was fired after rivals in the Trump administration openly plotted his downfall, and since then many senior VA officials have left, complaining of a politicized atmosphere at VA, with a focus on loyalty to President Trump. Shulkin claimed he was pushed out because he resisted moves to push VA toward privatization, which veterans overwhelmingly oppose. Democrats in the senate have promised to make it a litmus test for their support.

Ok, why do you feel the need to make a topic about a school shooting when it's already been plastered all over the Goddamn place by the media? You act as if nobody didn't know about this s*** and making a topic about it won't accomplish anything except for pissing people off for all the wrong reasons. Face it, there is no solution to these school shootings no matter what people do. Instead of posting the story about it why not offer a solution to it instead of just drawing useless attention to a problem that is not going to go away?

Is duckbear actually working for a company and paid to make these posts?

knivesX2004 posted...

Blightzkrieg posted...

Here come the liberals trying to throw their agenda into the spotlight rather than trying to pass legislation to prevent such events.

Nice try.
3/10 bait. Made me reply.

Yeah and that makes you easy bait since you like to respond.

WastelandCowboy posted...

Yes, lets just give attention to and make famous a homicidial scumbag.

Good job Full Throttle for making the situation worse.

Fixed.

Their fault for hiring you if you fuck up

Try your best and do it to the best of your abilities. You learn by doing.

Trial by fire, bitch.

Uhhh... it depends on the kind of camping and if you'll be in the actual wilderness for extended periods of time

WastelandCowboy posted...

Renraku_San posted...

TES_Nut posted...

No one knows who you are

Wait...wait...are you saying that I should feel bad because no one knows who I am on an anonymous video game internet message board??

Man, theyre just letting anyone troll these days.

IKR? TES_Nut should close his account forever.

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET

"There are multiple fatalities that have been confirmed," Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said, of a shooting at Santa Fe High School near Houston on Friday morning.

The sheriff added, "The number varies, but it could be anywhere between 8 to 10 fatalities at the school, including students and some adult staff as well."

A suspect is in custody, and "a second one detained" for questioning, Gonzalez said earlier. The suspect is described as a current student at the school.

Around noon, news of another potential threat emerged. The Santa Fe Independent School District announced, "Possible explosive devices have been located at the school and off campus."

Police are "in the process of rendering them safe," the district said, adding that the school was evacuated.

The shooting reportedly began before 8 a.m. local time, putting the school on lockdown and sending police rushing to the scene. Several witnesses have said the attacker was armed with a shotgun.

After announcing news of the shooting, the school district issued an update stating:

"This morning an incident occurred at the high school involving an active shooter. The situation is active, but has been contained. There have been confirmed injuries. Details will be released as we receive updated information. Law enforcement will continue to secure the building and initiate all emergency management protocols to release and move students to another location. All other campuses are operating under their regular schedules."

Several ambulances and Life Flight medevac helicopters were called to the location, and a stream of them were reportedly seen leaving.

Gonzalez said that one officer of the Santa Fe Independent School District Police Department was injured and is being treated at a hospital. He did not have details about that officer's condition.

The University of Texas Medical Branch said it received three patients two adults and one person under 18 years old from the shooting. One of those patients, a middle-aged man with a chest wound, is in critical condition, according to Raul Reyes, the hospital's director of media relations. The other two people had been shot in the leg, he said.

A student at the school told local TV station ABC 13 that she had been sitting in art class when someone entered with a gun and began firing. The student said that she fled and that she saw a student who had been wounded in the leg.

Another student, named Paige, told the station that she was in a classroom a few doors down from where the shooting started.

"I heard really loud booms, and I didn't know what they were at first," she said, saying she realized what the sounds were after she heard students screaming.

Paige said she and others took shelter in an area behind a stage after being told to wait before trying to leave immediately. The student said that she and others had trouble staying calm but that there was not a moment when she felt like what was happening wasn't real.

"It's been happening everywhere," Paige said. "I always felt like eventually it would happen here. I wasn't surprised, I was just scared."

As they exited the school, students left behind their backpacks to be checked by police and then filed onto a nearby grassy area alongside row of school buses. Images from the scene showed some students being searched by officers.

The same school was the site of a false alarm about a shooting back in February. In that case, students and teachers reported hearing "popping sounds" outside, as Houston Public Media reported.

Updated at 10:38 a.m. ET

A shooting was reported at a high school near Houston on Friday morning, with local media reporting that a gunman entered Santa Fe High School and began firing. The school was put on lockdown, but the situation is now "contained," officials say. Several witnesses said the attacker was armed with a shotgun.

The Santa Fe Independent School District issued an update stating:

"This morning an incident occurred at the high school involving an active shooter. The situation is active, but has been contained. There have been confirmed injuries. Details will be released as we receive updated information. Law enforcement will continue to secure the building and initiate all emergency management protocols to release and move students to another location. All other campuses are operating under their regular schedules."

The shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, reportedly began before 8 a.m. local time. It's not yet clear what the status of the gunman is. Several ambulances and Life Flight medevac helicopters were called to the school.

Citing a parent who was at the school, local TV ABC 13 reported that a number of ambulances left the school carrying wounded people.

A student at the school told the station she had been sitting in art class when someone entered with a gun and began firing. The student said she fled and that she saw a student who had been wounded in the leg.

Another student named Paige told the station that she was in a classroom a few doors down from where the shooting started.

"I heard really loud booms, and I didn't know what they were at first," she said, adding that she realized what the sounds were after she heard students screaming.

Paige said she and others took shelter in an area behind a stage, after being told to wait before trying to leave immediately. The student said that she and others had trouble staying calm but that there was not a moment when she felt like what happened wasn't real.

"It's been happening everywhere," Paige said. "I always felt like eventually it would happen here. I wasn't surprised, I was just scared."

Officers from the Galveston County Sheriff's Office and the nearby Harris County Sheriff's Office responded to the scene; so did agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

As they exited the school, students left behind their backpacks to be checked by police, and then filed onto a nearby grassy area alongside row of school buses. Images from the scene showed that some students were then searched by officers.

The same school was the site of a false alarm about a shooting back in February. In that case, students and teachers reported hearing "popping sounds" outside, as Houston Public Media reported.

This is a breaking news story. As often happens in situations like these, some information reported early may turn out to be inaccurate. We'll move quickly to correct the record and we'll only point to the best information we have at the time.

Why was this not flaired as politics.

The Senate on Thursday confirmed Gina Haspel as CIA director, making her the first woman to lead the spy agency despite the controversy surrounding her role in the waterboarding program.

The Senate vote of 54-45 in favor of Haspel came mostly, but not entirely, along party lines. She needed support from several Democratic senators to win confirmation.

Her confirmation effectively completes President Trump's recent shakeup of his national security and foreign policy teams. In recent weeks, John Bolton became the national security adviser, Mike Pompeo became secretary of state, and Haspel now takes over for Pompeo at CIA.

In addition to being the CIA's first female director, Haspel is also the first career CIA officer to lead the agency since William Colby in the 1970s.

Haspel, 61, is widely respected in the intelligence community. Since joining the CIA in 1985, just a few years out of college, she has held some 20 separate jobs at the agency, including seven postings abroad.

The CIA said those foreign postings include Europe, Eurasia and Africa, though it has declined to name the countries, saying that's classified information.

Haspel was undercover for her first 32 years at the agency, a status lifted just last year when she became deputy director to Pompeo.

Trump then picked Pompeo to be secretary of state in March, and chose Haspel to replace him as the spy chief.

Haspel immediately came under intense scrutiny for two specific episodes in her long career.

One was in 2002, when she ran a black site prison in Thailand where officers carried out waterboarding and other harsh tactics to extract information out of suspected al-Qaida militants. The other was in 2005, when she was based at CIA headquarters outside Washington and wrote a cable calling for videotapes of the waterboardings to be destroyed.

Democratic senators grilled Haspel on these events at her confirmation hearing before the Senate intelligence committee on May 9.

In several sharp exchanges with the senators, Haspel said she would not initiate any new detention and interrogation programs as CIA director. But she did not disavow the previous program, which ran from 2002 to 2008.

After that hearing, several senators said they needed additional information from Haspel. In a letter on Monday, she went beyond what she said in her public testimony.

"With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the CIA should have undertaken," she wrote in a letter to Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat on the intelligence committee.

Shortly after her letter became public Tuesday, three Democratic senators, including Warner, announced their support for Haspel.

"I believe she is someone who can and will stand up to the president if ordered to do something illegal or immoral like a return to torture," Warner said in a statement.

Haspel needed Democratic support to win confirmation because two Republican senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jeff Flake of Arizona, opposed her for her role in the interrogation program. John McCain of Arizona also opposed Haspel, but is receiving treatment for brain cancer and was not present.

President Trump, speaking on Wednesday to a gathering of officials from California who oppose the state's "sanctuary" law, compared some people who illegally cross the U.S. southern border to "animals."

During a White House roundtable discussion with law enforcement officials and political leaders, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims expressed frustration that California law signed last year by Gov. Jerry Brown forbids informing U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement of undocumented immigrants in the state's jails, even if police believe they are part of a gang.

Trump's response: "We have people coming into the country or trying to come in, we're stopping a lot of them but we're taking people out of the country, you wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people. These are animals," the president said.

The president thanked attendees at the roundtable who he said had "bravely resisted California's deadly and unconstitutional sanctuary state laws."

"[The] release of illegal immigrant criminals, drug dealers, gang members and violent predators into your communities" and providing "safe harbor to some of the most vicious and violent offenders on earth," the president said.

Gov. Brown tweeted out later that the president "is lying on immigration, lying about crime and lying about the laws of CA."

@realDonaldTrump is lying on immigration, lying about crime and lying about the laws of CA. Flying in a dozen Republican politicians to flatter him and praise his reckless policies changes nothing. We, the citizens of the fifth largest economy in the world, are not impressed.

Jerry Brown (@JerryBrownGov) May 16, 2018
As The Associated Press notes, "Brown insists the legislation, which took effect Jan. 1, doesn't prevent federal immigration officials from doing their jobs. But the Trump administration has sued to reverse it, calling the policies unconstitutional and dangerous. Some counties, including San Diego and Orange, have voted to support the lawsuit or passed their own anti-sanctuary resolutions."

Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump has repeatedly insisted that illegal immigration to the U.S. is contributing to a wave of crime. During the 2016 campaign, he famously referred to immigrants from Mexico as "bad hombres" and said most were "drug dealers, criminals, rapists."

Citing one study conducted by four universities, The New York Times wrote in March that data show, "a large majority of the [metropolitan] areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study's data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board."

According to the Times, "In 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. The number of areas where crime and immigration both increased was much lower 54 areas, slightly more than a quarter of the total. The 10 places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980."

The Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday that it stands by the conclusion of the U.S. spy agencies that Russia's attack on the 2016 election sought to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton a break with the finding of the House intelligence panel.

Members of the tight-lipped Senate panel backed this conclusion after spending more than two hours with Obama administration officials who were behind the intelligence community's highly classified assessment, made in the immediate aftermath of the election.

Parts of the assessment were declassified in January 2017 and concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign during the 2016 election to "denigrate" Hillary Clinton; the assessment also said that Putin and the Russian government "developed a clear preference" for Trump over the course of the campaign.

"Committee staff have spent 14 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work, and we see no reason to dispute the conclusions," said chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.

The House intelligence committee's report, prepared by its Republican majority, said that there were unspecified "significant intelligence tradecraft failings" with the assessment. The report disputed whether Putin was actively trying to aid Trump.

The bipartisan conclusion by Burr and his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Mark Warner made after a meeting Wednesday with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers amounts to a vote of confidence for the spy agencies.

Warner alluded obliquely to the House committee's decision to break with the CIA and other spy agencies.

"There are entities at least subsets of other entities that may have come up with another conclusion but ... we've interviewed literally over 100 individuals that were directly associated with [the intelligence community assessment]," Warner explained.

He continued: "I've heard nothing to contradict anything from the [assessment], particularly in terms of the fact that Russians massively intervened in our elections to the purpose of helping Mr. Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton."

The Senate intelligence committee's probe into Russian interference has been largely bipartisan, in stark contrast to the parallel investigation conducted by the House panel.

House committee Republicans concluded their investigation with a finding that the Trump campaign had committed no wrongdoing in 2016 and that its contacts with Russians were simply "ill-advised." Democrats complained that investigation was not sufficiently thorough.

The Senate effort continues. Senators say they'll put their conclusions about the intelligence community's assessment in a written report.

"The next step on this on this ... is to get a document out to try to continue to educate the American people," Warner told reporters assembled outside the meeting room. "There are a lot of folks that have dismissed the seriousness of the Russian threat. It is real."

Members of the panel warn that the Russian threat they are examining is not a historical artifact but a continuing danger.

"I also firmly believe that this effort is not over, that it continues to this very day, [when] the Russians are trying to sow the seeds of discontent in our society, take advantage of the polarization that exists, and divide us further," said Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

MICHALECOLE posted...

Have you played it?

i briefly played it when I was in college, when it first came out, for maybe about half an hour

WastelandCowboy posted...

Story mode is worth the money.

Multiplayer/Online is fun, but it gets very grindy.

yeah, i probably wouldn't be doing online mode

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/8jw9ph/is_it_lame_to_report_a_shoplifter/