If, as you wrongly assume, I had only driven by them, you could get away with that statement. Unfortunately for you, I actually went TO the farms, stayed at them (slept there) and watched the workers at their jobs. (EDIT: I also have an angora goat rancher in my family...close enough to the same thing for this discussion.)
I stand by my previous statement 100 percent, with first hand knowledge about the topic.
This video is bullshit. You dragged it out of me. 99.95% of farms would never allow anything they showed to happen, and would report the abuse to the authorities after booting the offender off the farm.

Edit: and yes, fast sheerers can do even more than 30 an hour, but they know exactly how to handle the sheep with tiny pokes that put them into a seated, leaning position that makes it simple to control them painlessly and without any trauma in the least using their legs while sheering. In the two times I watched, over 150 sheep altogether, I saw 2 get slight cuts that were taken care of properly and with care. As was mentioned above, stressed animals make subpar wool, so it's in the rancher/farmers interest to keep them happy, so they do.

Males had their horns on the farms I went to and the one's I drove past....so you're wrong about that too.

The patent is clearly invalid.
It fails both the "prior art" and "non-obvious" aspects of a patent, in that cell phones existed prior to the creation of this patent and using voice communication over a device is not "non-obvious" (at least, not since the 1900s).

So pretty much yeah, "WHAT THE FUCK PATENT OFFICE?" indeed.

I don't get his "this is what happens when the government controls patents" rant. It's a bad patent, they happen, and patent reform is badly needed in the US, but if you're going to make a statement like that, you need to propose an alternative.

If you don't want the "government" controlling patents, you want ... what? Get rid of patents altogether? Allow a private company to control them?

My original statement was not a call to action, rather a historical highlight of how we kaboshed the opportunity to correct a bad deed. Seeing as this statement has devolved into an internet argument (my least favorite online activity), I am going to refrain from participating altogether. It's been fun Videosift.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the referendum is not legally binding, is it?

So what happens if the plebs vote in favor of Brexit?

Brussels dispatches men in finely-tailored suits to London, with goodies in their suitcases. Politicians become supremely motivated to convince the plebs of the wrongness of their views -- or they take their continental brethren as an example and just ignore the plebs altogether.

Jokes aside, it might very well be a vote to leave a sinking ship.

Anyone here really think the EU can survive the groupthink-induced fixation on austerity? Anyone seen the economics data coming from Italy lately? Greece? Spain? France? Anyone think Italy can be in a single currency with Germany under German control? Anyone think the EU can survive the fall of the Euro or the departure of significant member countries?

The way I see it, the EU cannot survive economic orthodoxy. Greece is dying, Italy is bleeding from every orifice. Even as a strong supporter of a unified Europe, including Russia(!), I cannot support the EU in its current form -- it's rotten to the core and dominated by groupthink.

And with all that in mind, the fact still remains that the EU kept the Tories somewhat in check in many regards. What a disheartening situation...

You do realize, don't you, that most modern western nations do not even come close to banning firearms altogether and still they don't come close to the US history of gun violence and mass shootings. I'm sure part of it is just cultural but mostly it's just due to a collection of rules and regulations that restrict what kind of weapons can be owned, how they can be used, and stringent checks on the people who want to acquire them. Check out this article for some info about gun ownership in Canada.

http://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/06/13/news/how-us-gun-laws-stack-canadas-wake-florida-shooting

Sorry, but I am still against banning people from owning weapons based on browser history. Our government has a very nebulous definition of what it takes to be considered a terrorist.

Look at the individual in this shooting, the FBI suspected him, he underwent three FBI interviews and an undercover probe where he admitted to having terrorist ties. The FBI removed him from the terrorist watch list after all of that. Yet you can get added to the watchlist by looking at ISIS affiliated websites.

So, if we did follow the recommendations of the President, the terrorist would still have been OFF the watch list and able to buy guns, while the person who went to an ISIS site might be unable to.

The point is that no specific regulation is going to stop these shootings, other than to ban firearms altogether. I'm not willing to sacrifice that right.

You do know that harvesting plants creates analogues of pain and fear right? You better stop eating altogether.

Chernobyl was a big cock-up allright, as was Fukushima, although that seems to have been less severe.

What would you say is the most dangerous form of energy production we have now? What about the safest? Look up "Deaths by terawatt hour", you might be surprised.

Even wind power has killed about 3 times as many people per TWH produced as nuclear, AFAIK mainly due to the amounts of steel and concrete used in constructing the plants, the production of which is relatively dangerous. Coal is on a different planet altogether, killing about 1500 times as many people per TWH as nuclear.

Even if you assume the total deaths from nuclear power production are underreported and underestimated by a factor of 10, that would still only put it on par with solar power in terms of people killed to produce energy.

Now, nuclear isn't a cureall solution to our energy problems. Even if we wanted to, we simply couldn't build enough power plants to cover all our energy needs with nuclear, you've got the storage issue, you've got the issue of plant placement, and in general relying on one technology alone is a bad idea.

Still. Coal. 1500 times as deadly. How many articles and videos have you seen on how scary coal is? What gives?

haha, this is awesome. I am so happy they were able to debut with Kami band (it looks like they have done away with the silly fake band they did live performances with now altogether) because they go perfect with babymetal.

It's funny how they look kinda lethargic on that set after seeing so many of their concerts where they are always running around.

And yea the audience totally dug it. Saddly there was no interview snipit.

Au contraire, a patriot would not enable the State by funding its superfluous wars, banksters, and State cronies.

A patriot would do what he can to starve the Leviathan monster, not continue to feed it.

A patriot would help productive fellow citizens avoid the State's plunder altogether.

A patriot doesn't define "fair share" by whatever random numbers some self-serving politician and other government kleptocrats come up with. And only victims of the "public" education would think that patriotism is somehow equated with the desire to subject fellow citizens to such arbitrary theft extorted through violence or the threat thereof.

Well, cheers for sticking with it anyway, I really appreciate it.

It's a one hour talk on the deficit in particular, and most of what she says is based on MMT principles that would add another 5 hours to her talk if she were to explain them. With neoclassical economics, you can sort of jump right in, given how they are taught at schools and regurgitated by talking heads and politicians, day in and day out. MMT runs contrary to many pieces of "common sense" and since you can't really give 10 hour talks everytime, this is what you end up with – bits and pieces that require previous knowledge.

I'd offer talks by other MMT proponents such as William Mitchell (UNSW), Randy Wray (UMKC) or Michael Hudson (UMKC), but they are even less comprehensible. Sorry. Eric Tymoigne provided a wonderful primer on banking over at NEP, but it's long and dry.

Since I'm significantly worse at explaining the basics of MMT, I'm not even going to try to "weave a narrative" and instead I'll just work my way through it, point by point.

@notarobot

"Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations."

You don't have to take on debt. The US as the sole legal issuer of the Dollar can always "print more". That's what the short Greenspan clip was all about. Of course, you don't actually print Federal Reserve Notes to pay for federal expenses. It's the digital age, after all.

If the federal government were to acquire, say, ten more KC-46 from Boeing, some minion at the Treasury would give some minion at the Fed a call and say "We need $2 billion, could you arrange the transfer?" The Fed minion then proceeds to debit $2B from the Treasury's account at the Fed (Treasury General Account, TGA) and credits $2B to Boeing's account at Bank X. Plain accounting.

If TGA runs negative, there are two options. The Treasury could sell bonds, take on new debt. Or it could monetise debt by selling those bonds straight to the Fed – think Overt Monetary Financing.

The second option is the interesting one: a swap of public debt for account credits. Any interest on this debt would be transfered straight back in the TGA. It's all left pocket, right pocket, really. Both the Fed and the Treasury are part of the consolidated government.

However, running a deficit amounts to a new injection of reserves. This puts a downward pressure on the overnight interest rate (Fed Funds Rate in the US, FFR) unless it is offset by an increase in outstanding debt by the Treasury (or a draw-down of the TT&Ls, but that's minor in this case). So the sale of t-bonds is not a neccessity, it's how the Treasury supports the Fed's monetary policy by raising the FFR. If the target FFR is 0%, there's no need for the Treasury to drain reserves by selling bonds.

Additionally, you might want to sell t-bonds to provide the private sector with the ability to earn interest on a safe asset (pension funds, etc). Treasury bonds are as solid as it gets, unlike municipal bonds of Detroit or stocks of Deutsche Bank.

To quote Randy Wray: "And, indeed, treasury securities really are nothing more than a saving account at the Fed that pay more interest than do reserve deposits (bank “checking accounts”) at the Fed."

Point is: for a government that uses its own sovereign, free-floating currency, it is a political decision to take on debt to finance its deficit, not an economic neccessity.

"Weimar Republic"

I'm rather glad that you went with Weimar Germany and not Zimbabwe, because I know a lot more about the former than the latter. The very, very short version: the economy of 1920's Germany was in ruins and its vastly reduced supply capacity couldn't match the increase in nominal spending. In an economy at maximum capacity, spending increases are a bad idea, especially if meant to pay reparations.

Let's try a longer version. Your point, I assume, is that an increase in the money supply leads to (hyper-)inflation. That's Quantity Theory of Monetary 101, MV=PY. Amount of money in circulation times velocity of circulation equals average prices times real output. However, QTM works on two assumptions that are quite... questionable.

First, it assumes full employment (max output, Y is constant). Or in other terms, an economy running at full capacity. Does anyone know any economy today that is running at full capacity? I don't. In fact, I was born in '83 and in my lifetime, we haven't had full employment in any major country. Some people refer to 3% unemployment as "full employment", even though 3% unemployment in the '60s would have been referred to as "mass unemployment".

Second, it assumes a constant velocity of circulation (V is constant). That's how many times a Dollar has been "used" over a year. However, velocity was proven to be rather volatile by countless studies.

If both Y and V are constant, any increase in the money supply M would mean an increase in prices P. The only way for an economy at full capacity to compensate for increased spending would be a rationing of said spending through higher prices. Inflation goes up when demand outpaces supply, right?

But like I said, neither Y nor V are constant, so the application of this theory in this form is misleading to say the least. There's a lot of slack in every economy in the world, especially the US economy. Any increase in purchases will be met by corporations with excess capacity. They will, generally speaking, increase their market share rather than hike prices. Monopolies might not, but that's a different issue altogether.

Again, the short version: additional spending leads to increased inflation only if it cannot be met with unused capacity. Only in an economy at or near full capacity will it lead to significant inflation. And even then, excess private demand can easily be curbed: taxation.

As for the Angry Birds analogy: yeah, I'm not a fan either. But all the other talks on this topic are even worse, unfortunatly. There's only a handful of MMT economists doing these kinds of public talks and I haven't yet spotted a Neil deGrasse Tyson among them, if you know what I mean.

Wait for it...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-17/priest-says-tim-minchin-song-hurting-abuse-survivors/7178606

"A Jesuit priest and human rights lawyer has accused Tim Minchin of endangering the integrity of the royal commission into sexual abuse after the comedian penned a song describing George Pell as "scum" and inviting the Cardinal to "come home and frickin' sue [me]".

Father Frank Brennan has warned that turning the commission into a "laughing stock" runs the risk of derailing proceedings.

"I don't think it's altogether helped by having songs about a key witness, calling him scum, and a buffoon, and a coward and that sort of thing before the commission does its task," Father Brennan told ABC's the Drum program.

"Because if we turn it into a laughing stock, then the big losers ... will be the victims themselves.""

Yeah, it's Minchin's song that's disturbing, not covering up child rape...

Monkey Island games were always wacky and difficult puzzles simply because it required you to think of objects in such ways as to break the fourth wall of the game itself. Guybrush and his infinite pocket space.

Also note, these are good games despite their frustrating bits. There were far more frustrations prior to the days where you are given dialog choices, when you were required to type in all of the dialog options using key words. Cough, cough, older Tex Murphy games and just about every text adventure from the dawn of home computers.

I loved those games, but many of them turned into puzzles that maybe one person in the family finally figured out after brute force trying thousands of combinations of objects with each other. I did that multiple times in the original Myst. I think there was one passcode that took close to 10,000 attempts. LOL!

Or how about games that had dead ends but didn't alert the player? Cough, cough Maniac Mansion. People could die, but as long as one person was left alive, the game never ended, even though only the bad endings are left. But it's not like modern games, some of the bad endings were themselves puzzles, and some deaths lead to a half good and half bad ending, like winning a lottery and then having a character abandon the plot altogether because he/she is rich and then THE END.

Those were the days. None of this FNAF shit -- which is really what deserves the infamy of terrible, convoluted puzzles...

Before video games became as massively popular as they are today, it wasn't always a requirement to make your game easily solved and you were not always provided with prompts for failure or success until many grueling hours, days, months, sometimes YEARS of random attempts. How many families bought a Rubik's Cube versus how many people solved it without cheating and learning the algorithms from another source?

Go back hundreds or thousands of years and it wasn't common for chess or go or xiangqi (the most popular game in the entire world TODAY) to come with rules at all, so only regions where national ruling boards were created will there be standardized rules; so, the truth, rules, patterns, and solves of games have traditionally been obfuscated and considered lifelong intellectual pursuits; and, it's only a recent, corporatized reimagining of games that has the requirement of providing your functional requirements and/or game rulings so as to maintain the value of its intellectual property. I mean, look at how Risk has evolved since the 1960s -- now there's a card that you can draw called a "Cease Fire" card which ends the game, making games much shorter and not epic at all. Easy to market, but old school players want the long stand offs -- I mean, if you're going to play Risk... TO THE BITTER END!

@Imagoamin

whoa whoa whoa...
did you think i was calling YOU a bed-wetter?
like as in actually using the pronoun "you" to direct my fictional interaction as representing an actual person,in this case YOU?

well,that certainly explains the tone of your reply.

if this is the case then i humbly and sincerely apologize.i was not referring to you at all,but rather a hypothetical and totally fictional interaction between a cry-baby and myself.

which you actually just made my point about humor,and in this case sarcastic humor.an over the top referencing of a certain hyper-sensitive group,in order to make my point about bad ideas,bad philosophy and poor judgment.

the sarcasm should have been obvious.
but alas...it appears it was not,and has been misconstrued as a personal attack.

moving on to your suey park rebuttal.
while the response to her initial call for justice can easily be seen as vile and grotesque (because it is) how does that take away from her inanity? her blatant disregard for nuance and context? or that she simply lacks the basic intelligence to discern satire from actual racist remarks?

it does not.

i think that most people would agree that the vile,disgusting and dehumanizing responses that suey park was subjected to,are to be condemned and yes...ridiculed..for the stupid and trollish behavior they represent.

you do not reply to stupid with even more stupid.

i dont really understand your defense of language,or better put,the imposing of certain words being stricken from the language altogether because some people find them offensive.

language is a fluid animal,and it is ever-changing.words and terms are dropped from the vocabulary or they morph into something altogether new.i have no skin in on the game in that regard.that is how language progresses,and yes,certain words can be offensive in certain contexts.so we should avoid using them,if only to be a decent human being.

my issue is with the FORCED attempts to re-integrate new words.to control what people say and attempt to bring real world consequences upon them,and then turn around and call it "justice".that is not justice! that is censorship!

maybe this will help a bit.
i view words and language as such:words are the means to express thoughts,feelings and imaginings.when we consider the complexity of our thoughts,feelings and imaginings then it becomes quite apparent that words will NEVER suffice to truly,and accurately,express those very human creations.

words will always be inadequate.

so when some people get it in their head that certain words are just too offensive to even utter.this narrows the field of expression that is already inadequate.(i am not talking about BLATANT,and archaic terms that are not only offensive,but are no longer relevant,and in existence still to simply disparage,insult or dehumanize).

now maybe some words no longer serve a valid purpose or are truly offensive and need to be re-examined,but the only way to reach that conclusion as a people..we must actually TALK to one another,and it is in this free market of ideas where bad ideas go to die.

but we have to able to conversate for that to happen.don't you agree?

now i am not going to bother addressing the rest of your comment,because your tone was just a reaction to where you presumed i was coming from.

and you did presume.

you seem like a decent sort,so i will just chalk your final response up to finding my comment offensive and replied in kind.

just know i wasnt heated,nor enraged.
and i certainly wasnt calling you a bed-wetter.
though the extreme end of social justice warriors are STILL humorless cunts.

If you're gonna fix it might as well leave off the first part of the title altogether , but that's just me.