CatBus

SilverWook said:

And again, that is the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen.

That’s no signature. It’s a seismograph record.

Mike O said:

So, I have some mild good news. I bought a pill splitter and started cutting my Abilify and Klonopin in half and taking them with my Prozac. This has been somewhat helpful.

I’ve found some people are mysteriously much more sensitive to drugs than others. Consult with your doctor, but I’ve seen people cut the smallest available doses of psychoactive drugs into quarters with good results. Finding the right dosage for you sometimes involves trial and error – and again, consult with your doctor throughout this process.

This is the kind of thing I should be worried about more than my selfish, stupid bullshit.

IMO, from what you wrote, your level of worry about your grandfather seems higher than average. The fact that you have your own life to deal with doesn’t make you a worse person. It just makes you a person.

I secretly like sleeping more than I think that I should, because it’s my best respite from my mind and my problems.

Dealing with mental illness is exhausting. Some people have a much harder time getting a break from it than you. From that point of view, your ability to get a respite through sleep is fortunate. And at least to some degree healthy.

Sorry for the rambling. Just wanted to vent a little. Progress is a dangerous mistress. For all I’ve accomplished, I feel like there’s still so much further to go. And that’s not counting my REAL problems; being a 30 year-old virgin living with my parents working a dead-end job. I need to work on THAT too, and I’m desperately running from it.

I agree you don’t suffer from lack of things to worry about. But I suggest that you can trim the list a bit by trying not to worry so much about not being worried enough, and trying not to worry so much about enjoying escaping your worries 😉

Some chipsets fail to upconvert 720p24 properly. My Oppo BDP-93 (Marvell Qdeo 88DE2750 chipset) used to upconvert to 1080p24, but then there was a firmware update to fix a colorspace bug and 720p24 now goes to 1080p60 just like yours. I’m afraid in my case the fix is a new player, since it’s long out of support. What’s more annoying to me is that the 480i NTSC decoding went to crap at the same time too, in a much worse way. So it’s very possible the hardware itself is at fault, but I don’t know your model specifically. If only HDMI supported 720p24, then you could just pass it as-is and let the display handle the upconversion. Argh.

Hey, I bought a set of TR47 discs from some guy something like 15 years ago now. I didn’t know either. Live and learn.

darth_ender said:

CatBus said:

darth_ender said:

I don’t see a way that a party in power could twist the laws to maintain minority rule. If I am wrong in my information, please correct me.

North Carolina has had a hell of a time with its general assembly district maps regularly having a heavily partisan bias. The current one that hasn’t been struck down yet is awful too. I can’t speak for all states, but my state legislature also periodically redraws its own district maps. Demographic change and population growth make that a necessity, and gerrymandering typically comes with the package.

So if the North Carolina general assembly chooses a Republican Senator and the voters prefer a Democrat, the voters have little recourse. As of the 2016 election, the current North Carolina gerrymander gives the GOP a 10% boost in terms of seats in the Assembly, so unless more than 60% of North Carolinians oppose, they really can’t do anything about it. And that’s with the gerrymander that wasn’t struck down as unconstitutional. And they’re always devising “better” maps, too.

Yes, that does mean there need to be gerrymanders of both state and federal districts to make this happen, but that’s already in place. It is not safe to assume state legislatures represent the will of the voters of the state, or that voters can simply vote them out if they do something the voters don’t like.

Only statewide offices can’t be gerrymandered. Governors, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State, US Senators, those sorts of offices. That’s it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States#Remedies

It seems reasonable to me that we can change the laws, such as having non-partisan commissions handle redistricting, which is how we do it in Arizona. It seems to better represent the will of the people and would negate that legitimate criticism of my argument of repealing the 17th Amendment.

Non-partisan commissions (technically bi-partisan commissions – if there’s ever a serious third-party challenge, both parties could still conspire to gerrymander them out of the equation) do seem to work pretty well as far as I’ve been able to tell. They’re not always problem-free (sometimes people can sneak things through that don’t look wrong superficially), but certainly MUCH better than the partisan redistricting used in most of the country. My state also has one, and the map we’re currently using has a slight Republican bias, but I think that’s only because the Democratic regions have had huge population growth since the last time the lines were drawn. The ten-year redistricting period is far too long IMO for high-growth regions.

A serious problem with the commissions is that they’re created by statute… so they can be disbanded by statute. If we’re going to do something to prevent gerrymandering, it should be at the level of a constitutional amendment. As it is, commissions suffer the same weakness as the Voting Rights Act. The courts can knock them down, and the legislature can simply get rid of them. In a place where one party controls the whole state government (most of the country), it’s just too easy to undo. As constitutional amendments, they would be protected. Considering the commissions are basically a way to ensure that the democratic process happens, I’m really not comfortable with one that can go away with a simple majority vote. So while I like my state’s redistricting commission, I do not think it’s adequate as the sole means of protecting the democratic process.

Assuming we had constitutionally-protected redistricting commissions in all of our states, I still don’t think I’d be on board with your plans for the 17th, but my hair wouldn’t stand up on end when you mention it, which I guess would be a start 😉

In related news, the Supreme Court just punted on Texas’s gerrymander, which means it will almost certainly be used in the 2018 Congressional elections.

Next up on the list of subjects to ponder: SDH subtitles.

I’m pretty certain I want to expand these considerably, but there are lots of questions about exactly how I should do it. Initially – like in the 1.0 days – the only English subtitles were SDH subtitles, and I forked them a few revisions later. But the SDH subtitles are still pretty minimal – subtitling only the things that help the movie make sense, not necessarily adding much in the way of atmosphere. Remember how lame the medal ceremony would seem without the iconic musical score? Yeah, I don’t want that to be how the whole movie goes.

So we need to subtitle music. At the very least, we do an adjective, like “tense music”, “triumphant music”, “militaristic music”, etc. Maybe modifiers for loud, quiet, brass, vocals. The cantina music could definitely be called swing music since it’s basically Space Benny Goodman. Any other ideas? Putting music into text is hard. Should we do little music note symbols?

Should I stick with all caps? I like to differentiate non-verbal subtitles as much as possible, but maybe brackets are enough. Should I put spaces between the brackets and the text?

For other things, I guess it’s a matter of finding the best words to describe various Star Wars sounds. I’m still inclined to not subtitle things that are obvious. Such as when an explosion happens onscreen, I don’t really think we need to see [EXPLOSION]. But when Darth Vader breathes, I think it’s worth subtitling that because you really may not know it otherwise. For that I was thinking [MECHANICAL BREATHING] on his first appearance, and then [VADER BREATHES] for subsequent subtitles. And then [VADER WHEEZES] and so on for variations.

Apparently there are now at least two photoshopped images of Trump assisting Hurricane rescue efforts making their rounds among groups of Trump supporters on Facebook. One features him rescuing two cats, but you can tell it’s fake because his thumbs are too long (among other things). As satire, I suppose they’d be fine, but they appear to be taken seriously. The Pizzagate crowd still needs to be fed, I suppose.

Stop turning the crank, Chyron8472. As long as we’re all down here, I want to have a turn.

SilverWook said:

If that was the case, wouldn’t the Psychic Friends Network have warned her of impending doom?
https://youtu.be/VxCx6KIpJVE

She’s alive! Damn it!

chyron8472 said:

CatBus said:

thejediknighthusezni said:

I’m a bigot against those Andromadans.

But is it because he’s gay, black, or because he ate Dionne Warwick?

Ha. Okay, that made me laugh. 😃

I’m lemonading.

thejediknighthusezni said:

I’m a bigot against those Andromadans.

But is it because he’s gay, black, or because he ate Dionne Warwick?

TV’s Frink said:

Not sure why Top That! is in this thread, but I’m pretty sure I saw it in 1989.

You are cooler than me.

You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the Teen Witch rap.

Or, to be more accurate, you’ve never wished you were dead before you heard it. Same difference.

Looks like Zombie Trumpcare 3.0 has shambled into the open. Anyone got a Lobo?

I’ve actually heard this a lot, and a knew a possible Trump supporter who generally followed this same line of reasoning.

What if everything Trump says he’ll do is a lie? What if all the evidence indicating he’s been a petulant, self-absorbed racist, sexist man-child his entire life is wrong? What if he’s not as unqualified as all the evidence indicates? Plus, I read on Facebook he’s actually secretly pro-LGBT! If so, there’s a chance he could make a pretty good President.

Followed shortly by:

What if everything Hillary says she’ll do is a lie? What if all the evidence indicating she’s been a well-informed, capable, politically savvy leader her entire life is wrong? What if she’s not as qualified as all the evidence indicates? Plus, I read on Facebook she murdered Seth Rich! If so, her election could spell disaster for the nation!

So basically take everything you know about a person, turn it on its head, and vote pretending they’re actually the opposite of this person. If this truly represents the thought processes of a large percentage of Trump voters, they voted for President of Bizarro-land. Which kinda explains where we are today.

darth_ender said:

I wish I had more time. Now that I am researching a bit more, I can see the problem of gerrymandering being more of an issue than I’d identified, even with my previous statement in this very reply. But, as you suggested that we can alter the law to more easily remove senators, could we not also alter the law to minimize gerrymandering?

You’re right – what we could really use right about now is a Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 😉

darth_ender said:

I don’t see a way that a party in power could twist the laws to maintain minority rule. If I am wrong in my information, please correct me.

North Carolina has had a hell of a time with its general assembly district maps regularly having a heavily partisan bias. The current one that hasn’t been struck down yet is awful too. I can’t speak for all states, but my state legislature also periodically redraws its own district maps. Demographic change and population growth make that a necessity, and gerrymandering typically comes with the package.

So if the North Carolina general assembly chooses a Republican Senator and the voters prefer a Democrat, the voters have little recourse. As of the 2016 election, the current North Carolina gerrymander gives the GOP a 10% boost in terms of seats in the Assembly, so unless more than 60% of North Carolinians oppose, they really can’t do anything about it. And that’s with the gerrymander that wasn’t struck down as unconstitutional. And they’re always devising “better” maps, too.

Yes, that does mean there need to be gerrymanders of both state and federal districts to make this happen, but that’s already in place. It is not safe to assume state legislatures represent the will of the voters of the state, or that voters can simply vote them out if they do something the voters don’t like.

Only statewide offices can’t be gerrymandered. Governors, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State, US Senators, those sorts of offices. That’s it.

thejediknighthusezni said:

chyron8472 said:

Who the heck is a regular American?

Well, in this context, I was referring to denizens of North America who are qualified to vote in elections but not particularly concerned with lefty activist political scheming.

That’s me! I mostly stopped being concerned with lefty activist political scheming when the political left ceased to exist in my country approximately thirty-five years ago. I am always hoping for signs of its revival, though, so maybe that qualifies as concern.

darth_ender said:

I am in favor, however, of repealing the 17th Amendment.

After reading your arguments, I think there’s another fundamental philosophical chasm at some more basic level. Generally speaking, I don’t trust people with power to do the right thing. Senators, Presidents, whoever. Elections, while imperfect, are a means of keeping those in power from straying too far. Not the only means, but a critical one – and the one that must be used to some degree to qualify the nation as a democracy. I’m also a big fan of the separation of powers – if you have to give a bunch of people power, use the power of petty infighting to help keep them in check.

Due to some already-long-discussed issues (gerrymandering, the EC, etc), it’s become clear over the years that it’s possible for a minority of voters to retain control of the House and the Presidency indefinitely – the only question is how far a political party would go to implement this sort of minority rule. A system where the votes still happen, but one side is guaranteed to win regardless of the outcome. The Senate, for all its other faults such as its baked-in bias in favor of smaller-population states, cannot be gamed to the same degree as the House and the Presidency. Statewide elections cannot be gerrymandered. I feel it’s only because of this we haven’t seen people take full advantage of the politically-unpopular legal loopholes that could win them the House and Presidency regardless of the vote totals (because the whole concept of “politically unpopular” becomes irrelevant once you no longer rely on vote totals for your wins). There are worse things than gerrymandering floating around in the dark corners of the political world.

Thus, I don’t see the Senate as a less-democratic chamber that moderates the democratic excesses of the House at all. To the contrary, I see it as the nation’s only backstop (albeit a rather weak one given its baked-in bias and limited authority) against any plan for permanent minority rule in the US a la South Africa, which, given recent events, seems to clearly be the plan of far too many. Repealing the 17th would remove that backstop, and nothing else in the Constitution would prevent the sort of minority rule that is technically easily doable within the constraints of the rest of the Constitution – the literal end of American democracy – but for the conscience of politicians, in which I don’t place a great deal of trust.

darth_ender said:

Warbler said:

As has been pointed out to me by conservatives in this forum: America is not a pure democracy. We are a Democratic Republic.

That is a stupid GOP argument in favor of the College.

It’s also factually wrong. Yes, we are a democratic republic, but that is completely unrelated to the existence of the Electoral College. The House of Representatives is pretty much entirely what makes us a democratic republic. Many democratic republics around the world are perfectly functional without anything resembling an electoral college – in fact, the EC makes us less of a democratic republic than they are. The EC is derived from an early attempt at resolving federalism with a basic distrust of democracy, and you can have federalism without it.

yhwx said:

darth_ender said:

yhwx said:

Everybody says ‘Bernie would have won’ or ‘Bernie wouldn’t have won,’ but I won’t really believe either until I see some polling data.

darth_ender said:

I think the DNC as a whole is partially to blame. The very fact that there is a superdelegate system, disproportionally and undemocratically favoring the voice of the elite, allowed Hillary to grab the nomination when the more likable Bernie Sanders might have defeated Trump.

While there is no way to prove that he would have won, I feel he easily could have better united the Democrat Party and that his supporters were far more passionate than Clinton’s. Heck, Jeebus here protest voted against Hillary. I doubt there would have been much of that against Bernie, even among Hillary supporters. I’ve no doubt most would have gone ahead and voted for Bernie as their number two pick.

I think the unification problem had more to do with Bernie’s supports (and to some extent Bernie himself) than Clinton herself.

As documented earlier, Bernie’s supporters notably moved to support Hillary at higher rates and faster than Hillary’s supporters moved to support Obama eight years earlier. While there are always some holdouts in any primary race, the 2016 Democratic Party was notable for its lack of a unification problem, at least when compared to prior years.

Warbler said:

CatBus said:

Warbler said:

The account has his name on it. It is his account.

Sure. And it’s his face on the billboard, and so on. When your name and face are regularly handed off to others to create a message to associate with it, sometimes the best you can do is pull the offending material after-the-fact and presumably identify/deal with the person who created it. If you consider Twitter passwords to be sacrosanct things only to be given to people with the highest vetted clearance, you would be (perhaps properly) horrified by how it works every day in much of the world, where the intern gets handed it on day 1.

If it is the case that any new intern gets handed the password on day 1, I would suggest changing the name of the twitter account. Maybe change it to “Ted Cruz campaign” or “The Office of Ted Cruz” or “Ted Cruz INC” or “The Staff of Ted Cruz”. Something that indicate it is a twitter account belonging to his group(what it is called), and not his own private twitter account.

But, politically, he can’t. Cruz represents about 28 million constituents (which is appalling but true). And yet people who go through the trouble of writing to (or e-mailing, or tweeting, etc) their Senator want to feel like they got a one-on-one exchange with a US Senator, where their opinion was, at least temporarily, given the undivided attention of someone who could actually help. Which is ridiculous even for a decent Senator, let alone the likes of Cruz.

If you get a response back from “the office of Ted Cruz”, or “one of about twenty interns who just started working this month for Ted Cruz” – yes, it’s honest and accurate, but it’s politically counterproductive. It gives the voter the (probably accurate) impression that the Senator most likely will never set eyes on what most people write to them, which doesn’t exactly make you have good feelings about them come re-election time. So they keep up the facade of “oh yes, you’re really communicating with me personally” because it makes them seem like the sort of Senator people want to have.

It’s not just social media. Write a letter, and you’ll get a letter back signed by the Senator (well, with a printed image of the Senator’s signature). The return address will say the office of so-and-so, but the letter itself will look personal. I’m dating myself here, but I wrote a letter to the newly-elected Bernie Sanders when he was in the House, and when he actually wrote back it was like Christmas. OMG! Mr Smith goes to Washington WORKS! Woohoo citizen democracy! But seriously, upon reflection, it was just a form letter.

Showbiz and politics. Not so different after all.

Warbler said:

The account has his name on it. It is his account.

Sure. And it’s his face on the billboard, and so on. When your name and face are regularly handed off to others to create a message to associate with it, sometimes the best you can do is pull the offending material after-the-fact and presumably identify/deal with the person who created it. If you consider Twitter passwords to be sacrosanct things only to be given to people with the highest vetted clearance, you would be (perhaps properly) horrified by how it works every day in much of the world, where the intern gets handed it on day 1.

Warbler said:

What are you talking about? It it his account, and he was the staffer’s employer. Of course he had control of that.

I don’t know if this is the case here, but in at least a few cases, a political person with staff does not create social media accounts, post anything to them, write speeches or press releases, or read or respond to e-mails. And while they may theoretically have some sort of editorial veto over content associated with their name, it’s logistically impossible for them to review everything. Hell, they don’t even read the legislation they vote on. Trump is fairly unique in that he writes his own covfefe.

SilverWook said:

There’s a bomb scare going on at the Santa Monica pier out here today. And the usual A-holes on twitter are dragging their political sewage into it.

Who knew the quality of American public dialogue would be foreshadowed by YouTube comments?

So last week or so, I heard a BBC news story about Trump’s DACA decision. Although they included the fairly typical pro and con arguments from advocate for either side of the position, what struck me is that the “pro” argument came from a member of an SPLC-designated hate group, but one with a radio-friendly name (Center for Immigration Studies, so bland, so neutral-sounding). Furthermore, they didn’t indicate this for the listener as I think would be appropriate under the circumstances.

I’m sure they got a lot of flack from their listeners about this, and news organizations may have now started vetting their talking heads for white supremacists ties before airing them, or at least including the disclaimer “this person is a member of a known hate group” when they do. Or at least something like “BBC News tried to find someone supporting this policy who was not also a member of a hate group, but failed to find one,” which I think would be the most appropriate action for a news organization.

And now… FOX “News” is runs a hit piece on the SPLC:

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/09/08/splc-demands-correction-fox-news