Man all that work and they could barely fit the payoff in frame.

The patience that takes so much time and effort to "accomplish" something so pointless astounds me.

I'm Minnesotan. We have a weird collective tendency to say something bland but genial in place of blunt honesty (aka
"Minnesota nice"), and inserting a bit of subtle sarcasm is an informal pastime. I've had literal decades of practice, though it feels subtlety has become rather pointless of late.

This seems super pointless this early in the game.

this is exactly why i kind of hate this show. sometimes it's well researched and largely makes good points and sometimes it vacuous, pointless outrage like this.

Machine guns are firearms. You can buy pre 1986 machine guns in the USA (I'm not sure what form you have to fill out). The 1986 cutoff is fairly pointless.

I don't consider bazookas, grenades, mortars, etc. firearms. To me a firearm is essentially a rifle that fires cartridges. But if the US government considers them as firearms then that is what they are for legislative purposes.

I believe there is case law regarding what scope of arms they were referring to in the 2A and the result was any common firearm. This currently includes almost all pistols and rifles, both automatic and semi-automatic (with the exception being automatic guns must have been made before 1986 - I believe this limit should be removed).

I'm very much against restricting semi-automatic rifles. There are no good reasons for restricting them. It is unconstitutional. They are not the "weapon of choice" for mass shootings, pistols are. The lethality of them in mass shootings is the same as that of pistols (someone ran an analysis just recently). This last point surprised me a little.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics/comments/d7ypcv/no_mass_shootings_carried_out_with_semiautomatic/

I'm for background checks (i.e. for second hand sales which are the only sales left without a background check) as long as the service is cheap and no records are kept (i.e. it isn't used to create a de-facto registration database).

Public health wise, talking about firearms is a red herring. If I were to drop a bucket load of money into stuff in the USA it would be into making health care and mental health care cheap and available and reducing poverty. This would have more affect on mortality and morbidity rates then any gun legislation will. And yes, I would give fully subsidized health care to the poor.

By now you should be asking yourself what planet someone comes from where they support the 2A and free health care at the same time.

Love the guy, but show me succeeding the same trick time after time in quick succession all in one single take, then I'll be impress.

Point is, these videos are pointless. Anyone can do it - by chance - if they have all day, let alone Donnie fricking Yen!

Pointless. I've seen Titus Andronicus, and the playbill of this 'sequel' is so derivative of the the playbill I got then that I honestly can't see how it got produced.

One star.

Eh, I agree in theory but think that in practice it's a rather pointless endeavor. The type of person who is self-centered and entitled enough to make the "it's someone else's job to clean up my shit" argument is not the type of person who, in my experience, is remotely likely to change. Narcissism precludes negative judgments on one's self. Plus most of the time calmly explaining anything to a person who already feels you've wronged them is not going to result in the outcome you'd like. You might say that some of the time it'll have a positive impact, but I think on balance the amount of strife I'd put myself through for that rare "win" isn't nearly worth it.

I do feel this approach might work if there's a friend or family member with the offender, but even then at best it's a dice roll. Maybe the other party will point out that the asshat was in fact in the wrong, and that may alter their behavior in the future just to avoid an argument. However, if the 3rd party spends a lot of time around the entitled asshole in question then there's a good chance they either behave similarly themselves, or are well aware of the asshattery and know it's pointless to fight them on it. So... yeah. Maybe a semi-public shaming? Don't think filming would ever help things stay cool though.

This video really does sum up my feelings about Season 8.

I was mostly okay with the first half of Season 8 and could even give the writers a pass for only spending one episode on the battle of Winterfell and the Night King's destruction but...everything after that? Complete shit. I mean, Rhaegal getting shot not once, but twice, by scorpions from the "hidden" Iron Fleet, from what looked like a million miles away, was utter nonsense and only done for shock value. Unlike when the Night King killed Viserion, which was actually moving, Rhaegal's death was pointless and made no sense. For one, how could Dany not see all those ships from up there? Furthermore, it'd be ridiculously hard to hit a fly target, twice in a row, from that distance. Ugh.

The biggest misstep in my opinion was turning Dany into a villain. Her character was one of the more interesting of the series as she went from being a naïve slave, to a fighter, a mother, and ultimately became a champion of the people. She was a strong female character with mostly good, if somewhat flawed, intentions. While her drive to claim the Iron Throne and unite Westeros could be seen as warmongering, she certainly didn't deserve to be portrayed as a mad tyrant. That just seemed forced.

Then we have: Bran the Broken and Jon's banishment to the Night's Watch. What the hell? Everything in the finale seemed so forced and discarded a lot character development established in previous seasons. The last two episodes of season 8 were just really disappointing.

this video comparison is pointless unless they upload at least 1440p quality video... youtube is scaling both "original" and "enhanced" down, so you can't see any details to make the comparison.

The problem with the F35 is the squishy organic component in the cockpit.

The concept of a jet fighter is pointless these days and the idea of a "dogfight" doubly so.

This I agree. ST is indisputably more science based than SW, and deservedly earned that respect. It's fun to argue whether warp drive can/can not exist and all that, but to just compare the different warp speed of different ships, across different classes is kind of pointless, as the numbers are arbitrary to begin with, no?

Say, if the video instead compares Mach speed between F-15/16/18/22 etc. and argue which fighter got the more advanced engines (accounting for weight/speed/aerodynamic profiles factors) then I see the point...

"that doesn't justify using people in laboratory experiments"

uhhh, exactly how does holodoc think medical science works?
We use people in laboratory experiments all the damn time. It's called double-blind testing and it means that very sick people get given a placebo that we know does nothing.

I don't remember this episode, but I'm surprised at this lack of nuance from Star Trek.

And holo-space-nazi is right... it's funny how ethics go out the window when one of the main cast members life is threatened. But if a red-shirt is on the table....

Anyway, there's a massive difference between USING knowledge obtained by unethical means and GAINING knowledge by unethical means.

Don't get me wrong, medical ethics is really important. But throwing away knowledge after the fact is not only pointless, it's immoral. Especially in this case, where you're not even using the person who did the research, just a digital representation of them.

the real life example were the Nazi hypothermia experiments --the consensus, last I checked, was that the data was not used.

Of course, the truly pointless unethical American study was Tuskegee syphilis progression to dementia sample of African American subjects after there was already a cure for the disease...among other, wildly unethical studies...

@ChaosEngine

I fully agree with you that rape/sexual assault is a bigger problem (in magnitude and frequency) than false accusations. And that being an actual victim of sexual assault would be worse than being falsely accused of sexual assault, although it seems a bit pointless to debate the relative extent of how much these things could fuck up lives when they are both horrendous.

That being said, there's a reason that presumption of innocence and requiring proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt are the law of the land. And assuming that we follow through on those things (which I think we largely do), that's all well and good. BUT, that's all pretty strictly just in the legal realm.

False accusations of sexual assault don't need to get as far as the actual legal system to seriously fuck up a person's life. Employers, partners, friends ... these connections might choose to sever ties without requiring the same rigorous proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt that the legal system does.

As much as I personally tend to believe Ford as opposed to Kavanaugh, I think that given the span of time since the incident it is nigh on impossible to prove that her version of events is true beyond a reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the hearing put his current demeanor and partisan/biased attitude on blatant display in a way that seemed to me should be disqualifying with regards to the sort of standards we require for Supreme Court Justices. Apparently the GOP disagrees, and we can hold them to account for that at the ballot box.

That's rather cold comfort given that Justices serve for life. There'd be some constitutional crisis drama if Agent Orange gets removed from office as a result of some proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt of misdeeds. Robert Kennedy's quote about the ancient Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" seems apropos. Things have been entirely too "interesting" for my taste for the past 2 years...