As the whole building was reinforced, shielded concrete, only the obliterated half needed containment. In fact, this is the permanent fix, as most of the damaged area was already contained, but not particularly long term.

"We secretly replaced Bruce Silva's headbang bricks with 250MPa steel fibre-reinforced concrete, let's see if he notices the difference!"

So enlighten us because i can't buy what you're selling until i see something concrete. Your word will hardly suffice.

I don't care about the timing, political motivation, etc. etc. of this discovery of new emails. I think only 2 things matter:

1) Are they real / legitimate. But with all of the previous leaks, I never saw the Clinton camp trying to suggest that anything was fabricated. Taking stuff out of context to make it appear worse than what it arguably is doesn't count count as "fabricated". As much as I dislike Clinton, I have to give her credit for dealing with the out of context stuff so far in the proper way -- fill in the context so that people can make up their own minds (like some of the Wall Street speech excerpts, "public and private position", etc.).

2) Do they show anything actually criminal, even it is relatively minor. Capone went down for tax evasion, because that was the only thing they could successfully and concretely pin on him. And yet justice was served by going forward with that.

IF (and it remains a big if) these new emails end up meeting both of those criteria, I have absolutely zero sympathy for the whining that already has and will continue to erupt from the Democrat party.

Being a candidate in a presidential election paints a giant target on you and guarantees that your past is going to be under the microscope. If you've got skeletons in your closet, there is a very high chance for them to be discovered. Trump has had a well-deserved taste of that already -- maybe it is Clinton's turn now.

It wasn't particularly dangerous before, the supports were not 'bits of metal', they were railroad ties anchored into solid rock. 95% of the way you could simply walk the path, and in a couple spots there were via ferrata type cables to help walk across the beams where the concrete had eroded.

Pretty awesome for sure but I'm not so sure about the shed roof part. If she got tripped up in the basket and fell onto the concrete patio stones...yikes. Still nice to see a kid being encouraged to get outside and do something physical - she's pretty good at navigating those obstacles for a 5 year old!

Living in Thailand, I've grown to really appreciate locally grown meat and produce in comparison to massive factory farm stuff.

One good example: Tilapia fish. Back home in the US, I thought Tilapia was disgusting. It tastes like algae, because they are raised in man-made concrete tanks and fed exclusively on algae that is easy to grow. They won't breed in those conditions, so they have to pump in hormones to basically force them to reproduce, more hormones to make them grow quickly, etc. etc.

Here in Thailand, I live in a town close to a lake. If you go to the lake you can see huge enclosures made of nets, which keep the Tilapia contained but otherwise living very normal fish lives. They get a natural lake diet of insects, plants, etc., no need to give them any extra food. They reproduce without any encouragement.

Talk to one of the fish farmers, and they will pull up some of the net and present you with several fish to choose from. Point one out and they will pull it out, smack it on the head to kill it instantly, and then scale and gut it for you and put it in a bag. From alive in the lake to dinner in 15-20 minutes.

Or, if you go to a local market in town, people have stalls set up that serve the middleman function. They go to the lake and buy 20-50 Tilapia to put into a big tank in the back of their pickup, and keep them alive in there for a day or two until they are sold, for a slight markup so you don't have to drive out to the lake.


Roughly the same thing applies to pork, chicken, and most fruits and vegetables. Somewhat for beef also, but there is less of that since most Thais follow a branch of Buddhism that discourages killing/eating cows. So, gotta go to the Islamic Thai shops for beef.

Maybe the system here is old-fashioned, quaint, or a bit backwards ... but everything is really nice, fresh, and tasty compared to supermarket stuff back in the US.

Probably not, but if you look down at the end you'll see he was over a flat groomed run and several meters up. It would have been like landing on concrete.

and this is why you PUT THE FUCKING BAR DOWN.

Lambasting Pt.2

Human milk, GROSS! Cockroach milk, GROSS! Milk from a cow that's been facing in one direction for 4 years on a concrete floor, pumped with antibiotics, forcibly impregnated on what the industry calls a "rape rack" over and over, and fed bonemeal from it's dead neighboring milking cows, YUM!

I'm trying to raise awareness. This empowers people to make better decisions. And you try your best to beat me on a technicality or to discredit the host so that you can keep pretending none of this is real.



It just hit me. I just realised that your family and friends have farms. Now I understand the hostility. You're taking this as a personal attack on your family and friends, and on as an attack on their livelihoods.

Well my advice is to sell now and invest in new technology, the change is coming regardless of how hard animal farmers fight back.

I don't like seeing that either, but if you watch to the end they are actually in part of a larger area.

I'm hyper sensitive to that kind of stuff ever since i went to Beijing zoo. There was a really large enclosure, but it was really old, crumbling and in disrepair, cracks and holes in the floor here and there, all concrete, with one black bear inside pacing up and down by the only perspex window that was about 8 feet in length.

All the Chinese animals were in a special bit of the zoo - pandas and rhinos and all that, state of the art stuff. The 'rest of the world' animals were in the other bit that was old and poorly maintained. An American black bear was worthless to them I suppose.

Now even when i see animals in big areas, all i can see is that poor fucking thing almost dancing left and right for hours by the window to the outside. Really depressed myself writing this.

I left immediately and complained, but no one gave a shit or even understood.

Would be interested to see the total life cycle efficiency of these.

One of the problems with wind turbines is the energy cost of the foundations. Most large wind turbines require a lot of concrete to be mounted on. Concrete is a horrible material in terms of CO2 production, so a wind turbine actually has to operate for several years before it becomes carbon neutral.

This looks like it might solve that problem, but on the other hand, I'm unsure if it would scale well.

I dunno, I'm not an engineer, so happy to listen to someone more knowledgeable on this.

OK, that explains "why" one size number meant to cover multiple dimensions worked worse for women than men, why it has become meaningless now, and why it wasn't even particularly accurate when it was implemented.

But it doesn't explain why they don't simply switch to multiple dimensions that actually correspond to measurable values. For example, as a male, I can go into the shop and buy 34/32 pants, because I know that my waist is 34" and my inseam is 32". There is little to no variation between multiple brands, because those numbers mean something concrete and measurable.

If women were annoyed with the current system and wanted to know precisely what they were getting in that same way, why not petition companies to label things with multiple meaningful measurements (as many as necessary to get a precise fit for a particular garment)? Maybe this is sexist, but I tend to think the answer is that they don't because they *like* shopping and having to try on multiple things, whereas I feel confident that I can speak for most men and say that we just want to buy something that we know will fit to replace whatever we've gotten too fat for or worn out by wearing until it literally disintegrated...

The Clintons have proven to be quite teflon against scandal, but if there is solid evidence of something actually criminal I think that would crash down.

The concrete leaks so far haven't been that damning. But I think there's a point that even she would see her support dry up.

I'm largely with @newtboy on this one.

Charles Kinsey provides an excellent and concrete example of someone who thought that there was zero chance that what he was doing would lead to getting shot. He did absolutely nothing wrong, and from what I/we can tell actually handled everything as well as anyone could reasonably hope for. If I was in that situation, I guarantee I wouldn't have had the presence of mind to lay down on my back with my hands straight up and calmly explain what was going on.

So, as a white person who has never been in a situation like that, all I can do is try to put myself in the shoes of how a black person would see this. Here's a guy who acted perfectly -- a standard that I can't imagine holding myself to -- and he still got shot. And the police response is (so far) boilerplate utter bullshit.

I can't really imagine what it would be like to be black in the US, and have direct experiences with this sort of thing (even less extreme examples like profiling traffic stops) on top of WAY too frequent reports of this stuff happening. But I can try, and all I can say is that it seems terrifying.

Push people far enough, and they start pushing back. I think that's what @newtboy is saying. I absolutely do NOT condone violence against police, or painting them with a broad brush and claiming they are ALL racist ... but at some point, I can absolutely understand that there is going to be blowback for this shit that has gone on way too often for way too long.

In order to slow down / prevent / stop that blowback, police need to be working their asses off to change that image. The "blue line" mentality of protecting their own even when they make (massive) mistakes has got to go. Yeah, it is a hard job. Yeah, it means that police should be held to a higher standard of conduct than average Joe citizens. Yeah, it means that police need to accept that they face a certain amount of danger and risk -- danger that will make it hard to be calm, cool, and collected. But that's the job. Protect and serve the people, not themselves or the police department.

Until all the good cops (and there are lots of them, including some friends of mine) get together and make it clear that the actions of these bad cops are utterly unacceptable, things will continue to get worse.

I'm far enough away from these issues to admit that I don't have anything like concrete knowledge on the subject, but I feel like I should mention some of the more obvious counterpoints to some of the things he's said in this video. Otherwise I'd get that dirty echo chamber feeling, and no amount of showering seems to wash that away. Could be I'm just a masochist, though, who enjoys arguing.

I think there's racism in every culture. I think it's often much more subtle than described in the video, often even subconscious. I also think that modern western culture is among the least racist cultures to have ever existed, despite our many complaints.

I guess I'll talk about Libya first. The west (the white people he was talking about) is continuously demonized for supporting tyrants and the like. Yet when they participate in overthrowing a clear example of a extravagant super villain tyrant, they are demonized for that. I'm not saying they didn't have other motives, I'm just saying that it's an example of a tautology. No matter which choice they make they are labeled racist.

Now, when beleaguered folk make a desperate attempt to dangerously cross a sea, well knowing the risks they are incurring, it is again the fault of the Italians for not rescuing then with sufficient alacrity. Yes, many of them are coming from countries the west had a hand in destabilizing. But it would be pretty racist for you to demand that the Italian navy take full moral responsibility for the actions of other western nations, simply because they are white too. Also, if the only number you pay attention to is the number that drown, your bias is showing.

Next the issue of the Commonwealth. It seems absurd to expect the UK to treat former colonies populated by citizens that had moved there the same as former conquests that have since shrugged off the yoke of empire. The justifications for this discrimination would seem to be a combination of racism, cultural chauvinism and sober pragmatism. The latter two factors clearly scale with the gap between the culture of the colony in question and the home country, and probably ought to in some sense.

The incarceration thing is tougher to poke holes in, and clearly a much more touchy subject. Once could argue all sorts of justifications for why more members of ethnic minorities are apprehended, but it's nebulous and smells of bias and chauvinism, at best ending in a chicken vs egg conundrum. But once you're in police custody, I think can agree on demanding a higher level of equality of outcome. So I checked out a charity called Inquest who had compiled pretty comprehensive stats on police custody deaths since 1990. Here's a link: http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/bame-deaths-in-police-custody
To summarise, since 1990, ethnic minorities have made up a total of 153 out of 1557 deaths in police custody, or roughly 10%. Given that they currently make up 13% of the population, that seems to be well within an acceptable range of results, so I was confused at first. Then I thought maybe he had misspoken and had meant to say state custody, or inmate deaths. So again I looked for some numbers, and again Inquest had the most comprehensive data, broken down by year and ethnicity etc. Again here's a link: http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/deaths-in-prison
It shows 453 out of 3963 prison deaths are suffered by ethnic minorities. This seems almost perfectly in line with the 13% population of said minorities. So again, I'm a bit confused by the point he's making.

All of that said, I think I agree with the sentiment of his presentation, which perhaps confuses me even more.