This Is Fine - 2020-08-04

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1:01 AM

FISA warrants with compliance errors pretty much fine, says DOJ after review

2 hours later…

2:48 AM

NEWS: Blizzard staff put together an anonymous spreadsheet Friday to compare salaries and pay raises as part of an open revolt against low compensation. While CEO Bobby Kotick makes $40m/year, some Blizzard employees say they can't even make ends meet. t.co/p2uhnwWfFn t.co/tpnJd3Krun

3:40 AM

@Wipqozn I find it insane that people are expected to keep their salaries a secret

it helps no one except the companies trying to undercut you

7 hours later…

11:02 AM

AXIOS on HBO: President Trump Exclusive Interview (Full Episode) | HBO

I'd suggest you consume this in small bites

but there is some really disgusting shite in there

1 hour later…

12:03 PM

Global News: Trump threatens Tik Tok ban unless U.S. gets 'substantial portion' of operations sales price.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7248226/trump-tik-tok-operations-sales-price/

12:46 PM

China’s real name verification system for games to launch nationwide by September scmp.com/abacus/games/article/3095509/…

> For years, the Chinese government has been trying to stop kids from playing too many video games. Now regulators are taking things a step further by ensuring anyone wanting to play a game must log in with their real names, thanks to a state-run authentication system set to be rolled out by September.

> Anyone under 18 years old is limited to 90 minutes on weekdays and three hours on holidays.

> To enforce these limits, players are required to to give out their real names which can be checked against ID numbers. Tencent and NetEase, the country’s two largest gaming companies, got a jump on these plans by introducing their own verification systems.

1:36 PM

Trump: Coronavirus is "under control"

user image

> “They are dying, that's true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. It's under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague,” he told Axios' Jonathan Swan.

2:05 PM

More highlights from the Axios/HBO interview:

The 3 Worst Moments From Trump’s Newest Axios Interview

1. The "deaths as a percent of population vs as a percent of cases" segment

2. "I don't know John Lewis"

3. Getting defensive about his comments about Ghislaine Maxwell

> “I mean, she’s an alleged child sex trafficker,” Swan interrupted at one point. With apparent sarcasm, Trump responded, “Big deal.”

2:28 PM

> McConnell has 17-point lead over Democratic challenger McGrath

lol

2:42 PM

> Twelve percent of Democrats said they also support McConnell.

How... how is this even possible?

> The survey of 700 likely voters in Kentucky, reported on by the Louisville Courier Journal, was conducted online from July 24 to Aug. 2 and had a margin of error of 3.5 percent.

wait so are you telling me that the ",,,freakin MOSCOW MITCH xD" strategy isn't working

Oh, so it's a shitty poll. Garbage in - garbage out.

I also don't trust that the margin of error is only 3.5 points.

I mean both candidates are also garbage in so this works out on multiple levels

@MBraedley that is the sampling error in polls, that doesn't contain any kind of systematic error in the polls

Fair.

2:47 PM

@Wipqozn yeh sure, this is so for the good of the children and not to keep track of dissidence at a young age that could fester in an online environment with those filthy freedom loving foreigners

But given the population of Kentucky, I would expect to need a sample of over 1000 in order to get a margin of error below 5 points.

3:08 PM

@BradC Honestly, at this point, anyone who votes for Trump is morally bankrupt.

I mean we were at that point a while ago, but this just further reinforces it.

@Memor-X Well yeah, nothing suspicious going on here. Carry on. Ignore the camera watching you at all times.

It's honestly completley wild just how high is approval rating currently is. It's currently at 41.2%, which is around the middle of his range of approval ratings. I tihnk his highest wat 44%, and his lowest was 36%.

Honestly he's probably going to win the 2020 election.

It's clear he's trying really, really hard to rig the election.

And that's something the GOP have a lot of experience with.

3:33 PM

@MBraedley West Virginia has a ton of Democrats but voted for Trump 70%, I think it might be a somewhat similar idea in Kentucky

1 hour later…

4:49 PM

Massive blasts rock Beirut's port area, causing widespread damage cbc.ca/news/world/lebanon-beirut-explosion-1.5673644

2

> Massive explosions rocked downtown Beirut on Tuesday, flattening much of the port, damaging buildings and blowing out windows and doors as a giant mushroom cloud rose above the capital. Witnesses saw many people injured by flying glass and debris.

> Lebanon's state news agency NNA and two security sources said the blasts had occurred in the port area where there are warehouses housing explosives. It was not immediately clear what caused the blasts or what kind of explosives were in the warehouses.

> The explosions come at a time of tumult. Lebanon's economic and financial crisis poses the most significant threat to the country since a devastating 15-year civil war ended in 1990. The highly indebted government is facing a rapid inflation, soaring unemployment and poverty, made worse by the coronavirus pandemic.

> For decades, the country has struggled with power cuts and a huge public debt for the national electricity company, which racks up a deficit of nearly $2 billion a year.

> But rationing has increased since June, and became so severe that residents reported only a couple of hours of electricity per day in some areas.

Didn't realize it had gotten so bad

hopefully this turns out to be an accident rather than something intentional... although it's possible we'll never know.

Not that an accident suddenly makes it okay, just slightly less terrible. Slightly.

5:08 PM

That looks like it could rival the Halifax Explosion. It almost certainly will be in the top 10 list of non-nuclear explosions.

Yeah, it shook balconies and blew doors from quite a ways away.

Good chance it might be an ammunition depot

And one video showed a bunch of smaller explosions before the big one, which would be consistent with an ammo depot.

Got a linky handY?

twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1290688455845056515?s=20

twitter.com/i/events/1290676374433234945

@MBraedley Oh wow, yeah I see what you mean

I wonder if it was a fire of some sort, and then it was a chain reaction

5:13 PM

That's what it looks like.

Yeah, it was a fire, and some small explosions in the vicinity, then a massive blast. Lebanese media is reporting 'fireworks', but ammunition depot seems more likely...

6:05 PM

apnews.com/89347d1b618ab522ec6d13aa114f4e92

6:46 PM

> Trump, this morning, introducing his Secretary of the Interior: "He loves the Interior."

Just never ceases to amaze me how dumb this all really is

> @kasie: Speaker Pelosi suggested $600/week for federal benefits is her red line. Could that pass the Senate if POTUS wants it too? @senatemajldr: "It's something I’m prepared to support. Even if I have some problems with certain parts of it."

lol owned

@TimStone If I had been in a coma for the last 5-6 years, and woke up now to all these news. I don't think I'd believe it

I'd probably ask whether I'm in the Bad Place

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🤔

Look it was a light coup as a treat

I love to be 6 tweets deep in a thread, post "look juan guaido was not just an american pawn in some kind of coup", then post 7 go "then we tried to do a coup"

"I'm unfamiliar with how powerful even conventional explosives are" Twitter is now cancelled in its entirety, thank you

@Unionhawk I mean I guess the stipulation is that we were like "Oh, an opportunity to do a coup!" instead of manufacturing the circumstances ourselves which like, not sure that's a useful distinction

> Three men stranded on Pacific island saved after writing SOS in sand

> Lebanese Ministry of Health: 30 dead and 3,000 injured so far in Beirut explosion

A number that's sure to keep growing, my god :/

@TimStone Addendum to this rule is that while this is devastating the Beirut governor can't keep comparing this to Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Anyway, according to the Lebanese intelligence minister they were storing confiscated "highly explosive material" in the port that they seized from a ship almost year ago, which other sources suggest was likely sodium nitrate

Reminiscent of the Texas City disaster

Texas City disaster

The Texas City disaster was an industrial accident that occurred on April 16, 1947, in the Port of Texas City, Texas, at Galveston Bay. It was the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, and one of history's largest non-nuclear explosions. A mid-morning fire started on board the French-registered vessel SS Grandcamp (docked in the port), and detonated her cargo of about 2,200 tons (about 2,100 metric tons) of ammonium nitrate. This started a chain reaction of fires and explosions in other ships and nearby oil-storage facilities, ultimately killing at least 581 people, including all but one...

7:30 PM

@TimStone And of Timothy McVeigh

7:46 PM

> The pick to be ambassador to Germany has attacked the country for supporting "Muslim invaders" saying Muslims want to turn it into an "Islamic state." He has called for allowing the shooting of undocumented immigrants trying to cross at the border

@TimStone 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate

@TimStone Shooting people at the border is really, really unpopular here. There's some bad history there on the former east-west German border

> Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves issues statewide mask mandate. "I want to see college football. The best way for that to occur is for us all to realize is that wearing a mask, as irritating as that can be & I promise I hate it more than anyone watching, is critical."

@MadScientist Yeaaaah

The soldiers that shot fleeing people in East Germany and some politicians that ordered it were later sentenced for these crimes after the unification.

They were considered so blatant crimes, that the fact that it was legal at the time in the DDR wasn't a valid defense

> Macgregor also described the German cultural concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which seeks to "cope with the past" and confront the atrocities the country committed in World War II, as a "sick mentality" and he downplayed the country's Nazi history.

@TimStone jesus

In the event that this guy turns out to be some sort of neo-Nazi or something which is almost a given at this point feel free to forget he's an ambassador

7:56 PM

That fucking asshole might be even worse than the previous asshole

@TimStone I just looked up the biggest disaster of that type I knew of in Germany, from almost 100 years ago. That was caused by 400 tons, 2750 tons is insane

Oppau explosion

The Oppau explosion occurred on September 21, 1921, when a tower silo storing 4500 tonnes of a mixture of ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded at a BASF plant in Oppau, now part of Ludwigshafen, Germany, killing 500–600 people and injuring about 2,000 more. == Background == The plant began producing ammonium sulfate in 1911, but during World War I when Germany was unable to obtain the necessary sulfur, it began to produce ammonium nitrate as well. Ammonia could be produced without overseas resources, using the Haber process. Compared to ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate is...

@TimStone So definitely on the same scale as Halifax and Texas City

Yep

@MBraedley if I read the Halifax article correctly, possibly even bigger than that

The SS Mont Blanc had around 2300 tons of explosives

Just wild. I guess they didn't have a better option than to store the material there, but that's a lot of "stuff that goes boom" in one spot

@Nzall mostly TNT. TNT is more powerful than ammonium nitrate, although not by much.

8:01 PM

SS Mont-Blanc was a freighter built in Middlesbrough, England in 1899 and purchased by the French company, Société Générale de Transport Maritime (SGTM). On Thursday morning, 6 December 1917, she entered Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia, Canada laden with a full cargo of highly volatile explosives. As she made her way through the Narrows towards Bedford Basin, she was involved in a collision with SS Imo, a Norwegian ship. A fire aboard the French ship ignited her cargo of wet and dry 2300 tons of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, and 10 tons of guncotton. The resultant Halifax Explosion levelled the...

And there were some explosives even more powerful than TNT on the Mont-Blanc

@TimStone you really shouldn't store that close to a city.

not "mostly TNT". Mostly picric acid

@Nzall You realize you're talking to a Haligonian, right

@MBraedley Haligonian? you mean someone from Halifax?

8:02 PM

@MadScientist "close to a city"? It was in the city. Completely wild.

Yes

@MadScientist Yeah, I'm assuming that the general unrest made the port one of the more secure places to keep it, especially if the intention was to offload it to someone else? But that clearly didn't end up happening

Also, here's a picture of a US high school first day post-covid:

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and here's an article about how that schools football team has tested positive for covid: msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/…

@MBraedley yeah, just checked the picric acid article. It's more powerful and less stable than TNT

(image source: reddit.com/r/pics/comments/i3izcv/…)

8:37 PM

> Swan: Lyndon Johnson! He passed the Civil Rights Act.
Trump: Ask, ask: how has it worked out? If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did. How has it worked out?
Swan: You think the Civil Rights Act was a mistake?

nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/…

8:51 PM

6 hours ago, by Wipqozn

@BradC Honestly, at this point, anyone who votes for Trump is morally bankrupt.

That entire interview is just so surreal.

I'm honestly shocked he even agreed to it.

I haven't listened to it, I don't think I've enough alcohol in the house to make it through, so it might be better to not even try

@MadScientist I've just read up on the highlights, for the same reason

@Wipqozn It's beginning of August.

Doesn't school start in September?

@Frank shrug

Not sure if Americans are just different, or if they're starting early due to lost Covid time.

Sounds like the push to educate will result in less education as everything shuts down.

8:55 PM

I suspect that nothing will shut down until biden (hopefully) takes over in January

Trump and the GOP states have made it pretty clear they don't care who dies, so long as they're not the 1%

I mean Jared and Trump took the strategy of doing nothing so blue states die off

Anyone who supports them is going to get infected because they don't believe it's necessary.

This is literal Darwin in action.

Trump will lose for no other reason than killing off his support base.

But they're also going to infect other people

@Wipqozn unless people change behaviour on their own, this will be far too late

@MadScientist Oh I'm well aware

US is fucked

@murgatroid99 Exactly. If they only hurt themselves I wouldn't even care, but they hurt everyone.

The only hope is that treatment has improved far enough to really dampen the number of deaths

8:58 PM

Same reason anti-vaxxers are so damn dangerous

@Wipqozn And of course they're going to amplify this too

@MadScientist Doesn't matter if people can't afford to get treated, though.

@Frank Every state (each individual school district, really) in the US sets its own calendar

Honestly it'll be all the more frusrating when they release a vaccine and huge portions of the population just refuse to get it

I got to argue with an anti-masker yesterday.

8:59 PM

In Missouri, we tend to start earlier (mid-Aug) and end earlier (mid-May). In Seattle, they start later in the fall but go into June

@Frank Sounds like a bad idea if you're trying to maintain a nice blood pressure level.

Summing up their position, it's a slippery slope from complying with masks, to mandating masks, to mandating vaccines, to accepting the mark of the Beast.

@Wipqozn My worst-case scenario is the opposite. A vaccine is rushed, and is later shown to have serious side effects.

And 98% of people survive, so meh.

@Frank That last bit is a real leap

Speaking as someone who supports complying with masks, and mandating masks, and mandating vaccines

9:01 PM

@murgatroid99 Not if you're supposed to be an unthinking obedient little drone.

Which is...ironic, considering the Bible also says to trust and obey your leaders.

@Frank too bad so many leaders are also idiots

@MadScientist Also a concern, yeah.

@Frank I...what. What?!?!

For the record, I'd also support making masks and vaccines compulsory.

And I lean rather conservative in many areas.

@Wipqozn Religion. It's a hell of a drug when you cherry pick what you believe.

I'd generally avoid making vaccines mandatory, but masks are a very easy decision. They're mandatory in public transport and inside shops here, but it's infuriating that some people just don't seem to care

We had to run out to do some shopping today. The first place we went to had a sign saying face coverings were mandatory.

Half the people didn't have any. Unless it's enforced, nobody cares.

9:06 PM

Here's an interesting perspective on people like that

I mean it's still like 80-90% have masks on and actually manage to cover their noses. So it's in any case much, much better than nothing.

The key bit from that post I linked to:

> Look at the thing with not wearing the masks. I can tell you what that's about. It's about exposing fear. They're playing chicken with nature and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal.

@MadScientist I'd make vaccines mandatory for certain groups: teachers, health workers, the elderly

And then make it so people who want the vaccine can get it at a very low price

@murgatroid99 That's like watching a tornado and daring it to wreck their shit.

@Nzall free

The supermarket near my apartment literally pays you to get a flu vaccine. That should be the kind of thing we do for this.

9:27 PM

By which I mean, if you get a flu shot there, they give you something like $10 off your groceries.

10:13 PM

@murgatroid99 Sounds frighteningly accurate.

Honestly don't even understand how this extreme "Fuck liberal" mindset got as bad in the US. It seems extremely unique to the US.

I know that like there's a concentrated effort to make it happen by the alt right and the GOP... but still, just wtf.

It exists outside the US too.. there's a whole host of people in Canada that have got this completely insane and irrational hatred for Trudeau, based on nothing.

and I don't mean "Justin is perfect!", because he's got issues, and it's why I voted NDP. But the people with this extreme Justin hate don't care about any of that. They're hatred is based on... nothing.

but in the US that mindset just seems to be so much more widespread.

1 hour later…

11:23 PM

Beirut explosion: scores dead and thousands hurt as blast rips through city

Wait, the SEC is already investigating the Kodak loan? lol

@Wipqozn There's a photo that claims to be of the warehouse pre-blast but I'm waiting to see if it's confirmed because it just seems too absurdly bad

@TimStone That was quick

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Aug '204

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