Bob, as much as this'll surprise you, I totally agree with what you're saying. The distribution of the stimulus money to couples making up to $150,000 is friggen ridiculous -- and I'm in that category. I will do what I did with the last two checks: give to local charities helping the homeless and communities of color (as much as I hate that term).

The worst part of this is that it sets up a liquidity trap. The Fed can't reduce buying crap debt (that BBB dogshit is at 4% should terrify anyone who understands how debt and the rating agencies work), nor can they allow rates to rise (thus totally screwing responsible savers). This is the cusp of a financial disaster that blew past 1929 on 9/17/19 and is now approaching the cataclysm of the South Seas Company collapsing. As far as I can see, this is a total melt-up in the markets because there's no stable returns and everyone is now in speculation mode.

Were it my call, I would scale the money along income (or non-income) lines: $10k for the lowest incomes, sliding scale from there. I'd also set up government-backed savings accounts that pay 10% for those people and only those people. I'd also pay off/down student debt along the same income scales.

I do not begrudge the wealthy for their wealth. But capitalism can't be a winner-take-all system. We live in a society, and society will always have winners and losers. The least we can do is ease the burden for those at the bottom by taking some from the top. I'm tired of the homeless camps and mentally-ill people wandering the streets of Seattle. They are the least of us and thus should be the ones who get the most help.

Powerful...who are you fooling?
You're caught in a complex cataclysm of your own inadequacies
And pitiful weaknesses
Your soul secretes insecurity
So you live on the reflection side of the mirror
You're terrified of true power

you fear me

One thing I am looking forward to are good polemics as part of the election's post-mortem. In terms of video footage, both Cenk and Kyle over at TYT and Secular Talk respectively went off the rails quite nicely. But the good stuff, the really good stuff, will trickle in, and exclusively in written form.

Lambert over at NC makes a decent start, given his lack of sleep:

The Democrat establishment was warned about their weak candidate, and they were presented with a popular and well-funded alternative: Bernie Sanders. Instead, as the Podesta emails show in lavish detail, they used their control of the party machinery and their service providers in our famously free press to rig the primary in their favor at every turn. When their candidate was nominated, the Democrat establishment tacked right, and proceeded to explain to Sanders voters that their votes were not needed or even desired because, as #BernieBros, they were racist and sexist. Sanders supporters have every right to say #WeWereRight and #WeToldYouSo.

If this were Japan, we’d be seeing Democrat Party leaders committing seppuku, or cutting off their little fingers or — supposing them not to be gangsters — ritually and tearfully bowing to the people they betrayed. This being America, and these being Democrats, they are feverishly deploying the Blame Cannons at racist and sexist #BernieBros, Johnson, Stein, and the dogs who wouldn’t eat the dog food. These assclowns will only leave office if they’re whipped out with scorpions. So get to it, Sanders supporters. This is your time.

We arrive at the same conversation, have you actually done it? I seem to remember you saying that you did something but you did not even know what it was but you *thought* it was DMT. That is horrendously irresponsible - and I feel for you, for real

No one can say anything about this experience until they have done it. Just like ayahuasca that contains DMT - I did it for the first time a couple of months ago and it was nothing like smoked DMT, I could hardly tell they were similar substances. Except, it taught me what I was supposed to know and not what I anticipated - and yes, I would say it was awesome/scary but I was able to deal. Some people lost their shit, but that is also a part of the experience, for experience, for personal growth.

Which leads into - it can be a black market drug but that is exactly why he suggested - research and extract your own. The government can not make DMT plants completely illegal because those plants are everywhere, so this is a "drug" that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going away - or at least until the Earth goes through some sort of cataclysm. I'm pretty sure nature had a reason for it being so prevalent throughout it.

DMT is not dangerous. If you have a bad episode make sure you have a benzo on hand. But, if you are a studious psychedelic user you would already know this.

As to quantum mechanics and shit - yeah he probably should have stopped there. It's beyond anything anyone could possibly imagine so what's the point in describing something no one understands and can only be experienced at this point? Well, at least I've learned that trying to describe it to closed-minded manimals

Just for good measure though - I would say that, yes it is indeed more extreme than anything else you're likely to experience while you're alive. So, be fucking careful and do lot's of research.

Wait, is this a video of the cataclysm right outside of Orgimmar?

You're conflating two different points.

1 - Is overpopulation a problem that needs to be addressed?
2 - If it is a problem, is it possible for us to address?

We've been competing for less and less resources ever since populations started growing. Nobody in this thread has offered any evidence for why suddenly at and above 7 billion it will really become a problem this time. My hypothesis is that the past shows that the change in living standards from increased populations will be gradual and not cause some kind of cataclysmic hunger or global food war. Where is your evidence to the contrary? I've shown examples recent and past where the world has dealt with respectively, (1) high commodity prices and (2) dealt with proportionately much higher population growth than what we are experiencing today.

Society has continually shown the ability to drastically grow agricultural yields, tap deeper and harder to access water and energy reserves and substitute different inputs when a commodity becomes scarce or expensive. With global birth rates barely above replacement and global population plateauing, where is your evidence that with the ingenuity of the many people that have come out of poverty since the end of the Cold War, that we won't be able to handle a historically relatively mild proportionate growth in population?

Every time I see someone channelling Malthusian scare mongering such as this video, I always see the same tropes -

(1) The word exponential bounded about with some kind of mystical reverence;
(2) An over-abundant use of analogies while being absent of any historical basis for their argument; and
(3) A complete lack of plausible solutions to the problem because their argument is grounded in emotion and intuition rather than practicality.

and then the collective nerd rage reached such an apocalyptic crescendo that the angels in heaven wept tears of blood,demons cowered in fear and mother earth heaved in cataclysmic revulsion.
the peoples of the world gasped in utter awe at the sheer force and ferocity that was to become known as nerdegeddon.


so..
uh..yeah.im still gonna go see it because i am compelled to.
*promote

Not the Largest Man Made Non Nuclear Explosion
Halifax has you beat.
The Halifax Explosion occurred on the morning of Thursday, December 6, 1917. SS Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship fully laden with wartime explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the Narrows, a strait connecting the upper Halifax Harbour to Bedford Basin. Approximately twenty minutes later, a fire on board the French ship ignited her volatile cargo, causing a cataclysmic explosion that devastated the Richmond District of Halifax. Approximately 2,000 people were killed by debris, fires, and collapsed buildings, and it is estimated that nearly 9,000 others were injured.The blast was the largest man-made explosion prior to the development of nuclear weapons with an equivalent force of roughly 2.9 kilotons of Trinitrotoluene (TNT). In a meeting of the Royal Society of Canada in May 1918, Dalhousie University's Professor Howard L. Bronson estimated the blast at some 2.4 million kilograms of high explosive.

Well technically they got king of the hill taken away by a completely free to play game that you don't even have to buy. League of legends soared past them in active monthly users last November and they haven't slowed down. There was an article on forbes about this time last year where LoL had double the amount of monthly gameplay hours. I think WoW is finally dying.>> ^RFlagg:

If WoW would just adopt the Buy to Play model like Guild Wars 2 I would come back (if they kept the price low, say $30...$40 tops for this expansion as I've got the ones before it). With Guild Wars 2, Planetside 2, trying learn DOTA 2 and LoL and the host of Free to Play stuff, it is getting harder to justify the monthly fee. I liked Cataclysm, and I would be all over this, but money is too tight to waste when there are high quality titles out there that are buy to play or free to play. I predict an uptick in subscribers for a few months then the continual bleed of subscribers to other titles... though they'll still be king of the hill as even if they drop to 6 or 8 million by this time next year, they'll still be ahead of everyone else... I'll wager around 7 million left, around 5 or 6 million they might start thinking of making the move to another business model to test it out for Titan and get the bugs of the model worked out. I think Blizard's high quality justifies a Buy to Play over the Free to Play model...
As to the movie. Sam Raimi was slated to direct it, and may still be producing a part of it... last I heard Charles Leavitt was taking over the script and then they were going to call for a new director.

If WoW would just adopt the Buy to Play model like Guild Wars 2 I would come back (if they kept the price low, say $30...$40 tops for this expansion as I've got the ones before it). With Guild Wars 2, Planetside 2, trying learn DOTA 2 and LoL and the host of Free to Play stuff, it is getting harder to justify the monthly fee. I liked Cataclysm, and I would be all over this, but money is too tight to waste when there are high quality titles out there that are buy to play or free to play. I predict an uptick in subscribers for a few months then the continual bleed of subscribers to other titles... though they'll still be king of the hill as even if they drop to 6 or 8 million by this time next year, they'll still be ahead of everyone else... I'll wager around 7 million left, around 5 or 6 million they might start thinking of making the move to another business model to test it out for Titan and get the bugs of the model worked out. I think Blizard's high quality justifies a Buy to Play over the Free to Play model...

As to the movie. Sam Raimi was slated to direct it, and may still be producing a part of it... last I heard Charles Leavitt was taking over the script and then they were going to call for a new director.

Oooh, cool. Let me just read through and answer what I can.

1) We had a cataclysmic overload on our server when the game launched, so it went down over the weekend of launch. If you still have issues, try closing the app completely and restarting. The daily challenge is like in bubble bobble - you gather the letters in the game, and when you have the full word you win a mystery box.

2) Yes, if the daily challenge is bugging out, you're gonna have a bad time with that mission. The easy fix is that you can pay for a mission skip in the shop, or wait for an update. -_- It should reset and work again after a full restart though.

3) The mystery box is bugged in that you can make it confused if you click with more than one finger. This makes it lose its reference to the labels etc. Essentially, yes, it's a bug and what's far worse, it's MY bug. *cry* It will be fixed in an upcoming patch. I've already done it, it's just waiting for some other features. A hard restart will absolutely fix this.

4) Headstarts: When a game starts, an icon should swoop in from the left with the headstart icons. Clicking them will trigger a big jetpack boost that sends you quite a bit forward in the level. It's great for getting big scores. If that button doesn't show up, it seems something is amiss. Again, do the full restart and try again.

5) Skip missions: There are some missions which can take a lot of time, so we made these so people have a chance to skip the ones they didn't like (or couldn't do for some reason). When you have completed a mission, the skip is removed from the store - if the mission is still completable, it remains in the store. When you complete 3 missions, you get 3 new ones and the skips come back. The plural thing annoys the fuck out of me too, but this time it isn't my mistake. That is fixed in the upcoming patch.

6) Super sneakers are hard to use. The trick is to realize that you can swipe downward while flying/jumping, which gives you quite a lot of control. The really good players in the office love them, I'm like meh. I also avoid them when I can, because I suck at controlling them, heh.

7) 2x multi: There should be a timer in the bottom on all the powerups you pick up, if there's not, then something is bugging out hard. Same advice as before. Hard restart.

You get the tokens in the mystery boxes. When you pass the thresholds, 3, 50 200 and 500, you unlock the characters. You can change characters is Shop -> Characters (switch them on the arrows, and click select). I think the bigger thresholds are very high too, but that's what the other game designers felt was right. When you get more than the threshold, they are redundant at this point. I honestly can't say if they will be used for something, but it's something we have discussed earlier.


Phew, that was a big bit. I hope you're enjoying the game, we'll have some more stuff coming out for it soon enough - if nothing else, it will fix a bunch of bugs.


>> ^Sagemind:

I have a few issues with the game.
first of all - no instructions on how to play.
- how do you get/switch characters
Daily Challenges (JIVE) (no idea what JIVE means)
says "next challenge in 0:00:00" and NEVER Changes - so no new challenges - ever.

Missions
Of the three missions, the first mission is "complete 1 Daily Challenge" (which is not checked).
The other two challenges ("Dodge 20 barriers" & "6000 points in one run") are both completed and checked. This screen never updates or changes - no new missions ever (BUG)
Shopping
Hoverboard - works fine (double tap - got it)
Mystery Box - when I find a mystery box burring game play and tap to see what it is there is text there that never goes away (it reads:"1x Yutani's UFO - tap to open") - left over from a previous reveal) The new text for every reveal since layers over top of that original text making all text unreadable. I have no idea why that old text never goes away. (BUG)
Headstart (250/1000)
Not sure how these work, there is no explanation for them. I've won several through mystery boxes but they never show that I have any and I don't know how to engage them if I had them.
Skip Missions - OK fine, but I'd rather play through, it's like paying to cheat
I only have one skip mission left (Skip mission 1) which will let me skip my daily challenge #1. The challenge is to "Complete 1 daily Challenges" other than being pluraly incorrect, I've already completed the other two challenges and this has not gone away and never will since there is nothing left to trigger this challenge.
Upgrades
Jetpack - works great (fun challenge)
Super Sneakers - haven't mastered these yet. Are they there just to kill me? my guy is so unwieldy, I can't control. I can't stay on the coins because he jumps over them instead of on them and I usually die everytime I get the shoes. I avoid the shoes every chance I get.
Coin Magnet - works great (I only wish it worked this easy in real life )
2x Multiplier
When playing the game, I can't tell if this is working, I may be missing it, but I don't see anything that tells me when this is engaged or has run out.
Characters
How do you switch the characters?
Do you first need to complete/find the items? (for the girl I have 2/3) do I gain access to her once I get 3/3? I've played quite a bt. 3/3 seems doable but the kid with the radio (3/50) the rocker guy (3/200) and alien costumed girl (1/500) would seem IMPOSSIBLE to attain. If it has taken me 5-6 hours to get 1/500, I know I will never get 500/500 before I loose interest in this game.
Also, in the mystery boxes I've had about 4-5 guitars (and likewise for items from different characters - eg. hats). Are these supposed to be counting or are they redundant and I'm supposed to be getting different items for these characters?

OK, that's all I have at the moment. I'll let you know If I see anything else.
So the two bugs I see right away:
-The issue with the challenges never advancing
-The Text issue with the writing when revealing the Mystery Box
If you know of any fixes for my issues, let me know - Thanks

@dannym3141 Yeah, I had an account there after BC. I played in WoW beta and had my fill of the game in it's state then...so didn't sub up till first expansion. Someone offered me 150-250 and I laughed at him, I had a decently equipped max level druid, but I also had a bunch of level 40 something guys on the account plus a whole lot of money and a small personal guild I used to vault stuff. I told him I'd want 500 bucks offered before I'd even think about it, because while I could recreate the character the rest of the stuff would have taken me a long long time to redo. It's sitting around idle for however many years now...4 maybe 5.

But still doesn't change my opinion on account and gold selling ruining the games...gold screws with the markets where people with bots playing 24 hours a day are driving prices up creating the need to buy gold if you don't want to grind continuously. And sold accounts make it so they never have to solve the boring levels...like I thought 1-25 were crazy boring and around 40 it got really slow, but max level was fun until you played everything to death and 20-40 were fun due to the skills and maps becoming available.

No idea what the game is like now given they revamped everything with cataclysm....sometimes I'm curious to find out..then I remember how pissed I was with WoW toward the end of my time there...doubt I'd even get 2 weeks out of it before I was pissed again.

Everquest was a whole other beast, it was really cool because it was mysterious. But I know if I had the option to play it now for free I wouldn't, I tried to go back after they released more expansions and found it too confusing/cumbersome after WoW interface and stuff. Plus I really disliked EQs alternate advancement system, it was like leveling your character over again and gaining very abysmal gains for your efforts......would have rather they added multiclassing or something instead of that.

>> ^westy:

>> ^EvilDeathBee:
Why haven't we reached Mars yet, damnit!

because its a totally waist of time and effort sending humans to planets that are shit for human existence.
Robots are the only thing that should be sent to mars and the moon , it would be far more efficient and cost affective to do that than to send people.
It would make more sense for people to try and colonise the earth sea floor as this is likely going to be far more sustainable and practical if there was a cataclysmic event and the development of that over 60-200 years would develop the technology to allow future space travel.
Until we have some sort of technology to move through space faster than the speed of light which obviously is unlikely then I don't see any point in colonising other planets with anything other than a robotic presence.


*rolleyes* one of those people, eh?

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

Why haven't we reached Mars yet, damnit!


because its a totally waist of time and effort sending humans to planets that are shit for human existence.

Robots are the only thing that should be sent to mars and the moon , it would be far more efficient and cost affective to do that than to send people.

It would make more sense for people to try and colonise the earth sea floor as this is likely going to be far more sustainable and practical if there was a cataclysmic event and the development of that over 60-200 years would develop the technology to allow future space travel.

Until we have some sort of technology to move through space faster than the speed of light which obviously is unlikely then I don't see any point in colonising other planets with anything other than a robotic presence.

I do however think manned orbital space travel is something we have to develop right away and make possible right away for most people. We could also use it to send twats up into space and let them see how pathetic they are and how small earth and they are in the vast scheme of things with any luck that might make the world a more peaceful place to live in.

I fear that before we get anywhere near "type 1" civilization, there will be a cataclysmic battle between those intent on taking us back to the dark ages (religious fundamentalists), and those intent on preventing them from doing so. We can only hope that the latter prevail.