Starting out with "Dave Chappelle was decapitated" was a confusing point to begin with, then going into "a muslim being called a crackhead" I was all 'what's this guy going on about?'

It took me a minute to figure out that he meant Chappelle had been figuratively "killed" by hollywood.

He goes on a bit of a loop, but it all makes sense in the end.

Chappelle talks about Hollywood a bit in this clip:



....which refers to this story: Comedian Martin Lawrence Runs Into Street, Yells at Cars

I only became aware of Comedy Central fucking over Dave Chappelle from the Kat Williams video you posted, and the discussion it sparked on reddit.

Where you chose to start the vid, around the 3-minute mark, IS where the meat of the video starts.

I think the chart came from "The Opposition" on comedy central.

I'm a significant fan of The Wall, and certainly dig Amanda Palmer (though much more casually), but I'm pretty confused by this. The lyrics discuss an overly controlling and fear-propagating mother, while the images are largely implying a freeing, uplifting maternal force. But what appears to be the central character representing that maternal force is also saying the controlling mother's lines, while the central character of the malignant / controlling force is literally suckling at her tit. Well-made and gripping certainly, and I like the cover, but the message seems jumbled.

Also, NSFW flag?

I drove a semi sometimes for a couple years for my family farm. Didn't drive a whole lot, and pretty much all on back dirt roads and in lots/fields, to get some experience before possibly getting a CDL. Never ended up getting the CDL because I moved and changed jobs. I was around and learned from skilled drivers (my dad for one), so I know a little bit, but I'm certainly no expert. That being said:

Backing up a vehicle with a trailer is quite difficult because compared to a normal vehicle with no trailer, all your intuition is wrong and little mistakes get amplified quickly.

Backing up a car and want your tail end to go right? Turn the wheel right. Want the same thing to happen in a semi with a trailer? First turn the wheel left while you back up, which will push the tail end of your tractor left, causing a reaction like pressing on a lever that pushes the tail end of the trailer right. But don't overdo it, because that same lever-type action causes more movement the further you get away from the fulcrum point, so a tiny move there can result in a BIG swing.

Complicating that, you have no central rear view mirror. Side mirrors work, but distance can be obscured by the huge trailer very quickly.

Basically, backing up is one of the most daunting things about learning to drive a truck, particularly for people new to it. The "pull ups" he mentioned are the best way to overcome that. Pulling forward a short/medium distance gets the tractor and trailer back into alignment, so that straight back should result in the trailer going straight back. From that point, you can try to make small corrections. If it starts to swing a lot, pull up again and straighten out, lather rinse repeat.


The guy in the video does a good job (way better than I could do), but he seems to think he's the shit. I don't think you earn real trucking community bragging rights until you can reverse double trailers, or even triples if you want to be worshiped as a god.

Here's a video with doubles:


One of the full-timers on my family farm was quite good with doubles. Not "obstacle course" good, but I saw him reverse a slow circle around a grain bin. And he liked to tell stories about a some semi-mythical whiz guy that could reverse triples around a corner, etc.

I'm sorry, but a claim isn't evidence.
There are African countries where there may not be gun rights, but neither are there restrictions, mainly because there's barely government. Armed tyrannical groups have still managed to seize control, even though the populace was moderately well armed. Somalia comes to mind. The same happened repeatedly in central America and South America in the past.

So I disagree it's impossible, but it is more difficult.

I love these guys. We watched "Laserblast" last week, it was the last MST3K episode on Comedy Central. Still as funny as ever.

Wow so confused and confusing. Nice pants. Horrible economics.

I used to live in a country with no advertising and marketing, where all IP belonged to the central planning commission. The result was no innovation, low productivity and periodically no toilet paper.

Very collaborative certainly, on the perfectly capitalist neo-liberal black market.

Did he offer to bring God to central Europe? Because we've had that for nearly 1200 years and its OK but has nothing to do with Trump.

Even a supercut of his successfully read speech parts doesn't quite make sense. In the parts where he promises to fight together it is never quite certain for what or against what.

Drive them out! Anyone in the middle east can drive anyone else out as long as they are friends with Trump? Is that the policy?

I think Denmark should now be leaders of the free world - they seem to be doing a good job on the democracy and personal freedoms front and don't keep looking for new ways to take advantage of everyone else.

And it's well known that there's no other western power ready to step in.

Which is why this commentary affirms that the US is ceding power to Russia and China.

In the US, the central government cedes power to the States. In the world, there are other strong central governments who will step into the power vacuum. The weaker European states will be forced to react to the paradigm shift.

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

Rememer the talking point that 17 intelligence agencies pointed their fingers at Russia for having orchestrated the hacks during the election?

Even the NYT has finally buried that one:

The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.

I understand where you're coming from, but I stand by my previous posts.

Full disclosure, I never got professionally employed as a programmer / coder / software engineer. However, my Bachelors Degree was in CS, and I have many friends working in the field.

In the show Silicon Valley, Richard Hendriks is working for a large corporate entity but has an idea / personal project that he ends up spinning into a new company. He is trained as a software engineer (CS), NOT with any business or management background (MIS), yet he becomes sort of the de-facto boss / CEO (at least early in the show). He hires a small team to help him develop his product.

Given that scenario, I think the show portrays things very accurately or at least completely plausibly. He's a coder, not a manager. Programmers may understand the importance of formatting and style standards, but at least tend to not have the correct personality type to be comfortable with formally dictating those standards to a team (an activity which would generally be more in line with an MIS background).

Also, his company is small -- just a few other programmers. They are all specializing on different components of the product. So they generally aren't working on each other's code. Standards for function arguments / helper functions / etc. would have to be agreed upon to get their individual components to interact, but that is a separate issue from tabs vs spaces. It would be wise to set a style and naming convention standard and have everyone conform to it, I agree completely. But Richard isn't built for the manager / CEO position, so he either fails to recognize that or doesn't feel comfortable dictating standards to his team.

One more thing to consider is that he (Richard) essentially is the product. He's the keystone piece, the central figure. He's John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, or Steve Wozniak. Even in a very large team / corporate environment, I'd wager that more often than not the style standards that end up getting set tend to fall in line with whatever those key guys want them to be. Don't touch an id Software graphics engine without conforming to Carmack's way, or the Linux kernel without conforming to Torvald's standards. Especially if they are building something new from scratch -- which is again true in the Silicon Valley show scenario.

The show isn't a documentary on how to properly run a startup company in the real Silicon Valley, but it is generally accurate enough that it has a lot of nuances that people with a programming background can pick up on and be entertained by (even people that don't actually work professionally in the field like me). And more important, the general feel of the show can be entertaining even for people that know absolutely nothing about programming.

Weird. I remember watching the unedited version of the Comedy Central special and I remember feeling terrible for him because it seemed that the crowd did not "get it"; I think this is filled with laugh tracks even though it's "uncut".

Good thing Mathews isn't the special prosecutor, he seemed to miss a lot.

Flynn wasn't known to be involved before the election with the Russian election interference, but absolutely was involved in a second crime of subversion before Trump took office.
That's two separate investigations, Flynn was central to the Flynn investigation, and was found to be a liar and probably is guilty of subversion, a crime of treason.

Edit: Flynn was also guilty of lying by omission to congress, and not admitting he was a foreign agent (not hyperbole, he worked for Turkey and Russia if memory serves).

*ban self link http://serioussoundzz.ning.com/profiles/blogs/central-park-bootcamp-nyc-212-865-9290?xg_source=activity