Lurker > adjl

Revelation34 posted...

Yes but he said that they only get shipped like that instead of smuggling too.

He exaggerated, but direct smuggling like that on a global scale is limited enough that neglecting it isn't unreasonable. If you're operating globally, you need to scale up to make it worthwhile, and scaling up smuggling ships makes it a lot harder to stay under the radar (literally, in some cases). Piggybacking on legal shipping is generally going to be the better option there, especially where there's enough international shipping happening these days that you can probably get away with your goods only having to cross one or two borders.

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Zeus posted...

No, it's a consequence of the term being applied to girls much younger than the original concept entailed. Back when MILF was first a thing, people were talking about older women (but not necessarily old women) who still had it going on. She's still in her TWENTIES. Even late 30s is still pushing it a little, but even now she's substantially younger than a lot of women were when they had their first kid.

By porn standards (which is where most people encounter the term MILF), any woman past her mid 20's or so is commonly considered "older," particularly if they don't try to hide their age with copious amounts of makeup. It's obviously pretty ridiculous, but you can thank the fetishization of "barely legal teens" for that because it's meant it's common practice in porn to try to make stars of any age look 18-19.

Zeus posted...

While 18 and 19 doesn't carry the same "teen mom" connotations, 18 and 19 is still teenage years. All the same, I suppose I *could* have phrased that better.

You don't even need the kids to have been born at 18/19. A 29-year-old can easily have two school-age children even if she only started on them after graduating university (one born at 22 would be 7, one born at 24 would be 5), and that metric isn't overly relevant for anyone that takes a different approach to their careers. Yes, the average age of first childbirth has shifted later than that as more women enter professional fields instead of taking on motherhood as soon as possible, but being a mother of two at 29 isn't so much of an outlier that you need to blame teen pregnancy.

Zeus posted...

Oh, thought the article said she was 27. Either way, why would you round up other than to make it deceptive?

To point out that "she's in her 20's" is only barely true and comparable to saying that a $2.99 item costs $2. It's not so much deceptive as it is trying to correct for people's innate tendency to look primarily at the leftmost digit to form their impression of a number's value. Odds are, if she were actually 30, you wouldn't have had the same impulsive sense of objection to the idea of calling her a MILF because you'd think of her as being in her 30's, despite that being less than a year's difference (her birthday's in April).

LinkPizza posted...
but it also feel much closer due to being older.

This is also significant. For most people, the difference between 17 and 20 is going to be a lot bigger than the difference between 27 and 30, and not just because it's a greater percentage of their life. 17-20 is a period of pretty rapid change for most people: Graduating high school, living on their own, entering the work force, making significant decisions about the future... A lot of maturation happens in that time frame simply because of the life circumstances. By contrast, you can have significant life events take place between 27 and 30 (such as getting married, having a kid, settling into a career, maybe buying a house if things have been going well...), but that's significantly less universal than the life changes between 17 and 20 are.

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VioletMassacre posted...

She's basically 30, and a MILF is a MILF. It has nothing to do with age or when she got the kid.

Pretty much. I'll agree that it feels weird to see "MILF" used to describe women that are younger than me, but that's really just a consequence of getting old.

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Revelation34 posted...

Citation needed.

It's pretty much common sense. It's simply not practical to rely entirely on smuggling-only transports to get illegal goods around, given the risk of having such vessels get caught by authorities. Hiding illegal goods amidst an otherwise-legal shipment is considerably more reliable, since then you pretty much just need to be lucky enough for your container to not be one they decide to look closely at. That's not to presume that the companies shipping legitimate stuff are complicit in the smuggling, since there's (generally) no reason to suspect that, but it does happen.

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Sarcasthma posted...

Hey calm down, adjl, I was just putting some ideas out there. I wasn't saying people should actually do it and I'm sure that people didn't interpret it like that just because I'm the leader of this country.

Oh, I feel you. I'm just saying the idea wasn't quite complete without also drowning in chlorine instead of just mainlining it.

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Cheese scones are fantastic. Cheese biscuits are also fantastic, and I should really get my mom's recipe for the ones she makes because they're great and I could eat a dozen of them at once.

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Sarcasthma posted...

Wait, what if people injected themselves with the same chemicals from the pool?

That would definitely make them corona-proof!

Their blood, yes. Their respiratory system, not so much. You'd have to also fill your lungs and upper respiratory tract with the chemicals in order to be really safe.

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Zeus posted...

Shouldn't pools be pretty safe with all of those chemicals?

The pools themselves, sure. The air people are breathing above them, not so much.

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lihlih posted...

What's the difference between english muffins and biscuits?

English muffins are yeast based, biscuits/scones are chemically leavened. You get different mixing as well (pretty typical bread dough method vs. cutting/rubbing in fat) and different ingredient proportions (biscuits/scones are higher in fat). English muffins are also generally cooked with a griddle/skillet.

wwinterj25 posted...

I've never had American biscuits. Having googled it they seem more like scones but without the fruit.

Biscuits and scones are very similar, but as far as North American recipes for them go, scones tend to be sweeter and have a greater variety of extra contents (e.g. fruit). In my experience, scones also tend to be larger, comprising an entire snack on their own instead of being a side dish for something else, but that's something that can easily be changed if you want a bigger biscuit/smaller scone. There's room to say that scones tend more toward being desserts, while biscuits are more savory, but there are plenty of recipes out there for savory scones (cheddar & chive, for example) that buck that trend.

SunWuKung420 posted...

The differences in those formulations is a huge divide. Baking is more chemistry than cooking. Minor differences in fat content or salt can make the difference between edible and not edible.

It's rarely that dramatic. The whole "baking is chemistry" thing means minor changes do make a difference, and that difference is often quite predictable if you understand the underlying bake theory, but you generally aren't going to have to worry about making something inedible by adding 10% too much butter. You're just going to get more spread (and therefore a crisper product) or a softer texture (if it's not something that can spread).

More saliently, given that he didn't list specific quantities (so there's no reason to bring up differing ratios), those two basic formulas aren't actually that different. You've got different leavening agents (which can affect the rise, flavour, and preparation method), a different choice of fat (mostly just affects flavour, though water content may need to be adjusted to compensate because butter's ~15% water and shortening has none), and some different flavourings (namely the sugar and lemon), but the overall formulation is pretty similar (that is, they're both quick breads with rubbed in fat). The only really significant difference there is the egg, which will change the overall texture pretty noticeably (and actually isn't something I'm used to seeing in scone recipes, so I'm a bit puzzled by it), but even that can be mostly negated by tweaking other ingredients.

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"You only live once! That's why I'm going to take unnecessary life-threatening risks!"

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Zeus posted...

2) It feels silly referring to a teen mom in her TWENTIES as a MILF -_-

Plenty of people in their 20's are moms even without bringing teen pregnancy into the equation.

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Could the blood clots have been there before the covid infection?

Widespread systemic clotting is pretty unusual, especially the specific finding they're reporting, which is that some of the stem cells responsible for producing blood cells are circulating throughout the body instead of being confined to the bone marrow like they normally are. That's a significant clinical finding, and would likely have resulted in other symptoms prior to covid infection if it had been there. It's not impossible that there's a pre-existing condition and that these clots showing up is a coincidence, and I'm sure there have been covid deaths where the person already had clotting issues, but given the sample size, this correlation being mere coincidence is pretty unlikely.

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YoukaiSlayer posted...

Also that test hurts tremendously, the pain is still there by the time you get your results.

It shouldn't be that bad, provided it's done right. It was really uncomfortable when I had it done, and that discomfort lingered for a few hours, but if it's still hurting significantly more than a day later then the person doing the test delved too greedily and too deep. That, or you've got some manner of sinusitis going on up there (which can be mostly asymptomatic and also really hard to clear out of there even with antibiotics).

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What? Suggesting that rape is okay in the porn industry is a moddable offense? Who knew?

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An American traveling on a student visa is single-handedly responsible for bringing Covid back to Nova Scotia and PEI after weeks (months, in PEI's case) with no cases, so yes. Absolutely. Tighter than it's currently closed. Until America gets their act together and gets this thing under some semblance of control, letting them in is only going to interfere with our efforts to contain it (which, in some provinces, have been very successful).

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Zeus posted...

There's little doubt in my mind that if Trayvon had pulled a gun -- and I'm not suggesting shooting unless Zimmerman either went for his weapon or attacked -- instead of physically assaulting and bloodying Zimmerman, he would be alive today.

I didn't ask whether or not he'd be alive. I asked if you thought that's what he should have done when Zimmerman started following him, since you apparently believe that being followed justifies lethal force.

Zeus posted...

He brandished his gun because he was being threatened

By a guy skateboarding after his car. I don't know what kind of wacky rocket skateboards they've got in your neck of the woods, but around here, it's usually pretty easy to drive away from a guy on a skateboard if you don't pull a u-turn. Pulling a u-turn and going back to continue confronting somebody you've already escaped from isn't really typical behaviour for somebody that legitimately feels threatened.

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Why do people prefer to not live in fear of death?

Usually because they're clueless and/or really bad at risk analysis. Even the people who say they don't live in fear of death will avoid risking their lives unnecessarily provided they understand the situation well enough to do so. Presumably, you don't make a habit of jumping into traffic, because that's very obviously going to put your life in serious danger and you would prefer not to die if you can readily help it.

Fun fact: Presuming a 0.1% mortality rate for Covid-19 in otherwise-healthy populations under 60 (which is a bit of a lowball, many estimates are closer to 0.2-0.5%), you are ~30% (multiplicatively) more likely to die if you catch Covid than you are to roll snake eyes twice in a row ((1/36)^2=0.00077). It's not likely, no, but you've probably seen that happen if you've spent any significant amount of time using 2d6 for anything, and when you're literally gambling your life on that outcome, those odds aren't great. If I told you to go roll 4d6 and kill yourself if you got 4 ones, I can't imagine you'd take me up on that bet (for that matter, I hope you don't).

Avoiding Covid is just good sense for anyone that values their life (to say nothing of valuing the lives of the people around them to whom they could transmit it). You don't have to take that to unreasonable extremes like becoming a hermit on a remote mountaintop, but spending a few months avoiding crowds and washing your hands more often is a lot less likely to kill you than those crowds are, especially when it's really not hard to find alternative things to do for fun.

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The last Republican president to win a war, no less.

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Zeus posted...

"Large numbers"? The protests shown by the media were maybe dozens of people.

I struggle to believe that your insistence on looking strictly at protests and ignoring every other instance of people ignoring protocols is anything other than you being deliberately disingenuous. Have you really forgotten Spring Break?

Zeus posted...

Second, a lot of high-income jobs are also essential.

For in-person, public-facing labour (read: the actual high-risk stuff)? Considerably fewer than the low-income ones. That list pretty much consists of health care workers and not much else. Most higher-income essential work can be done from home, and the stuff that can't often doesn't require interaction with many people outside of coworkers (relatively low-risk interactions, given that it's a consistent group of people). Even when it is public-facing and in-person work, high-income jobs are also generally going to be better about supplying PPE and installing engineering controls to reduce the risk to workers than the corporate giants that employ most minimum-wage essential workers. Toss in the number of corporate giants that have leveraged their assets to count themselves as essential (e.g. GameStop), who generally don't pay their employees very well, and you've got a sizable majority of "essential" jobs being pretty low-paying.

Zeus posted...

You might need somebody for a job, but that doesn't automatically make them valuable to that job, especially when you could hire any number of people off the street who could do it just as well. And minimum wage is more than the value of the work in many cases.

If you need to employ somebody to do a job, you need to pay them enough to eat and pay rent. This is no different from using a vehicle: If you need a car to complete a task, you can't complete that task without putting enough gas into it to drive to the necessary destination, and expecting the car to run on less gas than that just because you really need to get where you're going is delusional. The entitlement of business owners who want to be able to pay a sub-living wage for jobs they need done is utterly abhorrent, especially when that decision is coming from corporations that have more than enough assets to do so comfortably. That smaller businesses often can't afford to pay livable wages doesn't mean a sub-living minimum wage is okay, it means your entire economy is FUBAR.

Zeus posted...

Except it literally does that. If the guidelines actually meant s***, they'd be enforced. The fact that they're not enforced suggests that it was likely a farce all along.

... You really do think that public health is the only factor that's being considered in enforcing these guidelines, don't you? Here I thought you were just being narrow-minded and not considering alternatives, but you really do steadfastly believe that there's no other possible explanation?

Zeus posted...

And you could easily protest without taking to the streets, be it posting propaganda, using social media, writing letters, etc.

Yeah, that sounds effective enough to be a realistic alternative. Never mind that people have been doing literally all of those things pretty consistently for as long as BLM has been around and very little has changed, which is a major reason why the whole issue has reached such a breaking point as to result in these protests, I'm sure it'll totally work this time.

Zeus posted...

We might have shut down later, but we shut down longer than a lot of other places and harder than some major nations. And our re-opening has been tame compared to even liberal nations.

Most countries haven't ended their shutdown yet. It's temporally impossible for the US to have shut down later than those countries and also have been shut down for longer because time is linear. I don't know what kind of weird time travel nonsense you're imagining here.

And no, your reopening has not been tame, given the number of instances of bars, restaurants, beaches, and other such places being crowded with people as soon as the government suggested it might not be illegal to do so anymore. That's not how you control an airborne pandemic. That's how you trigger a second wave (technically the first wave would have to end first to count this as a second wave, but whatever), especially when that happens well before case numbers are actually low enough to justify relaxing so much. Yes, some other countries have similarly failed to be suitably cautious in their reopening. Many of them are suffering a second wave as a result. Others haven't, because they waited until case numbers reached safe levels before reopening so aggressively.

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wwinterj25 posted...

Why are people so concerned with what others do?

Because some people value public safety and would like to see this pandemic resolved in a timely fashion. People taking unnecessary risks jeopardize both of those goals.

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Joker_X_II posted...

...besides all that, the TLDR of it is, that there is going to be a part of the trial where Floyd is going to have to be held accountable for who he is, whether it's for the prosecution or the defense.

There will be, but that's really only because what's-his-face's defense attorney is going to have nothing to stand on except to paint the victim as somebody who needed to die. The trial is to determine whether or not he was justified in kneeling on the dude's neck for eight minutes and most likely killing him by doing so. If not, then he is guilty of murder. Anything else brought up in the trial is purely deflection.

OhhhJa posted...

But a sober healthy person would've lived

Man, it's almost like having different protocols for dealing with mental illness/substance abuse problems instead of relying on inadequately-trained police to resolve such situations forcefully might be an effective change that would cut down on the number of unnecessary deaths at the hands of police. I wonder if any of the BLM people have suggested reallocating funds from police to help establish such services instead of just giving the police bigger hammers to solve problems that aren't actually nails. That seems like it would be a good idea.

I don't doubt that he was high. I don't doubt that being high contributed to his death. I could even be persuaded that his death could be considered inevitable given a normal police response and how the resultant anxiety would interact with his drug use. I do, however, doubt that his death couldn't have been prevented with better training and application of resources, and that is a key element of the cries to reform/defund the police.

Of course, none of that has any relevance to what's-his-name's murder charges. Regardless of the exact nuance of how Floyd died, kneeling on a suspect's neck is never appropriate police conduct and was almost certainly a contributing factor in his death. That cop is a murderer, plain and simple. Pre-existing health or drug issues that made Floyd's death more likely don't change that.

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Zeus posted...

Well, up until somebody started following him at which point he turned around and confronted them with a gun.

Do you feel that Trayvon Martin should have shot George Zimmerman?

Zeus posted...

You might have an actual argument had he *fired* the gun.

Yes, I'm sure he was brandishing the gun not because he was willing to kill somebody if he didn't get his way, but because... he... liked how the colour complemented his shoes?

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helIy posted...

he was also brutally murdered by the police after having done absolutely nothing wrong at the time

Nothing he was convicted of, anyway. Perhaps he did deliberately use a counterfeit bill. Perhaps he didn't. It's impossible to know now, thanks to his murderer, and since due process demands he be considered innocent until proven guilty, we have no choice but to consider him innocent.

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Joker_X_II posted...

No, the best I did was link a 4 hour video on Floyd's funeral, showing how over-the-top it was for such a small person...

adjl posted...

Protip: If you don't want people treating unsavory individuals as martyrs for a cause, don't martyr them.

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Protip: If you don't want people treating unsavory individuals as martyrs for a cause, don't martyr them.

argonautweakend posted...

If you verify he has no weapons, why even care that he "could become violent all of a sudden" as a result of drugs, when you have plenty of officers to step in if that were to happen.

I almost have to laugh at the "how else do you expect them to respond to somebody who could become violent at any moment?" people. If their ignorance weren't so incredibly dangerous and being used to justify unambiguous atrocities, it would be hilarious that they've apparently never heard of nurses, continuing care staff, or mental health workers, all of whom seem to do a fine job of dealing with people who can (and do) become violent at a moment's notice without having to kill them. But no, police have no choice.

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DirtBasedSoap posted...

the story and world-building was great, the dialogue and acting was awful

Pretty much. That's mostly why you're seeing positivity toward the PT now, since you're getting people remembering bits and pieces of the story and world-building and how they tie into the current films, and discussing those memories is helping people piece together the overarching story of the trilogy without having to take the bad writing along with it.

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Veedrock- posted...

If we don't know, why is it being sold as fact and sure occurrence?

Because doctors are seeing persistent tissue damage in recovered cases that doesn't seem to be healing. The long-term implications of that damage remain uncertain, but it is fact that such damage is happening.

Veedrock- posted...

I'm not a tinfoil hat person, I'm a "quit your bulls***" person.

Jumping to the assumption that leaving out concrete numbers is a deliberate omission for the sake of instilling fear is pretty conspiratorial. Especially when there's such a simple explanation as "the long-term effects aren't known for certain because the disease is 8 months old" exists that doesn't rely on any grand conspiracy to control the world through a narrative of fear.

Veedrock- posted...

By your logic I assume you'll campaign against a covid vaccine too? We don't know what effects a covid vaccine will have in 10 years, so you should fear the absolute worst and assume death or handicap.

That's what clinical trials are for. You can't completely rule out the possibility that a vaccine will have some sort of long-term side effect that won't show up during the trial period, but you can make reasonable inferences about whether or not the components of the vaccine will have such effects and observe the health of trial participants to identify issues that may worsen over time.

It's very different to say "we don't know for certain that this thing won't kill us in a decade so we should presume that it does" than to say "we can observe damage caused by this thing that is likely to cause further problems later in life." Being concerned about future health complications in recovered Covid patients is not a matter of being paranoid and worrying about some secret hidden power it has to hurt people even once it's gone, it's a matter of seeing people that have had the virus eradicated from their systems yet still have health issues they didn't have before being infected. This is empirical reality, even if the detailed statistics and full implications aren't fully understood yet.

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Unbridled9 posted...

There is a massive world of difference between an app gathering data with your consent, an app gathering data and selling it to advertisers, and an app specifically designed to gather data for a foreign government without the knowledge or consent of the people utilizing it.

Do you really think those other examples I gave aren't also hitting all three of those points? Heck, do you really think China isn't already buying user data from Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, or any other major data collecting company?

Don't get me wrong, TikTok is really bad for how invasive it is, but any efforts to find a legal basis on which to ban it are inevitably going to be affecting the entire data industry if they're applied with any sort of consistency, and the fact that that will include the US government means they won't be applied consistently. That sets a really sketchy precedent to move forward with.

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Zangulus posted...

He just likes to insult people and ignore points that dont coincide with his insanely narrow confirmation biases.

While saying that he's just trying to be informative and not insult anyone, no less.

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Z6980 posted...

So you're taking one example and making a broad statement? That's great. /s

No Drug is perfect. Why do you think they have all those warnings on them? You can't just take one example and then say "Well, let's scrap the whole thing". This is the exception, NOT the rule.

Except for the part where hydroxychloroquine has not been demonstrated to be an effective treatment for Covid, which would mean this is in fact the rule and not an exception. This is not a drug being imperfect and failing to fix the problem, it's a drug not actually treating the problem.

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Mead posted...

bubonic plague never really went away, get outta here with that clickbate

Pretty much.

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RedPixel posted...

If there was truly a deadly pandemic, it wouldn't even be debatable, everyone would be able to see it. And yet, climbing cases of empty hospitals and false positive/tainted tests all over the world.

That response doesn't do anything to address what you quoted. For that matter, I'm still waiting on that proof that wearing a mask causes hypoxia.

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Veedrock- posted...

At what rate? You omit it on purpose to perpetuate fear.

No, it's omitted because nobody really knows for sure yet. It's really hard, after all, to collect statistics on what sort of health issues arise 10 years after being infected with a disease that's only existed for 8 months. I think you need to loosen your tinfoil hat a bit.

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GastroFan posted...

Wasn't there a shortage of flour and yeast not too long ago because everyone was making bread at home? I wouldn't doubt that the price on both commodities increased afterwards, which Jimmy Johns had to swallow as a business expense, on top of any increase in the price of eggs, milk, etc.

They did, and flour's still rather expensive even buying wholesale, but saying that's a dollar worth of ingredients was a pretty generous estimate (especially with the sort of deals chains get on their ingredient costs due to the massive volumes they order them in). I'd be surprised if that dough has any milk or eggs in it, or if it does, it's powdered versions of each (which are also pretty cheap).

Yeah, they're still wasting company resources and that's generally something to discourage, but even at minimum wage, I can guarantee the wasted man-hours involved in making the noose and filming it were a greater loss than the dough itself. Bread - especially fast food bread - is really cheap.

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Antibiotics for a viral infection, no less. That's not how antibiotics work.

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RedPixel posted...

I don't look down on anyone,

RedPixel posted...

Those who are afraid believe that they're better people than those who see through the nonsense of the many double standards unraveling today.

Yes, that's a very neutral statement that doesn't portray yourself in a position of superior enlightenment or anything. Clearly.

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There's some kind of joke to be made here about him missing his Chans to be a good person or something, but I can't think of a good one. Bummer.

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Unbridled9 posted...

There's nothing wrong in the slightest with a government banning something being utilized to gather data on it's citizens without their consent or knowledge. That's... pretty basic sense. Not even common, like... basic.

That's most apps, though, to say nothing of the phone operating systems themselves. Pretty much every online-connected product or service you use today gathers some amount of data on you, to be sold to whoever will buy it. TikTok is particularly egregious about it, both in terms of the amount/nature of the data gathered and how insidious and aggressive it is (the app will actually alter its code to conceal how much data it's gathering if it detects that somebody is looking too closely at it), but I very highly doubt that's why the US government is taking umbrage to it. The US government is upset because they want more access to and control of said data than China is willing to give them. I can almost guarantee that if a US company made an identical app, nobody would be complaining (outside of the data security folks that currently complain about all social media because they understand the implications).

TheWorstPoster posted...

So, it's entirely OK for a dangerous regime [...] to create and promote a social media app that they made simply to harvest our data?

And here I thought you were pro-capitalism. It's not very capitalist to suggest that somebody you don't like shouldn't even be allowed to produce a product that people want. Why censor when you could compete instead? Create and promote a better app, and it doesn't matter what China's "allowed" to do because nobody will care about TikTok anymore.

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I really don't know why people have such a hard time differentiating between fear and discretion. Sometimes, basic risk analysis leads to the conclusion that taking steps to avoid the risk is practically superior to not doing so. That's not cowardice, that's common sense.

RedPixel posted...

Anyone lashing out at others for wanting to breathe oxygen for their health

This sounds like a claim you could easily substantiate by providing data comparing people's O2 saturation levels with and without masks on. If wearing a mask does indeed impair one's ability to breathe oxygen, O2 sats should go down over time and be measurably lower on average for the masked data set. Can you find evidence consistent with this hypothesis?

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More than too little, less than too much. I taste the sauce several times as I mix it up to get the balance right, and rarely measure anything precisely.

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Zeus posted...

You can't "increase your death," dead is dead.

If you have to resort to nitpicking Duckbear's writing skills, this probably isn't a context where you should try playing devil's advocate.

TheWorstPoster posted...

Had Obama touted the drug instead, Leftists would all be for it

That would really depend on how much medical consensus he had backing him up. In all likelihood, Obama wouldn't have promoted a specific drug without having some kind of concrete medical basis for doing so, since he was a whole lot less prone to the whole "speaking without thinking" thing Trump has such a fetish for. In a perfectly comparable situation, where Obama was inexplicably promoting a drug that pretty much the entire medical community (with the notable exception of the company that produces the drug and has ties to the president) did not support the use of, you would probably still get some left-wing people blindly following him, just as you've got right-wing people blindly following Trump (I might even go so far as to wager that the proportions would be similar), but the simple medical reality of the situation wouldn't change, and those who know anything about medicine would still criticize the promotion.

Quite simply, hydroxychloroquine is not a partisan issue, and treating it like one is thoroughly disingenuous. Objectively and neutrally, the use of the drug to treat Covid-19 has not been subjected to sufficient clinical trials to meet the standards of any developed nation's pharmaceutical regulation agencies and be approved as a treatment. It is a drug with horrible side effects that is pretty much only ever used for malaria because that's one of the few cases where the disease is actually worse than the cure (because malaria really sucks). Suggesting that people should face those side effects for the sake of treating a disease the drug has not been proven to treat is extremely irresponsible and reeks of a conflict of interests. That is true when Trump said it, and that would be no less true if Obama, Hillary, Biden, Bernie, or any other left-wing bogeyman you want to invoke was the one saying it.

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They're one of the primary predators of mosquitoes. If they had hands, I'd go for a brofist.

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TheWorstPoster posted...

It's nothing more than spyware

It objectively is more than spyware. It allows users to record, edit, and share videos. It is also spyware, and particularly aggressive, invasive spyware at that, but it's clearly more than just that.

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slacker03150 posted...

It's more about the attitude than the dough they were caught wasting. Just because something is cheap doesn't mean you should be wasting it playing inappropriate games at work. I wouldn't want my fast food workers having a pickle throwing fight either.

This is true, I'm just saying that the wasted food is actually a pretty trivial cost and most of the objection here is going to be on the grounds of poor behaviour/PR.

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HornedLion posted...

Thats a lot of dough too.

Eh, I'd be surprised if that much dough cost more than a dollar or so to make. Unless you're getting into rich doughs made with butter and eggs (which fast food doughs generally are not because shortening and soy lecithin are so much cheaper), dough is really very cheap. Most of the cost of making bread on-site is in the labour and space requirements, since shaping loaves manually can take a while and whatever space you use for proofing will be occupied for a while (anywhere from half an hour to 24+, depending on what kind of fermentation you're going for).

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Sounds like some manner of psychosis to me.

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Sahuagin posted...

it sounds like you're saying that "strategy" implies warfare?

Generally, yeah, or at least some form of competition between factions (you can have economic RTS's, after all). You can certainly make a case for non-competitive games being strategic and real-time, but that's really not what's typically meant by the genre label "real-time strategy" (much like "Role-playing game" doesn't literally mean any game in which you play a role).

Sahuagin posted...

factorio requires lots of strategy and especially logistics, but maybe not much tactics (though it does have some tactics too). it's maybe not a tactical strategy game, but it seems to me to definitely be a strategy game. and it's definitely real-time.

It strikes me as being more similar to management sims in that resource management and production are the game's primary focuses. Obviously, it's a very different game from Sim City et al, but the core gameplay style is more similar to that than to RTS games.

Sahuagin posted...

being killed is definitely a fail state, game over screen and all

I suppose technically it does, but in practice the norm is simply to reload the most recent save and try not to get hit by a train this time. Outside of self-imposed "hardcore mode" challenges, it doesn't really constitute "losing" the game, and the addition of a respawn feature basically amounted to dropping that pretense because very few people actually treated it like that and it ended up being more of an inconvenient setback than anything else (that, and multiplayer already offered respawning).

Sahuagin posted...

it sounds like what you really mean is that the game is easy on default settings. maybe, but that doesn't make it not an RTS game.

Eh, that's debatable. You can certainly say that it has an "RTS mode" of sorts if you deliberately tweak the enemy settings enough to make them an actual threat and make combat/defense a major part of the gameplay, but that's a very specific way to play the game that you have to deliberately seek out. Using that to call the game an RTS is not entirely unlike calling Warcraft 3 a MOBA because you can make DotA in it (though that is a substantially more extreme example than this and the fact that MOBA's are arguably a sub-genre of RTS muddies that a bit). By default, the core focus of the game is on factory building, with combat (and, by extension, competing for territory control and access to new resources) being a secondary mechanic that must be managed in order to make that central goal happen.

As with all genre arguments, though, I think it's too easy to get bogged down quibbling over semantics and lose sight of the reason genre labels exist in the first place. When asking if a game qualifies as a certain genre, the only important question that needs to be answered is "Would I recommend this game to somebody purely based on the knowledge that they enjoy the genre I'm trying to apply here?". Generally speaking, most people who say they like RTS's want something like Warcraft or AoE, so recommending Factorio isn't necessarily reasonable on that basis (recommending it on the basis of it being a fantastic game is, but that's beside the point), even if the game can be voluntarily configured to provide a comparable experience. Comparatively, recommending it to somebody who enjoys games like SimCity because of that genre preference is more reasonable, because somebody who likes management games will be looking for something like Factorio.

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Zeus posted...

How the f*** can they shut down single-player?

It's not uncommon to see this in F2P or subscription-based games, where even solo play is dependent on logging into a server. It's substantially less common for games with a single purchase price, since even in cases where the multiplayer servers are shut down and you can no longer access the multiplayer, the single-player is usually not server-reliant. This is kind of weird and sets a precedent that's more than a little concerning.

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If you're having trouble finding a sprite generator, look for something to generate custom pictures in Animal Crossing. Those will be 32*32, rather than 48*48, but I believe you can find generators that will do composite images that take up 64*64 (breaking the image into quarters and giving a pattern for each), and if it's specifically 48*48 you want, you can modify the full image by adding a white border around the lower right third (e.g. take a 300*300 picture and expand it to 400*400, leaving the extra space blank) and then just ignore that border in copying the template. Those will also let you force the picture into a specific colour palette, which you can base off of the colours of studs you have available.

That said, I'm basing that idea off of using such generators for the GC/DS Animal Crossing games and being given basically a paint-by-number printout. These days, I'm pretty sure it's more common to get codes that you input to have the game generate the design for you, which wouldn't work as well. Your mileage may vary.

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Tonight's going to be the last serving of roasted sausage with broccoli and fennel, served with a some brown rice.

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