overview for tonysoutham22

matt2500

No, it's not. The USPS operates as a stand-alone business, under guidelines established by Congress. It receives no taxpayer funding, and hasn't for decades.

Since its reorganization into an independent organization, the USPS has become self-sufficient and has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service

matt2500

As a point of clarification, reddit uses the nofollow attribute for all links, which specifically precludes any links from being indexed by search engines. Not that spammers don't try.

matt2500

There's a small, dedicated group of spam-hunters that hang out in the /new queue, but kylde is definitely the head of the bunch. He's here every day, without fail. A trophy is indeed appropriate.

matt2500

I was a very early employee of Amazon.com. One of our first management-type hires was a guy who'd been an exec at Barnes & Noble. He pushed hard to get them on the web, and was told, basically, to buzz off. So he quit and came to work for us.

matt2500

Hmm, an anti-spambot spambot? Kind of like a reprogrammed T-800? I like it.

matt2500

The Bill of Rights exists as a means of preventing the will of the people from trampling on the rights of minority groups. There's a reason the US is a republic. Tyranny of the majority and such.

matt2500

I like to read the /new queue pretty regularly, but it does often get frustrating to wade through all the spam. I submit to /reportthespammers a bit myself, but if I see kylde is on the case, I don't even bother. He'll be on top of everything. The man is a machine.

matt2500

More of your second point, less of your first. The buy-out may indeed increase the profitability of the company, but won't lead to an increase in the stock price because, very simply, there will be no stock to increase in price. All shares of the company would be privately owned, and no longer traded on public exchanges.

Speculators are buying up the stock, as you say, to take advantage of the premium paid when the private investors buy up all of the remaining float.

matt2500

It feels like that sometimes. "Seen it! Submitted 48 seconds ago by Kylde." I think the guy must have submission macros built in greasemonkey or something, or at least typing fingers of fury. Fueled by a thousand suns of spam-hating fury.

matt2500

It sucks that now there will be tons of appeals because they know they own the popular vote: 52.24% I expect that % to only increase because of #2.

There will two appeals: one to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and then to the SCOTUS. Popular opinion has nothing to do with this, as detailed above by EByrne.

matt2500

I'm going to nip this self-righteous bit right now. This demographic is 50-60 years now, how is it just now affecting change, 30-40 years after becoming voters?

The thing is, it's not just the ability to vote that affects change. Remember, people vote more the older they are, so while boomers may have had the right to vote for several decades now, in the early years they didn't exercise it as often.

And more importantly, you can't just vote in sweeping social change. You have to vote in the right candidates, yes, but then those elected officials have to advance to the point where they are the influential members of their institutions, the ones setting the agenda. This also takes time.

Finally, and most importantly, progressive social change almost always comes from the bottom up. You're going to see things like easing of marijuana laws and marriage equality for the lgbt community coming at the state level, and in turn these issues hit the state level only after there has been a groundswell from even lower levels of government, when counties and cities start pushing the envelope. And this happens only when those governments are filled by people progressive enough to push for these issues. And who are the folks filling county commisioner and city council seats? Well, it's by people who are well-entrenched in their communities, with homes and families and good jobs. In other words, by older types. Not by twenty-somethings just starting out in adult life.

Add to this that, because they are entrenched in the community, with good jobs and homes and families, they tend to grow more conservative. Progressive social change simply takes time. When people are in place who recognize that letting gays and lesbians marry doesn't threaten anyone's housing values, and that legalizing pot won't lead to mass drug abuse and crime, then we'll see progress in those directions. Which we're seeing.

The slow pace of change is frustrating, but it's the way the world works.

matt2500

There's a passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I think is very informative here:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

matt2500

I'm 41 and have done the same. But how many times have you been really engaged in a local election?

matt2500

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKT1P7x_Pzo

Might as well just leave that here.

matt2500

It's funny, one game I remember very specifically is Dragon's Lair, and that had almost the opposite problem. For the day, it's graphics were amazing (heck, they're good today, they were done by a Disney animator). But the stupid game was on Laser Disc, and it was more like a choose-your-own-adventure story than a game, from a purely gameplay perspective. There was so little interaction, it was frustrating as hell to play.

We still dropped dozens of quarters into that thing, though. It looked so good.

EDIT: I just bought this stupid game for my iPod. It's worse than I remember. You can't even look at the pretty graphics, because you have to look at the controls the whole time, and press the right button when it lights up at exactly the right time. It's nothing more than a glorified version of electronic Simon Says. I'm so glad that style of gaming died out.

matt2500

I found this via comments left by this spammer: http://www.reddit.com/user/ony3000

Here's another, similar post: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8nt61/informationtechnology/

I've seen spammers leave comments on other, older spam posts before, but never anything as crazy as this!

EDIT: basically, every comment left by ony3000 is to a spam post which has hundreds of comments left by other spambots. Just clicking through links at random leads to more and more spam posts, each of which ALSO have hundreds of comments by other spambots. Craziest, dumbest junk I've seen in a long time.

matt2500

Is it this?

matt2500

Service time. Neither has signed their first free-agent contract yet.

EDIT: and their contracts aren't a wash. Blanton is making $3 million, Lee is making $9 million.

matt2500

West Sounder here, I'm in Kingston.

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matt2500

TROPHY CASE

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