Serak The Preparer

He's too busy trying to figure out how to fit a Covid death count conspiracy joke into the situation.

What love letters would you write to yourself when @Iceman reps @slorch? "Dear Penthouse Forum...."

Why do we need to make that distinction? I think death is pretty apple to apple. If a roofer falls off a ladder and dies, the eulogy doesn't start with "At least he wasn't assaulted."

I think one of the major disconnects is that you, like half this board, are a lawyer. You can distinguish someone saying something in a legal manner (or portraying themselves as acting in a legal manner) vs doing something in a legal manner. If you were the target of something frivolous you may still want to consult a friend or go back to your class notes (or equivalent) but you can unburden yourself with relatively little effort. Others can't. I'm a reasonably smart guy and if I was the target of something anywhere on the spectrum of a legal threat, I would be freaked out. I would need to pay a lawyer. I would lose sleep. Even if clearly bullshit and actionable, I would have a big cost. I am not suggesting you fix this matter, I agree that it is not trivial and that there are clearly 1st amendment issues. But I also think that you have big blinders on with regards to your knowledge of not just the law, but how to interact with entire legal / judicial system, that most people don't. As a matter of evidence, I submit your LARPing comment. I think I did that right, I watched some Night Court reruns last night.

That is a bullshit and insulting analogy. When someone LARPs in the woods they don't impact anyone else. When Powell, this asshole, or other people abuse the legal system, it causes economic loss to individuals and organizations. If I was the target of one of these shitheads I would have to incur legal expense and be stressed as hell just because I don't know how to legally respond. I would know it's bullshit, you would know it's bullshit, but I would still have to deal with it. Dismissing it as LARPing or other hobby is just another way of ignoring the legal profession's obligation to police their own.

Of course. He's part of the DT Cabal. That is totally different from the CR Cabal. Their shenanigans are cheeky and fun! The other cabal's shenanigans are cruel and tragic.

Is 5 Ks through 2 good? That seems good.

Concept album is definitely a bit fuzzy. I can think of three great Lou Reed albums for example. Is New York a concept album? It is maybe the least "concepty" but attempts (I think successfully) to capture the feeling of New York in the 80's, from AIDS to poverty to race relations. It has a theme, but is it a concept? More concepty is Magic and Loss is a song cycle about him losing a friend to cancer. Most explicitly concept of the three would be his fantastic collaboration with John Cale, Songs for Drella, about the life and death of Andy Warhol.

Holy shit, did you really posrep your own post with a sock?

How so? What is the probability of life in any given year, or any 1 billion year period, or whatever time you want to measure? Surely you have an estimate if you think that it is more likely that there is life than not? Otherwise you are just guessing. And that is totally cool by the way, no trying to give you shit. I love sci-fi, watch Star Trek, etc., and I WANT there to be life, but what is your basis for saying it is mathematically improbable for no other life in the universe?

Well given an estimate of 2E23 planets in the universe and your typed estimate of 1E393 is only off by a factor of, oh, 1 with ~370 zeroes behind it, you can pardon for me laughing a bit at the accusation of fucked up math. But point taken, 2E23 is still a big number. How many have the right sun (long lived, but not too energetic)? How many are the right distance from the sun? How many are in the right part of any particular galaxy? Too close to a galactic core and radiation would wipe everything out. Further away from the core and starts tend to have bad composition of elements (too many heavy elements). How many have nice big bodyguards like Saturn or Jupiter to block stray asteroids? How many have stars with eccentric orbits that take them out of the habitable zone over few hundred million years? How many have nitrogen and oxygen? This is just off the top of my head, and ever here it's a lot of guesswork to even start to put in some numbers. It doesn't take a whole lot of "1 in a millions" to suddenly end up with a real small probability, even considering the large number of planets. Or do you have a better answer than "Nuh uh, that's fucked up"?

Why are we not that special? Do the math. Yes the universe has been around a long ass time, and there are a lot of solar systems out there. But what are the probabilities for development of life? We have a shit ton of placeholders for assumptions but very little confidence in the assumptions themselves. I am certainly not going to claim that there isn't life out there, I'm not even claiming that it is unlikely that there is life out there. I do think we don't even have enough basis to say likely or unlikely, though, other than what any individual wants to be true.

He may be a super smart dude but that is a dumb thing to say. We don't know nearly enough about the requirements for formation of life (and distribution of those requirements across the universe) to define a probability, let along a mathematical certainty, for other life in the universe.

Please don't make me cry.

"The pathetic GOP votes to deplatform itself from Gab" might literally be the funniest thing I've seen in the last month, and that includes The Audition from Mr Show. It's a platonic ideal of masterbatory stupidity and team-on-team purity testing.

Can the UFO's wrap up for tackles? If so, sign me up (but not for the full @NowThis experience).

I haven't jumped to any conclusion. I haven't said they are lying and I haven't said that there is trafficking. What I asked is what that prevalence is compared to the separation of non-trafficking families. I don't know, I strongly suspect you don't know, and I strongly suspect that nobody in BP knows either. In that absence of information, stripping families apart "just in case" is a terrible decision (oops, I mean bad optics).

what the fuck? The optics are the concern? So I guess I'll put you in the "Know this but think it's not a big deal?" category. Do we know there were traffickers with children? If so, how many? How does that compare to the number of children separated from parents? Totally agree that the system was overwhelmed so maybe, at a minimum, don't fucking take kids from their parents (never to see them again) until you are sure what you are doing?

Under the Trump administration, children were forcibly separated from their families. In a large number of cases, records were not kept about this separation so that children can never be reunited with their families. We literally tore apart families and left them broken, unable to reform. Did you: Not know this? Know this but think it's not a big deal? Think this is still occurring under the Biden administration? Know that this is not occurring but still think the Biden administration still has "exactly" or even "almost exactly" the same policies as the Trump administration? It's not the detention centers themselves that led to so much of the outcry, it's the way children were placed in them.

Hi @markstanco, I see you are back in the CR in the active shooter thread. Any chance you can come back to the thread you started and let us know the significance of 3 digit numbers with regard to Google searches?

Speaking of traipsing through version of reading, the poster who first said "damn" when it was released that the shooter was not white did not do so out of political or moral outrage. Rather, @Pasken was concerned that, as a another non-white person, he/she would face increased discrimination, as has happened in past terror incidents. I don't know if it's true, but I also know that I don't know because as a white person, I've never once felt extra scrutiny because of something a different white person has done. Frankly, I can't even imagine a scenario where that occurs. You have 10+ posts now being outraged that people want to blame white people, when in actuality it's non-white people not wanting to face increased targeting for harassment.

There are about 10 people who wont.

Man, this thread is so on-brand for the Texags crowd. @markstanco pops in with the obligatory factually incorrect take (that is never retracted when it is immediately refuted), @dcar00 shows up to make sure he tells a brown person that his experience with racism in Texas is wrong, and @slorch gets to point out that guns aren't the problem, just the people (never minding the fact that we regulate ownership / use of dangerous objects all the fucking time). Just need @Cheeseweasel to make a 2 weeks joke and we can be all done.

There may be a more elegant solution but what I would suggest is having a Maxif for each individual column (meaning all 200 maxifs are being calculated), then a simple hlookup or index/match so that only the dropdown stat is shown.