Ross Scott

This deserves an honorable mention: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501363_162-57331142/woman-pepper-sprays-other-black-friday-shoppers/

Have a couple more good ones. This one is from 2010, I love the fight that spills over and involves the worker while they're still at the entrance: os_s15cJU64 A friend of mine sent me this one, looks like the employees changed their minds about the customers: Best Buy opening 2011

I love watching Black Friday mob videos. It is sad about the incident where a worker got trampled to death in 2008, but for anything less, I love it when this stuff gets captured on video. I'm guessing some new ones will trickle in over the next few days, in the meantime go ahead and post the best Black Friday videos you can find. Here are a few I've found: This has almost ALL the best Black Friday footage I've seen. I remember in the past seeing somebody mix music from Left 4 Dead to some of these, but I can't seem to find that anymore: _dIBL4tYQPI This is another one that's pretty good. The uploader added some music video afterwards, but this is the best quality copy I've seen: RRiILStjZWE

Michael Archer: I don't think I can give much further discussion with regarding what's ethical or good for society. It all comes down to this argument for me: If it helps, assume you're part of a crew that shipwrecked on an island and I found my bean in the forest earlier. If your answer is still no, I consider that a little bit sociopathic, because I think it means you value property rights over human lives in all circumstances. I'll respond to some things where I think you misunderstood my meaning or answer your questions however: I'm not saying before capitalism, I'm saying it's become that way. Like if you were to compare the middle class in America 40 years ago to what it is now, the percentage of people that belong to it has gone down notably. If she's part of the upper 1% and has a fund of sorts, she's probably earning well over what most hard working Americans do just from interest and / or share dividends from stocks. It doesn't matter if it was all given to her, that's a common case with many wealthy families, she's now earning the income from what was given to her. Now you can argue that she didn't "earn" it in a traditional sense of putting work into it, but there are loads of millionaires who the same is true of. If it's made from interest / stocks dividends, she is still legally acquiring that money and the IRS would consider it "earnings." I'm not sure, my basic attitude is that if a society has enough resources collectively to do so (or an abundance of them), it should be able to provide basic needs for all its citizens, regardless of their condition. If that's not being done, then I think something should be changed so that is accomplished. I'm not anti-capitalism, but I also think there should be limits to it. Like say there was a society where no one could earn more than 100 million dollars. The excess money would be used to fund projects like roads, public schools, libraries, etc. I think that would be great, because I think the overall good that would create for people would outweigh the person's plans for their money past 100 million dollars. At 100 million dollars, the individual still has more wealth, resources and power than the vast, vast majority of humanity. You could even have a system where the earner over 100 million could choose how his extra money was distributed within certain channels. Say the money would normally be going to go to roads, but he wants it all to go to non-profit cancer research instead, that would be fine too. The excess money could NOT go towards buying a new mansion or investing in bank company stock however. The "acid test" for this would be to demonstrate the clear connection as to how this improves society as a whole. Simply "creating jobs" wouldn't count, it would have to do more than that. I'm not sure if this is utilitarian or not, I think it contains elements, but doesn't take it to an extreme. Your tyranny of the majority argument is valid, but I think imposing limits on some of the most powerful people on earth isn't the same as "tyranny." Besides, the limits wouldn't be applied unequally. In my conceptual society, EVERYONE would be under the 100 million limitation. The difference is people earning $20,000 wouldn't be so worried about it. Yes, that is part of it, but taxes are also lower than they've ever been. On a micro level, if your paycheck was cut in half and you can no longer pay medical bills, are your medical bills the sole cause of you going into debt? I wasn't trying to imply Bush was, but he WAS responsible for a LOT of tax cuts, which you can use to see if there's any correlation between that and poverty. As for Obama's job plans, I always felt like it was just stalling the problems from 2008.

Not that far, I have the video footage recorded, but I'm wondering if I should redo it since it has some spots that didn't go as well as I wanted to. I've already redone the sequence some 20-30 times trying to get it right. I've lost several days working on finalizing the results for the sound editing contest. I've also lost days to trying to solve bugs I'm getting with MKV encoding and playback. In addition to releasing the videos, I want to use RGB encoding to make archive quality copies in MKV format, but be able to convert them back to uncompressed AVI again in case I need to edit them later. It's proving to be much more of a pain in the ass than I anticipated, but it would mean saving a ton of space and having higher quality copies of the videos in the future. Lately I've been trying to get stuff rolling on CP again since I only last week got the fix back from Valve, so I've been encouraged by that, but it needs I mean to contact and organize a lot of things in order to get production started on that again. I'll resume work on FM very soon, there just haven't been enough hours in the day.

That and racing, I think leaving these out kind of skews results you'd get.

Things like nuclear and solar power are for electricity production. Very little of oil goes towards that. If we could magically have every power plant in the world operating on renewable energy, it would have almost no impact on the problem with oil dependence. The majority of oil use goes towards fuel, with industrialized farming in particular also relying heavily on it for chemical use. If we had been busting ass to create a transportation network that doesn't rely on oil 10 years ago, it might be such a huge issue. As it stands, we're unlikely to respond until it becomes a crisis situation, and by then we have less resources to work with in making a transition. So the question is how do you feed a growing population when the cost of farming doubles over a matter of a few years?

Ha, sorry, that wasn't the intent. Here's an alternate image if it helps:

http://www.accursedfarms.com/freemans-mind-episode-35/ 3rd paragraph.

The sound contest is finally over and I have the winners announced. The winner ended up being a tie between two people, so elements of both their entries were combined on the final mix. It's not perfect, but after multiple revisions from the contestants plus several hours of additional editing on my part, I'm declaring it done. You can download the video in MKV format below, which is much higher quality than any copy released so far. I decided to give awards to everyone who entered the contest, though some are more prestigious than others: Download new & improved "Diary of A Zombie" 1280x720 MKV (94MB) WINNERS: "TheDazro" (www.youtube.com/thedazro) Mark Dzidowski (www.homerecordingstudio.com.au) GOLD AWARD: "TheDazro" (www.youtube.com/thedazro) Mark Dzidowski (www.homerecordingstudio.com.au) Darrin Smith ([email protected]) SILVER AWARD: "AndrewN" (www.andreworks.com) "Chuck the 2nd" Ólafur Arons (www.youtube.com/OlafurArons) Ian Davis Chad Keating ([email protected]) Sean "Ita" Larkin ([email protected]) BRONZE AWARD: "av3nger" "Joannou1" (gldesert.com) Daniel Eriksson Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson Robert Fryer BEST VOLUME BALANCING: "Chuck the 2nd" MOST ORIGINAL SOUND EFFECTS: Darrin Smith ([email protected]) LOUDEST GUNSHOTS AWARD: "av3nger" JUST KIND OF DID HIS OWN THING REGARDLESS OF THE INSTRUCTIONS AWARD: "Joannou1" (gldesert.com) Daniel Eriksson Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson TURNED IN ENTRY AFTER THE DEADLINE WAS OVER AWARD: "Chuck the 2nd" Thorsteinn Gunnar Fridriksson Robert Fryer That should be everyone. If you sent me an entry for the contest, but don't see your name up here (I hope not), that means gmail swallowed your email somehow and you should probably contact me again.

I thought the world ended for Y2K.

I know I'm pretty biased in this area, but there's a strong correlation with the massive increase of the population of the earth and the growth of the oil industry. Modern farming uses fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that depend heavily on petrochemicals, let alone the additional oil that goes into running farm equipment and transporting it to market. My understanding is that we could theoretically support all 7 billion people we have on the planet now with no one going hungry or starving, but only with our modern production methods. Without the use of oil, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we can't sustain the current population we have.

I saw this today, might be significant: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change?newsfeed=true The IEA is known for being almost unrealistically optimistic in terms of predictions regarding oil, I don't know what their record is on climate projections.

I'd have to see a study showing no correlation between government spending on welfare and the poverty rate before I could just take your word for it. I mean if you spend 50 billion above average one year and the poverty rate drops 1%, it may not seem like much, but there could be a correlation. What I do know is our government welfare system didn't really start until after the Great Depression, so you would have to look at rates prior to that. I believe in the late 1800s and early 1900s you had poverty rates from 30-60%, which is much higher than what we have now. There's lots of variables at work in this, but that suggests that simply eliminating government welfare would just make the overall situation worse. In an anecdotal sense, say you're unemployed, can't find a job, and receive welfare money and food stamps. Now take that money away so that you can't pay rent or buy groceries. Now say that a private charity is overstretched and has to provide to even needier people than you. What options do you have then? I did a search on google and this is one of the first links I found: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/13/rick-santorum/rick-santorum/ It sounds like the numbers aren't as high as 42%, but it makes sense that if you have half the earners in a family, they'll have less to work with. Again though, I think this is an argument that our system needs improvement, if welfare was taken away these numbers would likely be higher.

I think this for AMD's APU processors. For gaming enthusiasts, this isn't going to mean a whole lot, but for the general market this is a much bigger deal because it means you could have cheap systems shipping with capable GPUs built as part of the processor. The main competitor to this is Intel integrated graphics, which is crap for anything related to 3D.

I actually made that noise based on a sound in the movie "What About Bob?" when Richard Dreyfuss is having this puppet show talk with his daughter.

The MKV copy is up, sorry it took so long to get it out. It took me a while to research x264 encoding and I ran a ton of tests before I had some confidence with releasing public copies of it. I'm STILL figuring out settings I want to use for archive quality, but I'll probably stick with these for public releases.

The MKV copy is finally up, sorry for the wait on that. I think these settings should be relatively good for general release.

I'm unfamiliar with this book, but reading the wikipedia article it sounds like they were looking solely at the differences between exponential and linear growth, and weren't accounting for much beyond that. I don't know of any reputable scientists who made predictions back in the 70s that we would "run out" by 1992. One of the more respected ones in the oil industry was M. King Hubbert. Hubbert predicted we would start peaking in 1995, though that was about 10 years off (all evidence I've seen suggests we've been peaking since 2005). He also correctly predicted when the United States would start peaking in production. Here's some information about how some of the better educated guesses are made on this today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_oil Anyone who says we're going to "run out" of oil by a specific date doesn't know what they're talking about. Decline in production won't work that way. There will still be some oil around for the rest of our natural lives. What I think will happen however, is that once we start seeing a decline in production, it will have a massive, massive negative economic impact on our society, the United States is especially structured around having cheap oil and having the price double or triple would be extremely disruptive. I really don't think our society is prepared at all for this kind of transition, which unfortunately makes the situation that much worse.

I finally got around to watching this. I think around 2050 in the video, they get extremely speculative, but most of what they say before that sounds pretty plausible to me. I especially like how they also predict the beginning of oil problems in 2015 (like I do) and included some small segments with James Howard Kunstler, an author whom I think has some good predictions for where civilization headed: Vapymid: This isn't propaganda, the entire thing is a prediction based on our current observations. There's no guarantee any of this will be true from the get-go. I did think they were a little heavy-handed in their talk about solar power, but beyond that, they look a lot of different variables that are affecting the planet and I think some of their conclusions were pretty good. Doom Shepard: It wasn't created for Youtube, it was a production put out by ABC. But I agree that it's not really a documentary, but just a possible interpretation of the future.

Actually I have one more comment, a friend presented me with this question, that I think could have saved a lot of time figuring out everyone's morality: Let's say you ate a belladonna berry by accident, which is poisonous. I have a calabar bean, which is the antidote. However, I refuse to give you the calabar bean because you can't give me something in return. Is that unethical?

I clicked on that article, and it cited another article, which said this: "At issue for the Republicans is the fact that an estimated 46% of Americans don't owe any federal income tax. That's because many of them earn so little that the standard deduction and personal exemption absolve them of liability." While I'm sure a few of them are parasites, my guess is the majority of them are not. If somebody works as a janitor 40 hours a week (or better yet, like some jobs I've had, 35 hours a week so they can work you almost full time without providing benefits), but can barely pay for his rent and groceries, but after filing his taxes, owes nothing to the IRS because he earns so little, do you think he's a parasite to society, even with the work he's doing? This sounds kind of bigoted. When you say "I know why" talking about someone else, assuming everyone else's views are really the same as yours, you don't really achieve any understanding that way. That would be like me saying that I know why some people listen to jazz; it's because deep down, they know metal is awesome, but they're too afraid they can't handle it. Personally, I think capitalism in its modern form produces great things, but has also become extremely harmful to the middle class and unregulated I think is dangerous to the well-being of society. As for the government, I feel like its been infiltrated by lobbyists and is a limp duck in a lot of areas or an enabler to what would have previously been illegal practices in the past. Exchange of goods isn't everything, force is necessary. I WANT the government to force companies not to do something like dump mercury into the river. If someone is making 100 million dollars a year, I WOULD like the government to take some of that money and use it to benefit people have almost nothing. So if they earn 80 million that year instead of 100 million, yes, they are being "robbed" for operating in the country they live in, but my guess is that money can improve the lives of an incredible number of people than it would in the hands of the individual. Well I'm sure he does work hard, though $350,000 or more of gross income a year makes it far easier to provide all those things than the vast majority of families, many of which likely work just as hard as he does. An example of hard work is fine, but I'm willing to bet the average blue collar worker works a hell of a lot harder than the average family member who inherits millions. I'm WELL within the 99% myself and was born into it, but I think my views wouldn't change if my income ever did. And yet this woman could earn more income from trust funds than your entire family combined. But if you're consistent with your ideology, I'm assuming you think it's more of a crime that she is charged any taxes from her trust fund income than to have the government force a percentage of it go towards scholarships for poorer families. No, I'm referring to everyone who lives within a civilization. This includes hard workers, but it also includes homeless drunks, and it includes upper income earners like the woman in your picture. Well if something immensely benefits thousands or millions of individuals and inconveniences a few individuals, I consider that generally a good thing. So if you earn 100 million dollars and the government takes 20 million from you, yeah, I guess that sucks that you don't get every last dollar, although you still have 80 million dollars, which is more money than 99% of people will ever see in their lives. Then if you turnaround and that money goes and benefits 20,000 people by providing schools for children, dental work for people who can't afford it, shelters for battered women, etc., I consider that a pretty good tradeoff for society overall, even if the individual would rather have his extra 20 million dollars. If it's easier, imagine it's the woman in the picture who's earning 100 million dollars each year from trust funds. Are there any projections this would actually work without a LOT of people being left on the wayside? America has both welfare and private charities and we still have about 44 million people in poverty. If there wasn't any welfare, that number would almost certainly be higher, more on that below. At least with a government "forcing" some things you can have some guarantees of some services, however shoddy they might be. Well again, according to wikipedia we have about 44 million in poverty in America. So 100 billion would mean about $22 per person in poverty on average. But even if you want to factor in every other charity, I think the math still doesn't add up. from 2000 - 2010 the Bush tax cuts saved about 2.7 trillion dollars in tax cuts, yet the poverty rate increased by 4-5%, with 11 million more in poverty. Even before the 2008 economy problems, the poverty level was rising steadily. So if your theory was true, that means that poverty should have gone DOWN because private charities would have had more money, because the government was taking less from taxes. Instead, it went up. Just relying on the kindness of people I think doesn't cut it, I think it would leave way too many people suffering or dead that wouldn't be with more socialized benefits. I think the government currently spends around 800 billion on welfare and we still have tons of people in poverty. I don't understand how we would have LESS poverty if welfare suddenly disappeared. Charity would have to raise at least an additional 800 billion just to have similar numbers to what we have today. I can't imagine any charity worker who thinks people do NOT have a right to something like a place to sleep or food. Well assume in this scenario you're living comfortably from your salary and this is not a case of triage, where by denying him you're saving someone else's life. If you still would like society to ALLOW you to let him die in your position, I think this discussion is over; your morality is simply different from mine. I think you value no compromise whatsoever to the rights of the individual, at any cost, including the lives of people who are less fortunate.

I think there's some important stuff here to focus on, otherwise the rest of this debate is pointless: The simple version of what I think you're saying is that the government shouldn't enforce anything that infringes on what other people wish to do (short of obvious illegal things, like theft, murder, etc.). I can understand that mentality, but in practice, I think this creates more of an "every man for himself" society. So if you're too poor to afford housing or regular meals, that's your problem. If you're injured or uneducated and can't find work, that's your problem. If you're ill or elderly and can't afford healthcare, that's again, your problem and nobody else's (unless they choose to make it theirs). Is this a correct conclusion of what you're advocating? If it is, I think that's immoral and rather brutal towards people, provided a society has the means to provide for everyone. So if so, I fundamentally disagree with what you're saying, sorry. As long as a society has the resources to do so, I don't think anyone should not be provided basic needs in order to survive, regardless of their situation. If that's not what you're saying, then who provides for all those types of people under the system you're describing? Well let's go back to my above examples in this post. Who exactly are the "robbers?" Does it include the person who is homeless on the street who wants somewhere to live and food to eat because he doesn't have these things and can't currently provide for himself?