β€­πŸ™… THE BAD IDEAS THREAD


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Buddy said:

    Also, the correct pronouns for talking about a group of people are β€˜them’ and β€˜they’.

    Which pronoun did you think I misused? "their staff?" If so, you/re wrong, because I was using a possessive.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @FrostCat said:

    Which pronoun did you think I misused? "their staff?" If so, you/re wrong, because I was using a possessive.

    Perhaps you should have used 'ΓΎere'?



  • @accalia said:

    hmmm.....i've seen that idea explored somewhere..... where did i see that?

    I once heard a similar joke.

    PRE-JOKE-WARNING: Not politically correct and may offend Democrats.

    Little Johnny was a smart second-grader who really liked politics. He watched the news a lot and could easily name many of our important past Presidents as well as current politicians.

    Sadly he was killed in a tragic bicycle accident by a texting driver. He woke up in Heaven and an angel began to show him around. In one room, Johnny saw shelf after shelf full of clocks. He asked the angel, "What are all those clocks for?"

    The angel replied, "That's how we tell how many times someone has lied. Each time a person tells a lie, their clock ticks one second."

    "Is George Washington's in here?"

    "Sure is." The angel showed Johnny the clock. It was stopped at 12:00:01. "He only told one lie in his life."

    "The cherry tree!" Johnny said excitedly. "What about Abraham Lincoln?" And the angel showed him Lincoln's clock. And this continued for several more famous U.S. Presidents.

    Finally, Johnny asked "Where is Barack Obama's clock?"

    The angel laughed and said, "That one is on Jesus's personal helicopter. He's using it to power the main rotor."



  • I think Shrub's clock is powering the tail rotor, then...


  • FoxDev

    @mott555 said:

    PRE-JOKE-WARNING: Not politically correct and may offend Democrats.

    that's ok. i just replaced Barak Obama with John Boehner and had a good laugh.

    πŸ˜†


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    I think Shrub's clock is powering the tail rotor, then

    Surely you're not one of those kooks who think "Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq".

    Remember that a necessary component of a lie is that you know it's not true. Being wrong != being a liar.


  • BINNED

    @ben_lubar said:

    Wasn't the entire point of not being a monarchy that the government would be held to the same standards as the rest of the people?

    The other point is that we can get rid of unpopular leaders without having to shoot anyone.

    @FrostCat said:

    Surely you're not one of those kooks who think "Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq".

    Remember that a necessary component of a lie is that you know it's not true. Being wrong != being a liar.

    The running joke about that was that the reason the Bush administration was so sure there were WMDs in Iraq was because they still had the receipts.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @antiquarian said:

    The running joke about that was that the reason the Bush administration was so sure there were WMDs in Iraq was because they still had the receipts.

    Which, of course, was nonsense, because at the time someone worked out who was selling all those weapons to Iraq, and it was--IIRC--mainly the French and Russians.


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    @accalia said:

    that's ok. i just replaced Barak Obama with John Boehner and had a good laugh.

    It's an old joke, retold every administration.

    @tarunik said:

    I think Shrub's clock is powering the tail rotor, then...

    I'm a little confused by this. He's not nearly as well known for actual lies (I'm assuming a heaven clock could tell the difference).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    [Bush is] not nearly as well known for actual lies

    He had someone to do that for him?


  • FoxDev

    @boomzilla said:

    It's an old joke, retold every administration.

    true enough.it's usually told by whichever party doesn't have the big guy in the white house.


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    He had someone to do that for him?

    Except the "lies" usually weren't, as I mentioned. So maybe the joke's funny due to being wrong?



  • @FrostCat said:

    If you're getting a subsidy not available to anyone else, you're not subject to Obamacare.

    The extra subsidies are essentially employer-provided healthcare positions.

    For example, I get insurance through my employer and don't need to get one on the exchange. Does that mean I'm "exempt" from Obamacare?

    The federal government has more than 50 employees, which means that if it were a typical employer it would fall under the requirement to provide insurance (or pay the extra "tax"). Suppose they had gone the usual private company route and contracted with a couple insurance companies to provide coverage. Would that be exempting the government or Congresscritters from Obamacare? I mean, I guess you could hypothetically say "yes" here, but they'd be following the same rules as everyone else, and so implying that Congress would be in a special situation in that case would be somewhere between very disingenuous and outright wrong IMO.

    That's not quite the case, of course -- because Congress is required to buy through the exchanges. But that makes them more subject to "Obamacare" than the sort of default position they'd face in the previous paragraph, not less. So my last thing about saying that implying that Congress is special still holds.

    What would you have wanted? Have the government exempt itself from the requirement to provide insurance, and then not do so for Congress? Because that would have been a special case, but it's the only alternative I can think of.

    I really don't understand this particular objection to Obamacare.

    [I haven't read other posts in this thread besides FrostCat's, so may have more to say later]



  • @FrostCat said:

    Surely you're not one of those kooks who think "Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq".

    Remember that a necessary component of a lie is that you know it's not true. Being wrong != being a liar.

    He wasn't entirely wrong, as we found out last year:


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    @EvanED said:

    Does that mean I'm "exempt" from Obamacare?

    There are so many parts to Obamacare...

    @abarker said:

    He wasn't entirely wrong, as we found out last year:

    Some of this was reported at least a decade ago, too, for those paying attention. There was a lot of speculation before the invasion about what the convoys carried from Iraq into Syria.



  • @boomzilla said:

    There are so many parts to Obamacare...
    Which is another reason that I don't like the statement that Congress is exempt. (Or FrostCat's "not subject to", which is what I should have said instead of "exempt from", or that the law doesn't apply to Congress.)


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    We should just flog all members and their staff every time they pass something that they obviously didn't read.


  • BINNED

    Seriously LOLed at that one



  • @FrostCat said:

    Surely you're not one of those kooks who think "Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq".

    Remember that a necessary component of a lie is that you know it's not true. Being wrong != being a liar.

    I think he got lied to re the WMDs in Iraq. I was making an example of him to say that "the modern politician is a pathological liar, in general", though.

    Filed under: it must be in the water, or the air, or something in DC...

    @boomzilla said:

    I'm a little confused by this. He's not nearly as well known for actual lies (I'm assuming a heaven clock could tell the difference).

    See above.


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    @tarunik said:

    I think he got lied to re the WMDs in Iraq.

    By whom? Who seriously didn't think there were WMDs in Iraq back then?

    @tarunik said:

    Filed under: it must be in the water, or the air, or something in DC...

    No, it comes with the job. Nothing unique about DC. Look at any politician at any level in any part of the world.

    @tarunik said:

    See above.

    Now I know that you're confused, not me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    I think he got lied to re the WMDs in Iraq

    Unless you want to retroactively decide that basically every intelligence agency in the world lied, that's not a sustainable argument.

    Saddam lied -- or may have been deceived by his own people -- about having them. That's pretty much beyond reasonable dispute at this point. Because of that, everyone else in the world was convinced he had them. "Bush lied" is an after the fact lie of its own, started by Democrats, to save face. I'm not going to do it because if you look, you'll find plenty of people already have, but it's easy to find video of all the major political figures in the US, in the run up to the war, including people like Hillary Clinton, saying Saddam had them. The same goes, again, for most of the world's intelligence agencies.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    By whom? Who seriously didn't think there were WMDs in Iraq back then?

    Again, the best information at this point is that Saddam's own people lied to him about their capabilities, literally in order to keep themselves alive and/or untortured, and everyone else believed them.

    Small amounts of post-inspector WMDS were found, at which point the anti-war people moved the goalposts and claimed "Saddam never had stockpiles of WMDs". Plus, nobody has ever examined the caravans out of the Bekaa Valley into Syria. All we can say for sure is nobody proved he had large stockpiles of post-inspector WMDs. We can't say he didn't have them because nobody stopped those caravans.


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    Again, the best information at this point is that Saddam's own people lied to him about their capabilities, literally in order to keep themselves alive and/or untortured, and everyone else believed them.

    Exactly.

    @FrostCat said:

    Plus, nobody has ever examined the caravans out of the Bekaa Valley into Syria.

    We should ask Vladimir.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    We should ask Vladimir.

    ...or Assad, who we all know has chemical weapons now. (He may have had them before, I don't know and am not going to bother to look.)


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    ...or Assad, who we all know has chemical weapons now.

    Except for the ones that ISIS has. And all the ones that got used already. And maybe a few that the Russians took (did any of that actually happen?).



  • @FrostCat said:

    Unless you want to retroactively decide that basically every intelligence agency in the world lied, that's not a sustainable argument.

    At some level -- some intelligence wonk (or Iraqi grunt under the threat of torture) said "yes" to the question in the absence of supporting data. Everyone else went and ran with that answer. Oops!

    @FrostCat said:

    Again, the best information at this point is that Saddam's own people lied to him about their capabilities, literally in order to keep themselves alive and/or untortured, and everyone else believed them.

    I'll agree with you there -- that could very easily be Ground Zero for the WMD mess.

    As to the caravans? Dunno, and we probably won't until our executive branch stops deciding to try to be a secret-catcher.


  • β™Ώ (Parody)

    @tarunik said:

    At some level -- some intelligence wonk (or Iraqi grunt under the threat of torture) said "yes" to the question in the absence of supporting data. Everyone else went and ran with that answer. Oops!

    Sorry, but you're rewriting history here. There was a ton of supporting intelligence and history. Which was why pretty much everybody believed he had stuff. There was literally no serious person or intelligence agency that didn't think so.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Which pronoun did you think I misused? "their staff?"

    I read that as referencing this:

    @FrostCat said:

    >Green's side say ...

    ... Fuck her for thinking she shouldn't have to play by the same rules

    Presumably, @Buddy meant that the pronouns should have been plural in reference to the multiple people who constitute "Green's side," rather than singular in reference to only Green.



  • Jerry Green, that is.



  • I didn't bother going back and reading it again to find out whether "Green" is male, female, both, neither or other, since your complaint was about incorrect number rather than incorrect gender, although it's possible both could be wrong.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Presumably, @Buddy meant that the pronouns should have been plural in reference to the multiple people who constitute "Green's side," rather than singular in reference to only Green.

    Well, at that particular sentence I was actually specifically thinking of her, so her and she were the right words, even though it also applied to her side.

    Edit: he, not she, whatever.



  • @mott555 said:

    Status: Got my replacement hard drive in courtesy of Western Digital's RMA service. That was fast! Currently making a system image and then going to restore it to a RAID 1 array using the replacement drive and the new drive I bought when I didn't realize my dead drive was fairly new and under warranty.

    Bad Idea: Modular power supplies with ambiguous connectors. While lying on my side beside my PC and working on cabling, I managed to plug an unused 6-pin GPU power plug back into the PSU itself because it's the same connector as the PSU-end of the modular cable I was connecting for the extra hard drive and I got them mixed up. The power supply survived but my motherboard did not 😦


  • FoxDev

    yep. that's bad design!

    sorry man. i hope it's only the MoBo that got toasted. that would suck (not a certain admin's) balls if the memory, add in cards, or CPU also got toasted.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @mott555 said:

    Bad Idea: Modular power supplies with ambiguous connectors.

    Ugh, yeah, that sucks. On my modular PSU all the connectors have one row of pins, like this:

    http://www.gearxs.com/image/cache/data/additional/images/PS-CU-500B-500x500.GIF


  • FoxDev

    *ahem*


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    1 out of 7. And that's just the first random pic I found that didn't have the sockets ALL like that. (As it turns out mine has a couple more of those connectors.) But TBH there's a certain amount of PEBCAK there. You're dealing with voltage, you should be looking at the socket.


  • FoxDev

    true, but the original version of Murphy's law does apply here too.

    allow something to be plugged in one fo two ways and someone will plug it in the wrong way.


  • FoxDev

    hmm... GIS fail and newegg doesn't have the model anymore, but the PSU i have in Amaterasu (older desktop) does this rather interestingly.

    the connectors for the PCI power sockets are male on the PSU side and the connectors for the SATA power connectors are female on the PSU side. literally impossible to misconnect.

    now that was some nice thinking!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    true, but the original version of Murphy's law does apply here too.

    allow something to be plugged in one fo two ways and someone will plug it in the wrong way.

    I did agree it was a bad design.

    IIRC 8-pin GPU aux and 8-pin CPU aux jacks are pinned differently but I'm not going to power down to verify that.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @boomzilla said:

    Sorry, but you're rewriting history here. There was a ton of supporting intelligence and history. Which was why pretty much everybody believed he had stuff. There was literally no serious person or intelligence agency that didn't think so.

    I will just leave this here...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    I will just leave this here...

    It quoted Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying it was clear that Bush had "made up his mind" to take military action but that "the case was thin."

    "Thin", here, is functionally the opposite of "there was no case."

    Straw also noted that Iraq retained "WMD capability" and that "Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN."
    UNR687 also provided a pre-existing basis, as it required Iraq to divest itself of "100%" of all WMD capacity, which the Memo agreed it had not.

    The most you can really say about this is that it claims people spun evidence. That's a far cry from what nutjobs like the Daily Kossacks tried to twist it into, which is that Bush lied.

    "Bush lied" is the same thing as 9-11 trooferism: the sign of a deranged mind, or, possibly, to be charitable, an ignorant one.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    "Thin", here, is functionally the opposite of "there was no case."

    "Thin", here, is functionally the same as "we should not go to war with this poor of evidence". There is no doubt in my mind that we never should have went to Iraq. Who fucked up, when and how? I don't care. You do not bomb the fuck out of another country without very compelling cause to believe that they are an imminent threat. Iraq was no threat to the US. Not in any way. A fucking idiot could see that.

    Bush and Cheney both said that Iraq had WMDs and had aided Al-Qu(however the fuck you spell it). That was demonstrably false, even at the time. And do not even attempt to assert that they did not say that...you know it is true and I can find the sound bites with 5 seconds on Youtube. Both Bush and Cheney said that Iraq helped with 9/11, which got everyone in to a fever pitch.

    Now, do I believe they intentionally lied to invade Iraq for X reasons? No. They are evil, but not that evil. I just think that they were utterly incompetent at their jobs.

    The whole thing was a fucking quagmire. We never should have went in to Iraq. Period. We had no business there. What we did was by all accounts a war of aggression. You can say, "We thought...", but that does not matter. All that matters is the results. We destabilized the region even further and have given rise to ISIS and other organizations. This is the exact same thing that happened when we meddled in the Afghan War. 20 years later we have Al-Qu(however the fuck you spell it) to deal with. No nation that minds their own business seems to have any issues. We meddle in the affairs of others and then act shocked and appalled when it comes back and bites us in the ass.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    Bush and Cheney both said that Iraq had WMDs and had aided Al-Qu(however the fuck you spell it). That was demonstrably false, even at the time.

    You're conflating. But it's self-evidently true that Iraq DID have WMDs. That's what the inspectors were doing there! There were huge amounts, yes, most of which that had been catalogued were old stuff. It was only later that people, seeing that they really were there, changed the goalposts to "newer WMDS than the ones from the Iran-Iraq war."

    @Polygeekery said:

    They are evil, but not that evil.

    You are a stone cold idiot if you think that. And while people say shit like that all over this forum, you should consider how many times I've said anything like that about you. Bush and Cheney were wrong. They weren't evil. You might like to compare to the guy who repeatedly only had to reach out his hand and we could have had Osama, or the guy who cheered that he "brought our troops home" and then, when things got bad again in Iraq--as everyone predicted--said it wasn't HIS fault the troops came home. Bush, by contrast, was doing something that turned out badly, and something he had one bad motivation for among many, but that he thought--again, wrongly--that would make the country safer.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    No nation that minds their own business seems to have any issues.

    Snort. Oh, you are so wrong.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    You are a stone cold idiot if you think that. And while people say shit like that all over this forum, you should consider how many times I've said anything like that about you.

    How about "fucking assholes" then?

    Keep in mind that Cheney said in the 90's that going in to Baghdad would be a huge mistake, because it would destabilize the region, etc. I positively despise the Bush administration. No administration has been without fault. I accept that most of the people likely to attain that position are going to assume some amount of corruption to get there. We are a society that seems to reward a certain amount of vitriol for some reason. But the Bush administration really ramped it up. I am no Obama lover, but even his administration has yet to reach the crescendo of corruption that Bush/Cheney had. Holy fuck, it was constant scandal and just a relenting shitstorm of vitriol. I have truly despised them.

    Wrong is one thing. I am wrong at least once a day. Before you engage in war, you remove all doubt. That is not a time to be wrong. You double and triple check, then go through it all again. You verify that you are correct. And you do not use a recent disaster to trumpet up your cause.

    @FrostCat said:

    Bush, by contrast, was doing something that turned out badly, and something he had one bad motivation for among many, but that he thought--again, wrongly--that would make the country safer.

    When it comes to war, you do not think. You know. If you are wrong, you just executed a war of aggression.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    Snort. Oh, you are so wrong.

    When was the last time Switzerland had a terrorist attack?



  • @boomzilla said:

    lies

    George W. Bush only told one lie! Barack Obama told 70 during the same term in US history! Wake up sheeple!



  • @Polygeekery said:

    When was the last time Switzerland had a terrorist attack?

    1969, according to the surely the most pointless category on the whole of wikipedia?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @FrostCat said:

    Ugh, yeah, that sucks. On my modular PSU all the connectors have one row of pins, like this:

    @accalia said:

    *ahem*

    Isn't that two rows of sockets?



  • And now another Bush is running for office. Don't you people learn? This would be Maduro stupidity level of democracy.


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