yeah, because i'd kill myself if i lived in a universe as poorly-written as GRRM's song of ice and fire

Kinda petty to criticize a work of art that you haven't taken the time to experience.

6.5/10

I sense it had a little bit of a political message and the age old be yourself you can do anything you want.

Those messages are still important and under-represented in the movie's context of racial and gender discrimination.

Even if you don't have a cap, ISPs will sometimes throttle your connection after some unspecified limit, though not to such slow speeds.

I actually pirated a few books recently, but only after I'd purchased them on Amazon and wanted to be able to read them on my Kindle as an alternate to the physical copy.

Harry, the head of Magical Law Enforcement for all of Europe, AKA the head Auror, spends his time whining, crying, telling his son he doesn't want to be his dad, refusing to do work (which is just paperwork), and later telling his son that, like every other character in Rowling's books, he's "actually more like his mother".

ffs

I don't need excuses for my "moral failures" because morality is nothing more than a spook anyhow.

Please report to your nearest Scientology treatment center to receive your compleimentary* Thetan auditing.

*After 10 easy payments of $99.99

Post other excuses that make you feel better about your moral failings.

Spoilers for masochists:


Pretty excited for this episode because it sounds like it's solely the Battle of Winterfell and a battle in Mereen, and GoT excels at big battle scenes (because they don't have to write any dialog).

Radical Islam is commonly criticized as an aberrant deviation from the "true" Islam followed by the majority of moderate Muslims. Talking about how it treats homosexuals or non-believers is within the context of Islam itself in the same way people criticize WBC as non-Christians for how they treat others.

And ultimately, when we criticize Islam on here for being violent or hateful, we're not talking about whether the Quran is correctly interpreted one way or another to convince a Muslim, we're talking as outsiders about why that is incompatible with our society. If radical Islam is the true religion, well then I guess I'm just fucked.

Decent vid so far. It's always been weird how these people get offended by statistics like "1 in 5", and so forth.

I was kind of hoping this 17 minute video would be more than, "SoA's rebuttal of 1 in 5 is wrong because he used the wrong study and he's a silly manchild". Because that's literally all it is.

This seems like a subject a lot of conservatives and liberals fail to understand. The premise is that a larger bureaucracy becomes less efficient as it increases in size, eventually reaching some non-quantifiable asymptotic point where more money and manpower can no longer be justified by their results. I've talked briefly on here about the how conservative and progressive aren't opposites: conservatives believe the best path to social, economic, national, and personal betterment is through more limited government spending than liberal policies, allowing private industry and citizens to drive the nation's growth. This is similar to what is going on with the Brexit--an economic argument is that Britain is devoting too many resources to a bloated bureaucracy when they could benefit more from independence. 

A domestic example of this exponential curve of efficiency is seen in tuition costs.

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.
(...)
As public spending to universities have increased (disproportionately higher than other public services), tuition costs and university administrative costs and staffing have skyrocketed, while professor salaries have stagnated.
State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.
(...)
Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

It's true that a lot of uninformed conservatives use 'small government' as a cudgel anytime the government demonstrates its inefficiency, though the same can be said for any political party and its taglines. The reality of our situation is that the U.S. will never see some radical shift in size and power; a department may be defunded here or there, the military will always lose funding in peacetime (only to be rapidly built up again in wartime, reflecting the tuition example), and states will always be held to account for federal laws through withheld funding.

What're your thoughts on the concept of a small government? Do you think it's even a relevant topic today, or do you feel otherwise, and that maybe a larger government is always more beneficial?

What if I'm just high on life?

6.6 Summary
Despite the relatively small and limited nature of the Serbian ballistic material used in this exercise,
the findings in relation to the direct connections, and class and subclass characteristics clearly show
that there is a significant gap in the current EU and South East European Intelligence picture in this
area.
It is clear that a considerable limiting factor in current pan-European ballistic comparison activity is
that there is no one system or protocol for the ‘proactive’ correlation of ballistic material across
either the EU or South East European geographic area. That is not to say that the available IBIN
system or protocol is not helpful or supportive, however, it must be recognised that not all
territories within the region are members of Interpol. In addition, it should also be noted that a
number of countries inside the EU are not members of the IBIN network, this includes some
countries who are users of the technology utilised within the IBIN system architecture, namely IBIS.
As a result, the respective law enforcement organisations of both the EU and South East Europe are
reliant upon specific intelligence that two incidents may be linked before commissioning any cross
border comparative work to be conducted. This is completely contrary to the proactive nature of
intelligence sharing that is being advocated.
One of the key findings of the research is that considerable untapped knowledge regarding the
supply, movement, illicit manufacture, conversion, use and origins of illicit firearms lies within the
data held both within the ballistic comparison systems of EU and non-EU members, as well as within
their respective intelligence and investigative capabilities. The collection, integration, evaluation,
analysis and dissemination of the aforementioned ballistic, intelligence and reporting information
could have a significant impact on the prevalence and use of illicit firearms both within the EU and
South East Europe.

See section 7 for talking points.

types an attempt at a joke but then decides not to post it