RandomGuy

Heh. This should be good. Those "illegals" account for about 12 million people currently living and working in the United States, and the only reason they're "illegal" in the first place is because of blatantly racist per country quotas that make it impossible for them to immigrate otherwise. The term is basically a useless weasel word. Yet they come anyway, and get paid way more than they would at home while also strengthening the American economy. It's a win-win, hence why 3/4 of the country supports amnesty. Illegal immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans. The reasons for this should be obvious. So by your logic we should have you deported and replaced with a Mexican immigrant who wants your job. He'll do it for a cheaper price and will be less likely to murder someone than you would; it's only logical. He's not "protecting the country" by preventing more people from becoming Americans, he's trying to limit its economy while ethnically cleansing the southwest because it fits into his populist platform. This is half of why he's going to lose the race hard; Latinos are 1/6 of all Americans now. Most of those Latinos are Mexican-American. They recognize racially charged rhetoric when they see it. There have been literally 45 people killed by Islamist terrorists in the USA since 2001, out of the several hundred thousand murders committed in that time period. You're many times more likely to die after getting struck by lightning than die in a terror attack. It's downright illogical to shut out potentially useful workers (Trump's not just shutting out refugees, but all Muslims) because of such a statistically insignificant number. Not to mention unconstitutional. Christianity advocates the killing of people for very minor offenses like working on Sunday, yet for some reason he doesn't want to ban all Christians from entering the USA. I bet you have absolutely no idea what's even going with ISIS right now. Yes, that's extremely racist. I'm pretty sure it's against forum rules too. I don't know why you dislike Sanders so much while being a Trump supporter. Sure he doesn't support obviously fantastical propositions like deporting those 12 million people, but he wants to shut out immigrants too. He even uses the same logic Trump uses (lump of labor fallacy, i.e. "unskilled foreigners will take American jobs and make everyone poor"). It's actually the same reason he opposes free trade... which Trump also opposes (i.e. "dirty Chinese people are taking American jobs, economists who say I'm wrong [basically all of them] don't know shit compared to me"). Community college tuition costs about $6,700 for two years, and the majority of the people in community college get aid packages of some kind to alleviate even that. More than a third of them, i.e. the really poor ones, flat-out don't pay anything. It's really not that big of a deal. Furthermore, Sanders doesn't support making the first two years of community college free- he supports making all college tuition free, which is ridiculous for a variety of reasons. Mostly because the current college system already acts as a form of very progressive taxation (whereas if all college was free, you'd have wealthy and middle class people getting government aid when they could easily afford college), where the rich pay a lot, the middle class pay a moderate amount, and the poor pay next to nothing. Students from higher income families paying the full tuition and everyone else getting varying amounts of subsidies down to an actual poor student who pays nothing and get a living stipend on top of it. So under Bernie's system, you would expend an enormous amount of political capital getting this passed, and then expend an enormous amount of political capital to raise taxes on the rich significantly to pay for it, and then you end up barely a step away from where you started. Finally, the college attendance rate in the US is abnormally high while our graduation rate is slightly below average. Any free tuition system would require stricter entrance requirements and stricter performance requirements on colleges to raise their graduation rates. That's what Germany does. By contrast, Clinton's more modest plan is specifically aimed at increasing the already significant subsidies for low income students, and more or less wiping out the cost of community college. This is much more likely to actually pass, and unlike Sanders' plan, which gives free handouts to everyone at the cost of an extra half a trillion dollars, it specifically targets students who actually need support. Most European countries aren't hardcore protectionist, in fact the economy of Denmark which he claims to be trying to emulate has free trade as the main base of its economic policy ("Denmark’s international trade policy fundamentally aims at allowing more free trade on a global basis"). On healthcare specifically, Sanders' plan proposes paying for the plan almost entirely via financially unsound taxes on the wealthy, rather than broad, more efficient taxes like VATs (because then he wouldn't even be able to pretend that the plan wouldn't cost a shitload); this is extreme leftist even by "European" (I assume you exclude the poor half) standards. Ah yes, that genius plan. I particularly like the part where he said he'd save $324 billion on prescription drug costs... when the USA only spends $305 billion prescription drugs in total ("When I pointed out that the yearly savings numbers they were presenting on prescription drugs were literally impossible, the Sanders camp revised the number to $240 billion — huge and arguably implausible but not larger than total annual spending on prescription drugs"). Single-payer is the more efficient model, but Sanders is an idiot with how he wants to implement it. ...and it was dumb because people had to pay more for mediocre products. Now the average American has more purchasing power, and people in poorer countries are rich compared to where they were a couple decades ago. You may as well ask the American people to pay a 10% tax to GM every year and then mail "fuck you" letters to Chinese peasants, it's functionally the same thing as this protectionist nonsense.

I'm opposed to Trump for the same reason I'm opposed to Sanders. His anti-immigration, anti-free trade economic policies are total populist nonsense that have been debunked for years.

Clinton won every state for the Democrats including both of the important swing states (on top of already winning the other swing states of Iowa, Nevada, and Virginia). Overall a crushing victory for Clinton. Final scores for the night: Vote percentages (C-S) Florida: 65-33 Ohio: 57-43 Illinois: 50-48 North Carolina: 55-41 Missouri: 50-49 Trump wins Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, and Missouri, while Kasich wins Ohio in a winner-take-all contest. Little Marco got rocked so hard that he suspended his campaign. Overall a crushing victory for Trump. Final results: Vote percentages (T-C-K-R) Florida: 46-17-7-27 Ohio: 36-13-47-2 Illinois: 39-31-20-9 North Carolina: 40-36-13-8 Missouri: 41-41-10-6 Missouri was extremely close for both parties. Less than a 1 point margin of victory for both Trump and Clinton. Wonder why that was... I took a look at the exit polls, as I do after every primary. It's pretty much more of the same- if only white men were allowed to vote, Sanders would have won every state. EDIT: Speaking of campaign finances, Sanders outspent Clinton in today's five states.

This is not true. Sanders gets most of his money from small, private donations. The list you're looking at omits those private donations, and is all his lifetime donations rather than what he's received specifically for the presidential election. This guy's average donation size is $27. Actually, I was looking specifically at his 2016 campaign donors... Over 80% of his 2016 funding is coming from Unions. Citation?

Sanders is the champion of two groups: young middle class white liberals (e.g. college students, particularly men), and angry factory workers who have been obsoleted by the modern economy (again mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly men). His support for the former manifests in pointlessly expensive policies that benefit only them, like free tuition, while his support for the latter manifests itself in long-debunked anti-free trade, anti-immigration economic protectionism/populism that is opposed by almost every mainstream economist (he's gotta get that union money somehow). This is why he loses the black and Latino votes by anywhere between 3-1 and 8-1 in every state (e.g. Texas, where Sanders tied with Clinton for the white male vote, but Clinton got 83% of black voters, 71% of Latinos, and 70% of women). In addition to minorities, he also lags with women voters and voters above the age of 40, though it's not nearly as huge as the disparity of his support among racial minorities. Even in Michigan, which was hailed by Sanders supporters as his breakthrough to minority voters, Clinton got 68% of the African-American vote to Sanders' 28% vote according to the exit polls. Sanders barely squeezed through via his dominance of the white male vote (62% v 36%). Speaking of which, Clinton swept Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina, and seems to be pulling a thin win in Illinois. 538's projections are roughly accurate so far. Missouri is still too close to call according to CNN, though so far it looks like Sanders is leading by a few points (538 projected an effective tie). He'll probably win it. I await the inevitable cries from Bernie Bros of "corporate shills" or "low information minorities". Hang on, I had some useful images for this subject last Tuesday. The exit polls for the four most populous states being voted on, from all across the country, from the deep south to the middle south swing state to New England to the Mexican-heavy southwest: Here's Texas: Virginia: Massachusetts: Georgia: As you can see, if only white men were allowed to vote, Sanders would have won all these states. Instead he lost them by: Texas: 66-33 Georgia: 71-28 Virginia: 64-35 Massachusetts: 50-48 Sanders' issue for the whole campaign has been that he has been unable to dominate any group besides young middle class whites. I'll wait for the exit polls this time around, but I doubt that's changed this week.

So, is there one specific mailing address we should send our letters to? Wouldn't it be more effective if one guy got a hundred letters on his desk than if a hundred guys each got one?

And if they were totally right, with a lack of the TSA causing 90% of planes to get bombed and the flight industry to be extinct in the world's largest country, them your comparison would make sense.

I'm very attached to the idea of high budget single player games not dying out and the whole world's gaming industry ending up like China's. Single player games there are literally less than 1% of the industry due to rampant piracy.

Totally irrelevant red herring. Are you a fan of piracy?

It's not collective punishment. It's a trivial security measure that very few people care about. Splinter Cell 3 and Hawx 2 taking over a year to Crack says you're wrong. DRM-free games getting the shit pirated out of them says you're wrong. Ubisoft and an Indie game company both explicitly saying that their DRM drastically reduced piracy says you're wrong. China vs USA says you're wrong.

So because I support methods that have been proven effective in reducing piracy, I support killing games? BTW I more or less support what Ross said on page 2. DRM and required online access are fine as long as the game isn't just deleted forever. Correction: tactics that minimally inconvenience customers and majorly inconvenience pirates. By and large pepole don't care about always being online. I wouldn't support these measures if many consumers WEREN'T entitled babies. If DRM-free games didn't suffer 90% piracy. If an Indie developer couldn't charge 1 cent for a DRM-free game and still get it pirated at a 25-30% rate. If piracy didn't outright kill the single player industry in the world's biggest country, forcing devs there to concentrate on freemium. If MMOs and mobile games didn't make up the majority of gaming profits now. If big single player games weren't dying. Unfortunately that is not the world we live in.

I already had most of that typed it up before the last ten or so posts. I'm not really interested in PMs either, because the point of arguments like this is not to convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced, but to make them look silly to observers. If barging and saying "yeah bros we should totally pirate all these games, that'll make people listen to us" didn't make him look silly enough. I'll stop now if no one else says anything about it. I just thought that my post contained some important information that people needed to see. Specifically the parts about World of Goo, profit margins, the Humble Bundle, and China.

World of Goo had a 90% piracy rate. Machinarium had a 90% piracy rate. Some indie games with zero DRM reach 98% piracy rates. Heck, there was one Indie game bundle that cost literally 1 cent and it still got heavily pirated. If you're seriously arguing that none of those hurt the companies, you're totally delusional. Except this is a load of bullshit. Ubisoft has repeatedly said that DRM requiring an online login drastically decreases piracy rates. It's impossible to determine if sales increased due to better DRM (how would you even run an experiment like that? You'd need a parallel world where one game is released twice with a strong DRM and without), but it clearly combated piracy in a time where piracy rates for non-DRM games can get into the 90s. An Indie game company did a study and found out that every time they changed their DRM scheme, their sales went up and piracy went down for a while until it was cracked, then sales fell again. Coincidentally their sales going up coincided with their downloads going down. The death of the single-player market in China (read: 1/5 of the human species) puts to bed the claim that piracy doesn't hurt games and DRM is unnecessary. Chinese developers have more or less abandoned single-player games for freemium games in the face of rampant piracy. The rest of the world is slowly following suit. Prove right now that more DRM means more piracy. Indie games, Ubisoft, and China all say the opposite. You also seem to be ignoring the video game industry's incredibly razor thing profit margins. The average is like 3%. EA is the most money-grubbing of these companies, and their average profit margin for the last five years is 2.78%. This, at best, puts them considerably below average for 212 companies (7.5%) despite them using every trick in the book to squeeze money out of the consumers and despite most of that probably coming from multiplayer-only games and shovelware. The profit margins for online-only game companies and casual game companies, by the way, is considerably higher. Then again you're probably one of those people who think EA's profit margins are 36%. Nobody but you brought up Gears of War 2. They have a much different effect actually. Namely, one actually cuts into their profits seriously but can only be answered with more severe punishment, while the other will probably just be ignored overall, because a lot of people pirate but no one actually takes boycotts seriously. LOL. If you want to make this about personal attacks, should I bring up the Armenian genocide thread? Pretty much nothing but a non-stop flurry of stupid on your part. If you DON'T want to make this about personal attacks, then good. Except always online games are consistently harder to pirate. You're full of shit. Piracy rates for Indie games are insanely high. Reality has proven that pirates will NOT just agree not to pirate if a game has no DRM. In fact they take that as encouragement. The first Humble Bundle cost literally 1 cent with no DRM and its piracy rate was still 25%. Spore had one of the worst piracy rates for a professional game ever, and proportionally the Humble Bundle's was nearly the same despite it, again, costing literally 1 cent. 500,000 copies of Spore were pirated in the first two weeks of sales, while 2 million were sold legitimately in the first three weeks. Proceeds to type up more walls of text. You are the stereotype of the whiny entitled gamer that people point to as justification for ignoring legitimate complaints, like the ones Ross has. You make this board look bad by association. With you repeatedly advocating and admitting to theft, on top of repeatedly picking fights with people and being an obnoxious and toxic individual in general, I'm frankly amazed you haven't been banned by now. I like how your great moral stance also results in you gaining hundreds of dollars worth of content without having to pay for any of it though. Clever.

Spoiled brats like you are the reason the single-player gaming industry is dead in China right now. You are also the reason that people think microtransactions, multiplayer only games, and always]-online games are a good idea. Because they're much much harder to pirate. It always amuses me when people think Spore's failure is not at all related to it being the most pirated game of all time (as of 2008).

Mass Effect seems pretty nice with its many friendly alien species (integrated in most places), universal translators, galactic civilization, 150 year average human life span, cheap commercial space travel, omni-tools, commercially available gene mods and cybernetics, medical technology (most diseases seemed to have been cured), lack of major wars, less than 1% of all planets being discovered, even less than that being claimed, etc. I'd probably want to be a normal guy doing a white collar job while living on a multi-species colony that happens to be in salarian space- if only because salarian space is the only area that doesn't get burned by the Reapers. Oh, speaking of which. The Reaper invasion that kills or displaces most of the galactic population is a downside to the ME galaxy if you happen to live during the timeline of the games. I'd put my nemesis in the world of Half-Life 2, a horrible dystopia where only a small handful of humans are left under a 1984-esque alien dictatorship, and where Earth's biosphere has been wrecked so you can't even be free in the wilderness (most animals were replaced by giant man-eating bug things). Normally I'd say I'd put him in the world of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream... but no one deserves that. They could always do that, it's just impractically slow without the mass relays (which is why they rebuild them).

Ross's hyping up of VR is making me suspect that he's a secret employee of Oculus or HTC. Normally I wouldn't care about "VR" and dismiss it as another gimmick (especially since I'd need an upgrade or a new PC to run the Rift), but Ross does sound like a true believer of the hype... and I've never even tried 3D gaming, so.

Damn, missed it. Ah well, at least I've got an hour and a half of stuff to listen to while I run.

7 AM? Damn. Of course I'm going to be there, but Sunday is usually when I sleep 'til 2...

Airstrikes may gradually smoke out Daesh, but they're not exactly being helpful for Syria's citizens. After all, the combination of strikes and Daesh's presence is the reason why they're seeking refuge in Europe. I think it'd be pretty hard to persuade them to wait out the conflict, and accept the possibility of being killed by accident. And stopping will help how? The number of civilians killed by the strikes is downright miniscule (somewhere between 200 and 600) compared to the number of militants killed (at least 3,300 in Syria alone, likely far more), which is pretty much the best you can ask for in any real war (vital civilian infrastructure is also painstakingly avoided in bombing targets, hence why Daesh still has an economy). Stopping will just let Daesh do whatever it wants. In an area where every other fighting force has basically broken down and they have explicitly genocidal intentions. Of course they're helping, unless you think thousands of extra Daeshbags in Syria (plus an extra 15,000-20,000 in Iraq) plus smooth supply lines for them would be a good thing for Syria? And no, they're not fleeing from the strikes and Daesh. They're fleeing from Daesh, Al-Nusra, and probably most importantly, Assad. He has made a habit out of terror bombing communities under rebel occupation to keep them from getting complacent. Yep.

Coming back because I found some more interesting infographs. Foreign fighters in Syria and IRAQ by country. Out of the nearly 30,000 foreigners who have run off to Iraq and Syria to join ISIL, the top contributors (not counting fighters who already returned home or died) are: 1. Tunisia: 5,000 2. Saudi Arabia: 2,500 3. Russia: 2,400 4. Jordan: 2,000 5. France: 1,800 Can't say I'm too surprised by these numbers. Tunisia's actually doing relatively fine, so their Islamist extremists probably use Iraq and Syria as an outlet ever since the Islamists lost the last round of elections. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are still hellholes, France still treats its Arab minority like shit, and there's an ongoing Islamist insurgency in Russia, and there has been one for nearly two decades. Number of Daesh targets hit by the Coalition; updated.

We can start by stopping the airstrikes. Spoken like someone who has done absolutely no research on the situation. This is true. France wasn't attacked because it was going to let in refugees, it was attacked because it's got a very poor, marginalized, and pissed off minority of Arab Muslims. Those attacks in Paris were pulled off mostly by French or Belgium-born Muslims, not immigrants of Syria. To get another picture, compare how many French Muslims ran off to join ISIL (at least 1,900, possibly more) to how many German (700) or American (250) Muslims ran off to join ISIL. True, France has more Muslims than those two countries, but not by much (USA: 3.1 million, Germany: 4.2 million, France: ~5 million). The vast majority of IS's revenue comes from selling oil to the Assad government; if you took out the handful of private donors from Saudi Arabia, next to nothing would change (a lot would change if you could somehow cut off the stream of thousands of experienced Chechen and Dagestani fighters flowing into ISIL from Russia, though; they stiffen out a largely subpar force). If you want to actually cripple the Islamic State, you would do much better by bombing Damascus and the big oil refineries. Not that anyone's going to do that, since Syria's now borderline non-existent economy would have no hope of being repaired after that level of infrastructure damage to their oil industry.

Most of the "concerns" about the refugee crisis are racist propaganda that have been historically proven wrong. E.g. "they'll never integrate", "we have no room", "taking in the refugees will wreck our economy", etc. This rhetoric is particularly strong in Poland and France, as both countries are highly racist. It's not as prominent in Germany or the UK. The 10 million number is for the total number of people displaced by the war (Assad likes to destroy houses). 4 million of those are refugees outside of Syria. Fewer than 1 million of those are in Europe. Mysteriously, the United States has no trouble assimilating well over 1 million immigrants annually, every year for several decades. Nor did it have any problem taking in 1,000,000+ war refugees in the immediate aftermath of the Second Indochina War, back in the 70s. Turkey, on its own, has also been able to hold up 2 million Syrian refugees in relative comfort. Yet an entire continent will commit collective suicide by letting in fewer than 1 million, apparently. I had no idea that Europe was so unstable. 3 million unemployed out of 80 million people puts Germany pretty damn close to the ideal unemployment rate; any lower than 4% should have you concerned. They still have a labor shortage, though. This is why OECD is saying that a softer immigration policy would be good for the German economy. http://www.ibtimes.com/german-cities-say-unskilled-immigrants-threaten-social-stability-country-faces-labor-shortage Many of the refugees streaming in are perfectly capable of performing the low to moderately skilled jobs that remain undone in the current situation. A disproportionate amount of the refugees were upper and middle class. EDIT: Of course, this will only work out if Germany acts more like the US than it does France. If they act like the latter, we'll get crap like 70% of the prison population being Muslim, and widespread discrimination against people based on skin color and religion being almost completely ignored by the government. It needs to integrate them into society instead of segregating them into ghettos in the suburbs and economically marginalizing them. Certain civil liberties may need to be curtailed, specifically I'm talking about the right of parents to send their kids to the kinds of extremist Islamic mosques/schools that preach hate. There needs to be a carrot in addition to the stick. German Muslims need to be able to see their lives improve and be given economic opportunities so there aren't giant mobs of angry unemployed young men burning cars every other weekend. Basically, don't be like France; with them it's all stick.

That was fun. I was worried Ross would get exasperated being 45 minutes behind the chat, but he caught up and remained forthcoming.

1 PM for me. Should be fun and informative.

This has not been a good weak for the SAA. They retook a road in Aleppo as part of the battle that's still raging here. They say that this will leave Daesh forces there to wither on the vine, but that doesn't seem likely for many reasons. Especially considering how often these things change hands. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34720597 More importantly, the Islamist rebels took Morek in their counterattack. This is after the SAA launched offensives in that area and gained nothing but a bunch of tank husks, and after a rebel counterattack that only lasted a few days. This is the kind of loss that spells doom for an army's morale. https://mobile.twitter.com/Syria_Protector/status/662020974422945794?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet The SAA state media is downplaying it. The rebels are saying that it was a great victory where they captured loads of loot and prisoners. Considering how the battle was going a few days ago, the rhetoric from both sides while it was still raging, and the strategic importance of that town... the rebels are likely closer to the truth here. Meanwhile American-led airstrikes in Syria have resumed after a short break; a couple dozen strikes have been launched in the past few days. Not to be outdone, Iran has also been heavily involved in making sure Aleppo doesn't become Hama; five more IRGC officers were killed on Nov. 2 alone, including a colonel. Still, having them be involved in combat, along with their Afghan and Pakistani auxiliary brigades, is a hell of a lot better than leaving the incompetent SAA to fend for itself against the slightly more competent (and much more motivated) Daesh. The IRGC are competent light infantry with effective light air and armor support, unlike the SAA. They're a force multiplier wherever they're present. http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/security-forces-kill-58-isis-elements-dismantle-150-explosive-devices-north-ramadi/ http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/anbar-police-announces-liberating-7th-kilometer-area-west-ramadi/ http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/security-forces-raise-iraqi-flag-jiraishi-bridge-cut-isis-supplies-ramadi/ http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/security-forces-cleanse-al-madaiq-kill-33-isis-elements-says-khalidiya-council/ The USA is also stepping up airstrikes near Ramadi, Iraq, where the Iraqi police and army are finally making some progress against Daesh. They have recaptured large portions of it, have (supposedly) killed hundreds of Daeshbags, and are well on their way to closing that pocket. Note: if I throw out numbers for the Coalition airstrikes or Iranian casualties without explicitly mentioning a source, just assume I'm using one of two pages. defense.gov's "Operation Inherent Resolve" for the former, and Reddit's "Iranian casualties in Syria megathread" [a collection of Iran state news reports] for the latter. [We should probably be dividing ISF kill claims by three... just to make sure]