>> ^flechette:

All I can say is, I want to like football (or soccer, whatever it is) more than I do, but I just can't fathom watching something for half an hour before someone scores. To be fair, I think baseball is more boring to watch, but for a different reason.


Ah, this is the beauty in football. Every match is different, you'll see different approaches, different styles, different attitudes, individual skill, teamwork. It's not just about scoring goals.

But it's not easy. It's a game of skill and if you're good or the opposition is very bad then you'll score lots. Or you'll enjoy one of those humdingers where either side might score at any time.

But often we're forced to endure turgid rubbish, it just happens sometimes, but the ultimate redemption is when finally, finally someone scores a goal. It's a satisfying release of energy and there is honestly nothing much like it even if your team has been playing like utter twits.

It is really, as much about the journey as the destination.

Hopefully it's a nice ride (I'd pay good money to see a mazey Messi dribble where he failed to score, rather than someone bundle one in) but sometimes it can be perversely enjoyable to see a bad team scrape a result.

On the other hand, going back to a U.S sport like basketball I see no particular thrill from seeing two sides trade baskets ad-infintum. It's just a relentless predictable, progression to the end at which point someone wins and players can crow about their "stats". I always loved playing basketball but it doesn't work for me as a spectator sport.

Meanwhile I love Football (American Football as we Brits tend to call it). That has more in common with soccer than any other U.S sport IMO. Players are still far too in thrall to coaches but it remains a magnificent spectacle.

Baseball I don't really get - but I respect it's traditions and iconic status in sport.

I thought it strange that the cop is touching Zimmerman without gloves on. You would think he'd have blood on him and the cop would not want that on his hands. On the red coat you wouldn't think it would show up on camera, but that grey shirt it would. So either he had no blood on his shirt and the jacket closed, and that cop stuck his hand in blood while checking him.......or there's no blood on him at all.

You do see the cop wipe his hand on his pants, but that's after he checks Zimmerman's back, which would be wet or have dirt on it if he was in the grass.

I see no bandages, nothing in his nose to stem blood flow from a broken nose. There is a point in the video where the light catches the crown of his head and you can see a line that may be indicative of a scrape or abrasion, but he would have a bandage if it were bad. The paramedics had seen him by this point, and he chose not to go to the hospital.

If I had just been brutally attacked, I'd want to go to the hospital and not the police station. Since the head beating was supposed to be bad, you don't know what the hell may have happened.....unless he was knocked crazy and was loopy from the beating. Which they would have made him go to the hospital at that point.

I also find it strange that they didn't take his clothes.


And for those whom are following the case, there's news out now that the police wanted to get an arrest warrant for manslaughter for Zimmerman, but were denied by the Attorney General. The expert the news interviewed said it was unusual, but not unheard of for an AG to not take police recommendation. That AG has recused himself from the case and they've put someone else in charge of the decisions now.

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/46883285/#46883285 This is a video where they discuss this.

I suspect Joe Oliver was let into the press to make Zimmerman look better, failed. So now Zimmerman's father has come into the picture realizing it looks bad.

>> ^robbersdog49:

>> ^Fletch:
Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? Especially with no communication with whoever is pulling you. Just one scrape into coral can mess you up badly. And when you're bleeding, you aren't just "flying underwater" any more. You're bait.

Where the hell does this end? Maybe people should be allowed to take responsibility for themselves and not be nannied at every turn.


Get on my knee you need a spanking!

>> ^robbersdog49:

>> ^Fletch:
Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? Especially with no communication with whoever is pulling you. Just one scrape into coral can mess you up badly. And when you're bleeding, you aren't just "flying underwater" any more. You're bait.

Where the hell does this end? Maybe people should be allowed to take responsibility for themselves and not be nannied at every turn.


Uuuh, yeah... ok,

That's what I'm trying to do, dipshit... be you're fucking nanny.

>> ^Fletch:

Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? Especially with no communication with whoever is pulling you. Just one scrape into coral can mess you up badly. And when you're bleeding, you aren't just "flying underwater" any more. You're bait.


Where the hell does this end? Maybe people should be allowed to take responsibility for themselves and not be nannied at every turn.

>> ^Fletch:

Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? Especially with no communication with whoever is pulling you. Just one scrape into coral can mess you up badly. And when you're bleeding, you aren't just "flying underwater" any more. You're bait. <img class="smiley" src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/smile.gif">


Might be just me, but it looks like the sort of thing, that when you're speeding toward that big hunk of coral, you would... oh I don't know... maybe... LET GO???

Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? Especially with no communication with whoever is pulling you. Just one scrape into coral can mess you up badly. And when you're bleeding, you aren't just "flying underwater" any more. You're bait.

You know... This is completely politically incorrect, but...

The boomers raped the economy, created one of the biggest world market crashes in history, were in power, both in elected office and by holding the balance of power in votes during the greatest shift between rich and poor (in the direction of the rich) in recent history and they racked up the biggest debt in history, leaving it to future generations to pay back.

In short, they've screwed the world for the rest of us.

Now they want billions of dollars for research and treatment so they can hold on for longer in their old-age homes and wipe out the inheritance?

Seriously? While young couples scrape to take care of their kids, and dream that one day, maybe they'll be able to afford higher education, if some of this crap gets sorted out.

I say screw 'em.

Let their brains rot. We shouldn't be spending another dime on them.

Of course they still vote in massive numbers, so that will never happen. They'd rather have children starving in the streets than suffer the slightest discomfort. They'll just rack up another few billion on the deficit for everyone left behind to pay off. What do they care? By the time anyone in power develops the backbone to actually DO something about the situation they'll be long dead.

For a vehicle with adequate clearance, I would wager that the smoothest way to traverse these (other than swerving into the other lane or otherwise going around them) might very well be to have a mild amount of speed built up -- something like 10-15 MPH or more. Remember the episode of Mythbusters where they drove on a washboard road at varying speeds, and the higher speeds were generally smoother?

Of course, you'd have to have enough play and range in the suspension to have that apply here, and they might just be too tall for the great majority of vehicles. But if that is the case, then they would also be presenting high-center and front/rear bumper scrape problems to a whole bunch of standard vehicles. If that is the case, I think a little civil disobedience (or disobedience to the housing complex or whatever entity installed them) might be in order involving a few sledgehammers and shovels...

This stuff: http://videosift.com/talk/Time-to-Trim-the-Interface?loadcomm=1#comment-1390141

I would like to see comment formatting done with simple markup rather than HTML. It would make trimming down or breaking up quotes easier and would be much easier in general for less technical users.

I was against threaded comments when it was brought up a while back because we rarely got that many comments on a video. Now I'm thinking it's justified or will be in the near future.

I would like the floating/pinned comment box idea to be polished. At the very least make the setting sticky. Even better if it was a pop-out deal like the IM function.

We don't need *beg or *requeue anymore, we've got *promote. Adjust the power point cap so everyone can use it, if necessary. Please don't make us requeue our videos every 8 hours to keep them alive. Let masochists like @Sarzy get their abuse elsewhere.

If we must continue down the road to MMOVideoSift, please take extra care not to work against quality with new features. I'm still convinced that this has been a big part of the dip in variety over the years.

Give us a "page scraper". Let us submit any URL, like we can do with youtube, and let @siftbot scrape the page for valid embeds, presenting us with a list to choose from. Think of it the same way you pick a thumbnail when you share a link on Facebook.

Make tags show on-hover so as not to give away spoilers (without requiring us to leave valuable tags out).

How about some super tooltips? http://i.imgur.com/H4c7q.png

Here's some small tweaks that I think would be nice.

On the advanced search screen, the options for Search Type should be "Videos", "SiftTalk", "Comments", and "Blogs". In other words, take "Search" out of the text. That way you can tab into the field, press V, S, C or B and keep on tabbing.

Status doesn't have enough options to warrant the awful multi-selector widget. Just give us some checkboxes.

It looks to me that they're using the garden hose to prevent scraping their bungee lines against the concrete; there's bungee cord running through all that hosing, so they're not exactly as insane as you might have thought.

Still a cool sight, considering the industrial building.

>> ^garmachi:

>> ^westy:
I would say something like the tour de France would be miles harder in terms of general physical requirements and overall strain it puts on the body.
this looks like good fun if its the sort of thing you enjoy though.

The TDF requires that you pedal for hours and hours and hours...
The Tough Mudder requires that you run, and jump, and climb, and crawl, and strain, and struggle, and freeze, and overheat, and breathe, and hold your breath, and take electric shocks, and smash your ribs against hard surfaces, and scrape your elbows, and scrape your knees, and eat sand, and overcome your fear of heights and overcome your fear of tight places, and overcome your fear of fear and... and... and...
(Yes, speaking from experience.)


yah its a different sort of sport and in the end if you are doing something against other people you are going to be pushed to your limmit.

I was just getting at the aspect of overall physical drain if you had a strong man event that lasted 2 months then it would be in the same catagory as the TDR , in the end riders in the TDR have to pace themselfs to do the full race if you had a TDR that lasted one day then they would pace themselfs to that, same with this strong man event i guess part of the skill is knowing your energy recources and using them properly.

>> ^westy:

I would say something like the tour de France would be miles harder in terms of general physical requirements and overall strain it puts on the body.
this looks like good fun if its the sort of thing you enjoy though.


The TDF requires that you pedal for hours and hours and hours...

The Tough Mudder requires that you run, and jump, and climb, and crawl, and strain, and struggle, and freeze, and overheat, and breathe, and hold your breath, and take electric shocks, and smash your ribs against hard surfaces, and scrape your elbows, and scrape your knees, and eat sand, and overcome your fear of heights and overcome your fear of tight places, and overcome your fear of fear and... and... and...

(Yes, speaking from experience.)

There couldn't be a corrupt local gov't this bad just racking up overtime hours by plowing imaginary snow. All I can think is that they are doing the router before 2 feet of snow to check for any obstructions or areas that are too narrow or might damage the plow or property.

The other thought is that they might have put accurate GPS trackers on them and they are mapping out the streets for ability to replay the route in the snow. But in reality I can understand why they are ruining the plows and concrete scraping them up.

They're not just focusing on income inequality or ownership of resources. Just because one clip focuses on it doesn't mean that the entire movement is fixated on one stat. There are a lot of stats the left are focused on, such as unemployment to name another. And it's not a stupid statistic to focus on. If there is too much stratification of wealth, and there is such a thing, then what other statistic would illustrate that it's gotten out of hand?! For the good of the economy, for everyone across the income range, if the rich possess too much wealth, there won't be enough people with money to purchase goods and services being produced. This hasn't a thing to do with the little orphans you helped in Mexico.

Is it being trumped to the point it's being played like an emotional dagger instead of being analyzed rationally? Of course. But come on, if you're gonna sit there and say that only the left is guilty of that, then you're being partisan. How is raising the marginal tax rate on the super rich a few percentage points "communist" or even "socialist" on an objective scale? Or even using those words to elicit a knee jerk reaction by people to say it's bad just because of the word instead of rationally discussing the policy? Or when anyone suggests raising taxes on the rich, it's automatically "class warfare"? Or you using derogatory terms like "NeoProgLibNaziCommunistSocialist" blah? Give me a break.

And yes, some wealth stratification is good. You want the people who work hard or are more talented to have more income. It keeps incentives in the system. I have no problem with that. But you're pretending that the income gap between super rich and poor is static, which misses the entire point. It's not static. It fluctuates. We're too the point now where it's getting absurd to the point that it's hurting the economy. You're also pretending that the stats only illustrate the gap between the super-rich and the poor, and that's not the case. The stats are showing the gap between the rich and everyone else, including middle class, which is being decimated.

You have very little patience when you hear a college-age son's of yuppies whining about they only earn $30K/yr for their liberal art major degree? What about me, the son of a solid middle class family who got one of those horrible liberal art degrees (Master's in Education, Bachelor's in History, Minor in International Studies) and got a "fake job" as a history teacher in a public school? Are you kidding me with this? (BTW, what a good person you are to say whose jobs are of value and whose aren't!) What I did for a living for four years combined produced less value than a commodities trader did in one year, whose job is essentially speculation that artificially drives up prices on the things they trade? You don't find something extremely absurd about that?

Let's do the math. At those salaries, a public school teacher is producing less than 10% of the value of what a commodities trader does, and a commodities trader isn't even required to have a college degree, and we're not even including the better benefits and bonuses. I'm not naive enough to think a public school teacher would ever be paid that well, but when the gap is getting wider, and wider, and wider, and you're seeing a public school teacher's benefits getting reduced, particularly retirement, I'm sorry, but something is horribly wrong here. The market is failing to address a basic societal problem. I'm not advocating a state controlled economy (aka Communism) to even it out. I'm advocating the gov't make it moderately more equal by raising the rich's taxes, and ease up on the poor and middle class. Tax capital gains like it's income, subject to the same brackets, etc.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Or is that a typo for "ProgLibDytes"
As with "neolibs" it is a word of my own creation which I used to describe the crazed, hardcore, insane left-wing liberal denizens of the world. Neolib was my default for a long time, but lately the vitriol of the left has gotten so prone to hate, anger, and insanity that I have moved to defaulting with "ProgLibDyte" to describe them. It is perfect because it is so close to "Troglidyte" (cave dweller) and covers "Progressives" and "Liberals" together. ProgLibDytes. Cave dwelling political liberals and progressives. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Which one should we obsess over?
How about not picking just one, and looking at all of them - or at least a LOT of them? Regardless, examining only the gap between the ultra-rich and the poor is about one of the stupidest metrics one could examine when it comes to economics. It means absolutely nothing in terms of either real income, economic trending, or any other meaningful metric. Such a myopic stat serves only one purpose, and that is to angry up the blood of the lower class.
There are always going to be really rich people who have so much money that they could eat gold bricks and crap diamonds. These guys are always going to exist in the same nation as people so poor they scrape the very bottom of the economic barrel. The difference between the top 0.1% and the bottom 5% is utterly meaningless. It is pure nonsense to get mad about the difference between Bill Gates and the guy who pumps gas. It tells nothing about anything.
I personally donate my time to help the poor. I've helped the poorest of the poor in US cities and I thought I knew what 'poor' was. Then I volunteered to help little towns in Mexico. When kids and widows weep in your arms just because you came to them with a few bags of cement to put a small concrete slab in thier one room dirt-shanty then you know you've hit the real thing.
In the US, even those who live in so-called 'poverty' have cars, TVs, homes, cable, internet, clothes, and money to spend at McDonalds on a lark. So I have very little patience when I hear college-age son's-of-yuppies whining about the fact that they only earn $30K a year (with benefits) for thier liberal-art's major compared to Wall-Street guys (who are actually performing a real job) earning 300K plus cash bonuses. Boo-freaking-hoo.