The Gaming Den

maglag wrote:Super medical corps are, you know, the guys who spend billions in drug research every year (and make gods know how much profits selling those drugs).

Bolt isn't some small time athlete, he's won multiple gold medals.

Which means that the tests he has to run through will most surely include any and all the stuff that shady medics could pull out on him.

Meanwhile Justin Gatlin runs for the USA, meaning he has direct acess to several of the top medics in known existence. And those medics have a direct interest in buffing him up for nationalist pride's sake. And even then Justin turns positive in tests now and then, while Bolt has always come out clean.

So no, Jamaica's medics aren't some kind of shady hidden genius that would be able to completely outperform USA's super medical corp treatments while remaining completely under the radar.

I have no idea if Bolt is clean or not, but this entire post is dripping with misconceptions.

Doping technology is a constantly moving target where the testing capability is trying to catch up to the latest in doping tech. The dopers have access to the same tests and basically manipulate things until they know their latest product can beat the current testing standards. Standards advance and the dopers advance as well. Calling it genius is misguided and misses the actual problem of trying to test for things that are designed specifically to not show up on current tests.

The billions spent on research are not in the doping field. The billions typically is because it is fucking expensive to do all the clinical trials required for the FDA to approve legit drugs that are designed to treat common conditions. I'd be shocked if anyone spent billions on a doping technology, because the market is very niche, and by its very nature is going to wane once testing catches up.

Jamaica doesn't need secret medic geniuses. High school kids can get access to doping resources. I have no doubt that people try to approach top tier world athletes.

Do the Olympics test for Supersoldier Serum? I know that the formula was supposedly lost when Erskine was killed, but there have been several shady groups attempting to recreate it.

I wouldn't be surprised if Bolt was sponsored by Hydra. They're into everything these days.

Finland update. The economy is steadily getting worse, our politicians are still trying to cut benefits from the middle and lower classes (while keeping their own benefits and those of the rich intact), and now the refugees coming here threw a tantrum because apparently the Finnish cuisine doesn't taste good in their opinion. Today's news media said that "even among those who sympathize with the refugees, this didn't exactly sit well" which I can kinda understand, since it seems like they're biting the helping hand with that one. At least we're not getting more thinly veiled threats from Russia, despite the president saying stuff that Putin apparently didn't approve of when it came to the Syrian crisis.

Not that I think you're lying about the food thing, but that sounds like the kind of think anti-immigration conservatives would create by blowing out of proportion a quote along the lines of "well, the food isn't what we're used to, so no one's entirely happy about it, but we're all glad that we're not being shot at." Is that possibly what happened? I know fuck and all about the Finnish news media.

A few days ago I read the article about refugees comming to Finland and turning back to go to Sweden, because Finland is cold, unfriendly and boring.

I wish I could make this stuff up. They're unhappy about oatmeal porridge. Normal Finnish food.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgYh61YvYDo

And I honestly try to see both sides of most issues like this, when it's possible. This is NOT a black and white situation.

I can understand why locals might feel iffy about the immigrants, but I also get that they're coming from a place far worse in search for safety.

But I still think it's honestly naïve to think that there isn't a single one among them with less than noble intentions, especially with how abusable our welfare system is.

Edit: Just an addendum. I myself am the son of an immigrant who came here some 20 or so years ago. I'm also Jewish, so I'm not okay with that KKK guy* at all. Fuck that guy.

* = There was a Finnish guy protesting against immigration while wearing a KKK uniform. The police put a search warrant on him, but he's already been caught and is facing multiple charges.

erik wrote:

maglag wrote:Super medical corps are, you know, the guys who spend billions in drug research every year (and make gods know how much profits selling those drugs).

Bolt isn't some small time athlete, he's won multiple gold medals.

Which means that the tests he has to run through will most surely include any and all the stuff that shady medics could pull out on him.

Meanwhile Justin Gatlin runs for the USA, meaning he has direct acess to several of the top medics in known existence. And those medics have a direct interest in buffing him up for nationalist pride's sake. And even then Justin turns positive in tests now and then, while Bolt has always come out clean.

So no, Jamaica's medics aren't some kind of shady hidden genius that would be able to completely outperform USA's super medical corp treatments while remaining completely under the radar.

I have no idea if Bolt is clean or not, but this entire post is dripping with misconceptions.

Doping technology is a constantly moving target where the testing capability is trying to catch up to the latest in doping tech. The dopers have access to the same tests and basically manipulate things until they know their latest product can beat the current testing standards. Standards advance and the dopers advance as well. Calling it genius is misguided and misses the actual problem of trying to test for things that are designed specifically to not show up on current tests.

The billions spent on research are not in the doping field. The billions typically is because it is fucking expensive to do all the clinical trials required for the FDA to approve legit drugs that are designed to treat common conditions. I'd be shocked if anyone spent billions on a doping technology, because the market is very niche, and by its very nature is going to wane once testing catches up.

Jamaica doesn't need secret medic geniuses. High school kids can get access to doping resources. I have no doubt that people try to approach top tier world athletes.

You're contradicting yourself so many times it is kinda funny.

All the testing and manipulation that dopers do to beat the latest test techs? It ain't cheap. And it demands having acess to the latest test techs. And test subjects. And proper facilities. You don't want your rich client to drop dead because of a poorly tested product.

For an USA super medical corp, finacing new doping is a drop on the water on their budget, and they most probably get good will with the government to help them pass/protect new mass-market products. "Hey, help our athletes win and we'll give you a tax cut while extending your patents".

And then you insinuate that high school kids have plenty of cash, test subjects, laboratories and deep intel to produce top-tier new doping drugs that will completely baffle the professional medics in the olympics, and I don't know if I should laugh or cry. And then those super high school kids all concentrate in Jamaica because reasons.

I've actually heard a talk by the deputy director of a doping test laboratory, and funnily enough - the thing they most often test for is steroids. Dozens upon dozens of variants of steroids, which is hardly a new or exciting medication - it's hormones, you're making some yourself. But still, testing for steroids is not easy because there's so many variants and the inherent variability of biological systems gets in the way a lot. There is research on "steroid profiles" and how the mixture of steroids varies between caucasian and asian men, and they *need* to know that kind of thing to do their job and not wrongly accuse the wrong guy of doing steroids.

Remember, doping was super common at the Tour de France because some doctor in Spain had found a way to dope cyclists with EPO that was not tested for at the time. Lance Armstrong used plain old testosterone and EPO, too. Ex-cyclists have confessed to doping with growth hormone, and their faces certainly look like it, but it was no problem for years - even if they probably saw a lot of doctors in that time. All you need to manage is find one thing that's not currently tested for, find a slip-up in the testing schedule, or just get a compatriot in the corrupt carbuncle that's known as professional sports organizations, abuse that successfully, and you've done it. Not every drug is detectable even if it's effects persist for months or years - that was the problem with EPO until someone found an extremely clever way of testing for it. Even worse, not every event is supported by routine professional doping tests, and amateurs and small-time pros all over the world are probably doping themselves in even MORE unsafe ways than the big names do.

While I don't argue that a bunch of high school kids won't readily be able to cook up some chemical modification themselves (if only for lack of motivation and lab space), there are labs in Asia where all kinds of new or experimental medication for heart and vascular disease is copied and sold freely. You can just order that and find one of (many) ways to get it past controls - a german TV team actually manged to order genuine and clean human growth hormone from someplace in Asia and got it delivered without as much as a sneeze, just because it was labeled as "Glucose" and therefore too cheap to be subject to routine controls. To boot, it was not included in doping screens at the time they did that.

Finally, why on earth do you think that dopers are concerned with safety? Giving an adult growth hormone is dangerous as fuck, and it was done in top-tier european contests with tests by actual doctors. You can get it done with cheap and dirty chemistry OR with general purpose drugs that are actually valuable to medicine (EPO, commonly-used steroids, ß-Agonists, growth hormone, testosterone - fuck, all my examples so far), so there's little reason for big pharma to spend R&D money on that market. It's tiny compared to the general population, and they're gonna abuse prescription medication anyway. If you believe doping uses top-secret undetectable pharmaceuticals that I can't even begin to know about and a poor country could never acquire if they wanted, the onus is on you to prove that. The cases that we know about are quite the opposite of what you imagine, and properly motivated high schoolers would manage that with ease.

TL;DR: Same as with illegal drugs, you'll never have a perfect doping screen because testing for pharmaceuticals is *easy* to screw up and seriously does not need any R&D money because you're just copying and varying the old and new products of big pharma. And same as with illegal drugs, big pharma is probably not directly involved in it because they can make a lot more money with selling chemo than with selling crack.

icyshadowlord is presenting his case in a very collected way, which is uncommon for contemporary Finnish internet conversations, so thanks for that.

Our largest news outlets already published what was going on with the food and the asylum seekers: in this facility, the occupants couldn't cook their own food, because it doesn't have a kitchen AND the amount of dairy was upsetting non-Nordic stomachs. The food delivery was altered immediately. Also, I believe the portion sizes were miscalculated before, because they, too, were rethought, because apparently adult males need more food than children.

Also, the Finnish economy isn't, or going to be, in terrible shape, as is rather easy to read up on if you speak Finnish, or possible to read up on if you don't. I can provide some good articles (in Finnish) if someone wants them.

We now have a Libertarian-Libertarian-Anything goes -threeway government that was obvious to put this shit about the same issues as the US right wing out the moment they took office. What kind of narrative were you expecting?

There was a case where a group of refugees "took over" a bus in Sweden (by which I mean they declared they were staging a protest and refused to leave when asked), protesting that they were facing inhumane conditions in Sweden, due to that part of the country being:
A. Too cold (on the one hand fair enough, it's cold. On the other hand, it's fucking Scandiwegia, not Australia.)
B. Too isolated and far away from major cities.

My girlfriend was rather pissed off about point B there, what with them basically calling her home town an inhospitable shithole - small groups do make it easy for people to go "Well I know a much nicer place that caters to your needs and is more like what you're used to: the bombed out ruins of your home! Or offshore Australian concentration camps! GET IN THE VAN!" You just have to remember that these things are cases of a few people making a relatively minor fuss.

Koumei wrote:There was a case where ...

...thaaaat story stank of one of those you know beat ups where minor important details had been left out so it took me like five seconds to discover they were protesting at a forced relocation to a rural area and wanted to be in a more metropolitan area, in the same country, ANY metropolitan area.

Which is generally were migrants, refugees, and yeah, actually EVERYONE wants to be, rural areas suck. Isolated rural areas suck, and frozen isolated rural areas suck. You only have to look at urban migration to know it.

Now there is a (remotely) valid argument from the government that "its where we had our refugee housing at" but really, they're basically just trying to get some refugee housing on the cheap because no one buys housing in isolated rural frozen areas.

This is going to be a problem in Australia too. Repeatedly refugees are being touted as a potential solution to rural outback towns with collapsing populations. Because apparently that's our plan, When white people don't want to live in a region because it's a shitty isolated wasteland with no services instead of providing incentives or improving services we are just going to MAKE brown people live there! Thus also ensuring all the white people flocking to the big city don't have to see them. Bam. Two birds with one stone.

AND it's charity because they are refugees so they better damn well like it when the bus drops them in the middle of the desert!

So apparently, the TPP has been signed. Word is we plebs should eventually learn for how little our sovereignty has been sold in the next few days.

I just can't wait to live under Brunei Sultanate laws.

MisterDee wrote:So apparently, the TPP has been signed. Word is we plebs should eventually learn for how little our sovereignty has been sold in the next few days.

I just can't wait to live under Brunei Sultanate laws.

I just want to know why we only get the shit half of Shadowrun (or cyberpunk fiction in general), where megacorps own people and are bigger than crap like "nations" or "democracy", and why we can't half the "for one day's work you can get the cash to get cyber-eyes as weekend surgery".

I would even be okay with both. If I could get my face and feet replaced with bionic versions and basically pick up paid work just by sticking my head out the window (bonus points for paid work involving explosives), I would accept the robotic overlords.

For anyone in Canada, apparently you can get free nudes and weed for voting against Harper.

Finally, Canadia has a purpose for being there.

Congratulations, Canada and its Liberal Party for completely spanking the opposition.

Anyone know why the NDP and the conservatives did so astoundingly poorly?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Congratulations, Canada and its Liberal Party for completely spanking the opposition.

Anyone know why the NDP and the conservatives did so astoundingly poorly?

Well, there's this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRhnGXvUcAAIgYD.png That's the front page of a Canadian newspaper recently.

Or that Harper doubled down and went full crazy. Racist rhetoric, posing with Rob Ford and Family, all kinds of fun stuff.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Congratulations, Canada and its Liberal Party for completely spanking the opposition.

Anyone know why the NDP and the conservatives did so astoundingly poorly?

For the NDP:

- Mulcair was not particularly charismatic or impressive at all in any way - he performed poorly as a party leader. The previous leader, Jack Layton, was far better, and honestly I think if he was running the NDP we would be having a Liberal-NDP coalition government of some sort (maybe NDP-lead, maybe Liberal-lead) - but his death in 2011 has left the party greatly diminished, and Mulcair was not up to the fight.

- NDP policies and politics mostly agree pretty closely with Liberal politics, so they tend to split the left vote between them. This time round there was a widespread belief that the Liberal party was gaining ground the entire lead-up to the election, and this in turn lead to leftist voters who were voting strategically against the Conservatives to vote Liberal.

For the conservatives:

- Historically, governments in Canada often last 8-10 years before the public gets tired of them and throws them out with vigor (often enough so to create a minority government in other parties. Historically, this election is part of that trend. Harper and the conservatives have been around long enough to attract a lot of negative emotion to their brand..

- Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister and Conservative leader, is extremely hated. He is widely felt by people to be out of touch with voter desires, to be very uncharismatic, and he's been supportive and trying to pass / passing a lot of legislation recently that is extremely unpopular

- Biggest example of unpopular legislation is Bill C-51, which a lot of people feel goes against Canadian values and is very bad overall (not entirely unlike a Canadian Patriot Act). Part of the Liberal platform was to modify and revise this law. Also the TPP thing didn't do him any favours (though the Liberals and NDP were more noncommital towards it, with rhetoric that basically boiled down to 'we will let you know what we think about it when we see it', rather than outright promises to reject it... so I think the odds are probably at least 10:1 in favor of us signing the damned thing.

- Conservatives tried to center debate around some ultimately pretty meaningless social issues which a lot of people disagreed with the conservatives on (e.g. coming out strongly against women wearing niqabs for various government interactions). They probably projected that they'd do better here than they would campaigning on actually important issues? But a lot of people didn't like this at all.

- Conservative attack ads were some weak-ass shit. Probably the least effective attack ads I've seen (this is a matter of taste and opinion, but seriously, they were poorly done even by the standards of typical conservative propaganda. Also, their attack ads mostly seemed to attack Trudeau, ignoring Mulcair - which given results of voting seems justified, but this level of focus probably helped to focus public attention on the narrative of it being a C vs L race rather than splitting the left vote.

- A few minor factors that probably didn't help any for them but almost certainly weren't decisive: Conservatives have been doing a lot of stuff that angers the youth vote, such as it is, and the other parties have been a lot more e.g. in favour of measures that would help university students. Pretty much everyone in their 20's that I talked to at all was strongly in favor of "anyone but Harper" or much rarely "Someone in specific who is not Harper", and a lot of these people probably looked at the field and picked the most likely non-Harper winner, which probably helped get the liberals their slim majority. This is before you even factor in the pro-marijuana-legalization of the Liberals. However, this is still a minor factor because I would be very surprised if more than 40% of us voted in the election nonetheless... disaffection in the youngest voting demographic is very high.

As far as what the Liberals did right:

- Arguably the most charismatic leader of any of the 3 most major parties.

- Name recognition - even now, a lot people have positive affection for Pierre Trudeau, so having his son run got a lot of good public feeling for free.

- Good performance in propaganda and agitprop - felt like fewer attack ads in number but the attack ads were higher quality; more positive self-promotional ads.

- Were running against Harper (right time and right place... it would have taken an astounding level of incompetence to make Harper win again).

Is Pierre related to Garry?

The Conservatives were not going to form a majority government barring a spectacular campaign (and since Harper and spectacular don't belong in the same sentence...)

The election was Mulcair's to lose and, honestly, he pretty much did that entirely on his own. I would have been very surprised had he done as well as Layton, but what really sunk him was the unfortunate double standard that while the Liberals could be honest and say "we'll reinvest in Canada, so yeah we'll have some deficit spending" the NDP couldn't without being painted with the "yeah yeah NDP tax-and-spend-our-way-to-bankruptcy."

Also, the goddamn niqab bullshit - Mulcair did the moral thing and stated where he stood clearly, which cost him quite a few racist rural votes (at least in polling.) And when it started to look like Mulcair was in trouble, Quebec massively jumped ship to the other Anything-but-Harper option and gave Trudeau his majority.

That said, Trudeau ran a very good campaign and I'm delighted that for once Montreal voted as a bloc and for the party in power.

Apparently Australia helped. Because for the shitty scaremongering campaign Harper pulled, with BURKA-NIQAB-MUSLIM-ARAB-KEBAB fear and all that, he hired Australian political strategists. From our current shitweasel coalition. That backfired like a fucking plasma gun.

So Australia helped in a small way. Mostly by not helping. It's nice to see that Canadians have a lower tolerance for that kind of shit than we do.

Shrapnel wrote:Is Pierre related to Garry?

From IMDB of all things, the creator of Doonesbury is:

Distantly related to former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau through a common ascendant exiled from France a few centuries ago. He made a reference to his distant cousin in his October 16, 1974 cartoon strip (the week's theme was President Gerald Ford's pardon for draft dodgers in Canada).

Koumei wrote:Apparently Australia helped. Because for the shitty scaremongering campaign Harper pulled, with BURKA-NIQAB-MUSLIM-ARAB-KEBAB fear and all that, he hired Australian political strategists. From our current shitweasel coalition. That backfired like a fucking plasma gun.

So Australia helped in a small way. Mostly by not helping. It's nice to see that Canadians have a lower tolerance for that kind of shit than we do.

Actually, it worked quite well for the conservatives. A lot of areas were looking like they'd NDP before they started with that and a lot of them turned tory or sovereignist once the issue came up.

The NDP had a 6% lead in the polls in August and they dropped from 37% to 20%. The Niqab issue started the ball rolling and once it started to look like they couldn't beat Harper, the ABC vote (anyone but conservative) swept to the Libs