For a change of pace, how about we talk about the fact that everything the article had to say about the deregulation was quoted in the summary? I actually read through the article to get more details, but none were to be found.
The rest of the article provides some (quite interesting and informative!) graphs and analysis about the current and future state of energy both globally and in the US. Nowhere in the article did they talk about what form the deregulation would take, when it would start, when Trump approved it, or any of the other salient details you'd expect in an article that was ostensibly about coal deregulation.
I have no reason to doubt that Trump is doing exactly as Bloomberg said, but I'd love to see some information about it, rather than the bait-and-switch they pulled with their lede that has nothing at all to do with the rest of the article. Alternatively, Bloomberg could have just shown me the graphs, since they're good in their own right and shouldn't be buried under a lede that has nothing to do with them.
Which is to say, as you see the comments filling up with people arguing about deregulating coal, enjoy a nice laugh at the fact that they're taking sides based on an article that has nothing to do with the topic they're arguing about.
This is a kickback program, no different than Amazon's affiliate program. Sites attach their referrer ID to links, and when someone following a link buys an app, the referring site gets a kickback (taken from Apple's cut) on each sale. This is a standard business practice, and all Apple is doing here is adjusting the strength of the incentives they're providing, presumably because they no longer see as much value coming from referrals. There's nothing abusive about reducing incentives.
Now, this may be a case of Apple shooting itself in the foot, given that these sorts of affiliate programs generally play a role in drumming up business; dropping the incentive from 7% to 2.5% on each sale will result in fewer sites referring people to their store. But considering Apple had neither a legal nor a moral obligation to set up an incentive program at all, it'd take quite the stretch of the imagination to suggest it's some sort of abuse.
If that's a concern, why not just drop any Amazon markings? At that point, the car would be indistinguishable from any other self-driving car on the road. It's possible that self-driving cars in general may become targets, but as another poster has already pointed out, the fact that they're pretty much guaranteed to record the crime in great detail will act as a deterrent for most would-be thieves, I should think.
you gain insight that cannot be quantified or qualified [...] And when it wears off it's back to normal.
Which is a euphemistic way of saying that, whether we're talking subjectively or objectively, you gained absolutely nothing, other than the feeling that you did. An experience that doesn't match up with reality is pretty much the textbook definition of a "delusion", which is exactly what the other AC called the thing you're describing.
As a child, I remember listening to an adult talk about their experience living in a foreign culture for a few years. One of the things this person mentioned was that it was common for the village men to get together, partake of a particular local product, and then "solve the world's problems" while in some sort of altered state. Sadly, the men had yet to devise a method for retaining those solutions after the effects of the product had worn off.
Even as a child, I was keenly aware that what these men were receiving was merely the experience of a revelation, without any of the substance of one, and it left me questioning how anyone could be so silly as to confuse the two, given that one is evidenced by actual change, while the other isn't. Now that I'm an adult, I still ask those same questions every time I hear people suggest that their experience with psychedelics allowed them to do great things that they wouldn't have been capable of otherwise.
I'm fine with the idea that LSD allows people to experience things they wouldn't have otherwise (e.g. an earlier poster talks about the incredibly odd sensation of their brain's hemispheres not acting in a unified manner), but if LSD really was capable of everything that I've heard its users suggest, we'd have already solved world hunger, ended poverty, and abolished war. I'm not exactly holding my breath for the day that LSD leads us to victory in any of those battles.
They also sleep, breathe, eat, and drink fluids about as often as the previous generations did, but you don't see any articles suggesting Millennials breathe an awful lot. Millennials are only flaky inasmuch as they are apparently on par with how flaky previous generations were, yet for some reason the narrative surrounding Millennials is that they are flaky to an extent not seen in previous generations, even though the data doesn't back that up. Why is that?
We like to feel as if we have control of the things surrounding us, and one of the ways that we do that is by putting simple labels on complex subjects in an effort to make sense of them. In many cases, our stereotypes are based on outliers from the group or a bad first impression. Confirmation bias reinforces those stereotypes. Our desire to be right prompts us to ignore evidence to the contrary, particularly when those stereotypes make us feel superior in some way. As if those factors weren't already enough, we then have business models that revolve around pushing salacious narratives, such as clickbait journalism that thrives on pandering to the lowest common denominator in order to generate the most pageviews.
Around and around all of this spins, perpetuating stereotypes that have little or no basis in reality.
Mind you, I'm someone who has been at his current place of employment for over 5 years...despite being labeled as "Gen X", "Gen Y", and "Millennial" since my birth 33 years ago. The fact that they can't even figure out what to label me should tell you that the labels are imprecise at best. And, to say the least, I wouldn't suggest holding your breath for me to begin embracing the "gig economy", feeling entitled to have anything I want with no effort, or burying my face in my phone to the exclusion of the people around me, despite the notion that those are the traits that define everyone in my (currently assigned) generation.
Maybe, just maybe, I'll keep being the person I am, just like most everyone else, regardless of what inaccurate stereotypes others--such as yourself--insist on applying to us.
That's because the headline is some of the worst sensationalistic tabloid journalism level garbage I've ever read. They did not observe "negative mass". They created a system wherein, under specific circumstances, part of the system behaved as if it mathematically had negative mass.
Thanks for the clarification. While they may not have created actual negative mass, it's good to know that they've created something that the public will confuse for the real thing, since if there's one question I love hearing over and over again, it's "When will we have Jetsons-style flying cars and hoverboards?".
I agree. I think I was slightly miffed at the previous poster as well, hence the play-by-play, but I did spend more time on that post than necessary. And I do agree that language is a living thing. I think there's a balance to be had between prescriptivism and descriptivism. As a rule, I err on the side of trying to use things as prescribed, while at the same time trying to practice patience and tolerance towards those whose notion of language is a bit more...fluid.
Sorry, I'm not up to date on every meme. I'm guessing you're trying to be clever by referencing something that happened somewhere on the Internet?
As for Reddit, I've never had an account there. About the only time I visit is when friends or search engines link me there. With all the political stuff it seems like they're embroiled in, not to mention their nonsensical moderation system, I've never had an interest in participating. Honestly, Slashdot is the only place with comments that I participate on a regular basis at this point.
That's true, but whenever I learn something like this, regardless of whether it was in response to a troll or not, I like to both correct myself and share that correction/education with the others here, if only so that anyone else making the same error can learn from my mistake.
Ehh, no system is perfect. I'll admit that there are exceptions, but I was speaking about these sites on the whole. Plus, I'm not convinced that one was about bribes, so much as it was about people wanting to be convinced that Disney and Abrams had managed to right the sinking ship that they loved. In that regard, Disney and Abrams did succeed by producing a decent movie. It was by no means a great film, nor worthy of all of the high scores it received, but it was sufficient to tell everyone that Star Wars was back, which was exactly the purpose it needed to fulfill.
For example, the 2014 film Lucy received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes
I wouldn't consider its 67% critic score and 47% audience score "overwhelmingly positive". Quite the opposite, in fact, since those scores tell me is that the film was divisive among critics and was not altogether that well received among general audiences. And both of those make sense, given that Luc Besson's films tend to have decent technical chops (e.g. tight action, decent cinematography) but have for some time been sorely lacking in areas that are really important, especially to general audiences (e.g. pacing, story, characters you actually enjoy).
To me, it's felt like he's been going downhill ever since Leon (1994), though others may suggest The Fifth Element (1997) was his peak. Either way, he's been in decline for quite some time, and I agree with you that Lucy (2014) didn't do him any favors.
Let me provide a play-by-play reaction to your post...
You obviously don't know what the phrase "begging the question" means
Crap, did I accidentally use it other than how I intended?
*goes back to check*
No, I used it exactly as I intended to. Is it possible I've been misusing it this entire time without knowing any better?
*pulls up a DuckDuckGo search in another window while reading the rest of your comment*
and aren't willing to find out
Well, that's a rude and baseless assertion that isn't supported by any evidence. I certainly wasn't willfully misusing it, and I'm not aware of having received correction from someone in the past. That said, I don't get notified when ACs respond to me, so it's certainly possible that you or someone else has been screaming at me about it for years without my awareness. I should still check whether I used it correctly, or maybe he'll tell me how I misused it if I just read a bit further.
so really the best thing for you to do is just stop using it instead of abusing it.
...seriously? Rather than provide a helpful bit of education or correction, you're simply telling me I'm wrong and should stop? Give me some credit. This is Slashdot. Many of us are open to receiving correction when we're wrong. Some of us even enjoy being told why we're wrong, simply because the quickest way to ensure we're right is to learn from our past mistakes.
For anyone curious: I abused the term. While the way I used it (i.e. to mean "inviting the question") is well understood in everyday usage, it's incorrect in much the same way that "I could care less" is almost always the opposite of what the speaker actually intended, yet will still be understood by most listeners. Particularly in legal and logical contexts, "begging the question" strictly refers to a form of circular reasoning. For instance, "reasonable people think and reason intelligently" begs the question "what does it mean to think and reason?", which leaves you right back where you started.
I really should have been aware of that already, but clearly I've incorporated the incorrect usage into my own speech. I'll try to do better going forward, so thank you, AC, for your correction, though it may have been mean spirited.
I was going to suggest that the alternative title could be "Someone Didn't Get The Memo: IMDb Scores Are Still Useless".
A few years back, I used an extension to display IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores in Netflix's web UI, thinking they'd help me cut through the chaff and find the films I was most interested in. It became apparent almost immediately that while the Rotten Tomatoes scores were good and the Metacritic scores were occasionally decent, the IMDb scores were nothing more than useless noise, given that they were so far out of sync both with what the other sites are reporting, as well as what my own experiences would suggest reasonable scores should be for the films I had seen. And really, none of this should come as a surprise, given that IMDb is a wiki platform with poor policing, meaning that the scores have become a battleground for various forms of e-peen measuring contests.
So far as I'm concerned, Rotten Tomatoes has for years done a far better job, particularly with their distinction between critic and audience scores, which makes it much easier to understand what to expect from a movie: - High critic score/high audience score = probably the best thing I'll see all year - High critic score/low audience score = a thought-provoking film that likely won't entertain - Low critic score/high audience score = mindless, "junk food" entertainment - Low critic score/low audience score = a trash film that's only thought-provoking inasmuch as it begs the question: why was this film was made?
In contrast, IMDb scores give me no useful information. They don't tell me what to expect, whether I'll like the film, or even if it's a good film. They're just noise.
Came here just to say this. After seeing it mentioned in the xkcd: Movie Narrative Charts several years ago, I thought it seemed out of place sitting next to the rest of those films, so I wanted to see what had warranted its inclusion.
When it finally showed up on Netflix a few years later, it blew me away.
It's the only movie that I have ever finished and then immediately rewatched. It's the only one that I even wanted to immediately rewatch, since normally I either want a break or want to let things percolate. But with Primer? Not so much. Every time I felt like I had a grasp on it, something would happen that would show me otherwise, but never in a frustrating way. After multiple viewings it holds up beautifully, with each viewing revealing just a bit more about how the world of the movie works and how the characters interact with each other. And with it being so short, it never overstays its welcome.
Well worth watching. And I believe it was even re-added to Netflix just a few months ago...
and Apple's...) product - it responds to voices from people it doesn't know,
Not so. When it comes to "Hey Siri" voice activation, you have to train Siri to recognize your voice. It's not perfect by any means, but it does make an effort to not respond to others trying to pull these sorts of stunts.
Suddenly Uncle Sam owed me $2000. Property taxes are negligible given the system that's skewed in favor of home owners who take a massive benefit from the general population's tax contributions.
You seem to be unaware that the $2000 Uncle Sam owed you was a refund for overpayment. As such, it came from your contributions, not the general population's.
It's likely that you failed to adjust your W2 withholding (which you should review on an annual basis), resulting in you overpaying towards your income tax. As such, you effectively gave Uncle Sam an interest-free loan for $2000. When you filed your taxes, you told him that you accidentally gave him too much, so he settled your account by refunding your overpayment, minus any interest he earned in the meantime. The $2000 has always been your money, even when it was in his custody. When he gave it back, it was from the money you overpaid him, not from the general population's tax contributions.
At the end of the day, you're still net negative. You still paid into the system via your income tax withholdings and you certainly didn't get a refund for more than you put in. The only way you'd be net positive would be if you were actually receiving money from other people's contributions, but that only happens if you're on some form of welfare, which is definitely not the same thing as a tax refund.
(Aside: I'm simply pointing out that taxes don't quite work the way that you suggested; I am not making any sort of statement regarding how taxes should work, nor am I offering opinions about welfare, income inequality, or even whether withholding too much is a good or bad thing)
As others pointed out, $1350 is the maximum, not the minimum, so I won't beat that dead horse. What no one else has commented on yet, however, is that you also got the next thing you said wrong: if you've been involuntarily denied boarding, you're (typically) not in the right by refusing to give up your seat.
In a normal case of someone being told they are being involuntarily denied boarding, the airline is required by law to immediately provide a document explaining the passenger's rights in plain language. That document makes it clear that regardless of whatever offers they had made up to that point, the passenger would still receive the amount required by law. As such, it makes no sense to try and hold out for more, given that no more would be coming. You'd already be getting the full amount the law provides.
That said, this was anything but a typical denial of boarding, given that boarding had already occurred, making it impossible for them to deny boarding at that point. As a result, his refusal actually does make sense, not because their offer was too low as you said, but rather because they were demanding something from him that they had no authority to demand.
Exactly. Once the passengers are boarded, you can't deny them boarding (which is what the airline is authorized to do when they're overbooked), so the aviation security officers had no business being on that plane unless a passenger was posing a security risk. The airline is trying to suggest that the passenger became belligerent when asked to give up his seat, hence why security became involved, but reports from other passengers seem to indicate that other than refusing to deplane, everything was civil until the officers started shouting at him to get off the plane.
If the reason for removing him was because he was belligerent, but the reason he was belligerent was because they were trying to remove him, they have no leg to stand on, in much the same way that you can't (legally) arrest someone for resisting arrest. It's no surprise, then, that the department is throwing the officers under the bus, with at least one already being placed on leave pending an investigation, and the department making it clear that the officers acted contrary to standard operating procedures.
What other industry is allowed to sell commodities twice? Usually that is considered fraud....
ISPs who oversell? Or, even worse, ISPs (to grab a random one from a hat, let's say Comcast) who accept payment from subscribers in exchange for delivering the packets their customers request at the fastest available speed, and then also charge another company (again, grabbing a random company from a hat, let's go with Netflix) a fee before they actually deliver the packets their customers request at the fastest available speed.
There is nothing to stop an airline paying more compensation. Take this case:
Your link disproves your point. At no point did Delta ever offer or provide more than the amount required by law. When the family asked for $1500/seat to voluntarily give up their three seats, the airline countered $1350 apiece (the maximum amount required by law), and the family took the offer. Had the family stuck to $1500, it's likely that Delta would have simply denied boarding to other passengers, since it would have saved them $150 per seat.
The reason the family got $11,000 in total is because they repeated the whole process three days in a row (accepting $1350, $1300, and $1000 per seat, respectively), and then finally just got refunds for their tickets. None of that went beyond what the airline was already required to provide. In fact, had the family allowed themselves to be involuntarily denied boarding, it's possible that they would have made even more money, since they would have been entitled to the full $1350/seat each time, rather than the lower offers that they voluntarily accepted.
Slashdot Mirror
For a change of pace, how about we talk about the fact that everything the article had to say about the deregulation was quoted in the summary? I actually read through the article to get more details, but none were to be found.
The rest of the article provides some (quite interesting and informative!) graphs and analysis about the current and future state of energy both globally and in the US. Nowhere in the article did they talk about what form the deregulation would take, when it would start, when Trump approved it, or any of the other salient details you'd expect in an article that was ostensibly about coal deregulation.
I have no reason to doubt that Trump is doing exactly as Bloomberg said, but I'd love to see some information about it, rather than the bait-and-switch they pulled with their lede that has nothing at all to do with the rest of the article. Alternatively, Bloomberg could have just shown me the graphs, since they're good in their own right and shouldn't be buried under a lede that has nothing to do with them.
Which is to say, as you see the comments filling up with people arguing about deregulating coal, enjoy a nice laugh at the fact that they're taking sides based on an article that has nothing to do with the topic they're arguing about.
Abuse? How do you figure?
This is a kickback program, no different than Amazon's affiliate program. Sites attach their referrer ID to links, and when someone following a link buys an app, the referring site gets a kickback (taken from Apple's cut) on each sale. This is a standard business practice, and all Apple is doing here is adjusting the strength of the incentives they're providing, presumably because they no longer see as much value coming from referrals. There's nothing abusive about reducing incentives.
Now, this may be a case of Apple shooting itself in the foot, given that these sorts of affiliate programs generally play a role in drumming up business; dropping the incentive from 7% to 2.5% on each sale will result in fewer sites referring people to their store. But considering Apple had neither a legal nor a moral obligation to set up an incentive program at all, it'd take quite the stretch of the imagination to suggest it's some sort of abuse.
You make a compelling point. I suppose I forget just how stupid people really can be.
If that's a concern, why not just drop any Amazon markings? At that point, the car would be indistinguishable from any other self-driving car on the road. It's possible that self-driving cars in general may become targets, but as another poster has already pointed out, the fact that they're pretty much guaranteed to record the crime in great detail will act as a deterrent for most would-be thieves, I should think.
you gain insight that cannot be quantified or qualified [...] And when it wears off it's back to normal.
Which is a euphemistic way of saying that, whether we're talking subjectively or objectively, you gained absolutely nothing, other than the feeling that you did. An experience that doesn't match up with reality is pretty much the textbook definition of a "delusion", which is exactly what the other AC called the thing you're describing.
As a child, I remember listening to an adult talk about their experience living in a foreign culture for a few years. One of the things this person mentioned was that it was common for the village men to get together, partake of a particular local product, and then "solve the world's problems" while in some sort of altered state. Sadly, the men had yet to devise a method for retaining those solutions after the effects of the product had worn off.
Even as a child, I was keenly aware that what these men were receiving was merely the experience of a revelation, without any of the substance of one, and it left me questioning how anyone could be so silly as to confuse the two, given that one is evidenced by actual change, while the other isn't. Now that I'm an adult, I still ask those same questions every time I hear people suggest that their experience with psychedelics allowed them to do great things that they wouldn't have been capable of otherwise.
I'm fine with the idea that LSD allows people to experience things they wouldn't have otherwise (e.g. an earlier poster talks about the incredibly odd sensation of their brain's hemispheres not acting in a unified manner), but if LSD really was capable of everything that I've heard its users suggest, we'd have already solved world hunger, ended poverty, and abolished war. I'm not exactly holding my breath for the day that LSD leads us to victory in any of those battles.
They also sleep, breathe, eat, and drink fluids about as often as the previous generations did, but you don't see any articles suggesting Millennials breathe an awful lot. Millennials are only flaky inasmuch as they are apparently on par with how flaky previous generations were, yet for some reason the narrative surrounding Millennials is that they are flaky to an extent not seen in previous generations, even though the data doesn't back that up. Why is that?
We like to feel as if we have control of the things surrounding us, and one of the ways that we do that is by putting simple labels on complex subjects in an effort to make sense of them. In many cases, our stereotypes are based on outliers from the group or a bad first impression. Confirmation bias reinforces those stereotypes. Our desire to be right prompts us to ignore evidence to the contrary, particularly when those stereotypes make us feel superior in some way. As if those factors weren't already enough, we then have business models that revolve around pushing salacious narratives, such as clickbait journalism that thrives on pandering to the lowest common denominator in order to generate the most pageviews.
Around and around all of this spins, perpetuating stereotypes that have little or no basis in reality.
Mind you, I'm someone who has been at his current place of employment for over 5 years...despite being labeled as "Gen X", "Gen Y", and "Millennial" since my birth 33 years ago. The fact that they can't even figure out what to label me should tell you that the labels are imprecise at best. And, to say the least, I wouldn't suggest holding your breath for me to begin embracing the "gig economy", feeling entitled to have anything I want with no effort, or burying my face in my phone to the exclusion of the people around me, despite the notion that those are the traits that define everyone in my (currently assigned) generation.
Maybe, just maybe, I'll keep being the person I am, just like most everyone else, regardless of what inaccurate stereotypes others--such as yourself--insist on applying to us.
That's because the headline is some of the worst sensationalistic tabloid journalism level garbage I've ever read. They did not observe "negative mass". They created a system wherein, under specific circumstances, part of the system behaved as if it mathematically had negative mass.
Thanks for the clarification. While they may not have created actual negative mass, it's good to know that they've created something that the public will confuse for the real thing, since if there's one question I love hearing over and over again, it's "When will we have Jetsons-style flying cars and hoverboards?".
there is
There are
at least 40 definitions for the word free
"free"
in the dictionary,
dictionary.
its
It's
no one elses
else's
fault or problem you
that you
are to
too
fucking stupid to remember more than one
one.
Sorry, why were you saying he was stupid? I was a bit distracted.
I agree. I think I was slightly miffed at the previous poster as well, hence the play-by-play, but I did spend more time on that post than necessary. And I do agree that language is a living thing. I think there's a balance to be had between prescriptivism and descriptivism. As a rule, I err on the side of trying to use things as prescribed, while at the same time trying to practice patience and tolerance towards those whose notion of language is a bit more...fluid.
Sorry, I'm not up to date on every meme. I'm guessing you're trying to be clever by referencing something that happened somewhere on the Internet?
As for Reddit, I've never had an account there. About the only time I visit is when friends or search engines link me there. With all the political stuff it seems like they're embroiled in, not to mention their nonsensical moderation system, I've never had an interest in participating. Honestly, Slashdot is the only place with comments that I participate on a regular basis at this point.
That's true, but whenever I learn something like this, regardless of whether it was in response to a troll or not, I like to both correct myself and share that correction/education with the others here, if only so that anyone else making the same error can learn from my mistake.
Ehh, no system is perfect. I'll admit that there are exceptions, but I was speaking about these sites on the whole. Plus, I'm not convinced that one was about bribes, so much as it was about people wanting to be convinced that Disney and Abrams had managed to right the sinking ship that they loved. In that regard, Disney and Abrams did succeed by producing a decent movie. It was by no means a great film, nor worthy of all of the high scores it received, but it was sufficient to tell everyone that Star Wars was back, which was exactly the purpose it needed to fulfill.
For example, the 2014 film Lucy received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes
I wouldn't consider its 67% critic score and 47% audience score "overwhelmingly positive". Quite the opposite, in fact, since those scores tell me is that the film was divisive among critics and was not altogether that well received among general audiences. And both of those make sense, given that Luc Besson's films tend to have decent technical chops (e.g. tight action, decent cinematography) but have for some time been sorely lacking in areas that are really important, especially to general audiences (e.g. pacing, story, characters you actually enjoy).
To me, it's felt like he's been going downhill ever since Leon (1994), though others may suggest The Fifth Element (1997) was his peak. Either way, he's been in decline for quite some time, and I agree with you that Lucy (2014) didn't do him any favors.
Let me provide a play-by-play reaction to your post...
You obviously don't know what the phrase "begging the question" means
Crap, did I accidentally use it other than how I intended?
*goes back to check*
No, I used it exactly as I intended to. Is it possible I've been misusing it this entire time without knowing any better?
*pulls up a DuckDuckGo search in another window while reading the rest of your comment*
and aren't willing to find out
Well, that's a rude and baseless assertion that isn't supported by any evidence. I certainly wasn't willfully misusing it, and I'm not aware of having received correction from someone in the past. That said, I don't get notified when ACs respond to me, so it's certainly possible that you or someone else has been screaming at me about it for years without my awareness. I should still check whether I used it correctly, or maybe he'll tell me how I misused it if I just read a bit further.
so really the best thing for you to do is just stop using it instead of abusing it.
...seriously? Rather than provide a helpful bit of education or correction, you're simply telling me I'm wrong and should stop? Give me some credit. This is Slashdot. Many of us are open to receiving correction when we're wrong. Some of us even enjoy being told why we're wrong, simply because the quickest way to ensure we're right is to learn from our past mistakes.
For anyone curious: I abused the term. While the way I used it (i.e. to mean "inviting the question") is well understood in everyday usage, it's incorrect in much the same way that "I could care less" is almost always the opposite of what the speaker actually intended, yet will still be understood by most listeners. Particularly in legal and logical contexts, "begging the question" strictly refers to a form of circular reasoning. For instance, "reasonable people think and reason intelligently" begs the question "what does it mean to think and reason?", which leaves you right back where you started.
I really should have been aware of that already, but clearly I've incorporated the incorrect usage into my own speech. I'll try to do better going forward, so thank you, AC, for your correction, though it may have been mean spirited.
I was going to suggest that the alternative title could be "Someone Didn't Get The Memo: IMDb Scores Are Still Useless".
A few years back, I used an extension to display IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores in Netflix's web UI, thinking they'd help me cut through the chaff and find the films I was most interested in. It became apparent almost immediately that while the Rotten Tomatoes scores were good and the Metacritic scores were occasionally decent, the IMDb scores were nothing more than useless noise, given that they were so far out of sync both with what the other sites are reporting, as well as what my own experiences would suggest reasonable scores should be for the films I had seen. And really, none of this should come as a surprise, given that IMDb is a wiki platform with poor policing, meaning that the scores have become a battleground for various forms of e-peen measuring contests.
So far as I'm concerned, Rotten Tomatoes has for years done a far better job, particularly with their distinction between critic and audience scores, which makes it much easier to understand what to expect from a movie:
- High critic score/high audience score = probably the best thing I'll see all year
- High critic score/low audience score = a thought-provoking film that likely won't entertain
- Low critic score/high audience score = mindless, "junk food" entertainment
- Low critic score/low audience score = a trash film that's only thought-provoking inasmuch as it begs the question: why was this film was made?
In contrast, IMDb scores give me no useful information. They don't tell me what to expect, whether I'll like the film, or even if it's a good film. They're just noise.
Came here just to say this. After seeing it mentioned in the xkcd: Movie Narrative Charts several years ago, I thought it seemed out of place sitting next to the rest of those films, so I wanted to see what had warranted its inclusion.
When it finally showed up on Netflix a few years later, it blew me away.
It's the only movie that I have ever finished and then immediately rewatched. It's the only one that I even wanted to immediately rewatch, since normally I either want a break or want to let things percolate. But with Primer? Not so much. Every time I felt like I had a grasp on it, something would happen that would show me otherwise, but never in a frustrating way. After multiple viewings it holds up beautifully, with each viewing revealing just a bit more about how the world of the movie works and how the characters interact with each other. And with it being so short, it never overstays its welcome.
Well worth watching. And I believe it was even re-added to Netflix just a few months ago...
Mac Classic was my first as well, followed by a Performa 400, if I recall correctly.
and Apple's...) product - it responds to voices from people it doesn't know,
Not so. When it comes to "Hey Siri" voice activation, you have to train Siri to recognize your voice. It's not perfect by any means, but it does make an effort to not respond to others trying to pull these sorts of stunts.
Mod parent up.
Suddenly Uncle Sam owed me $2000. Property taxes are negligible given the system that's skewed in favor of home owners who take a massive benefit from the general population's tax contributions.
You seem to be unaware that the $2000 Uncle Sam owed you was a refund for overpayment. As such, it came from your contributions, not the general population's.
It's likely that you failed to adjust your W2 withholding (which you should review on an annual basis), resulting in you overpaying towards your income tax. As such, you effectively gave Uncle Sam an interest-free loan for $2000. When you filed your taxes, you told him that you accidentally gave him too much, so he settled your account by refunding your overpayment, minus any interest he earned in the meantime. The $2000 has always been your money, even when it was in his custody. When he gave it back, it was from the money you overpaid him, not from the general population's tax contributions.
At the end of the day, you're still net negative. You still paid into the system via your income tax withholdings and you certainly didn't get a refund for more than you put in. The only way you'd be net positive would be if you were actually receiving money from other people's contributions, but that only happens if you're on some form of welfare, which is definitely not the same thing as a tax refund.
(Aside: I'm simply pointing out that taxes don't quite work the way that you suggested; I am not making any sort of statement regarding how taxes should work, nor am I offering opinions about welfare, income inequality, or even whether withholding too much is a good or bad thing)
As others pointed out, $1350 is the maximum, not the minimum, so I won't beat that dead horse. What no one else has commented on yet, however, is that you also got the next thing you said wrong: if you've been involuntarily denied boarding, you're (typically) not in the right by refusing to give up your seat.
In a normal case of someone being told they are being involuntarily denied boarding, the airline is required by law to immediately provide a document explaining the passenger's rights in plain language. That document makes it clear that regardless of whatever offers they had made up to that point, the passenger would still receive the amount required by law. As such, it makes no sense to try and hold out for more, given that no more would be coming. You'd already be getting the full amount the law provides.
That said, this was anything but a typical denial of boarding, given that boarding had already occurred, making it impossible for them to deny boarding at that point. As a result, his refusal actually does make sense, not because their offer was too low as you said, but rather because they were demanding something from him that they had no authority to demand.
Exactly. Once the passengers are boarded, you can't deny them boarding (which is what the airline is authorized to do when they're overbooked), so the aviation security officers had no business being on that plane unless a passenger was posing a security risk. The airline is trying to suggest that the passenger became belligerent when asked to give up his seat, hence why security became involved, but reports from other passengers seem to indicate that other than refusing to deplane, everything was civil until the officers started shouting at him to get off the plane.
If the reason for removing him was because he was belligerent, but the reason he was belligerent was because they were trying to remove him, they have no leg to stand on, in much the same way that you can't (legally) arrest someone for resisting arrest. It's no surprise, then, that the department is throwing the officers under the bus, with at least one already being placed on leave pending an investigation, and the department making it clear that the officers acted contrary to standard operating procedures.
What other industry is allowed to sell commodities twice? Usually that is considered fraud....
ISPs who oversell? Or, even worse, ISPs (to grab a random one from a hat, let's say Comcast) who accept payment from subscribers in exchange for delivering the packets their customers request at the fastest available speed, and then also charge another company (again, grabbing a random company from a hat, let's go with Netflix) a fee before they actually deliver the packets their customers request at the fastest available speed.
There is nothing to stop an airline paying more compensation. Take this case:
Your link disproves your point. At no point did Delta ever offer or provide more than the amount required by law. When the family asked for $1500/seat to voluntarily give up their three seats, the airline countered $1350 apiece (the maximum amount required by law), and the family took the offer. Had the family stuck to $1500, it's likely that Delta would have simply denied boarding to other passengers, since it would have saved them $150 per seat.
The reason the family got $11,000 in total is because they repeated the whole process three days in a row (accepting $1350, $1300, and $1000 per seat, respectively), and then finally just got refunds for their tickets. None of that went beyond what the airline was already required to provide. In fact, had the family allowed themselves to be involuntarily denied boarding, it's possible that they would have made even more money, since they would have been entitled to the full $1350/seat each time, rather than the lower offers that they voluntarily accepted.