@leebowman - Apologies. We never censor anyone on VideoSift, except for spam, and that is the case here. The system mistakenly detected your high level of activity immediately after sign-up as being from a possible spammer, and it tried to redact any potential spam.

All your comments have been restored and you've been white-listed so the system will never again mistake you for a spammer. Obviously, we encourage new users to participate, but being inundated by spammers over the years has required our automated spam-detection thresholds to be rather strict. (This kind of false positive has happened maybe twice before in eight years.)

From a former Comcast employee:

"If I was reviewing this guy's calls I'd agree that this is an example of going a little too hard at it, but here's the deal (and this is not saying they're doing the right thing, this is just how it works). First of all these guys have a low hourly rate. In the states I've worked in they start at about 10.50-12$/hr. The actual money that they make comes from their metrics for the month, which depends on the department they're in. In sales this is obvious: the more sales you make the better you do.

In retention, the more products you save per customer the better you do, and the more products you disconnect the worst you do (if a customer with a triple play disconnects, you get hit as losing every one of those lines of business, not just losing one customer). These guys fight tooth and nail to keep every customer because if they don't meet their numbers they don't get paid.

Comcast uses "gates" for their incentive pay, which means that if you fall below a certain threshold (which tend to be stretch goals in the first place) then instead of getting a reduced amount, you get 0$. Let's say that if you retain 85% of your customers or more (this means 85% of the lines of businesses that customers have when they talk to you, they still have after they talk to you), you get 100% of your payout—which might be 5-10$ per line of business. At 80% you might only get 75% of your payout, and at 75% you get nothing.

The CAEs (customer service reps) watch these numbers daily, and will fight tooth and nail to stay above the "I get nothing" number. This guy went too far; you're not supposed to flat out argue with them. But Comcast literally provides an incentive for this kind of behavior. It's the same reason people's bills are always fucked up: people stuffing them with things they don't need or in some cases don't even agree to."

http://np.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2arg1k/comcasts_customer_service_nightmare_is_painful_to/ciy33bx

I think it's mostly about adrenaline & dopamine highs . It's the same reason some people still manage to "enjoy" rollercoasters or skydiving and the like despite basically being frightened shitless by them.

All depends where your threshold for fear lies. Up to a point your physiology rewards you for what it interprets as taking a worthwhile risk, past that point it punishes you with an unpleasant response. e.g. you might get a good feeling from driving fairly fast, but if you push too far that good feeling turns to blood chilling terror.

The key is that everyone is tuned differently, some people get stressed out walking to the shops, others have to jump off buildings to get any sort of buzz. And naturally further to that we all interpret the level of risk differently in different situations. There appears to be quite the split between how people react to intense physical and cerebral stimuli.

Personally I don't really like being shit up by films like in the above, but then when I feel the back end sliding on a motorbike or drop a light aircraft into a stall I usually end up giggling like a little girl. (within reason)

As I understand it It's an evolutionary thing, we need some people who thrive on risk and go exploring and others to stay alive and raise the kids & naturally all of this is taken wildly out of context by our modern life styles. End result: some people watch scary films to feel alive and others have to race powerboats.

I'm sure there are other more emotional/metaphysical reasons too like our inherent fascinations with mortality, cruelty, paranormal etc. (and anything else we don't relate to in everyday life). But the fear "high" is definitely a big factor I think.

Pretty much my thoughts.

I wonder if socio-economically, being a South African group there's a higher threshold to top the reality of everyday life. Taking murders per capita as an example, it bests (perhaps not the best choice of words) even Mexico by a notable margin even with its drug violence:

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

Well, the issue is that the only way we measure contribution is with video posts and "quality comments". Both of those two tend to be very binary, in that either they give you a point or they don't.

I would like to see a more gradual approach to putting a value on a user - stack overflow uses an interesting system, which I'm sure videosift is also inspired by.

I think, for instance, comments should give more, but not if they're negative or 0 votes - as soon as they've been upvotes, they should give something - maybe even on a increasing scale: 1 vote, 1 point, 2 votes 3 points, 3 votes 6.5 points etc something in that vein. Yes, this would mean that each person would get many more points, but the star thresholds should be adjusted accordingly.

Same with videos - a video with 4 votes, should still give you something in the form of value; lets say it gives 10 times the amount as a comment. Then the video posters are still the most valuable players, but commenters aren't completely powerless.

Sift talk posts could also give something, using special powers in a positive way could give something.

Maybe a heated discussion in a single thread could trigger something; each award could also result in a certain amount of points.

I would make videosift much more of a game.

@RedSky - You aren't reading what I'm saying.

I'm talking about finding an equilibrium in which humanity can thrive economically, socially and environmentally.

I'm only saying that things like environmental damage, fracking, certain food production techniques, the current flavor of resource wars, and the fact that a massive proportion of our current population really can't feed itself are all evidence that the effort required to sustain current and future population levels doesn't fit my definition of finding balance.

The only point of no return I'm talking about is that at some point it will be essentially impossible to get to that place of balance that I favor. It's a nebulous concept for sure, but I do think it is relatively imminent and at the very least that we are heading in the wrong direction - especially in light of the notion proposed by this video where exponential growth can give you a false sense of security right up until just before you hit it.

I actually agree with you and think that earth could sustain an arbitrarily large population of say 20 billion or even more.

But we'd have to spend more of our time and efforts competing (sometimes violently) for the resources, we'd have to shape ever larger proportions of the natural world to our own narrow needs, we'd have to put up with a much less pleasant environment, and since it will be challenging enough to just get the resources to feed and clothe your own people, there is a really good chance that unfathomable (billions) quantities of human beings will be marginalized by this system and spend most of their time suffering.

Again, a far cry rom my definition of equilibrium.

As for your notion that vague global threats don't cause change, for starters I'm not sure that's true - there are significant popular environmental movements around the world and also some threshold of self interest can be breached. For example if you look at negotiations over things like the Kyoto protocols you will see that developing nations who are much more susceptible to environmental changes like shifting climates and rising sea levels are significantly more likely to sign on. It's no coincidence that Bangladesh and a few other island nations were the only countries to ratify the thing.

But there are also educational and social strategies that can have a huge effect. I think that you'd get a lot of mileage from just increasing women's rights around the world.

Interesting, but like rychan some elements didn't really click for me personally.

I never felt pressure to "be a man". I felt pressure to be a conformist. To NOT be academically engaged (ie. don't be a nerd). Some pressure to be into sports (particularly football), which is as close as I think I ever felt to "masculine" type pressure.

I ended up hating the bullies. A lot of them were jocks, so I decided I hated sports. Eventually I pretty much hated people, in general. I The difference between HS and college was like night and day (it gets better, kids), but it still took me a couple years to lower some of my defensive walls.

The bit about feeling pressure to hide anger didn't ring true for me at all. Some of the few times I felt like I was getting some respect happened when bullies pushed me or my friends far enough for me to snap. Didn't happen often, but in the two "fights" I got into in High School I was rewarded with months of calm / being left alone after them (being left alone / ignored doesn't sound great, but it was about as comfortable as I ever could get in High School).

I "won" both fights, and in both instances had to be dragged away from the bully who had started it by a teacher after causing some moderate damage (bruises up to bloody nose). No punishment for me from the administration in either case because I had zero record of causing trouble vs. the boys I had fought with being in trouble damn near constantly. I suppose that if I had lost / gotten my ass kicked it might have been different, but the (dangerous) lesson I learned was to show anger with a little earlier threshold than I normally would have done. Certainly not that I had to hide my anger. I would argue that feeling encouraged to display or even exaggerate your anger in that way is probably a more common masculine pressure than hiding it.

I definitely agree with rychan that bullying seems like a much larger issue to me, and that it doesn't seem very closely linked to masculine gender role pressure. Still, this is interesting.

People hear that the flicker fusion threshold is about 16hz, and that movies play at 24hz so they assume that there must be no benefit to higher framerates. Ofc, movies have a lot of motion blur to make the movement appear more smooth and quite often a TV will have sophisticated tech to make the lower framerates on TV shows appear smoother than they actually are. Computer monitors, for the most part, show sharp images and we sit closer to them so low frame rates are much more noticeable. The rods and cones in our eyes might have a "fresh rate" of 16hz (I think rods actually respond much faster, but w.e) but they aren't synchronised like a camera. Our eyes will detect light, or any changes in it pretty much instantaneously. You don't have to wait for the next refresh. At what point our brain, or the variance in latency of the optic nerve, become the limiting factors I don't know. I'd like to think we wouldn't have evolved such advanced optical receptors only to be bottle necked by our brains. In short: 120hz ftw.

My absolute greatest peeve with console ports is mouse settings though. The number of times I've had to delve into the .ini to disable mouse acceleration or set my sensitivity to something sensible. Sometimes even the .ini doesn't have the answer. I fucking hate it when you get a sensitivity slider with 10 arbitrary notches. "Don't worry gamers, I'm sure you'll find a setting you like. As long as your preference is for a mm of mouse movement to spin you between 360 and 720 degrees. Ps. you do have a gamepad rite?"

As you say, "Fuck you" indeed.

Chris Farley, Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur, The Beatles (they were all fucked up on various abuses, including physical), Michael Jackson, River Phoenix, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, John Belushi, Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Biggie Smalls, Gary Coleman...

I don't think Chris Farley is the prime example, but he's on the list.

But... that doesn't mean their works are any less for it. Getting famous for having talent brings reward, but it also blurs the lines and stunts maturity...

Most of these people didn't even make it to 30, or were so fucked up by the time they had hit this milestone, there was nothing they could do; they didn't have the necessary life lessons that guide us by constant evolution of being. Too many rewards and too much pressure with few threshold guardians to intercede. It's a gauntlet.

Essentially my guess is that the bullet can only transfer so much kinetic energy to accelerate the block upwards. Above that threshold it finds other ways of disposing of this energy. Why this threshold/diminishing return might exist idk.

So yeah, I think there must be some change in the efficiency of the transfer of energy in the two examples. Does smacking the bullet right in the centre create more sound? Does the bullet deform/heat up more in the first example because the block simple can't get out of the way fast enough? You'd think that spinning a block would take comparitively little energy compared to all those other inefficiencies. Perhaps if you were to increase the velocity of the bullet you might not see that large of a difference in the height it rises - rather the block would sustain more damage, the slug would pancake more etc etc.

It does seem raher counter-intuitive though. I'd like to know the explanation.

All I see in the comments here are a bunch of haters that wouldn't know the majestic graces of an actual-real forest dryad (horse) if one frolicked with palpable yearning right in front of them! This "camel - toe"
you are all speaking of might just be the threshold to each of your respective infinite bliss. Nature!

Upvote for a recent personal respect for Mr. Trampoline.....I only wish my own epic trampoline fail was captured on tape, it would have surely garnered over 100 votes for anyone who uploaded it....the physics involved alone would have been enough fodder for a paper on the wonders of kinetic energy vs. threshold displacement energy

Somebody who wonders if siftbot will award another power point for crossing the 500 threshold a second time?

Shh!!!!

Also Takk

A few inputs for consideration, largely to do with making this site more inviting:

- Re the quoted point - this is true if someone is heavily motivated to do so, and has the right habits (routinely visiting video sites, knows what the community will like, understands how to position and title a sift for best attention, knows how to efficiently do the complicated process of sifting, is motivated), but might not be for occasional users like myself that do a fair bit of browsing and only a little contributing.

- The term "probationary" is a little negative in connotation and not really welcoming. From an online dictionary, the definition that best applies is "A process or period in which a person's fitness, as for work or membership in a social group, is tested.". Feels like applying for a job, and is not exactly welcoming new members with open arms. It's easy to understand why new members need a special differentiating status to prevent people from creating lots of vote-spamming accounts and the like, but that word and the accompanying big red stamp sends the wrong signal to those that are first checking out how this site works.

- All that being said, getting rid of the P isn't really the point. It's being given the privileges that most membership-oriented on-line communities offer for being a member in good standing, even if that member has a low interaction count. That includes doing more self-care on one's own videos (as already mentioned), reducing the thresholds at which increased privileges are opened up, and - dare I say it - having the ability to contribute a dissenting opinion (i.e. a downvote) more readily.

- Conversational threads like this getting promoted to the front page are an excellent sign of a healthy attitude in this community.

Yes I saw what people refer to as THEM. I knew of entities entering what some call the afterlife or the breakthrough reality by fission reaction in head experience. But, I thought I was going to see angels or something of that nature.

My breakthrough was terrifying because I had thought I had gotten to know the nature of this drug. And if anyone attempts to play around with it, it can seem like magic, or an alien computer program that shows you the most beautiful landscapes, sacred geometry, infinite electrical grids, the universe. It is as though something is coaxing us into this experience. And what I mean by this is that on my first breakthrough it began normal. I hit it with my EYES closed. Two seconds in there was a huge blue/white pure energy tunnel that appeared and I was excited, oh shit this is going to be huge.

The next thing that happened was instead of going forward like I usually had into the mandala, sacred geometry grid or whatever it is to begin with, it fell to the ground, like a painting in a black room. And I was instantly freaked out. WTF is going on? The place where a beautiful pure light grid existed in an infinite way had just fallen to the floor. Then blackness. My eyes were closed. That blackness began to unfold. That blackness slipped off the wall and unfolded a box that revealed the actual room around me that I was sitting in. Again, my eyes were closed. Then the box unfolded around me. And room went by by as the box trapped me in it and the floor of this dimension was removed. It seemed like a conspiracy,a GOTCHA moment and instantly I thought, why am I doing this again? TOO LATE. I was thinking what the hell is going on, like some alien had coaxed me into this and was capturing my entirety on purpose.

The floor had been removed traveling at lightspeed, like I was a quantum magnet reaching its destination somewhere in the middle of the universe, dissolving through unknown dimensions, I could never have believed this possible and kept thinking, HOLY SHIT, ITS REAL. The box came undone as everything around me was destroyed like all nuclear bombs had gone off on Earth. Then the frequencies began, like a jet engine taking off. There was no way I was going to survive this. From a low drone to the most high pitch sound I had ever heard it blasted me apart. I died. I died materially and consciously. I splattered the instant that frequency reached its unbearably powerful threshold. SPLAT. Up until this point, from my room to this point. I had been literally screaming for dear life in my head. Like I never had before, not like a rollercoaster but holy shit, I am going to die. My subconscious melted completely whilst I saw the quantum physiology of the space around me. Something there was physically turning off my consciousness. And then it went dark.

And then I woke up. And they were there. And at the time even in another life, in another dimension I was still freaking out and they told me like they do everyone, to calm down it is OK. They are the paradox. They are either the root of who you are or they are aliens that make one sound crazy. They are the ones that give you deep lessons on how to live life and yet, you see, we are here talking about them and that makes us sound absolutely batshit crazy but anyone who has seen them will say. THEY WERE FOR REAL with all of their being. And then you ask, so who are they? My main concern has been forgetting them and concentrate on what they taught me. Nothing could have ever prepared me. And actually do not wish for any atheist to do this.

But, if they must go around acting like they know something for fact that cannot be proven, that there is a God or not, well they are just about as good as someone like me taking a drug and coming back saying something is real when there is no way to prove it is real. The main diffierence being I SAW it, I FELT it, I HEARD it. And no Christian in my own personal knowledge has seen, heard, or felt something on this level, and to me certainly means atheists are flat out wrong, like I said I was agnostic. And I have been atheist for long stretches of life. But, like I am saying. It could be aliens out there trying to guide us into its vortex and steal our souls because we venture into a new frequency we normally do not. It could be just a psychedelic and all those percentages of brain activity we do not use creates an infinite experience, a huge puzzle that the brain likes playing with itself and it plays it out with you and you just have to go along for the ride, no turning back. It could be the program that we receive upon birth and death. I have no idea of what this shit is. Except, that it has been used for thousands of years in the Amazon with expert shamans and that it challenges the very seat of atheism and challenges the participant on the grandest scale. It is one whacked out puzzle. But, so is the universe and consciousness.