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The ending skit was nowhere near as funny as the clips of psychics getting caught I prefer psychics more in science fiction, where writers make stories about humanity eventually evolving to move things with our minds, but that's died off lately.Azhais posted:If you would like to know more about Chester A Arthur (and other Presidents), there's a thread for that There was a really good thread once about going through every presidential election and having goons vote on them. I think it petered off before Chester A. Arthur though. Notable events were John Adams getting elected 4 times in a row and the first republican president getting elected 4 years early with John C. Frémont. It was interesting to see how many presidents nominally abhorred slavery until the one who did America's biggest single act of genocide, and how slavery made national elections devolve into a pathetic mess of idiots aggressively saying nothing about one of the most important issues of the time.
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Feb 28, 2019 03:57
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I think it was an alright segment. Kinda weird to tie Donald Trump into it, because he has no relation to it beyond being a shitbag who does not care in any way for the American people or human beings in general. A lot of the time when people talk automation, they get wrapped up in futurism, so it was nice to have a measured take on things. Also I like how that one reporter has ascended to the next level past coming up with puns to introduce segments with. Baronash posted:Most of the automation that takes place isn't swapping a person for a robot, it's using software to do 1/3 of the responsibilities of 3 people, then getting rid of one of them and splitting what's left between the remaining 2. More like taking 1/4 of the responsibilities and then firing 1 and putting the 2 others on overdrive.
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Mar 5, 2019 22:55
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While basic income and things like that would be good, I don't think we're anywhere near the "end of work" that futurists think automation is leading us towards. Mostly because in the absence of meaningful reasons to push money around, people will figure out meaningless reasons to push money around. A lot of the financial industry seems like that.Propaganda Machine posted:I'm cool with the lottery. That money mostly goes to tax-funded things like public schools. Well, there was a little show that had an episode on how the introduction of the lottery didn't really increase the amount of funding for education and just enabled tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, shifting the burden from people who could afford to pay their taxes to people with addiction issues and hopeless lives that they desperately want an escape from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA
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Mar 7, 2019 00:47
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That bit on how laughing at Trump tends to soften how much of a monster he is really hit home for me. He used reality TV to remake his career, and regardless of how incredibly stupid he may actually be, he does know how to be a clown. And many of his supporters see the more monstrous things he gets caught with as more clowning around, not to be taken seriously or on face value. Back in the day with W, it felt like laughing at him had a power to it, because he was a pathetic man trying to put forth a serious image to get power to abuse, but Trump is so not-serious he doesn't even bother to lie well. He constantly puts out easy jokes as chaff for people to get caught up on so they won't bother with the more uncomfortable material. I also continue to be surprised at how many people are acting like the allegations of Michael Jackson molesting children are new. People have been talking about them for years, when I was in middle school, long after his career had dwindled, it was one of the only things I knew about Michael Jackson. And in happier news, John Oliver made a brief appearance on his old show, The Bugle if any of you are interested or like puns.
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Mar 12, 2019 04:33
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An okay episode. There's kind of an elephant in the room of a particular elephant that isn't in the room for once, a certain somebody that remarkably wasn't mentioned throughout the whole episode. Public outcry is sometimes the only outlet the people have against certain bad people in power, which is why they refine these outrage responses, before they get bored and turn it on some rando.
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Mar 21, 2019 17:49
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I'm not a fan of wrestling, but I am sure a fan of workers' rights, so I hope the best for the wrestlers. I'm surprised John didn't mention the time that the Iron Sheik called him out on the Bugle.
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Apr 2, 2019 04:51
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punk rebel ecks posted:This may be a very nice question but why didn't McMahon just...you know...fire them? It's not like Penn State where these people were valuable talent that couldn't be lost without effect. It's a very common theme in these things that the powerful men who let these things happen don't actually give a poo poo. I don't know if it's social norms not permeating certain strata of society or if just being wealthy makes you stop caring. Or maybe there's a whole horrifying secret world the wealthy live in, but that line of thinking is what made people invent the pizzagate conspiracy.
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Apr 2, 2019 19:10
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The bits they use to button up segments can be pretty hit and miss; I still remember "Drumpf". They're very informative in the segments, and they like making big flashy public moves, but they really shy away from actual activism or direct moralizing because that's more responsibility than they're exactly comfortable with. A coal baron or cigarette companies sure, simple enemies to face. Throw some money at charities when the opportunity comes, definitely. But they're not going to do some kind of long-term activism. And I know the idea is to finish off with something funny, but they really miss the mark sometimes. You just know the funniest thing to finish off this segment would've been a whole wrestling bit, but I bet John Oliver's dead-set against physical comedy.
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Apr 7, 2019 17:25
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What I'm saying is that the episode should've ended with John Oliver in a wrestling ring, and I bet he would rather chew off his own leg than take off his shirt.
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Apr 7, 2019 18:40
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I'd rather they call him more directly what he is. Con-man, Fraudster, convicted criminal, mob affiliate. No pussyfooting around pretending like he's not got a well-documented 40 year record of crimes and fraud.
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Apr 7, 2019 23:47
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I think it's very important to keep Herman Cain away from any position of power, especially if it has anything to do with finances. He should remain a relic of a time when sexual harassment could tank your political career and the insane candidate that the news loves to give airtime to because he's so crazy didn't win. Nein, nein, nein. tarlibone posted:Truth be told, manufactured homes can be better in build quality, because they're made in a factory by people whose job is making that home. Traditionally built houses depend on local contractors who may or may not give any number of fucks about quality control. I think you can get prefab homes that aren't legally classified as mobile homes? I might be wrong though. It sounds like this is a ridiculous carved-out category of housing that's just renting an apartment but with less protections or benefits.
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Apr 9, 2019 04:02
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A good bit, but after that joke about Wallace Shawn looking like a baby, all I wanted was for Wallace Shawn to be one of the actors they got to reenact court documents with.
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Apr 17, 2019 03:03
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I think Stephen Colbert was known to be really into interacting with his audience, at least back during the Colbert Report days. It's why it took a minute or two for the show to get started because the crowd wouldn't stop cheering. I don't know if it's like that now on the Late Show. I think in general it's a lot lower energy.
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Apr 18, 2019 00:14
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Whelp. https://twitter.com/ogecebel/status/1120293745021181953
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Apr 28, 2019 04:40
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It is a really weird position to try arguing about the relative pain levels in various execution methods when your bottom line is that "no execution is acceptable". The idea of a "painless death" is a weird idea that doesn't really make sense to me either way. It's a weird idea that tries to use other emotional queues to get around the central idea of what they're doing. Execution is largely a psychological thing because people who super hate crime feel more vindicated by doing extra harm upon criminals. In more recent days, I understand that perspective more than I used to, since the idea of Donald Trump dead with his head on a pike as a warning to others who follow in his footsteps like Mussolini or Muammar Gaddafi does give me a little comfort, but obviously since that's not likely, there's no reason to try extending those feelings to smaller-time criminals who may not even be guilty. That vindictiveness plagues the entirety of the justice system, making even smaller sentences more tortuous than anything else. Firing squads aren't 100% legal either. It seems fair to let inmates choose their own form of execution, although that is probably too impractical. Snowglobe of Doom posted:Also John was surprisingly lenient on the fuckwit Australian politicians in the opening segment, they're a lot shittier and have been loving up a lot harder than he let on. I've only heard of the guy who tried to both admit to kidnapping some kids back in 1996 and argue that it wasn't kidnapping. https://www.triplem.com.au/story/one-nation-mp-hopeful-has-very-bad-day-on-twitter-28878 Tenkaris posted:Jim Adler the Texas Hammer has been doing that poo poo for loving ever, it was funny to see something local like that on LWT. Yeah, but it's been a long while since I've seen local commercials, he's gotten a lot older. Funny, but in the same way a lot local ads are funny.
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May 6, 2019 20:22
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I think the executioners currently prioritize keeping the body intact and minimizing cleanup. There might be some comfort in being able to have an open casket funeral, but I think mainly nobody likes cleaning up human remains. The chair is just the worst for that. The concept of a "painless death" is for people trying to fool their own empathy or people trying to work themselves up to a suicide.
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May 7, 2019 04:13
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The big problem is that the death penalty is just one of many ways our justice system really sucks. It's focused more on punishment than rehabilitation and a huge number of people get falsely convicted. Even before conviction, there's the fact that real lawyers are expensive and public attorneys are a poo poo show. Before that there's the fact that bail sucks as an institution. Before that there's the fact that there's a lot of bad police out there will just harass people for no good reason, or even just use excessive force up to and including on the spot executions, and it all goes full circle.banned from Starbucks posted:Do you deserve death if you shoot up a school full or 3rd graders? Maybe, but seeing as how most of these mass shootings either end with getting shot down by cops or just shooting themselves, it seems like they want to die anyways, and I'd rather not oblige somebody that deranged.
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May 9, 2019 16:19
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I can't hear John Oliver talking about the Green New Deal without remembering Andy Zaltzman's joke about FDR getting a stripper for his bucket of lobsters. Also while Georgia has tried its hardest to be king poo poo of awful abortion bills, many states are trying to pull this poo poo all at once. Alabama's case where they violated procedure to sneak things through really stood out to me. https://twitter.com/AlabamaPolitics/status/1126546567735980033
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May 14, 2019 20:17
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Also conspicuously absent are the "new deal" parts of the Green New Deal. Which I get it, the Earth is important and it can only be protected with real administrative action, while social good and challenging the aristocracy of the rich is all radical and scary, but there's a reason why it was in there. Can't stand up to corporate pillaging without standing up to corporations. Inequality of representation is also a huge problem, but most politicians in most governmental bodies will absolutely refuse to mess with the system that got them into power in the misguided belief that everything will work out for the better forevermore. That and the whole calculus where they'd rather go a thousand miles to the right than a foot to the left.
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May 15, 2019 16:18
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Another of those episodes about a problem I didn't know much about, but makes a lot of sense from what I already knew. What I did know beforehand, and what I'm surprised John Oliver didn't mention, is that in some places coroner is an elected office, which compounds the problem. I would've liked it if he went over what other countries do for coroner as well. Edit: Whelp I'm dumb SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 20, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 18:57
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Seems like one of those things where surgeons have no idea about how hardware works so they just assume the best. On the other side of the coin, there's people without medical licenses or approval hacking their insulin pumps to automatically adjust and desperately buying up outdated models with exploitable security holes because medical companies have no interest in providing the service they want at an affordable price. https://medium.com/neodotlife/dana-lewis-open-aps-hack-artificial-pancreas-af6ef23a997f https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bouYRMItWnI But there's no clear line between that and more wild and crazy stuff like DIY electrotherapy, injecting CRISPR into random parts of your body, and trying to use quartz to cure cancer.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:22
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It was so English for a while there, I thought John was gonna get his green card revoked. Although really you'd think they could just look up a picture of Rory from back then to compare. tarlibone posted:Throughout my youth and well into adulthood, Georgia's flag also had the Southern Cross on it. That changed in the early 2000s. (It was added in the 1950s for... let's just say "reasons.") They changed it from the more well known confederate flag to the "official" confederate flag, the Stars and Bars, the flag that Mississippi is splitting the difference between. Dang, all of these states that reference the confederacy with their flags are states that voted against the ERA. How 'bout that. I could've sworn that it was South Carolina that just straight-up had the confederate flag, but their flag's actually pretty nice. Anyways, human rights are good, oppression and lies are bad. If we put more rights into the constitution, stocking the Supreme Court with judges with bad opinions wouldn't be such a prominent problem.
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Jun 11, 2019 04:27
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I feel like most democrat pushback against impeachment comes from the misguided idea that they don't want to risk weakening government offices when they're in power, which ends up meaning that the most criminal politician this country has seen in a long while gets off scot-free. An attempt to balance national discourse from only one side. In that vein, Some More News has an interesting message for Joe Biden. I feel like I, a person who has never had a German class, know more german than that Fox News guy. But he should really look down inside himself at how much pride he holds in such a little accomplishment and find some new avenue to better himself. Which he never will because that's against the point of conservatism.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:42
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Outside of the obvious advantages of not having him as president, setting a warning and precedent for future generations, beginning the long process of dismantling the kleptocracy, and whatnot, I also just don't want him running around as a free man after a long career of criminal action.
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Jun 19, 2019 15:37
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It's a bit distracting when you keep coming up with goofy nicknames for your enemies. It's also a real tonal shift when you do it in the middle of a complex analysis. Kinda reminds me of that really stupid demon rats line. It's really worrying to look at Trump's history of weaseling around through the court system, and how he's one of the highest profile pieces of poo poo who knows how to drag things out and avoid any real culpability forever. Some of it's just the court system being willing to cut slack to any rich white men or accepting payouts in lieu of real jailtime, but it makes me worry that if any of these politicians hesitate to avoid seeming too partisan, he'll weasel his way out of everything and have made a massive net profit out of his sham of an administration. And also after he's gone, regardless of how we get rid of him, there's going to need to be a massive effort to get rid of all the stooges, incompetents, and actual criminals that have gotten into important bureaucratic positions, and if the people who want to work with a light hand win out, we'll be feeling all these kleptocrats for the next 30 years.
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Jun 19, 2019 20:52
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It's hard to really say how much Pence would be able to do, how loyal he'd be to the administration and vice versa, or even if he'll somehow be swapped out for a rando in some last minute intrigue.pwn posted:As it has been, so it shall be The Democrats have always been uncomfortable with really embracing the left, probably for a bunch of reasons, between big money leaning rightward, grand machinations to alienate them from blue collar workers, and there's even a good amount of people who are still confused about the great party swaperoo over civil rights. That's before you even factor in defectors either dissatisfied with the party line or trying to court people from the other side. Only thing is, I'd've told you something similar about Republicans back in 2008. W rode a fairly delicate coalition between factions into office, and then kept power with some fragile jingoism that had entirely fallen apart and left the party in tatters by the time he left. It's a fairly recent development that the Republican party managed to unite around a more sturdy alliance between fascist white supremacism and wealthy pragmatists. If you go digging, you can find a whole lot of party members who at least claim that they are dissatisfied with the current order, so it's possible a big enough defeat will send fascists back into hiding for a couple more decades. The US's two-party system kinda requires that both parties be broad, unfocused umbrellas over more people and factions than any human being could reasonably be expected to manage, and a whole fuckin' lot of politics throughout our country wind up resting in weird bureaucratic finagling within the party rather than actual democracy. That's why some people are developing weird sub-parties to organize within the hegemony of the behemoths rather than hopelessly flail around either united outside the system or disunited within the system.
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Jun 20, 2019 00:54
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Yeah, it's not violating ~decorum~, it's just a dumb play on a gross term. You'd probably get similar pushback if you called them retardlicans.
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Jun 21, 2019 02:07
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Amazon has gained a near-monopolistic control over e-commerce, but despite that, it has continued to keep prices, not just down, but down at around the impossibly low levels they destroyed their competition with, which is important because when the antitrust movement in America was dismantled in the 80s, it was under the pretense of only breaking up big businesses when it could be proven that the monopoly negatively affected consumers. What that means is that when Amazon hefts its monopolistic authority, it has to squeeze on the workers to increase profits rather than on the consumers. It's part of how everything bad about Amazon is part of a cohesive whole rather than isolated problems.
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Jul 1, 2019 19:14
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The main bit about warehouses is up on their official youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9m7d07k22A I've also noticed full episodes popping up on youtube as well lately, although I assume somebody will crack down on those at some point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeHmh9ty8kk I feel like all the legal disclaimers say a lot about how hard these companies are clamping down on workers. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jul 1, 2019 |
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Jul 1, 2019 22:16
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For groceries, there's also services that'll just go to the grocery store for you if you still don't wanna bother with physically shopping yourself. Walmart and Target even have pickup services. But there's still some things that it's hard to get anywhere other than online, and the low (predatory) prices make it hard, if not impossible to try avoiding it. You can't effectively put enough pressure on these companies with just boycotts, it's something that can only be solved legislatively. pwn posted:Mother Jones dived into this back in 2012. That's a little illuminating. They don't expect their draconian firing policies to actually be meaningful, it's just a paper-thin excuse to skip out on an amount of pay. It's a punishment, but not one that will have meaningful impact on the employer since they don't have to risk not having an employee afterwards. In other words, firing somebody but immediately accepting a reapplication from them isn't firing, it has to be some kind of massive violation of workers' rights. That and the wage theft.
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Jul 2, 2019 18:28
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Amazon started offering single day delivery on everything because they worked out the numbers and they could do it, and they're doing everything they can to push up sales just a little bit more, not particularly because they want your money from whatever the gently caress you're buying at the moment, but because they want to put the squeeze on the competition to break them and force them out of business. That's how they got big, they've been running their company to make whatever industry they're in a zero-sum game. You can't deal with that any other way than direct legislation. They're not going to stop unless you force them. And what else is really annoying is that if the government manages to win a long, dragged out battle with Amazon to force them to give workers fair working conditions, they'll turn right around and try using their now-humane conditions to show off how generous and good they are as a company, just like what they do with that $15 wage that they only instituted after congress started introducing bills targeted at companies that pay their employees a non-living wage that forces them to live on government aid programs.
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Jul 5, 2019 01:21
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I mean it's the employees being squeezed that's the problem. If you enforce proper labor standards, who the gently caress cares how quickly consumers get their poo poo? It's not a new thing for logistics companies to have to deal with randomly spiking demand, just worker's rights have been drastically scaled back in recent years.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:51
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Like somebody posted before, if you want to be able to meet randomly spiking demand, have on hand enough employees to handle full capacity the whole time. They can reduce the distance that employees have to walk and they can allow employees sick days and whatnot without randomly firing them. It's a little dubious how "profitable" it would be, but like I said before, profitability doesn't technically matter to companies that are just trying to destroy competition. Maybe the cost it would take to keep single day delivery working would be more than the company feels like it can reasonably sustain, but then they can just shut down their program themselves. It's only getting sidetracked to worry more about a company's dumb marketing strategy than the people they're willing to hurt to do it.
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Jul 5, 2019 22:25
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There are a number of practices that definitely should be illegal, like the immediate firing with no warning, and a couple that probably are illegal like having to be at work for an hour before getting on the clock, the conditions that harmed people's health (and killed a person, that's manslaughter right there), and keeping people working with a dead body on the floor, but usually the enforcement method for things like that require people to band together to sue the company, and putting together a class-action lawsuit is hard, especially with companies that are very aggressive at firing workers with a hair trigger. Historically, the most comprehensive way of enforcing fairer labor standards is employees banding together to form a union, so that there will always be lawyers onhand for dealing with violations of labor laws and more specific problems can be handled more directly with collective bargaining. The best way to encourage that is to get right-to-work laws repealed, have the right to protest more firmly entrenched, and to try to crack down on companies that are preventing unionization. It could also help to directly target massive anti-competitive companies with too much control over an industry and break them up like we used to do with monopolies so that the companies have less relative power to suppress their workers. Theoretically, with companies in competition for workers, that could even lead to improving working conditions as part of competing for workers. Also, smaller companies would presumably be worse at keeping unions suppressed. I'm not saying that it would be "easy", but it is thoroughly doable. Especially since it's already been done. If you read up on labor movements back in the 20th century, much of this has already been done before. Conditions for dockworkers back at the turn of the century involved many of the same problems.
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Jul 6, 2019 00:52
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Largely, they don't care. Employees don't have any input, and are mostly considered disposable by the companies, so no concern is spared for them. It's never about actual cost, it's just about how wellbeing of workers has absolutely no value to them.
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Jul 8, 2019 05:39
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I don't think nationalization is good for that kind of industry. It legitimizes Amazon's unfair consolidation of power while saddling the government with this huge series of duties without the venture capital that keeps it alive. Would the government have to go nationalizing the whole industry? Something like internet could be nationalized as a utility though, or at least treated like phone lines (break up big providers, allow anyone to provide through the same lines). Or even something like the oil industry, which is already treated as a matter of national security and ends up being kept afloat by government subsidies anyways.
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Jul 8, 2019 19:34
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If you were going to nationalize any part of Amazon, the delivery infrastructure is the only thing worth something. The entire store website could be accidentally deleted and have to be cobbled back together out of excel documents and paperclips and it still wouldn't be any kind of loss. Incidentally the way that Amazon runs a store, a delivery system, and manufactures and markets its own products is called vertical integration, and it used to be illegal back when antitrust laws were a thing.
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Jul 10, 2019 15:40
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Yeah, the solutions to a broken free market like the current ISP oligopoly involve either codifying the hegemony into a governmental institution or trying to break it up into a free market again, and considering how often the government bends over for big media companies trying to maintain copyrights forevermore, the latter might be safer. Although come to think of it, I wonder if the big media companies that are also ISPs ever comb through their customers' data.
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Jul 16, 2019 22:02
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Milo and POTUS posted:It's really weird when the plot stops and he spends 30 minutes on an in depth breakdown of the lion monarchy Is Simba still loving his sister? That's the reason why real Lions don't inherit their father's pride and instead go wandering to find a new one.
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Jul 20, 2019 18:31
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The idiot defense is a lot more common than you'd think. That was half of W's presidency. It just gets confusing when people pretending to be idiots genuinely are idiots beneath the facade beneath the facade. It's how all those high-power bureaucrats turn into total amnesiacs whenever they're under indictment and get away scot-free. That interview about paragraphs B and C was just like a piece out of a loving sitcom. I feel like the fact that John Oliver didn't see fit to mention how England finally won the Cricket World Cup is like the ultimate proof that he no longer talks to Andy Zaltzman. Also shrimp chips are alright, John's making a big fuss over nothing. 
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Jul 30, 2019 22:41
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