I don't even think his hands are small...when but when people say it all I can think about is a toddler-esque Trump (Trumppler? Toddump?) throwing a tantrum and punching tweets in on his phone with stubby little fingers. It's that unfortunate combination of low self-confidence and self-esteem totally eclipsed by an enormous ego.

Did Maher ever clap so much before?

Same here, this album and tour had an enormous impact on me. I saw them in Boston and Providence at the beginning of this tour and it inspired me to start creating animations and editing videos. I tuned out after Zooropa too, the only songs I listen to since then are Mofo and Elevation.

There's a video on Youtube somewhere that I will have to sift if I can find it, it has a lot more material from this era, like the "Eau de Zoo" perfume commercial you see on the Times Square screen (where Bono says "God bless ya, Zoo products")

No, I didn't confuse anything. Almost every single country benefits from 'illegal' immigrants as well as regular ones. France, for example, has thousands of illegal immigrants from mostly Islamic countries that provide services to it's mostly aging native population. We benefit no more and no less than any other nation from illegal immigration, as @newtboy mentioned, if you import food products or grow them locally you probably are benefiting from illegal immigration.

As far as your evidence, I hope this will suffice as 'some':

Steven A. Camarota, PhD, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, in a Jan. 6, 2015 article, "Unskilled Workers Lose Out to Immigrants," available at nytimes.com, stated:

"There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and we also admit over a million permanent legal immigrants each year, leading to enormous implications for the U.S. labor market. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that there are some 58 million working-age (16 to 65) native-born Americans not working — unemployed or out of the labor market entirely. This is roughly 16 million more than in 2000. Equally troubling, wages have stagnated or declined for most American workers. This is especially true for the least educated, who are most likely to compete with immigrants (legal and illegal).

Anyone who has any doubt about how bad things are can see for themselves at the bureau's website, which shows that, as of November, there were 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans working than in November 2007, while 2 million more immigrants (legal and illegal) were working. Thus, all net employment gains since November 2007 have gone to immigrants."

Jan. 6, 2015 - Steven A. Camarota, PhD

George J. Borjas, PhD, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Harvard University, in a Sep./Oct. 2016 article, "Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers," available at politico.com, stated:

"[A]nyone who tells you that immigration doesn't have any negative effects doesn't understand how it really works. When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable...

We don't need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages."

Sep./Oct. 2016 - George J. Borjas, PhD

Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., PhD, Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, in an Oct. 14, 2010 briefing Report to the US Commission on Civil Rights, "The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers," available at usccr.gov, stated:

"Because most illegal immigrants overwhelmingly seek work in the low skilled labor market and because the black American labor force is so disproportionately concentrated in this same low wage sector, there is little doubt that there is significant overlap in competition for jobs in this sector of the labor market. Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low skilled black workers (the highest for all racial and ethnic groups for whom data is collected), it is obvious that the major looser [sic] in this competition are low skilled black workers…

It is not just that the availability of massive numbers of illegal immigrants depress wages, it is the fact that their sheer numbers keep wages from rising over time, and that is the real harm experienced by citizen workers in the low skilled labor market."

Oct. 14, 2010 - Vernon M. Briggs Jr., PhD

There are more educated people than I that hold the same opinion, but let me give you an easier to understand, and absolutely true, example. How do I know it is true? When I was a much younger man, I worked for a roofing company. So I lived it.

The company I worked for was owned by a family friend, who had worked for most of his life in the field and had an excellent reputation. However, in the 90's around the time NAFTA was passed and (not related, I hope) illegal immigration spiked in Texas, he began to lose out to other companies. He did some snooping around and found out they were often charging hundreds of dollars less in their estimates than he could possibly offer, at least while still making a profit. He also found out that the two companies that were taking most of his business were staffed with illegal workers, being paid much lower wages than he could give to his legal employees.

Fast forward a year and he was close to declaring bankruptcy. Just like any type of labor where you pay your employees little to nothing comparatively to their compatriots in the same field, you cannot compete fairly. Net result, he was forced to let us go one by one, replacing us with illegals.

Obviously, I moved on, learned a different skill and began to make far more than I would have as a simple laborer. But the fact remains that an entire industry was undermined and radically changed by the inclusion of cheap illegal labor. This will not change if we simply ignore illegal immigration because it is the 'nice' thing to do. What it will accomplish is that young people will slowly find that certain jobs are out of their selection. It also will get worse the more accepted and commonplace illegal immigration becomes. I know for a fact that while I worked at Apple there were entry level support techs that were illegally here. Perhaps you will say that it is a benefit because it would prevent offshoring, but I disagree. What it does is make the working class poorer and doesn't solve the other issues brought about by illegal immigration, such as Emergency Rooms being flooded by people who can't afford insurance. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it is common to go to the ER and see people stacked like cordwood because they can't refuse patients unless they are a private hospital.

As far as The Jungle, and my statement about it and it's author, I was merely pointing out that as much as you try to put forth that illegal immigrants have a bad life here in the USA, the fact is that we used to treat legal immigrants far worse. Perhaps it was a reach on my part, but it seemed logical at the time.

I doubt we will agree on any of this, but I respect your opinion. I live in a state that has a very large proportion of illegal immigrants, and while you are correct that they are generally not a criminal negative to society, they do have severe effects which I think you are overlooking. I do think that legal immigration policy needs massive change and businesses that exploit the almost slave like labor of illegals to make more profit should be punished severely. In the meantime, when we do catch illegals, they should be deported, not protected by a sympathetic politically motivated law enforcement group.

If he wants to add billions to welfare, better to just do that and not make a ridiculous jobs program wasting resources and alienating our neighbors and allies with no tangible benefit.
I'm all for repairing existing infrastructure first, plenty of jobs to me made there, and many more permanent ones if we actually do proper upkeep this time, but I see absolutely no need to create a new enormous piece of infrastructure mostly in the desert first, leaving nothing to pay for the rest and few willing to work there without ridiculous bonuses at taxpayer expense.
I wish Republicans (since they have the purse strings) who bemoan the state of the country, would put fixing it first.

5' tall is enormous for an ant. Were you in a movie called "them"?

As well as that from Charles Dickens, who wrote in "A Christmas Carol":

"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. BEWARE THEM BOTH, and all of their degree, BUT MOST OF ALL BEWARE THE BOY, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. AND ABIDE THE END."
(emphasis mine)

Ignorance is a bill that always come due and it comes due like a motherfucker when you will least expect it and can least afford it.

To quote Orwell:

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Reality is a motherfucker, too: if ignorance is the fall, then reality is the sudden stop at the end.

*tripplepromote
Come on Sifty....try something new.

All the polls weren't wrong....the ones taken during the primary were dead on...the dozens that had Clinton tying or loosening to Trump, and showed Sanders winning by a landslide.

I totally blame the DNC and Clinton herself, they guaranteed this result by cheating during the primaries (and losing the votes of those they cheated) then rewarding the cheaters with top paid positions in her campaign. There was absolutely zero chance of her winning after that, and before that she only had a 50/50 chance. On top of that, it was 100%foreseeable that there would be an accusation <2weeks before the election, and no way for her to defend against it, because she's untrustworthy and opaque. Also, no one on the planet could have done more to energize the Republicans...she was their 'get out and vote', and it worked far better than the Democrat's enormous ground game. Turn those blame cannons around, Dems. This is on you.

Son.

Of.

A.

Bitch.

I knew this day would come. I didn't know when. I only knew it wouldn't be soon enough.

@eric3579 is probably definitely the most passionate sifter around. He's poured his heart and soul into this little place and we love him for it. If there's anyone who's ever deserved galaxy, it's Eric, and I know @dag and myself feel the same.

Congratulations Eric and thanks for all the many contributions and all your effort for the many years we've been together.

You are an enormous steaming pillar of sift. ♥

We live in a world populated in the enormous majority by mindless tribals. Of course their rituals are idiotic.

Educational videos are fine, but what we need is a cull.

I'm not sure I really fault the developers that much, although I hear the PC release is a fucking hot mess atm... Some of the complaints come across as, "The developer should have warned me it wasn't going to live up to my completely unrealistic expectations".

Why is it that when people see a trailer for a movie that view it with a degree of healthy skepticsm, but when its a trailer for an enormously ambitious game made by a small studio with a release date 2 years or so away people lose their fucking minds. And its not even just poor lil jimmy consumer, the game/tech press apparently forgot the lessons of Spore completely in 2014. I guess hype gets more pageviews?

I imagine that in 5 years time they'll be hailing another messiah that has apparently created an entire universe because maths. Turns out being God is actually quite a difficult feat. WHO'D HAVE THUNK? -props to whatever divine may exist btw - we're really struggling to create a sequel that justifies the original.

On the plus side the soundtrack by 65daysofstatic is ace. Their music probably contributed in a large degree to the "success" of that E3 trailer, so, you know, maybe it wasn't completely unrepresentative of the final product.

The simplest counter arguments to your dismissal are, 1) it's not a single degree, it's a number of degrees in a short time, releasing massive amounts of methane at once instead of over a few millennia. 2) it's exactly what happened 250 million years ago when climate change happened rapidly enough to release massive methane deposits in a short time frame, causing massively more climate change and a mass extinction event. Since then, there has not been the same kind of rapid mass increase in ocean temperature since the methane deposits were replaced.

It's about the speed of the temperature change, not just the amount of temperature change. Methane is short lived in the atmosphere, so if a change happened over 1000 years, the same total amount of methane might be released as a 100 year change, but only 10% of it will be in the atmosphere at a time. Consider, we've raised the temperature fast enough that the permafrost is melting at the same time as ice at the bottom of the ocean. That's a fairly unique situation that releases two enormous deposits of methane at the same time.

Our understanding does not need to be "complete" to be scientifically valid, or right. We may not know everything we need to know about the climate, but what we do KNOW is how methane reacts in the atmosphere, and how methane hydrates melt at certain temperatures/pressures, and we are near those levels in the deep oceans and permafrost areas today....so close that there are massive methane pockets bubbling out of the northern oceans and recently frozen ground worldwide.

These things always interest me, because I have such a high form of self health anxiety that I am constantly analyzing myself. I see this, and it is the same with diabetics who are functional but unaware anything is wrong when going into low sugar shock, and I cannot imagine this ever happening to me. If the slightest thing was off, my brain would be all over myself.

I don't drink much because of this, if I get even a little drunk my brain starts spending an enormous amount of concentration to correct for the impairment. Its for the best I guess.

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Not her firs public lie, in fact she's been publicly lying about herself since she met Trump, with his help.
Apparently she's repeatedly claimed to have a degree she never had....she actually left college before completing (nearly failing) her freshman year and never returned....but her biography both online and in her introduction at the convention claimed.....
"began modeling at age 16, but she only began working full-time after obtaining a degree. She graduated “in design and architecture at University in Slovenia"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/melania-trump-college-claims_us_578dd95ce4b0c53d5cfac0dc

What a pair of enormous frauds. The Republicans have one hell of a ticket. This is what you get when your entire party gets their "information" from Faux news.