USCE Autumn: Well Actually, This IS somethingpedantic.com

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > USCE Autumn: Well Actually, This IS somethingpedantic.com

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Welcome to final chapter of USCE this year. We're really gearing up for Midterms, and therefore things may get extra snippy. Please keep yourselves civil here. If you do just want to come to this thread to argue, we can point you to a more productive place.

Evergreen topic info: This is a quick reminder that USCE is for discussing of current events and news about the United States in the year of our LORD 2022. If anyone has some interesting articles they wish to talk about, post it here! And please add some of your own commentary to it first. This isn't supposed to be a place to just dump bad tweets. There are plenty of other places to do that on SA, or if you just like reading those, do it on Twitter with the weirdos.

Also of note, we understand that there will be some repeating or blending of info about the 2022 midterm races. Some sharing of conversation is fine, but if you're talking about or linking an article for a specific senate/house/gov race, the conversation would probably be better in the Dedicated Midterms thread.

The latest news from the last thread was about Florida using their federal COVID funds to fly people to Martha's Vineyard.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Seems like there was an enormous amount of fraud with the CARES Act and the early days of the pandemic.

Some of it was probably worth it as just the cost of getting all of it out as fast as possible, but still pretty staggering.

Current estimates are:

- $76.1 billion in PPP fraud.

- $46.5 billion in unemployment fraud.

- $661.5 million in food assistance fraud.

- (Debatable whether this is technically fraud or not since there weren't explicit restrictions on how states could use it, but...) Roughly $80 billion in aid to state governments/local governments/schools was used for funding projects or hiring staff that they needed before the pandemic and was not covid-related.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1573009447454412800

# ¿ Sep 23, 2022 02:23

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:43

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

That was Uber; which is why I included the "(except for Uber)" part.

Ebay did something similar several years ago now.

https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid

quote:

Encouraged by these findings, eBay management agreed to run a controlled experiment where they shut off all Google search ads in a third of the country, while continuing to buy ads everywhere else. In contrast to branded keywords � where it�s inevitable that the company will end up as one of the top unpaid listings � there�s a good chance that if you try searching for �used les paul guitar,� a guitar reseller will appear ahead of eBay�s search listing. So in order to drive a customer to eBay for his guitar purchase rather than, say, Guitar Center, it might be worth the cost of placing a carefully targeted ad.

But in aggregate, that�s not what the eBay team found � overall, there was no appreciable decline in sales of eBay listings in the part of the country where Google ad purchases were shut off. People who thought to buy guitars via eBay were finding their way to the site anyway, either by clicking on natural listings, or by going directly to eBay�s site without using a search engine at all. Search ads did generate a modest increase in the likelihood that internet surfers with little recent history of eBay transactions would end up making purchases on eBay. So paid search ads serve an informational function, letting a sliver of potential eBay customers know that they�re in the guitar business. But by the time you get to customers who have had three prior eBay transactions in the last year, the effect of paid search on sales drops almost to zero. Overall, paid search turns out to be a very expensive way of attracting new business: The study�s authors estimate that, at least in the short-run, paid ads generate only about 25 cents in extra revenues for each dollar of ad expenditures. (For branded keyword searches, the additional revenues are close to zero.)

People buying search ads aren�t idiots � they�ve looked at the correlation between keyword purchases and subsequent sales and no doubt found it to be strong. But this study suggests that marketing departments should be more careful in confusing causation and correlation in assessing the returns to their ad expenditures, to avoid the equivalent of concluding that marketing works because you advertise and sell a lot in December.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2022 23:59

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Digamma-F-Wau posted:

I don't know what the gently caress you guys are talking about cucumbers are good and pickles are nasty

mod note: poster is wrong

and if I didn't like the current thread title so much I would say so there

# ¿ Sep 29, 2022 01:10

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Looking at Wikipedia, it was bundled with Tobacco and Alcohol in 1968 after Congress passed a gun control law through the Interstate Commerce clause, because of its similar regulatory actions

edit: vox'd

# ¿ Oct 2, 2022 03:30

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Dubar posted:

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1579788950696185859

lol

lmao

also she's trying to look like rogue from the x-men or something

# ¿ Oct 11, 2022 13:54

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Please, keep making fun of the 28 dollar Taco Bell order, this is now by mod decree.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2022 02:24

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Shooting Blanks posted:

I believe insurance was paid and my dad was effectively told "tough poo poo."

You stick something up there long enough you'll get diamonds :dadjoke:

# ¿ Oct 24, 2022 09:36

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Tarezax posted:

If you're not horrified looking at a company's code you probably work for that company, just saying. Hell, I get plenty horrified at my own company's code

Any codebase more than a few years old is a tower resting precariously on mountains of technical debt

please stop talking about the forums this way

# ¿ Oct 28, 2022 04:14

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

ManBoyChef posted:

Honestly Paul Pelosi should have had more happen to him for that DUI. Secondly all the insider trading is pretty lovely. Id rather see both of them face those crimes than get beatup though.

Are you calling for capital punishment about this? I'm not getting it.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2022 01:17

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Beast Pussy posted:

I'll hop in to be the nay sayer. The story is rad (i made it about halfway through the first season), but it's about equal parts story and ads, which makes it unlistenable in my opinion.

If you can weave a story about elder gods loving their Quip toothbrush after waking up from their relaxing Leesa mattress effectively then it could work

# ¿ Nov 7, 2022 01:44

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

haveblue posted:

One day, not too long from now, Twitter is going to break and no one will be left who can fix it

1000 radiums typing at 1000 keyboards will eventually re-create twitter.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2022 02:11

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Rebel Blob posted:

It isn't just the cost of these ever more gigantic trucks, but their very design is becoming ever more warped to serve their size. Lines of sight that are so bad that it shouldn't be street legal for a consumer vehicle.

https://twitter.com/bontrager_keith/status/1495443890253357059

oh my loving god that is the worst thing I have ever seen

# ¿ Nov 18, 2022 23:36

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

selec posted:

The state isn’t equipped to deal with this issue because ultimately the cops agree and slow-walk efforts to protect minority groups. Abolish the police.

https://twitter.com/dgisserious/status/1595447152125399045?s=46&t=dy0WgvoTwf0njw4ZP39IBQ

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Hey, so please don't add your own commentary on what the article actually says, which is "the police were given a tip by a watchdog organization and then acted on it."

NYTimes posted:

Initially, the tweets indicated that perhaps the threat might occur on Long Island, so the consultants immediately alerted law enforcement authorities there. By early afternoon, the security team found additional online profiles seemingly linked to Mr. Brown that mentioned other threats, Mr. Silber said.

And by 2 p.m., it became apparent that the threat could be in New York City, at which point Mr. Silber’s team alerted city police officials.

“We basically told them that, ‘We know you get a lot of incoming, but you should pay attention to this,’” he said.

In a statement, Commissioner Sewell said that the department’s “exhaustive intelligence gathering led to the arrest.”

# ¿ Nov 24, 2022 01:58

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Charliegrs posted:

This is from a few pages back but I just want to comment on it.

The reason why a mass shooter doesn't normally get beat to an inch of their life is because they are holding a freaking gun and most people they are shooting at are trying to get the hell away and not run towards the shooter. It will never be the norm for them to be stopped by force of any kind other than someone else armed with a gun (like a cop) taking them down.

I don't think "fear of pain/death" is going to stop people. It is the same argument made about the death penalty being a deterrent for criminals.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2022 11:01

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Paracaidas posted:

I've not seen that anywhere? Everything I've seen matches LT's:

Adding another early state, and having a geographically large trio, is interesting. Iowa and New Hampshire could be done fairly easily without requiring huge organization or expense. The same likely doesn't hold true now, particularly in Michigan and Georgia (and NV, to an extent). That likely thwarts halfassed runs like Pete and Amy ("we tried and got our names out there, and could have spooled up if we did well and money flowed in"), but is also another barrier for anyone succeeding if they don't enter with infrastructure and deep pockets and the primaries already have plenty of those.

gently caress it, I'm 100% for making bigger states first. I'm sure the cable news networks liked the clown car debates because it was cheap for them and could fill lots of time, but it was so stupid.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2022 00:13

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

PhazonLink posted:

so youre saying the solution is to offer the rich to the pale green glow?

works for me.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2022 07:04

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Morrow posted:

You'd see a lot of candidates coming just to throw their hat into the Hawaii Primary and campaign there for three months straight on their donors' dime

Yes I was going to say it will be hard to a campaign to look like they are "working hard on the trail" when everything is in hawaii - people already complain when senators/govs are off at a corn fair.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2022 04:29

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

evilweasel posted:

unless the 13th amendment has some really unusual interpretations I�m not familiar with, I think you mean the 14th

boobs and moobs must be free

# ¿ Dec 8, 2022 05:14

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Real "what are you gonna do, arrest me?" energy from SBF there.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2022 01:24

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The Lowtax and Elon comparisons are being made explicitly by a Washington Post and Buzzfeed reporter right after Elon got driven out of the chat.

Just amazing.

Joementum? I thought he was fired?

# ¿ Dec 16, 2022 06:11

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Trump having the fortitude to withstand the siren song of Twitter compared to several other online brains is... something.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2022 06:18

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Even after all these years, I don't remember hearing about The Brick Man before. All of these... what could I call them, "Sad Trump all alone" stories just make me hate him more.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2022 00:08

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

I think in the right wing chudosphere being at the Jan 6 riot is becoming a mark of pride for the true believers. You'll have new right wing media personalities pop up in the next 5-10 years trying to Rannazzisi themselves saying they were super there and were right next to Ashli Babbitt when she was shot.

edit: USCE Winter will be opening up soon, probably right after New Year's.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2022 02:11

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:43

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

New Thread is up: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4020995

# ¿ Jan 2, 2023 01:48

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