>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^Duckman33:
>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^blankfist:
It was a government sanctioned assassination of one of their own citizens. He wasn't charged with a crime and sentenced. Do we have the protection of rule of law or don't we? This is exactly the problem I have with this whole social contract thing. What happens when the government breaks that contract with its citizens?
quality doublepromote

Since they both refused to be so nice as to come over and face trial, and more importantly, plotted and executed acts of violence against American assets while abroad, America was in tough spot. The deaths of these two is not so terribly different from any common criminal charging out of a hostage situation with guns blazing and a grenade in his hand.

And I will re-iterate the reporters question. Where is the proof the he was plotting to execute acts of violence against American Citizens? When are we going to get to see that proof? Judging from your comment you are privy to some information the rest of us and the reporter isn't.

Have you typed his name into google?
Anyone in a holy rage over the burden of proof in this, can you please answer this two questions first?
1. Do you believe Alwaki was responsible for the plotting and assassination of multiple people, and on what evidence?
2. Same question, but regarding Obama's assassination of Alwaki.
You're wanting to have your cake and eat it too, I'm not on board for that.


Wow. Thank god for the internet. If google says it's true it sure is. If google says the next guy on the street is a bad man i say let's sent some drones and kill him. just so, no judge. And there i was thinking of life as being so complicated. Have to get me some of those penis enlargement pills. google say they work just fine.

I don't believe everything I read on the interwebs. Specially when it comes to corporate owned news stations.

By the way, I'm not in a "holy rage" just because I ask questions. I ask questions because I don't appreciate being lied to, or manipulated into having an, "Ameerrrricaaa, Fuck yeah!" mentality.

>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^Duckman33:
>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^blankfist:
It was a government sanctioned assassination of one of their own citizens. He wasn't charged with a crime and sentenced. Do we have the protection of rule of law or don't we? This is exactly the problem I have with this whole social contract thing. What happens when the government breaks that contract with its citizens?
quality doublepromote

Since they both refused to be so nice as to come over and face trial, and more importantly, plotted and executed acts of violence against American assets while abroad, America was in tough spot. The deaths of these two is not so terribly different from any common criminal charging out of a hostage situation with guns blazing and a grenade in his hand.

And I will re-iterate the reporters question. Where is the proof the he was plotting to execute acts of violence against American Citizens? When are we going to get to see that proof? Judging from your comment you are privy to some information the rest of us and the reporter isn't.

Have you typed his name into google?
Anyone in a holy rage over the burden of proof in this, can you please answer this two questions first?
1. Do you believe Alwaki was responsible for the plotting and assassination of multiple people, and on what evidence?
2. Same question, but regarding Obama's assassination of Alwaki.
You're wanting to have your cake and eat it too, I'm not on board for that.

>> ^Duckman33:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^blankfist:
It was a government sanctioned assassination of one of their own citizens. He wasn't charged with a crime and sentenced. Do we have the protection of rule of law or don't we? This is exactly the problem I have with this whole social contract thing. What happens when the government breaks that contract with its citizens?
quality doublepromote

Since they both refused to be so nice as to come over and face trial, and more importantly, plotted and executed acts of violence against American assets while abroad, America was in tough spot. The deaths of these two is not so terribly different from any common criminal charging out of a hostage situation with guns blazing and a grenade in his hand.

And I will re-iterate the reporters question. Where is the proof the he was plotting to execute acts of violence against American Citizens? When are we going to get to see that proof? Judging from your comment you are privy to some information the rest of us and the reporter isn't.


Have you typed his name into google?

Anyone in a holy rage over the burden of proof in this, can you please answer this two questions first?

1. Do you believe Alwaki was responsible for the plotting and assassination of multiple people, and on what evidence?

2. Same question, but regarding Obama's assassination of Alwaki.

You're wanting to have your cake and eat it too, I'm not on board for that.

>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^blankfist:
It was a government sanctioned assassination of one of their own citizens. He wasn't charged with a crime and sentenced. Do we have the protection of rule of law or don't we? This is exactly the problem I have with this whole social contract thing. What happens when the government breaks that contract with its citizens?
quality doublepromote

Since they both refused to be so nice as to come over and face trial, and more importantly, plotted and executed acts of violence against American assets while abroad, America was in tough spot. The deaths of these two is not so terribly different from any common criminal charging out of a hostage situation with guns blazing and a grenade in his hand.


And I will re-iterate the reporters question. Where is the proof the he was plotting to execute acts of violence against American Citizens? When are we going to get to see that proof? Judging from your comment you are privy to some information the rest of us and the reporter isn't.

@mgittle okay, it sounds like we were mostly misunderstanding each other then. I pretty much agree with everything you said in the last post.

The only thing I'd point out is that the quote you cite from Modern Money Mechanics is right, but you're leaving out what happens after that in the process:

The lending banks, however, do not expect to retain the deposits they create through their loan operations. Borrowers write checks that probably will be deposited in other banks. As these checks move through the collection process, the Federal Reserve Banks debit the reserve accounts of the paying banks (Stage 1 banks) and credit those of the receiving banks.

Whether Stage 1 banks actually do lose the deposits to other banks or whether any or all of the borrowers' checks are redeposited in these same banks makes no difference in the expansion process. If the lending banks expect to lose these deposits - and an equal amount of reserves - as the borrowers' checks are paid, they will not lend more than their excess reserves.

Which is what I was getting at. A single bank that gets a $10,000 deposit, can't turn around and make $100,000 in loans itself. It loans out $9,000, and when that principal gets deposited in another bank, it can loan out $8,100, and so on and so forth.

With enough loan/deposit iterations, it can end up being as much as $100,000 in additional money in circulation, but like you said repaying the principal destroys that money again.

I'd also point out that all of the above would create money even if your currency is on a full gold standard.

But I guess before we go down that road, I probably should just ask you to elaborate a bit on your thoughts about the relationship between growth and fiat currency.

Like, what do you mean by "growth"? Increase in GDP? If GDP falls, how does that threaten the existence of fiat currency?

By my reading of economics, a shrinking economy is called a "recession", and that's exactly when modern economics says we should take advantage of the fact that we have fiat currency and use it to increase the money supply to spur growth.

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I'd like to experience some of the good old days of shooters again not because games were better back then, much of the design has moved on, but now days there is just a flood of games all using the same mechanics as each other with no variety or substance.

Resistance 3 was a breath of fresh air, old school style gameplay mixed with modern mechanics. The health system, however was imbalanced. They could've done more to make it work better, but overall though, i really enjoyed Resistance dispite a few questionable design decisions. The fact that you can carry all the weapons at once nearly made me tear up.

DNF is a good example of totally cocking up the "old school" approach by implementing the WRONG modern features. Firstly the regenerating health. This right away causes a problem; you can regenerate your health, so for some challenge we need to make the enemies do a lot more damage to keep the player from abusing the system. What happens? You are almost always sitting back behind cover while waiting for your health to regen before firing again. That's not Duke Nukem! I heard other ideas were that you needed to kill an enemy to regain health, THAT is Duke.
Then there's the 2 weapon limit. George Broussard in all his game design incompetence said they couldn't find a way to implement a weapon wheel effectively on consoles... Resistance 3 seemed to do it fine. So did HL2 years back. Moron.

Regen health and 2 weapon limit can and do work for some games like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War, but FFS let's try something a little different once in a while. But some developers use them as a development crutch; less testing, balancing and design required. Less effort in other words. Or they use it to make the game less complex, which is a bad thing. Ninja Gaiden is a good example. It seems to be going down a path of less and less substance, there's only the combat. This is terrible. The original game's store, upgrades, potions, rewards for exploration, non-linear main world all helped to pace the game better rather than an exhausting trudge through constant unrelenting combat seen in Ninja Gaiden 2 and from the sounds, even more so for the third game.

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I think Yahzee isn't technically a reviewer of games, he's oped'ing about games with humour. His reviews aren't particularly objective but they never claim to be.

And yeah, a lot of us do spend time wishing for old mechanics to come back. Winning a fight with a few % health left against all odds is far more satisfying than hunkering down behind a wall, regen'ing, popping out to shoot, regen'ing etc. Leaning around corners (rather than sticking to the wall and suddenly getting a huge panoramic as far as the camera can scan) is another example. No, we don't generally want verbatim copies of old games to come back, but some of the meatier bits would be nice.

I'd humbly submit that older games don't hold up against modern games because they aren't supposed to. That doesn't mean older game concepts don't hold up. eg. Dead Island doesn't have regenerating health or a cover system, which really do help ramp up the 'survival horror' factor.

I think part of the problem is that there's a whole lot of people out there who can't quantify how much wealthier the people feeding them the "Creating Jobs" stuff are. See: http://videosift.com/video/Most-Americans-Unaware-of-Growing-Concentration-of-Wealth at the 1:40 mark. Everyone thinks they are middle class that's a 29k avg neighborhood and 140k neighborhood, 3:30 repeats it again....they think the majority of Americans are middle class.

I'd venture to say that many people in that crowd are there, not because they understand that the people working on wall street dwarf their salary probably by a factor of 4 or 5 in the lower paid white collar jobs and up into the 100+ factors when they get into the upper positions. They are there because they want what they had back, and they can now see that Wall Street or at least the mentality of Wall Street has in a very short period of time affected many aspects of their lives.

If they could still afford a place to live, food, and have a decent job, they probably would have never noticed the long term erosion of the system by those with the money and power...twisting it so they took more of the pie and left the middle and lower class to figure out how they will afford their house (debt which in turn shifts more money up the ladder).

I mean most people who have jobs right now, the only information they care about on unemployment is when it comes from someone they know who they consider to be a "useful employee" and not their stoner brother, etc. And even then it's probably "These things happen, you'll find another job." until they are still unemployed 6 months later....maybe they were just lazy. 12 months rolls around and they are still unemployed? Now it starts to scare the living shit out of people, especially when another friend or family lost their job a month or two back. When it looks like it might affect them personally is when they care, and by that time it's been 1-2 years of people they know going unemployed at various times...working at McDs or Walmart because there's nothing out there.

http://videosift.com/video/Food-Speculation-Explained

Showing another way the Wall Street mentality is just giving us all a good screwing. Instead of these folks taking their talents to create something, they leech off of the people doing the work and drive up costs while creating massive uncertainty for everyone involved.

http://videosift.com/video/Elizabeth-Warren-The-Coming-Collapse-of-the-Middle-Class

Shows that people were experiencing bankruptcy more often that you would assume, but were able to hide it. Plus the general fixed costs being increasingly higher over the years with no overall salary gains to offset them.

http://videosift.com/video/Paul-Krugman-Income-Inequality-and-the-Middle-Class

Showing that they have been on the union bust kick for 30 years now at least, and it's something unique to the US because Canada in a similar global economy still has the level of unionized work force as the US had 30 years ago. Education has nothing to do with the income disparity. And the income disparity was fixed by policies put in place during the 1930s and early 40s. Which have been removed layer by layer since then, with increasing frequency in more recent history. And he points out in the video that the highest paid hedge fund manager makes more in a single year than 88000 NY teachers do in 3 years, my recounting of it might be off a little it's near the end of the video.


http://videosift.com/video/Multi-Millionaire-Rep-Says-He-Can-8482-t-Afford-A-Tax-Hike

Then you have this knucklehead talking about 200k to feed his family and how he can't afford a tax hike because it will prevent him from investing in store improvements and openings (that make him MORE money, so yeah..). Jon Stewart covered this in a much more funny way and how stupid the argument being made is. I'll re-iterate my take on this though. If they can't create jobs with the money they have coming in now after all the other tax deductions over the years, and all the opportunities before this day to do.....they will not do so. It's a fool's bet to depend on some guy who can't demonstrate how he has created jobs in the last 2-4 years in some meaningful way and how those low taxes make it possible to do so. Taxes would pretty much force him to reinvest in his business because if he tried to take it in profit he'd be paying a chunk of it out in taxes.




I think the most profane thing about this country right now is that people who want to work can't find work. And those who are working, especially blue collar jobs have a bunch of white collar guys speculating on their production....every thing that blue collar guy makes/produces probably has 10 or more white collar guys trying to make a buck off of it. It's like a house of cards, except the support structures are the very few people who still put out useable materials. It's crazy how something like that was let run wild, with more and more of the regulation taken away so they could stack even more cards onto the mess. The money isn't to be had in production, it's made in speculating/futures/etc...and it's just massively crazy to realize that all the middlemen are allowed to drive up the costs of oil/food/etc instead of cutting that shit out through regulation.

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.

Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.

I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.

Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.

The main difficulty in simulating a brain is that the brain is almost infinitely parallel, while turing machines are inherently serial. Each neuron is dependent on the neurons around it, which themselves are dependent on the neurons beside them and so on.

To do that calculation in a serial machine is crazy time consuming. You have to essentially re-iterate every single neuron several time to advance one single "step", while the brain does it in real time. We're getting closer, but we're not nearly there yet.

There are ways to simplify it, of course, but then we sorta lose the point, don't we?
>> ^hpqp:

@gwiz665
I like the hardware/software analogy too. In fact, there is a project to make a computer model of the human brain (for circa 2023): http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page-52741-en.html

The guy shouldn't feel so bad. He did the best he could. She was going to steal no matter what, meaning that even if he chose to steal he would have left with nothing.

Shitty people fuck it up for everyone, not so much you can do about that except to live your own life with integrity.

Oh, and usually in iterative games "cooperate" is the best initial strategy until someone screws you, and then you switch to copying their behavior (tit for tat).

Damn it, I don't know how to break up the quote so nicely, so I'll just have to answer in order and hope you can follow. Apologies.
Agreed, I was wrong when I said per capita, that can be misleading in both directions, debt/GDP is a much better measure. I don't understand your math however, our debt is well over $14 TRILLION, and our GDP is less than that today (I think by far, but I can't find current projections, it was $14 trillion in 09). That makes our ratio 1/1 at best, or 100%, not 60%. That only takes the 'on the book' debt into account.
Thanks for the EU lesson, I really didn't know. It sounds like ditching your own currency is a bad move, huh?
OK, raising interest rates is LIKE re-valuing the currency, but not the opposite of how they often devalue it, by simply printing more. That's why the gold standard was good, it made it illegal to just print more without the gold to back it, making hyper inflation less likely.
Yes, hyper inflation is the fear. If, because we have obvious insurmountable debt, we become more of a credit risk and no one will lend us money (like happened to Greece), that's the only option left, isn't it? We don't have union partners tied to us with a currency chain, and we are too big for any 'partner' to bail out anyway. We're left with paying debts by printing money, which leads to hyper inflation. That's what could happen if they don't get hold of the debt, by spending cuts AND tax increase.
And that leads to the next point, I have repeatedly said it is BOTH under taxing AND overspending. You seem to not read the part where I say it's also under taxing, repeatedly. It's imperative we get BOTH under control and in balance, in my view.
It's true, you can balance the budget at 100% of GDP if you live in a socialist society, that's a way to go. In a capitalist society, you need to leave enough for commerce to continue in order to generate MORE revenue for next year. I don't think 50% quite cuts it in most cases. 75% probably would, and would give the feds a huge fund (3.5 trillion per year) to both pay our debts and pay for services, if those services are curtailed to a reasonable level (and that's the rub, what's reasonable to one is not to the other). It's absolutely true that maternity leave by itself poses no problem whatsoever, it's the hundred thousand other iterations of similar programs combined that make it impossible to do anything properly. I absolutely agree that we should generate revenue (taxes) at least at the same level as our spending. I don't think that's quite possible at the level of spending we have now, just as it's not possible to continue under funding the budget that exists and floating larger debt (creating more spending with no service because of larger interest payments, another reason large debt is BAD). We need to thoughtfully prioritize our spending AND raise revenue in my eyes. Keeping priorities straight is not a strength held by most Americans, and certainly not our government, so I have little hope this will happen.

@JiggaJonson

There was a lack of specificity in the original wording, not a change in the argument.

California's drop was due to migrations of people from the less-skilled sectors of other societies, expanding the less-skilled sectors of California's society. This is reflected in long-term trends like increased high school drop-out rates. The new expanded less-skilled sector continues to have an increased fertility rate and decreased length of generational iterations.

I think there's probably a tendency to employ magical thinking and pretend that there could be zero change in gene frequencies occurring in the above-described dynamic. But in the post Human Genome Project age, the story of genetics is becoming more and more interesting, rather than fading away.

Awesome video....

@Yogi
I think your sentiment is in the right place, but I'd assert that this campaign is a pro-gay rights campaign as well. (re-iterating @Stormsinger methinks)

I long ago stopped trying to approach you with logic, dyst. After about the third iteration of the same old nonsense. It's like trying to put out the sun with ice cubes.