johnzo

Yeah, my company really stepped up on this one. We're seeing it in a super nice theater, I got a +2 to bring some friends along. Just hoping the movie is good!

Seeing Star Wars on Friday. My company's taking us out. My expectations are high, I'm looking forward to high-fiving all my nerds, so I suspect it will be a crushing disappointment. Then I'll be trying to get tickets for a 70mm showing of the Hateful Eight on Xmas Day.

Should we discredit the consensus of ninety-five percent of the world's climate scientists because Leonardo DiCaprio is ignorant about how Calgary's weather works? If not, then why the **** does this matter?

The Earth is going to last a lot longer than human civilization on it will. Barring a visit from Galactus, our planet has about five million millennia ahead of it. Humans have been doing agriculture and building cities for less than ten millennia and we've already faced at least one extinction / mass die-off event. There are going to be many more in our future, and we're going to roll a deuce at some point. So who cares if the seas will rise dramatically at some point in the life of the planet? The germane question is, will the seas rise dramatically while the Earth is still populated by humans?

Are you seriously telling me that because we didn't directly observe an event, we can't know anything about it? Evolutionary biologists, astronomers, murder detectives, and airplane crash investigators will be very disappointed to learn this. I welcome correction from the earth sciences people on all this, but we do have ways of measuring the evolution of glaciers by examining the sediments found within them. For instance, if you find a linear layer of ash from Krakatoa in your ice sample, you know that ice has been frozen in place since 1883. Also, you can examine the rock around the glacier and boulders that were transported and deposited by the glacier. When rock is exposed to the sun, it's struck by cosmic rays, which react to create very convenient isotopes that have known rates of decay. So by examining the prevalence of these isotopes in the rock, you can estimate how long the rock has been out in the open. Unless this is all a dirty lie, we can chart the rise and fall of glaciers. I am out of time and can't google it, but I suspect that we can know about how sea ice has evolved by examining its effects on coastlines.

KBF, I hear you about partisan polarization. I'm pretty lefty by nature and I'm constantly shaking my head at the bullshit antics on my side. I hate it when people lie about important things, and I hate when the imposition of doctrinal purity trumps the good that the doctrine is actually trying to achieve. I'm the kind of guy who loves socialism but isn't super fond of a lot of socialists, y'know. But, back to the matter at hand. Yes, there are profiteers and liars on all sides of the climate debate. America in particular is a land of opportunistic entrepreneurs. When I think about these things, I keep coming back to the massive scientific consensus assembled around climate change -- fewer than five in a hundred climate scientists dispute human-driven climate change. Why is that? The simplest explanation is that climate change observations and conclusions are made in good faith. What are the other explanations? If this is a conspiracy -- Schmitt suggests climate scientists communists -- its one with ironclad discipline. Is climate change just a marketing strategy for research grants? I can buy that on some level, but that research has to survive peer review. If it's ****, it'll be flagged as **** -- unless there's a conspiracy. Yes, this is an appeal to authority. I'm just an internet idiot, I can't argue climate science and I won't just copy words from a friendly website. But if you're going to have an authority, science is a pretty good one to trust -- its batting average is pretty high. Sure, when I was a kid we were told we were moving into an ice age. When I was a kid I was also told that smoking was super bad for me, that computers were going to double in power every eighteen months, that CFCs were burning a hole in the ozone layer, that HIV caused AIDS -- all of those things turned out to be true.

Is Marshall really an every-down back? He's not great at making anyone miss and I think you need some element of shiftiness to be a great CFL back. You look at Cornish, he's got the power and can drag the pile, but I've also seen him absolutely embarrass linebackers with a move. And Walker had very few touches in his time here. Many of them were up-the-gut blasts, and he got owned on those. Couldn't believe how badly we used him. He's not a complete player by any stretch, but he can do damage in the open field -- run a pick on the MLB, get him the ball with some receivers and a lineman in front of him and let him do his thing. But we just used him like an ordinary running back.

Hillary Clinton is openly calling out the NRA. She's a follower, not a leader, so she must be convinced that the politics on this are shifting and that the NRA's absolutist Second Amendment views are becoming a minority. That said, everything hinges on the Supreme Court. The White House and Congress can pass whatever they like* but there will be constitutional questions about anything they do and the NRA has been pretty successful at the Supreme Court (recent reversals notwithstanding). So the best thing to do for gun control right now is to put a Democrat in the White House who will get to make some Supreme Court appointments. * they won't pass anything, because the federal House is hopelessly shitfucked by the cult of anti-personality that Gingrich established. No gun legislation has any chance of hitting the floor there, unless it's about expanding gun rights.

Seriously, what can Obama do about America's gun problem?

You've said this several times, KBF -- that climate change alarmism is lucrative and will continue so long as people can get paid to study it. And I don't think this is unreasonable. People will do things to get paid, and people get invested in the things they get paid for. However, this argument has never been convincing to me because action on climate change will cause significant disruption to moneyed interests. If you say that climate change science is fueled by greed and avarice, surely you must also acknowledge that opposition to climate change action is motivated by greed and avarice as well, and not by ivory-pure devotion to the preponderance of scientific evidence.

Dude, if we could terraform Venus then Terran climate change would be ... simple. Venus is a nasty place. It'd be easier to terraform the Marianas Trench.

Absolutely. The free market is pretty wonderful at making new stuff for us. For instance, the free market is kicking ass when it comes to making better and better computer hardware. It's a great time to be a software guy like me. The automotive industry is awesome too. Cars in the 2010s are insanely better than cars built just fifteen years ago. We have practical hybrid vehicles and plug-in cars. We have Teslas. However, the free market can also be addicted to the status quo, to rent-seeking, to profiteering. Look at how fat and happy the telecommunications industry is. Look at how the quality of Internet access in the West lags behind the rest of the world. Look at how the pharma industry invests in the next Viagra instead of a cure for diabetes. There's a role for governments to invest and incentivize for the public good. The American government subsidizes things like corn and oil to an absurd degree, and while it's infuriating to see companies like Exxon and BP and Monsanto sucking at the public teat, it also makes some sense from a strategic standpoint. What nation can survive without a stable food and energy supply -- especially one as big and spread-out as the USA? In telecommunications, we see communities across the USA starting to build their own publicly owned broadband networks, because the free market just isn't cutting it. We have publicly-funded pharma research (which is then snapped up and patented by pharma companies, but that's another issue). We have investments with no obvious immediate return -- any crewed space travel falls under this category. The free market is cool, but it needs to be nudged sometimes and, occasionally, bypassed completely.

Unless Mars is wayyyy more interesting than we think it is, there's no fossil fuels there. Mars colonies will need to be powered by nuclear or renewables, so we need to get on that in any case. Investing in Mars is a sound idea. Even if we don't bake ourselves out of a planet, humanity will eventually be extinguished on Earth. Supervolcanoes, gamma-ray bursters, asteroids, ice ages ... in the long view, we escape Earth or we die.

What is the cost of adapting to climate change? What is the cost of effectively forestalling it? If you look at this stuff in purely economic terms, you want to select the cheaper option, right?(and I don't believe that you should look at these issues as pure economics: there are large human costs involved, which is why the KBF argument about climate change investment vs, say, malaria investment, is actually a pretty effective one) Additionally, if we are investing in alternative energy technologies today, won't that make tomorrow's "natural" replacement of fossil fuels easier and cheaper and less disruptive? Aren't those investments good ones for the future even if climate change is not a disaster?

The U.S. is built with checks and balances so power doesn't get out of control. You're absolutely right when you say the 2nd amendment is there to ensure the people have the means to fight tyranny.And tyranny appears to be approaching. 'Every now and then the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' Would you support American black communities who choose to arm themselves so they can fight the cops? You look at the DoJ's Ferguson report, and that's what you'll see -- tyranny. Widespread violations of the Fourth Amendment. Cops and courts used as an instrument of taxation, intentionally targeting black people. Unaccountable cops beating and harassing the people they're supposed to protect. How do you think it would work out if an armed citizen's militia formed in Ferguson? Spoiler alert: it's happened before, and the government resorted to ******* aerial bombing to end the movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE

Trump is a ******* clown, but in the interests of fairness, I have to point out that HRC has also declared that the government needs to regulate social media, the internet, and encryption technology in order to prevent the spread of jihadi thought. She just said it in a way that made her sound less like an idiot.

Not thrilled, but I'll take Lapo over Jones. Jones has never proven he could be a good OC, whereas Lapo has at least a couple good-to-great years in that role. Though if we don't get more talent at receiver and on the line, it won't matter who we have at OC. Our line was always playing a guy or two short last year. It was like we were giving opposing defences a power play. Most encouraging thing about the Lapo / Osh presser was the royal blue golf shirts. Good looking duds there. Hopefully a sign of things to come.

Does Wylie deserve to come back? Our OL has been brutal for both of his years, and with Chris Greaves going from a healthy scratch as a Bomber to a starter with the champs, that's gotta make you wonder...

Iso, you know football better than me -- say Drew Willy thought that MB was an idiot and his offence was dogshit, do you think he'd really be super frank about expressing that opinion? Or maybe he just doesn't want to see "WILLY PUBLICLY QUESTIONS COACH" over a Friesen byline?

What is that argument? Asking in good faith -- I'd really like to see Cortez in blue but all I'm going on is the numbers and the couple times I watched his Jennings O late last season. Very curious what you see / hear. Is it an X's and O's thing? Is it an interpersonal thing? Something else?

Every Browns Loss Since 1999, Ranked https://subwayrecord.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/every-browns-loss-since-1999-ranked/ I kinda thought about doing this for the Bombers since 2012.

I think Ottawa wants to hang onto Maas and BC wants to hang onto Jones.

Yeah, and the other top offenses in the second half of last season (Redblacks, Eskimos, Stamps) were all led by veteran quarterbacks. Cortez had Jennings playing like a CFL veteran. There's another real promising Wally QB recruit. Burris, Garcia, Dickenson, Printers (for awhile), Pierce, Reilly, Lulay, now Jennings. Insert standard lament: "How does he do it, when we haven't found a good one since Danny McManus?"

Answering my own question from earlier: O'Shea's record when Willy makes it to the third quarter: 9-13. When Willy doesn't make it to the third quarter: 3-11. The three non-Willy wins are two 2015 Nichols wins and the Marve 2014 come-from-behind snow-bowl win in Calgary.

Etch was like our eighth choice of DC candidates, right? Because we couldn't get the people we liked better to join us? At that point the choice for DC was between Etch and Samcanadian.