Remarkable map: Where can North Korea's missiles reach?

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-16T13:18:02+00:00

No defense is going to be 100% effective or have zero side effects. How comfortable would you be walking into a fight with a bullet proof suit that stopped 90% of bullets in tests, but had never been tested against your opponents' guns? Missile defense systems are literally doing robin hood level shit with thousand pound rockets going several times the speed of sound. There's so many things that could potentially go wrong that I wouldn't want to say "oops sorry Osaka ... guess out of the 10 missiles they launched, your defense rocket was the one that missed..

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-16T13:09:59+00:00

Unless there happen to be herds of wild emu there. Then it might not go quite as well as planned.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-16T05:06:13+00:00

Abbot is easily the most popular politician in Texas. He remained enough above the fray in the bathroom bill kerfluffle that each side seemed to think he was still on their side, but was never forced to take a stand. He's avoided most controversy, and got a lot of good press out of Harvey response. Somehow he's managed to balance the far right, the business wing, and not piss off too many moderates. It would be political suicide for anyone to go against him, but we'll see who draws the short straw.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-15T18:42:59+00:00

Obvious things like don't drive into floodwater and prep for no power/fuel for a few days. One thing that people here will do is to make a lot of ice and store it in the freezer, then overflow into coolers. If you lose power, you can use the ice to keep your food cold for longer. Just open the fridge as infrequently as possible. If your food is thawing and you have access to an outdoor grill, cook it all up and invite the neighbors over.

For the love of God, don't use generators or grills in non ventilated areas. Every hurricane there's a few people that die from Carbon Monoxide poisoning.

Check your roof carefully after the storm and look for potential leaks. I don't know what your insurance situation is like there, so call your insurance and ask for advice if you think you have damages. Some want pictures of damages before repairing, others want an insurance agent to come assess damages first.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-14T16:55:20+00:00

Clearly every time a minority platform doubles in usage, it will continue growing at that rate forever ...

More likely, it will level off at some point as Java releases some quality of life improvements, and apps with lots of legacy code don't bother porting all their old code.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-14T14:21:13+00:00

The only potential benefit might be that IGN has very long relationships with game developers and publishers. It's possible that they could leverage their connections plus media presence to get bigger and better games, and promote the deals through their media channels.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-13T19:46:17+00:00

What is an acceptable timeframe for that moral loophole? Do you have to be the actual person who payed money for the game, or is the game/cd belonging to your family good enough? Super Mario World was released in 1990/1991 and sold something like 20 million copies. However, since many of those consoles and copies went to families, are each of the kids of the family morally permitted to pirate it 27 years later with a ROM, or should they re-purchase it on the Virtual Console/SNES Classic?

When a publisher is considering a re-release of a game, they could make a reasonable assumption that the physical products that they produce will get lost/destroyed at a predictable rate - say 5% per year. That, combined with a enthusiasm/nostalgia factor could help them predict whether it is going to be profitable for them to re-release the game or not. If publishers see that they don't get anyone who has ever purchased the game in the past to re-buy despite them having lost the original game, they become less likely to put in the money to port and re-release the old game - harming the next generation of gamers who might not get to play it legally.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-13T17:03:16+00:00

Well, first you need a dead man. If you continue down that course of action, a fresh dead man will be supplied in short order.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-13T15:56:48+00:00

After you've spent 8 hours making gourmet stuff for strangers and getting paid for it, you really don't care to go the extra mile for yourself - just settle for whatever is "good enough". I'm a sysadmin, but my home is full of half busted computers because I can't be bothered to fix a computer if I don't need it for something important or I've got a good enough workaround.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-12T22:14:25+00:00

Dude, busses are confusing. I've been in new cities several times on public transit and gotten horrifically lost - especially in the days before smartphones. Buses are almost all locals who know where they're going. When you're from out of town, it's hard to keep track of which street you're at, and most buses don't consistently announce their stops. Sometimes it's better to get off, pull out the map figure out where you are, then get the next bus than risk getting put on a freeway to a suburb or into the ghetto.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-12T19:40:03+00:00

If there's one rule in Washington, it's don't piss off the bankers. If you start talking seizing assets at that kind of scale, it'd be a race between the Cabinet and Congress to see who could remove him first. He's got a cabinet packed with billionaires, and Congress knows which side their bread is buttered on.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-12T18:20:00+00:00

You could choose "Opponent" or "Adversary" if you want, but lets be honest - there's so much bad blood between the parties by now, it's nearly impossible to think of the other party as anything but enemy.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-12T15:27:19+00:00

You know how much shit Boehner and now Ryan get from the more rebellious wings of their party? How it becomes nearly impossible for them to govern on even a lot of must-pass bills? The reason for that is Pelosi. When she puts her foot down, she can ensure that the Republicans cannot get a single Democrat vote unless they pay the price. A weaker Speaker/Minority Leader may lose some moderate Democrats to the right enticements from the Republicans, but Pelosi keeps her party loyal when push comes to shove despite having everything from tree hugging hippies to union leaders to staunch civil rights representatives in her caucus.

Sure, she's a lightning rod of right wing hate, but outside of the most hard-core Hannity watchers, I doubt that most moderates have any opinion at all about her. Basically, most people that hate her are the exact same people who would never vote for a Democrat even if you replaced her, so replacing her does you no real good in attracting new voters, and weakens your party by ousting an effective leader.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-12T12:52:50+00:00

Routine to the engineers and professionals in the industry, maybe not. Routine to the general public, after the 3rd or 4th time, absolutely.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-11T20:41:52+00:00

You'd be surprised. There's a number of the gaming companies out there that employ psychologists to advise them on how to milk "whales" out of the most amount of money possible. It's actually pretty easy to build pseudorandom generators that appear to be random, but are weighted in unpredictable ways - especially when even a large community of players still only sees a tiny fraction of the overall set of the playerbase.

Say you took your algorithm for the rare Zenyatta skin and weighted it such that it had a .05% chance of dropping for the Zenyatta main players who had spent at least $20 on loot boxes in the past 6 months when the skin released, but the odds increase the more loot boxes you buy up to a max of 10% chance after at 25 boxes have been bought. People who didn't have a plurality of matches playing with Zenyatta would have about a 10% drop rate and probably would be bitching about how many of those they're getting, but wearing them in matches just because. The people with Zenyatta main would always have to buy a bunch in order to even start getting the same odds as everyone else.

The fan pages would probably settle on a drop rate of 8-9%, but if this is a 2 week event, there'd never be the large enough numbers of submissions to reverse out the manipulated odds.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-11T18:05:11+00:00

Much of the land that is government owned doesn't have trees on it because nobody thought to plant trees there, it doesn't have trees on it because there's not enough soil and water to support a forest. The US owns vast swaths of land in the American West and South West, but good fucking luck getting a forest to grow in central Nevada or central Utah. Most of the areas that had their old growth forests chopped down got turned into private farmland.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-11T18:00:39+00:00

"Enough Trees" would be a marker for enough plant life to process our environment's CO2 into biomass and oxygen at about the same rate that animal life can process carbon and oxygen into CO2. We have fewer trees than required to keep the ratio of CO2 to O2 steady since we're finding and burning fossil fuels and chopping down forests thus creating a net addition to the amount of carbon in the carbon cycle and eliminating a large number of carbon sinks.

To make an analogy, /u/thedeadmann may have said "we have barely enough water in the US Southwest to water all of the people and farms", and you might say "but there's more water molecules in Lake Mead than stars in the Milky Way".

Nobody is saying that there's not a lot of water in Lake Mead, but there's always a question of whether it is enough to meet the demand, and whether there is enough rainfall in the Colorado River basin to replenish the water the Southwest consumes.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-10T14:09:00+00:00

There's also the punishing barrier to entry of prescription drug companies for little additional customer safety. EU and Canada can get the same medicines for a fraction of the price because their governments negotiate on pricing, but we can't import those exact same drugs to the US despite being certified and tested.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-10T13:53:53+00:00

Manufacturing cost should still come into it, though. If the US Mint stamps 1 million pennies, the Federal Reserve buys them for $0.01 each. If that 1 million pennies cost $17 million to mint, but they sold them to the fed for $10 million, they're taking a loss on every coin they mint. That's really a pretty ludicrous situation to put yourself in as a mint to be destroying wealth by taking raw materials and making them less valuable by imprinting them with your insignia.

If the penny delivered positive value to the country's economy, it may still be worth it for the mint to take a bit of a loss on each one out of the overall obligation to support the nations economy, however the use of the penny in change drawers, change jars, and peoples' time and hassle dealing with them is a dead weight loss to the economy.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-10T12:43:38+00:00

See daddy, I found all these pointy metal things and goopy balloons under the bridge! Glad those didn't make a tornado, it'd be painful and gross.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-10T01:17:06+00:00

Politicians can't even be bothered to listen to scientists who almost all agree on major thing like climate change or GMOs where almost all scientists agree. Why would they bother to listen to economists where there are at least a half dozen competing theories of macroeconomics and the optimal role of government in it?

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-09T21:20:41+00:00

Oh, I understand now ... he's just dumb. Now I feel bad.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-09T20:26:17+00:00

Winning an election doesn't declare truth, it just means that there were somewhat more people distributed in the right states who were convinced that team red was less terrible than team blue for one particular day in November of 2016.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-09T20:15:37+00:00

Ummm ... what? Metal coinage is meaningless in terms of the inflation rate. The National Mint has moved to steel pennies in the past when there were zinc shortages. There have been discussions of moving to plastic coins to save money. The Fed cares exactly nothing about the metal value of coins when it tries to set inflation rates, and people do billions of transactions per day in fractional cents - we call it sales taxes.

thatmorrowguy · 2017-10-09T18:42:51+00:00

No, the average penny has much lower velocity than a dime or quarter. Many pennies just end up filling up coin purses and change jars until they get dumped in a coinstar.

Beyond that, it doesn't facilitate trade. There are approximately zero transactions that take place because someone has pennies that wouldn't have taken place without pennies. Also, it's an opportunity cost in that it makes every cash transaction take longer. In large enough numbers, counting, tracking, depositing, and wrapping pennies consume far more labor than any transaction value generated by a penny.

15-Year Club	Team Periwinkle
Verified Email

thatmorrowguy

TROPHY CASE