Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Messages - evensgrey

#31
The Podcast / Re: Bogosity Podcast for 17 February 2019
February 28, 2019, 01:35:14 PM
Fortunately, the switch to color also meant an end to deleting episodes.  Doctor Who was not the only program mauled by this, of coure.  The famous program "Vision On" lost a huge swath of episodes from before color started up, for instance.  (For those who didn't get the luck of seeing this growing up, it was an art program aimed at working as well for deaf children as others, so there's background and incidental music, but no essential gialog, although some presenters do talk a bit.  This cycles back to Doctor Who because one presenter who notably did speak, and speak intelligibly, was Sylvester McCoy, who went on to play the Seventh Doctor years later.  And, for those familiar with his quirks, he did play the spoons on both programs.  So far as I know, the only hing he's done where he didn't get to play the spoons onscreen was "The Hobbit".)

I am a bit surprised the BBC was willing to spring for the extra costs of doing an entire adventure on film.  Film is expensive, even if you only have to pay incremental costs of using more of it.  (It was also already in color, so the camera operators didn't have an excuse to call for more money.)

If you want to take a look at a plausible future for the UK had there not been Thatcher, have a look at the final Quatermass series.  (The UK is well down the road of Venuzuela, but without a strongman figure running everything into the ground, it all just sort of drifted that way without anyone really doing anything one way or another.)
#32
The Podcast / Re: Bogosity Podcast for 17 February 2019
February 27, 2019, 03:10:39 PM
I had to look up the timing, but 'Winter of Discontent' not only happened before she was elected PM, it probably got her elected.  One of her other major reforms was changing labor laws so that strikes like that wouldn't happen any more.

(for those not familiar with the period in the UK, labor unions were ridiculously powerful and frequently held sympathy strikes where one union would strike in support of another union, even in a quite different indursty.  Labour, typically of a leftist party in government, was desperately trying to at least reduce the rate of increase in public sector wages.  We had a similar situation in Ontario in the early 90's under Bob "The Boob" Rae, who's misrule of Ontario gave us the then-new political term 'Martelling' as a result of trying to reduce what doctors were paid under the Ontario government medical insurance scam.
#33
The Podcast / Re: Bogosity Podcast for 17 February 2019
February 27, 2019, 01:50:38 PM
There's much less hyperbole in "Tax Man" than you might think.  For instance, the line "One for you and nineteen for me" is exactly true:  The income tax rate at the time went up to 95%.  (And leftists like to pretend that things like Thatcher's reduction of income tax to less insane levels was not the cause of radical improvement in the financial situation of many in the UK, including the poorest having their real incomes increase faster than they had for decades, and instead pretend that the UK joining what became the EU more than five years eralier somehow caused improvements that only manifested after Thatcher changed things radically.)
#34
The Podcast / Re: Bogosity Podcast for 10 February 2019
February 23, 2019, 06:22:44 AM
When the QuadrigaCX thing came out (which I heard about almost exclusively on CBC, incidentally), the takeaway I got from it was that if you want to hold crypto as an investment, you need to do so in devices you physically and digitally control.  And there's multiple good devices, although not all work with all coins.

On Madoff, not only was he under regulation that he appeared to comply with, but when Harry Markopolos concluded that Madoff's numbers were impossible and likely actually fraudulent, he was so personally disliked by regulators that his warnings were ignored.  His warnings started coming NINE YEARS before Madoff was finally busted (when his OWN CHILDREN reported that he had confessed the fraud to them).  (Incidentally, thre's a wonderful scene in either the novel "Armageddon?" or "Pantheocide" where a succubus named Lagda has Bernie on her talk show [yes, this makes perfect sense in context] and he suggests she wouldn't have behaved substantially differently than he did.  She agrees wholeheartedly, then points out:  "I'm a demon from Hell, the epitome of evil!  What's your excuse?")  I have long wanted to know just how long Madoff weas able to keep his Ponzi Scheme going, since it must have been fully fraudulent by at least 1998 for the numbers to not work at all by 1999

As for the Bible and mistranslations...Sometimes, the translators didn't understand at least one of the languages that well.  Sometimes, the concepts in one language didn't really have equivalents in the other.  And, sometimes (read: "almost always") the translators had an agenda and needed to 'adjust' the text to support it.  Thus, we end up with supposedly single narratives that repeat variants of scenes that obviously ahouldn't occur in the same story, like Noah's storage crate (about as good a translation of 'ark' as you're going to get, this is exactly the same word use in the phrase translated as "Ark of the Covenant") being loaded with a pair of each animal in one place, and with seven pairs in another place.
#35
I lost interest as soon as they got to the 'worshiping totem poles' comment.  I find it difficult to maintain interest in the rhetoric of people ignorant enough to think totem poles were even a common element in the cultures of New World indigenous peoples, rather than being speiofic to the coastal peoples of the Northwest (in modern Oregon State, Washington State, and Province of British Columbia).

I would kind of like to know where they think all the supposed Black kings in Germany came from. (The Georges were Germans, in fact George I didn't even speak English, and brought over German artists and intellectuals to fill those roles in his real court, whilst Englishman held relatively meaningless roles in the official court ostensibly to do the same jobs.  I'm specifically thinking of both his personal composer and astronomer.)  They even kept a liking for hiring Hessian mercenaries from Germany, which leads to things like the famous King of Pruisia in, so named in hopes it would deter the Hessian mercenaries from looting and burning it (which seems to have worked, the building survives today, and even held together when it was moved some years back).

The notion of Jesus being Black instead of the somewhat colloquial "little brown Jew" he would have been (if there is a specific historical personage at the root of the stories, which, given how muddled and contradictory of established historical documents from the time they are is unlikely) and that they know this in his 'hometown' (which I suspect they think is Nazareth, despite the fact that he is referred to as a 'Nazarene', which actually denotes a certain type of Jewish aesthetic of the period and not being from what was at the time a village too small to be mentioned in any surviving records and wouldn't have had any other meaning to the people of the period except to distinguish this Jesus from the hundreds or even thousands of other guys with the same name).

And that's just the stuff I know off the top of my head about the first few minutes of their idiotic rantings.
#36
While watching this video from Tim Pool (yes, I'm two weeks behind in my YouTube videos, I've been busy, OK?)

[yt]PNnAfFdqyUY[/yt]

I realized Trumo and Hitler actually do have one significant action in common:  Both of them wrote books describing their methods long before they rose to political power.  The methods are mostly dissimilar, and the objectives almost entirely opposite
#37
I found an absolute goldmine of articles about her on the Australian Morning Mail.

First, there's this one about a really unfun investigation she's a possible target of:

http://morningmail.org/gets-worse-18c-user-cindy-prior/

There are accusations that her attorneys had access to non-public information that they shouldn't have, and the possibility that she or someone connected to her improperly accessed the student's records was the subject of an investigation.  That's a very bad thing for a former administrator to be on the sharp end of.

And yes, Cindy Prior did end uop the recipient of bankruptcy actions:

http://morningmail.org/requiem-old-crone/

Seems she hasn't paid the court-ordered compensation for the legal expenses of the students she targeted.

The trouble arising from this idiocy has spread:

http://morningmail.org/qut-students-sue-tricky-triggs/

The head of the commission that was handling the matter before it became a court case has been caught out deliberately misleading the public about what happened during her commission's investigation, so she's up for a libel suit by the students for claiming that the posts on Facebook were racially discriminatory.

An MP has gotten herself on the wrong end of a defamation suit as well:

http://morningmail.org/terri-butler-mp-sued-for-defamation-there-is-a-god/

Seems she couldn't not make the patently false claim that one of the accused students used a racial slur on a Facebook posting that was already proven to not be his.

This just never seems to stop providing one funny outcome after another, doesn't it?
#38
General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
January 06, 2019, 02:51:17 PM
Quote from: Dallas Wildman on January 04, 2019, 10:46:13 PM
Sargon of Akkad of course is for closed borders.

[yt]ycEeDXusv7s[/yt]-

-Publicly funded infrastructure is not legitimate due to the mere ethical problems with taxation.
-Private property can be enforced WITHOUT the government.  That's why it's called a right to keep and bear arms.  To say otherwise is a false dichotomy.
-Close down the borders and it is GUARANTEED that "upper class" will see the "working class" as entitled and indolent.  After all, that "working class" is willing to keep otherwise industrious and eager individuals out of the labor market just to boost their own wages.
-More problems with this video, but I could go on.

Call yourself a "liberal" all you want Sargon, positions like these betray the little slivers of Marxism in you.  After all, Karl Marx himself did advocate for sealed off borders.

Marx may have realized that his ideas were rubbish and turning the whole country into a prison was the only way to keep people from leaving.  Then there's the issue that Marx claimed there wouldn't be countries any more, so...

As for Sargon, he thinks socialized medicine is a good idea, so...
#39
General Discussion / Re: Fav quotes
December 29, 2018, 11:52:31 PM
From Lindybeige, a YouTuber who makes (mostly) historical videos.  This one, however, is about Evolutionary Psychology.

[yt]WFxOxU9qQyQ[/yt]
#40
My YouTube subscriber feed seems to be mostly Tim Pool, TheQuartering, and Sargon of Akkad these days, and they seem to be mostly about the crazy nonsense coming from the dieing digital media companies and how the silicon valley tech firms are effectively conspiring against nonconformers.  And this is annoying because it's important enough that I need to watch them but I really don't want to have to.  Ah, the wonders of living through a media singularity...

Anyway, the interesting thing I've noticed is these videos are not just monetized, but HEAVILY monetized.  One of Sargon's videos at about 15 minutes had three different internal ads, and an opening and closing ad.  Ten minutes from Tim Pool had opening, closing, and internal ads as well.  This is pretty consistent:  YouTube has gone back to putting ads on 'controversial' creators.

Now, since I'm watching through a TOR connection, I'm getting a pretty random sample of ads (Ad Sense is clearly using the apparent IP to select ads, not the YouTube login info, since my login is specifically set that I'm in Canada, but I'm getting ads in and for various Easter European languages and places and services, like a Croatian tourism ad and various language localizations for Panzer Rush), but the ads are there.  They must be coming in because in those areas, none of the content on these channels is the least bit controversial.
#41
Which thing?  Bad military security?  Bad network security?  Failure to update critical infrastructure?  Buzzfeed doing something stupid?

Oh, yes, all of the above.
#42
And Buzzfeed is doing it's usual bang-up job.  Down at the bottom of the page are links to related articles.  One of which is about the US military having a security failure due to outdated router firmware.  What?  How does THAT relate to net neutrality?
#43
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000167-86a0-df8f-adff-affda6d90001

So, there's the December 6 ruling.  The court has ruled that the questions about whether Hillary attempted to evade FOIA requirements, and questions as to the legal adequacy of searches through emails the State Department had access to, and questions about the good or bad faith in earlier attempts to settle the FOIA case are all valid for further Discovery and review by the court as to the adequacy of the responses to Discovery.  The judge also noted that either the State Department officials involved were negligent and incompetent, or they may have colluded with Justice Department officials to stop the inquiry and deceive the court.  (We're looking at one pissed-off judge, here.  This is the second most angry I've ever seen a US Federal Judge, the most being the Dover case in 2006 where the judge openly accused two defense witnesses of perjury.)

Don't forget that not only could FOIA evasion constitute a felony, there are also potential charges under the Federal Records Act and the Espionage Act.   The last are the very charges Comey incorrectly declared Hillary Clinton absolved from because she didn't have the intent to violate the law, which is not a requirement for failing to properly and securely handle classified information under the Espionage Act, and neither is that anything was actually accessed by someone not authorized to do so.  All that is required is that the documents were handled in a manner that did not meet the security requirements of the classification level of the document.
#44
The Podcast / Re: Podcast for 9 December 2018
December 10, 2018, 12:04:25 PM
I think this definitely proves that the model CoC from the Geek Feminism Wiki is garbage:  You can have the thing in front of the people who are supposed to be enforcing it, and they have NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS.  (As an SJW project, that's to be expected.  SJW's don't have rules.  Having rules would mean people would be able to know what is and isn't allowed, which means they can't be arbitrary and constantly change things so they can expel the people they don't like.)
#45
The Podcast / Re: Podcast for 2 December 2018
December 04, 2018, 09:40:18 AM
Even jazz isn't what is used to be.  35 years ago, you were SUPPOSED to applaud jazz solos, right over the resumption of the rest of the piece.  Now, a lot of places don't want you to applaud AT ALL.