arch_8ngel

Had to look it up to know they were even still around, since I haven't seen one in the wild since ours closed back in the first wave. (same with our sears) Evidently they are down to a few hundred stores, where they used to have thousands. Honestly thought they all kicked the bucket a few years back

Stay away from all of those silly app-based groups. The absolute shit-show that has been Robinhood lately should serve as a stark warning to anyone using any of those places. If you have enough money to be investing, you have enough money to work with at least one of the 3 big-name discount brokerages (Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard). EDIT: to go along with that, until you have a meaningful amount of money, you probably want to stay away from options-trading anyway, so "getting stuck with options" shouldn't really be a primary concern for the vast majority of investors.

Schwab (bought TD Ameritrade) or Fidelity would be my suggestion if you want a full range of investment options. Vanguard is great if you just want their mutual funds and ETFs. Etrade was bought by Morgan Stanley, so I'd stay away from them, personally, but I just don't like giving any amount of money to the full-service guys, even in a round-about way through a subsidiary.

New Tang Dynasty is what the acronym means, but read more about what that group actually is. Yes they are "generally factual", but they have a HEAVY BIAS against China/Chinese-government. If they are the sole source for major news like this, it doesn't really make sense that other sources wouldn't have picked up a legitimate story of that magnitude.

Do a search on "NTD News" -- they are a "Falun Gong" group, which China considers to be cultists and anti-china propaganda. It would be hard to take anything they say to the negative about China at face value. (would obviously be AT LEAST AS SKEPTICAL of any official news from China -- not saying to "trust china" with the above, just pointing out that you would have a hard time finding a more extreme anti-chinese-government biased source)

My point is, you can't have an outbreak so severe that China has built a special crematory to handle the bodies on a timeline where that build-up happened so far before cases became apparent in the west. It just doesn't line up. I would be totally willing to believe that China had thugs welding doors shut from day 1. Tooling up a crematorium on that timeline is extreme even by China's standards, unless they were already planning to incinerate their muslim-minority population as a separate crime against humanity and just happened to shift focus to severely ill elderly at the last minute. But I don't think that would ever be their plan for their detained minorities, since they are known to be harvesting their organs for transplants. EDIT: they definitely spooled up their cremations, big time, I just have a hard time believing it was anything close to the timeline you're hearing about 3rd hand.

This timeline just doesn't hold water, when you consider how many people transit the impacted areas of China and that we are JUST NOW getting confirmed cases and deaths in western countries. I definitely don't believe the stats published by China, but I think it is extremely unlikely that people "in the know" were fleeing this particular viral outbreak as early as December.

Yeah, a couple of years ago, I felt like I was continually sick for an entire year as the kids hit me with everything they dragged home from daycare.

No TP crisis in my area, either, but we just had our first confirmed case overnight, so today all bets are probably off I have had a decent pantry and freezer stock built up over the last few weeks, in case any kind of quarantined comes down the line. but hit the grocery store yesterday for odds and ends and there was a ridiculously good sale on meat. We have local producers that probably send a lot to China (reason why a Chinese firm bought in so heavy to Smithfield foods), and with those exports blocked they are practically flooding the local market with pork. Fresh ground beef was only $3.49/lb, as well for 93% lean. My brother in law's guess was that slaughterhouses are working ahead in case they get stuck with a shutdown in the next few weeks. I think the only wiped out sections were cold medicine and cheap frozen pizzas. (Interestingly the premium frozen pizza brands were all marked down to cheap pizza prices and we're still on shelves) if you have the freezer space, there are some good deals to be had right now.

We are testing considerably fewer symptomatic people than other developed countries. It isn't an economic constraint. There is no particularly good excuse for other major countries to be able to test symptomatic people at a vastly higher rate than we are. End result is that we are likely to end up with a higher true infection rate than other developed nations.

My main gripe against Last Jedi is that the entire premise rests on a unique element of the bad space physics of the Star Wars universe. (ie they require fuel just to continue at cruise in space)

It sure would be nice if we (USA) were actually doing some broader testing in areas with confirmed cases, rather than intentionally distorting the statistics. Based on death rates in countries with more thorough testing, our actual infections are 5-10x higher, at least. Lots of symptomatic people are apparently being denied testing though, just because they didn't travel to a risk zone or aren't aware of direct contact with someone who did. Going to lead to a lot more domestic transmission just due to needless ignorance.

Most of the software includes on-screen controls via touch screen, at a minimum. And for things that benefit from a controller, they usually support blue tooth or USB controllers.

Oh, yeah, getting less experience per kill was pretty clear, and a typical construct for those kinds of games. My main gripe was the spread on stat increases when you finally earned that level up -- i.e. not only did it take longer to get, you end up with some dinky +1HP.

I'd give it at least a 7/10. I enjoyed it, and while yes, there is seemingly a lot of "fan service", it was a really fun theater experience. There are a few grating script-writing issues where too many colloquialisms slip in and drag you out of the immersion ("droid, please!"), but all of the Star Wars movies have them ("I'll see you in Hell!" from Han Solo at the beginning of Empire, for instance) and it was kind of endemic of any George Lucas movie back in the day (Willow's "king of Kashmir" quip from Madmartigan).

I'm not sure that is entirely true. It doesn't take much save-scumming to induce MUCH higher stat boosts than the infamous +1HP-only. I would believe that relative levels could reduce the probability of a better increase, but they definitely don't seem to cap it in any way.

I've played through the first game, I think. I love the tactical battle concept, though the character management across the team gets a little bloated to juggle. My main gripe is the leveling system -- nothing is more irritating than having a level up that awards nothing but a single hitpoint to a front-line fighter or tank, when re-rolling that level up (by save-scumming the battle) shows you could have had MUCH higher point/stat boosts across the board. Maybe it all averages out, but it seems a bit broken to have the ranges that wide (i.e. no fixed minimums)

But but but... Bernie said he didn't understand why Castro was so bad! So it is totally OK that our current president sucks off 3 or 4 major despots in the present day. EDIT: just to be clear, I think Bernie's comments about Cuba were REALLY out of touch, at a minimum. But the people getting up in arms about it have been giving Trump a free pass on his pandering to numerous current dictators. Cognitive dissonance in full-swing.

@RH China is definitely still suppressing information. There was a story either today or yesterday that was talking about them censoring any online messages in their country of people trying to post anything about death rates, for instance. I wouldn't have any confidence in their advertised numbers until after this thing has started to decline in western countries where the records will be more reliable and harder to fake.

I know. I was kidding. Essentially every major Chinese company (and probably most mid-tier companies) has deep ties to their government and more-or-less exist at their pleasure. I would never trust any of their financial disclosures for this reason, as an investor. And I would certainly never trust them as the backbone of worldwide data transmissions.

I view it less as some kind of bias and more as just basic pragmatism. But I guess that is my bias talking

If you really think you'd be willing to live in Texas (anywhere other than Austin), you'd probably be willing to live in most of FL, GA, SC, or NC, as well (at least anywhere near the metro areas).

It just seems like common sense to not want a major Chinese company to be responsible for the majority of your telecom structure... and you can't really separate the business from the politics (or military risks) when it comes to the largest Chinese companies in sensitive industries.

Doesn't seem like it would account for TP buying in the USA, since I am pretty sure most of our paper products are manufactured domestically, and most Americans are familiar enough with the smell of a paper plant to not think that our paper supplies would be disrupted by China in any way.

Or...hear me out... you could do this WITHOUT promoting the spread of AIDS and hepatitis. Not everything is some kind of slippery-slope situation. If there is a reasonable public health intervention with good efficacy that doesn't inherently cascade to the government dictating minutia in your life.