I'm always unsure why people seem to have a problem with this. I suspect it's tort-reform-propaganda at work.

The amount of civil cases filed, aka access to the court system by the general public, should be considered an integral part of a healthy democracy.

"How often plaintiffs sue will also turn on the predictability
of the courts. Recall the standard model of litigation and settlement.

Litigation is more expensive than settlement, so disputants do best if they settle their quarrels out of court, all else equal. Suppose they know what a court will do. If so, they can settle their dispute by that expected litigated outcome and pocket the fees they would otherwise have paid their lawyers. The point is simple: if they know what a judge will do, they have no reason to ask him. Under this model, disputants primarily litigate rather than settle only when they each hold optimistic estimates of their prospects in court."

"Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacc o settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lo ttery and a money machine for a lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reput ation is unfounded. Ameri can courts seem to handle routine contract and to rt disputes as well as th eir peers in other wealthy democracies.

More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high numb er of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts. "

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Ramseyer_681.pdf

OK. I'm going to close this case as settled.

I saw earlier videos where they were chilling the cement and thought maybe that was a possibility also.

That settles it. It was the price that went through the roof.

This school stands out because of it's close proximity to a number of dressage clubs. Students into that sort of thing have to deal with booking flights for their horses so they have time to get settled into their new stables before the school year starts.

You are lucky. My fat fingers upvoted your comment when I wanted to downvote it. Could I get this issue settled @siftbot ?

Let's call them what they are.

Concentration camps.

The first stages of Ethnic Cleansing.

I'd like to point to the following article via Slate.com

"As one of the few journalists permitted to tour the government’s new internment camp, about 40 miles from the southern border, the New York Times correspondent tried to be scrupulously fair. Forcing civilians to live behind barbed wire and armed guards was surely inhumane, and there was little shelter from the blazing summer heat. But on the other hand, the barracks were “clean as a whistle.” Detainees lazed in the grass, played chess, and swam in a makeshift pool. There were even workshops for arts and crafts, where good work could earn an “extra allotment of bread.” True, there had been some clashes in the camp’s first days—and officials, the reporter noted, had not allowed him to visit the disciplinary cells. But all in all, the correspondent noted in his July 1933 article, life at Dachau, the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, had “settled into the organized routine of any penal institution.” "

Yes... he did it. If there were any doubts left, this should remove them. Trump officially put the United States on the same path as Nazi Germany.

What are you going to do about it?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

-Niemöller

Most of the statements in the video are true, but the numbers are off a little for the black unemployment rate. they haven't changed in any remarkable way, relative to other groups' unemployment rates. Black unemployed is still 2x higher then the rate of their white counterparts.

The pace of economic growth in america is still far lower then other emerging markets. One thing is for certain the american middle class is shrinking. While elsewhere around the world millions are climbing out of poverty and settling into their own country's version of the american dream.

If the G7 becomes the G6 by this time next year due to tit for tat tariffs we will be looking back at a DOW when it use to be higher then 25K reminiscing of the good old days.

It's not even as much that BLM disrupted the Pride parade, but that one of their demands was to ban the police from participating in the parade in the future. That's actively destroying years and years of hard fought progress to bring people together, and I can't fail to call that a bad thing. Again, I hope the US chapters are different in that much, and in many states there is also much more justified outrage against the police, which is very much unlike up here in Canada.

Canada's BLM held sit in protests demanding to meet with the chief of police and then repeatedly abandoned the meetings before they were supposed to happen. They then went on to condemn the police chief for having zero interest in protecting black civilians in Toronto. FYI, the chief of police of Toronto at the time was a black man.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mark-saunders-police-black-lives-matter-1.3587533

A BLM toronto co-founder railed at how our Prime Minister, who makes Barack Obama look like very right -leaning, is a white supremacist terrorist. Rhetoric that just means absolutely nothing and looks like little more than gross false victimhood.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/nzd4px/black-lives-matter-toronto-called-justin-trudeau-a-white-supremacist-terrorist

And then for good measure another co-founder squeezed in a quarter million dollar 'overtime' payment on their last week with the University of Toronto's Student Union. When the Student Union sued to get that money back as their was no documentation justifying paying out that kind of money all of a sudden the Student Union were racists. Eventually the case was settled with an undiclosed amount returned.

https://thevarsity.ca/2017/07/31/the-breakdown-the-utsus-lawsuit-against-former-executive-director-sandy-hudson/


BLM Toronto has done enough harm I am pretty comfortable saying I oppose them. The goal of making race relations better is of course good. Correcting injustices is of course good. I just don't see that coming from a group taking the actions I've seen, IMO they are actively making things worse, not better.

Again, that is specific to up here in Canada, I can't imagine that the US chapters can be as bad without it having been all over the media where I couldn't miss it. That said, up here I would likely have altogether missed everything but the parade as well save for having personally witnessed a just disgusting racist attack on someone at a an event. That led me to discover the attacker was tied in with BLM Toronto and suddenly seeing that as perhaps not an entirely isolated event .

from the yt description:

A Galton board, also known as a bean machine, quincunx or Galton box, was developed by Sir Francis Galton in the 1800 to demonstrate the central limit theorem.
In reality, this machine doesn’t exist. This video is a computer simulation of a “Galton board” with Blender, an open-source 3D computer graphics software.
Firstly, simulation was run with all white balls. When the objects all settled, they assigned each ball a color and ran the program again.

The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

She had such an amazing voice.

This doesn't tell the whole story though. In 2004, she sued Pink Floyd and EMI for songwriting royalties. Given that she was originally paid 30 pounds, I think it's fair to say that she deserved a cut of the squillions of dollars they made of this. They eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, but I hope it was at least 6 figures, because god damn, she NAILED it.

I didn't dislike the new Ghostbusters. Of course it couldn't surpass the original, but I felt the SNL casts were fun to watch on the big screen and they had fun making it. I wanted to turn my brain off and see something fun with my wife next to me and it delivered enough. Is it better than a free SNL episode on TV? No. But is it worth a ticket? Yes, to support these actresses & production, IMO. God knows we need more "fun rides" movies than the "another-month-another-Marvel/DC-superheroes-punch-fest" routine we've settled into for a couple of years now.

I don't mind the SJW aspects of any Hollywood production. I rarely get bothered by SJW-undertones, bad accents, historical/source material accuracy if the movie/TV is good/fun/meaningful. When I spot them, I can mentally compartmentalize and say "OK, moving on..." and focus on the plot, acting, theme and the storytelling. What I am bothered by, is when a production went way over-board to be stereotypical and predictable. Is Ocean 8 overselling SJW? I don't feel it. At least, I don't go look for it to criticize for the sake of it.

However, from the trailer, it doesn't have that Ocean 11 signature slickness to it, though. Love Sandra Bullock to death as I am, she's no replacement to Clooney in terms of magnetism here. And Cate & Anne being overly typical Cate & Anne... that I am sick of. But it is a crime-genre movie that I can get my wife to the theater to watch together because of the cast, this the original O11 & Godfather type of movies can't.

One of Jordan Peterson's claims, that the left has settled into higher ed and wants to shutdown debate in favor of indoctrination, is openly on display in the video. All 3 staff from Wilfrid Laurier state it as contrary to the university environment to present a debate on use of pronouns, or to allow the subject to be debated, save that student's are FIRST taught and thoroughly prepared to know which side of the debate is right before hand.

One of them even dismisses Peterson's claim that you can be convicted for failing to use the pronouns requested by others as baseless and contrary to all evidence. Mean while the Ontario human rights tribunal clearly states that is exactly the case. link below.

If you are find with higher education abandoning reasoned debate in favor of indoctrination then you don't need to care. Of course, here in Canada we aren't facing the same risk you American's are of finding the tables turning and the indoctrination landing in the hands of tea party or trump types.

Still, keeping free speech and reasoned debate a cornerstone of education is extremely important to maintaining a free society in my opinion and the video is a window into dark corners hell bent on shutting that down.

http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/questions-and-answers-about-gender-identity-and-pronouns

Do you recall the day you chose to be heterosexual? ;-)

While far from settled, there are indications sexual orientation may be genetically influenced at least, if not genetically determined.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/speculative-genetic-link-to-homosexuality-found

There's more conclusive evidence of a genetic component to transsexuality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexuality

But it does prioritize freedom of choice...the customers. Freedom to discriminate against others based on race, sex, sexuality, age, or religion in public business is a freedom most people don't want to foster.

I do agree, there are exceptions, like the one you mentioned. Forcing a women only spa area (or any other business where group nakedness is part of the service) to allow people with a penis to enter is touchy (pun intended)....far more than allowing them in a rest room....and above my pay grade, so I won't be opening a women only spa, at least until that's well settled.

Edit: no one is forced to participate in a lifestyle, period. First, creating an object used by someone who's 'lifestyle' differs from yours is not participating in it, second, you are not forced to remain in business. If you CHOOSE to have a public business you are required to operate it according to the law and not discriminate against customers based on race, age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, .... with very few specific exemptions.
Bigots got over having to make cakes for interracial couples, they'll get over this bigotry too.