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VitalSigns posted:Hmmm... Look man, it's not actually spending if you don't put it on the books alright. I mean did Enron teach us nothing about how those with business degrees are honest folks that are only there to
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Anubis posted:So, is there any rightwing response to Christie paying $2m more for an ad campaign that featured his family over the next highest bid that didn't? I know it's asking a lot but are those facts even getting out there at all in right wing media or is it all just screaming about the false equivalence of IRS and Benghazi till they are red in the face? Is there a good article that sums up why this is a bad thing other than the fact that Christie is apparently connected to the winning bidder? Specifically I'm wondering if there is at least a plausible-sounding justification for why they went with the more expensive ad campaign (bigger ad buys, better response from market research, etc.). Going with the highest bidder isn't intrinsically a bad thing.
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Jan 15, 2014 02:46
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joeburz posted:Is there anything on the right wing media side that even approaches the level of journalism and significant reporting you can see on Maddow's show, as well as a few others on MSNBC? radical meme posted:Hong Kong is No. 1? loving seriously.
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Jan 15, 2014 02:48
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Savage just said anyone who concealed carries a gun into a movie theater is a lunatic and that retired cop that shot the guy to death for texting should be executed. It hurts when he is occasionally on the right side of an argument. He thought George Zimmerman was a blatant piece of poo poo racist too.
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Jan 15, 2014 03:17
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Dr.Zeppelin posted:Is there a good article that sums up why this is a bad thing other than the fact that Christie is apparently connected to the winning bidder? Specifically I'm wondering if there is at least a plausible-sounding justification for why they went with the more expensive ad campaign (bigger ad buys, better response from market research, etc.). Going with the highest bidder isn't intrinsically a bad thing. We haven't, that I can find anywhere, found the justification for choosing the larger bid. The real charge is that they overpaid for the services (with federal funds) because the ad company was willing to turn them into quazi Christie advertisements during an election year. The reason this isn't as big of a deal as the bridge thing (yet) is because we don't quite have all the info out, yet. Once we see what was in each of those bids it'll either completely go away or it'll be the nail in the coffin.
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Jan 15, 2014 07:40
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Isn't Christie arguing that the 'Stonger than the Storm' campaign was to let out of state folks know that the beaches were open? Because that doesn't jibe with (Wall Street-firm owned, Christie supporting) NJ 101.5 constantly running the spots over the summer. Were they compensated for airtime with Federal dollars?
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Jan 15, 2014 13:51
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McDowell posted:Isn't Christie arguing that the 'Stonger than the Storm' campaign was to let out of state folks know that the beaches were open? The official purpose of the campaign was trying to bring tourists to the boardwalk area in NJ, yes. And yes, the station didn't donate the air time, the radio and TV campaign was all paid for with federal dollars. In total $25m got spent on the campaign, including more than $4m to produce the ads. Which is one of the questions, the other campaign didn't feature the Christie family and would have allowed an extra $2m to be spent on ad buys instead of fees from the production company. Then there are questions about the woman who approved the whole thing, she was appointed by Christie after she was forced into stepping down from the Attorney General's office because she had taken out a $46k personal loan from her then boss Christie (when he was leading that department, before he was elected). This: http://www.nationaljournal.com/poli...hought-20140113 is a pretty decent starter on the subject. Right now, I think all we can see is a ton of smoke rising from all this, who the hell knows if we are going to find a fire out of it, though. The whole affair kind of shows you exactly how close Christie keeps his staff, and how he gets loyalty within his ranks. I mean, I doubt any of my bosses would ever consider giving me a personal loan for anything bigger than lunch.
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Jan 15, 2014 14:28
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How close he keeps his staff, but somehow fails to even catch a whiff of an astronomical gently caress-up just begging to be found out.
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Jan 15, 2014 14:44
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mr. mephistopheles posted:Savage just said anyone who concealed carries a gun into a movie theater is a lunatic and that retired cop that shot the guy to death for texting should be executed. When that story broke, they didn't have pictures of the parties involved - I was waiting for the victim to be black and for the inevitable shitstorm to follow. Turns out, white guy talking to his child. I'm not saying Savage et al are all horrible racists, but I can just imagine some white knighting for the shooter if circumstances were different.
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Jan 15, 2014 14:46
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robotsinmyhead posted:I'm not saying Savage et al are all horrible racists... Savage is a horrible racist.
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Jan 15, 2014 15:09
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That "Index of Economic Freedom" thing is some of the most transparent horseshit I've seen I've seen in a while, mercy. I like how "Government Spending" is a category, like that would automatically make a country less "free". Gotta cut those social programs and let 'em starve or we'll never be free! Pity Somalia isn't ranked. They seem like a pretty Freedom-Lovin' country.
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Jan 15, 2014 16:17
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Seriously, look at their methodology. It's psuedo-statistics for generating fake outrage. If you even look at the values, literally one decade has seen hardly any change in the US total index, yet its trumpeted as a herald of the end times. Only reason I remembered the Index was An Actual Thing was because my idiot friend was posting links of it on facebook.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:15
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Monkey Fracas posted:Pity Somalia isn't ranked. They seem like a pretty Freedom-Lovin' country. Not ranking it is deliberate and ridiculous. It's the precise outcome of their libertarian fantasies but uh, its chief exports seem to still be fish and piracy so uh. Singapore!
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Jan 15, 2014 17:25
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robotsinmyhead posted:When that story broke, they didn't have pictures of the parties involved - I was waiting for the victim to be black and for the inevitable shitstorm to follow. Turns out, white guy talking to his child. Did you miss the part where I mentioned he called George Zimmerman a racist who killed Trayvon Martin because of his skin color or misread it? He raged about it and said Zimmerman should either spend life in prison or be executed, I can't remember which, and he called people who were denying it had anything to do with skin color idiots. Zeroisanumber posted:Savage is a horrible racist. Extremely Islamophobic? Yes. Hates "liberal Jews?" Yes. Racist? I don't know if I'd agree with that.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:37
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SedanChair posted:Not ranking it is deliberate and ridiculous. It's the precise outcome of their libertarian fantasies but uh, its chief exports seem to still be fish and piracy so uh. Singapore! Ha ha yep it's actually at the bottom of the page under "Not Ranked". Why would they even put it on there? My favorite thing about this is that they're taking a metric they straight-up made up whole-cloth and treating it as seriously as the GDP or unemployment statistics or something.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:40
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mr. mephistopheles posted:Did you miss the part where I mentioned he called George Zimmerman a racist who killed Trayvon Martin because of his skin color or misread it? He raged about it and said Zimmerman should either spend life in prison or be executed, I can't remember which, and he called people who were denying it had anything to do with skin color idiots. I kinda purposefully glossed over it because I didn't want to make any judgements Savage because the post wasn't about Savage per se and I don't know anything about him.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:46
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/15/in-bitcoin-trust/ Warning: John Stossel
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Jan 15, 2014 17:48
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^^Every single thing that Stossel writes is even dumber than the last thing that he wrote. How is it possible?mr. mephistopheles posted:Extremely Islamophobic? Yes. Hates "liberal Jews?" Yes. Racist? I don't know if I'd agree with that. I remember when he called for an ethnic cleansing of England to get rid of all East Indians. Motherfucker is racist as poo poo.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:49
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ayn rand hand job posted:http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/15/in-bitcoin-trust/
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Jan 15, 2014 17:50
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 This got posted on Facebook. The unironic use of sheep while promoting a fox news link. I don't even know how to argue this. Video in question: http://video.foxnews.com/v/3055233355001/big-government-and-you/#sp=show-clips Flaggy fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 17:55
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ayn rand hand job posted:http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/15/in-bitcoin-trust/ Hahahaha. Oh my god, that article. I had to stop reading when I actually saw it say "I fear my dollars may someday be worth pennies. So I bought Bitcoins."
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Jan 15, 2014 18:03
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mr. mephistopheles posted:Extremely Islamophobic? Yes. Hates "liberal Jews?" Yes. Racist? I don't know if I'd agree with that. A few years ago he read a short essay about the coming extinction of the white man on his show. He's loving racist.
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Jan 15, 2014 18:21
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Flaggy posted:
I can't watch the video, but it seems like O'Reilly is predicting something stupid, so the best course of action is to bet your friend $1,000 that the stupid thing won't happen. Let him define parameters and a timeframe. Be sure to ask him why he won't take the bet (because he won't take the bet.)
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Jan 15, 2014 20:07
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joeburz posted:Is there anything on the right wing media side that even approaches the level of journalism and significant reporting you can see on Maddow's show, as well as a few others on MSNBC? I happen to catch Fox News rather often when I'm at the home of my SO's parents but the time slots are rather random so I don't catch the primetime shows really. This Christie bridge scandal is a prime example where nearly all of Maddow's show is presenting useful information regarding aspects of the scandal, background information that even high-information viewers may not have seen, and bringing in people to talk who are also presenting information of that caliber. It doesn't reek of appeal to authority cheerleading that I've seen from Stossel and others that are rather light on evidence or significant information. Of course not, facts have a well known liberal bias.
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Jan 15, 2014 20:20
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What's the point in doing the hard work that a Nate Silver does when Unskewed Polls gets all the attention for telling them what they want to hear? What's the point of reading documents and hitting the streets to do real journalism when magnitudes more people want to read about faked videos of liberals doing bad stuff? What's the point of reflecting on big losses and reforming your party even slightly when everyone would rather cosplay Ben Franklin and martyr themselves in pointless losing battles?
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Jan 15, 2014 20:37
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ayn rand hand job posted:http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/15/in-bitcoin-trust/ Hahahaha holy crap I'm laughing near to tears here.  Intel&Sebastian posted:What's the point in doing the hard work that a Nate Silver does when Unskewed Polls gets all the attention for telling them what they want to hear? What's the point of reading documents and hitting the streets to do real journalism when magnitudes more people want to read about faked videos of liberals doing bad stuff? What's the point of reflecting on big losses and reforming your party even slightly when everyone would rather cosplay Ben Franklin and martyr themselves in pointless losing battles? The unregulated free market will surely provide the most Spacedad fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 20:59
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Spacedad posted:Hahahaha holy crap I'm laughing near to tears here. They are more efficient and superior at making money than actual journalism on important issues so YAY A FEW PEOPLE GET TO BE REALLY RICH and everyone else gets to And, in the end, isn't getting really rich what life is really all about? HackensackBackpack fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 21:07
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I kind of avoided the whole bitcoins thing since it sounded so dumb but now that overstoked has picked them up I'm hearing real people start to mention them. Is there a high level explanation why it's as stupid as people here say they are?
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Jan 15, 2014 21:11
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Several. Many of them in this thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3575754&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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Jan 15, 2014 21:15
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Cool thanks!
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Jan 15, 2014 21:19
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Radish posted:I kind of avoided the whole bitcoins thing since it sounded so dumb but now that overstoked has picked them up I'm hearing real people start to mention them. Is there a high level explanation why it's as stupid as people here say they are? Short answer is that they are an experiment which got popular with crypto geeks, then libertarians, then lazy broke nerds, then speculators, then small shady businesses that sell equipment to produce bitcoins, then people who really want to make money from technology but don't understand technology, then people who report on technology for people who want to make money on technology but don't really understand technology, then here we are today. It's a snowball of idiocy and people trying to scam or preach to each other.
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Jan 15, 2014 21:22
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Short answer is that they are an experiment which got popular with crypto geeks, then libertarians, then lazy broke nerds, then speculators, then small shady businesses that sell equipment to produce bitcoins, then people who really want to make money from technology but don't understand technology, then people who report on technology for people who want to make money on technology but don't really understand technology, then here we are today. It's a snowball of idiocy and people trying to scam or preach to each other. Basically it is the GOP in currency form. In other news, The San Francisco bay area used to have a great radio station called Green 960. It had a great lineup of progressive talk. Stephanie Miller in the morning, Tom Hartman in the middle of the day. Randi Rhodes in the afternoon, and Norman Goldman in the evening. Well about a year ago they shuffled things up and brought in beck and a few other "financial talk shows" which sucked but at least i could still hear a couple good shows. Skip to this year and it has been completely re-branded as 960 The Patriot. It now only has right wing blowhards 24-7 and there is no trace of any of my progressive shows. Let's just say I am pissed about it. gently caress the radio.
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Jan 15, 2014 21:30
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It sounds like from reading that thread that the currency is so volatile that you can lose or gain value in hours depending on if you spend money or horde it which is the primary flaw. If that's the case while it makes sense for crazy libertarian leaning Republicans to try and score points by allowing bitcoin donations, why would overstoked want to be involved in something like that and potentially eat huge loses in revenue?
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Jan 15, 2014 21:31
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Bitcoin is a never ending hole where people scream about inflation and how the US dollar has "lost" 97% of its monetary value since the creation of the Fed and the switch off of the gold standard. But hey, swing down to Magic The Gathering: Online eXchange to see what the current price is off butt coins to USD. E: best part about Bitcoin is that the price spikes from time to time and the trading latency also spikes up to like 80 minutes. As in, you see that the price of Bitcoin is $1000 now, put in an order, and you'll find out in 80 minutes what you actually sold them for! Phone fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 21:35
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Well, probably should mention they went from being worth nothing (10,000 bitcoins for a pizza in 2010, infamously) to $2 around the popular-with-libertarian (LIKE MY FRIEND JOE I AM NOT JEALOUS) time in 2011 to like $800 now. Like, stupid or not I wish I would have dumped more money into them (but I would have sold out at $300 because that's when Joe did).
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Jan 15, 2014 21:38
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Radish posted:It sounds like from reading that thread that the currency is so volatile that you can lose or gain value in hours depending on if you spend money or horde it which is the primary flaw. If that's the case while it makes sense for crazy libertarian leaning Republicans to try and score points by allowing bitcoin donations, why would overstoked want to be involved in something like that and potentially eat huge loses in revenue? Yeah, it has the magical combination of being incredibly volatile as well as having a built in lag on transaction time that can range from seconds to hours. The part that needs to be stressed is that bitcoin was a test, an experiment, a prototype. Imagine if criminals started using monopoly money for transactions and this caught on with the public and no matter how dumb it is nobody wants to be the first to walk away and leave money on the table. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 21:39
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Radish posted:It sounds like from reading that thread that the currency is so volatile that you can lose or gain value in hours depending on if you spend money or horde it which is the primary flaw. If that's the case while it makes sense for crazy libertarian leaning Republicans to try and score points by allowing bitcoin donations, why would overstoked want to be involved in something like that and potentially eat huge loses in revenue? 95% of the businesses that claim to accept bitcoin don't. They usually use a an intermediary such as Bitpay or Coinbase to give them cash straight up in exchange for the bitcoins. Now how Bitpay or CoinBase keep operating is an entirely different story, base around crazy ex-Goldman Sachs staffers and probably the Russian mob. Also this is not totally relevant but 
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Jan 15, 2014 21:40
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Radish posted:It sounds like from reading that thread that the currency is so volatile that you can lose or gain value in hours depending on if you spend money or horde it which is the primary flaw. If that's the case while it makes sense for crazy libertarian leaning Republicans to try and score points by allowing bitcoin donations, why would overstoked want to be involved in something like that and potentially eat huge loses in revenue? The biggest problems with Bitcoin, in my opinion, are: (1) It is needlessly expensive in terms of energy invested thanks to the way the mining difficulty algorithm works. (2) Because there is a maximum number of possible coins, the currency is inherently deflationary. (3) Lost Bitcoins can never be recovered by any means. (4) To complete a transaction requires you to have a copy of the blockchain, which just recently surpassed 13 GB in size. Transactions must also wait to be authorized by at least 51% of the blockchain copies, meaning that they easily take at least 10 minutes to complete. (5) There is no way to recover stolen Bitcoins or to reverse a transaction unless the person you paid pays you back fairly. (6) The price of Bitcoin is highly volatile thanks to the lack of any real backing or regulatory agency. (7) Bitcoin is a security mess in many ways, most notably the so-called "51% attack" where a mining pool with more than 50% of the mining power could claim every further Bitcoin mined as their own with no way to stop them. (At the time of this writing, the pool GHash.io has 34% of the hash power). Also it's populated pretty much entirely by libertarians and scammers, but I can't say I'm too surprised given its lack of any form of regulation and the extreme difficulty of tracing transactions.
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Jan 15, 2014 21:43
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ayn rand hand job posted:Also this is not totally relevant but I love that "fiat money controlled by a central government" is somehow not sound. As if money of any kind would have any value without a government and bank declaring that it did.
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Jan 15, 2014 21:50
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My Q-Face posted:I love that "fiat money controlled by a central government" is somehow not sound. As if money of any kind would have any value without a government and bank declaring that it did. A common libertarian belief, and one that Ron Paul has a huge boner for, is returning to the gold standard and the time where ONLY precious metals counted as money. Because, you know, that went so well in the past and the gold standard is completely free of all corruption and manipulation.
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Jan 15, 2014 21:57
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