LTS

Internal accounting can be an ugly construct. As you indicate, those who paid into the system while in NY and then collect later in life while in Florida are really doing nothing more than getting back the share they paid in (in theory). Whereas those who have lived in Florida all their life are not. Except, what if they are disproportionately spending elsewhere? After all, money ends up in the government pockets in many ways. Analyzing one piece of the pie, or even 4 pieces of the pie is dangerous when there are thousands of pieces and the pie is so big you can't make out what is 5 pieces away from you.

I thought those were to see if you got the high score! So, we're "restructuring" right now. I hate this period. We have these levels of executive approval on processes but during these times they are never available. They don't understand why work slows down. Then they take forever to implement them and basically waste 3-4 weeks worth of work time by either undoing or not responding to the checkpoints they put in place. My major project is in this restructuring.. so at the moment I am also hoping that I am still around after they are done figuring things out. I'm almost assuredly losing the project (being taken from our whole business unit). I have other projects.. but... you never know. Sigh.

To me that reads that RJ is scheduled for the rest of the home games... that's all.

That's cool.. I've been by there. If only I had a boat.. ?

Yeah, and to jam together you need to send far more information across the pipes than a game does. Hell, just trying to do recording on a PC without proper drivers can make it difficult. I spent a good amount of money back in the day I used to use my laptop for many of the VSTs I ran and had to source out the ASIO to an external box just to keep the latency low enough locally.

It's a fair question. So why aren't people asking the news media why they haven't asked the question. I suppose this opinion piece is an attempt to call it out, but it would seem that it might not be too hard to get a few people to rally up and begin asking, openly, for NBC, ABC, CNN to respond to why they have not mentioned it. I don't follow this stuff, but is this a FOX News item? Are the Republican backers out there hamming it up over social media calling out the other media outlets for not discussing it? I have not heard anything about this until you posted it and while I don't really follow the news, I do see an equal number of headlines from what I would consider both conservative and liberal media outlets. So, if the Republicans aren't asking these questions it makes you wonder just how much there is to the accusation. Or, somewhere, the analytics say that bringing that subject up now, while the country is in the middle of the pandemic, would be career suicide.

Impressed? No. Why should you be impressed? People should give what they want and can. If that group gives $100k, then it's $100k more than existed before they gave the money. Instead of being thankful they gave anything, people want to chastise them for not doing enough. Talk about looking that gift horse in the mouth. Next time perhaps they should just keep the money right? If its such a worthless gesture, then why bother. Who needs that extra $100k anyway? Can we also chastise those who don't do enough in life to elevate themselves? Is that acceptable? After all, these players are in the sub 1% of the population who make it (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-hard-is-it-to-make-it_b_5803634). So, they had to work hard to make it that far. Are they required to give it all back? Bottom line, you can blame people for their money and you can blame people for not working hard enough. Neither position wins. So best to just get along. I don't find it advocating for "the privileged" so much as advocating for people getting to live their lives the way they see fit without having to be criticized just because it doesn't conform to someone else's view. I see plenty of people with money who live a lifestyle I don't agree with. I also see plenty of people without money who live a lifestyle I don't agree with.

It wasn't for me. Just... I dunno, not for me. It looks great. I know a lot of friends like it. But I really couldn't get past learning the basic controls before I didn't want to touch the game again. And so it sits on my PS4, consuming disk space, having only been played perhaps for a total of 3 hours, including the online piece. Depends on what kinds of games you like as to what I would recommend. Also, what system are you on? I just played Ori and the Blind Forest (on PC, but it's on Xbox too) and I loved it. I actually completed 100% of it, not just the story but got every power up and hit all of the map. Only game I've ever done that on. I am onto Ori and the Will of the Wisps now. On PS4 I played the ever loving hell out of Horizon Zero Dawn. You can pick that up for super cheap now. It's excellent.

I grew up loving Ted Darling. I had no love for RJ. There was something about his voice on the radio that initially just turned me off. I couldn't deal with it. Then, you rifle through a slew of just absolute PBP hacks.. and they adopt the dual-broadcast... RJ is suddenly my favorite. Now, I can't imagine a game without him and I don't want to. I don't dislike others that have done the job and I am sure, at some point, I will come to grips with RJ not calling games, even with his mistakes these days. But for me, RJ is to PBP and the Sabres to what Anthony Bourdain was to me for travel/culture/food TV. It's in their sincerity and their delivery, it's how real they are. I would rather hear a Sabres game with no announcer, than someone other than RJ at this point. I do have one hope, that when players have something extremely emotional and tangible to play for there tends to be a way to get more out of themselves than usual. I would hope, hope like hell, that whomever is on the roster next season finds a way to dig deep and give RJ a proper season.

I do. and it really depends on the game. I mean, as networking stands, latency is the real enemy of it all. But, let's say I am playing FortNite. It makes a real difference if you get on NA-East servers versus further West. I play with friends from coast to coast, so it varies and inevitably people on either coast due worse when they are on the servers the opposite side of them. Last weekend I was playing at 20ms ping. (insane?). I was far more successful than I was the other night when it was 135ms. It wasn't even worth playing. I can't get my ping in Warzone, but it makes a huge difference there as well. Every game is different and in reality there is far more to the calculation than just latency. This is a really great write up of all the factors that go into things and while it's written for Overwatch the variables remain the same. Now, go read about how Valorant is being set up. Riot Games, over the past few years, has been buying up large 10G-100G waves between major data centers (link is to part two of their vision and creation) to create their own network that is "off the Internet". The concept was to get the gamer to the closest interconnection and then transfer traffic onto a private wavelength that did not compete with other Internet traffic. Essentially building out the "E-SportsNet". Any game, in theory, could be put onto this network.

You have a campground? How did I not know this? Do tell.

It would seem. Person in Monroe County was arrested for not self-quarantining and refusing to be tested despite displaying symptom. They had to convert a suburban precinct into a quarantined holding area and move the inmates there to another facility all because of this person. Insane. Putting deputies and others at risk.

Kinda makes that night at the Flying Dog Cafe in Stockholm seem like a dream dinner? Just remember, you can't fix stupid. Not all of us are lucky enough to have the perspective that this isn't the worst thing ever. For many they've spent their lives tuned out to the fragile nature of the world. They have to process all of this still. It will take time.

It goes further than employment, but you are right. One that you hope sticks when this passes.

A friend showed me that they have an app that brings their wine labels to life. It was pretty cool when they showed me.

I figured that would be the case. Frankly it's why it's okay for video streaming to phones to be a lower resolution as well. The device, despite its amazing screen, still isn't suited for properly displaying the resolution. Similarly, the speakers/headphone cannot handle a full sound resolution. No need to send the frequencies in the extreme ranges if the system converting it to sound can't reproduce those frequencies.

Given what most people listen to Spotify on, do you think it matters? Honestly curious.

I'm not in disagreement with you here. There are all kinds of options and at the moment so many are just options, not actions. Overall the key is to take a deep breath and then let it out slowly.

What's okay? Whose life is more important? To you, your mother-in-law, to the person whose loved one needs treatment, it's their loved one. You are both right and both wrong. There are many possible ways to deal with something like this. None of them are good. There is nothing good about this situation. It's an absolute mess. These are the types of scenarios that you don't plan for because people don't want to hear about it. They are the situations that when you do plan for them and tell people to expect the worst they dismiss it because they refuse to accept that something can have such an impact. "Your problem is not my problem, my problem is more important than yours." We largely live a life where its all about us and people we know and those we don't are irrelevant or at the very least not as important. Let's talk about moving people around so as to reduce the strain and impact on medical professionals. Let's talk about moving people around to distribute the infected cases to reduce strain on supply chain logistics and other related issues that arise when too much of one thing is in one area. Let's tell the tale of two cities here with Woody and North Buffalo who are each in different hospitals with vastly different experiences in patient composition. Does it make sense to subject Woody to patients from New Rochelle? Does it make sense to leave North Buffalo in the middle of an incredibly dense outbreak of the COVID virus and wish him luck? Hell does it make sense to make it worse? In a situation where you have patient A who might need treatment and patient B who does need treatment, who do you choose? The threat indicator would suggest that patient B is in a more pressing situation. All lives being equal, patient B gets treated first and if patient A needs treatment once patient B is consuming the systems resources, then patient A is an unfortunate consequence of circumstance. Let's complicate the discussion. Let's riff of what Woody posted above. Patient A may need treatment. Patient B needs treatment but has a terminal illness already. Do you consume resources working on Patient B at the expense of Patient A? If Patient A needs treatment after B starts do you shift resources to A? After all, Patient B is going to die from another cause even if you can get them to survive COVID. The situations are not as simple as one would like to make it. It's natural to get emotional and say, "My family member is more important." It's natural, but in the objective view of the world, it's not true. Certainly one could go down the slippery slope of comparing the value of a persons life relative to what they create in society. That's not a road I would go down.

Ask him if he wants to try playing goalie... and you need to practice your shooting. ?

Every time these things happen, I think we need to change the Idiocracy counter. Similar to the Doomsday counter, but this one counts down towards us fully realizing Idiocracy.

I can't imagine how this would work. In a system that rewards the crappiest team the best chance to win, how do you run a tournament where those teams are expected to beat the better teams for a chance at what should go to the worst team? Does the better team start with a 2 goal deficit or something? ?

While related, let's fork the discussion of what makes the US great to another discussion and let this be for political discussions about COVID. The discussion on higher education is outstanding but will be lost and confused in here (or the COVID discussion will). What do we think? Now, the stimulus bill should be an interesting topic. Is it right? Is it wrong? Is it too quick a reaction or is the reaction right but the scope of the solution a little too much to try and pull off at once?

I wonder if those who had already qualified will remain qualified and those who are up for qualification will be the only ones allowed to attempt it. Almost as if, you moved 2020 to 2021 in its entirety. No changing out any of the athletes.

This change in work force distribution is expected to lead to a paradigm shift in business. My work is directly related to providing solutions that can enable remote work forces. We are expecting a massive uptick in our sales. Our residential access sales have skyrocketed the past two weeks to levels we've never seen before. We anticipate that businesses will examine the cost of office operations versus the cost of enabling remote workforce with an allowance for operating a smaller meeting/collaboration space and end up settle on the distributed work force model. This should create some serious change in the office space real estate models and subsequently impact businesses that have largely relied upon large pools of office workers keeping them in business (coffee chops, restaurants, office supply stores, etc.)