Straight from the Guardian's current article on the most recent shipwreck in the Med:

The deaths are likely to renew calls from campaigners for Europe to reinstate full-scale search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Last October, the EU opted not to replace the Italian-run Operation Mare Nostrum, which saved about 100,000 lives last year, amid fears that it was encouraging smugglers and migrants to organise more trips to Europe.

What they forgot to mention: Italy would have continued Mare Nostrum if the rest of this bloody EU had bothered to pitch in with a few bucks. The total bill was €114 million per year. Petty cash, by any measure.

The replacement, Frontex's Operation Triton, doesn't even have a mandate to save shipwrecked folks, just to keep them away from EU soil.

European values worthy of yet another Nobel Peace Price, I'd say...

Ever since the Hulk opted to do both F1 and Le Mans this season I've been meaning to take a closer look at Le Mans and see what it's all about. I keep hearing Alan McNish compare current generation F1 cars with Le Mans cars and it's made me curious...

Is there a defect with the mechanism?
-No there is not

1). The Sift IS failing to indicate additional pages, I've noticed this quite a bit lately.
-No thats not true. It does but the last page is not a page number but an arrow thingy.

2). I've also noticed that the sift pages can't decide if they want to use the new format or the old one. I seem to get them both randomly on each page - no pattern that I've noticed. This tends to confuse how we are seeing things.
-NO, it works as intended. New format when viewing individual videos. All other pages old style. Also you can opt out of new format if you would like(bottom of the page)

3). The information that used to be at the bottom of the page, which indicated who has up-voted or down-voted is missing. We can no longer tell who has voted in which direction.
-Newt answered above.

EDIT: I answered my own question about this. Apparently "US Citizens Living Abroad" is one of the exemptions to the mandate/rule. So nevermind the below.

As a US citizen living outside the US, one thing that concerns me is the health care / insurance mandate and penalties.

I live in Thailand, and have health insurance through the nearly-universal Thai healthcare system because I have a job that pays in to it. On top of that, I have insurance through a private insurer based in the UK.

The Thai system is really good. A few years ago, I had something like 5 episodes of tonsillitis in one year, and my doc told me that I should consider getting a tonsillectomy. I opted to go for it, and the Thai govt. insurance paid for the entire operation except for about $30 that I had to pay myself because I opted to stay in a private, air conditioned room for a recovery night instead of the busy public ward. Other than that, it cost me absolutely nothing.

The private insurer I have is for any travel outside Thailand and backup purposes; it has a higher max payout and would allow for more optional treatments to major things. I haven't made any claims against it so far, but it is a nice safety net. The only downside to it is that it works "around the world*" (*except in the US, because that system is so f*&^ed up they wash their hands of it). So, on the rare occasions where I make a trip back home to the US, I'm technically uninsured.

Signing up for Obamacare would be pretty pointless for me. I've been in Thailand for about 10 years, and during that time I've been back to the US only twice for a sum total of about a month and a half. But technically, it seems that I may be subject to penalties since I don't have any US insurance coverage. No idea if there are exceptions for expats or not.

On the top header where it says your sift name. Put your mouse on your name and a drop down menu will reveal itself. You can edit there. If you need more help let me know

Also at the bottom of the page you can opt out of the new design

Here's a vote for daylight saving time (with bi-yearly switch) from the Netherlands (mentioning the latitude is important I guess):

With all year standard time, it would become light at 3:30 in the morning in June (with accompanying waking bird sounds). How many extra deaths would that get from sleepy car drivers.

With all year daylight savings (which I would opt for if forced to choose, long evenings FTW indeed), in December it would only get light at 10:00 am...

The people most common complaint against the switch is that people who like it just have to change their daily routine on their own, but that's not really possible with standard work, shop opening etc. hours.

Sorry to bug you again ...

Don't know if this is just me or not ... with the new permalink page, when viewing one that has a dead video (such as this example) I just get a big blank grey screen where the video should be, which makes me think maybe the page isn't loading properly or something. If I opt out of the beta, then I see the YouTube player window and if I press play I get the message "this video does not exist".

Is there anyway with the beta version to better convey that you're seeing a dead video and not a possible browser error?

Thanks Keep up the good work!!

I opted back in and did a "standard sift watching session" for me of a few videos.

This time I forced myself to actually look for things that I noticed weren't in the places that I was expecting.

Some more thoughts:

I tried to figure out where to see "who voted for this video", currently under the comment entry box. I can't find that information in beta UI. I must admit that the current location isn't particularly logical, but I know to look for it there and I can't find it at all in the beta.


The "sidebar" content changed from Sift of the Week / Comment of the Moment / Leaderboard List (of whatever section you are currently in; Top New Videos, Top Videos Expiring Soon, etc.) to Suggested Videos and Related Videos. I think the old sidebar content was more likely to be relevant to what I want.

I get that that stuff has been moved into the header menus, but in my opinion it is harder to access there:
For beta - mouse to Watch button/menu, hover, mouse to relevant section like Top New Videos, mouse to which one I want
Old - mouse to what I want in the sidebar, which is probably already visible but not taking up TOO much screen real estate, and if it isn't visible it is a quick mousewheel jump away

In the meantime, the new sidebar makes stuff that I personally don't care about at all BIGGER. I don't understand what/who suggests the "Suggested Videos" and by what criteria they are deemed to be of interest to me, and "Relevant Videos" are mostly relevant in a long-timescale sense (ie., stuff from a single video series, containing same/similar tags, etc.) where on the sift a big part of the appeal is to vote on what is hot NOW. But those two things take up more space than the old sidebar that was filled with stuff that I *did* care about; they are now big thumbnails with a title underneath plus lots of spacing between list items compared to small thumbnail with title *beside* and very minimal extra padding/spacing between list items. So, the new sidebar has stuff I don't want to see, and spaces it out so that I have to scroll the mousewheel a lot more to get through it (even though it has fewer total list items than before!).


A big part of my personal enjoyment and engagement with the sift is video comments. I'm not a big fan of the beta font for comments, but I think I could potentially get used to it. But more important than the font is that it seems like each comment gets less total screen real estate, and there is more padding/space between each comment AND the sidebar.

I'd like to see that spacing/pad cut down to more like the old style. Beyond that, I figure it is safe to assume that you're not interested in bringing the old sidebar content back (Sift of the Week / Comment of the Moment / Top X Videos) from its beta location in the menubar. Assuming that that will stay there, I'd *much* rather see comment boxes that take up the majority of the page width with NO sidebar. Old sidebar and old style comments would be my personal choice, but assuming that isn't going to happen, I just feel like the beta sidebar is unnecessary and massively oversized / overspaced.


So, I gave it another shot ... back to opting out for me for now.

Basically I'll throw in my opinion, which is really just to parrot someone else's... I'm guessing me and @eric3579 have fairly close to the same layout--screen wise (size or perspective), resolution wise, and so on. Since I have the same issues and concerns eric has (like channels and other "inclusions" a video belongs in). Right now it is harder to find some of the details for the videos posted--or they need to be in a more simpler and easier to access spot (but, as noted--this may be due to a size/resolution issue; since I don't know if everything scales correctly yet); which makes me hesitant to make any changes to any videos. But, as noted (and as I found out later on) the opt-in opt-out buttons are found nearby, allowing me to figure out what I need to, until we decide on a fully finished product.

One question I might ask is, does the new site--as of right now--already scale correctly no matter what resolution you are at? So if you go WAY up into the "4K" range, will the site look really bizarre (I know that there will already be far more "space"; but, is it setup right now to arrange all the site items to display in their correct positions)? Inversely, for a long time cellphones were forcing site admins to create a mobile edition of their website(s); but, thanks to smartphones (plus their fast CPUs, and 1080p screens) this is being phased out.

Keep chomping at the bit @lucky760; I'm sure with our feedback and your willingness to get this finished so quickly will indeed help us get more than likely a bit of what we all want out of this (making the community as a whole basically happy with the finished product; and as mentioned, hopefully helping newer users). Keep up the good job.

The opt in and opt out buttons, easily accessible on each page, are extremely helpful for comparison and makes me much more willing to view, and attempt to more use/explore the new design. Good call Lucky

I happened to click on "top users", and found that only the first entry on each page is displayed, whether logged in or out, but only if you've opted in to v6 beta.

I assume that's something to do with these changes?

@lucky760 - further to the message I sent you, more testing has revealed that if I try and play any video from LiveLeak while opted in, I get the message "File not found or deleted!", but if I opt out it behaves and plays as normal

Beta Opt In right of the video title in the old format.

How do we submit videos on the redesigned video web pages? Also, where are the channels? Did I miss them? For now, I opt out (how do I opt back in for later?)!

@blackfox42 - Fixed that link to opt back in, so it should work for you now.

@Baristan - That sounds good in theory (and I thought so in the distant past), but in practice it makes the site effectively unusable.

@eric3579 - I know there are lots of things you (and others) were bound to have issues with. As I explained in my dissertation, that's part of the point of doing this, to hear from you all what's wrong or what's missing or what should change. For example, being unable to click a menu tab to actually go somewhere can be fixed by adding a link in the sub-menu (or something).

To you and @newtboy, a big point about all the new header content is that you can now see all that information and even more all in that one area without searching all over the page for it.

Good feedback about the font. I've changed it and I think it's much better.

The video voters and who's viewing are currently excluded, but (yet again), that's part of the point of this beta test. If everyone feels they need to be added back in, then we (meaning dag and myself or us all as a community) can consider how we should include those things. (If/when they're added back in, it'll only be for logged-in members.)

@newtboy - Not everything everyone is noticing is intended to be that way. The indication that you voted on a comment wasn't supposed to be missing. And it's fixed now.

The opt out link is in the footer of the new video page, however to you and everyone else, I'd request and encourage that you stick with the beta test for a couple of days if you can bear it to at the very least try to help us with more, fuller feedback once you've become a little more accustomed to the changes.

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone. Keep it coming.