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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/30/22 in all areas

  1. Doesn't matter. It might be not interesting to some, but it was interesting to me.
    2 points
  2. To date, we've taken the approach endorsed by the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What exactly are these badges you speak of?
    2 points
  3. Short version: Clarence Thomas is a rotten apple and Republican stooge. Longer version: Over the last dozen years I've been on here and taken an interest in SC and US politics, he is clearly the outlier to what constitutes a good SC judge. His wife's antics being out in the open kind of explains his past voting record. I can't quite compute that he's black and yet holds this ideological position. Did he see a novel and fast track way to get where he is today in a Republican-leaning field not well-represented by minorities i.e. it's not about principles, but about personal advancement? As far as his wife goes, it's not difficult to mistake her words for that of Marjorie Taylor Green.
    2 points
  4. I found this interpretation of Putin's real objectives to be disturbingly plausible: https://archive.ph/2022.03.30-020554/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/opinion/ukraine-war-putin.html The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power. Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean? “There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.” Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s). Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance. “Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors....
    1 point
  5. The joke, taste level aside, compared JPS to a sexy and glamorous movie star in a popular movie in which she surmounts all obstacles. It could be a weak joke, it could be a little transgressive, and a lot of humor is built on mild transgression. As Stephen Colbert said, the way to really hit back at a comedian whose joke you don't like is to not laugh. A blow that Will Smith failed to administer, and which would have been more effective, given that cameras were trained on him and JPS for a reaction shot. JPS, herself, wisely wrote this about her condition a while back: I really had to put it in a spiritual perspective of, like, the higher power takes so much from people. People are out here who have cancer, people who have sick children. I watch the higher power take things every day and, by golly, if the higher power wants to take your hair, that’s hair? When I looked at it from that perspective, it really did settle me.
    1 point
  6. Your logic looks right to me, certainly (well done for allowing for the decrease in free oxygen), though I don't pretend to do this sort of thing every day. You probably have a lot more practice at doing problems like this than I do. I seem to recall you have asked for confirmation of your answers before and they were OK then. I have a feeling you may be quite good at this - unless I'm mixing you up with someone else.
    1 point
  7. For the sake of documentation,
    1 point
  8. It's in bad taste, not due to the severity of the joke (almost negligible) - but for two other reasons. 1. It's about another person's physical appearance. Louie Anderson's weight is not a secret; Joan Rivers' cosmetic surgeries were not a secret - and while they could make fun of themselves, a close friend making fun of them in private would be acceptable - a stranger doing it on national television is offensive. 2. It's at the expense of a non-participant. The celebrity being roasted is fair game but their family members are off limits.
    1 point
  9. I guess they mean this. I was curious too.
    1 point
  10. It's ludicrous to try to portray Chris Rock's joke as in bad taste. Jada has gone totally public with her head shaved, she made a video about it that had already clocked up TWO MILLION views, and yet a comment that she would be a suitable casting for the GI Jane part is supposed to be offensive, or in bad taste? People need to get real. This was not her little secret, it was something she'd taken time to publicise worldwide, as something that doesn't need to be hidden away. Chris Rock's very mild joke was really treating it in the same everyday normal manner. A derogatory joke would have been different, but it wasn't. Chris Rock's routine about "Black People vs Niggaz" sums up Will Smith. Just when black people get things going right, some "damn Niggaz" come along and spoil it. Here he is doing that routine to an auditorium full of black people, and they are loving it. Because they've got a sense of humour. But if you've got no humour in you, then you will find most comedy offensive.
    1 point
  11. I have been an aficionado of boxing since I was an early teenager, and it looked liked a staged slap to me. Will Smith went through the motion, but he put no power into the contact. Chris Rock's head didn't move, nor did his expression change. It didn't fulfill Koch's postulates.
    1 point
  12. This shows that if you put your mind to it and use a certain rhetoric you can successfully attempt to prove that the fax maschine had the same impact on the global economy as the internet does.
    1 point
  13. I think this is right. The energy of squeezing goes into pushing neutrons to occupy more and higher energy levels. But, back to the OP, why would the photons resist compression?
    1 point
  14. A joke is a joke; if it's not funny, so much the worse for the joke, and the joker. But I don't think for a minute Chris Rock's life was in danger. Com'on.
    1 point
  15. Her condition forces her to keep her hair cut really short ... like G.I. Jane. That was the joke. Where are we going with this ? Safe spaces for those poor disadvantaged Hollywood celebrities ? Shootings in comedy clubs ( especially when Ricky Gervais is performing ) ? Real life doesn't give anyone the right to not be offended. And I still don't know why it's all over the news, but I suspect INow is right, it provides a distraction from the real problems.
    1 point
  16. It's more like this scene from Animal House I mean, sure your mind is blown, and it's fine that you're blown away by an idea, but it's not based in much science. You have the opportunity to learn some really neat things, if you are so inclined.
    1 point
  17. What are the key differences you see between these two?
    1 point
  18. ! Moderator Note We attack ideas here. We don't attack groups of people, verbally or literally! This is an unacceptable violation of the rules you agreed to when you joined.
    1 point
  19. The way I'm looking at this is either I'm right or they're just trying to come up with an idea worse than like, the security holograms from dead money, or a touhou yokai, or thunder kiss '65 No offense
    -1 points
  20. Please explain, "they did" a fly by...
    -2 points
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