I wasn't and am not kidding about the bet. It's not vindictive. I'm sick of hearing bulllllllllllllllllllllllshit from these people. I have the attorney lined up, escrow seems simple enough. And the multiple posts were deliberate to draw attention.

These people get on here and reddit and w.e else spouting their bullshit hurting people. Go look on amazon, search for "vaccine" - the top 50 results in the books will be conspiracy nonsense. I'm of the mindset that these people don't actually believe these things themselves. If he did, he'd take my bet immediately. (still very interested if you're reading this bob) But he won't because he doesn't. And i stroll through the internet getting my argument quirks out to know where my faults are. I'm practicing if you don't mind.

Although, you're right, it is somewhat vindictive at this moment- I'm too numb to these trolls and you gotta speak their troll language to get their attention. Bob doesn't respond to well reasoned arguments, he only responds to crazy bullshit. I stand on what I've already said. The damage being done is incalculable, but i can personally say that 5 teachers from my school have died of Covid 19. The harm from this nonsense is real, and if he's made slightly uncomfortable by 3-5? (idk i dont even care to look) comments on his "personal videosift profile," - too fucking bad for him, or as he'd say, "fuck your feelings."


Yah' got little militia groups peppering the usa straddling a fence about if they're gonna kidnap the Georgia governor, and you're worried about me venting my frustration with one of the soothsayers? Spare me.

If he can contribute to a league of morons on the regular to the actual detriment of his fellow Americans, I can communicate, in a way that I see fit, that he should be ashamed of himself.

Can you explain what your description text has to do with the video? I watched it based on that, and was expecting something along the lines of a logic puzzle or a look at some of the quirks of the human decision-making process / biases.

Great discussion but I think the point the video makes is that the emphasis in education has changed from molding kids to meet a standard to molding educational standards to fit the kid. Parents are now their child's advocate as opposed to being part of the education process. Schools are so afraid of bad press or being sued that they won't stand up to parents and their outrageous sense of propriety. All of this combined results in a broken education system.

Like it or not, parents need to stop and realize that in most cases teachers are trying to prepare their kids to survive in a world that's NOT going to conform to their unique little quirks... a world that's NOT going to accept that 2 + 2 = 22 because that's just not how the world works.

Damn, sorry to hear that. I could go off on a frothing at the mouth rant at how bad it was, what we went through. To save money our original company, a nationwide US health insurance company, outsourced us right at merit raise time (nice touch, a-holes) to an off-shore company that would probably only ever meet expectations running an assembly line operation for building PCs.

They were out of their league taking over level 1 and 2 operations for a large company, which was already working through the pains of merging with other companies they had acquired. Instead of inspiring the legacy workers to stick around to make the transition work, their attitude was we were lucky the host company insisted we get first crack to reapply for "our" jobs. Like it was all one big assembly line and we could be easily replaced with someone with an A+ cert for $11\hr. The equivalent of pulling up to a storefront and having IT landscapers jump in the back of a pickup truck to work that day. Might work for an assembly line but not for a complex embedded IT infrastructure with 1001 local support quirks. They were completely clueless.

Add insult to injury, their internal processes were so bad, over the course of a year they asked us continually to remind them of the phone# of the iPhone they gave us and the serial# of the laptop they gave us. At least half a dozen times, it was fucking absurd. And when we were offered an incentive to help reduce the ticket log backup, they mailed unsigned money orders to fictional home addresses they had on record for us. With the stamp on the wrong part of the envelope for those lucky enough to receive their unsigned money orders. You had the option of mailing the money order back to get it signed (good luck getting it back) or committing a felony to get the money you legally earned, by not using the first option. Took me 7 months to finally get my money order, who knows where they originally mailed it. Their indifference during this whole mess was staggering, you had to badger management and HR like they were a deadbeat drunk brother-in-law who owes you money.

And they kept putting off the review\raise process until they finally offered us 50 cents an hour for the highest performers. I gave my notice the next day.

Sorry for the rant, it was such a colossal failure on all fronts, except no doubt for the amount the host company saved on IT during that time. But of course nobody is interested in capturing the countless hours of downtime and lost productivity introduced by these IT cost "savings". Last I heard they were putting the contract back out to bid before the scheduled end of the current contract, which doesn't surprise me. What a freaking waste.

I hope you find work soon, Ant.

The first time I remember learning anything about a (fictionalized) version of this weapon was in Goldeneye for N64. But I remembered it (known as the RC-P90) having an 80 round capacity in that game.

That didn't set off any alarms for me, but an interesting note was made here:
The FN P90 only holds 50 rounds in its magazine. It is speculated that the RC-P90's 80 magazine is actually a mistake due to directly giving the RC-P90 0x50 (that is, 80 in hexadecimal) bullets rather than 0x32 (50 in decimal).

Kind of a funny quirk for a CS nerd like me. Get your hex right, programmers!

It almost pained me to sift it, because I'm an Avs fan and the old rivalry is still there for me a little bit.

But this transcended my bias on that pretty easily. Young kid, hero in his first NHL callup, Russian connection like so many of your team's greats (Fedorov and the all-Russian line were killer back in the peak days of Wings/Avs rivalry), happening in one of the final days at the Joe, plus this weird statistical quirk added in -- enough to make me jump up and be a Wings fan when I saw it!

Here's hoping that both of our teams pull off rebuilds ASAP and stop being cellar-dwellers. Young kids like this are probably key to that!

You did good on that joke and on its explanation. I got it just fine without the commentary though.

I left your whole commentary here, because I make it a practice to delete all comments from my wall. Your essay needs to be saved for posterity.

So here is a quirk of Videosift.

If you are ignoring someone, and they make a comment on one of your videos, you will never get another email saying that comments have been made.

I had no idea of the implosion on that comment stream. Dear god in heaven.

What is really sad is I only wanted a temp ban. I honestly didn't know of @gorillaman's propensities. I am all for second, third and fourth chances -- even though some people have left the Sift in the past because the worst abusers were allowed back. I understood their pain, but I'm still all for more chances. If you love something enough, maybe you will change your behavior. I certainly don't change immediately. I will accord others the opportunity to learn over time.

So no edit help, huh? I think I'll use this:

As "Homeland Security" says, if you see something, SAY something. (Because here is the truth: As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote, "Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.")

Much cleaner. Don't need the snark bit. Quote marks. Gotta love 'em. (Quote marks, not parentheses, to denote snark. I'm getting old.)

I didn't address your tendency to tread lightly with me in my first response. I figured it was made up of three things:

1. My early days on the Sift, I had really thin skin. I was easily hurt and upset. One of the biggest gifts to me in my life was learning on the Sift to be clearer and stronger in my communications. And to walk away from the abusers. And to use the ignore button. I figured that my early reactions were in your brain pan still.

2. That tone of voice thing. It is real. What is a simple, clear declarative sentence in my head can be read as a whine-fest by others.

3. I think it is great that you write carefully when you write to me. Keep it up! It's called caring about the person you are talking to. I have zero problem with that. In fact, I see it as a Great Good. (Because if you aren't, and I lay my own internal tone of voice onto your words in a way that doesn't match the words in your head, you will be hearing from me. And I am just as verbose as you, my friend! A punishment worse than death!)

And yes. We are people who hang in there. It is a blessing and a curse.
Well, only a curse to those who roll their eyes and snort "good grief, just shut up!" I'm cool with it.

Thanks for hanging in with me. And I am truly sorry about gorillaman. He did it to himself, though. He did have other choices.

In solidarity, I say to you -- Fuck Homeland Security and ginned up xenophobia and racism.

(A poet? Do you write epic odes? Surely not haikus!)

I was surprised to hear John Oliver discussing the "Get Rid of the Penny" topic in the USA, not because the subject is uninteresting, but because he failed to point out the glaring anachronism that Americans still call their one cent coin a "penny".

Do they not realise that they started a revolution in 1765, declared independence in 1776, and started making one cent coins in 1793?

Why do they still call cents pennies? After more than 200 years, I would have thought that even the most parochial or remote American would have heard the news.

The Canadians aren't much better. The penny finally dropped there in 2012, when they stopped minting one cent coins. The first Canadian one cent coin was struck in 1858. One strange quirk is that the word penny in Canada used to refer to a two-cent coin, even though they never issued any 2 cent coins! It is possible they were referring to US 2-cent coins, which were issued from 1864 to 1873, but more likely because a French sous was worth approximately half a (British) penny, therefore a two sous coin was the near equivalent of a penny.

In Euroland, the Irish recently started to phase out the use of one and two cent coins, but most of their discussions were also about dropping the penny!

One solution could be to emulate Zimbabwe, where high inflation means that one US dollar is worth about 360 Zimbabwe dollars, or about 520 to a British pound. This neatly avoids the need for any fractional denominations.

Talking about fractional coins:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_chard/7145393421/

...which also reveals a surprising etymological link between coins and anatomy, as does this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_chard/6390568191/

Perhaps the guy he mentioned getting a cent stuck in his anus was going for the closest alternative.

So, I know essentially nothing about football /soccer (a fact I am sure will become immediately obvious). Maybe sift football fans can relieve some of my ignorance:

When I saw the title, I assumed that the keeper was going to launch it the distance of the pitch and score, but I see he's up with the other players.

In hockey, a team can "pull" their goalie back to the bench, allowing them to put an additional skater out on the ice in order to try to score late game-tying desperation goals like this. I guess this is the football equivalent of that?

In hockey, you can replace your pulled goalie with any skater you want (generally, they will be replaced by players with the most offensive upside or "clutch" scoring abilities). But I guess in football, maybe it has to be the goalie/keeper?

And as a followup to that last question, in hockey a goalie is not allowed to carry/touch/control the puck beyond the red (center ice) line. That rule is *almost* never actually put into effect, because there is basically no good reason for a goalie to do that. ...Unless you are (one of the alltime greats) Patrick Roy, team down by many goals with a few minutes left, upset with the lackluster effort of the team playing in front of him, and wanting to light a bit of a fire under their asses:


...Clearly didn't work out in as positive way as the football goal here (Roy didn't even know that it was a penalty to carry the puck over center ice beforehand), but a really funny quirk that happened in a game that I actually remember watching live on TV.

Great talk. I love Nat, she's genuinely funny.

I have to say that it surprises me to hear her refer to "Asians" as a single group. There are massive cultural differences between Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Thais, etc. No-one refers to Germans, French, Italians and English as "Europeans".

I also don't really think there's anything wrong with making fun of your culture. Many of my favourite comedians do that all the time (Dylan Moran and Billy Connolly for example). There's a world of difference between recognising and laughing at your own cultural quirks and making racist stereotype jokes.

a couple of quirks I've just found with the new permalink page ...

when searching for something (hover over watch, hover over search, wait for advanced search window to open), if I want to paste using mouse commands, I right click to open the mouse menu, but then when I move down to select "paste" the search window disappears.

secondly, if I have a permalink page open in a browser window on my second monitor (extended desktop), if while playing the video I click the icon to make it full screen, it opens on my primary monitor, not my second one.

I believe the problem is with the government's use of competitive judiciary : where each side debates their case, regardless of merit, and the expectation is that the 'right' argument will win simply because truth should naturally be able to present a stronger argument.

This assumption not only leads to some face-palm-worthy cases/charges, it also inevitably leads to people being convicted in situations where everyone involved knows with absolute certainty that the defender is innocent (often because quirks within the rules of the official process).

In this case, the "right" thing to do is : Apologize to the man, and refund him any costs that he's incurred so far due to this mess.

But "process" requires that the government push their argument to its absolute limit, even with zero merit, because the officially sanctioned way by which the situation is resolved is via argument in court (conveniently, the need to do this is also decided by people working in court - effectively excusing their professional existence and securing their very employment).

There is no 'admitting there was a mistake'. A mistake has to be proven in court. So even though everyone involved knows that the man is not at any fault, they will still force him to spend his time and money arguing a case, just to jump through hoops, and in the end it's _extremely_ unlikely that his personal costs will be refunded to him (lawyer fees, etc).

In the mean time, everyone on the government side is simply doing their 9-5. None of this is a burden to them, and it's in fact 'how they put food on the table'. If they aren't charging him, they're charging someone else. This is just another day at the office.

The guy getting screwed can't say 'no thanks, I'll not participate', because men with guns will show up and drag him away (police arrest for not going to court). It's effectively a predatory practice whereby the government fleeces people. Everyone involved knows it's meritless, but they simply force you to dance [else go to jail], and collect some fees in the process.

Because, really, what's at stake is not 'the truth' or 'justice'. It's simply "process". An excuse to inflate the number of court cases, to keep court spending high (to secure next year's budget - "use it or lose it" accounting), to keep collections high, and generally keep the high paid welfare cases (9/10 govt employees) employed.
TBH, for a country that supposedly "hates communism", actual communist countries haven't even managed to work it out this well. (I'm not talking fairy tale boogey man communism like you see in old propaganda. I mean the practical day to day actual workings. Vast government employment, bureaucracy, "process above all".)

-scheherazade

Your video, Whose Line is it Anyway? Party Quirks: Melissa's Underwear, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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I <3 her quirks!

That's a side of Dan I've never seen before. But it does prove he has his own hangups and quirks...I was starting to wonder.