Woot

3 hours ago, Queen M said:

you'd live ten 100-year-lives casually remembering random things from your previous lives at specific times in your life. Think a long case of deja vu.

Barely sounds any better than just living once and dying. With a memory wipe and completely different experiences they'd basically be different people with little connection to me.

How much would you pay right now to know that you'd lived 9 lives before and to start randomly remembering small moments of them?

It depends on how it works. Would I have to get born and live as a baby 9 times while having an adult mind? Would I spend 900 years as a world-famous freak of nature getting studied all the time because I'm the only one living that long?

8 minutes ago, RedFive said:

I'm just going to say it...  someone needs to watch "Before Sunrise" and tell us what the hell is wrong with the movie that none of us have seen it.  There.  It was said.

It's a pretentious art film and I'm sure it's terrible. There's a lot of them at the top of rotten tomatoes for every year, I figured I'd spare 1 of the 20 allowed poll options for one of them.

The movie polls are back.

congratulations @Lamort

I think the characters have been the most important thing with Star Trek. TOS is cheap and dated and every episode is absurd but with Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov it's still the 2nd best series.

Voyager is the worst I've watched because every single character sucked. The most entertaining one they had was The Doctor, so they milked and flanderized him until he became as boring as the rest of them. A handful of my favorite star trek episodes ever are from Voyager - "Nemesis" and "Dreadnought" come to mind, which happen to be episodes where the whole annoying cast is gone except for a single character.

I haven't actually watched Enterprise yet.

Micchan, queen of the forums, should either do the job or appoint one of her subjects.

22 minutes ago, Micchan said:

Should the US stop declaring war to every shithole they can find on a map? YES

Fine, we won't invade Italy then.

http://www.bash.org/?151227

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgl4tXO6nQQ

27 minutes ago, japan77 said:

I throw her in the shit that Reagan Spawned pile.

Literally starts a war to gain reelection (Falklands War)

 

I think the Argies started that war when they invaded territory held by Britain for a century, settled by British people who were almost 100% in favor of British rule. Do you really think she should have done nothing, or that any other prime minister would have done differently?

Just looking at their strength on paper Colombia's military is bigger, richer, and more experienced, and it's backed by a state that isn't failing. I don't know of any special quality Venezuela might have over Colombia.

On 4/26/2017 at 1:02 PM, Tevron said:

breaks unions, and there's no legitimate/strong monopoly laws

17 hours ago, japan77 said:

Creation of anti-monopoly laws, worker's unions

Does nobody see the irony that big unions are some of the strongest monopolies that exist in this country? Just because a cartel is controlling labor instead of oil or internet service doesn't make it a great idea for an efficient economy. Anything a union can do can be done better through law, so if we're dreaming up a perfect system then what's with the unions?

You're a shitty replacement for Sargun

11 hours ago, Chief Savage Man said:

you have still said nothing

 

its a cost benefit consideration inherent to the specific issue, and handwaving it away as being less important as some other problem days nothing about it specifically

No, it's really not unique to this issue at all. The cost benefit consideration works the exact same way as it does on any other question of animal rights. You balance the benefit to humans on one end of the scales, and you balance the harm to animals on the other end.

If someone thinks animal testing isn't worth it, their scales are unbelievably weighted towards one side. Weighted so heavily towards one side that if someone used them consistently, they would have joined the voluntary human extinction movement by now instead of being around to vote in a poll like this. Is that clear enough?

3 hours ago, Chief Savage Man said:

 

this is a useless argument and you have said nothing of value

 

the fact that there are issues larger in scope does not have any bearing on one's ethical/moral position on smaller issues

 

What I mean is that almost anything you do in life causes more harm to animals for less benefit. 

Based on some cursory googling: let's estimate that a million animals big enough to care about suffer a horrible research death every year.

Divide that into the population and multiply by a lifespan, and you get about 0.25 animals killed in your lifetime for research.

Or if I'm off by a huge factor, let's say a whole animal or two is killed in your lifetime for research.

Imagine going through your life and cutting out anything activity you do, any product you consume, that kills even a single animal in an entire lifetime and has less benefit to you than all the medicine and science that's come from animal research. Can that be done? It might seem difficult to imagine how it's possible, but there's one way to do it - jump on a compost pile and strangle yourself with some organic hemp rope. That's basically what I was getting at with my comment.

From what I've seen serious economists seem to be split about 50/50 on minimum wage - it's not a question with an easy simple answer. I'm going to take the useless cop out - choosing "other" and saying that some a different system like a negative income tax would be more efficient than any minimum.

Anyone who'd say no is so anti-human I don't know why they even live instead of jumping on a compost pile and strangling themselves with some hemp rope. Of all the ways that animals are hurt as a result of human activity, people go after research?

6 minutes ago, Chief Savage Man said:

why does every torture thing turn into a writers meeting for 24

When someone makes an absolute argument like "information from torture is useless because they lie and it can't be verified", any counterexample is enough to undermine it. I don't think where's the bomb, where's the training camp, what's the password, etc, are outlandish scenarios. But it's not like we have access to a whole lot of real data in this argument.

20 minutes ago, Smith said:

This type of discussion is always amusing because the average citizen sees torture as a cruel necessity while our own military admits that it doesn't even work:

 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-government-torture-doesnt-work/5530591

Almost all those sources are complaining about the trustworthiness of the information. What's so ineffective in a case where there's a fast easy way of checking the truth of the information? For example, a password to a device, or the exact location of a bomb set to go off in a city. Then "anything to make it stop" can only be the truth. I don't buy the argument that it's a totally useless thing that we don't have to a moral debate over because it's just never a solution to any problem ever.

Citizens or prisoners of war, never. Foreign terrorists? It's extreme but there are equally extreme situations could warrant it. It's easier to stomach doing that to combatants than, for example, killing children in drone strikes, which almost everyone accepts as a unavoidable reality of the conflict.

Just us and them, no other countries involved, means that the US wouldn't have anything to worry about on the land. it would just be a naval and air battle. That's a winning proposition for us, we'd do a lot more damage than we received. But neither side could actually destroy the other. We can't win a land war in Asia and they can't cross the Pacific.

I remember everyone cheering when news first came in about an apparent secular military coup. Now everyone is crying totalitarianism after a mostly-democratic referendum. That seems like staggering hypocrisy to me. I think the real issue is that we see Turkey as a country on the border between an Islamic shithole and a nice Western secular country. We want them going in our sort of direction, and we really don't care how it happens or how many of their people share our values. And what do you know, a lot them feel the same way on the other side. I think western outrage, sanctions or anything else we could possibly try would just fuel Erdogan's side, so there's nothing we can do.

In the elections I've voted in there's been two real options, and with two options there's no difference. It's like asking if you heat up a room by making it less cold or by making it more hot.

I agree with RedFive. Getting overbooked is like a flight getting cancelled due to weather, it's just a risk and expense of travel. The problem is that the airline apparently set $800 in shitty hard to use vouchers as the limit for the auction before they started forcibly ejecting people. That's a pretty shit deal, no wonder they couldn't find volunteers.

But apparently there's a federal rule that they owe you 4x the cost of the ticket, up to $1400, if you're forcibly ejected. They must not be paying that money out unless customers press for it? It sounds like it would solve the whole problem if it was actively enforced.