scoobdog

The key points (I think) is that kickoff ball is in the same place but the actual line of scrimmage is 25 yards in front of that. Receiving and kicking and lineups are 5 yards apart and no one moves until one of two returners touches the ball. There are no fair catches but the ball can still roll into the end zone for a touchback. Essentially, everything is centered around nobody moving until the ball is caught, shortening the time and distance for the kicking team’s players to run up on the returner.

Cool

They're going to great lengths to reduce the high speed impacts of special teams plays.

I'm no engineer, but the way that bridge collapsed suggests there was at least one underlying design flaw. Also, someone is going to need to question the road crew's foreman, if he survived, on why he didn't evacuate his crew when the road was shut down.

There are a lot of fucking Cybertrucks all of the sudden. I saw my first one in the wild like a month ago. Now I can’t go a day without seeing at least one. They’re even more hideous than I expected.

You should do the Camino de Santiago.

I don’t think I ever used Mapquest, but I jumped straight to a GPS in the ‘90s from a Thomas Guide.

In 1984, I went to the Olympics in Los Angeles.

Happy Birthday!

Well, antisemitism can infiltrate any discussion, even ones as serious as war crimes. Nonetheless, there wouldn’t be room for these claims if Israel fought a competent and principled war. They didn’t need to flatten entire neighborhoods and blast tens of thousands of civilians to oblivion to achieve a targeted attack on a terrorist group.

Nah, who ever buys Ivana's final resting place can turn it into a paid attraction just like she would have wanted.

The law being what it is, the US won't stop sending weapons unless it becomes untenable because its contending with a dissident GOP that will use any opportunity to portray a change in policy as a retreat by Biden and his administration. That being said, this refusal to veto the Security Council resolution is apparently enough to drive the point home to Netanyahu. That being said, I find his insistence on cudgeling the Biden government with statements like this and overt acts like meeting Republicans behind the president's back as insubordination. We should not be in the business of dictating anything to a foreign government, but we are in that business because of the weapons we deliver to them. The simplest response to him canceling the delegation is to withhold the next shipment until Netanyahu comes back into compliance with our requests.

Such reports are unfathomable if true. We frequently (and sometimes rightly) get criticized for our military activities overseas; it comes with being in unstable "powder-keg" situations on a repeated basis. Nonetheless, the idea of American soldiers, sailors and Marines running roughshod over civilians is inconceivable given their level of training and the professional standards they're held to. It's entirely possible that the reports are distorting the situation to an extent, but even rouge IDF soldiers engaging in abusive behavior is completely inexcusable and the fact that the reports are even appearing at all is a testament to how the IDF and the Israeli government has completely lost control of the situation. Netanyahu better figure out real quickly that he's losing the support of his one big ally and, once that support is gone, the state of Israel will be a sitting duck.

You underestimate the backlash. But, no one is suggesting that aid stops now, just that it isn’t limitless.

Not to get all serious and shit, but it says something about the women who reclaim derogatory terms like these from men. You never see passive women called either, only women who are standing up for themselves.

Yes, I'm aware. My point is that American legislators won't have the appetite for mass murder and destruction that an Israeli citizen in the middle of a war will, and this Rafah operation could be the final nail in the coffin, so to speak.

Good for them. Let's see how much they support it when the US decides to scale back its weapon sales to Israel. They seem to have forgotten that the Israeli continues to exist because it has the backing of a superpower.

Fine, I'll go first: All this talk about how great the economy is or isn't is patently absurd because it only has reference from the perspective of the current election cycle. The economy might be stable by most metrics, but you can't call it healthy as long as the wage disparity gap continues to be as large as it is. It's also not realistic to expect it to be healthy as long as we have a dysfunctional legislature that uses non partisan governance as chips in a high stakes political poker game. In general, even talking about our basic needs is pointless in this political climate because a comparative minority is willing to cause mass casualties in the pursuit of victory. That being said, we can talk about how the economy reflects a path forward in such a climate. While not healthy, the economy we have now does have some safety rails still in place for POC. Instead of focusing on how we can "revive" an economy that isn't in need of reviving, we should be focusing on how we can alter that economy in a way that diminishes latent racial and gender bias, and that means investing in opportunities for POC, women and the LGBTQIA community. We're not going to solve the income gap and its underlying factors, namely housing insecurity, working poverty, and gentrification, without addressing the fundamental driver: a distinct lack of investment in communities that come from within those communities. This has ramifications even for the agribusiness discussion. Talk about agricultural workers not making enough to survive somewhat glosses over a bigger issue. Having spent the past ten years traveling up and down my state, through the central valley and coastal farm communities, I've had something of an unique view into the inner workings of infrastructure or the lack there of. One observation I've noticed is that these communities are (ironically) either food deserts or alarmingly close, despite being smack dab in the middle of farmland, Full service markets are moving into the region from smaller chains, replacing larger corporate chains that have moved out or downsized, but the process is slow and uneven. The issue is obviously not crop availability of supply lines (though those are neither as obvious as one might think), it's in private investment by people in the community. An out of state grocery chain can certainly afford to build a new market, but it's not likely to have the same insider knowledge that local grocer would have. That could lead to the larger chain possibly not investing because of potentially weak sales, or it could also lead to profits going out of the area, representing a capital drain on the community. If we're going to discuss the economy, we should be talking about how effective it is on the micro economic level, not on how good the stock market is,

What the fuck is going on in here? Are we going to talk economy or just critique everyone's posting style?

I will take your song and appreciate the hell out of it. Also, snogging you right back.

As a starting point: the real cost of food is wholly dependent on what the general consumer can afford and sustain. As reductive as it might sound, food items can't be determined by free market because the end result of such a system is that the government will inevitably step in for those people who can't afford the market rate. After that, the cost of proper wages for agricultural workers is subordinate to everything other than profit because the other material costs (equipment w/depreciation and fuel costs, resource costs like water, soil, fertilizer, pesticide) are all items that are free market.

Indeed there is. Hey @Raptorpat, let's break this off an start a new thread.

Can't really comment on that, per se. Regardless, those same wealthy individuals regardless of how they come into their wealth know that they can prop up weak leaders easily. When one such weak leader is willing to attack the system and push a fringe agenda, they're at least smart enough to know that the risk does not meet the potential reward. Trump got corporate support the first time around because corporations saw him as being weak and potentially ineffectual. Now that he's proven to be weak and effectually destructive, he isn't particularly appealing. Jaded as this might sound, Biden is a much better target for such corporate pressure because he's not only unlikely to cause the mass harm that Trump can, he's also likely a lame duck leading a highly partisan Congress which will effectively kill major legislative changes from wither side of the political divide. In any other situation, that would be the only reason you would need to vote against him, but in this situation it says less about the man and more about the government we've given him to lead.

I know you were responding specifically to Icarus' diminutive expression of people's concerns about food prices and survival (which was itself a response to a diminutive statement by Masquerade). Like Pat said, there is a lot of room for discussion about food price stability and it has nothing to do with wages. The CPI for food has been artificially suppressed for a long time in part because agriculture represents a major export market that, unfortunately, has led to foreign interests staking claims on US soil. The issues isn't something that can be resolved with market manipulation or corrections, which is problematic because it does represent a real drag on the economy that will only get worse the longer it is left unattended.