Cutter wrote on Sep 19, 2020, 13:30:
[
You're forgoing the possibility that Trump just might win. Worse still, the GOP may actually get the 2/3rd control of Congress they want and need.

The former is possible but unlikely; it would require a dramatic change in the state of the race, and/or full scale shenigans around voter disenfranchisement. On the current trajectory, Trump has no realistic shot of winning the popular vote, and his path through the electoral college is unlikely, having largely fallen out of contention in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, (the states that won him the presidency in 2016) and having to defend ordinarily solidly red sunbelt states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona.

The latter (assuming you're referring to the Senate) is not currently possible. Of the 33 senate seat up this cycle, only two of them are possible pick ups for the Republicans. To get to 60 seats would require winning in deep blue states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. Meanwhile they're defending 13 or so contestable seats, several of which they appear to be on track to lose. The best realistic scenario for Republicans this cycle is they hold the Senate with a 51 or 52 seat majority, but more likely the Democrats retake the majority with a similar margin.

WaltC wrote on Sep 19, 2020, 10:53:
The principles espoused in the Constitution are based on human nature, which hasn't changed a bit in the last 10,000 years...;)

There we have it, folks: WaltC is a young Earth creationist. Either that or he is woefully misinformed on the estimated age of the species homo sapiens (150k to 200k years old).

zcaa0g wrote on Sep 19, 2020, 08:05:
Ginsburg believed in a "living" U.S. Constitution so that directly goes against her vow to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Now she can be replaced by a Constitutional judge and the SCOTUS will be far off better for it.

"Well, bye."

Oh, please. Conservative movement jurists have no problem undoing long standing Constitutional precedent if it meets Conservative policy goals either. I've got news: the Constitution is a broadly written and often ambiguous document that affords multiple, sometimes contradictory, interpretations by rational, reasonable people. Originalism is just Conservative rhetorical cover for the normal legal process, a rhetorical cover which happens to mesh nicely with the Conservative fondness for immutable, dogmatic sources of truth. Have you ever wondered why judges produced by a political movement that started in the 1950s consistently write Originalist Constitutional interpretations of a document from 1787, i.e. supposed divinations of the will of the Founding Fathers, that perfectly align with the preexisting policy goals of that movement? If you think it's because the Conservative movement exists in perfect harmony with the divine will of the Founding Fathers, then there's this bridge in Brooklyn I'm selling that you may be interested in.

jdreyer wrote on Sep 18, 2020, 21:11:

Bill Borre wrote on Sep 18, 2020, 20:34:
I bet Trump is asking his advisors just how fast he can nominate a supreme court justice.

Unfortunately, the process bypasses the House. So Republicans are in control.
It used to be the case the SCOTUS nominees required a 3/5ths supermajority vote to proceed to the President, but the Republicans nuked that.

Strictly speaking, it always only required a majority to confirm a nominee, to the court or otherwise; it did however require a 3/5 majority to close Senate debate and proceed to a final vote.

Murkowski has publicly stated she will vote against a Trump nominee if one is put forward prior to inauguration in January. Romney hasn't spoken publicly yet but he is likely to follow suit. After that, two additional Republicans would need to break away and unfortunately that's probably too much to hope for.

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 18, 2020, 20:51:

Bill Borre wrote on Sep 18, 2020, 20:34:
I bet Trump is asking his advisors just how fast he can nominate a supreme court justice.

Mitch McConnell blocked President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, for 293 days.

If that worthless piece of excrement approves a nominee before the election there will be hell to pay.

McConnell's office has already issued a statement saying that he's committed to holding a confirmation vote for a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court.

Fuck McConnell. He has shown his total bad faith. In the likely event Biden wins the Presidency and the Senate, he should pack the court. 13 justices sounds like a fair number to me.

ExGemini wrote on Sep 17, 2020, 21:08:

Scottish Martial Arts wrote on Sep 17, 2020, 21:01:

Jaxx wrote on Sep 17, 2020, 20:52:
If they call that debt in, our economy is absolutely screwed.

That's not how treasury bonds work.

Enlight us.

US treasury securities have fixed maturation and interest payment schedules and are not callable. The principal is repaid on the maturation date of the security.

There's no mechanism by which a treasury bond holder can ask for their money back ahead of schedule. If the bond holder needs to liquidate the bond prior to maturation, they can sell it on secondary markets with a price that reflects the remaining number of interest payments and time remaining until maturation.

Jaxx wrote on Sep 17, 2020, 20:52:
If they call that debt in, our economy is absolutely screwed.

That's not how treasury bonds work.

subx wrote on Sep 17, 2020, 05:15:
Surely the saving of not having a disc drive would be gone after buying a couple of games at their fixed digital prices? Seems like a crazy option to go for, but I guess people are quite stupid.

The Playstation Store routinely has Steam style sales with steep discounts. I've got about 40 games, most of which are AAA titles, on my PS4 and have probably spent under $500 to get them. A disk drive gives you more options but it's not like forgoing one means you'll pay $70 for every PS5 games you ever purchase.

WaltC wrote on Sep 14, 2020, 13:00:
I guess if you want to discount the average surface temp on Venus being ~860 degrees F, with a perpetual acid ran from perpetual sulfuric-acid clouds, etc., you might talk about "life on Venus"...I guess...;)

It's not at all implausible. Ever hear of extremophiles?

In the 1980s and 1990s, biologists found that microbial life has great flexibility for surviving in extreme environments—niches that are acidic or extraordinarily hot, for example—that would be completely inhospitable to complex organisms...

Tom Gheysens from Ghent University in Belgium and some of his colleagues have presented research findings that show spores from a species of Bacillus bacteria survived and were still viable after being heated to temperatures of 420 °C (788 °F).

Of course, the phosphine in Venus's atmosphere may be caused by something other than microbial life. But the utter hostility of Venus's environment to complex life does not preclude the possibility that microbes could be living and thriving there.

jdreyer wrote on Sep 11, 2020, 15:06:
As if 2020 couldn't get worse: "Let's not make new games, let's just refresh old games!" Don't like how this trend is taking off.

The Sega Saturn doesn't emulate well. Short of buying an old Saturn and copy of Panzer Dragoon off ebay (which will run you $250 for CIB) there was no good way to play Panzer Dragoon in 2020. Now there is.

Quinn wrote on Sep 10, 2020, 02:24:
[
No, SMA, your brain is unable to fathom that if someone gives critique or even dumb ad-homs toward a person who isn't white, doesn't automatically mean said someone is racist. I also noticed the bolded part. That "mentally inept" lives as a stereotype for a certain race in your brain, is your problem. Nobody is a mind-reader. Next time I'll give critique or uncharmingly insult a non-white person, shall I check with you first what stereotypes live in your head?

If you are familiar with the history of American slavery and segregation, then you know that American culture built up a series of stereotypes around the "Negro" to justify their brutal subjugation. Specifically, that they are less sensitive to pain; that they are less intelligent; that they are more likely to engage in criminality unless kept under strict control; that they are sexually profligate and that the men will rape white women unless, again, kept under strict control; that they are, at their core, beasts of burden and not rational, moral actors. These are the attitudes which justified slavery, which justified Jim Crow and segregation, and which justifies continuing racial inequities particularly as regards the criminal justice system. You do not have to actively consider yourself a white supremacist to have absorbed these attitudes and anyone who is being honest with themselves will find themselves thinking or feeling them from time to time, much like any American will also think "freedom is good" from time to time -- it's just part of our culture.

If someone starts expressing racially conservative views, i.e. that it is inherently illegitimate for a black athlete to engage in protest on American race relations, they themselves may not view themselves as racists, but having absorbed American cultural attitudes towards blacks, it is entirely likely that they will express their racially conservative views in terms of the aforementioned longstanding racial stereotypes. Using the term "mentally inept" -- when arguing that nothing untoward happened because Kaepernick's career was already in steep decline -- is tipping your hand. If his career is in steep decline, then you can provide the statistical evidence to show it, and you have proved your premise in your larger argument. Falling back on "mentally inept" suggests that this is not an evidence based argument. Instead, the argument is rooted in unconscious cultural attitudes which then engender resentment in the racially conservative person when he is forced to confront racial inequity, such as when a protest regularly occurs as part of his favorite sport.

Quinn wrote on Sep 9, 2020, 19:06:
So everyone who doesn't agree with you guys are simply racist now? So pathetic.

No, Quinn, your brain is unable to follow an argument or infer anything that isn't explicitly spelled out for you. Hell, you're too dense to notice a bolded part of a block quote, let alone connect it to longstanding racial stereotypes. If you'd like to see what rebutting a rhetorical antagonist looks like, please examine Eirikrautha's post: he did a bang up job.

Speaking of which, you make a good rebuttal, Eirikrautha. I don't follow football so I can't produce a counter argument other than to say that the impression I got living in the Bay Area in 2012-14 was that Kaepernick was a star quarterback. Seeing the *ahem* racially conservative members of this board proclaim him a terrible player raised a red flag, so I googled "quarterback ranking" to see if he was really that fucking terrible. Turns out that statistics say he wasn't terrible, and ranks along names that non-Football fans still know. But you've pointed out the limitations of those statistics and the downward trend of his career, so I'll concede to someone who knows better than I do.

RogueSix wrote on Sep 9, 2020, 15:28:

Prez wrote on Sep 9, 2020, 06:12:
Football is still about athletes with amazing skill right? I don't mind if he kneels, sits, stands on his head, whatever during the National Anthem. He really just isn't that good at Football.

Yeah. His Superbowl performance was abysmally bad. He was a nervous wreck who made mistake after mistake and poor judgment after poor judgment due to being scared shitless. He is obviously mentally inept to perform at the elite competitive level inherent to the NFL playoffs and especially the Super Bowl. He may be OK in regular league games so he should probably sign with a tail end club that does not run the risk of ever getting very far in the playoffs.

It's too bad we don't have something like sports statistics to objectively measure athlete performance and instead have to just rely on Internet racists to make subjective assessments for us.

Prez wrote on Sep 9, 2020, 06:12:
Football is still about athletes with amazing skill right? I don't mind if he kneels, sits, stands on his head, whatever during the National Anthem. He really just isn't that good at Football.

That is objectively not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Football_League_career_passer_rating_leaders

Maybe you're just not very good at tolerating Blacks speaking their mind?

Did no one have a Game Boy as a kid? Yeah, the screen is small by 2020 standards but it suits the extremely limited resolutions of 8-bit gaming well. Someone who picks up a Game Boy in 2020 will get used to the small screen size almost immediately; they might however have more trouble with the lack of a backlight. After a solid decade of smart phone use, our eyes have become pretty accustomed to only seeing backlit screens, and it can be kind of shocking at first to go back to something that has no integrated lighting.

Kxmode wrote on Sep 7, 2020, 18:10:
Why isn't Tenet on Amazon Video Cinema? I'd pay $25.00, which is WAY more than a cinema ticket; even more than IMAX.

My guess would be that Nolan pulled rank with the distributor in order to give Tenet as much of a theatrical run as possible, given the pandemic. My understanding is that he's a bit of a traditionalist with respect to the cinema going experience and continuing to shoot on film, which he then pressures the distributor to get screened on traditional film projectors. Other than reparatory screenings at the IFC Center, the last time I saw a new movie on film was in 2017 for Dunkirk.

Meanwhile, in New York City, we had one day of snow last winter, which melted off by the afternoon of the following day. And while not comparable to central Texas, we had roughly 6 weeks this summer where the temperature never dipped below 80° and the dew point never went below 70°. It's increasingly hard to be anything but pessimistic.

Millennial here (born in 1985), and got 10 out of 11. Fun quiz but the framing is moronic: as others noted it skips over Gen X and seems not to understand that the oldest millennials -- i.e the generational cohort that started reaching adulthood around the turn of the millenium -- are turning 40 this year and at the very least used a TV like this in the guest bedroom at Grandma's house if they didn't have one as the family TV.

Also, you used the screwdriver to break the tab on a blank VHS tape to make it read-only; you made it writeable again by putting electrical tape over the tab location.

PHJF wrote on Aug 22, 2020, 14:44:

ColoradoHoudini wrote on Aug 22, 2020, 14:34:
It's been pretty good here in Colorado without any lockdown BS from the useless politicians. Bars, restaurants, lakes, parks.. good to go here. Just have to wear your fakebelieve mask to get into places, then take it off. Not too worried about a flu

Hope the rest of you can get out from under your shitty politicians thumbs and take back your cities.

If anyone was wondering why this country is exponentially worse than all others in responding to C19...

We have Republicans?

Nucas wrote on Aug 21, 2020, 19:02:
does anyone make movie or game decisions based on reviews? honest question.

I think this question misunderstands the ultimate point of art criticism. Art criticism is not a consumer product review; it is an argument by one person about what their response to the object of criticism means. What did they see? What context did they bring to seeing it? What did they walk away thinking about? What does it mean? How did the artist achieve this meaning? If you engage critically with art, then these questions are of interest. When you read a critic, it's a chance to hear someone else's answers to these questions, and in hearing them, perhaps come to understand your own response better, and, maybe, the art itself.

Take a look at Roger Ebert's second review of Groundhog's Day with this in mind: I think you'll find that the next time you watch that film, your eyes will see something more sublime than you remember.