Credit card company revenue comes from a number of sources but interest / fees are a large component.

My point was more, by definition continuous 30-60 days interest free periods (loans) aren't 'free' and there's cross-subsiding going on.

The business model is built on selling a highly overpriced product to consumer A, so you can sell an underpriced one to consumer B.

This is pretty far from the capitalist ideal of companies competing and continuously innovating to offer consumers the best product.

Yep, the name comes from Dakar, Senegal (In Africa), when the race, the Dakar Rally, was originally ran from Paris to Dakar. It's now held in South America, yet retains the legacy name.

These are specially built off road vehicles, Kamaz is the manufacturer in this example. Like many races, there are different classes of trucks that compete in the Rally, alongside dirt bikes, quads and cars.

It's basically Mad Max and I encourage folks to check out highlights of it, or the similar Baja 1000 race.

Interestingly, the truck class includes support trucks that don't actually compete, but assist competitors stranded in the middle of nowhere.

This Red Bull sponsored Monster (energy drinks!) has right around 1000hp and a 265 gallon fuel tank if I recall correctly. Road trip!

It's hard for me to know why Putin is doing what he's doing. When he moved on Crimea, was he doing it because of the advance of European influence closer to Russia's borders? He's short on good allies unlike 'the west', so can he let people chip away at his comfort zone? Or is he a crazed imperialist?

I don't know. Why don't I know?

Because my government have shown themselves over the years to be a bunch of twats who will literally tell bare faced lies, whilst smiling, and when confronted with the horrors of what they've done they throw their heads back and laugh like a fucking sea lion swallowing a fish whole. And that's what they've done to their OWN PEOPLE. To other countries countries we declare war and send in the multinationals to rape their resources. I consider the invasion of Iraq equally dodgy as the invasion of Crimea. So my moral compass for what's ok and not ok no longer has a baseline.

On the other side, a bunch of people who used to know how the world worked back in 1970 probably thought propaganda was the best way to whip up some nationalistic pride and resentment toward the reds, but in 2017 the majority of young people don't trust a single word they say. So these 70 year old media mogul billionaires can't even tell a believable truth anymore - even if Putin's tanks were half way down my street i'd have to clap eyes on them before i could be sure.

Plus Russia's leadership is Putin himself, he's the spearhead, and he's very cunning. Our leadership is spread across a set of democratically elected people, half of which are both incompetent and self interested, while half of those remaining are merely one or the other. It's easier for one person to look competent and assured. Someone like Merkel has to share the associated incompetency of whatever the German equivalent of her 'cabinet' is.

That's not "my" definition. That is from Merriam-Webster. I even provided you with a link.

Newsflash: the meanings of words change.

The original meaning of "decimate" was "reduce by 10%", but these days it means "kill or destroy a large portion of".

"Marriage" used to mean "a man paying someone else to take his daughter off his hands", but these days it means a "formally recognised union of two people as partners in a personal relationship".

And "president" used to imply a degree of competence or leadership, these days it means "orange buffoon".

Also, who the fuck hates hot dogs? What the hell is wrong with you? Hating hot dogs is unamerican! Why do you hate America, Bob?

I have to disagree with this. If you're working with even a team of two, you have to edit someone else's source code, and tabs v spaces has to be agreed upon. There are a lot of other, more entertaining questions of formatting that have to be settled upon, not to mention how to name things: CamelCase versus under_scores.

Any halfway competent programmer figures out the local standards by observation and follows them. Anything else is an indication that she just doesn't give a shit about getting along with co-developers.

The content of the video wasn't bad, but the tagline / title they chose gives a very faulty perception, I think.

I guess "how accurately can the skill of players on a team relative to players on competing teams predict their aggregate regular season success in various sports" doesn't roll off the tongue quite so easily.

I love hockey largely because a great team can be good at everything OR specialize in being offensively skilled / big and mean / fast and opportunistic / defensive system minded / whatever. Take a team loaded with extremely skilled superstars and put them up against a team of low-skill bruisers that play tough but legal and work well as a unit, and the pure skill team can easily lose. Makes for fascinating interplay between philosophies / rosters / coaching schemes.

So some of you Americans honestly believe this is the correct way to police a neighborhood community? Or are you all trolls?

This is close to incarceration for jaywalking or shooting someone for wearing a hoodie and being black.

Look at how many officers and what effort and time it takes to solve the case of a scratched car at a crossroads scene and how they manage to make a meal of it.

At 3 minutes into the video they are exactly one competent cop, two calm sentences and one phone call to parents away from not having to deal with the ensuing fracas. Even if they did everything by the book they will be remembered as assholes.

The message the girl gets is she should have tried harder to get away sooner because cops are pigs (even when they try to do things right and have a camera).

Policing a community is much easier (or only possible?) if people want to cooperate and trust the policemen to not be arrogant douchebags waiting for 15yr old girls to "make their day".

Possession of marihuana - she should be glad to be alive. Go watch Fort Apache, the Bronx one more time.

Excellent. But, I have a reaction to your (Green's?) text in the description.

1. Nostalgia is a motivator. But I think it tends to be a *strong* motivator only of individuals, not of collective societies. If Trump has nostalgia for fossil fuels (personally I think his motivations lie elsewhere), the good news is that that nostalgia won't be very contagious to American citizens. At least not for long.

People like Elon Musk / Tesla are making it clear that electric and renewables are the sexy high-tech future. That appeal to our vanity will be much more effective as a "carrot" motivation, as compared to a "stick" with carbon taxes etc.


2. This essentially boils down to an industrial version of Isolationism. Trump represents a bigger push in that direction by far compared to being motivated by nostalgia. BUT, I think that trying to explain that resistance in him and others purely through that anti-globalization lens misses some things.

Just as nostalgia is a better motivator for individuals than societies, altruism (if you believe it can exist) functions the same way. And that's 90% of what the Paris Accords are: altruism.

On paper, it makes sense for us as individuals in the US to acknowledge that we got a disproportionate level of advancement out of fossil fuel usage through our history. As individuals, we can see the undeniable truth in that. But ask us to act -- collectively -- on that and watch as our collective altruistic tendencies are drastically reduced compared to the sum of our individual altruistic tendencies.

That's not really evil, that's just human nature. But it is precisely the reason that I feel that encouraging people like Elon Musk is by far the superior way to lead us into the future. Tesla makes cars that are better than competing ICE vehicles for many/most use-cases. And not "better" in the sense that our individual sense of altruism gets triggered to reward our brain's pleasure center because we've prevented some Pacific islander's house from getting wiped out in a sea level rise by buying one. No, better in real, measurable criteria: less expensive to operate, better performance / top speed / acceleration, features ... potentially even panty-dropping sexiness. That shit can motivate us as a collective society much more reliably than altruism.

And that's why I think it is more important to encourage the Elon Musks of the future than it is to get TOO overly concerned about the Donald Trumps of the present. Although admittedly, there's certainly ways to try to do both.

Has Hollywood just entirely lost its shit?

I have no idea whether that movie is good or bad from the trailer. It's a cobbled together mess of action and dialogue that makes no sense in the context provided here.

I am so frustrated with big budget movies. There's so much garbage coming out of the studios these days and trailer editing like this doesn't help me as a consumer, it just turns me off the whole process. Like that Cloak and Dagger trailer that's also floating around. I want to like it, but I have no idea what it is based on the trailer. Considering how important trailers are to commercial success, you'd think they could hire a half-way competent editor to put them together.

Argh!

/rant

If that is a fact only you can prove it. Any competent person can prove the fact that no white police officer has ever been convicted for murdering a black male in america's entire history.

She brings up the controversy...by correctly answering the man's silly question?

If you have children, you absolutely have a dog in the fight. By homeschooling them, you, statistically (and the few statistics available are heavily biased FOR home schooled children, comparing volunteered home school test scores with the entire public school population), are giving them a better grasp of English, but worse understanding of math, and certainly aren't doing well teaching science. You also leave them with absolutely no real life education on interpersonal relationships, which are almost as important, since you can't use your knowledge if no one will work with you because you are a spoiled narcissist incapable of listening to others.

After 25+ years of education at 13+ different schools, I've NEVER heard the lesson, that you can ONLY learn through formal schooling, taught in any school, and I know of no one who thinks that way, from pre-school teachers to the many Stanford professors I know. Based on my excessive experience, this is absolutely NOT a lesson taught in average schools. You are simply mistaken about that.

For those who don't wish to ignore the sacred honor of teaching one's own child how to work in a group, how to have a reasoned discussion with others, about subjects the parent is not an expert in, or how to delegate responsibility, all without being the sole focus of all attention, school is a great institution. If you wish to relegate them to a life of having problems dealing with others and (statistically) having even worse math and science skills than average, home school works great.

I still have a dog in this fight, even though I have no children, because I live in a society where I have to deal with others. Those I've dealt with that have a home schooling background have been far more difficult to work with than others, being both less competent and less congenial on top of having a misplaced sense of superiority, both moral and educational.

Quoting Sniper007:

" A child is put at a tremendous disadvantage when they are taught that they can not learn anything except through formal schooling."

-- I completely and 100% agree with this, except . . .

" This is the inevitable life lesson all children are taught in schools (public or private)."

-- Reeeeealllly? Can I get some kind of cite on this? FWIW, I attended public schools -- good and bad -- and never came away with this lesson at all. Nor do I know anyone else who has. In fact, I'd say my view is the polar opposite of your own: as a self-made man, the most valuable lessons I've learned have come from experience (better known as The School of Hard Knocks).

"But for those who do wish to so delegate the sacred honor of teaching one's own child to a third party government agent(...)"

-- So you can't do both? You can't have trained educators teaching your child important fundamentals like math, science, languages and arts while you teach them social skills and whatever form of ethics and mores you want to instill them? To do the first is the cede the second?

Here's a little anecdote on my experience with home schooling:

My sister, now 30, was home-schooled by my parents. Her entire work history, up until now, has been a disaster. Lost jobs, conflicts with managers and co-workers, absenteeism -- everything shy of stealing from her employer. Why? Because she expected the world to revolve around her once she had her GED. She thought she was smarter than everyone else because she never had the social experience of encountering different levels of competence. Because home schooling catered to her needs and wants, she figured employers should do the same. Because she never had to learn classroom structure, she never learned to play nice with authority and know her place and work within it.

This is an anecdote and therefor does not equal data. But I think had my parents decided to send my sister to a public school, she'd be a lot farther ahead in her work-life than she is now and she would have had an easier road getting there.

Your mileage may vary, and hopefully will.

Winning!

When are we going to see Gary Busey and Flavor Flave competing for a cabinet position?

This fake president can't seem to keep a single rational thought in his head, and his administration of yes men is doing nothing to help by just repeating his insanity and pretending it's rational.

So, republicans....how DID you gain all the weight?

Measurably less intelligent. Nice summary. Starts as a rant but gets deeper.

Mercury at 4:00 and 5:33. Gold.

Also appearing: Frank Zappa.

I could not care less about "pop music" as such, but why cant there be even just one radio station run by someone competent to pick music?

Disclaimer: I like the first Coldplay album.

@Janus
you are not alone,many here on the sift tend to lean in your direction,however,i find this to be misplaced skepticism.

when it comes to russian internal policies,and actions abroad i tend to agree with the assertion that RT leans towards russian state "message of the day".similar to how CNN,MSNBC and FOX play that game.

but when it comes to being critical of the USA,and considering just who chris hedges is as a journalist and writer.i find the criticism un-warranted.

that is just my opinion,you are free to disagree of course.

though i would like to point out that many media outlets that have produced fantastic content,with exceptional journalists,are under siege.TeLeSUR and aljazeera english are in the crapper due to funding,and small,independent outlets are also struggling to compete with the megalithic corporate media to bring critical analysis in these dangerous times.

so while i agree that a venue such as RT should be approached with a modicum of skepticism,i also feel very strongly that we should not throw the baby out with the bath water.

chris hedges has been a extremely vocal critic of power,corruption and the devastating affects of neoliberalism.pulitzer prize winning author and journalist.

so while this may be on on RT,it is chris hedges that has credit with me.he has proven to be a man of integrity.