lostfan

What's that got to do with anything?

I'm surprised that people feign surprise when they talk about the US advancing its own national interest and not the interests of another country. Which is pretty much what every major power in the history of civilization has done.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Feb 3, 2011 -> 11:11 PM) I used to love Wade back when he was at Marquette and will never forget the day that he was drafted by Miami and the Bulls took Hinrich. Now you could say I hate Hinrich, that would be fair, but I loved Wade. He isnt what he used to be, and without his exception athleticism he is not a top 5 player. I hate to say it, but the injuries appear to be piling up. You can say Lebron cant be a SG, but that just isnt true, his skill set fits perfectly as a SG. Just because on most teams he plays SF due to that being the best match up, does not mean that his ultimate best position could not be SG. Against a team that has a bigger combination of SG/SF there would definitely be advantages in having Lebron be the SG. I guess I dont really compartmentalize players that are 2/3s unless they have some sort of size issue. If they are in the 6'6-6'8 range they really can play any position, especially if they are as good as Lebron. Sorry if that doesnt fit your criteria for how I rate my top 5 basketball players, but so be it. "without his exceptional athleticism?" I'm sorry but that makes no sense. None. Might as well say "if it wasn't for the fact that he could shoot the lights out Ray Allen isn't that good."

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 3, 2011 -> 06:16 PM) Eh, I have a hard time calling someone who can't do anything more than 5 feet away from the basket one of THE best in the game. If teams figure out to collapse and deny the post, Blake will disappear. I hate to have to invoke the name, but Jordan didn't really shoot until a few seasons into the league because he didn't have to, he got by on pure athleticism.

Alexei is, what, 28? He's never going to learn plate discipline.

Carlos Boozer is like the Carlos Quentin of the NBA.

Danks is trying to roll the dice because he knows he'll get big money in free agency. Can't hardly blame him.

s***ty OBP and a waste of RBI opportunities. No thanks.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 2, 2011 -> 09:31 PM) Well, first of all, would you expect any other leader of the U.S. to respond differently? Secondly, this isn't an Islamic led revolution, at least not yet. Any comparisons are premature. Although, in 1979, those were originally student protests and a few months later the Islamists hijacked it.

kap you're badly mischaracterizing the government's message/foreign policy on those 2 things. On Iran in 2009 they came just short of calling the thing an outright fraud and didn't want to give the impression they were directly interfering in Iran's internal politics since that would fall right in line with their propaganda (which is based in truth pre-1979). Over time the support for the protesters got louder and stronger, but the "revolution" eventually faded since the military and security services still support/are controlled by the regime. Never at any point do I recall them saying Iran had the "right" to govern aside from bland diplomat-speak. In Egypt, right now, they are trying to hedge their bets so they don't end up on the wrong side and trying to walk a fine line. And still they don't want to be seen as directly interfering and don't want to put a "made in America" stamp on it since it really doesn't have anything to do with the US one way or another really. This is decades of foreign policy, having nothing to do with this administration and Mubarak's regime is fatally wounded but might still survive. They aren't going to come right out and say "Mubarak, time to go." Given the choice between letting the Muslim Brotherhood take over and having Mubarak stay in power, they'd keep Mubarak. Welcome to American foreign policy for the last 30 years. Least bad of a series of bad options.

Y2HH really has a point and that's why the left was lukewarm to this bill at best.

QUOTE (knightni @ Feb 2, 2011 -> 09:01 PM) Still think that a snowblower is a bad investment, lost? seeing as how I don't live in Chicago and didn't have a once-in-a-generation blizzard since then, and have a townhouse with only about 30 feet of sidewalk I haven't really changed my mind.

QUOTE (Controlled Chaos @ Feb 2, 2011 -> 08:44 PM) oh yeah. Not sure why either. I'm sure the guy that barely shovels and does just enough to get his car out, looks at people like me and says...loser! i have lazy ass neighbors. I kind of look down on those people actually. My neighbor to the left of me is like 83 so to me it's like a moral obligation to shovel her sidewalk, and there's community stairs that we all use. Guess who's the only one to do that? Until last year though there was a mystery neighbor that used to get up at dawn when it snowed and shovel all of our sidewalks, I never knew until right before he moved that it was a guy who had an accident and had brain damage and couldn't work, he used to say "these people got to go to work" but he never wanted us to see him shoveling.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 1, 2011 -> 11:17 AM) That must be nice. The nicer part is not having to curse my wife the f*** out again for being retarded.

the whole thing about Twitter in Iran was, for lack of a better explanation, wishful thinking combined with just something that sounded cool. There were like 60 people inside Iran who had Twitter and when they shut the internet down that number was reduced to about 5 or 6. The Iranian government (and the Egyptian government too) is just as able to use social media to oppress as would-be revolutionaries are to use them for organizing or whatever. What you really see is spontaneous mass protests organized the old-fashioned way like the sit-ins in the 60s and basically every other protest that's happened before social media. People just tired of the Mubarak regime and joining in when they see there's really a chance for it to happen.

The Onion cutting a little too close to the truth again.

My brother is a Blue Line operator, he said f*** it and went to work, then when he got there he said f*** it I'm not going home for a while, because it's difficult, and because he's banking with the OT.

I didn't read all of those posts in the last few pages but I see y'all talking about LSD - I don't know what the city has to apologize for here. Yes it was a clusterf*** but what else could they do? People ask "why didn't they plow LSD?" I'm pretty sure every plow the city had was in use somewhere important. Why didn't they shut it down? I don't know... but that traffic has to go somewhere else. Plus it wasn't like it was a secret there was a historic blizzard on the way, and LSD is notoriously unstable. 25 feet waves off the lake and whatnot. Blizzards are considered emergency conditions for a reason.

Thanks guys and happy birthday motherf***ers!

QUOTE (danman31 @ Jan 31, 2011 -> 04:57 PM) Yeah the drunks are a really annoying feature. AC is good because it's fun to be able to fight off 15 guards at once if you're good enough, but it's EXTREMELY repetitive. AC2 is light years better. They give you different stuff to do, it's not as repetitive and the combat is improved with a little more variety. I'm playing Brotherhood now. I'm not sure it's better than AC2, but it's at least as good. I kind of miss the old days of taking on 12 guys though haha. I just started playing AC2, the first AC was a decent game but this one is SOOOOOOO much better. I lol'd at one of the opening missions though, at Lucy. "Desmond, SHUT THE f*** UP." You don't expect to hear her talking like that after the first game where she was getting bossed around.

I'd do that, but I can't get on Soxtalk at work.

It's fair value for Alexei. Best defensive SS in the AL, and elite defensive SS's that can actually hit don't grow on trees anymore post-steroid era.

My wife is still a moron, but I got her W2 (FINALLY on the last day) and it turns out I won't owe after all. *wipes brow*

It's a valid point though, these party threads were not intended to be the place to have multi-page arguments about obviously biased articles. The occasional "that's factually untrue and here's the proof," ok, but not knock-down drag-out arguments, that's what the rest of the forum is for. (it doesn't just happen in this thread btw, you guys are basically just talking about Balta anyway) I end up posting in this thread a lot because a) I'm a mod and B) I just post a lot in general, but you usually won't see me doing that.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 31, 2011 -> 12:24 AM) The first PS3's were costing Sony approximately $800 to make, I believe. They improved the design, and reduced the number of parts, to the point where they are about breaking even now, which is the goal with all consoles. eh I should've qualified that statement. All consoles lose the company money at launch for the first year or two. Sony had a harder time coming out of the gate than they should have. I suppose for them it was worth it since they did win the format war (whether that is actually going to be that significant remains to be seen) by sheer blunt force.