Lurker > Antifar

I was told the economy was good, though
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/05/23/killing-electoral-college-means-rural-americans-would-be-serfs-column/3770424002/

Should rural and small-town Americans be reduced to serfdom? The American Founders didnt think so. This is one reason why they created checks and balances, including the Electoral College. Today that system is threatened by a proposal called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPV.

Rural America produces almost all our countrys food, as well as raw materials like metals, cotton and timber. Energy, fossil fuels but also alternatives like wind and solar come mostly from rural areas. In other words, the material inputs of modern life flow out of rural communities and into cities.

This is fine, so long as the exchange is voluntary rural people choose to sell their goods and services, receive a fair price, and have their freedom protected under law. But history shows that city dwellers have a nasty habit of taking advantage of their country cousins. Greeks enslaved whole masses of rural people, known as helots. Medieval Europe had feudalism. The Russians had their serfs.

Credit the American Founders with setting up a system of limited government with lots of checks and balances. The U.S. Senate makes sure all states are represented equally, even low-population rural states like Wyoming and Vermont. Limits on federal power, along with the Bill of Rights, are supposed to protect Americans from overreaching federal regulations. And the Electoral College makes it impossible for one population-dense region of the country to control the presidency.
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California has already passed NPV, along with 13 other states plus Washington, D.C. Nevada, with six electoral votes, could be next. NPV only takes effect if it is joined by enough states that they control 270 electoral votes, which would then control the outcome of all future presidential elections. If that happens (NPV needs 81 more electoral votes), and if the courts do not strike it down, big cities will gain more political power at the expense of everyone else.

The idea that every vote should count equally is attractive. But a quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin famously reminds us that democracy can be two wolves and a lamb voting on whats for lunch. (City dwellers who think that meat comes from the grocery store might not understand why this is such a big problem for the lamb.) And when you think about it, every check on government power, from the Electoral College to the Bill of Rights, is a restraint on the majority.

Just an impossibly dumb take.
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Andrew Johnson doesn't get enough credit for being just a god-awful president.
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BreezyExcursion posted...

anyone who thinks andrew jackson is bad is a loser

Why do you think this?
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Guess
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Por que?
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Companies like EA do have a choice and consent, though. They either incorporate in the US, or choose to sell their games in the US market. They aren't just born at random.
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Bad
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https://t.co/TVWM9ONKGq
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Listen: he's very stupid.

If obstruction of justice charges required proof of the underlying crime, the law would only apply to people who obstructed justice poorly.
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Absolutely
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Assange seems like a shithead, but also seems like there are real issues with sitting idly by while the Trump administration prosecutes someone for publishing info.
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https://bit.ly/30Jl95Z

On Friday, the Trump administration unveiled its long-awaited assault on transgender patients, unveiling a draft rule that permits health care providers and insurance companies to discriminate against individuals on the basis of their gender identity. It marks the third time this week that the administration has rolled back federal protections for trans people, after allowing health care workers to refuse treatment for trans patients and homeless shelters to turn away trans people. The proposed rule, written by the Department of Health and Human Services, also permits providers to discriminate against women who seek care after obtaining an abortion.

Trumps HHS has been crafting this policy for years in an effort to exclude trans people from the Affordable Care Acts Section 1557. That provision bars most health care providers and insurance companies from discriminating against patients on the basis of sex (among other things). It incorporates the definition of sex discrimination used in various civil rights laws, most notably Title IX, which applies to educational institutions. The Obama administration enacted a rule interpreting Section 1557 to protect transgender people, explaining that discrimination against a patient who transitions from one sex to another is, by definition, sex discrimination. But on the last day of 2016, U.S. District Judge Reed OConnor issued a nationwide injunction blocking the rule, ruling that sex encompasses only biological differences between males and females. (OConnor has since gained notoriety for his decision holding that the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.)

The Trump administration, which purports to oppose nationwide injunctions, told OConnor that it agreed with his decision and would create a new rule that complied with the ACA, ending any possible appeal. Now it has, and the result is cruel, misleading, and extraordinarily offensive. HHS basic theorythat sex discrimination does not include discrimination against people who transitions sexesis baffling. When a doctor refuses to, for instance, prescribe hormones to a transgender woman, he is discriminating on the basis of sex: He believes his patient is a man and should not receive treatment for women. It is difficult to think of a clearer example of sex discrimination in health care, other than an outright refusal to treat patients of a certain gender.

Two aspects of the rule stand out as especially deceptive and disturbing. (To understand why, remember that the ACAs definition of sex discrimination is drawn from Title IX.) First, in the main text, HHS cites two district court decisions ruling that Title IXs ban on sex discrimination does not protect transgender people. It also cites two district court decisions reaching the opposite conclusion to illustrate that the courts have been inconsistent on the issue. In reality, however, the clear majority of district courts to consider the issue have found that Title IX does protect trans people. HHS wrongly implies that the district courts are evenly split.

The agency then pulls another sleight of hand: It relegates to a footnote decisions by four federal appeals courts holding that Title IX can or must be read to encompass anti-trans discrimination. Reading the rule, you would never guess that the weight of judicial authority contradicts HHS legal theory. It states only that these appeals courts have addressed the issuenot that, upon confronting the issue, they unanimously agreed that anti-trans discrimination is sex discrimination.

A second duplicitous passage in the new rule is even more alarming. In an ominous tangent regarding Title IX, HHS suggests that merely compelling non-trans students to be around trans students might itself constitute illegal sex discrimination.

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Balrog0 posted...

Obama is responsible for lots of human rights violations and deaths but you wouldn't be okay with someone attacking him for being 'uppity' would you?

You're right to note that context, and I agree with you that that would be bad. But I don't think crying is necessarily as gendered as "uppity" is racialized; this seems more like when conservatives made fun of Obama for crying. Except he was doing that over dead kids, and May over her dead career.
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It is fine to mock Theresa May, who had power over the loves of millions of people for several years and mostly used that poorly.

It's not cool to make fun of coworkers for showing emotion. Unless they're like, a dick to you.
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I'm going to a Nats game when I visit DC in August
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I had basically every 1998 sports game on PC, but I don't know which I played first.
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Fainting on 9/11
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I think it was a Van Halen Greatest Hits compilation, not counting ones I borrowed from my parents
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Genesis:
Sonic 2

We only had that and 3D Blast
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https://twitter.com/thymetikon/status/1131702577878503425
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I have a Pixel 3 and really like it.
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Purple_Cheetah posted...

Ride 3

I've come to frustration with ride 3, because the ai is... either stupid fast or nonexistent. I might need to turn off automatic balancing, apparently it leads to this issue.

Aside from the AI (which was mostly non-existent to me in 2), how do you like it?
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SaccharineSmile posted...

Anyone else here a big F1 fan? Thinking of going to Europe to catch a couple of the races

I've been following it for a few years; don't get to watch as much as I'd like due to time zone differences
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Anyways, he's still in congress and his Twitter account likes white nationalist stuff:
https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/status/1131755152136970240
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Metal Gear Solid V, which is the first game to really break through Hitman 2/AC Odyssey in months
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Because they do not have the power to do so on their own, and there are maybe two Republicans with any real desire to aid them in that goal.
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https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1131728912835383300
Context, this article from earlier today:
https://wapo.st/2Mg4XGy

Distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), altered to make her sound as if shes drunkenly slurring her words, are spreading rapidly across social media, highlighting how political disinformation that clouds public understanding can now grow at the speed of the Web.

The video of Pelosis onstage speech Wednesday at a Center for American Progress event, in which she said President Trumps refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations was tantamount to a coverup," was subtly edited to make her voice sound garbled and warped. It was then circulated widely across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

One version, posted by the conservative Facebook page Politics WatchDog, had been viewed more than 2 million times by Thursday night, been shared more than 45,000 times, and garnered 23,000 comments with users calling her drunk and a babbling mess.

The origin of the altered video remains unclear but its spread across social media comes amid a growing feud between congressional Democrats and Trump. In addition to links from multiple YouTube and Twitter accounts, the video has appeared in the comments sections of message boards and regional news outlets.

Analyses of the video by Washington Post journalists and outside researchers indicate that the video has been slowed to about 75 percent of its original speed. To possibly correct for how that speed change would deepen her tone, the video also appears to have been altered to modify her pitch, to more closely resemble the sound of her natural speech.

The altered videos dissemination highlights the subtle way that viral misinformation could shape public perceptions in the run-up to the 2020 election. Spreaders of misinformation dont need sophisticated technology to go viral: Even simple, crude manipulations can be used to undermine an opponent or score political points.

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https://wapo.st/2wcMI9W

President Trump has personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News, according to four administration officials.

In phone calls, White House meetings and conversations aboard Air Force One during the past several months, Trump has aggressively pushed Dickinson, N.D.-based Fisher Industries to Department of Homeland Security leaders and Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commanding general of the Army Corps, according to the administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The push for a specific company has alarmed military commanders and DHS officials.

Semonite was summoned to the White House again Thursday, after the presidents aides told Pentagon officials including Gen. Mark Milley, the commander of the U.S. Army that the president wanted to discuss the border barrier. According to an administration official with knowledge of the Oval Office meeting, Trump immediately brought up Fisher, a company that sued the U.S. government last month after the Army Corps did not accept its bid to install barriers along the southern border, a contract potentially worth billions of dollars.

Trump has latched on to the companys public claims that a new weathered steel design and innovative construction method would vastly speed up the project and deliver it at far less cost to taxpayers. White House officials said Trump wants to go with the best and most cost-effective option to build the wall quickly.

The President is one of the countrys most successful builders and knows better than anyone how to negotiate the best deals, said Sarah Sanders, White House press secretary. He wants to make sure we get the job done under budget and ahead of schedule.

Fishers chief executive, Tommy Fisher, has gone on conservative television and radio, claiming that his company could build more than 200 miles of barrier in less than a year. And he has courted Washington directly, meeting in congressional offices and inviting officials to the Southwest desert to see barrier prototypes.

Even as Trump pushes for his firm, Fisher already has started building a section of fencing in Sunland Park, N.M. We Build the Wall, a nonprofit that includes prominent conservatives who support the president its associates and advisory board include former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach has guided an effort to build portions of the border barrier on private land with private funds

The first section is expected to be unveiled soon. Fisher-branded equipment and workers were visible this week preparing the site outside El Paso, within feet of the International Boundary Monument No. 1, placed in 1855 at the beginning of the effort to delineate the Mexican border. The stretch is the only area in the region without a barrier, in part because it crosses rugged terrain.
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Jared Kushner, the presidents son-in-law, has joined in the campaign for Fisher Industries, along with Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), an ardent promoter of the company and the recipient of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Fisher and his family members, according to campaign finance records. Cramer, in an interview Thursday, said the Trump administration has shown a great deal of interest in his constituents company.

He always brings them up, Cramer said, noting that he spoke with Trump about Fisher twice once in February and again on Thursday. Each time, Trump said he wanted Fisher to build some of the barrier, Cramer said.

Cramer said Trump likes Fisher because he had seen him on television advocating for his version of the barrier.

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There's no reason to believe they won't at this point.
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CruelBuffalo posted...

Thank God. Whats this about a childrens book though

Are you not familiar with "How the People Trumped Ronald Plump"

In which there is a character named Robert Moral, who is jacked, shirtless, but wears a tie?
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https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1131710424578187274


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I'm imagining it right now
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The law and order president
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Bump
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Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg
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JebronLames posted...

Antifar posted...

Didn't Michael Douglas get cancer from oral sex?

what?

https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/news/20130603/michael-douglas-blames-his-throat-cancer-on-oral-sex
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Didn't Michael Douglas get cancer from oral sex?
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r25 posted...

Tldr

Viewership and revenue figures are routinely inflated, and the industry's current expenses are wholly unsustainable.
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One Riot employee with knowledge of League of Legends esports revenue, when asked whether the League Championship Series makes money, laughed. Its current goal, they said, is to prevent it from losing money indefinitely.

Despite the huge amounts of cash pouring into the industry from sponsors and investors of all types, the hard truth is this: investment is not revenue, nor is it earnings. If an esports org does make profit, according to Fields and others interviewed, its on a thin margin. Most appear to be burning through their main source of cashtheir investors capital.

Investors believe esports could be the next NBA or, optimistically, NFL, and theyve poured hundreds of millions of dollars into realizing that vision, even while esports businesses are struggling to stay out of the red. Over the last couple of years, a slew of esports organizations have run clean out of money and slunk off with their tails between their legs: Circa Esports, Allegiance, the Moviestar Esports Channel, and Millenium, not to mention a huge number of journalistic publications covering esports. Layoffs are relatively common, including at organizations like Echo Fox, the ESL, and Infinite. Entire leagues have shuttered, too, including Blizzards Heroes of the Storm esports and the H1Z1 Pro League, which suffered from delayed payments and, in the end, owed 15 teams a reported $200,000 each. Several professionals interviewed by Kotaku privy to the financials of esports organizations say they do not know what their organizations long-term revenue plans are.
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To sponsors, advertisers, team owners, and the rest of the investors pouring money into esports, the industry has a great thing going for it: those supposedly massive viewership numbers, which are said to be packed with a hyper-specific and highly attractive consumer group: 16- to 24-year-old men. When Sebastian Park got into the industry after working in tech, he was excited about one thing in particular: We were like, We dont even have to do targeting! Everyone is male and 18-34 in this community!

The millennial and Gen-Z audience also has its own exploitable idiosyncrasies. They dont watch as much television as their predecessors, and therefore, a lot of them arent watching the NFL or the NBA with the same gusto as their parents. For investors frantically looking for the next big thing that will replace dying traditions, esports seems like an obvious next step. But its not going to be such a simple transition.
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Lets look at this commonly-cited factoid: Last years League of Legends World Championship drew in more viewers than the Super Bowl. According to one publication, 200 million people watched the LCS last year from China alone. Meanwhile, 103 million people watched the Super Bowl. LoL World Championship draws more viewers than the Super Bowl, went the headline Its a good headline, if true. But it turns out that the original numbers, which were drawn in part from Chinese streaming platforms, were unverifiable. Also, a Super Bowl viewer needs to watch for six minutes to register with Nielsens tracking. For esports, someone can be briefly browsing Twitchs front page, where the livestream is playing, and count toward its viewership. League publisher Riot Games later published the real numbers: 99.6 million unique viewers.
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On television, the NFL and the NBA arent responsible for telling people how many people watched a given game. A third party like Nielsen is, and those third parties have built decades worth of trust. Yet in esports, those numbers are reported either by the game publishers, the esports teams, or the streaming platform. Thats a pretty huge conflict of interest, especially since each of those organizations has something to gain from reporting attention-grabbing numbers.

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https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843

The mainstream narrative of esports has been lovingly crafted by those who benefit from its success. Theres big money in esports, they say. Youve heard the stories. Teenaged gamers flown overseas to sunny mansions with live-in chefs. The erection of $50 million arenas for Enders Game-esque sci-fi battles. League of Legends pros pulling down seven-figure salaries. Yet theres a reason why these narratives are provocative enough to attract lip-licking headlines in business news and have accrued colossal amounts of venture capital. More and more, esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop.

I feel like esports is almost running a Ponzi scheme at this point, Frank Fields, Corsairs sponsorship manager, told an audience at San Franciscos Game Developers Conference last March. He smirked. The crowd laughed uncomfortably. The smile dropped from Fields face as he continued. Everyone I talk to in this industry kind of acknowledges the fact that there is value in esports, but it is not nearly the value that is getting hyped these days. Later, Fields would clarify that this value, and future value, as of now, is optimistic at best and fraudulent at worst.

Fields is not the only longtime esports veteran who is worried the industry is a bubble, or more accurately, an industry comprised of several bubbles. Seventeen other experts on the North American esports industry shared similar concerns with Kotaku, some describing it merely as inflated and others as completely unsustainable. Several spoke on the controversial topic because they love esports and want to see it succeed organically, in a sustainable way. There is, of course, a genuine love shared by thousands of people for playing games competitively. Right now, many who spoke to us for this story said, the stuff that makes the esports industry seem like a tantalizing investment rests on unsubstantiated claimsor blunt-force lies.

As investors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the ballooning esports industry, many feel their way forward with statistics that indicate that paydirt is just around the corner. League of Legends Gets More Viewers Than Super Bowl, reads one 2019 headline from CNBC, glossing over the fact that theyre comparing apple viewership metrics to coconut viewership metrics. A 2017 Morgan Stanley report leaked to Kotaku claimed that, in its first year, the Overwatch League could conceivably generate $720 million in revenue, about the same as World Wrestling Entertainment. By 2022, says Goldman Sachs, viewership of pros playing competitive games like League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive may be on par with the National Football Leagues viewership today. But according to many people Kotaku spoke to with knowledge of the industry, a lot of these statistics are at best rosy-eyed and, at worst, inflated, unverified, or misleading.
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NewZoo analyst Jurre Pannekeet, who sees the revenues for 14 esports teams, says the majority of teams are operating at a loss, but declined to say how much on average, citing nondisclosure agreements. When pressed whether that majority was closer to 51 percent or 90 percent of teams operating at a loss, he said: If you looked into it, its probably closer to 89 percent than 50 percent.

Much of that is likely due to players salaries, which Fields describes as being at completely unsustainable levels. Some reports indicate that North American League of Legends pros earned $105,000 a year on average in 2017. After the league franchised in 2018, the average went up to $320,000. Some players have made closer to a million dollars per year. The revenue has not yet equaled what the salaries demand, Fields said. Esports organizations have to pay those salaries, on top of the $10 million that they pay to Riot Games to be in the league at all.

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ROBANN_88 posted...

does the Captain Spirit thing relate to the story at all, or was that more of a hype-demo?

The main character from that is present in episode 2, and you do interact with him. I didn't play Captain Spirit, but it felt like the sort of thing that would have been more impactful if I had.
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HiddenLurker posted...

Or all the left wing people that claim open borders is great(as long as those masses of people don't go to their cities of course).

Open borders was basically how the US operated until like 1920, and those same left wingers are entirely happy to support sanctuary city laws.
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It'll be like three hours between this tech being made public and someone uploading a vid of Joe Biden saying he sacrifices infants to moloch.
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Total_Lost2 posted...

How is the game overall compared to LiS and LiS:BtS?

I didn't play Before the Storm, and playing through each episode months apart instead of all at once kinda changes my perception as compared to the original.

But I'd say that the writing is a lot tighter; dialogue feels more natural whereas in the original could veer into "how do you do, fellow kids?" territory. I like that each episode so far has had a distinctive setting, but that brings up the issue mentioned in post 3 about not having consistent characters for the most part. I give them props for raising the stakes plot-wise; episodes 2 and 3 both take some wild turns.

One area where it falls short of the first game is that it kinda lacks a gameplay hook without the time travel mechanic.
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Just finished Episode 3, which ends in pretty shocking fashion.
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