Too lazy to read even the first sentence of a relatively short post sufficiently closely to understand what it actually said. Too cowardly to engage with even slightly foreign ideas.

Dullwitted combative asshole proves what everyone else already knew - that municipal traffic administration is so mindnumbingly dull that you can get out of well-deserved consequences if you just badger the authorities sufficiently.

The 27b/6 spider is so much better: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html

FWIW, I think it is sincere. Varoufakis has two points. 1) Austerity is contractionary. Forcing Greece to raise taxes, cut pensions and run escalating fiscal surpluses makes it impossible for Greece ever to grow its economy sufficiently to pay off its debt. (The debt is likely unpayable in any case, but Greece is being subject to needless suffering and endless debt peonage because Schaeuble and the lenders refuse to cede any ground.) 2) It's not possible for every country to emulate Germany and run a trade surplus, because one country's surplus is another's deficit. If you expect other countries to buy more from you than you buy from them, the money has to come from somewhere. In other words, if it's your policy to run a trade surplus then you will have to finance your trade partners somehow.

Pure quality by John, as usual.

There are a few points I'd like to add, in order of appearance.

5:10 – Greek default or Grexit could be manageable by the rest of the EZ, economically. Italy looks a bit shaky and Spain still looks like shit, so things could spiral out of control, but chances would be better now than they were in, say, 2010.

However, Grexit would be a political nightmare. EZ membership is supposed to be irreversible, so Grexit would reduce the Euro from a common currency to a peg when viewed from the outside. That's open season on the rest of the PIIGS. If Greek then rebounds, other people might very well decide to give Germany the finger and leave as well. If Greece fails, you have a NATO member turn into a failed state, which not only gives NATO the shivers, but also buries any notion of solidarity within the EU. This union survives because of the promises it makes, which include increasing standards of living and solidarity among different peoples. Without it, we're left with... what exactly?

And nevermind the humanitarian catastrophe taking part in Greece. We've conditioned ourselves to block out the pain and suffering of people in Africa. We even manage to shrug at the cesspool of corruption that is Kosovo. But if we do that to Greece as well, what little moral authority Europe might still have left would be gone then.

5:32 – The last payment Greece received was in August, long before Syriza took over. The previous government was in disagreement with the Troika and therefore transfers were frozen.

5:57 – Troika payments are required to service previous debt obligations. They are separate from what the Greek banks require to maintain their liquidity. That would be Emergency Liquidiy Assistance (ELA) from the ECB, which is a different thing entirely, even though it comes from a member of the Troika.

The ECB is bound by law to maintain and ensure the stability of the banking system(s) within the EZ. If a bank runs into liquidity problems, support is provided by the national bank of the respective country, which funnels funds from the ECB to the troubled bank. That's ELA, and a limit on ELA is a limit on the amount of funds that banks can draw from through this process. If an illiquid bank is cut off from ELA, it goes belly up. Bad idea.

Some argue that the ECB should not provide ELA to those Greek banks anymore, since they are insolvent, and ECB rules forbid ELA to insolvent banks. But as Varoufakis said, even the ECB's own Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) department, which is the new banking oversight, declares the four large Greek banks to be solvent. So there is no reason for the ECB to cut ELA to Greek banks. It's all political, and the ECB is designed to be outside of politics. That's also a reason why its membership in the Troika is so controversial.

The political argument for cutting off ELA is that Germany et al. are on the hook for the total amount should Greece itself go belly up. Somewhere along the line, someone made the glorious decision to install the ECB as a currency issuer without providing it with the attributes of a regular currency issuer. If the Bank of Japan or the Bank of England racks up losses, noone cares. They issue their own currency, they cannot go bankrupt, whatever debt they have in their books is irrelevant, for this discussion anyways. But the ECB has to balance its books, it has to receive funds from its members to balance losses, and in proportion to their economic size.

They made sure that politicians can scare the demos by pointing out how they have to foot the bill for this shit, even though it's the one entity where debt truly doesn't matter at all.

By the way, the funds that Greece is hoping to acquire are meant, primarily, for two purposes: making debt payments and to provide financial room to convert ECB(?) debt into EFSF debt (4% interest down to 1%). That's all. No spending.

6:54 – "Printing" money is generating demand out of thin air. There is a shortage of demand throughout the entire continent. So yeah, if the folks at the ECB could type in a few numbers, that would be swell.

Even Germany has a shortage of demand. We are merely hiding it behind the €200b+ of demand that we steal from other countries, i.e. our current account surplus. But the infrastructure and investment spending over here is at all time lows. We'd need an additional €200b+ just to get the infrastructure back to the state it was in a decade ago.

There is no productivity growth in Europe. The UK actually lost a lot of productivity by its introduction of zero hour jobs and other forms of slavery. Without sufficient demand, there is no need to improve production capacities – they can't even sell what they could produce right now.

You are required to do whatever you safely can if you find yourself blocking the emergency vehicle.

In this case, moving 10 feet forward and to the curb would have been sufficient.

...and yes, this person was most likely clueless rather than arrogant.

You seem to have clearly missed the point and are obviously trying to just push an agenda rather than objectively look at the situation. The first thing you can think of is a race issue? Stop trolling. The officer in the video I linked showed restraint, attempted to issue verbal directions to the person and a lack of action got him killed. The same could have happened to the officer in this sift. How do you know that man was not going to start grappling with the officer? Then what? The man steals the officers side arm and kills him? The man pulls out a hidden weapon and kills the officer? Maybe you need another example?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P5mB6grzf4

The officer in this sift told the guy to stop advancing towards him. The guy repeatedly ignored the officers commands. The officer has no idea what the suspect is capable of and felt sufficiently threatened to shoot considering what the suspect could be capable of. What do you think he was doing? Going in for a hug? This was either suicide by cop, or he was trying to get in close enough to do something.

Its a matter of chicken vs egg. They don't need huge military expenditures because security is provided by the US. But if they and all their neighbors had to provide sufficient defense, mostly against the people who are most likely to invade them (i.e. their neighbors), you get an arms race like you have with India/Pakistan, North/South Korea, Iran/Saudi Arabia. The indirect savings and the refocusing of capital and human resources away from the military in all of these allies countries makes the world a much safer place, since war no longer becomes the go to solution for states to resolve differences.

US bases do fall into 2 categories. Allies who don't want to get invaded again, and enemies who lost and became allies. As for Kuwait, that didn't work out well for Iraq, and Kuwait is still independent and an ally. Ukraine has no US bases, Russia would go ballistic if there were (surprisingly appropriate use of the word). ISIS is the anomaly, but right now you can put that down to the fact that Obama really, really doesn't want to put US troops on the ground (think he would hesitate if ISIS invaded England or Australia for example?), and that Iraq's military is trying to handle this as much as possible on their own and clearly having trouble.

I don't know if we need all 800 bases currently or if some are just vestigial. I'm not qualified to give an opinion on the necessity of them, though

We are a known quantity on many interstellar maps if the evolutionary paradigm is true. It wouldn't take that long for a sufficiently advanced civilization to locate every planet that has life on it, especially if they could use inter-dimensional travel. They could automate everything using robotics, or by some other means unknown to us. Perhaps they could even instantly colonize those planets using sentient robots.

The point is that we are a resource to be exploited and after an estimated 15 billion years of the Universe existing, according to the secular narrative, there should be many civilizations out there capable of doing just that. That we haven't been contacted or seen any activity at all is more than curious; it is dramatic evidence that we are in fact alone in the cosmos.

You are quite right @MilkmanDan - after seven random shuffles the chances of the top card staying at the top the whole time would be 1/128, which should be sufficient - it would probably sink down a bit sooner, and thus be distributed evenly throughout the deck when you shuffle it that many times. The top card and bottom cards each have a 1/2 chance of staying where they are after a single riffle shuffle.
And I do have a quite decent riffle shuffle; I just had a silly math brain fart.
But hey - what would the sift be if everyone thought things thoroughly over before posting?

I disagree with the insinuation that that is intuitive...

I think to answer @Zawash 's concerns, the seven riffle shuffles is probably close to the "sweet spot" because even a card on the very bottom or very top will likely move at least 1-2 places away from those extreme positions (top or bottom) in a single shuffle. Then, on the second shuffle, it is likely to move even further -- the probable "distance moved" is even higher and goes up rapidly away from the extreme edges. By the time that you've riffle shuffled 7 times, it should easily have shifted far enough away from either extreme end to be sufficiently "random".

Sorta like the old elementary school math question of would you rather have a million dollars NOW, or one penny today and then double that amount each day for the next month. We tend to underestimate the value of option 2 (over $5 million after 30 days, $10m+ for 31) because our brains are much better at grasping/predicting geometric growth than exponential growth.

That doesn't have anything to do with "inability to perform a proper riffle shuffle", just a very human tendency to underestimate exponential changes over a few iterations.

A couple of things:

I have verifiable evidence than Marijuana is both addictive and harmful

unless you've conducted double-blinded randomised controlled trials, you don't have evidence, you have anecdotes. Yeah, that sounds kinda dickish, but it's really important.

no one should dictate what plants others can eat

That's pretty ambiguous. First, we're not just talking about eating, we're talking about using in other ways too (in this case, smoking). Second, we already regulate other plants/products, like alcohol and tobacco.

For me, it's pretty simple. Marijuana does not cause sufficient harm as to warrant making it illegal. If an informed consenting adult chooses to smoke, drink or get stoned, that should be their choice. Obviously you shouldn't be drunk or stoned while driving or doing surgery or caring for kids, etc, but we already control for these cases with alcohol.

TBH, as much as I love beer, whiskey and wine, it's much harder to justify keeping alcohol legal than it is to keep marijuana illegal.

Curse phrases and insults in local dialects work quite well in this regard, at least for now.

In our case, they are sufficiently different from any major language to not be mere permutations of known words. Can't extract/derive regional insults in Eastphalian from any dictionary.

Diceware works as well, if you only need to remember 2-3 passphrases (for your Password Safe or whatever).

*wings
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Clarke)

The rack you see that the car drives over, the bridge itself that is - IS in fact a Cattle gate.

I will privledge you with learning about them here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_grid

A cattle grid – also known as a stock grid in British English; cattle guard in American English; vehicle pass, Texas gate, stock gap in the U.S. Southeast;[1] or a cattle stop in New Zealand English – is a type of obstacle used to prevent livestock, such as sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, or mules from passing along a road or railway which penetrates the fencing surrounding an enclosed piece of land. It consists of a depression in the road covered by a transverse grid of bars or tubes, normally made of metal and firmly fixed to the ground on either side of the depression, such that the gaps between them are wide enough for animals' legs to fall through, but sufficiently narrow not to impede a wheeled vehicle or human foot. This provides an effective barrier to animals without impeding wheeled vehicles, as the animals are reluctant to walk on the grates.