#2 the Scarecrow's brain? Go look up the meaning of satire. As the wizard hands Scarecrow his diploma, he says that the most learned intellectuals in the world have no more brains than Scarecrow does, but that they have something he does not: "A testimonial," the wizard says, handing the scroll to the Scarecrow.
Scarecrow: "The squaree of the hypoteneuse of an isosceles triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides!" And everyone applauds because he said something super-intelligent.
My mom, every time the thing was on: "Right triangle!"
I'd bet that the scene was filmed that way on purpose. The Pythagorean theorem applies to a right triangle, not an isosceles triangle. Getting something like that wrong is exactly the kind of thing that over-degreed pseudo-intellectuals do all the damned time and it's not something unique to post-WW2 America.
#4: The CSM-101 (Arnold) tells John Connor that the T-1000 is made from a "mimetic polyalloy--living metal." Right there. Living metal. Do try to keep up?
#6: This doofus doesn't seem to understand that the Ark was going go to back to Hitler regardless, and would have if Belloc had not insisted on opening the thing himself. One of the Nazis even tells him just to take it back to Berlin. If he'd done that, maybe Indy would have escaped and maybe he would have been shot, but if the Ark of the Covenant had been sent back to Hitler, Hitler himself would not have been the guy opening the thing--that would have been left to scientists--and the next group of people who tried to futz with the thing would have known not to open it. So, logic fail. The thing is better off in the American warehouse than in Hitler's hands, because "the Ark is a source of unspeakable power and it has to be researched!" Hitler (or, more specifically, the Ahnenerbe) might have figured out a way to use the thing as a weapon.
#7: "Died alone"? No servants or anything? Not a fatal flaw.
#8: because a genie is much more powerful than a magic hypnotism staff.
#9: "This is really a movie that requires everyone to make idiotic decisions except for the main characters." I think you'll find that to be the case about just about every movie starring Robert Redford.
#11: doofus doesn't understand that a colony will have stores of food which would take a single girl years to exhaust? And it's constantly raining on that planet.
#13: how cute, referring to God in the female. Go back to freshman philosophy class, but this time, learn something.
Today's clickbait article is really disappointing. As I said, written by a mid-wit asking questions that he thinks are smart.
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A halfway competent profile of this person would have shown how suited he was for the position he held. Which is to say not at all.
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This is one of those issues where I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Here is the problem: I agree that it does cost a lot to develop new drugs. Out of a thousand candidates you might find one compound that does something useful about a condition, can actually be safely administered into the human body, and which does not have side effects which are worse than the disease it treats. Once you've identified it you need to figure out how to make it in quantity. And patents only last what, twenty years at best? And you need to patent the thing as soon as you discover it lest someone with faster people get it to market before you do. In that two-decade period you need to do everything to get the drug to market and earn a profit on your R&D investment so your stockholders stay happy.
As you can see, I understand the situation faced by the drug companies to a pretty fair degree.
On the other hand? Pharmaceutical companies are excessively greedy, as we've seen from the examples of comapanies charging thousands of dollars per dose for generic (ie off-patent) drugs solely because no one else manufactures them. Like the simple EpiPen, going from about $80 to $400 because the company that makes them realized they could charge that much and people would still have to buy them.
Mrs. Fungus is taking a drug, a new one for which there is no generic, and the drug store's regular price for a month's worth of the damned thing is $1,500. Absent insurance and other discounts, that would be flat-out impossible--and with the discounts it's $15, a mere two orders of magnitude less. While she was waiting in line to pick the thing up, the guy in front of her was picking up some kind of topical cream. The Medicare price for the shit was $150. By changing his insurance information to "no" they got the price down to $80 for him.
ADDENDUM: I am told that the $1,500 price was after her medical insurance was considered. So it is, in fact, even more expensive than that, which means she paid less than 1% of the MSRP for the stuff. END ADDENDUM
This is why I no longer have any sympathy for much of the medical industry. How on Earth can you justify a price tag of $1,500 a bottle when it's possible to sell it for $15? Let's face it: Ford Motor Company would not be in business if they went around selling $30,000 cars for $300; it is simply impossible for them to do so. But Ford can put a $30,000 price tag on a car and sell it for maybe $27,000 and still make money. Ford doesn't find it necessary to have discount programs and "transportation insurance" and government subsidies to mitigate the cost of their products, and there is no circumstance where their new vehicles can be bought for 1% of the MSRP.
So if the drug company has to charge $1,500 to make a profit on the drug, how can it be available at 1% of the price? If $1,500 is actually a price that pays their development costs and assures them a decent profit (let's say 10%) how can the drug be sold at 1% of the price? But we don't know what their profit margin is. There's no way to find that out; it's all proprietary information and it's not something you can calculate from known data. (Unlike making a car, for example.)
What we do know is that, in other countries, the drugs are sold for a lot less money than in the US. Perfect example is the cure (not treatment but cure) for Hepatitis C. In India the drug costs something like $8 a dose. Why is it $80 thousand for a course of the stuff in the USA? And how many doses does the company actually sell at that price? What does a typical health underwriter actually pay for that drug?
Conversely, in some of those countries, the price of the medicine is subsidized by the government.
And so--I understand that this is not a cut-and-dried issue. It should not be complicated; it need not be. It is, however; and I'd wager that billions of lobbying dollars have been spent by the pharmaceutical industry to make sure the law obfuscates the issue as thoroughly as possible.
Price controls don't work, so we can't require that they charge a certain price for their products. Not even like, "the US price for a drug shall be the second-lowest price of that drug worldwide". But what we could do is to strip all the obfuscating laws away and make the prices more transparent, so that if XYZMed is charging $1,800 for a drug and $1,500 is pure profit, people will know that. Certainly we need to remove the bans on the importation of drugs so that Americans have a choice in prices.
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Speaking of which, the government wants to further restrict opioid prescriptions on the theory that the people out there who are addicted to opioids became addicts after taking them for pain.
That theory is incorrect; the people who are serious opioid addicts take the stuff recreationally. People who get them for post-operative pain take them according to the directions and stop when the stuff runs out or the pain goes away.
Take me, for example. The last time I had my wisdom teeth out, the oral surgeon prescribed Vicodin. I took two doses of it, after which I switched to ibuprofen. The pain didn't need Vicodin any longer and I like being able to drive and, you know, be conscious.
Typical dose was a single tablet. Take two of them, though, and you're floating on the clouds; and the people who are addicted to the stuff need to take more pills to get the same effect. After a while you need two or three pills just to avoid withdrawal, too.
These people are not getting the pills from their doctors. They are buying them on the street, or stealing them.
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Better watch it with that satire or Snopes.com might "fact check" you and accuse you of spreading fake news.
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Refueling spacecraft is going to be researched again. Seems to me that you have a tank in orbit, you put some spin on it and pump from the center. There are probably half a dozen easy ways to do that which would need minimal modification to work in zero G at extremes of temperature, without spilling, in a vacuum, all while continuously tumbling around Earth--
Yes I am being sarcastic. It's never been done and it's very easy for a guy sitting on Earth to say, "Hey, all you need to do is...." But I do think spinning the tank is going to be part of the solution, because with cryogenic fuels you can't use an expanding tank and you have to deal with ullage somehow. In current spacecraft they do an "ullage burn" which is a low-power maneuver to settle the liguid to the bottom of the tank where the pumps can get at it; but you can't do that with a space station.
And we see the same kind of shit here we saw from NASA and the aerospace industry in the 1970s. Larry Niven often alleges that NASA tried to "burn" the Saturn V blueprints in order to keep it from "competing" with Space Shuttle. SLS is big money for Boeing; anything that competes with it must be destroyed.
But you see, this is Boeing's big problem now:
SpaceX privately developed the Falcon Heavy rocket for about $500 million, and it flew its first flight in February 2018. It has now flown three successful missions. NASA has spent about $14 billion on the SLS rocket and related development costs since 2011. That rocket is not expected to fly before at least mid or late 2021.SLS is a gravy train. What incentive does Boeing have to finish ASAP and as cheaply as possible when it's not their money being spent? This is why "cost plus" is such a bad deal for the American taxpayer.
On the other hand, there's nothing but upside for SpaceX there. Who's going to pay traditional NASA prices for launches when SpaceX has made reusability one of its core models? NASA and the legacy aerospace industry have talked a good game about reusability, but SpaceX is doing it.
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Apparently it's racist when you take steps to keep migrant gangs from making trouble.
A swimming pool in the German city of Düsseldorf has been forced to introduce mandatory ID card checks in an effort to stop sexual assaults and rowdy behavior by migrant youths that has required the police to be called out on numerous occasions.Okay, right there, when you start talking about "sexual assaults", you lose the right to cry "Racist!" Sexual assault is simply unacceptable, period, and I don't care what the customs are in whatever pisspot country you hail from.
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If you're really an "arborist" you shouldn't be surprised by all this. That's a link to the NYT so don't click if you don't want to give them clicks.
Basic point: the landfill that used to serve as NYC's garbage dump was closed decades ago, and there are trees growing on it. Big surprise. "Oooh look at how nature is reclaiming this place!" As if that never happened before.
Our ecosystem is designed to do that. Not-quite forty years after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens, for example, the place is covered with trees even though it was a barren wasteland in the immediate aftermath.
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So, Representative Horseteeth has once again "removed all doubt".
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said certain communities, including ones within the United States, have no other option than to riot if they are marginalized.I had to fix grammatical errors in that blockquote. But, hey! It passed spell check!
Ocasio-Cortez made the comments during a radio interview with New York's Hot 97 Tuesday, several weeks after an armed, self-described "Antifa" man attacked an ICE detention facility in Washington state using similar language to hers in his manifesto.
In the big LA riots prompted by the finding that Rodney King was a dumbass who was too stoned on PCP to surrender peacefully to police, Korean shop owners got on their roofs with rifles to "dissuade" any would-be looters or vandals.
That post concludes:
AOC is transitioning from being a clueless dumbass and becoming a dangerous clueless dumbass who will get people killed. But for the Left, having people killed is not a bug but a feature.But there's more.
But this post from the same blog makes a good point too.
The young Jews who hate Netanyahu are Leftist idiots who either don't know or don't truly grok the situation with the Palestinians. They have been brainwashed and their opinions are crap.This is why I have zero sympathy for "Palestine", and why I deem anyone who supports it a fool of the highest order.
The lack of food and water, jobs and money in the Palestinian territories has nothing to do with Israeli oppression, but the fact that the Palestinian government wants it that way.
Yasser Arafat died a multi-millionaire in a chateau in Paris. He stole all his money from the Palestinians. The government takes money from foreign aid and uses it in the Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund, to pay the families of people who die as martyrs to kill Israelis. Palestinian schools teach nothing but the Koran and Jew-hatred.
The leaders keep the people poor and miserable then blame Israel to incite them into becoming terrorists. Hamas hates the Jews and wants to wipe them all out and so raises Palestinian children to want to be warriors against the Jews.
But the left has never really liked Jews. One of the central features of every last leftist government has been persecution of them; Palestine is a communist front and it's an example of why the left loves islam so much: they have much in common. Hatred of Jews, control of the people--just to name a couple examples.
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Speaking of removing all doubt there was another Democrat debate the other day. The quotes are indeed risible.
Apparently Tulsi Gabbard slammed the crap out of Kamala Harris.
Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Senator Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana," "blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so," "kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California," and "fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way."The leftist media is aghast, so I think I know who they're supporting for the nomination.
You don't want to talk about unionized plants closing because in right-to-work states there are manufacturing jobs a-plenty.
I have seen several pundits bring up the fact that the debate was in Detroit and none of the candidates brought up the GM Plant closure.Alabama is a right-to-work state.
It is probably a good idea for them to not bring that up.
Where I live in north Alabama, we have a Toyota engine plant, and soon to be a Toyota-Mazda joint plant. There is a Mercedez-Benz plant south of me in Tuscaloosa.
We also have a Polaris Industries plant here, which draws from the same pool of workers.
Then there is Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Blue Origin, Orbital Systems ATK, General Dynamic, and most of the rest of the aerospace sector here.
Marianne Williamson is insane. I mean, totally bug-fuck-nuts insane. $0.05 says she'll be the nominee for VP.
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The wheels start to come off the Al Sharpton train. Sharpton is, like Jesse Jackson, a race grifter. He makes his money (and he makes a lot of it, believe me) by rushing in whenever there is some kind of racial contretemps.
The Democrat party has no need for him and his ilk, though, not with them importing illegal aliens by the carload. Left to their own devices, the Democrats are going to make hispanics the biggest voting bloc in the US. Wonder where that will leave blacks?
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And what are the gun laws like in East Pittsburgh? Are concealed carry permits issued on a "shall issue" basis? Is it even possible for an ordindary citizen to have one? What are their gun laws like?
The city council - at the insistence of the "community" - disbanded the police force following a shooting. A shooting for which the officer was charged with First Degree Murder, and then acquitted by a jury. Now they're whining about the emboldened criminal element shooting up the town, stabbing people and generally wreaking havoc across the town.If you campaign to have the police removed from your community, do not complain when crime runs rampant.
Cry us a river.
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There are never really any good answers when a big business goes bankrupt. The problem is that Sears was milked for more than a decade. At the end of that road, payouts to retirees etc is just another debt that's part of the bankruptcy. Debts are ranked by importance and the lower you are on that totem pole, the less money you get of what you're owed.
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I like how the wheels are coming off this particular diversity bandwagon. So this guy identifies as a woman, but he has full male equipment. He goes to a salon and insists that they wax his "female" penis and testicles. They say "no", and he sues them for violating his civil rights. So he's put a few women out of business because they refused to wax his male genitals even though he identifies as a woman.
It's hilarious to watch. I mean, the commission which oversees the licensing of the salons has to take this dink seriously because not to do so makes them bigots! Because remember: if the person identifies as female but has a penis, that's a female penis!
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I don't think Pritzker has a leg to stand on here but then again you need to be a massive hypocrite to be a Democrat in the first place.
The "asshole who removed all the toilets from one of his mansions so he could declare the house "uninhabitable" and avoid the hefty tax bill that went along with the address," had this:
Gov. J.B. Pritzker vowed Wednesday to investigate the "fraud" uncovered in a ProPublica Illinois investigation that found well-off Chicago families gave up legal guardianship of their teenage children to qualify for financial aid earmarked for the needy.Pritzker got caught red-handed committing the exact same sort of "fraud" that he accuses these people of: gaming the system.
Pritzker had a simple message for any parents who took part in the scam: "Shame on you."
"If people are defrauding the system, these wealthy parents are literally committing fraud here," Pritzker said at a Chicago news conference. "We need to go find them, root it out and make sure that those dollars go to the right people."
Pot, kettle, etc. Not at all surprised.
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That's a lot to be proud of, all right.
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Avoiding poverty in the USA is actually pretty simple. It comes down to three things you must do.
1. Finish High School.Those three painfully simple things mean an enormous jump in earning potential. If you're able to do those three things in that order, and given a spot of work ethic, you will earn above the poverty line.
2. Get married.
3. Don't have children until you have accomplished #2.
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So it's now August. Doesn't feel like it.