hamsterTK

Sounds like a epic lawsuit magnet. As Nonny Moose said, libel suit in 3...2...1..Remember, in the US, the first amendment right to free speech doesn't cover telling lies, or highly exaggerated hearsay, with the intent of damaging one's character. It's harder to review a person than it is to review a business or service in a way that isn't libelous, I think. Someone whose repairman was late is sharing a plausible story, and someone who is complaining about bad food is stating an opinion. Yelp can say that they are simply a channel for fair reviews. Saying anything negative about a person is going to be vastly more subjective, and way more likely to come off as malicious. You can't prove that someone is of bad moral character, you can only share stories which are probably hard to verify. Either way, boom, I think a good lawyer could come down on this if it was harming your professional life or resulting in harassment.

It's not about the time spent doing the thing so much as the amount of time left over...

I think there's other aspects of justice reform too. Courts also need to be unclogged and sped up. Unfortunately this may cost money, but on the other hand I'd like think trials are more productive at turning up facts and getting justice served than plea deals. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law

All I could think when I heard of this, was, "these gunmen wanted a Darwin award". Sort of like trying to rob a gun show, just isn't going to happen. Anyways, there can be zero sympathy or tolerance for people who would use violence to retaliate against people who offend them. Shouldn't even be a debate.

All these years the old debate about how solar and wind won't work because of how to store the energy(giant reservoirs! compressed gas in salt domes!)...its mooted. Just put the battery bank on the consumer end. It's genius. Also most households would never experience blackouts unless there was a major disaster like a hurricane. No more surge protectors on power cords either, since I'm sure this battery bank could work as an uninterrupted power supply. I suppose the mode of power generation this could hurt most of all would be natural gas. If I understand correctly gas turbine plants have an advantage of being able to start and stop operations and exist to add power to the grid during peaks. If everyone had a home battery system then peaks stop existing.

I think the assumption that kids are good with technology will eventually prove false. I think its true for the generations represented on this site- anyone born from the mid-1970s to about 2000. We used PC's as our primary computing devices that allow for exploring. However those born today and from now on will experience nothing but highly user friendly gadgets that offer a seamless experience but can be very opaque in their function. There's less absolute need and even less informal opportunities to tinker or explore technology.

Yes...It's called an EBT card. They haven't been giving out paper stamps in a very long time. Those did not even serve their intended purpose of restricting purchases anyways, since people sold them. SNAP; aka supplemental nutrition assistance program, is "food stamps" as people once knew them(they were actually stamps decades ago). It only buys actual food and a retailer has to be set up to accept it. TANF; aka temporary assistance for needy families, is a cash allowance aka "welfare". The Kansas law restricts where EBT cards containing TANF credits could be swiped, and limits cash withdrawals to $25 a day. The latter is IMO a cynical ploy by credit card companies, which already make money off this system. The more times you have to withdraw the more fees they get to charge, and show me an ATM that lets you take out exactly $25. Also if you needed to pay something like rent in cash because like most truly poor people you have no bank account, well tough luck. As for the restrictions on where cards can be used, the only real thing in the list that I firmly disagree with is the line that says "pools and spas" and maybe "movie theaters". So a poor family could not visit a YMCA or city recreation center? This bothers me a lot, that is the kind of healthy activity that I see a family using welfare money for beyond the basics of rent, etc. IMO the entire damn reason for welfare is to take care of children and indigent adults, and part of "taking care" especially involving kids is providing both a sense of normalcy and being able to provide for them typical childhood experiences. I am not Scrooge and this is America not a third world country with no money. I would not mind if some microscopic fraction of my tax money went to pay for Tyrone's trip to camp or if their family "splurged" on a movie. I had an idea where really only "catastrophic" care needs to be universal. My theory on why health care is a failure of the free market is a result of consumers being unable to truly make choices, even those with private insurance. Healthcare is just too much of a "black box". While someone is incapacitated in a hospital bed and doctors are considering what treatment to pursue there are a million variables and little things that middle men can find ways to charge for, and things hidden in the fine print of your policy. You have one set of middle men whose job is to find a way to charge $300 for an aspirin and another set of middle men whose job is to negotiate the costs back down. This is a Kafka level of absurdity and rip-off-edness. Given the mantra of "greed is good" that exists in American corporate culture and its incestuous relationship with government now I don't see real efforts to fix this. The ACA makes it harder for them to be greedy but I agree a truly single payer system is the real, final fix. But boring outpatient stuff could be a cash business with an expanded Medicaid to help out poor people. Dental and optometry don't have the flaws of the health care system as a whole because they are outpatient and simple enough that people can shop around and pay out of pocket.

I wouldn't really put much weight on the communist label given the context. My understanding is that in Turkey the authoritarian left has always represented a secular alternative to the authoritarian Islamist right. Anyways, kind of interesting 1970s vibe from that pic....

Yeah, exactly. I use social media to communicate with people but lost interest in it as a hobby/form of entertainment a long time ago. Its even worse than the regular internet because most people's social circles aren't going to have dissenting voices and since its your friends its your tribe. I think we could put to bed the myth that anonymity on the internet makes people act badly. It does, but it also allows people to speak their mind and break up group think and the mob mentality. And you get exposed to a lot more correct information and things that make you question your assumptions. If you get your news or hear about things mostly from Facebook, I can't imagine you being very well informed.

What do you guys find favorable about Rand Paul, exactly? Most of his platform will benefit the rich and gut social programs, while I doubt the overall political establishment would ever end the war on drugs, etc. http://www.vox.com/2015/4/7/8360691/rand-paul-budget-president Its a culture that values things that tend to make people successful. Also a lot of Jewish communities are in big cities where special opportunities exist, a lot of those they created themselves.

Looks really excellent! Can't have enough low density low value commercial buildings.

Looks good. Both additions would add something missing to the game. Specifically the recreation facilities. I like the idea of the latter being an addition to the education or health menu. Actually requested something like that in the request thread, did you notice there are NO sports fields in the game aside from the stadium and the pre-release basketball court park? Although IMO some of the vanilla low wealth low density residential buildings look fairly grim and northern european already. Isn't paradox swedish? Do some british central city and industry if you are dissatisified with how the row houses turn out? I was always a big fan of some of the SC4 stuff made by a user named Gascooker way back when. And the user Tonkso? also created a lot of art deco UK stuff. I don't really know what you would call the style, but basically the type of buildings best represented by the battersea power station, the tate gallery, and a ton of other early to mid-20th century industrial and commercial complexes. "Brick cathedral"?

This is what I was thinking. Though at least in this case, the "lot editor" and the "BAT" were rolled into the game and released at launch rather than being about a year apart IIRC.

Potato laptop here. Game heaves on lowest setting but is still playable.

I haven't seen much of the game thusfar and only scrolled a little bit through the asset editor. Here's what I'd add: Gritty older looking power plants. Non-cutesy parks. Like different sports fields/minor league stadiums with bleachers. A public pool. A "sunken" plaza?

Perhaps the motive was competitive in nature. It was a show dog, after all.

I couldn't care less, this country has had many relations, and friendships, with uglier places. I'm more interested in watching the fireworks in the Republican party, between Rubio who is opposed to lifting the embargo, and others who are more open minded. If the former faction loses, it might be the end to an ugly chapter in American history where dumb politics have been used to justify and maintain hawkish foreign policy, interventions, slimy CIA behavior, etc, by convincing ignorant people that there is a clear distinction between the good guys and bad guys. Next project should be Iran.

You guys have posed a black or white dilemma to a complicated issue. The two choices are not "oil is bad" or "yay oil". Rather we weigh the environment costs of the most damaging forms of extraction with the economic cost of restricting them with policies, and find a balance. Oil sands mining is extraordinarily destructive and very expensive compared to virtually all other types of oil extraction. Also it has bad energy-returned-on-energy-invested value, there is a lot of processing required and the energy it takes to do that must be subtracted from the energy you get from the oil itself. And that means it has a higher break even point. The economic consequences for everyone outside Alberta if tar sands were singled out might be worth the conservation. Besides, the lure of money from this has turned your PM into a shill for big business.

I'll take the bait and respond to the original proposition of the thread, no matter how unpopular what I say will be... The Taliban are certainly the bad guys, but the region is a festering sore whose problems were created long ago by the British. The tribal culture and extremism were promoted for geopolitical reasons, as part of some strategy to keep borders secure without paying to station a large army. In the parts of Pakistan known as the the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA, there is not a normal constitutional form of justice or law. Instead of fair trials, there is collective punishment handed out to entire tribes and the whole system puts power in the hands of "political agents" whose office was created in the colonial period. Until the 90s people there couldn't vote for their own representatives, and the collective punishment even affected children prior to a reform effort. All of this created anger towards the Pakistani government and is fertile ground for corruption and makes it impossible for the area to develop.The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is also an arbitrary boundary splitting an ethnic region in half. Like I said, the Taliban are evil, but things like illiteracy and how easy it is for people there to feel resentful prevents a new generation from rejecting their ideology. and bigger more challenging problems that won't go away overnight with a military crackdown.

I wonder if they'll implode if put under enough pressure. Maybe they'll start a famine on their own.

Isis reminds me of the Khmer Rouge in its evilness but also the complexity of the situation in Cambodia at the time and how it was on the heels of the Vietnam war. Then and now the war would be won over a long period of time by the neighboring states who won't be doing it for the west but for themselves. As for Islamic fundamentalism, their honeymoon period of political correctness is dead now that people see their true nature. Like communists in the 80s, young fundamentalist students in Belgium might find themselves in the trunks if police cars with a bullet in their skull instead of the club meeting they thought that pamphlet was advertising. Bad old days are back. Cold War is back. Oh well.

Makes me think of Sunny D. An orange juice like artificial/blended product with more vitamins it or something, that was popular in the 90s. It never really replaced OJ at the average breakfast table, and I never liked the stuff. But they still make it so people must continue to buy it.

wut I suspect this is meant to be a joke?