Lurker > red sox 777

That's true, which is a good reason we shouldn't have state-run healthcare. Another reason is that state-run healthcare will tend to reduce innovation in medicine. This may not seem important now, but innovation grows exponentially.....even if the difference is only 2% a year, our grandchildren will feel a huge difference in the quality of healthcare they receive.

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90s games > 00s games

The biggest problem in today's society is probably corporate influence. If Ron Paul's policies went into effect, these corporations would have even more power, not less.

That's where I disagree with you. Who does regulation hurt, big companies or small companies? Big companies are still going to operate, they're just going to devote a lot of resources to compliance and ways to still make profits despite them, or to lobbying Congress/regulators to make the regulations more favorable to them. Indeed, right now regulations are very favorable to big companies, what else can you call 3 trillion dollars of stimulus given to them?

On the other hand, a small company can't afford to devote large amounts of resources to making sure it complies with regulations. It can't afford lobbyists to get Congress to help it. It's not too big to fail. Regulations set up a lot of barriers to entry that make it very difficult for small companies to compete. And so they can't compete. Big companies get bigger and bigger, and the supposed fallout from their collapse becomes more and more devastating.

And it's because we're trusting government bureaucrats to protect the interests of the public instead of the free market. But state-sanctioned monopolies or oligopolies, however well-intentioned (and given how much commingling there is between big corporations and government, I doubt it's very well-intentioned currently), cannot work. Because it stifles competition, and there's nothing you can do to stop big corporations from dominating if they have no competition. The only alternative becomes shutting down the industry, which hurts everyone.

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90s games > 00s games

Rural America is as poor or poorer than inner city America, but has a much higher quality of life. As for suburbs, where do you think all the wealth is going?

Riots don't happen because people are highly oppressed. They didn't happen in the USSR under Stalin and they don't happen in North Korea now. They happen when people have both the will to try to overthrow the establishment and the power to actually do so.

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90s games > 00s games

canada riots when they lose(or win) hockey games, you're overthinking the requirements for this quite a bit

Canada is more leftist than the US. Besides, sports riots don't happen much in the US.

That said, there are definitely parts of America that are prone to riots. They just make up a relatively small minority of the country, and are held in contempt by the rest of the country. Suburban and rural America will not riot without some major major changes, and that is what controls America.

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90s games > 00s games

The US is too proud to riot. People think of themselves as free, equal, citizens who can actively engage in capitalism. For riots you need people who think of themselves as inferior, second class, workers forever unable to engage in capitalism.

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90s games > 00s games

Orwell had it right in 1984 on class warfare. Class warfare is always between the rich (top 1%, people who get most of their income from capital gains in the USA) and the upper middle class (the next 19%, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. who haven't made it to the point where their real profession is capitalist). The bottom 80% are just enlisted by the high or middle in their class war.

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90s games > 00s games

We should at least try ending corporate welfare, yeah. We've pumped somewhere north of 3 trillion into that already in 3 years. For 1 trillion a year, you can eliminate poverty in the US by fiat just by giving it away to poor people.

By fiat means that there's no need for this money to actually stimulate the economy or motivate people to work harder or any of that. Just giving it away is enough.

I don't see the evidence that the continued handouts to big corporations are helping to stimulate the economy, so perhaps we can try stopping. I doubt we'll get the catastrophic economic meltdown that is feared, because the market knows that the total amount of capital in the system is still the same.

And this meltdown is feared most by those who have most to lose- the rich. The Great Depression did hurt the rich much more than the poor, even before FDR, and the reason is that the rich had far more in investments (even as a percentage of their wealth) to lose. In capitalism, the reason owning things is so profitable is that it's more risky. You've got more to lose when things go bad, so the price you receive for that is much higher profits when things go well. You can't have it both ways, and perhaps that's why the stimulus isn't working.

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90s games > 00s games

Strongly against. If you don't want to hand out government entitlements, just end entitlements. Trying to stop "abuse" of the system is:

1. Immoral
2. Throwing money down the drain (and far far far moreso than the entitlements themselves, which are just pumped back into the economy when they are spent)
3. A stepping stone to less freedom
4. Doesn't even make sense, because the whole idea of entitlements it to give stuff away. How can you abuse a system that is supposed to give stuff to you?

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90s games > 00s games

Yeah, that doesn't make sense at all, seeing as the French revolution and the American revolution are so closely tied together, with France being basically America's closest ally for some time afterwards because of the co-revolution, and the Statue of Liberty being a gift from France....

The reason is that the French Revolution came after the American Revolution, so it didn't impact it. Nor did the French Revolution have a huge impact on America afterwards, much less than the impact it had on Europe, which was huge.

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90s games > 00s games

....This team is completely pathetic. Another loss, and to the Orioles this time.

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90s games > 00s games

The French Revolution was barely touched on at my high school. It is very America-centric indeed.

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90s games > 00s games

The price is going to go up, or the amount of content will go down, or both.

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90s games > 00s games

The studios decided they weren't charging Netflix enough to stream their content.

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90s games > 00s games

You feel insulted and degraded when you get a gift card for a specific store?

If the intent is, "I don't trust you to make purchases that are good for you, so I'm only letting you shop at this one store," then yes I'd feel insulted. If the intent is just to give a gift, or even "I want this store to have more sales," I'm totally fine with it.

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90s games > 00s games

people who abuse welfare should feel insulted and degraded as often as possible, though.

In that case, we should just get rid of welfare altogether. As long as we keep it we should do it right and treat people with dignity.

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90s games > 00s games

There's no reason why you can't give someone something and tell them they have to use it in a specific way. Especially when you have a way to enforce it.

But we don't want the government to be doing this. Or at least I don't.

I mean, it's one thing to require someone to use a gift in a certain was as a condition of the gift to promote your own interests. But if the goal of the gift is to promote their interest- then making stipulations as to what is best for them is downright insulting and degrading.

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90s games > 00s games

This would be true if it wasn't for the existence of the welfare state.

Just because you give someone something doesn't give you the right to control their lives. A gift is a gift is a gift. Once you have given money to someone, it is no longer yours, but theirs. That means they can do whatever they please with it, and you have no right to it whatsoever.

The right to use property as one sees fit should not be infringed.

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90s games > 00s games

And there's a big difference between comparing 2-10 for the Red Sox with 95% of the season left and Star Fox 64 with 2/3 of the season finished.

I'm not sure what the problem is? SF64 didn't even get ranked this week, and I don't think anyone voted it higher than #20. It's definitely in the same areas as the other games at the bottom of the top 25.

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90s games > 00s games

And if those 12 games cost the Red Sox a playoff spot, I will laugh so hard.

Man, this team could be a 105 win team but for those 12 games and the last 12 games. But that proves the point precisely. Outliers matter. This RS team doesn't deserve to make the playoffs based on playing like a 105-win team for 85% of the season, if it plays like the worst team in the other 15%.

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90s games > 00s games

Nah, games against the top 25, and especially top 10, are more significant regardless of the result. This is because they are intrinsically more important matches, and because they're more reliable matches (if a fodder game gets blown out 75/25 or 90/10, well, it really makes no difference). So, that RBY match may be worth, say, 1/5 of SF64's total instead of 1/17. And, that match puts SF64 around #5. Let's say the other matches puts it a bit outside the top 25, at #29. That would average out to #25. In actuality, it would average out to higher than #25, because the ranks are closer lower down the list.

We like to exclude outliers, but usually, it's just wishful thinking statistically. As an example, the Red Sox went 2-10 to open this season. Now, for most of the season, I liked to compute their stats not including that stretch, and made projections on their future performance based on that. But that was wishful thinking. Those 12 games were just as predictive of future performance as any other 12 game stretch in the season.

Wait, Star Fox 64 isn't even ranked. It got all of 12 votes last week.....I'm not seeing the problem.

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90s games > 00s games

I treat outliers the same as other matches, as long as there isn't good reason to exclude them. Good reason means something like: the site was down for 12 hours of that day and we got half the usual number of votes, or 10 people announced that they only voted against a game because of LMS. It does not mean: this result went vastly differently than I expected, or than the other results would indicate. Good reason means something that, if you know about the reason, you can predict that something unusual will happen.

Otherwise outliers are statistically the same as any other match.

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90s games > 00s games

Seems to me the government doesn't have any business controlling what people do in their personal lives even if they ruin their own lives.

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90s games > 00s games

Pedro was robbed of the MVP in 1999 and 2000.

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90s games > 00s games

#11 Super Mario Bros. 3 (Tanooki Blitzball Conference)
Mega Man 3 (Patriot Time Portals Conference)
SoulCalibur II (Games of the Decades Conference)
#15 Final Fantasy IX (Smackdown Hotel Conference)
#12 Final Fantasy VII (Fanservice Conference)
Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Brawl for Broke Conference)
#22 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Metroid Eater Conference)
#6 Super Smash Bros. Melee (Fanservice Conference)
Final Fantasy Tactics (Sonic Overload Conference)
Gitaroo Man (Thousand-Year World of Sunshine Conference)
Chrono Cross (Sonic Overload Conference)
No More Heroes (Tanooki Blitzball Conference)
The World Ends With You (Zelda Overload Conference)
#16 The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (Games of the Decades Conference)

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90s games > 00s games

That's like saying that Cloud underperforms against Link. It's a meaningless statement.

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90s games > 00s games

Let's say the AL East goes 93, 92, 91, 90, 62. That puts them at 23 games over .500 collectively. That's not so much that it would be difficult to get 3 94-win teams among the other divisions, as long as the AL goes out and gets something around .550 on the NL again in interleague play.

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90s games > 00s games

If Toronto is good next year, we could conceivably had 4 90-win teams in the AL East. Which may mean that we have 0 95-win teams as a consequence. Which may mean that the wild card is not from the AL East.

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90s games > 00s games

Resident Evil 2 (Smash Trigger Conference)
#1 Chrono Trigger (Smash Trigger Conference)
Battletoads (Brawl for Broke Conference)
#20 Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Nintendo Objections Conference)
Sonic Adventure (Twilight Barrel Galaxy Conference)
Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (Smackdown Hotel Conference)
Fallout 3 (Thousand-Year World of Sunshine Conference)
Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (Thousand-Year World of Sunshine Conference)
The Secret of Monkey Island (Smackdown Hotel Conference)
Starcraft (Fanservice Conference)
#10 Metal Gear Solid (Zelda Overload Conference)
#21 Paper Mario (Games of the Decades Conference)
Max Payne (Games of the Decades Conference)

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90s games > 00s games

Galaxy 2 has also lost to FFVI.

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90s games > 00s games

I agree with Peter Schiff on decreasing regulations. The financial industry is so regulated it resembles a government-run oligopoly controlled by the largest banks and regulators, and makes things more expensive for everyone. Every dollar spent regulating is a dollar spent rearranging money to different people, which would be a 100% loss to the country, or worse, a dollar spent enforcing an oligopoly (more than 100% loss).

Deregulate. Give people more choice. I bet a lot of people wouldn't invest their money with big Wall Street banks if they had other viable options. Nor would you get nearly as much groupthink if you don't have a few people making all the decisions, and without groupthink, we're much less likely to have a major financial bubble and collapse.

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90s games > 00s games

Happy Constitution Day.

Also, TL:DR is incredibly stupid and should never be posted. If you didn't bother to read the post, don't reply!

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90s games > 00s games

New Nintendo = Gamecube and later.

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90s games > 00s games

Boston won today, good. If we can win one of the next 2 games, that leaves us at 4 up with 10 to go. But the Rays play the Yankees 7 times and the Blue Jays 3 times, while we play the Yankees 3 times and the Orioles 7 times, and turning around a 4 game lead with only 10 games to work with is a really tall order in any case.

The Yankees have a really tough schedule the final 10 games: 7 against the Rays and 3 against the Red Sox. The Tigers' final 10 is....1 with Oakland, 2 with Kansas City, 4 with Baltimore, and 3 with Cleveland.

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90s games > 00s games

red sox, you gave three possible scenarios for Rand to win, but which of those, given his personality, is he likely to actually do?

Darth Rand opens with balefire immediately. TOM Rand would probably opt for cutting off Voldemort from magic first, if the super vague fry-all-evil-beings-near-him thing doesn't work. And it is vague, because it doesn't fit into normal mechanics of the series, and no one in the WoT universe knows how or why it works, other than that Rand is the Dragon Reborn, the fulfillment of thousands of years (or an eternity, depending on how you look at it) of prophecy.

I don't see TOM Rand being hit by a surprise AK even if his evil frying powers don't manifest themselves here. He does have incredibly good luck/destiny, and he would in all probability block AK by moving a physical object in front of him like Dumbledore, or dodging, or blocking with both a magical and a physical shield to be safe.

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90s games > 00s games

I think Voldemort could conceivably win, but it's more likely than not that Rand would. The only way Voldemort wins is if he goes for AK and gets it off first, and Rand tries to block it. There are a lot of ways Rand can win:

1. Rand balefires Voldemort before or at the same time Voldemort uses AK. If they're both hit Rand wins because the balefire will erase Voldemort to before he used AK.

2. Rand dodges AK and defeats Voldemort with his generally superior magic.

3. Rand cuts off Voldemort from his magic at the start, if magic in HP is close enough to channeling in WOT for him to do that (and if it isn't, there's an argument that there might be something magical in WOT that can block AK too).

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90s games > 00s games

Rand couldn't tank too much that actually hit him. But he has very strong shields and is very fast, so actually hitting him is the hard part.

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90s games > 00s games

its just I don't know how he would block something like stupify (meh just going by movies haven't read all the books) where it doesn't seem to make a physical move its just point and BAM your frozen for a few seconds

Well, there's an equivalent to stupefy in Wheel of Time (in that it has the same effect), which is to bind/freeze the opponent with air, and Rand would just cut that weave apart pretty effortlessly.

The other thing is that Rand can cast multiple spells simultaneously, whereas I believe HP wizards can only do one at a time. They can fire off spells in rapid succession, but can't actually perform multiple spells at the same time.

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90s games > 00s games

Rand can probably block anything Voldemort can throw at him except Avada Kedavra. He's not very tanky though, if he were to get hit (which he probably would not).

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90s games > 00s games

It doesn't impact the area, it's a normal weave targeted at the other channeler. It just happens to be one of the fastest weaves you can cast. And as it does no harm to the other person (unless you choose to then inflict harm on them now that they are utterly at your mercy), so all forms of Rand would have no compunction about opening with it. It's like expelliarmus, but faster.

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90s games > 00s games

The most common thing that happens in Wheel of Time in a duel between two channelers is that the stronger one will cut off the weaker one from the Source, rendering them unable to use magic. It's only when the channelers are close enough in strength that neither is able to cut off the other, or it's a large battle where you want to use area of effect attacks, or it's a surprise attack or something of the sort, that you see much in the way of actual battle weaves.

Rand is definitely a lot more powerful than Voldemort, whose only chance is winning by opening by Avada Kedavra and hitting.

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90s games > 00s games

Rand al'Thor

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90s games > 00s games

Oh, we can do much more than that. First we'll weight the board 8 user final top 25 with the RPI to produce a preliminary BCS top 25. Then we'll go through the user votes to see how much individual ballots differ from the preliminary BCS top 25, and lower the weight we assign to ballots that are far away from it, by a formula such that a small or medium deviation from the consensus will lower the weight of your ballot by very little but the rate at which your ballot's weight is lowered will accelerate thereafter.

We will then retally the votes, producing the final BCS top 25, with a cardinal numerical value for each. The RPI for the other games will then be recalculated using only matches against the BCS top 25, and the top 37 games from that will be entered into the bracket.

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90s games > 00s games

In that case, I take it that the final top 25 and all the conference champions are auto-seeded into the bracket?

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90s games > 00s games

That doesn't explain the other part of the question, which asks what it is.

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90s games > 00s games

What is this tournament committee and why does it feel so undemocratic?

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90s games > 00s games

And in my opinion, it's completely unacceptable for any free society to impose limits of freedom of speech or thought that isn't action. Action can be punished. Thought? Communication of thought that no one is obligated to listen to? Never. It's barbaric and evil.

Freedom of speech is nothing if not the right to offensive speech. Unoffensive speech needs no protection, because no one is going to try to silence it. The entire point of having freedom of speech is precisely to protect speech that society or legislators might deem offensive.

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90s games > 00s games

A slippery slope argument like this might appeal to a simple-minded jury, but in a legal system based on precedent, where mens rea must be present in order to convict an individual, committing hate propaganda is not equivalent to singing "everybody was kung-fu fighting."

The slippery slope is at the legislative level and possibly the appellate level, not the trial level. Is singing that song illegal now? Will it be in 20 years?

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90s games > 00s games

Wind Waker is right on the bubble for top 25 to me. There's a lot of games bunched up around there.

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90s games > 00s games

Good luck to Brandon on not revealing who he is.

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90s games > 00s games

And how many ranked games ahead of PW1 have lost from the time that streak started until this week?

That's actually a strong point in its favor. I think the answer is all of them except CT, RE4, and MGS. So going undefeated for so long isn't easy. And top games do get freak bad performances, like RBY going to OT with SF64 or SMB3 losing to Persona 4 this week.

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90s games > 00s games