#actually i bet $50 that he wouldn’t run for president again

[p-antalons]

HES YOUNGER THAN US PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN WHAT THE FUCK

this winter classic stuff really has me a fool tell me why i thought bobby orr was long dead that man is like 70

[arizonaconservativegal]

Hi, I was wondering if you could explain to a non-American what is happening/has happened with this whole impeachment stuff? I’ve tried looking through new reports, but they’re all heavily left-wing biased.

Ah heck, I really haven't been following it because there is zero chance they are going to remove the president but I'll do my best. Also I apologize if this is over explained but I'm not sure if it's the process you're confused about or the details of this specific case so I'm going to try to explain both.

Alright so Congress is made up of two bodies of elected officials, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The president is entirely separate from Congress, but the two oversee each other. Impeachment is one of Congress's options for handling a president who has violated his oath of office and it functions a little like a criminal trial.

The House of Representatives investigates and determines if there is enough evidence to suggest there might have been a crime (kind of like how a grand jury would decide if a case would move to an actual trial). They hold investigative hearings and call witnesses to help them determine if a crime has been committed and if so, what that crime was. This has been going on for several weeks now and if you hear the term "impeachment inquiry," this is what it refers to.

The House then draws up the Articles of Impeachment, which you can think of as an indictment in a criminal trial. They lay out all of the charges the president is facing and a simple majority (50% plus one) must approve each of them. This vote happened last week.

In this case, Trump is facing charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Allegedly, he abused his power by threatening to withhold aid from Ukraine if they did not investigate a political rival (Joe Biden) and he may have obstructed Congress by instructing his staff not to comply with Congressional subpoenas.

If I can insert my own commentary here, these charges are excuses rather than reasons for impeachment. House Democrats have been looking for anything they can possibly use against Trump since before he was even inaugurated. This whole thing is flimsy at best and a mockery of our constitution with unconsidered consequences at worst.

Once the House votes to approve the Articles of Impeachment, the president is officially considered "impeached" but not yet removed from office. The paperwork is sent over to the Senate where the president will stand trial and it is up to the Senate to determine if the president should be convicted and "sentenced" to removal from office. This requires a two-thirds majority vote of the Senate. I should note that although this functions like a criminal trial, it is not technically a true criminal trial so if the president is convicted, he could still face actual criminal charges and potential jail time later on after he has been removed from office.

The hang up right now is that the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democrats who hate the president, but the Senate is controlled by the Republicans who are generally more fond of the president because he is also a Republican. The House has voted to approve the Articles of Impeachment, but they are currently refusing to deliver the documents to the Senate because the president's allies there are not likely to convict him.

I have to be honest, I have no idea if the House Democrats will be able to avoid delivering those papers to the Senate and I'm not really clear on what happens if the Senate never officially receives them. As far as I know, this has never happened before. I'm actually more interested in how that piece of the fight plays out than anything else so far.

But if the Senate trial does get started, Mitch McConnell (as the head of the majority party in the Senate) gets to decide what happens next. And if there is one thing you should know about Mitch McConnell it is that he is one devious son of a bitch and he knows every single Senate rule backwards and forwards and isn't afraid to exploit them especially if he feels the Democrats have already been playing unfairly. I have to say I respect and fear him immensely for it.

So basically there are two options for McConnell once he receives the paperwork:

#1: he can table it in favor of working on more pressing matters and the entire thing stalls. No hearings are held, no votes are taken, no one is removed from office. Trump is still technically impeached but who cares because nothing ever comes of it (at least until the Democrats take control of the Senate but let's be honest, if they manage that in 2020, Trump's done for anyway)

Or #2: he can proceed to trial. I think he will pick this route. There are very few rules in a Senate impeachment trial. McConnell gets to call any witness he likes, bar anyone from testifying that he wants (which is something the Democrats already did on the House side so you can bet McConnell feels this is a completely fair strategy at this point), ask any questions he wants, and drag the whole thing out as long as he pleases. Sure, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court gets to preside over the whole circus, but that guy is a Republican too so I wouldn't count on him to be much help to the Democrats.

Now the thing to remember here is that Democrats currently have 5 presidential candidates who are members of the Senate, plus Joe Biden who is very much at the center of all the allegations against Trump. So McConnell can tie up every single one of these people in months and months of hearings during election season, meaning they can't be out on the campaign trail. In fact, federal law prohibits them from doing any campaign activities while on the premises. No fundraising calls, no strategy meetings with staff, no checking email even. Nothing. They can grandstand as much as McConnell lets them during the trial, but it's not like C-SPAN is a popular channel these days. Every hour he has these guys in a hearing is an hour that is completely wasted for them during the most critical point in their campaign.

But there is something else here. Joe Biden is looking at least as guilty as Donald Trump in all of this. There is not a single thing to prohibit McConnell from calling ol' Joe and even Hunter Biden to testify. Defying his subpoena would be Obstruction of Congress (the very same thing Trump is charged with). If they do respond to a subpoena and testify, any crime they implicate themselves in would be fair game for a criminal trial. They would have little choice but to plead the fifth (constitutional protection against self-incrimination) and how do you think that would look to American voters? "Uh sorry, I can't answer that because it will make me look really guilty..."

If this thing ever came to a vote in the Senate (and that is a big if), a two-thirds majority would be required to convinct and remove the president from office. Two-thirds of the Senate is 67 Senators out of 100. There is no separate vote to acquit. If the vote to convinct fails to get the necessary 67 votes, the president is automatically considered acquitted and gets to stay in office.

The current Senate is made up of 45 Democrats, 53 Republicans and 2 Independents (although I think one of those two is Bernie Sanders who is running for president as a Democrat). Even if Democrats managed to pull a couple of Republican votes to their side, they wouldn't come close to that magic number of 67.

But just for fun, let's pretend this is Democrat Fantasy World and they do get 67 votes. What happens next? The US Constitution says that the president is then removed from office and the vice president takes his place. Which means Mike Pence would be the president. Mike Pence, the only person Democrats fear more than Trump because he is far more conservative and actually knows how to get things done in government. By the way, it's late enough in Trump's term that Pence could serve out the remaining few months of this term, run for the seat in 2020, and then run for re-election again in 2024 (constitution technically says a president may serve 10 years, this would put him at about 9). Do you hear that sound? That is the sound of me laughing until my sides hurt because if this happens, Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.

Oh and if they want to impeach Pence too? The entire process starts over. Good luck guys.

TL;DR: Congress got tired of actually doing its job and decided to waste a lot of time and resources on a dog and pony show. Nothing is actually going to come of it.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S3 Ep 18: Noah’s Dad Decides he Doesn’t Love His Son Anymore When Noah Gets Way Too Into Petz Hexing

I was hanging out with Bro and he made me look at a lot of bad Yugi wigs that were 600 dollars each, and because only like...4 good Yugi wigs exist in the world, I decided to help him get out that Yugi itch in a healthier way, by copy editing these posts and fixing the way I spell Gozaburo wrong about 400 more times before this arc ends.

So last we left off, Noah decided to reference that one part of the Bible he knows.

He’s gonna change the playing field to kind of run through the history of the Earth, showing us that in every period of history his outfit was never acceptable.

Also he got the history a...little bit wrong. You had to have people before Noah’s ark but...whatever. I took astrology, there’s a lot about planet formation we’re still kind of guessing on, so do whatever you feel like, Yugioh. It’s not like any kids watching this got real pissy about how Noah was totally botching the Archean period.

He also decides to dump on us how he got so smart. See, Kaiba got smart by studying a lot, surrounding himself with people way dumber than him, and then just bossing everyone around him until they agreed with him that he was very smart. In Noah’s case, it’s because he’s literally a computer.

I’m really glad I get to find another anime that’s all ham about this tree. In this case just slapping it on there for a few seconds, long enough for me to say “WHAT THE HELL, KIDS SHOW?” before it vanishes again.

Good on you, Noah. You just...casually slipped that in there.

Ah, but unfortunately, the AI who is like...not even human and is *pretty sure* He’s Noah Kaiba is still kind of attached to his Dad. Maybe it was a part of his core code that he couldn’t reject his Father? I dunno, just seems weird that he achieved enlightenment and was like “So uh...I guess I’ll play cards and take over a mindless corporation. Good use of my time.”

(read more under the cut)

Kaiba’s reaction to hearing that his brother stores all of human knowledge was “well, it can’t possibly be that difficult. I’ve done way more than that. I have a homeschool degree and half a high school diploma so go to Hell, bro.”

Yo how many people would sit down, turn to their computer, and just start shouting at their core processor about how they’re waaaay smarter than it? Remember that during this entire conversation, Kaiba is shouting at a literal computer.

So anyway, we finally get to see why they bothered showing us spider room a few episodes back. Youknow, that room with the baby in it? Turns out...there was never a baby in this room, since Noah was a kid when he first woke up here.

Before it was covered in spiders, it was covered in blue and off white. This is a very boring Martha Stewart room in different shades of robin eggshell. You can tell this kid is a Kaiba because oh boy that is a...really boring 50 yo housewife look, ain’t it?

I’m sure it’s symbolic for the fact he is hella dead and innocent at this point but like...every time we see Kaiba interior design it’s just the last type of design you expect from this high octane family.

Anyway, Noah’s kind of surprised to be awake because, last he remembers, he was very much hit by a car.

Ya, I mean, if you have to tell your son you Frankenstiened him into a horrible crime against humanity, might as well tell him as quickly and bluntly as possible, I guess.

Anyway, because Noah existing breaks the most basic moral human laws in every country on Earth, they kinda can’t let him go anywhere, which means that to prevent the loneliness, Kaiba gives him...a pet?

So Noah and the dogcat decide to travel through Domino and realized very quickly that there were only like...five NPC’s. There’s like an ice cream girl, and like a couple walking people, and that’s about it.

Noah’s words were something like “man this place is full of glitches!” because his dogcat wouldn’t stop barking and he threw a rock at it and it didn’t care. Glitches.

I guess it’s one way to look at it?

It feels like Noah got somewhat cursed like Pharaoh did, just a little bit. Like not completely it’s just that I can’t help but notice both are trapped in some sort of basic geometry shape--Pharaoh’s is a pyramid and Noah’s is an orb, and both have untold superpowers matched with some heavy depression that goes with having said superpowers. Not to mention, both have a host body all set up for possession, it’s just Kaiba is a little bit youknow...unwilling to participate. They’re very different obviously it’s just...way to trap your characters in shapes.

Anyway, last episode I felt like maybe Noah liked being an orb, this episode he’s made it a little more clear that it is kind of not great being an orb...but only because he can’t throw any rocks at dogs or have real conversations with anyone but his own Dad.

Anyway, Noah got a little bored. So his Dad sent him to virtual Mars.

And now Noah only finds joy in hacking his digital pet. Relatable.

Now I know a good chunk of you are my age--that good Jenna Marbles age--and will know exactly what I am referring to, as for the rest of you, turning your digital pet into a hell creation was just a thing we all did in year 2000ish. All of us did this.

And I was like “I bet you, that someone out there has made a robot Hex, I guarantee” because I spent...I want to say 2 years of my life downloading modded breedz of Catz 4? I even tried to do it myself but I wasn’t any good at it because I was super young and bad at computers, I never actually got Robbie William’s Millennium as a Catz meow (though trust me, I did try. It was my life’s dream when I was small.)

But the closest I found to a Robot Petz was this?

Dang. Look at that thing. This one is actually pretty good because it does resemble an animal. I admire it a lot. Trust me, I spent like days moving my bunniez feet around trying to make a dragon and just ended up downloading someone else's dragon.

And then, from the same page I saw this gem right above it.

HELL YES........

....I freakin love this period of the internet so freakin much. I was only ever really a part of a couple of fandoms as a child and the Petz fandom will forever hold a little part of my heart. I mean, look at this. What’s not to love?

Like, Catz is probably number 3 on my list of best games ever made. Not so much because the game was any good, but because none of the files were protected in any way so even kids like me could hack in there and make the weirdest abominations and post them all to their Angelfire pages.

Well, other kids could, I was so baby that I was still using my Mom’s email address and did not know how to put a damn thing on my webpage. Which I did have. But it had like...only frames. It had like 3 words and just me splitting the page into 50 frames because I did not know what I was doing.

I apologize to all the kids in the room who have never seen a web page covered in ugly ass frames. You lucky bastards.

....but Petz...Noah was into PETZ. I can respect him for that.

I still think he’s a little creep-o, but knowing that he hacked his pet has given me a lot of appreciation for his work.

Anyway, it was after Noah changed the boring ass simpleton dog into a much better dog that Gozoboro decided “I have made a monster, I am abandoning my boy.” Which uh...this was the thing?

This?

I mean as far as body horror goes, Litterbox up there is way worse. As far as body horror goes, we also have, Jinzo over here, but the digital dog with a cute robot head was the thing that made Gozoboro say “What have I done!?” The dog is digital, it’s not even alive.

Especially since I feel like the follow up question Noah made was like way more frightening than the dog thing?

Kaiba glazes right over this entire conversation. Like full stop, he didn’t even seem to blink. No part of this story even slightly surprised him, although I will admit, at least Seto has decided that Noah...exists and might in fact be a robot his Father made once. This in itself is a big deal for Kaiba, who has a goldfish memory and denial wider than the sea he’s trapped under.

First of all, congrats to the storyboarder/animator for drawing a hand in that angle, mad respect.

Second of all, this is pretty close to the actual line from the show, Kaiba legit thinks that his Dad wanted Kaiba to be the president, after he knows full well that his Dad was like “Don’t Take Over My Company, You Little Twerp” and then like tried to even send Seto back to the orphanage whence he came. Kaiba’s pretty sure that his Dad wanted that whole thing to happen exactly the way it happened. No regrets. Just family being family.

And Moki’s still chilling on the Moki couch, just kinda taking this all in before he’s summoned unto the field like a playing card.

Ah, yet another person who is like “KILL MEEE” on this show. It’s been kind of a while. Like, who’s left that hasn’t stood in front of a loaded card-gun like this? Duke? Is Duke the only one who hasn’t sacrificed his body for the greater card-good at this point? Is this why Duke is our amoral Chaotic Neutral? Is this why Duke is still the only one who hasn’t died yet (and I’m crossing my fingers still that he’s gonna be our death 169, it can happen, I can believe)?

I feel like this is the season of weird hugs. Like everyone on this show that has hugged has gotten a little weird. The only not-weird hug was when Yugi attempted to hug Joey once and then Joey dodged the hug and wrestled him into an arm-distanced noogie instead--which is technically still not a hug, but the closest we’ve gotten to something a human would do. It is so lucky for our art team that all the huggers are supposed to be hella weird anyway.

Anyway, next episode we get to find out if Noah also had an AIM username or got really into Jelly pens. I can see him getting suuuper into Jelly pens, with hair like that.

Anyway, here’s a link to Season 1 Ep 1 to read in Chrono order, in case you just got here and you’re looking for that.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

If there’s one thing the Democratic establishment is good at, it’s panicking. And the latest reason for panic among Democratic insiders is Bernie Sanders. According to a New York Times article from earlier this month, the prospect of a Sanders nomination is “spooking establishment-aligned Democrats, some of whom are worried that his nomination could lure a third-party centrist into the field.” It is “also creating tensions about what, if anything, should be done to halt Mr. Sanders,” the article says.

Should Democratic insiders really be worried that Sanders will be nominated and cost them an election against President Trump that they’d otherwise win? I’m here to make the case that they shouldn’t be, or at least not yet. Instead, Sanders-related panic is premature for at least three reasons:

While Sanders is one of perhaps a dozen candidates with a plausible shot at the nomination, the field is fairly wide open, and it’s too early to say how formidable he is.

It’s also too early to conclude very much about Sanders’s “electability” against Trump, especially in comparison to other Democrats.

Finally, even if they wanted to stop Sanders, it’s too early for the party establishment to know how to go about doing that — without more input from rank-and-file voters, any move meant to hinder Sanders could backfire.

Each one of these claims could be the subject of a long post — so I just want to focus on the first one for today and leave the others for later.

To be clear, I think Sanders can win the Democratic nomination. He’s probably the 3rd- or 4th- most likely nominee, in my estimation — slightly behind Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and roughly tied with Pete Buttigieg, but ahead of everyone else. All of these candidates (and others such as Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke) have their own assets and liabilities, so I wouldn’t go to the mat if you put them in a different order.

But sometimes, I get the sense from Sanders backers — or from other election analysts who look at the polls a little differently than I do, or from traditional reporters — that they think Sanders’s strength in the polls is being ignored. Empirically, however, Sanders’s position in the polls is not all that strong; it’s consistent with sometimes winning the nomination but usually not.

Candidates in Sanders’s position in the polls have a mediocre track record

According to our polling tracker, nine polling organizations have released national polls of the Democratic primary since O’Rourke declared for the race last month.1 On average, Sanders has 21 percent of the vote in the latest polls from each of these firms.2 His polls in Iowa are a bit worse than that — he’s averaging 18 percent in the last five polls there.3 New Hampshire is a mixed bag, with Sanders at 30 percent in one recent poll but just 16 percent in another one.

How Sanders fares in recent national and early-state polls

Most recent poll from each polling firm in each state since Beto O’Rourke’s entry into the race on March 14*

National Pollster Dates Sanders Morning Consult 4/15 – 4/21 24% Change Research 4/12 – 4/15 20 USC Dornsife/LA Times 3/15 – 4/15 16 Emerson College 4/11 – 4/14 29 HarrisX 4/5 – 4/6 19 Quinnipiac University 3/21 – 3/25 19 McLaughlin & Associates 3/20 – 3/24 17 Fox News 3/17 – 3/20 23 CNN/SSRS 3/14 – 3/17 20 Average 21 Iowa Pollster Dates Sanders Gravis Marketing 4/17 – 4/18 19% Monmouth University 4/4 – 4/9 16 David Binder Research 3/21 – 3/24 17 Emerson College 3/21 – 3/24 24 Public Policy Polling 3/14 – 3/15 15 Average 18 New Hampshire Pollster Dates Sanders University of New Hampshire 4/10 – 4/18 30% Saint Anselm College 4/3 – 4/8 16 South Carolina Pollster Dates Sanders Change Research 3/31 – 4/4 14% Nevada Pollster Dates Sanders Emerson College 3/28 – 3/30 23%

* Where the pollster conducted versions of the poll with and without Joe Biden, the version with Biden is used.

Source: Polls

Across the board, those numbers are well down from 2016 — when Sanders got 43 percent of the vote nationally, along with 50 percent in Iowa and 60 percent in New Hampshire.

You could take a glass-half-full view of this for Sanders, however. Sure, he isn’t getting as many votes as last time around, but you wouldn’t expect him to in a field that already includes 17 major candidates, rather than just Sanders and Hillary Clinton. And 20 percent or 30 percent of the vote could still be good enough for first place in the early states.

Historically, though, candidates who are polling at only about 20 percent nationally despite the near-universal name recognition that Sanders enjoys don’t have a great track record. From our research on the history of past primary polls, I found 15 candidates from past nomination processes who, like Sanders, (i) polled at an average of between 15 percent and 25 percent4 in national polls in the first six months of the year before the Iowa caucuses5 and (ii) who had high or very high name recognition.6

Candidates in Sanders’s polling position mostly lost

Candidates with high name recognition and 15 percent to 25 percent of the vote in early national polls

Year Party Candidate Poll Avg. Off. ran for Pres.? Had Run For Pres./ V.P. Before? Won Nomination? 2016 R Jeb Bush 16% ✓ 2012 R Mitt Romney 20 ✓ ✓ ✓ 2008 D Barack Obama 23 ✓ ✓ 2008 R John McCain 21 ✓ ✓ ✓ 2004 D Joe Lieberman 19 ✓ ✓ 2000 R Elizabeth Dole 18 ✓ 1988 D Jesse Jackson 15 ✓ ✓ 1988 R Bob Dole 22 ✓ ✓ 1984 D John Glenn 24 ✓ 1980 R Gerald Ford 19 ✓ 1976 D George Wallace 19 ✓ ✓ 1976 D Hubert Humphrey 15 ✓ 1976 R Ronald Reagan 22 ✓ ✓ 1972 D Ted Kennedy 24 1972 D Hubert Humphrey 24 ✓ ✓

Three of these candidates won their nominations; the other 12 lost. That would imply that Sanders has around a 20 percent chance of winning the nomination, about where he is in betting markets.

Of course, you could look at that list and debate which candidates are and aren’t truly similar to Sanders. To be that well-known so early in the primary process, you generally need to either have (i) run for president or vice president before (e.g., Mitt Romney or Joe Lieberman), or (ii) be related to someone else who did (e.g., Jeb Bush), or (iii) be famous for reasons not directly related to politics (e.g., John Glenn), or (iv) be a political celebrity (e.g., Barack Obama). If you look only at the candidates who — like Sanders — had run for president or VP before, 2 out of 10 won their nominations (John McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012), so that’s still 20 percent.

There are other ways to slice and dice the list. Candidates polling like Sanders have done better in recent elections. And the list includes some candidates who never officially declared for president (e.g., Gerald Ford in 1980), so arguably, they should be excluded. If you look only at candidates who at some point officially ran for president, 25 percent (3 of 12 ) won. On the other hand, there’s also an argument for including the candidates who didn’t officially run since some of them were de facto candidates who lost in the “invisible primary” and bowed out before anyone voted to avoid embarrassment.

Achieving a delegate majority could be hard for Sanders

You could also argue that the three winning candidates from the list — Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 — aren’t good comparisons for Sanders, especially from a “The Party Decides” standpoint where preferences among party insiders and activists are leading indicators of voter preferences. Romney, for instance, had the backing of the GOP party establishment as a potential consensus choice, whereas Sanders largely lacks it from Democrats. Obama was a rising star, rather than someone left over from a previous cycle, and gained a lot of momentum among party elites as the 2008 cycle wore on, even if they also liked Clinton. McCain, who ran against the party establishment in 2000 but was someone the party could live with in 2008, is in some ways the most favorable comparison for Sanders.

In many respects, however, Sanders is more similar to Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, George Wallace in 1972 and 1976 or Ron Paul in 2012, candidates who represented important constituencies within their respective parties but who didn’t have an obvious way to unite the rest of the party behind them or to win a delegate majority.

At times, Sanders’s strategists actually seem to be leaning into the strategy of being a factional candidate. The Sanders campaign may have all kinds of reasons to feel aggrieved by how the party establishment has treated it, especially when it reads articles like the one in The New York Times that suggest the establishment is out to get it again! Nonetheless, the campaign hasn’t sought to mend fences when conflicts have arisen this year. Instead, Sanders aides told The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere that they think they can win the nomination with as little as a 30 percent plurality of delegates. That’s a risky strategy since it would necessarily entail a contested convention, where party insiders would play an outsized role. Nor would Sanders, a 77-year-old white man, reflect the various constituencies of the Democratic Party (and the demographics of the delegates themselves) as well as someone like Harris might.

But isn’t Sanders well-liked by a broad spectrum of Democrats — even if he isn’t necessarily their first choice? That isn’t entirely clear, either. Rather, his favorability ratings with Democratic voters have varied a lot from poll to poll. Here’s a table, for instance, comparing favorability ratings in the three most recent national or early-state polls where I could find them: Morning Consult’s national poll, Monmouth University’s poll of Iowa, and Saint Anselm College’s poll of New Hampshire. (Note to pollsters: Please ask favorability questions of your respondents! It would be helpful to have more than three recent polls to go by.)

Sanders’s favorability ratings are good but not great

Average of favorability ratings among Democratic voters in recent national, Iowa and New Hampshire polls

Morning Consult: U.S. Monmouth: Iowa Saint Anselm: N.H. Average Candidate Fav. Unfav. Fav. Unfav. Fav. Unfav. Fav. Unfav. Ratio Buttigieg 38% 9% 45% 9% 42% 6% 42% 8% 5.2 Biden 75 14 78 14 70 18 74 15 4.8 Harris 49 12 61 13 54 10 55 12 4.7 Booker 44 12 54 16 56 11 51 13 3.9 O’Rourke 47 11 60 13 46 17 51 14 3.7 Sanders 75 16 67 26 67 25 70 22 3.1 Klobuchar 28 13 51 10 31 13 37 12 3.1 Castro 28 12 36 9 24 8 29 10 3.0 Inslee 17 7 26 5 10 6 18 6 2.9 Warren 55 19 67 20 58 30 60 23 2.6 Hickenlooper 16 9 32 8 15 10 21 9 2.3 Delaney 14 9 31 12 17 7 21 9 2.2 Gillibrand 32 14 37 17 33 18 34 16 2.1 Gabbard 16 11 29 13 16 13 20 12 1.6

Only candidates whose favorability was asked about in all three polls are included in the table.

Morning Consult poll was conducted April 15-21, Monmouth University poll conducted April 4-9 and Saint Anselm College conducted April 3-8.

Sources: Polls

From what data we do have, however, Sanders’s favorability ranks somewhere in the middle of the Democratic pack. While Sanders does well in the Morning Consult poll, he has relatively high negatives in the polls of Iowa and New Hampshire. On average between the polls, Sanders has a favorable rating of 70 percent and an unfavorable rating of 22 percent, or a ratio of 3.1 to 1. That’s good, but not great. Julian Castro and Amy Klobuchar are much less well-known than Sanders but have about the same favorable-to-unfavorable ratio among voters who know them. And Buttigieg, Biden, Harris, Cory Booker and O’Rourke have better ratios than Sanders.7

So while Sanders currently trails only Biden in first-choice preferences, it’s not clear who would win a one-on-one race between, say, Sanders and Booker, or Sanders and Buttigieg, especially once Booker and Buttigieg became as well-known as Sanders is. Buttigieg in particular is already running close to Sanders in some recent polls (though not others) despite considerably lower name recognition.

Learning the lessons of 2016 — or overlearning them?

But doesn’t all of this sound awfully familiar? The chances of a candidate who polls fairly well are dismissed by the media on the theory that he lacks support from party elites and/or because supposedly he’s a factional candidate who won’t improve his support beyond his 20 percent or 25 percent base?

We made all of those arguments in 2016 about Donald Trump, about which — of course — we were pretty darned wrong.

The parallels between Sanders in 2020 and Trump in 2016 aren’t perfect, by any means. Sanders isn’t exactly a traditional politician, but he’s much closer to being one than a reality-TV star like Trump is. Trump initially polled poorly but surged in the summer of 2015, whereas Sanders started out polling well from the get-go.8 Trump (after his surge) was polling in first place, whereas Sanders is second behind Biden. Perhaps most importantly, Republicans use a winner-take-all system in some of their primaries, especially later on the race, so winning 30 or 35 or 40 percent of the vote could allow Trump to win a preponderance of delegates. The Democratic system is more proportional, so the same vote totals for Sanders might result in a contested convention.

Still, the cases are similar enough that Democrats see the parallels — “a political scenario all too reminiscent of how Mr. Trump himself seized the Republican nomination in 2016” is how the Times article put it. Reporters and people analyzing the campaigns see the parallels too, and that undoubtedly makes them reluctant to downplay Sanders’s chances — all the more so since Sanders himself did better in 2016 than most people (myself included) expected.

But our goal here at FiveThirtyEight is not to make predictions that minimize the amount of crap we get from readers. Instead, it’s to use data and history to zoom out and provide as much perspective as possible. Over the long run, that philosophy has worked pretty well. And over the long run, and across a larger sample — not just the recency bias brought about by 2016 — candidates in Sanders’s position have been fairly big underdogs against their respective fields,9 whether on the basis of polling alone or polling plus other factors. That doesn’t mean Sanders can’t win or won’t win, or that his support is only about name recognition. But in a field this wide open, and so early on in the race, he’s equivalent to a No. 1 or a No. 2 seed in the 68-team NCAA basketball tournament: about as likely (arguably) as anyone else to win it all, but still a clear underdog against the field.

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.

[asfeedin]

The problems with Italy, Germany’s plans to resume 2019-20 season

We’re no closer to knowing when soccer might return to action given the global reaction to slowing the coronavirus outbreak, but there’s still a lot happening in the broader soccer world. Gab Marcotti reacts to the main talking points in the latest Monday Musings.

Jump to: Modest proposal to subs rule | Italy, Germany plans to resume not feasible? | UEFA’s desire to finish season | Ex-Barca president speaks out

More substitutions, please!

As a response to the coronavirus pandemic, leagues are considering applying for permission to make five substitutions per match rather than the usual three. The motivation behind it is preserving players from injury as they’ll necessarily need to play a very congested schedule when the 2019-20 season resumes, but it’s the sort of change that ought to be considered on a permanent basis for the simple reason that it reduces footballers’ minutes on the pitch.

– Stream new episodes of ESPN FC Monday-Friday on ESPN+ – Stream every episode of 30 for 30: Soccer Stories on ESPN+

It’s not just about reducing fatigue, either. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you reduce minutes by, say, 10%, then you reduce the likelihood of injury by 10% too.

We’re not talking about the sort of continuous substitutions you often see in preseason friendlies, either. One obvious rule to put in place would be that you can have your five subs, but you can only sub on three occasions, which means you’d have more double or triple changes. It’s a minor thing perhaps, but a legacy that ought to stick around after this terrible public health crisis is over.

The flaws in Germany, Italy’s plans to restart the season

After the German Bundesliga comes Italy’s plan to restart the football season. We’ll know more after Wednesday’s summit with government officials — obviously, by video conference — but the Italian FA meanwhile unveiled their conditions for a restart. And the more you hear about this, the more skeptical you become.

There are plenty of similarities with the German plan. Players, coaches, staff, kit men, physios and others will be sequestered away at their club’s training grounds. They’ll be heavily screened and tested, both for COVID-19 and for antibodies. Of course, that’s just the protocol for training to resume: there will be a whole new one for actually playing the games.

2 Related

That said, there are myriad issues in simply trying to get the training regimen off the ground. Like the fact that half the Serie A clubs don’t have adequate facilities at their training grounds to accommodate everyone who will need room and board for nearly three months, particularly since they all need to stay in single rooms. Or the fact that while Italy has developed an extensive coronavirus testing program, performing some 60,000 tests per day, using it on footballers may not be a great move in a PR sense. Or that physios giving post-workout massages in full PPE for the first two weeks of training camp — as mandated — seems unnecessary at a time when there are legitimate shortages.

Once you get into games, it only gets more complicated.

Read all the latest news and reaction from ESPN FC Senior Writer, Gabriele Marcotti.

Serie A is hoping to cram 123 games — that’s how many are left in the 2019-20 season — plus the return legs of the Coppa Italia semifinals and the finals into less than two months. Then, there’s the ever-present (and ever-unresolved) June 30 “cliff edge,” when nearly a quarter of Serie A players become free agents or their loan deals expire and they return to their parent clubs. FIFA’s plan is nice and all, but it’s subordinate to national employment law, which basically means nobody knows what will happen.

– Ogden: What does ‘behind closed doors’ mean for a soccer game? – State of play: Where Europe’s top leagues stand in finishing season – Bandini: Lazio’s owner stands alone in finishing Serie A campaign

It’s not surprising that, according to reports, at least six Serie A clubs are against any form of a restart. (Among them, Brescia, who are last in the table, with owner Massimo Cellino saying he’d rather get relegated than participate in what he considers to be a pointless charade.) As for clubs in Serie B and the third division, forget about it: there’s no way they can sustain the expense or meet the logistical requirements. Like an increasing number of clubs in the English lower leagues, they also realize it’s simply not viable.

UEFA’s desires to finish season remain improbable

play

1:50

Stewart Robson discusses UEFA’s possible restructuring of this season’s Champions League.

As you’d expect, UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin would like play to resume. He told Italian daily Corriere della Sera that while public health remained the priority, he was “an optimist” who believed there were solutions to restart leagues and cups and end the domestic seasons.

“It will probably be without spectators, but the most important thing is playing games,” he said. “In these tough times we could bring some happiness and a sense of normality, even if they are only on TV. It’s too early to say we have to abandon the seasons.”

Ceferin is saying what his constituents — clubs and leagues — want him to say, and fair enough. Those for whom there is money at stake — not just TV money, but sponsor contracts — have a major vested interest to continue. Of course, that applies to UEFA competitions like the Champions League and Europa League too. In fact, were we to make predictions — a hugely risky thing to do, admittedly — you’d bet that the only football we’ll see in the foreseeable future is at the very highest level, where broadcast contracts and those super-clubs with the biggest revenues move the needle. And even that remains a very big question mark.

play

1:26

Julien Laurens ponders whether Real Madrid and Barcelona are close to going the way of Man United and Milan.

Ex-Barca president Rosell speaks to media

This weekend, former Barcelona president Sandro Rosell gave his first interview since 2014. He spent more than two of the intervening six years in custody awaiting trial after being accused of money laundering and financial irregularities, the same accusation that forced him to leave the club. He was ultimately fully cleared, which may explain why he’d have a legitimate chip on his shoulder about those two years behind bars.

Rosell remains a figure that looms large at Barcelona, so his words matter. After all, Jose Maria Bartomeu, the current president, was his right-hand man. Rosell said he wouldn’t run for president again “as long as my mother is alive, it’s a promise I made her,” but he’s bound to have a strong influence on the club’s presidential elections next summer, and he made it clear he’s ready to take sides.

For now though, he’s urging Barcelona to bring back Neymar, which is understandable given that he signed him in the first place.

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Tags: 201920, blog - marcotti, English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Germanys, Italy, Plans, problems, resume, Season

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[sorayahigashikata]

Chapter 84: "I NEVER SAW THIS COMING."

[thing1ewot-blog]

Moonrider – Forum Troll / Fail Spy

Well, folks, here we go with our first troll of the new year. And the winner is:

MOONRIDER!

Congratulations, Moonrider. Now take a bow…and while you’re down there, kiss our ass you ugly, bearded, fat fuck. (No, the shave didn’t help you man. You looked better with that ugly-assed mug covered up…but we’ll get to that in just a few moments.

Now, our history with Moonrider goes back to when this site was first getting set up. I was, at the time, only a passive part of what was going on. Gomez was trying like hell to set up a forum for the site at the time and was just getting his ass handed to him by a bunch of fucking Wotlabs trolls that were spamming it non-fucking-stop.

And it was Moonrider who kept saying over and over again that he was blocked and couldn’t register his name and that Gomez had banned his ass.

Of course, none of that shit was true.

They even set up an account in his name FOR him and he made some other stupid shit accusations against them and I think at that point they just said, “fuck it” and moved on.

Moonrider has always been an asshole. He never has anything good to say about anybody or anything other than himself, which is funny since the ugly fuck doesn’t have a whole shitload going for him. But I digress…

Here’s the type of asshole Moonrider is – he’ll post this in a response to somebody:

But when somebody else does essentially the same exact thing, he posts this:

In other words, Moonrider is allowed to use images in response because he has no fucking brains or vocabulary, but if anybody else does it then they’re a fucking idiot that needs to go back to school.

That’s Moodrider. That’s how he rolls.

So here’s the next question, who is this prick?

Well, you guessed it, we’re going to tell you. Moonrider’s name is Jesse Woodson. Ahhh fuck it…here you go:

Jesse H. Woodson 22109 Countryside Ln Lignum, VA 22726 Facebook MySpace (YES!!! He has a fucking MySpace Page!!!)

We’ll pause for you long enough to stop laughing and clean up the shit you just spewed out of your mouth all over the fucking monitor.

So here he is in all his glory, folks:

Yep.

Ugly.

And fat.

Just like almost all of them. It’s so fucking predictable it’s almost disappointing, isn’t it?

So, that’s it then. That’s him. Typical fucking World of Tanks, ugly, fatass troll.

UPDATE 1/6/18:

So Leftist brought to our attention the fact that Jesse made a bit of an ass of himself over at the Wotlabs forum when they changed the colors of the WN8 scale back in 2014. Apparently, he cried like a little bitch over it, then got essentially neg repped / shamed off the board completely.

That lasted about two weeks before he crept back saying his wife had died of cancer and he was burying her that Wednesday.

WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK?!?!

His wife has cancer and is dying so he’s worried about and bitching about colors on stats in a free-to-play pixel tank game?

HO LEE SHIT!!!

How do we know this? Well, let’s look at a few things:

Here’s his Facebook page where he announced he was engaged to a lady named Erin Beach. That’s in 2013 as stated.

So a year later, he’s crying like a bitch over stats, gets neg repped and shamed to death, vanishes, then comes back announcing she’s dead of cancer:

You know, that would be very sad but for one small little detail.

Here she is just this past October:

Pretty damn nice looking…especially for an alleged corpse.

And we have her Facebook page which we’re not going to post, but it’s also alive and well. She’s a girl after God’s own heart. She’s going back to school to get her degree and working her ass off at two jobs to take care of her family while shit-for-brains Jesse plays fucking eye-spy and pixel tank games.

Nice going, dipshit. You pissed away a woman most guys dream of finding over a fucking free-to-play pixel tank game.

So where does the “spy” thing come in? Well, this is where it gets dicey. This is either a complete, total, epic fail on his part or the most staggering set of circumstances to occur since John Wilkes Booth leaped down to the stage with a smoking gun in hand after he didn’t shoot President Lincoln.

Oh wait…

Anywho, so I get this mysterious email. Here it is in it’s entirely:

Guys,

I often disagree with your approach. And I think your political commentary is shoddy and takes away from your purpose. But with those digs I just wanted to tell you:

Rita published this crap about a skin in the console game and didn’t contact anyone for statements, didn’t realize that WG can take anything they want that users post to the forums etc. My point is, it was shoddy journalism.

While I don’t agree with your editorial slant, you guys do great investigative work. Undeniable. And the quality of your work is a sharp contrast in comparison to the gossip column Status Report has become.

I check the site out. I have a different view. In the end you have a right to your approach and you do some great work.

I do PR work in DC. You fact check better than a lot of major networks and papers. In a time where journalism has really devolved to printing gossip, you guys have some respectable principles. Diversity of opinion is great when the opposing side has command of the facts. It’s why I keep reading your stuff.

You can print this if you want. I sent this privately simply because it is partially critical. Please don’t use my name or phone if you do.

I am a crappy 50% player in the game who struggles passed tier 8, by the way.

Christopher Alexander 202.779.8387

I responded back cordially:

We never expected for everybody to agree with us. Hell, that’s not even REMOTLEY possible.

We were just sick to death of never having a voice. Of the Wargaming power clans who are also the moderators deleting anything and everything that shows who they really are and what they’re really all about while putting their own bullshit narrative into place by nothing but pure censorship.

If we get it wrong, it’s not because we just fucking made it up. We’re simply telling it how we see it with the information we actually hunt down and find.

Thanks for the letter. No offense is taken. We’re not above criticism (god knows we’ve gone ’round and ’round with Scorpiany on more than one occasion), but criticize us. Don’t come on our site trying to troll us with your bullshit like they do on the official forum. You’ll notice that Scorpiany still hangs around.

Thanks for the letter. Believe it or not, we’re getting more and more just like it almost daily now.

Regards,

Thing 1

So then, VERY quickly, he comes back with this:

Well… The fact that a dude named Thing 1 could bets his beat better than half the DC press corps (on either side of political spectrum) pretty awesome.

You guys have your thing, and I get it. But I’d love to see you guys sit down with Wargaming and do an interview. You’d need to be softer in your tone and that may not work with your intent, but that would be something.

While I am not as negative about them in general, there media relations are poor, and I doubt they would do it.

Funny, Chieftan and I were in adjacent units in Iraq (I was a Scout) and a few years ago I was in a match and chatted with him. When I explained what I do now he encouraged me to apply for as their PR head.

That would have been a tough job.

So they invest in the new tech. Does this mean they stop being accountants now and spend money to enhance the game? Or will they be more arrogant and double down with the attitude that the graphics fixes everything so stop complaining about your tier 8 you bought perpetually being feasted on by tier 10s.

Guess we’ll know soon.

So, instantly, I’m like:

So what WAS an apparently innocent email now turns into “I know the Chieftain” and “you should sit down with Wargaming”.

SAY FUCKING WHAT?

So, I make a couple of calls and go into investigation mode.

The guys email address is: christopher.alexander.dk@gmail.com

Why would DK, a multinational fucking publishing/media company, use fucking Gmail? Well, folks, they wouldn’t. I made a phone call and it turns out not only does DK NOT use Gmail, they have never heard of anybody named Christopher Alexander and are sure that he and his message are a complete fraud as far as they are concerned.

OK. Cool. So who is he then?

Probably best to run the phone number he provided. So I make another call and get that done. I also open the source on the email itself and find the final IP address of the original sender:

That, folks, is the IP of the cell phone that sent the email.

It’s an unregistered, pre-paid cell phone. Oh how convenient, eh? But we do know where it was used last. It was last registered bouncing off a tower in close proximity to Jesse’s house.

Well, let’s look at a few pictures to help you all visualize this better. Here is Jesse’s house:

Now, if you zoom out from that, you’ll see where the cell phone last registered:

Folks, that is one hell of a coincidence, is it not?

But then the question arises, why would he go to all the trouble? Well, we have a theory on that. You see, we think he thinks that he’s smart. He wanted to see what we would do, and if one of us would call the unlisted, pre-paid cell so they could fuck with us or something.

I don’t really know.

But I do know this: Moonrider came to this site earlier to see if we had published anything. First time he’s ever been here, folks. Today. Right after all this shit went down, he shows up.

Now folks, any ONE of these things in and of itself means nothing.

But ALL OF IT?! What the fuck are the odds?

Less than zero, folks.

[junker-town]

A day in the life of an inveterate MLB gambler in 2038

What will happen when betting on baseball isn’t just legal, but incredibly easy?

Before the game

The security lines are long because President Grohl is attending the game, but the slow line gives me time to finalize everything. The Reds to win, of course. They aren’t going to pay off that big because they’re such heavy favorites, but they’ve been playing .700 ball for almost two full months. The Nationals ... not so much.

It’s everything else that takes some more thought.

The over-under on Kumar Rocker is five innings, and I go with the over. The second-time-through-the-order nerds wouldn’t approve, but Jay Bruce is something of a throwback manager, and he lets his veterans go deeper into games than most. It’s one of the reasons Rocker threw 150 innings last year, and he shouldn’t have a problem with this Nationals’ lineup.

Over-under on runs scored for both teams is 8.5, which is low, but I still take the under. Rocker has been one of the best pitchers in baseball for almost two decades now, and he’s actually getting stronger with age. The Nationals’ lineup is, like, eight guys they found at the bus terminal, but Hunter Hunter can pitch a little, so it should be a low-scoring game.

Over-under on strikeouts for both teams is 25.5, and I go over. Might be the easiest bet of the game. Rocker’s averaged 16 strikeouts per nine just on his own for the last two years, which is better than the league average, and Hunter’s no slouch there, either.

Over-under on home runs is 2.5, and I take the under. It’s been a while since I’ve watched a game with fewer than two homers, but I’m all in on Rocker. And Hunter, too, I guess.

By the time I’m in my seat with a hot dog, I’m feeling pretty good. Maybe I won’t need to pick up extra shifts after all.

First inning

This is a fucking disaster.

Rocker has nothing. It’s like someone showed him the painting in the attic, and now he’s pitching to his age. He’s throwing weak-ass 97-mph meatballs, and the Nats can’t miss.

After the third homer of the inning, I delete the slip with the homer prop bet. When Bruce trudges out to the mound before the inning is even over, I delete the other slip. I’d be willing to bet the Nationals haven’t scored six runs in the first inning in any game over the last 20 years, and now they’re pummelling a Hall of Famer? The exact asshole I put my faith in?

I scream at Rocker as he leaves the mound. Something about his wife, I don’t know, but it sure makes some heads turn. Not my proudest moment.

Counterpoint: Screw that guy.

Finn Raloit comes in, and you can smell the smoke coming from his shoulder. He throws one pitch — one — and it’s a 99-percent hit probability off the bat. Here comes the seventh run, and this stupid, stupid crowd is going nuts. They haven’t seen a game like this all season.

The next batter breaks his bat, and the crowd groans because the two-percent hit probability comes up on their screen at the same time. Except it falls. It falls right in front of that fat tub of Trout in left. The guy’s, like, 50, and I get that he’s still a draw because of the chase, but why can’t they just park him at DH? Why does Bruce keep playing him in the field? After the last out, I let Trout know about my opinions. More heads turn, and I get a warning notification. Looks like we got ourselves a narc.

In the bottom of the first, the Reds hit two dingers, screwing up the other bet, and I consider literally printing out the slips so that I can eat them. Just om nom nom nom, right down into my stomach, where the acid and bile will turn the bets into literal shit.

There’s still a chance that the Reds could win, I guess. The Nationals’ bullpen is just that bad.

Second inning

Not as bad as the Reds’ bullpen, apparently. The idiots. The absolute idiots. It’s 12-2 with two outs, and I want to throw up.

Let’s see ... $5,000 on the Reds to win, with $4,000 on all of the side bets. That’s $21,000. Two months’ rent, give or take. I message my boss about those extra shifts, and he responds in about five seconds to tell me they’re all filled. Even if you want more than the standard 80, you can’t get it. This is bullshit.

Third inning

Printing out the slips is harder than it should be. Just one kiosk in the stadium? When I was younger, there was one in every other section.

But I get it done, and I start taking bites. The chewing is pissed off and deliberate, and I don’t care who’s staring at me. Get down in my belly. Become the literal shit that you are.

Fourth inning

Drinkin’.

Fifth inning

The itch starts again. I can’t scratch it, I absolutely can’t. I know how this ends. The voices in my head aren’t as persuasive as they used to be, which is a good thing.

Then I start running through the different scenarios.

If I can’t get more shifts, there’s no way I’m making rent until the middle of next month. A three-day notice will expire on the ninth, and I know those assholes will file on me the next day.

I’m not calling my parents again. It’s humiliating enough when they actually give me the money, but they haven’t done that in years.

Everything I could sell is gone. The Playstation IX, the multipass, the embots, the microwave tower, the creepy-ass dog robot from Boston Scientific that used to keep me company and rummage through my drawers while I slept. I’m not sure if I could liquidate everything I own and come up with $10,000, which is depressing.

The only thing standing between me and a shelter is a hot streak. It’s the only way.

So I turn on the notifications for the Official MLB Wager app.

God help me.

Sixth inning

The trick is not getting overwhelmed. The only problem is that I’ve never managed this trick successfully.

PROP BET: WILL VLADIMIR GUERRERO III REACH BASE SAFELY (+150)

He’s just a child, but screw it, he’s hot. I look to the right of the screen, and the bet is on.

PROP BET: 1ST PITCH BALL? (+95)

He’ll get ahead in the count. I look to the bottom and adjust the bet to $1000, then look to the left and confirm.

PROP BET: RUN SCORES THIS INNING? (+160)

If you’re going to bet on a runner, you might as well bet on the run. And, shit, this makes me remember that all of the inning prop bets need to be in before the inning starts. Lightning round.

PROP BET: NUMBER OF STRIKEOUTS THIS INNING, MORE THAN ONE? (+110)

Yes.

PROP BET: NUMBER OF STRIKEOUTS THIS INNING, MORE THAN THREE? (+2000)

Ha, ha. Sure, screw it, swing for the fences.

MLB.COM WARNING: YOU HAVE PLACED FIVE BETS WITHIN ONE MINUTE. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU ARE AWARE OF THE RISKS OF GAMBLING, AND CALL 1-800-STOP-BET IF YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.

Shut up, nerd. I scroll through the waiver and acknowledge.

PROP BET: ERROR COMMITTED IN INNING? (+200)

This is exactly the kind of bet a player can swing in a blowout without drawing any attention at all, especially the minimum-salary scrubs playing the garbage innings. Hell yes, I want to bet on an error.

PROP BET: WALK ALLOWED IN INNING? (+110)

Green-ass rookie on the mound. Yep.

PROP BET: OVER-UNDER ON GROUND-BALLS in play, TWO (+110)

Uh, crap, is Perez a sinker guy, or is he ... uh, fine, fine, yes, over.

Damn, too slow for more bets. The inning starts. The first pitch is a fastball right down the middle, and Guerrero doesn’t even pretend to be interested. Idiot.

PROP BET: 2ND PITCH BALL? (+95)

Yeah.

Guerrero swings at a pitch that bounces. Idiot.

PROP BET: 3RD PITCH BALL? (+90)

Sure.

It’s a ball. Finally. This is where it turns around.

PROP BET: BALL IN PLAY? (+120)

Yes.

Guerrero pops it up. So that bet hits, but the earlier one about reaching base is a miss, and they cancel each other out.

I’ve never even heard of this guy coming up to the plate.

PROP BET: 1ST PITCH BALL? (+95)

Sure ...

Seventh inning

PROP BET: 1ST PITCH BALL? (+95)

Yes. It’s a ball.

PROP BET: 2ND PITCH STRIKE? (+95)

Nailed it.

PROP BET: 3RD PITCH BALL? (+95)

Yes, and the hitter waves through a lazy breaking ball like an absolute asshole.

PROP BET: 4TH PITCH BALL? (+95)

Yes. Missed, dammit.

PROP BET: 5TH PITCH BALL? (+95)

Yes. It hits.

PROP BET: WALK ON NEXT PITCH? (+110)

Yes. But it’s fouled back. Idiot ...

Eighth inning

Cut off. Account empty. I use the cash in my wallet to buy a final beer. The strongest they have is 6.1 percent, which is about a third of the strength I’m looking for.

This is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad this is bad.

Ninth inning

A miracle.

Every day for the last two seasons, I’ll spend a few bucks on the MLB Powerball 10-Team Parlay, just for laughs. I pick the same teams to win, every time, unless they’re playing each other: Cubs, Royals, Astros, Pirates, Rays, Angels, Braves, Brewers, Indians, and Tigers.

It spells out “CRAP RABBIT.”

Which makes me laugh.

The odds are roughly .09 percent to hit on all 10 teams, which means a jackpot on a 10-dollar bet would be something like a 1,000 bucks. But today I put $100 on it. No reason, either. Was just feeling it.

All of those teams won today. Every single one of them. I’ve never hit on one of these.

I just need to find the slip.

The state lottery is literally the only place in the world that still prints shit out.

Why do they still print shit out? Idiots.

It’s not in my pockets. I check six times before I check another six times.

I know I bought one today. I always do.

I know I bought one today.

When I find it, hey, look at that, there’s another game tomorrow. And the day after that. And, well, there are like 1,000 games every year, and they can’t all be this shitty.

They can’t all be this shitty.

I just need to find the slip.

[businessliveme]

Women Desert Trading Floors as Bias Blocks Path to Management

(Bloomberg) –Camilla Sutton climbed through the ranks to become global head of foreign exchange at Scotiabank in Toronto. Along the way, she put up with being asked if she ought to travel while she had small children at home and being mistaken for a junior employee. And then there was the day when she was the only woman in a top-level meeting — yet again.

Like many other women in the $6.6-trillion a day currency market, Sutton eventually left trading. She now works for a company aiming to improve gender diversity.

“Very senior women in the industry are going to be the only woman at the table at every table they’re sitting at,” Sutton said. “It becomes very tiring and exhausting for women who are at senior levels within the industry to continually be faced with the everyday microaggressions.”

For some female professionals, it’s worse than that. Chau Pham, a former Morgan Stanley vice president in foreign-exchange sales in the U.S., said in January she was fired without explanation 22 days after returning from maternity leave. Stacey Macken, a broker, won an employment suit in September against BNP Paribas SA in London after saying she was paid less than male colleagues. She found a witch’s hat on her desk on one occasion.

But it’s also the daily grind that wears women down. Whether it’s being interrupted constantly in meetings, getting short shrift in pay or working without female role models, current and former traders say the industry remains a tough place for women.

Banks say they are trying to hire and promote women, and several pointed to specific programs and goals. But upper levels of management don’t show it. None of the top 10 investment banks has a woman running global currencies trading, according to information provided by the banks.

Read: Women Exceed 25% of Board Seats on S&P 500 for the First Time

Sutton and Catherine Flax, the former Americas head of foreign exchange and commodities at BNP Paribas, were among women highlighted in a Bloomberg story three years ago on the rise of female currency traders. Both have since left the industry.

Another departee: Meg Browne, who worked in foreign exchange for 30 years. She began as a trader at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then joined HSBC Holdings Plc and Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in sales and research. She once accompanied colleagues to a strip club in the 1990s “because I didn’t know how else to network with my bosses.”

“My worry is that things have not changed,” she said. “It’s just more hidden.” She now works in the non-profit sector.

Two women in the industry said that when they started in banking they were pushed toward sales rather than trading, a role seen as more traditionally female. Another said that while the bank where she worked talked up its diversity policies, her male colleagues said they didn’t see a problem with her being paid less than them. More than one man told her she was only there because she was female.

A fourth woman, who had been working in foreign exchange for almost a decade, said she left after taking a new role and being bullied and undermined by her male boss.

“I had a very hard experience,” she said. “I never quite recovered from it.” She runs her own company “so I never have to go back to that atmosphere.” Like the others, the woman asked not to be named for fear of how she’d be affected at work.

In the U.K., pay-gap disclosures unleashed by a new reporting requirement have put a spotlight on the lack of women in senior positions. Women make up more than 57% of the bottom pay quartile in finance and insurance and just over 30% of the top pay quartile, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the latest set of disclosures, in April 2019.

HSBC Holdings’s gap actually widened in the second year of mandatory reporting in the U.K. Elaine Arden, group head of human resources, said in a June report that the lack of women at high levels within the banking unit had a “material impact” on those figures.

Read: Saudi Women Get a New Right- Allowing Their Kids to Travel

Sutton now works for Women in Capital Markets, which seeks to accelerate gender diversity in the Canadian finance industry. She said when she worked in currencies that there were many women around at junior levels, but as she moved up the ladder the women gradually disappeared.

“All of a sudden you put your head up and look around and go ‘Oh my gosh, where did all the women go?” Sutton said. “The days of a stripper walking onto a trade floor are completely behind us. There isn’t anything as obvious as that. What we face now are these somewhat subtle biases that are built into every single day.”

Flax felt she had to work more hours than others. She was conscious of being the only single mother on the trading floor and was determined people wouldn’t think she couldn’t do the job. She also saw the ranks of women thin out as she moved up the hierarchy but said she thought it was a choice people made.

“I had an opportunity to go back to running a trading business and I said no, because I had my own lifestyle decisions,” she said.

Flax is now a management consultant, board member and adviser for various organizations. One thing that would help, she said, is for banks to adopt more flexible ways of working. Average working hours vary bank to bank and between roles, but, according to 2018 data from banking forum Wall Street Oasis, the lowest on average is 54 hours and the highest 85 hours.

Banks say they are trying to attract more women. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has set up several internal programs aimed at attracting and retaining female talent, including an initiative that brings together male executives, called “allies,” to discuss how to retain and advance women. The company had a female co-head of currency trading until March.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said it wants women to make up 50% of its incoming analysts and has set up five onsite childcare centers around the world that open at the start of the trading day. NatWest Markets said that “as an industry, we should be striving to attract and develop the best people regardless of demographic.”

And Bank of America has a female head of global G10 FX options trading and a spokeswoman said the company’s management team is more than 54% women and/or people of color.

Finance firms are now so desperate for female candidates that several of the companies recruitment specialist Richard Hoar deals with are putting headcount aside so they can snap up senior women when they become available, he said. But it can be hard. A study Hoar conducted for a client in mergers and acquisitions showed the proportion of women at director and managing-director level within finance was as low as 11%, compared to 20% in consumer and health care.

“Do firms look after female talent well enough?” asked Hoar, a director at Goodman Masson. “You tend to find lifestyle decisions that you might have to make as a woman that you don’t necessarily have to make as a man.”

Read: ‘Challenging and Lonely’ Path of Women CEOs Slowly Gets Busier

Allyson Zimmermann, a former currency broker, sees some signs that companies are taking their responsibilities more seriously. She now is an executive director in Zurich for Catalyst, a nonprofit that seeks to improve workplaces for women, and said she rarely has to make that business case any more.

“I see pockets of evidence it’s getting better,” said Zimmermann. “With the Metoo movement, companies cannot deny that something isn’t right here. The evidence that I see is companies are asking how do we do this, rather than why.”

Still, a British government study into what stops women from progressing in the workplace, by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, found that 35% of the gender pay gap can’t be explained by the data. It could come down to factors including “discrimination, harassment, preferences, and choices (constrained or otherwise).”

When currency-market professionals traveled to Barcelona for this year’s TradeTech FX conference, an annual industry get-together, they were greeted with a now-familiar sight: Out of the 100 speakers, just 12 were women.

“I would have definitely made a big bet that, 25 years from the day I started, the gender balance would be substantially different,” said Sutton.

–With assistance from John Ainger, Paul Sillitoe and Jeremy Diamond.

The post Women Desert Trading Floors as Bias Blocks Path to Management appeared first on Businessliveme.com.

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[thekingsnecktie-blog]

Ghostwriter Wanted (Some Collusion Required)

Recently The Daily Beast reported that Donald Trump is already excited about the idea of writing a “tell all” memoir:

[Trump] is planning on it being explosive and assumes (not without reason) that it will be a New York Times bestseller. And since the early days of his administration, he has conveyed his eagerness to get started on the project. “He sounded excited about it,” said one person who was present last year when the president made comments about writing a memoir. “He said it would sell better than even The Art of the Deal.”

Another source, who is a friend of Trump’s, said the president has casually discussed how such a book could be used to dish dirt and settle scores with his foes in the media, the Democratic Party, non-loyal Republicans, law enforcement, and even individuals in his own administration. Trump, according to this person, noted that this memoir could help “correct” the “fake news” already published in popular books and newspapers, and give him the opportunity to spin a juicy yarn on his time at the heights of power.

********

Mick Mulvaney stared at me from behind his desk in the chief of staff’s office. The man exuded honesty, integrity, and principle in a way matched only by the likes of McConnell, Nunes, or Ross.

“Blood test go OK?” he asked.

I nodded. “And you’re sure my family is all right?”

“You bet. I checked their handcuffs and gags myself. And there’s Netflix and Amazon in the safehouse.”

“Thank you.”

He peered down his granny glasses at me as the quizzing began. “What great author do you see Trump most resembling?”

I thought for a beat.

“Shakespeare?”

Mulvaney scowled. I tried again.

“Faulkner?”

The scowl deepened. “Think harder. In human history, who’s the greatest author in the English language—or any language, for that matter?”

I racked my brain. Then it came to me.

“Donald Trump?”

Mulvaney’s scowl transformed into a broad grin.

“Circle gets the square. You’ve read his previous bestsellers, I presume.”

“Naturellement.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What do you think the president’s greatest literary strength is?”

“I think he’s very good at creating fiction.”

“The president sees this book as a chance to set the record straight; to call out all the ‘fake news’ he’s been subjected to for the past three years.”

“Right.”

“Also he wants people to know he has really long fingers.” Mulvaney winked. There was a pause. “And everyone knows what that means.”

I forced a smile. There was another pause, until Mulvaney spoke, helpfully:

“It means he wants people to think he has a really big dick.”

“I think people are well aware that Mr. Trump is a really big dick.”

“Has one, has one,” Mulvaney corrected.

I made a note and took advantage of the lull to ask a question of my own.

“Will there be much back and forth with Mr. Trump while I’m writing? Normally I’d interview the subject at—”

Mulvaney cut me off. “We need someone who can run with this without needing their hand held. Dig?”

“No problem. But I assume, when it’s done, Mr. Trump will at least read it over to approve it?”

Mulvaney furrowed his brow. “We’ll give him the manuscript, yes.”

That furrowed brow worried me. “Are you saying he doesn’t have the attention span to read his own book?”

Mulvaney was silent, furrowing some more. I narrowed my gaze.

“He can read, right?” I asked.

“We’ll get Bill Barr to do a four page summary and someone can read it to him.”

I decided to let it go. “Any books he particularly admires that I might want to read, as models?”

“Two Corinthians.”

I wrote that down.

“Any thoughts on titles?” he asked while I was writing, as I thought he would, and I had some ready to pitch.

“Sure thing. How about, Trump: Almighty God-Emperor and Savior of Democracy (Part I)?”

“Bit subtle, don’t you think?”

“How about No Collusion: How I won the Presidency Without Really Trying?”

“I like it, but a bit narrow. Think bigger.”

“Mein Kampf?”

“Love that. Might be taken, though—we’ll do a copyright search.”

“Any topics you’d like me to avoid?”

“Just his refusal to release his tax returns, his multimillion dollar deals with Russia that he lied about to the American people, the $50 million bribe he offered Putin in the form of a penthouse apartment, the money laundering for Russian oligarchs, the real estate fraud, felony campaign finance violations, hush money for mistresses, anything having to do with abortions he might have paid for, the Trump Foundation, the Trump inauguration, his previous marriages, his temper, his early onset dementia—“

I stopped him. “I get it,” I said. “And I presume there will be an audiobook too?”

“For sure. The President will read it himself.”

My eyes must have gotten big, because Mulvaney’s got narrow. “He can read!” he barked, reading my mind.

“Of course.” A coughing fit came over me. Mulvaney looked rattled. He looked down, mumbling to himself, and I noticed for the first time that in his hand he had prayer beads. “If they’ll let him record it from Sing Sing,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, regaining his composure. “Anyway, we can always get Alec Baldwin to do it.”

I nodded. He seemed mollified. “Any other questions, or can we button this thing up?”

“Just one. Why don’t you just hire Tony Schwarz again?”

Mulvaney’s lip curled into a sneer. Actually, it may have done that around 1967 and been fixed that way ever since.

“That is a name we don’t mention around here. The man you’re talking about proved to be a shameless publicity hound and traitor to his country. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I hesitated.

“We’re also looking into that rumors he might be Jewish. Jared’s on the case.”

I was confused. “But isn’t Jared—”

Mick cut me off again. “It’s because of people like Schw—I mean, that author—that we’ve developed the GLAS protocol.”

“GLAS protocol?” I asked.

“Ghostwriter Loyalty Assurance System. It’s all in the fine print in the contract. A microscopic silicon chip will be inserted behind your ear, subcutaneously. Should you violate the terms of your contract at any time—say, by getting all uppity and mouthing off to the press—a small electrical shock will be applied remotely, as a reminder of your obligations. Should you continue to act out, the voltage can be increased accordingly. And should you prove completely uncontrollable, the chip is capable of releasing a nerve agent into your bloodstream that will induce a violent and painful death within 24 hours.”

“Is that legal?”

“Normally no. But as a great man once said, it’s not a crime when the president does it. Cool with that?”

“Actually, that’s not much worse than some of the deals I’ve signed in the past.”

“Anything else? I have to get over to the Oval Office and look at paint swatches for the re-education camps.”

“One last thing. Not to be crass, but…..about the pay?”

Mulvaney waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, there’s no money upfront. It’s an honor just to be asked to write this book, don’t you think?” He continued before I could answer. “But don’t worry: you’ll make a killing in profit-participation. It’s the same deal President Trump has always given his contractors. Ask anyone in Atlantic City.”

I frowned. He seemed to sense my anxiety.

“Hey, if you can’t trust Donald Trump, who can you trust?”

I threw up in my mouth a little.

Mulvaney opened a desk drawer. “So, if there’s nothing else, it’s just a matter of dotting i’s and crossing t’s…..”

He pulled out a fountain pen. I could see that it was filled with my own blood, which the White House medical staff had drawn earlier. He held out the pen and slid the contract across the desk, nodding for me to sign on the line which was dotted. “Just think,” he said, smiling, “you’ll always be remembered for your part in telling the Trump story.”

As I took the pen, I smelled sulfur.

[radioleary-blog]

The Injustice League

If we had to elect a billionaire womanizer with anger issues, I wish we had elected Bruce Wayne instead. That I could get behind. Think about it, President Batman. How does that sound? Pretty damn awesome, that’s how that sounds! “Pow!” “Biff!” “Ka-Pow!”  I love those comic book sound effects that accompany a solid kick to the face or a roundhouse punch on the old Adam West Batman show. I bet “Ka-Pow!” probably hurt a hell of a lot more than “Biff!” or “Pow!”, right? There was definitely a wide range of fight sound effects, I actually did a little research to find some other real examples of superheroes hitting each other, and they weren’t all great:

“Bam!” That’s not a punch, that’s the sound of that obnoxious midget Emeril Lagasse cooking food on TV.

“Zonk!” Sounds less like a mighty blow from Thor’s hammer and more like the stoner from Doonesbury doing blow and getting hammered.

“Boom!” “Crash!” These two word show up a lot in comics, and what scares me is these are the same words they use on Wall Street every day to describe what’s happening to our retirement accounts. It doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that fluctuations in the market are like Batman’s fist, and my 401K is the Joker’s face.  

“Crack!” “Zap!” “Crash!” That sounds like the drug you did, the police hitting you with a taser, and the sound you make as you hit the sidewalk. I would imagine the next sound effects would be “Make-Bail!” “Court-Appear!” and “Do-Time!”          “Fap!” “Fwap!” “Sock!” “Bonk!” “Bamf!” “Wank!” “Splooge!” I kid you not, these were all really used in Marvel Comics from the 1980s. But it sounds more like the soundtrack of every teenage comic book nerd discovering masturbation. The next sound effect was most likely “Ma! Don’t You Knock?!”

But I digress. President-elect Batman. The Caped Crusader-in-Chief. The Dark Knight POTUS. Sure, it’s crazy, but I think that actually sounds less insane than our reality here on Earth-Prime, with President-elect Donald J. Trump. What the hell happened? Is it just me, or does it feel a little like we somehow stepped into an alternate reality that really wasn’t supposed to happen. Like someone messed up the timestream, and we all have a residual memory of things having been better somehow in a significantly different world. We can feel it in our bones, that things were intended to go down another way. It’s kind of like The Man In the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel of an alternative reality where America lost World War II. It was a book I loved as a young man and read over and over, but now I know it as that show that’s supposed to be good that I can’t see because I don’t have Amazon. I preferred the book. There are certainly parallels, Trump actually lives in a high castle. But it’s more like The Man In the Gaudy Ostentatious Gold-Plated Tower. And rather than leading an underground resistance against Nazi and Imperial Japanese rule, he just kind of causes traffic in midtown Manhattan to become a permanent unmoving cluster-fuck from MoMa to The Met.

Maybe Donald Trump is like Batman from an alternate reality where his parents don’t get killed in an alley during a robbery attempt. So rather than devote his life to seeking justice and protecting the city from evil, he instead goes on the Howard Stern show and talks to Baba Booey about third-world swimsuit models he’s banged while he and one of his three wives were “on a break”. You know, Bruce Wayne only pretended to be a shallow, rich, gropey asshole so people would never suspect he was secretly a hero. I don’t think our President is pretending, and I don’t suspect he’s secretly a hero, either. I hope he is a hero, sure, but I still hope Andy Kaufman is just faking his own death, too.

Hey! Wait a minute! This explains why Trump’s eyes are so white while the rest of his face is burnt orange! He wears a mask! Holey Moley, It’s all starting to make sense! But whereas Batman fought the Penguin, The Riddler, and Poison Ivy, Trump mostly just fought Rosie O’Donnell. And a girl in a beauty pageant. And the cast of Hamilton. And I don’t think he actually won any of those fights, either. While Batman keeps the peace in Gotham City, one time on the Celebrity Apprentice Donald Trump kept Meatloaf and Gary Busey from fist-fighting over missing art supplies. Yeah, Batman seems like the better choice to me. Although I wonder what the sound effects would be for a Batman administration? “Veto!” “Photo-Op!” “Fund-Raise!”

As I’ve been thinking about this, and taking this weak premise far too seriously, I’m beginning to realize I may have some real problems with a Batman presidency. Not so much with the hitting and the vigilante stuff. Not with the fact that he’s a lunatic who deludedly thinks he rules a major metropolitan city, and if anyone else in a costume challenges him, he locks them away in Arkham mental asylum. No, my problem is the way he treats Alfred. Batman just may be a republican after all, because he treats Alfred the way the Walton family treat Wal-Mart employees.

How come every villain in Gotham City, from Clayface to Two-Face, they all have dozens and dozens of well-trained mercenary henchmen working for them, but Batman? He’s just has Alfred. He makes Alfred do absolutely everything. Bruce Wayne is like the richest man in Gotham City, but he’s too cheap to hire any real workforce? No wonder Gotham City is constantly overrun by criminals - Bane’s got an elite squad of para-military assassins knocking off the Gotham Bank, and Batman’s got an 85 year old British guy who’s gotta finish a load of laundry before he gasses up the Batmobile.

Alfred is like, “Yeah, right away, ‘Master Bruce’, mind if I put your damn socks away before I do the pre-flight check on the Bat-Copter? ‘Cause if I don’t take them out of the dryer right now, everything is going to be wrinkled AF by the time you get back.”

“You do realize I’ve only been trained to kiss rich people’s asses and serve soup, right? You want me to set the table and get the door? No problem. You want me to load Kryptonite missiles onto the Bat-Tank? Then you better download the manual, Caped Crusader, because they didn’t cover that shit in butler school. It’s bad enough you’ve got me changing the oil in the Bat-Jet while I’m wearing a tuxedo, but then I gotta keep dinner warm all night while you brood over the city from the top of a watertower.”

“You know, you employ like 50,000 people worldwide with this Wayne Foundation and Wayne Industries, and routinely hire thousands more temporary workers and independent contractors. You know that, right? You are on the board of directors. Here’s a crazy idea, let me get back to polishing the silver and ironing your cape, and maybe you bring in some people who are actually qualified to run your advanced-weapons motor pool.”

Is it my imagination or does it look like Alfred works seven days a week? Every crisis I’ve ever seen in Gotham, Alfred is always right there. I’ve never seen him take a day off. You’d think if something happened on a weekend, Bruce Wayne would have like a part-time guy there. “Hey, Travis, is it? Can you hold off on doing those dishes and run down to the Bat-Cave and dig out my underwater Batsuit? Killer croc is starting some shit. No, I don’t know where it is exactly, Have you looked by the giant penny? Or the T-Rex? Alfred has his own system. You guys need to communicate on things like this.”

You think Alfred ever hangs out with Jarvis, the Avengers’ butler, and they just bitch about their jobs? “You just have Batman, you have it easy, Thor leaves his hammer laying around and I can’t move it, I have to vacuum around it, and I always vacuum up Ant-Man. And they ought to call her the Scarlet Bitch, let me tell you.”

But it just goes to show you how old these characters are that they have a butler. Who the hell has a butler these days? Mike Tyson had an entourage of like 50 people, but even he didn’t have a butler. A tiger-wrangler? Sure. A Maori Tattooist? Yes. No butler. Butlers are an anachronism from an antiquated class system. Batman still reflects the culture of the 1930s when he was created. Good thing Batman isn’t from like 70 years earlier than that, or it probably wouldn’t be a white guy working for him, and he probably wouldn’t have a choice. And when he said ‘Master Bruce’, he’d really mean it.

So let me see if I got the story straight here. Alfred raises Bruce from a kid after his parents were killed. And in gratitude, Bruce makes him work like thirty years past retirement age. No pension plan? So he’s just gotta keep working until he drops dead? No 401K? Bruce Wayne is one cheap bastard. No. He’s a Cheap Bat-stard.

Batman is so cheap he won’t even rent a nice place for his Batman stuff, he just lurks in an underground cave full of batshit and stagnant water. I don’t know which he’s gonna catch first, the Riddler, or dysentery. Is he gonna collar a criminal, or just get cholera. A damp cave? Really? It’s a breeding ground for mosquitos. He’ll get the zika virus before he gets the Joker. He’s basically in a subterranean pit filled with bat guano, breathing that shit in, he’ll get double-pneumonia before he gets two-face.

And they thought Howard Hughes was a crazy billionaire. At least Howard Hughes was smart enough to bang some movie stars. Batman? What’s his thought process on a Friday night? “Hmm, what to do tonight...I could date that supermodel who’s been sending me nude selfies….but on the other hand I could impale some junkie mugger with a couple of Batarangs… I gotta go with Batarangs. Hey Alfred!”

Make America and Gotham City great again.

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND – MAY 18

After a couple slower weekends with no new movies grossing more than $20 million, we get the second doozy of a summer sequel in Fox’s Deadpool 2, which will try to recapture the magic of the 2016 movie that became one of Fox’s biggest hits to date, just behind Avatar and a couple of the Star Wars prequels. So let’s get to that one first…

DEADPOOL 2 (Fox)

The second big release of the summer is this sequel to the action-comedy that grossed

$363 million domestically after opening with $132 million over the Presidents Day weekend in 2016. The original Deadpool was quite an eye opener for Fox and other studios, because it was the first absolutely ginormous R-rated blockbuster in quite some time, and it was only one of three R-rated movies to gross over $300 million.  That success helped pave the way for Fox to allow filmmaker James Mangold to make the R-rated Logan, which would become the highest-grossing spin-off from the X-Men franchise after Deadpool with $226 million. What do we learn from this lesson? Superhero movies are still frequented by 17 to 34 year old males who don’t like their action watered down.

Ryan Reynolds had been talking about playing Deadpool for years, but his appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a disappointment for the fans of the character.  Undaunted, Reynolds continued to push to get an R-rated Deadpool movie made, teaming with Zombieland creators Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to write and produce Deadpool. That drive to make the movie proved wise, and that writing team has been reunited for the sequel, joined by director David Leitch, who directed the first John Wick movie and last year’s Atomic Blonde.  (Leitch is also attached to direct the Fast and Furious spin-off starring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham’s Hobbs and Shaw.)

Besides changing many minds in Hollywood about R-rated fare, Deadpool really turned things around for Reynolds who had been floundering after the back-to-back disappointments of X-Men Origins and Green Lantern, although the former did considerably better than the latter. Reynolds still had a few hits after that including the action-thriller Safe House with Denzel Washington and the DreamWorks Animation family film The Croods, but there were some definite misfires. R.I.P.D. was one of the bigger ones, an expensive FX movie that grossed just $33 million, an amount that was actually pretty good for his drama Woman in Gold with Helen Mirren. Self/Less and Criminal both bombed, and sadly, the excellent Mississippi Grind, directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden of next year’s Captain Marvel, didn’t get much theatrical attention. 2016’s Deadpooldoubled the domestic gross of Reynold’s biggest previous film, and that might have helped his 2017 action-comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguardwith Samuel L. Jackson, which grossed $75 million after a $21 million opening, based on a $30 million budget. It definitely seems like Deadpoolhas made Reynolds a bankable star once again.

As you can read in my review, I really enjoyed the movie, and reviews have generally been decentfor a non-Marvel comic book movie, and that will help drive up the excitement for this event movie that could see it bringing in $20 million or more in Thursday previews and probably $60 million or more when that’s compiled into Friday’s box office.

Deadpool 2 is opening in 4,332 theaters, which is the widest release for an R-rated film, which is no surprise, because Fox’s marketing has really been on point, driving up anticipation for the movie that should help it gross $150 million or more this weekend. Earlier in the summer, I thought it might open even bigger but had to bring my expectations down to something more realistic.

And that just leaves us with the week’s Deadpool 2 counter-programming…

BOOK CLUB (Paramount)

Somewhat of an anomaly in terms of counter-programming is this comedy from Paramount that is targeted specifically towards the older women who were probably out in force last Sunday for Mother’s Day. This one stars Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, so if you’re a woman over 50, this probably is your Avengers: Infinity War.  

It’s the feature film debut of Bill Holderman, who made the film independently before Paramount decided to get behind it, which will probably end up being a wise move since there’s so few movies for women over the next month.  Sure, there’s last week’s Life of the Party and Breaking In, but neither movie received decent reviews or audience ratings, so they probably will fall away, and this film’s warm and fuzzy story about older women finding their sexuality through reading E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey might seem like a solid bet. (No, I have no idea why Universal, who made the movies based on James’ books, didn’t pick this one up for a possible DVD box set somewhere down the line.)

It’s odd that this movie didn’t open over Mother’s Day weekend, as it might have done very well, but it’s still in pretty good shape to make around $10 million depending on whether the cast gets out there for talk shows, which they seem to be doing. Essentially, it’s up for third place against last week’s openers Breaking In andLife of the Party with Global Road’s family film Show Dogs acting as a possible surprise spoiler.

SHOW DOGS (Global Road)

In a summer that’s surprisingly devoid of family and kids films, Global Road will try to get in one more family film before Disney-Pixar’sThe Incredibles 2next month. This one involves talking dogs (always popular with the kiddies), and it’s directed by Raja Gosnell (Big Momma’s House, The Smurfs), who has a lot of experience with talking dogs between Scooby-Dooand Beverly Hills Chihuahua, both which were huge hits.

There’s certainly a young audience out there for Show Dogs, which features Will Arnett and the voices of Alan Cumming, Stanley Tucci, Gabriel Iglesias (who seems to do more voice work than actual acting), Ludacris and Shaquille O’Neal, as well as Rupaul and Natasha Lyonne, which might make this the craziest cast ever put together for a family film. (Maybe second to Disney’s G-Force?)

Even though the fledgling Global Road (formerly Open Road) is releasing the movie into over 3,100 theaters, there just doesn’t seem to be much buzz around the movie, so business might be spread out thinly among them, but who knows? The only thing even remotely approaching a “family friendly” film are the two Marvel movies currently in theaters, and there’s a definite vacuum at a time when family films could thrive. Even so, Show Dogs– not to be confused with the Cuba Gooding Jr. hit Snow Dogs-- is likely to end up with between $8 and 9 million, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it explodes with the weather getting warmer and bored kids needing something to do. (Or rather, parents needing something to keep those bored kids entertained.)

POPE FRANCIS: A MAN OF HIS WORD (Focus Features)

Opening moderately into 350 theaters is this new doc by Wim Wenders about the current pope, which is more about following him around on his day-to-day then telling his life story. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival over a year ago, but Focus picked it up as part of their recent incentive to release more docs. (They also have the Mr. Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighborcoming out next month.) Depending on whether the Catholic Church backs the movie and helps promote it might help determine how well it does, but I think an opening between $1 and 2 million is doable, putting it somewhere in the bottom of the top 10 or just outside with Magnolia’s RBG, which will expand into the same number of theaters. (I was supposed to see this on Monday but flaked out on the screening, though I’ll be making up for it on Thursday night at a special preview screening, so I might have some thoughts later this week.)

This week’s Top 10 should look something like this…

1. Deadpool 2 (20thCentury Fox) - $153.2 million N/A 

2. Avengers: Infinity War (Disney/Marvel) - $29 million -53%

3. Book Club (Paramount) - $9.2 million N/A

4. Breaking In (Universal) - $8.8 million-50%

5. Life of the Party (New Line / WB) - $8.4 million -54%

6. Show Dogs (Global Road) - $8.1 million N/A

7. Overboard (MGM/Pantelion) - $5.5 million -45% 8. A Quiet Place (Paramount) - $4.2 million -35%

9. I Feel Pretty (STXfilms) - $2 million -38%

10. Rampage (New Line / WB) - $1.6 million -56%

-- Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (Focus) - $1.5 million N/A

LIMITED RELEASES

For those who aren’t quite religious enough to see a Pope Francis doc but still want to alleviate any post-Easter guilt, there’s Paul Schrader’s excellent dramatic thriller First Reformed (A24), starring Ethan Hawke as a Catholic pastor who runs the First Reformed Church in Upstate New York that’s getting ready to celebrate its 200thanniversary. When he meets a young pregnant woman (Amanda Seyfried) whose husband is having issues, he throws himself into helping them, but things get dramatically worse as he gets involved. I’ve been hit or miss on Schrader’s films in recent years, but First Reformed is his best movie in a very long time. It’s definitely a slow build of a movie, but the tension Schrader creates building up to the amazing ending makes me want to see it again.

I can also recommend Dominic Cooke’s On Chesil Beach (Bleecker Street), a period drama starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle (both of whom appeared in last week’s The Seagull), which is an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name. The young actors play Florence and Edward, two youngsters who meet and fall in love, but whose wedding night is disastrous, to say the least. We watch the two on their wedding night with flashbacks to when they first meet, and it’s a pretty heavy-duty drama, rather difficult to watch at times, but Ronan and Howle are amazing in it.

Jim Carrey stars in Alexandros Avranas’ thriller Dark Crimes (Saban Films), playing a police officer named Tadek who begins to similarities between an unsolved murder and a crime from a book by writer Krystov Kozlov (Marton Czokas), so he begins tracking the writer and his sex-club worker girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Carrey is kind of mixed when playing non-comedic roles, but this is also his first starring role in a feature in a very long time, so maybe it’s worth a look? It opens in select cities and will be On Demand after a month-long run on DirecTV.

Göran (The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975) Olsson’s doc That Summer (IFC Films) acts as a prequel to the Maysles’ iconic documentary Grey Gardens, as it assembles some never-before-seen footage of Edith and Edie Beale and their Long Island home, which once saw the likes of Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger and Truman Capote pass through it.

Another intriguing doc is Saving Brinton (Northland Films), a portrait of Mike Zahs, an eccentric Iowa collector who discovers a number of rare showreels from William Franklin Brinton, including footage of Teddy Roosevelt and some of Georges Melies’ early work, part of the collection of moving pictures that Brinton brought to the Heartland.

The Hollow Child is a supernatural thriller from Jeremy Lutter (Reset), which Vertical Entertainment just picked up out of Cannes last week. It stars Jessica McLeod as troubled teen Samantha who wants to expose a supernatural imposter and rescue her foster sister. Here’s an intriguing trailer for it:

I’m kind of intrigued by Champion, the Korean arm-wrestling movie being released by Well Go USA and starring Ma Dong-seok (Train to Busan). It’s the feature debut of director Kim Yong-wan, and it’s a sports comedy (influenced by Sylvester Stallone’s Over the Top) about a Korean adoptee who becomes an arm wrestling champion. It is also opening almost a year to the date of ANOTHER movie called Champion. Go figure.

Apparently Matthew Portfield’s narrative Soller’s Point (Oscilloscope) already opened in Baltimore last weekend, but it opens in New York this Friday and L.A. on May 25. It stars McCaul Lombardi as Keith, a 24-year-old living with his father (Jim Belushi) on house arrest in Baltimore after his release from prison as he tries to create a new life. It also stars Deadpool 2’s Zazie Beetz, so if you’re in New York, you can do a double feature!

Ian (King Corn) Cherney’s doc The Most Unknown (Abramorama / Motherboard) is an experiment which follows a group of scientists as they explore new fields and places, and it’s probably no surprise that filmmaker Werner Herzog was an advisor on the film being that it crosses over with his own interests in science.

Netflix has a really great movie streaming this weekend called Cargo, an Australian post-Apocalyptic film starring Martin Freeman, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival. Directed by Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, this is an amazing film set in the Australian Outback that’s so different from The Walking Deadand all the other zombie movies being made in its wake. Like the show, it does deal more with the living than the dead, but it has such an interesting array of characters. You can read more about it in my Tribeca mini-review here.

Netflix is also offering the South-African romantic dramedy Catching Feelings from Kagiso Lediga (who also stars in the film), which I know absolutely nothing about.

Me? I’ll probably be spending most of my weekend at the Metrograph, seeing the movies in the Sylvia Chang retrospective, some more Kubrick, Hitchcock’s The Birdsand Ghost Dogfrom Jim Jarmusch.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The drama over who exactly will lead the newly elected Democratic House majority is continuing — and getting more complicated. There’s no guarantee House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi will become speaker in January. Her critics are numerous and appear to be intensifying their efforts, with a bloc of them releasing a letter on Monday pledging to oppose her. And this process may go on for a while.

But Pelosi has a big advantage: There is no obvious alternative to her. It is, as the cliche goes, hard to beat something with nothing. Right now, despite all the buzz about Pelosi’s future, no Democrat is actually running against her for speaker. She is almost certain to win the internal House Democratic vote next week to be the party’s nominee for speaker, in part because she might be running unopposed. Her critics’ best bet to defeat her is probably to wait till the formal speaker vote in January, refuse to back Pelosi then, and force her to step aside — and then hope someone else emerges with enough support to get the job.

To explain Democrats’ lack of options, let’s look at some factions within the caucus, none of whom have coalesced around a candidate who could easily supplant Pelosi.

The current leadership

In some ways, all this uncertainty is because of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, who is the House Democratic Caucus chair, the No. 4 post in the party hierarchy, was taking steps to make a run for speaker if it became clear that Pelosi didn’t have enough support. He has the right resume: He’s a longtime member, he’s already on the leadership team, he has a mainstream ideology (he votes with the president’s positions at a pretty average rate for House Democrats according to our Trump Score), and he’s significantly younger (56) than Pelosi (78), whose critics have highlighted her age.

But Ocasio-Cortez beat Crowley in a huge upset in a June primary. That left the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, and the No. 3 Democrat, James Clyburn of South Carolina, as the main alternatives to Pelosi among top party leaders. Hoyer is 79. Clyburn is 78. Hoyer also has a reputation as a centrist (probably reinforced by the fact that he is an older white man) — and I think Ocasio-Cortez and others in the Congressional Progressive Caucus are unlikely to embrace him.

Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t rule out Clyburn or Hoyer (or Pelosi) becoming the speaker. It’s a complicated job and Democrats may eventually conclude that at least in 2019 and 2020, they can’t afford a speaker who’s learning it on the fly. This trio has been leading the Democrats since 2005 — so almost no other Democrats in the House have any real experience with doing what a speaker does, such as representing the party to the media, navigating the complicated House rules governing votes and floor debates, and creating a policy and political strategy for the entire bloc of House Democrats.

There are a few younger Democrats with posts further down in the leadership chain who have signaled they want to move up, including Illinois’s Cheri Bustos, New York’s Hakeem Jeffries and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair was a key figure in winning the party the majority. But it would be a big leap for any of them to become speaker right now — they are fairly low-profile and aren’t known as legislative leaders. It would be more logical for one of them to become the No. 2 or No. 3 Democratic leader in January and start positioning themselves to become the speaker in 2021, if Democrats still have control then.

Possible speakers: Bustos, Clyburn, Hoyer, Jeffries, Lujan, Pelosi

The anti-Pelosi bloc

There is no official anti-Pelosi contingent, but we recently wrote about 21 members who over the last year have signaled that they might oppose Pelosi. (This group overlaps some with the 16 who signed Monday’s letter, but some members on our list didn’t sign, and some of the signers were not on our list.) Why are none of them viable speaker candidates? First, 10 of the 21 are newly elected to Congress — and freshmen are traditionally not chosen as speaker, in part because the job is so complex.

Among the 11 anti-Pelosi incumbents, only one, Linda Sanchez, is already on the Democratic Party’s leadership team as the caucus’s vice chair. She was planning to run for Crowley’s job, which tells me that she didn’t think she had enough support to aim for Pelosi’s. But earlier this month, her husband was indicted on charges of misusing federal funds by charging personal expenses to the power company he worked for. The congresswoman has not been charged with anything herself, but she said she would not pursue a new leadership post.

All but two of the 11 anti-Pelosi incumbents are men. This a major problem for this bloc, as Pelosi’s defenders are increasingly arguing that a gang of men is seeking to unseat Pelosi, the only woman who has ever served as speaker of the House. Aside from Sanchez, the other prominent female anti-Pelosi figure is New York’s Kathleen Rice. But Rice and three other Pelosi critics — Tennessee’s Jim Cooper, Pennsylvania’s Conor Lamb and Oregon’s Kurt Schrader — are among the most conservative Democrats in the House, according to our Trump Score. That won’t help any of them become speaker in a House Democratic Caucus that includes dozens of members who want to impeach the president.

There’s Tim Ryan of Ohio and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts — youngish, charismatic figures with fairly normal voting records for Democrats. But they have little experience in leadership on Capitol Hill, making them far from ideal candidates for speaker. The other anti-Pelosi incumbents — New York’s Brian Higgins, New Jersey’s Bill Pascrell, Colorado’s Ed Perlmutter and Texas’s Filemon Vela — are fairly low-profile figures.

Possible speakers: Moulton, Ryan

The committee leaders

When Republicans picked him to be speaker in 2015, Paul Ryan had not been in the party’s formal leadership. Instead, he was the top Republican on a key committee (Ways and Means). And there’s a good chance that a new speaker could emerge from the 22 Democrats who lead the party on various committees.

But why isn’t there any obvious candidate now? First, there’s age. Congress is generally run on seniority. So, all else being equal, committee leaders tend to be older. Just five of these 22 are under 65. So again, if the anti-Pelosi movement is really about a younger look for Democrats, most of these men and women aren’t ideal speaker candidates.

Also, none of these 22 has been in the top leadership either, so they haven’t done all the fundraising and political work that Clyburn, Hoyer and Pelosi have.1

Finally, becoming the top Democrat on a committee generally requires Pelosi’s support (or at least a lack of outright opposition). So these 22 leaders have some loyalty to Pelosi — and some incentive not to cross her, in case she remains in charge.

Pelosi’s relationships with this bloc of members are extremely important to consider — they aren’t likely to break with her unless it’s fairly clear she truly can’t become speaker. If Pelosi can’t win, Adam Schiff of California might be an ideal speaker alternative. He is the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which has made him the party’s spokesperson on high-profile issues surrounding Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian interference. He is poised and articulate. He is 58 years old. (On the other hand, he literally represents Hollywood, which is perhaps not the message Democrats want to send as they try to win Midwestern swing states like Wisconsin in 2020.)

Possible Speakers: Schiff; Adam Smith of Washington, top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee; John Yarmuth of Kentucky, top Democrat on the House Budget Committee

The Congressional Black Caucus

At least 50 black Democrats were elected this month — African-Americans will constitute more than a fifth of the caucus in the House. They are the chamber’s biggest minority group, and the one that is being most vocal about wanting more power. Clyburn and Marcia Fudge of Ohio are openly considering speaker bids if Pelosi falters (and Fudge is considering an outright challenge.) Cedric Richmond, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, has been publicly advocating for either a black speaker (there has never been one before) or a black majority leader.

So why isn’t one of the CBC members the clear Pelosi alternative? First, Clyburn is in some ways blocking other black members from being real candidates for the job. If Democrats wanted him to replace Pelosi, there would have already been a push in that direction. He and Hoyer are not really what her critics are looking for, because they are also pretty old and have long been part of the Democratic establishment. That said, Clyburn has been a mentor to many of the younger black Democrats in the House. So I don’t think they will be aggressive in pushing to be speaker themselves until it’s clear that Clyburn is no longer a candidate.

Some younger black members will have another problem: impeachment. Of the 70 House Democrats who supported at least one of two previous efforts to impeach President Trump, more than a third are black. Having officially supported impeachment might be too liberal of a stance to take for anyone who wants to be the leader of a party that campaigned this year on not impeaching Trump. That vote could complicate a speaker bid by Fudge, Jeffries and Richmond, all of whom voted to start the impeachment process.

That said, Fudge is an intriguing prospect. She’s 66; she once ran the Black Caucus, which is a post that does involve some fundraising and management; she’s a woman, which is a relevant factor in any effort to replace Pelosi; and she has the gumption to announce she is open to the job.

Possible Speakers: Clyburn, Fudge, Jeffries, Richmond

Democrats essentially have four options:

Stick with Pelosi.

Choose someone else from leadership, such as Clyburn or Hoyer.

Choose someone else who wants the job, such as Fudge, who is right now basically running for speaker.

Or choose someone like Schiff, who will likely only become a speaker candidate once Pelosi is out of the running.

I think Pelosi becoming the speaker is the most likely outcome, but I wouldn’t rule out the other three possibilities. There is a big, complicated stew of ideology, loyalty, ambition, age, gender and race at play here. Take gender alone: The new House Democratic Caucus will include at least 88 women, which is almost 40 percent of the party’s House members. I didn’t include “women” as a faction above because … well, they’re nearly half the caucus. And it’s not clear that the women of the House are aligned in a formal bloc like the CBC. Nevertheless, Pelosi’s supporters have have criticized the idea of ousting the party’s female Democratic leader after the “pink wave” in 2018. And there appears to be some pressure to replace Pelosi with a woman if she’s going to be replaced. That could help Bustos, Fudge or another woman if they make a bid to become speaker, but I doubt that anyone will emerge as the candidate formally put forward by the female members of the House.

Part of the complexity of the question of who might replace Pelosi also lies in the critique of her — House Democrats opposed to Pelosi have complained that she is old and unpopular and has been at the job for a long time. But party leaders are usually old, unpopular and fairly entrenched. (See McConnell, Mitch, who is 76.) Picking someone new and fresh for a job that is fairly complicated and requires a lot of prior knowledge is somewhat contradictory.

So I really don’t know who Democrats will pick for speaker, or who they should pick. (OK, I think they should probably choose Pelosi for now, with Bustos, Jeffries, Lujan or Schiff as the No. 2 and heir apparent. And this seems fairly obvious to me, but I’m just a journalist.) The House Democrats themselves seem just as confused. So we may have to wait until the vote in January before we really know who will be the next speaker of the House.

[online-smartphone-store-ca-blog]

Pixel smartphone upgrade highlights Google push into hardware

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Google last week unveiled new versions of its Pixel smartphone, the highlight of a refreshed line aimed at weaving artificial intelligence deeper into modern lives. Click best online smartphone store in california for more info

Google software and artificial intelligence were common threads in the gamut of new devices it unveiled to step up its challenge on the hardware front to rivals such as Apple and Amazon

The new Pixel 2 and larger Pixel 2 XL are the first Google-made phones to be released since the California tech giant announced the acquisition of key segments of Taiwan-based electronics group HTC.

The upgraded smartphones will be available for order as of Wednesday in six countries starting at $649 for five-inch display Pixel 2, and $849 for the six-inch Pixel 2 XL.

The new aluminium-body smartphones along with Google's upgraded connected speakers and new laptop computer all aim to infuse artificial intelligence to make the devices more user-friendly, built around the Google Assistant - the rival to Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and others.

Google vice president Rick Osterloh said Google's new devices "are simple to use and they anticipate your needs."

Osterloh told the product launch event in San Francisco: "You interact with your devices naturally with your voice or by touching them."

UNITED STATES

New Google earbuds offer real-time translation feature

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Google on Wednesday introduced new Pixel earbuds that the company says are capable of real-time translation of conversations in different languages...

3 days ago

Google, by bringing in a team of engineers from HTC, aims to emulate the success of Apple iPhones by controlling the hardware as well as the software used in the premium-priced handsets.

The revamped camera in the smartphone retains a single lens but seeks to improve images via "computational photography," an artificial intelligence tool that can enhance pictures.

Analyst Ian Fogg of IHS Markit said in a tweet that the new smartphone "adds incremental improvements on the great v1" while noting that "Google's challenge is to solve production limits which hurt the original."

Fogg said the use of computation to improve images with a single lens "is technically impressive."

Google announced a slimmed down version of its connected speaker called Google Home Mini starting at $49 in the United States, stepping up its challenge to market leader Amazon.

The new Google Home Mini is available for pre-order in the seven countries where the device is offered and will go on sale in stores October 19, the company said.

SOUTH AFRICA

#EntrepreneurMonth: Persistence propels businesses forward

Sabelo Sibanda and Thulisile Volwana are the founders of Millbug, an electronics manufacturing company, as well as Tuse, an Android app that tackles connectivity issues...

Ilse van den Berg 4 Oct 2017

The new speaker, which responds to voice commands using artificial intelligence, is less than half the price of Google's first generation speaker and makes this "more accessible to more people," said Google hardware designer Isabelle Olsson.

A premium version of the speaker - a $399 Google Home Max unveiled Wednesday - offers more power and audio quality for music aficionados.

The new Google Clips camera - one of the surprises of the event - "looks for smiles (and) moments, because the software is in the camera," said Google product manager Juston Payne.

"It's like having my own photographer shooting and choosing my best moments for me," Payne said of the $249 device.

Another surprise from the event was the wireless Pixel Buds, which can deliver audio from a smartphone and also include the Google Assistant and real-time translation.

A demonstration at the event included a two-way conversation with one person speaking English and the other Swedish.

"The camera and the earbuds were really held up as examples of what the company can do by leveraging the Google Assistant," said Ross Rubin of Reticle Research.

A new Pixelbook laptop was touted as a "high performance" computer powered by its Chrome operating system and designed as a rival to Microsoft's Surface and Apple's iPad Pro.

With a 12.3-inch display, the device is a convertible PC that can be used as a tablet and is sold starting at $999 for US customers.

GLOBAL

Amazon beefs up Echo lineup and Alexa skills

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Amazon has unveiled upgrades to its Echo speakers and announced that Alexa smarts will be built into BMW and Mini automobiles by the middle of next year...

28 Sep 2017

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said the new devices showcase the tech giant's artificial intelligence.

"We've been working hard continuing our shift from a mobile-first to an AI-first world," he said.

"We are working on software and hardware together because that is the best way to drive computing forward."

The launch comes in the wake of Apple's announcement of a new line of iPhones, and Amazon's upgrades to its Echo speakers powered by its Alexa digital assistant

"It is a portfolio designed to take Google into more parts of your life, particularly in your home," Reticle Research analyst Ross Rubin said of the array of devices the internet giant unveiled on Wednesday.

"Amazon is focusing on a range of price points and designs; Google is focusing on a range of experiences."

Source: AFP

02

Why Starbucks Shut Down Its Online Store

Starbucks has revolutionized food and beverage retailing in the last two years, convincing millions of customers to pay, and even pre-order, with their smartphones. Given Starbucks’ tremendous success, food companies should pay close attention to what the company just did: it just shut down its online store.

How can an online-focused business survive without a website? Starbucks wants its digital efforts to be focused on its mobile app, which will also convince customers to come into the stores instead of sitting at home and surfing the web. Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz has said that retailers need to become “experiential destinations,” to keep up with the Amazons of the world. That means you have to convince people to get off their butts. “Your product and services, for the most part, cannot be available online and cannot be available on Amazon,” he told investors in April. Instead, the company is urging shoppers to look for Starbucks products in its stores and in grocery aisles.

It’s a bold move, and one that has already caused a bit of a backlash. Starbucks sold flavored syrups online, and when the website went away so did those syrups -- including vanilla and pumpkin spice latte mixes that some customers craved.

Starbucks’ decision is yet another sign that the shift in retail to online buying is not proceeding in an obvious direction. Even as Amazon gobbles market share from traditional retailers, for instance, the company is also opening its own brick and mortar stores, and making a big bet on Whole Foods. Meanwhile, analysts say some companies like Nike may have shifted too quickly into digital sales -- by making its products so easily available online and elsewhere, Nike made them seem less special, they argue.

By forcing customers to actually walk into stores, Starbucks is making it harder for them to casually buy a pound of coffee from home. But in the long run, forcing people to make that extra effort could forge a deeper connection.

Big Picture: Starbucks closed its online store, a striking decision from the leader in online food and beverage retailing. online smartphone store in california

03

Cash is already pretty much dead in China as the country lives the future of mobile pay right now

Alipay is owned by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial Services and has 520 million users, according to its international website.

The app is linked to online money market fund Yu'e bao, encouraging users to invest and spend with Alipay. Attractive interest rates of nearly 4 percent or more have turned it into the largest money market fund in the world, with 1.43 trillion yuan ($217 billion) as of the end of June, according to state media reports citing Yu'e bao's manager, Tianhong Asset Management.

"We expect China ePayments to quadruple to Rmb300tn, while eWealthmanagement AUM and eFinancing could triple to Rmb 6.7tn and Rmb 3.5tn by [2021]," Elinor Leung, head of Asia Telecom and Internet Research at CLSA, said in a September 5 report.

"High mobile internet and ecommerce penetration, and an underdeveloped traditional financial market will drive growth," Leung said.

Mobile pay is growing so rapidly in mainland China that as a foreigner I sometimes found it difficult to complete basic transactions without it.

When I tried to pay at a Beijing McDonald's on a late night, the only payment options were China's Union Pay credit card system, Apple Pay or WeChat Pay and Alipay. As an American visitor without a Chinese bank account, I wasn't able to find a way to use those systems and the store clerk wouldn't take my cash.

"Cash is accepted in all McDonald's restaurants across China. After our investigation, we believe this is an isolated case that happened during night shift change, and thus, all cash counters were temporarily closed," a McDonald's China Customer Care Center told me in an email.

Taxis were also nearly impossible to hail in Beijing due to the rise of Didi, a ride-hailing app that bought Uber's China operations in a deal worth $35 billion last summer. Again, Didi was linked through WeChat and I couldn't use it without a Chinese bank account.

When I finally did get a taxi, the driver gave me a fake 50 yuan bill in change. Several stores also claimed three of my 100 yuan bills from a New York money exchange were counterfeit. If I could participate in the cashless society, I would not have lost about $50.

[jimdsmith34]

5 People So Blinded By Their Hobbies They Forgot To Live

Not everything we do needs to have this super-special, universe-altering purpose behind it, especially since the universe could give negative shits about what us sentient specks of space dust do with our brief love affair with consciousness. So go ahead, indulge in a pointless hobby or 10 — play the shit out of your video games, color all the adult coloring books, get that doctorate that everybody spits on because you weren’t born with 35 years’ experience. Just don’t let the pursuit of pointlessness consume your life to the point where actual important stuff goes forever ignored.

If you ever find yourself doing anything like the following, burn it all to the ground, hug your family, and apologize profusely for so coldly ignoring them all these years. If you don’t have a family, hug Mario and Luigi. They miss you too.

#5. Don’t Blow 40 Years And $2 Million Building A Giant Boat, Especially If You’re Landlocked

Dillon Griffith isn’t the first person to build his own boat. But while most content themselves with stitching together a pile of wood and praying to the Sky God that the Tuna God doesn’t whisk them away for a forced marriage to Aquaman, Griffith went and built himself a 64-foot, 40-ton, steel-and-electric monstrosity that he dubbed the “Mystic Rose.” It took him 38 years and cost roughly $2 million to complete.

Naturally, he did it to earn money.

Now we know who taught Axl Rose everything he knows about managing start-up costs.

He was inspired to build his own giant boat in 1977, after chartering his first, less-giant boat for fishing trips failed to earn him any money. After concluding this was because his galley was too small to allow for truly hardcore fishing, he set out to build his own, ginormous fishing boat. That way he could charter more people for more trips and make more sweet, sweet mackerel money.

Reminder: He spent $2 million to get there.

Unless somebody catches the Kraken, good luck breaking even before the next supercontinent forms.

He also took 38 years to finish, because Dillon Griffith is not a professional huge-boat maker. What’s more, he eventually moved away from the ocean and into a land-locked area, yet he continued to build his boat. That’s like moving to Death Valley and trying to build your own ice hockey rink. Oh, and the project damn near killed him, and not in the typical “oh, all this hard work is killing me” kind of way. No, more like a crane fell on him once and shattered his body. That kind of killing. Also, an 11-pound cylinder once broke his neck. After that, it was probably less a labor of love and more one of pure stubbornness. He saw a ship that steadfastly refused to be built, and he stared it right in the barnacle-encrusted porthole and said, “Fuck you, thou shalt be built.”

And build it he did — after nearly 40 years of lonesome, dawn-to-dawn work days, the ship is ready to sail. Finally, as Griffith says, he’ll “make money and [he] won’t have to worry anymore.”

Of course, there’s still the issue of getting the boat to sea, since he lives far away from it and all. He estimates it’ll cost an extra $55,000 to have it towed there, but then he’ll make money for sure! He’s set up a GoFundMe to cover these final costs, so feel free to help him if you like. He’s almost there; he just needs a little push over that finish line.

Well on his way!

#4. Don’t Waste Half A Century Building Your Own Helicopter Out Of Garbage

Like so many children of the pre-1950s (and post-2020s, after President McCarthy executive-orders all vaccines into the same dirty pit where we stashed those Atari ET games) a Honduran man known simply as Agustin contracted polio. He’s been unable to walk since.

Young Agustin dreamed of being a pilot, so he’s spent the past 50 years constructing a helicopter out of garbage. This despite knowing precisely dick about helicopters aside from “they exist.” And he insists his will fly, despite it never coming even once close to doing so. Ever bet 99 percent of your poker chips on what winds up being a 6 high? That’s this, in weird mutated sorta-copter form.

And this is insisting your 2-2-4-5 is a royal flush and the dealer’s just blind.

Agustin started this project in 1958, thinking it would take only three months because what’s a helicopter compared to a soap-box racer or a homemade turkey sandwich. So already we have a grown man cock-sure that he could build a working helicopter, single-handedly, with everything that Oscar The Grouch had grown sick of masturbating to, in three months. He missed that deadline by a mere 573 months, because, according to him, “Things kept getting complicated.” Big flying machines that typically require an entire crew to assemble do tend to be that way, yes.

Nothing should take 20 years to finish except raising a child. And writing The Winds Of Winter.

But still he perseveres, tinkering with his helicopter daily, all by himself. He gathers junk, trash, and spare parts wherever he can find them and assembles them all on his own — even the propeller’s chains are DIY. It’s neat, but it’s also Fallout 4: Saddest-Ever Edition. And I do mean he finds those parts wherever — for years, Agustin used an old, rickety wheelchair, until his friends and family bought him a shiny, new, working one, direct from the United States … which he immediately disassembled for helicopter parts.

Good parts.

If this were simply performance art, it’d be one thing. But Agustin still believes, and will likely keep believing until his final day, that his literal pile of garbage will get visited by the Blue Fairy one night and become a real helicopter. He outright admits that it “looks like a caricature of a helicopter” but somehow doesn’t grasp that that’s exactly why his only hope to fly is the same as ours: Board a plane, get drunk on boxed wine, and let someone who knows what they’re doing help him roam about the country.

#3. Don’t Spend 17 Years Building A Wooden Lamborghini In Your Basement

Hey, let’s watch 1/27th of a movie!

That’s the intro to Cannonball Run, and even non-carheads can see it’s awesome, as is the Lamborghini Countach Tara Buckman zooms around in. Ken Imhoff certainly agrees, but unlike us the film didn’t inspire him to drink shitloads of beer and fantasize about getting coldly laughed at by Buckman if he dared approach her. He was instead inspired to build his very own Countach. Out of wood. And not just some rinky-dink model for his mantel. He was going to build a life-size wooden Lamborghini, engine and all, and he was going to drive that motherfucker.

Maybe he drank shitloads of beer after all.

He can’t drive 55. Or 45. Or 35. Or 25. Or 5.

Like most people who don’t know what they’re doing but confidently stumble through it anyway, Imhoff figured his “Bull In The Basement” project wouldn’t take long — five years, tops. It took him 17, the literal length of childhood. That’s an appropriate analogy, by the by, since he missed much of his kids’ own childhoods while locked in his basement sanding, polishing, fucking up, redoing, sanding, and polishing again.

Wouldn’t want to enter the void with anything but a perfect shine, after all.

By 2007, his Treeborghini was finally finished and ready for unveiling. Except, he couldn’t get it out of his basement, since basements don’t have garage doors. So, Imhoff did the only logical thing he could: He paid a guy to cut a big hole in his basement, dig up a gnarly dirt ramp, and tow the car out of the basement and into the light. He would’ve driven it out — it theoretically being a car and all — but it’s a chunk of wood.

Good thing he brought those protective blankets. Wouldn’t want anything to get damaged and plummet in value or anything.

He eventually powered it up enough to joyride around the block, bring his kids to school, and gather a few termites. But, after five years, Imhoff decided to sell. He claimed the maintenance was too much to handle; all that wood polish sets you back, but presumably he’d also love to recoup some of the “unimaginable [financial] extremes” his Cannonball Pratfall put him and his entire family through. At least we know he won’t try anything this dumb again.

Oh wait, no. He immediately started work on a wooden Studebaker Hawk. Check back with Cracked in about 20 years for an update.

source http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/13/5-people-so-blinded-by-their-hobbies-they-forgot-to-live/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2017/08/5-people-so-blinded-by-their-hobbies.html

[adambstingus]

5 People So Blinded By Their Hobbies They Forgot To Live

Not everything we do needs to have this super-special, universe-altering purpose behind it, especially since the universe could give negative shits about what us sentient specks of space dust do with our brief love affair with consciousness. So go ahead, indulge in a pointless hobby or 10 — play the shit out of your video games, color all the adult coloring books, get that doctorate that everybody spits on because you weren’t born with 35 years’ experience. Just don’t let the pursuit of pointlessness consume your life to the point where actual important stuff goes forever ignored.

If you ever find yourself doing anything like the following, burn it all to the ground, hug your family, and apologize profusely for so coldly ignoring them all these years. If you don’t have a family, hug Mario and Luigi. They miss you too.

#5. Don’t Blow 40 Years And $2 Million Building A Giant Boat, Especially If You’re Landlocked

Dillon Griffith isn’t the first person to build his own boat. But while most content themselves with stitching together a pile of wood and praying to the Sky God that the Tuna God doesn’t whisk them away for a forced marriage to Aquaman, Griffith went and built himself a 64-foot, 40-ton, steel-and-electric monstrosity that he dubbed the “Mystic Rose.” It took him 38 years and cost roughly $2 million to complete.

Naturally, he did it to earn money.

Now we know who taught Axl Rose everything he knows about managing start-up costs.

He was inspired to build his own giant boat in 1977, after chartering his first, less-giant boat for fishing trips failed to earn him any money. After concluding this was because his galley was too small to allow for truly hardcore fishing, he set out to build his own, ginormous fishing boat. That way he could charter more people for more trips and make more sweet, sweet mackerel money.

Reminder: He spent $2 million to get there.

Unless somebody catches the Kraken, good luck breaking even before the next supercontinent forms.

He also took 38 years to finish, because Dillon Griffith is not a professional huge-boat maker. What’s more, he eventually moved away from the ocean and into a land-locked area, yet he continued to build his boat. That’s like moving to Death Valley and trying to build your own ice hockey rink. Oh, and the project damn near killed him, and not in the typical “oh, all this hard work is killing me” kind of way. No, more like a crane fell on him once and shattered his body. That kind of killing. Also, an 11-pound cylinder once broke his neck. After that, it was probably less a labor of love and more one of pure stubbornness. He saw a ship that steadfastly refused to be built, and he stared it right in the barnacle-encrusted porthole and said, “Fuck you, thou shalt be built.”

And build it he did — after nearly 40 years of lonesome, dawn-to-dawn work days, the ship is ready to sail. Finally, as Griffith says, he’ll “make money and [he] won’t have to worry anymore.”

Of course, there’s still the issue of getting the boat to sea, since he lives far away from it and all. He estimates it’ll cost an extra $55,000 to have it towed there, but then he’ll make money for sure! He’s set up a GoFundMe to cover these final costs, so feel free to help him if you like. He’s almost there; he just needs a little push over that finish line.

Well on his way!

#4. Don’t Waste Half A Century Building Your Own Helicopter Out Of Garbage

Like so many children of the pre-1950s (and post-2020s, after President McCarthy executive-orders all vaccines into the same dirty pit where we stashed those Atari ET games) a Honduran man known simply as Agustin contracted polio. He’s been unable to walk since.

Young Agustin dreamed of being a pilot, so he’s spent the past 50 years constructing a helicopter out of garbage. This despite knowing precisely dick about helicopters aside from “they exist.” And he insists his will fly, despite it never coming even once close to doing so. Ever bet 99 percent of your poker chips on what winds up being a 6 high? That’s this, in weird mutated sorta-copter form.

And this is insisting your 2-2-4-5 is a royal flush and the dealer’s just blind.

Agustin started this project in 1958, thinking it would take only three months because what’s a helicopter compared to a soap-box racer or a homemade turkey sandwich. So already we have a grown man cock-sure that he could build a working helicopter, single-handedly, with everything that Oscar The Grouch had grown sick of masturbating to, in three months. He missed that deadline by a mere 573 months, because, according to him, “Things kept getting complicated.” Big flying machines that typically require an entire crew to assemble do tend to be that way, yes.

Nothing should take 20 years to finish except raising a child. And writing The Winds Of Winter.

But still he perseveres, tinkering with his helicopter daily, all by himself. He gathers junk, trash, and spare parts wherever he can find them and assembles them all on his own — even the propeller’s chains are DIY. It’s neat, but it’s also Fallout 4: Saddest-Ever Edition. And I do mean he finds those parts wherever — for years, Agustin used an old, rickety wheelchair, until his friends and family bought him a shiny, new, working one, direct from the United States … which he immediately disassembled for helicopter parts.

Good parts.

If this were simply performance art, it’d be one thing. But Agustin still believes, and will likely keep believing until his final day, that his literal pile of garbage will get visited by the Blue Fairy one night and become a real helicopter. He outright admits that it “looks like a caricature of a helicopter” but somehow doesn’t grasp that that’s exactly why his only hope to fly is the same as ours: Board a plane, get drunk on boxed wine, and let someone who knows what they’re doing help him roam about the country.

#3. Don’t Spend 17 Years Building A Wooden Lamborghini In Your Basement

Hey, let’s watch 1/27th of a movie!

That’s the intro to Cannonball Run, and even non-carheads can see it’s awesome, as is the Lamborghini Countach Tara Buckman zooms around in. Ken Imhoff certainly agrees, but unlike us the film didn’t inspire him to drink shitloads of beer and fantasize about getting coldly laughed at by Buckman if he dared approach her. He was instead inspired to build his very own Countach. Out of wood. And not just some rinky-dink model for his mantel. He was going to build a life-size wooden Lamborghini, engine and all, and he was going to drive that motherfucker.

Maybe he drank shitloads of beer after all.

He can’t drive 55. Or 45. Or 35. Or 25. Or 5.

Like most people who don’t know what they’re doing but confidently stumble through it anyway, Imhoff figured his “Bull In The Basement” project wouldn’t take long — five years, tops. It took him 17, the literal length of childhood. That’s an appropriate analogy, by the by, since he missed much of his kids’ own childhoods while locked in his basement sanding, polishing, fucking up, redoing, sanding, and polishing again.

Wouldn’t want to enter the void with anything but a perfect shine, after all.

By 2007, his Treeborghini was finally finished and ready for unveiling. Except, he couldn’t get it out of his basement, since basements don’t have garage doors. So, Imhoff did the only logical thing he could: He paid a guy to cut a big hole in his basement, dig up a gnarly dirt ramp, and tow the car out of the basement and into the light. He would’ve driven it out — it theoretically being a car and all — but it’s a chunk of wood.

Good thing he brought those protective blankets. Wouldn’t want anything to get damaged and plummet in value or anything.

He eventually powered it up enough to joyride around the block, bring his kids to school, and gather a few termites. But, after five years, Imhoff decided to sell. He claimed the maintenance was too much to handle; all that wood polish sets you back, but presumably he’d also love to recoup some of the “unimaginable [financial] extremes” his Cannonball Pratfall put him and his entire family through. At least we know he won’t try anything this dumb again.

Oh wait, no. He immediately started work on a wooden Studebaker Hawk. Check back with Cracked in about 20 years for an update.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/13/5-people-so-blinded-by-their-hobbies-they-forgot-to-live/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/164116858212