Shermann
Shermann's JournalIs Zaporizhzhia the first active nuclear power plant to be seized by a hostile military force?
I believe so. These are dangerous times.
I wonder how Russia will keep it operational. You can force captives do manual labor indefinitely, but nuclear engineers running a complex facility? Not so much. They're going to need some freedom and autonomy.
It will be interesting to see how Russia manages this. They could bring in their own people. It was built by the USSR, and they will have knowledge of the reactor design. But time marches on and by now there are surely a lot of custom systems in place requiring tribal knowledge to operate. I'm guessing they will have to make it worth their while. There are seriously bad optics if that plant shuts down.
This is Ukraine's fight
You don't enact a no-fly zone unless you are prepared to enforce it. And you will likely have to enforce it deep in the Eastern Bloc. And if you enforce it, it's WWIII. This isn't advanced chess strategy, it's basic checkers.
We are glorified cheerleaders on this one.
Germany is #1!
Germany's 28-day COVID case count of 4,964,658 just surpassed the US count of 4,793,905 according to JHU. I don't recall a time since the start of the pandemic where the US wasn't #1.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise
I watched this docuseries on Peacock. There's a lot of detail, too much really. There is this previously unaired prison interview with Gacy throughout. There's really only one question to be answered during such an interview: WHY? You aren't going to get that here. Gacy basically flip-flopped from originally confessing to claiming he was largely innocent. He comes out with this huge scrapbook of notes and goes into these pedantic details that the media and the legal system got wrong about him. It's really frustrating to watch as he took zero responsibility. At the end of the day, he wasn't that interesting of a character. What's interesting is how he escaped justice for as long as he did. There were so many clues, and he was very sloppy, but the Chicago police dropped the ball. He's just a despicable figure best forgotten in my opinion.
The MSM may be gaslighting us with the NFL head coaching discrimination story
Hear me out. I don't know what the "right wing talking points" may be on this subject and generally steer clear of those on DU. I'm approaching this from a statistical perspective and not a partisan one, so I'm asking for some leeway.
The headline is basically that 70% of NFL players are African American, but only one coach is. This sounds alarming at first, until you peel the onion a bit. First, I separate these into two statistics starting with the one African American coach. African Americans comprise 14% of the total US population. If this ratio were perfectly reflected in the population of NFL coaches, that would equal 4.5 coaches. Last year, there were 3 coaches. This was very close. Then Flores and Culler were fired, and we're down to 1. These two firings (which have not been demonstrated to be racially motivated) threw off the ratio substantially. However, the pool of 32 coaches is pretty small, so this is not statistically significant.
Then there's the statistic that 70% of players are African American. This is statistically significant considering the population of over 1600 players, and I don't claim to be able to explain it. Regardless, it really isn't the case that most coaches are ex-players who are promoted. There are some examples of that, but that is not the norm. Therefore, I don't see how the 70% statistic bolsters the position that African American coaches are underrepresented. If anything, the strongest case that can be made here is that white players are being underrepresented in the NFL.
CNN is getting ready to suuuuuuuuck
CNN has crossed over into unwatchable territory due to all the commercials in my opinion. I'm not a fan of recording news or sports and really just want to flip those on in real time from time to time. But CNN's advertising is unbelievably repetitive. They have figured out that much of their target audience on CATV/SATV is the 65+ crowd. The younger audience has largely abandoned CATV/SATV for streaming services, a trend that will surely continue. So, today's CNN viewers get hammered mostly with ads for prescription drugs, over the counter remedies, and thinly veiled legal services related to mesothelioma.
Enter CNN+. Launching next Month, this will be CNN's foray into the streaming world. This is a transparent attempt to reach the younger audience. Anderson Cooper and Fareed Zakaria dance around in sport jackets in the teasers promising a more "casual" vibe.
What does all this mean for CNN viewers, young and old?
I believe it means the ads will be EVEN MORE repetitive. The CATV/SATV crowd will be hearing a whole lot more about that goddamn mesothelioma book. FFS, these are already running several times an hour, so have fun with that. They will also be pounded raw with the prescription drug ads. Only the United States and New Zealand allow these types of ads, and the reason why is painfully apparent.
So, what ads will the CNN+ crowd see? Maybe they'll get the Liberty Mutual ads, which is going to suck for them. They will probably see that banner every 5 minutes. Maybe they'll get those shitty CarShield ads too.
Both services will surely feature extensive meta-ads for CNN's own content. This cannibalization of their own advertising time can only be explained by their actual content being stretched so thin as to not fill all the time available. This stretching will surely only get worse as the content is spread across two platforms.
This is really going to suck!
Any Yellowstone fans?
I just finished season 1 and am hooked. It's a role Kevin Costner was born to play.
It's fairly absurd, I see it as Montana's answer to Sons of Anarchy. But it is still pretty good.
The NBC Peacock version is the one to watch. It is 4K and TV-MA instead of the watered down CATV/SATV version.
Weather.com is shitty now! (website review)
I don't think it happened overnight, but the slow and steady slide towards the sewer has reached an indisputably odiferous point.
Weather.com is a shitty website. Let's start with the Hourly page because, well, that's the only page that matters. This page takes as long to load as porn over a dialup modem (or so a friend informs me...) The hourly forecast doesn't fit on the screen because of this massive ad banner that takes up almost 25% of the vertical space. There are two more ads to the left and right. The total webpage is so tall as to be around 10 screen pages. This is mostly ads, about a dozen in total. There's a popup video because, well, why wouldn't you want to watch a video?
The 79 cookies employed by the website probably don't help with performance either.
The first hour of the hourly tabular data is in 15-minute increments, and the rest is 1-hour increments. This creates a kind of discontinuity that is jarring. There is a link to "Go Premium" which will make it all 15-minute data for a price. I wonder if I can pay the upcharge to make it all 1-hour data? Does anybody really need 15-minute forecast data? Weather.com is struggling to find ways to add value here.
If you missed the "Go Premium" link at the top of the data, there's another conveniently placed at the bottom. And there's one on the website navigation bar.
When you hear the Cheers theme, what bar or restaurant do you think of?
This is a rhetorical poll. Stop playing that song, Applebee's. FAIL
Did Trump ever commit to a goal with a significant chance of objective failure?
I'm not even concerned with whether the goal was achieved or not. Were there many committals which met this criterion? This is a good question to ask your conservative friend or family member.
Trump did commit to a free border wall, and this campaign promise objectively failed. I'll grant that one. He learned from this mistake and rarely repeated it. He did commit to balancing the budget, but the timeframes were quickly (and conveniently) pushed out well past his second term once in office.
When it came to infrastructure, there was an acceptance by Trump that this was a national priority. However, all we got was "infrastructure week". This amounted to little more than discussions and arm waving with no measurable milestones. Contrast this with Biden's infrastructure plan. This was significant legislation subjected to a final yea or nay vote (unlike Trump's executive actions).
Trump did not enter anything resembling a formal nuclear arms agreement with Kim Jong-un. He merely asserted that they "fell in love".
When it came to health care, we got a promise from Trump that his "great health plan" would be revealed during his second term. Biden, on the other hand, has included significant improvements to health care in his first-term BBB plan. This has bipartisan opposition and is also subject to a final yea or nay vote.
Trump never committed to ending the pandemic. This was thrust upon him, and his response was largely to downplay the threat. He tried to shorten the yardstick used to measure success by taking anti-science positions. Cases are increasing because of the increase in testing, period. Biden, on the other hand, has never tried to hide from the science. The cases are the cases, the deaths are the deaths.
Anthropomorphic climate change is not a reality of physics in the MAGA-verse. In Biden's real world, the US has rejoined the Paris accord which has quantifiable emissions targets.
Are you seeing a pattern here? In the absence of measurable milestones, a politician can merely assert that they are doing a great job on your behalf. I say demand better.
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Current location: Fort Mill, SC
Member since: Sat Feb 22, 2020, 12:55 PM
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