Ghost_MH

49 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Do companies in the US typically have good short and long-term disability plans as part of their benefits? Not that that would help with medical costs, but it would help with being off work and not having to use savings.

Nope. Some companies do. The last time I had to use it, disability paid out 60% of my check, and it took a month to get the first short term disability check. That was fun. I imagine for people living paycheck to paycheck, not getting a check in a month and then getting only 60% of your pay at that would really suck. That is, on top of whatever medical expenses you have piling up resulting in your disability. In my case, it was back to back kidney surgeries. Even with insurance, it cost thousands out of pocket, I was out of work for a month and a half, and the first month of that, I received no paycheck. Then when I went back to work, they cut off my short term disability benefits, but my doctor didn't send in his paperwork to clear me for work, so I wound up missing a week's pay because of it.

That was me working for a company with what are considered actually good benefits around here.

1 hour ago, Greatoneshere said:

Given the writers and director involved, I don't think this will ultimately be any good, but it certainly looks . . . interesting, I think?

The best comparison we can make is probably Goosebumps and that was better than expected. Not great, but solidly entertaining. If we get solidly entertaining out of this movie, I'd consider that a success.

Fire bunny looks cool, but I need to see their evolutions. Also, I usually choose versions based on legendaries, but I'm sure we'll get one or two more Pokemon Directs between now and release.

4 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

Eh looking at their responses, it seems like they knew exactly what they were doing. 

Look at their quote...

Quote

When pressed further on if there was a reason why he kept the AMA going after the criticisms began pouring in, Brock replied, "Yes. I was fucking overwhelmed with a plethora of different emotions to be honest."

Yeah, I'm leaning toward the "they knew what they were doing" camp.

53 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

 

Berniebros are the best.

2 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

All of this.

 

And you know, you just fucking KNOW there's going to be a goddamned beam fight between Jean and Scott because this franchise is borderline creatively bankrupt when it comes to action scenes. There have been like... 5 good ones across all of the movies, and some of them have been copied multiple times.

Well, Simon Kinberg has already done this story once and he wants a second shot at it, so expect all your favorite scenes from Last Stand to be back. Then again, he was expecting this movie to reboot the franchise...again? That was all thrown out after the Disney acquisition, so who knows where this movie is going to go now. Someone remind me why Fox though the guy that wrote Last Stand should be the guy put in charge of the X-Men reboot and then given even more control the reboot it again.

2 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

Someone at 8chan reached out to them and they ran with it, according to them.

Cool. Someone reach out to them and ask them to do an AMA here. We're at least two steps up from 8chan.

3 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

I’m still not over how fucking dumb everyone was in Apocalypse. I’ve little hope that this is going to be good.

Aside from everyone being dumb, they had no idea what power levels looked like during Apocalypse. There is no way they'll be able to handle even the idea of the Phoenix Force. Oh, and we'll get robots in this too...maybe...Mr Sinister? Did they just throw all of that out after Logan? This reboot X-Men franchise is a mess.

1 hour ago, Reputator said:

OK yeah I need to see this. I feel like I'm 12 when I see that trailer.

My wife audibly squealed loud enough to scare our kids when Mewtwo burst out at the end of the trailer. These trailers have done a great job of making feel like their kids again. The slow-mo remix of the Pokemon theme to start the trailer doesn't hurt either.

43 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

What story about negative aspects of a particular industry is complete without somebody from the industry claiming the problem is overblown?

You are correct, only in this case nobody has been arrested on human trafficking charges. Maybe they're still to come? Also, if this was a months long sting, that really does suck. Police watched a place they believed women were being held captive and paid the women they believe were victims for massages? They even set up video to catch these women being forced to perform acts against their will and did nothing about it for months? That's all just gross.

So maybe this spa wasn't trafficking women and the police are just exaggerating in their pursuit of a normal prostitution bust?

Yeah, it still actually looks way better than it has any right to.

5 minutes ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

 There is no need to build a hype train for a 7 min video. Just drop it now. 

We live in a world of announcing teasers for announcements of announcements for trailers that have yet to come and the press eats it up. There's no going back. Nintendo has been pretty good at just announcing trailers and at least this time, they aren't announcing something to play in the middle of the night and are just dropping it, first thing in the morning. However, you know if it would have dropped this morning, it would have been announced yesterday.

24 minutes ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

This has to be the shortest direct ever. Just release a 7 min video on YouTube and call it a day. 

Isn't that pretty much what they're doing? I don't, for a second, believe these are actually live.

Just now, mclumber1 said:

This particular bill will not pass in the Senate, and if it did, President Trump will veto it - which is funny because he tweeted last year that he would pass such a bill. lol.

 

 

I think if you want to see actual gun legislation passed this year, you're going to need to have a compromise bill.  I know I sing about it all the time, but something similar to the DIY background check bill (similar to what Senator Coburn proposed in 2013) paired with something gun owners want, like removing silencers from the NFA, would have bipartisan support and actually become law. 

No new gun laws will have bipartisan support. Even compromise bills that are a net positive for gun owners would still not actually pass with a GOP-controlled senate. No Republican in Congress is going to willingly set themselves up to be challenged from the right the next time they're up for reelection, and voters aren't smart enough to not vote against their best interests. We just saw the government shut down over a bipartisan funding everyone on both sides was happy with. In what world would a bipartisan bill touching something as hot button as gun rights ever come to pass?

1 hour ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Well wouldn't that be an issue with any platform? If someone else watches a show on netflix it's going to show the most recent watched.

 

In any case, this is much improved:

 

No, because Netflix fixed that in two different ways. First, you can simply have different profiles that area as easy as a button press. Setting up different profiles on Amazon Prime is a pain in the ass. Also, Netflix keeps track of where you were on a per series basis. So even if I didn't have different profiles, I'd know where exactly I left off on a series as long as someone else doesn't go in and watch it.

Amazon has gotten better on mobile, but their app on smart devices is still awful.

On 2/20/2019 at 9:53 PM, Keyser_Soze said:

 

While not great they have improved it. For instance the by season thing is sort of better now because you can choose what season you want from the show page. Usually if you're watching the show with multiple seasons it will jump to the next season after your finished the previous one.

The bigger issue is that if you bookmark a series, it doesn't actually bookmark your place in the series. It bookmarks the season you bookmarked. That means you either did through seasons or you pick it out from the recent list... Hoping that nobody else watched a bunch of stuff since the last time you watched an episode.

2 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

This thing was last night?

And with no host.

8 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

So if his current script is not objectionable, then why would his current directing be?

As I said, because his prior actions were reprehensible enough that Disney doesn't want to give him a job and more money. He already got their money for the script, so that's just water under the bridge. By cutting off the relationship, they're just not giving him new money.

Like, I work in IT. If my boss find out I was living under a fake name because of some crimes I was on the run from, he'll fire me. However, why the hell would he rip out all the work is previously done. Sure, maybe spend money on a lengthy audit, but throwing away work ALREADY paid for? That would be just silly and willing to keep that work done isn't at all at odds with the firing.

11 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Paint color doesn't reflect words and ideas of someone who got fired because of something else that he wrote.

 

Your analogy is closer to: I got a guy to paint my house and loved the paint he mixed but later found out he tweeted he puts human blood in the paint he uses so I fired the guy but then still used the paint he mixed.

No, that doesn't make sense, because Disney has read his script and already knows he hadn't put any if that questionable content in it. They just don't want to give him any more money.

Fine, the painter had a habit of putting blood in the mix. I fire him and, after checking, saw that he didn't taint any of the paint he was planning to put up in my house. Still a pretty shitty thing to do to past customers, so he can stay fired because I so don't want to give him any new money. Like, maybe if he went back and apologized to previous customers and offered to redo their walls, maybe, but in this case, he didn't even take down his old tweets bragging about it. Me firing him got him to finally take them down, but I'm not hiring him again for the minimal effort it took to do something he would have done years ago.

Mister 50-something painter man. You don't really get to play off being some edgy fine arts major in your 40s. It's a bad look.

2 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

How do you not find firing a person over their objectional content hypocritical when you then use their content? At least don't be intentionally dense over the issue, even if you disagree. 

Why would it? They already paid him for a script and have that in hand. What Disney chose not to do was pay him again for directing.

Like, if I hired a guy to paint my house, he chose a bunch of colors I loved, and then I found out he's an asshole. It's perfectly cool and not at all hypocritical, if I fire him and get someone else to paint everything with the colors he chose.

I just can't see Google as a big player in this space. Their track record for new services it's abysmal and, somehow, their messaging is even worse. For music streaming, they have Google Play Music and YouTube Music, but they're also sort of the same thing? You pay for one, you get both... And YouTube Red, which is something else entirely different. There's also a free tier of Google Play Music, but not YouTube Music. There is no free tier of YouTube Red, but all the exclusive content behind YouTube Red's paywall is now free. Maybe? Sorry, did I say YouTube Red? I meant to say YouTube Premium. Also, it's not YouTube Music, it's YouTube Music Premium. There is no unpremium YouTube Music, though. I guess that's the free tier of Google Play Music?

There's a reason Google has a hard time making things work out even when they have good products. I don't even know what my Chromecast is called anymore.

5 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

Sony already does it, Google will get into it, and it's likely only a matter of time before Amazon does as well (they're a storefront with a massive cloud architecture), but I agree that MS has the best chance to succeed.

I also agree with this. We'll see it in various iterations over the next few years, but these early services are not to the point that Netflix or Spotify were when they launched. We're at least a couple years away from that moment.

It's the latency issue with higher user counts that only someone with the server footprint of a Microsoft, Amazon, and Google can address. That gives them the highest likelihood of succeeding. They're the only ones with servers in enough places to be able to almost guarantee the least lag of anyone else in the market. Then, between those three, I'd give Microsoft the edge based on Xbox name recognition, alone. Google will likely try to make their streaming service something that's built into Android to leverage their user base there, but I'm not really sure how dedicated they actually are to the entire endeavor. Amazon is a weird outlier for me. They have their hands in a lot of different places and, like Google, tend to drop things quickly if it's not going well for them.

1 hour ago, TwinIon said:

I think MS would be fine if the Xbox hardware was to game consoles what the Surface lineup is to PCs, a low volume, high end showcase. Of course, they'd only be happy with that if their services reached a critical penetration, but I think it's the direction they'd like to head.

 

Games as a service plays into everything that current MS is all about. It's recurring revenue, cross platform, and funnels money into their cloud services division.

Games as a service is also something only Microsoft will likely be able to succeed with. The Xbox brand already has enough recognition and they're also the only company with that distinction that also has the tech footprint to make it doable. It's probably a good play for them, but we'll see how it works out.

3 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Can dogs even have autism?

I don't believe there's any way to test a dog for autism even if such a thing existed...which I don't believe it does.

As per the article...

Quote

“But there is currently no scientific evidence to suggest autism in dogs or a link between vaccination and autism.”