That's the funny thing about an anonymous vote, you don't need to be emboldened to be a bigot at the poll...

You need to be emboldened to come out on the street and wave awful signs around, but not to vote.

And bigots are the most motivated (along with authoritarian control types, many of which sit to the left of center). They are more likely to vote at every election even when the candidates don't necessarily fulfill their beliefs.

All things being equal, I'd hypothesize that Trump won because the centrists and disaffected Sanders voters ditched Hillary rather than embracing Trump. She didn't make mistakes, she wholesale spat in the face of many groups she just didn't give a fuck about, and it came back to bite her in the ass.

Every last person going in the ditch or crashing would seem to be speeding or going too fast for conditions.

I note the Comcast trucks are there to repair a box someone drove into while they WEREN'T THERE.

He just sees some money to sue at.

I wonder how well it would work today though. The glow was a bit... off... but more modern technology could perhaps make the puck stand out more, while ditching the trail when it goes super fast.

Look Mutter, nein helmut!

“The vision vehicle will act with foresight and is able to protect the rider at any time,” says Heinrich. Driver assistance features will continually monitor the environment, the route, the speed, the angle of lean, and myriad other factors, intervening to ensure the rider can’t crash. Gyroscopes keep the bike upright when stationary, so you can’t even fall when stopped. BMW’s roughly an eternity from actually telling riders to ditch traditional safety gear, but things like traction control, hill start assist, and antilock brakes are already making it harder to kill yourself on two wheels.
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/bmws-motorcycle-tomorrow-feels/

His name was Steve, and he did the Retro Request Show on Sunday nights. I went to a party at the Northern Hotel up in oldtown FoCo, and he rented one of the apts there. You got two free doses when you paid tho get in, and it was hella strong and I could not maintain around all sorts of people. He ended up babysitting me the rest of the night, and we entertained ourselves by digging through his vinyl. He let me come up to the studio while he did his show a few times. When McReynolds and I went to see Hole together after we broke up, and he ditched me for some ratchet chick he met that night. Steve helped me get even by getting me back stage to watch the show, and I got to chill with Drew Barrymore after. Damn, I miss KTCL, what the station used to be like until Clear Channel bought them out. What it is now is pretty depressing, right doll?

I think that the GOP is in full-on panic mode, and doesn't care about legitimacy / shot at winning for this election.

They (the party elites) will do absolutely everything they can to prevent Trump from getting enough delegates to lock up the nomination. Hence Colorado and Wyoming. Those actions make it seem like they prefer Cruz, but actually they dislike him close to as much as they hate Trump.

Although it is still mathematically possible for Cruz (559 delegates) to get enough delegates to lock up the nomination (1237 needed), realistically it is out of reach (826 still available). Trump (756 delegates), on the other hand, could well manage it. So, the GOP strategy is to avoid that at all costs by encouraging people to vote for Cruz or Kasich in primaries, or even better to encourage more state GOP offices to hold a smoke-filled room convention that grants all the delegates to #NeverTrump instead of even bothering to let people vote.

If they manage that, the contested national convention will get ugly. They (GOP elites) would turn on Cruz instantly -- cast aside. In any other election cycle they would have turned on him already, but with juggernaut Trump, they have to use him to get to the contested convention.

So the question becomes who if not Trump or Cruz? Who will the GOP try to push in? I think that right now, they aren't as worried about answering that question as they are about trying to get there. That being said, they have some options:

Mitt Romney was their first thought. He took some tentative steps towards playing along with the GOP plans, failed to generate any excitement, and has since faded back into relative obscurity. But he remains an option.

Next up was Paul Ryan. A lot of the GOP see him as the future of the party; the "great white hope". There was a flurry of activity making it seem like he was going to take up the flag, but has since denied that he would be interested in or even accept getting the nod. However, he was cagey and close to as vocal against getting the nod to be speaker of the house, and then accepted that. You never know.

Kasich would be another option. He's relatively benign, and wouldn't offend many more of the republican base than the GOP is already ready and willing to offend in order to prevent Trump (and to a lesser extent Cruz).


Of those, I tend to think that Romney is the most likely choice for the GOP in the end. I think it would be extremely stupid to foist "future of the party" Ryan into this election, which would certainly taint his political future. Kasich makes a lot of sense, but on the other hand, "in for a penny, in for a pound" -- as long as the GOP is willing to go to these great lengths to keep Trump out they might as well just own the illegitimacy of it, shoot the moon, and hand pick someone that a) they have complete control over, and b) has nothing to lose in terms of political future. Voila, Mitt Romney.


I also don't think that the GOP will just throw in the towel if Trump locks down the number of delegates needed for the nomination. I'm sure they already have some last-ditch, scorched earth preliminary plans in place for that contingency.

However, I think that they essentially already have thrown in the towel with regards to the election in general. At least to a sufficient degree that they don't give a rats ass about the chances for whoever is the republican nominee winning. That's a *distant* priority behind NOT TRUMP, among other things. Which is pretty stupid, because the likely nomination of Hillary on the democrat side gives them what should be a *golden* opportunity to steal the election. IF they could come up with a vaguely tolerable candidate ... which they won't.

I think Cenk is getting a little bit overexcited at around the 5:30 mark, when he thinks that these polls show that America is center-left, as opposed to the long-standing belief of Fox News that America is center-right.

What I think they show is that America is much more radically anti-"sleazy politician" than ever before.

Trump has the biggest portion of the republican side of things, because he is clearly NOT a normal politician, and however you feel about him you must admit that he is not an "establishment" kind of figure. Sleazy? Sure. But not "sleazy politician". Cruz doesn't appeal to the republicans that like Trump, because he is closer to being a "sleazy politician".

On the Democrat side of things, it is a similar picture if you just go by opinion polls rather than delegate count. Hillary is another "sleazy politician". Even among Democrat-leaning respondents, a high percentage of people polled prefer straight-shooter NOT establishment-friendly Sanders to Hillary, precisely because of that. Democrats are tired of sleazy politicians too.

To be fair, the Democrat side is less divided, because a lot (possibly most) of the real pro-Sanders people will hold their nose and vote for Hillary over any of the opposition, if she is the nominee, even though they would (greatly) prefer Sanders.

Trump supporters will *never* vote for Cruz, especially now that Colorado and Wyoming just gave all their delegates to Cruz without even bothering to allow their residents to vote. Cruz doesn't actually *have* any supporters -- the GOP is only trying to persuade Republicans to vote for him so they can deny Trump the delegates needed to lock up the nomination and go to a contested convention -- at which point the GOP will have no further need for Cruz and ditch him like a used condom. The few registered Republicans that want Kasich are very likely to NOT vote for Trump if he is the nominee, and will likely be similarly displeased with whichever asshole the GOP tries to shoehorn in in the event of a contested convention.

So yeah, the Republican side of things is a real clusterfuck. But the likely nomination of Hillary for the Democrats seems like a very big mistake to me, mitigated only slightly by the dog and pony show that is their opposition in the GOP.

I heard they recently ditched a bunch of on board mini-mac's at the core of it and went with a single windows 7 box.

Well that's one way to dump a load: Turkish tipper truck driver responds to road rage dispute by ditching lorry full of dirt onto busy highway

Lorry driver stopped truck and dumped load on busy highway in Turkey
Incident was apparently in fit of road rage after truck was being tailgated
Shocking dashcam footage shows cars following closely behind the truck
It then stops and dumps haul of dirt and grit onto road - blocking motorway


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3503729/Well-s-one-way-dump-load-Turkish-tipper-truck-driver-responds-road-rage-dispute-ditching-lorry-dirt-bu
sy-highway.html#ixzz448RaTW4l

I 99% agree with you, but:

Some of that responsibility we all assume when driving to be able to react to things happening in front of us is legitimately mitigated by assumptions that people are going to drive mostly sanely.

Like, on a highway with only 1 lane going each way, when there is an oncoming car in the other lane we assume that they are going to stay in their lane and not swerve right in front of us at the last second. Or, when going around a semi-blind curve on a road, we generally maintain speed and assume that nobody is going to stop / reverse down the lane (although causing accidents that way is a fairly common insurance scam trick).


The tailgater here was *NOT* giving himself enough space to react to 100% normal, sane things that could happen. The brake-check goes (slightly) beyond the normal, sane things that we would usually assume are going to happen when driving. The only problem that I have with it (the brake-check) is that like @SDGundamX said, it very likely could have resulted in an accident including completely innocent victims -- like the car pulling onto the highway or even oncoming traffic on the other side of the ditch.

Basically, the tailgater deserved what he got here. BUT, he could easily have smashed into bystander cars that wouldn't have deserved it at all. So, the takeaway for me is that I'd be hesitant to do a brake-check like that in a situation with that much traffic around. It is still 99.9% the tailgater's fault, and would have been that way even if he had smashed into somebody else. But I'd feel real bad if I brake-checked some asshole like that and he careened into somebody that did nothing wrong.

Awesome. I hate tailgaters. Suck ditch, loser.

They've really got to ditch the neon BS. That is killing my excitement, and making it impossible to turn anyone else on to this amazing event.

As was mentioned above, the cost of the fuel is a non-starter. Currently SpaceX uses a Kerosene / Liquid Oxygen fuel mix.

After the anomaly (the space industries way of saying accident) in June SpaceX did a complete vehicle review. They are now using a more advanced technique to cool the LOX which means for a denser LOX liquid in their tanks, which ultimately means they have more oxidizer on board for their flights now.

Coupled with the LOX improvements they have made upgrades to the engines which means 30% greater efficiency. Basically the horsepower per engine has increased.

This means they can get their payloads to orbit plus have more then enough fuel left over in stage 1 to return it to land.

The greatest efficiency comes from returning the stage(s) and then reusing them in future launches (not proven yet). ALL launchers (u.s, soviet, indian, ESA, Japan, etc) ditch ALL of their hardware into the ocean when getting payload to orbit. Bye, bye multi million dollars worth of engines and hardware.

If SpaceX can turn that scenario on its head and reuse those stages and MORE importantly the engines they will cut their costs per launch by a substantial amount. Ultimately that means cheaper per pound cost to get material into orbit.

All of the media uses the word "explosion" when describing the June anomaly which is funny because there was never an ignition of onboard fuels.

The LOX tanks have smaller Helium tanks inside them. The helium is released during launch. The helium rises in the LOX quickly, expands and pressurizes the tank to ensure the LOX is "squeezed" into the pipes in order to keep up with the turbo pumps.

One of the struts holding a helium tank inside the LOX tank failed. The helium tank shot up and blew threw the top of the LOX tank and took a good part of the top of the stack off. The engines actually fired for a few seconds after the anomaly and then sputtered out. The rest of the vehicle at this point is still fairly intact.

Without proper structural integrity the vehicle started to veer off course, dynamic pressures built up and the vehicle was essentially ripped apart by those forces.

At 3:20 the Helium tank rips off its struts. At 3:27 the remainder of the vehicle disintegrates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuNymhcTtSQ

SpaceX mentioned that in June, the dragon capsule continued to relay telemetry until it smacked into the ocean. If the Dragon had better software onboard it would have detected the anomaly and recovered with chutes. Elon said that software would be active on Dragons from now on.