iRend posted:

http://www.thecourier.com.au/story/3742933/ballarat-bus-crashes-into-melbourne-bridge-audio/?cs=61



Oops! This is a bit different from the old 7'10" bridge. Looks like he was off by a clear 2 feet.


(e: nobody died)

the article posted:

“We are out to protect our brand and make sure we don’t tarnish our brand,” Mr Baird said

Regalingualius posted:

Another fun fact/horrible little irony: the legislation to create the Secret Service came onto Lincoln's desk on the same night he thought he'd have a relaxing time at Ford's Theater.

Testekill posted:

He was going to get back to reviewing it when he went to work the following day

Enourmo posted:

Why does the President's security detail care about money counterfeiting? Surely that would fall under the purview of the Department of the Treasury that prints legal currency, or perhaps the FBI who are in charge of federal crimes?

goddamn obama sticking his fingers in everything

AgentF posted:

The power source of the future!

Tiggum posted:

And I specifically addressed this point in the post you quoted and replied to.

Tiggum posted:

Yeah, objects don't "have history", history is not a property of matter. Some people just arbitrarily decide that a thing is worth more money because it's old. Genuine old things are not inherently more valuable than identical reproductions, unless you mean to historians who can learn something from them. But most things that are valuable because they're old are not useful for learning anything, they're just old. Like, no one's upset because that coin could have been studied to learn something about the past, it was just an old coin. You could make a new one and it would be just as good (except in the minds of people who attach arbitrary value to old things).

I Am Crake posted:

There aren't enough in the world to accurately mock this post.

Value isn't an element on the periodic table that exists in certain quantities in certain objects. It's not a physical property that can be ascribed to something. It's what people are willing to pay for a thing. If you're really too thick to see how people are willing to pay more for a genuine old coin than a reproduction, you lack a fundamental understanding of how human beings think and feel.

I once visited the caves of lascaux. They reproduced the paintings in a seperate cave for tourists to visit, so the original ones wouldn't be damaged. I would've never been able to tell the difference if they hadn't told me, but it somehow made the things I was looking just a little less inspiring, because I knew it was just some French assholes who painted them instead of a dude 15000 years ago even though I knew the originals look exactly like the ones I was looking at. This is the same thing.

quote:

There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as being the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land.

They are/were unspeakably wonderful. That is to say, you couldn't speak very much of them at once without being so overcome with emotion, truth and a sense of wholeness and oneness of things that you wouldn't pretty soon need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda. They were that good.

Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.

Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and drier.

Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words on that effect.

They travelled the time waves, they found him, they explained the situation - with some difficulty - to him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such an effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write which such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do chat shows, on which he sparkled wittily.

He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a problem, but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition of his book and a stack of dried habra leaves to copy them out on to, making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way.

Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what's changed? The first people say that that isn't the point. They aren't quite sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn't it.

Alaois posted:

it's astounding to me that Tiggum hasn't even successfully passed the Turing Test yet and somehow people still argue with him

Tiggum posted:

Yeah, objects don't "have history", history is not a property of matter. Some people just arbitrarily decide that a thing is worth more money because it's old. Genuine old things are not inherently more valuable than identical reproductions, unless you mean to historians who can learn something from them. But most things that are valuable because they're old are not useful for learning anything, they're just old. Like, no one's upset because that coin could have been studied to learn something about the past, it was just an old coin. You could make a new one and it would be just as good (except in the minds of people who attach arbitrary value to old things).

ayn rand hand job posted:

Secret Service was founded about 50 years before the FBI, 4th oldest US federal LEOs. Before them it was the Postal Service inspectors, US Marshals (who handled enforcement side the of federal courts), and Parks Police in order of establishment.

They also were officially in the Treasury Dept. up until the establishment of DHS after 9/11 and were transferred in.

Elendil004 posted:

The USCG has the parks police beat by a year.

Powered Descent posted:

Remember Talia, the starving Yelp girl from the other day? This whole thing is escalating into a wonderful slapfight.

Murphy Brownback posted:

It doesn't detract from the main point, but people keep calling those "steaks" as if it's some fancy meal, when it says right there next to the pic it was a chuck roast which is very cheap (relative to steak). The mid/top-shelf liquor and wine are definitely luxuries though and she deserves all the criticism she is getting for those. I guess she's getting a couple grand out of this from gullible internet people but i would think most peoples' dignity/reputation is worth a lot more than that.

Azhais posted:

I hope I can save up enough to buy a $24 bottle of bourbon some day

speshl guy posted:

For people who don't understand the coin schad, that coin collector made a very similar mistake to that of a monk that erased the only surviving copy of Archimedes' "The Method" so that he could print a book of prayers on it, because he didn't understand the significance of a text that outlined the heart of calculus thousands of years before Newton and Leibniz came along. But lol stupid nerds with their historical preservation standards

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prayer-archimedes

bobjr posted:

FAROOQ posted:

College educated white girls who move to san fransisco for customer service work deserve the worst possible interpretation of their actions and intents.

speshl guy posted:

For people who don't understand the coin schad, that coin collector made a very similar mistake to that of a monk that erased the only surviving copy of Archimedes' "The Method" so that he could print a book of prayers on it, because he didn't understand the significance of a text that outlined the heart of calculus thousands of years before Newton and Leibniz came along. But lol stupid nerds with their historical preservation standards

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prayer-archimedes

kazil posted:

Yes, a guy devaluing a coin that would have been in a rich man's collection is exactly the same situation.

Powered Descent posted:

But they're being the screechiest bunch of assholes I've seen in a long time (and I follow politics), and they're acting like they never made a naive mistake when they were fresh out of college.

As for Talia herself, it sucks that she landed in that hard-to-get-out-of situation, and I actually hope her newfound Internet fame leads her to something better.

Judge Schnoopy posted:

Some people making mistakes out of college own up to them and take ownership of their life instead of trying to shift blame and assblast the CEO of their company publicly on the internet vv

And I hope her dumb publicity stunt tirade follows her around and haunts her employment prospects. Airing out your grievances on the internet instead of dealing with them internally should probably be a last resort, especially with a company that relies on social media and public image. Maybe she should have written the letter more professionally and sent it directly to the CEO, and if they respond by firing her she can go all out with her whiny e/n rant.

PhazonLink posted:

The locations of anicent trees are also kept secret because gov./park/wild life managers dont want dumb people loving around with them.

Or "smart" people like that one grad student.

veedubfreak posted:

Oh it will. Nothing dies on the internet. Check out the Taco Bell rear end in a top hat. He's pretty much blackballed everywhere now.

im pooping! posted:

You must explain this immediately.

quote:

Basically, Currey got his tree corer stuck in the tree. So stuck that it wouldn’t come out. An unwitting park ranger helped him by cutting the tree down, to remove the instrument, and later Currey began to count the rings. Eventually, he realized that the tree he had just felled was almost 5,000 years old – the oldest tree ever recorded.