Balta1701

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 06:57 PM) The whole ambiguity thing in movies/TV is getting out of hand. No, not everything needs to be spelled out, but there ought to be an effort to provide enough plot or dialogue so that an intelligent fan can draw a logical conclusion. Lost was just a series of random events designed so that it got people interested, but the writers didn't have a complete story in their heads and predictably couldn't provide explanations for a ton of things. As a counterpoint, I'll say the Sopranos. We didn't see Tony die, but given all of the events/hints/common sense, it is possible to logically draw that conclusion. Maybe we should all follow that example and cut to black just before the end of every.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 06:53 PM) The current laws are really bad. I'd like to add, I really strongly disagree with this.

Seemingly due to the Republican campaign against Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen for the cure foundation has decided to stop funding breast cancer screenings through that organization. This will, of course, likely further curtail those variety of screenings, particularly in groups that are poor/not otherwise served by our health care for the wealthy system.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 06:20 PM) I dont think you can change the law for guys or girls. That being said, age of consent is usually a state law and different states have drastically different laws. I personally think that the law easily could be changed to avoid such a nonsensical situation. If the "victim" states there was consent, then there is no crime. If the "victim" is silent on consent or says there was no consent, then you can move forward on the case. The fact is, people have been convicted when the "victim" absolutely consented and even at trial testifies that they wanted it to happen. That situation is just stupid. The problem is, in almost every version of these cases, the "Victim" (as you use quotes) would say that there was consent. If a 12 year old had sexual relations with a teacher, that 12 year old would probably say that there was consent, unless it was obviously by force...but the real issue is that society has judged, correctly, that under a certain age and in particular in certain situations where 1 side has inordinate power over another, the adolescent doesn't have the mental capacity to give that consent. We make that determination all the time, whether it is charging people for crimes or a 21 year old drinking age. The logic is the same. In the case of a 12 year old, the logic is obvious, the 12 year old cannot give consent. Ohio society has judged that the dividing line is 16, or 18 in the case of a clear superior with undue influence, and that certainly seems a reasonable standard to me.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 06:13 PM) I think Gingrich stays in at least through Super Tuesday, unless he truly runs out of money. If he's getting lambasted by then, at that point, it is a math question. Does Romney look like he will get enough delegates for a true majority? If not, and if Gingrich/Paul Santorum can together get better than 50%, it will get very interesting. With polling the way it currently is, no. He'd need a serious boost to be able to get a majority from where he's polling nationally, even if Gingrich erodes a little.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 06:18 PM) I assume you will now next say that since it was caught it doesn't' matter, or some such drivel. Clearly, the solution is Voter ID laws. Oh wait, it's another case of absentee ballots, which would have not been caught by any Voter ID law out there. Oops, forgot. Again. If anyone actually cared one iota about preventing voter fraud, eliminating mail in/absentee ballots would be number 1 on the list. But then, that doesn't explicitly prevent Democrats from voting.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 05:46 PM) Why? Don't have enough money for coaches or for teams to actually give people who want to participate an option of actually doing so? Cutting events back to save money on travel time? That's just sad.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 05:37 PM) Budgets are a concern. The uniforms were shared and we couldn't always get appropriate games for them. Our athletic coordinator "took one for the team (coaches)" and coached them himself, saving the school a coaches stipend. They only had one referee working their games. To save on travel time, they also played a shorter game. We do budget for football A and B teams and boys basketball A, B, and C teams. Girls volleyball also has a C team, but IIRC basketball stopped at a B team. Track is a zoo. The city and state's taxpayers should be embarrassed by what you just wrote.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 05:32 PM) Why do I feel like you are yelling at me while agreeing with me? I am agreeing with you, just pointing out how key the 1998 El Nino is to all of this. That's really the monster that stands out on every plot.

QUOTE (ChiSox_Sonix @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 05:11 PM) He's specifically said he'd rather not A lot of people have said that, but they threw enough money around to overcome that in the case of Reyes and Buehrle.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 05:09 PM) They need to do away with that nonsense. If I'm 16/17 and I have a chance to ream something that looks like that, it's on. Shouldn't be a crime at all. Frankly, I don't know about the 16 part, but having it be stricter where the more senior person is in a position of authority over the younger person makes a ton of sense to me.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 05:06 PM) Isn't 17 legal now? This hot piece of ass did nothing wrong. In Ohio, the age of consent is 16 unless the other person is a teacher/parent/administrator/coach/something like that with the person, in which case the age of consent is 18.

Robocall currently running in Florida.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 03:36 PM) That was simply me impersonating greg. No, that quote was much more Marty.

I promise to care exactly as much about that as I do about Obama's bowling form. Meaning, I'll get really annoyed that the press talks about incredibly stupid things ad nauseum.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 03:08 PM) Oh I do, for the most part. The idea that, if you focus on an 8 year period, the temps seem to have leveled, while a true fact, is obviously and grossly missing the big picture. Probably on purpose. Plus, even if they are right, and temps stay level for a while - we are still far higher than we were decades or centuries ago. Really, that's not even true on an 8 year period. The real trick is the ungodly, ridiculous, totally unprecedented 1998 El Nino year. There's a reason why they always start any "There hasnt' been any warming in x number of years" in 1998, if you start in 99 there's a clear trend, if you start in 05 you've got like 4 years and the warmest was 2010 and that's stupid anyway because of the el nino cycle. The real trick is that 1998 el nino, where they can say that there hasn't been any warming in x number of years, because the warming during that single year was so completely unprecedented thanks to the strength of that el nino.

Indians pick up Russ Canzler, who will probably wind up their opening day 1b.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 02:09 PM) Gonna be a nice little race between Rubio/Irving for ROY. Haven't had one of those in a while. Don't call that one too early. I believe Wall got off to a pretty solid start last year but his numbers backtracked some while Griffin got better. Brandon Jennings was scoring 22 a game in November 09 and finished the season scoring 15.5.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 01:35 PM) You are missing the point here, by thinking this is not true. I know it has been studied, deeply and often. And as I said, I am fairly convinced. However, when you are talking about the relationship between human behaviors and climate, you cannot possibly say anything with 10o% certainty, or even 99%. There are far, far too many dynamics and variables involved. That is why, as I said, the question of antrhopogenic climate change remains debateable, while the more pure question of "is it getting warmer" is not. Ok, in that comparison, I'm going to apply more data to prove that "whether the earth is getting warmer" has been debateable, because that has been. The best example I can give you of that is the "Berkeley Earth Surface Team", the oil-company-funded group that was made up of UC Berkeley math and physics profs who spent years saying that the earth wasn't really getting warmer, the temperature signals were just being dominated by the effects of sampling locations, underrepresentation of areas that had gotten colder, and the urban heat island effect. That study began releasing its results last october, and once again they were in line with everything else. Give you another one, this one I believe is in Science this week. There's been an issue with temperature reconstructions, in that it seems like there is less energy escaping from the atmosphere than there should be given the current warming levels and the current oceanic heat content estimates. This of course would be a problem...how to say what the temperature change has been when you can't figure out where the heat is going. The study this week in Science argues pretty convincingly that the issue is just the margin of errors on the measurements, and we're simply slightly under-counting the amount of heat going into the ocean. Heck, a good 3rd one is that study by Roy Spencer in Alabama featured here last year, where that one prof argued based on cherry-picked satellite data that there really was no warming signal at all, that people were just mistreating the clouds. There is an enormous amount of money still being spent to establish that, no matter how warm it is outside, the Earth itself isn't warming. The 3 levels of denial are all still getting focus; the earth isn't warming, the warming isn't CO2, and the warming is CO2 but there's nothing we can do about it. If you're going to call the question of whether CO2 is the dominant forcing or not still up in the air, then the question of whether or not the Earth is warming is still up in the air. Really, the right answer is that the evidence that anthropogenic CO2 is the single dominant forcing over the last several hundred years is just as overwhelming as the evidence that the Earth has warmed over that time. The data quality arguing against either of those statements is incredibly poor. If you're putting so much emphasis on whether CO2 has been 85% of the warming or 120% of the warming, then you need to put the same emphasis on whether or not the current warming is 0.7°C or 1.0°C, because any answer other than those are well outside of the current margin of error.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 01:08 PM) But the question of how much (or even if) that warming is caused by humanity, cannot be considered open and shut. Really, I don't think this is true. That is a question that has been investigated just as heavily as any of the others, because there's enormous amounts of funding for anyone who can come up with a plausible mechanism other than CO2, and CO2 is the only one that really works. Furthermore, it's also the only one that really works at all throughout geologic time, and our correlations in that area have gotten better and better, to the point where there is virtually no obvious recorded temperature anomaly in the geologic record that is not associated with a large fluctuation of CO2 and nothing else. It really is the driver, and it's driving things right now. The IPCC report has once again been abundantly cautious on this issue and said that, in their words "since 1750, it is extremely likely that humans have exerted a substantial warming influence on climate. This RF estimate is likely to be at least five times greater than that due to solar irradiance changes." Really, what they'll say when they're not making a document for policymakers is even stronger than that, there is effectively nothing that would drive the warming since 1750, and it's highly likely that humanity has been a dominant influence on the climate for at least 7000 years. Their number is that CO2 and greenhouse forcing is the strongest influence by a factor of 5, as noted there, and that is almost certainly a conservative number.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 12:27 PM)

QUOTE (fathom @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 10:20 AM) So what happened on Alcatraz relating to the overall story? I lost interest in the weekly manhunt aspect of the show.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 10:01 AM) My wife posed an interesting question to me last night about Alcatraz: how do they always get called to the scene of these crimes when Garcia's character, and maybe Neal's character, are the only ones that know of the prisoner's quirks? These episodes it has sorta worked. In the child abductor episode, The Prof. was listening to a police scanner and recognized the pattern. In the sniper episode, a sniper in a major city is going to go out to everyone, so that's an easy one to respond to. I believe last night was again the professor recognizing a pattern based on a police report of a guy having robbed 2 banks but only stealing items from a safety deposit box. The first one, IIRC, had his first victim being a guy who had worked at Alcatraz and harassed that particular prisoner to the point of wanting revenge 30 years later. It could strain reality but so far these episodes have all had reasonably sensible explanations, especially if you give them a "guy who is obsessed with Alcatraz and criminals with very unique M.O."

QUOTE (GoodAsGould @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 09:31 AM) I think this season it has been mostly Brady. Drafting those TE's and keeping a solid O-Line in front of Brady despite some turnover has been 2 clearly important steps.

Good rant.