unclevlad

On top of the blinders and greed...this is HOUSTON.  The owner is justifying everyone who said that what was done to them in the wake of the cheating scandal was a slap on the wrist, and I expect that whole issue is going to come back with a vengeance now.

This one is more complicated, tho.  The issue is racial profiling.  See a white guy in a mask, oh, that's a good thing.  See a black man in a mask, and.....???
 
Some other down notes...
Probably some time this weekend, we'll pass 2 milestones....10M cases and 500,000 deaths.
Yesterday, the US new cases rate spiked badly...about 1 person in 9200 yesterday alone.  7th worst rate in the world...3rd worst if we limit to countries with 10M+ populations.  Chile and Brazil would be the larger countries;  Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait would be the others.  Worse...in western Europe, the worst rate is in the UK.  It's 1/8 of ours.  Yesterday basically tied for the 2nd highest number of new cases--a touch over 39,000 on 4/24,;36,090 on 5/1; 36,015 yesterday.  4th worst is 34,600 and change.
 
Yes, we have failed miserably.  No pun intended.
 

This can be true in negociational situations, where you demand everything and refuse to budge.  But as long as you recognize that progress towards the goal is what this is about, then you can achieve.  Not quickly, probably not steadily, but you can achieve, unless the resistance to change is greater than the force attempting to make the change.  (Gun laws would be an example.)

https://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-1812-incredibly-disturbing-nypd-memorabilia/

FU2

I agree with this.  FAR too many pitchers on rosters due to how pens get used now.  Management is heavily focused on fear, and matchups in the moment...even if the immediate action has negative longer-term expectations.  (Here, longer-term could be 2 innings later, or 2 months.  Torey Lovullo has taken heat for burning out the D'Backs' bullpen through early/mid season overuse, leading to late slides.)
 
And pitching changes just kill flow, by definition.  Mosey out to the mound...talk...talk...take the ball.  OK now we signal.  Pen guy moseys in from the outfield for 2 minutes, spends another minute prepping the mound.  NOW he starts his warmups.  GAHHH.  The only thing worse is the *ridiculous* amount of time some pitchers and hitters take, even with no one on.  

It would've been good years for a pitcher, prorating.  Even in 2018...he hit .168. 
 
Whether we like it or not, the DH isn't going away.  The mindset in baseball, more than I think any other sport, prohibits it.  Hitters are taught to groove their fastball swing.  The result?  Home run or strikeout.  They're so rigid, so specialized, that shifts work because they can't NOT pull the ball, so often.  The same thing applies to pitching.  You have to be perfect, perfect, perfect, throw hard, harder, hardest.  How many curve ball types still exist...versus flame throwers, especially?  And to get there?  You focus on the pitching side...and the value there is too high to allow even the good hitters to waste their time on that side.  (Not to mention risk injury.)  Good article here:
 
https://tht.fangraphs.com/the-state-of-pitchers-hitting/
 
points out issues like minor league pitchers just don't hit.

Sure, there are isolated examples of pitchers that can hit, but they're sparse.  And a pitcher who's a below-average hitter (even for a pitcher)...no one cares, no one's ever really cared IMO.  Even before the DH.  Sandy Koufax hit .064 in '63, and .076 in '66...but all he did was win the Cy Young both years, win MVP once and be runner-up the other, start 81 games, complete 47, win 52, with 16 shutouts.  WHO CARES ABOUT THE HITTING?   

I'd also rather have the pitcher focus on defense.  A pitcher who's solid defensively helps in the important, higher-leverage situations...runners on 2nd and 3rd, pitcher gonna hit?  He's gonna get yanked a lot of the time anyway.
 
What I think is asinine is the massive distortion due to one league using the DH, the other not using it.

Yep.  I don't think Badger was doing this intentionally, as he's not alone here, but...calling it a "prediction" isn't simply inaccurate, it strikes me as (potentially intentional) misinformation, to create disbelief and denial in the readers' minds.  

A similar word choice elsewhere...someone titled a thread "PC Has Gone Too Far."  The OP's entire post was "Elmer Fudd is banned from having a gun."  There was no BAN.  Warner chose to remove the gun...their own action.  Not as a result of outside pressure.  Which changes the entire tone of the discussion.  "Ban" is intended to raise hackles, and it's totally wrong.

Yep.  I don't think Badger was doing this intentionally, as he's not alone here, but...calling it a "prediction" isn't simply inaccurate, it strikes me as (potentially intentional) misinformation, to create disbelief and denial in the readers' minds.  

A similar word choice elsewhere...someone titled a thread "PC Has Gone Too Far."  The OP's entire post was "Elmer Fudd is banned from having a gun."  There was no BAN.  Warner chose to remove the gun...their own action.  Not as a result of outside pressure.  Which changes the entire tone of the discussion.  "Ban" is intended to raise hackles, and it's totally wrong.

Except it was never a "prediction" really, more like "had nothing been done to contain the spread, the estimate is..."  which is entirely different.  Expert opinion on that, hasn't changed much.  The measures that have been taken have saved an unknown but huge number of lives.
 
And we're seeing the evidence, in those places where reopening is going too quickly and with too few mitigation efforts in place.  No, NOT all of them...but tooooo many to ignore.  The pattern:  execute reopen and mitigation well, case load increase is manageable;  do it badly, case load risks getting out of control.  This is no longer arguable on the facts, IMO...doesn't mean some factions and/or individuals don't deny it...just that their position is not rooted in reality.

To get back to "what powers would help with crowd control" point...
 
First, ANY use of powers runs the risk of backfire and escalation.  Keep that in mind.  
 
Best thing would be to use a super who's respected and admired, then probably a presence attack of the "calm down, let's talk about this" variety.  Superman suddenly sweeps in overhead and starts talking?  Yeah, I'd say that would get people to hesitate, and that's the first thing to do to de-escalate.  It's also dramatically appropriate for most heroes, albeit not necessarily in a Dark Champs campaign.
 
After that...AoE NND makes some sense but absolutely risks a panic reaction from those outside the AoE.  A very low-power Entangle AoE might be a better choice...1 Body, 5 Def is gonna hold all norms pretty much, and it's clear they're not actively hurt.  What else...well, ask yourself what would inhibit a mob, with low injury risk?  As has been pointed out, there's few simple answers.
 
Would supers want to get involved?  Probably not, as a rule, with the exception of trying the presence attack.  If tear gas, beanbags and rubber bullets are a 3 out of 10, live ammo is a 5, miltary vehicles are 7-8, then supers are 8-10 depending on how powerful they are.  Oh, and with a secondary caveat...some villains could get involved...and heroes might well be watching to see if they do.

We will, we will mock you
We will, we will mock you

Of course, some things never change.  The NFL still can't write a catch rule that's comprehensible...and the mega-res cameras have only made the hair-splitting that much finer.  The Olympics not only have doping by norms...they have masking agents that hide supers in events intended for norms only.  The World Series of Poker was rocked with a clairvoyance scandal.  Gymnastics is embroiled in a size controversy...in many ways, smaller is better in gymnastics, and it's believed genetic manipulation has been in play by certain countries, to build the better gymnast.  (Among other things.)

One thing people may not know, about power...IIRC, about 50% of the electricity generated, is lost in transmission from the plant to your home.  Power lines are not perfect conductors, and power plants tend to be isolated.  The generation requirements thus get cut down by twice the production capacity of a localized power station.  Fuel cells are an option, but graphene has some extremely interesting properties and potential in that area too...it's just a bitch to produce the stuff.
 
Even if you're not gonna deal with classically tosic...there's a huge issue in the Gulf of Mexico due to fertilizer discharge...excess phospates and nitrogen.  Or a way to manage the algae that cause Red Tide...even if it's a system that's deployed after the tide's been identified, it'd still minimize the impact.
 
Might be REALLY expensive but...mostly-submerged buildings.  Imagine a vacation to Bermuda that includes a visit to a dome at, say, 50' depth?  Light's not a problem, pressure isn't much of a problem, if at all.  But to watch the sea life?  Cool!  Space tourism would practically be a given.
 
If you do want -non-agency weirdness...stigmata, highly distinct, probably NOT normal, features.  Scales, fur, eyes, antennae, whatnot.  They may mean nothing;  they don't imply powers, or maybe just imply something very minor.  Perhaps they show up in families with NO history of powers.  It's just the gene pool.  How about powered animals?  Altho ya gotta be careful here, as...imagine a field mouse that can teleport 3' at will.  VERY hard to catch, now, which means predation would be reduced, and thus the population could spiral out of control in an area.
 
 

To get back to "what powers would help with crowd control" point...
 
First, ANY use of powers runs the risk of backfire and escalation.  Keep that in mind.  
 
Best thing would be to use a super who's respected and admired, then probably a presence attack of the "calm down, let's talk about this" variety.  Superman suddenly sweeps in overhead and starts talking?  Yeah, I'd say that would get people to hesitate, and that's the first thing to do to de-escalate.  It's also dramatically appropriate for most heroes, albeit not necessarily in a Dark Champs campaign.
 
After that...AoE NND makes some sense but absolutely risks a panic reaction from those outside the AoE.  A very low-power Entangle AoE might be a better choice...1 Body, 5 Def is gonna hold all norms pretty much, and it's clear they're not actively hurt.  What else...well, ask yourself what would inhibit a mob, with low injury risk?  As has been pointed out, there's few simple answers.
 
Would supers want to get involved?  Probably not, as a rule, with the exception of trying the presence attack.  If tear gas, beanbags and rubber bullets are a 3 out of 10, live ammo is a 5, miltary vehicles are 7-8, then supers are 8-10 depending on how powerful they are.  Oh, and with a secondary caveat...some villains could get involved...and heroes might well be watching to see if they do.

As Lord Liaden said, this is more a trope of high-magic fantasy.  In the supers genre, weirdness requires agency, so it's gonna be linked to someone.  The cause might not be *known*...Spider Robinson had Tesla build a Death Ray that was responsible for Tunguska, for example...and the general notion of high-level powers sometimes interacting bizarrely isn't much more than a small extension of a typical Accidental Superhero origin.
 
I know of at least 3 supers writers who explicitly include clean-up...a big supers battle creates a big mess, right?  So the clean-up, generally ignored in the comics, is more of an issue in books.  In at least 1, the clean-up is aided by a tech genius...here, lemme replace those old, dirty, inefficient appliances, hook in a few 75% efficiency solar panels, replace your heating/AC...whoa, suddenly the owner's saving several hundred a month.  Heck, if a tech genius can make, say, a 75% efficient solar panel that costs $20 per square foot to make, and also a high-capacity, SAFE power storage system for, say, 50 kWh...then solar becomes incredibly useful.  FAR less use of fossil fuels.  

Speaking of cleaning up...a device that extracts carbon from the atmosphere.  Getting this to make a real impact on global warming would be hard, simply because reducing carbon amounts by 10% would mean extracting BILLIONS of tons.  But, taking out the carbon, soot, etc. over cities?  Yes, I think that's doable.  And again...feed this into another machine that can process to create something useful.  Graphene is incredibly simple, as it's just carbon, but it's harder than heck to make.  Well, maybe not for a tech genius.  Cotton is almost all cellulose...and cellulose is simply 6 carbon atoms with 5 water molecules.  How about a system to clean up plastic trash from the oceans?  How about making recycling so easy and efficient that it becomes profitable?
 
 

I don't have a problem with Perceivable because, push comes to shove...it's largely the same as OIAID.  It clearly marks the individual *as* a super, so it's not there when the person is trying to blend in.
 
Now, if the campaign never deals with the heroes outside of costume, then there's more of an argument to bar OIAID, Perceivable, etc.  But really...this is one of the LESS abusive things you can do.  How about:
 
--Beam and/or Limited Range for blasts/flashes.  How often do you spread, or blast past 100 meters...with the nasty range mod to consider?
--Costs END to activate, on a persistent power that doesn't cost END (like DN, DR, or resistant defenses).  The big downside is they swap over to Constant in that case, so they go down if you're stunned or knocked out.  But even then...also include 1/2 DCV.  Get a nice 1/2 limit.  And you can go bigger...all tied to the activation only...easily.
 
A significant problem with Hero is the enormous array of limitations crammed in...largely, IMO, trying to accommodate fantasy tropes/keep costs sane when translating between genres, and due to the attempted completionist/simulationist nature of 5E and 6E.  The system implicitly lends itself to abuse.  That's my main argument for suggesting, basically, a no-limitations approach, unless it really matters.  Energy absorption that is limited to heat...that's a limitation worth points.  Rapid Attach, HTH only...they could just as easily have specified HTH RA as 5, and Ranged RA as 5.  (And probably should have, IMO.)  But...linked?  OIAID?  Perceivable?  Beam?  Limited Range?  Generally not worth getting back points.  And that applies fairly often.  Conversely...IMO, feel free to ignore restrictive rules.  For example, buying Teleport with Megascale requires ANY use of teleport to take an extra phase...which makes it almost impossible to use in combat.  Because an advantage on a power is always used, you don't have a choice.  That's fine in most cases but it's poor in others.  (A "solution" is to split the teleport into the combat teleport, and a naked advantage for the Megascale.  But that in itself shows that the system is flawed, IMO.)  

I feel we have begun to drift off azimuth here. A lot of the last two pages of posts really should be in the Politics thread.

If what John Oliver is saying should not be listened to because he's an entertainer by profession, rather than an academically-credited authority on whatever subject he's discussing, then there's no point in listening to or reading practically anything posted by anyone here, including yourself.

Racism's been around forever.  Inflammatory media has been around for quite some time;  Rush Limbaugh goes back to the early 80's, for example, and he's never been bashful.  And we can't ignore the Al Sharptons who fan the flames on the other side.  Trump is a contributor...because as President his stature and visibility are so much higher.  And, the stature of the office is an enabler itself..."hey, the President of the US backs us, that PROVES we're right!"  Another factor...simply, go back to why Black Lives Matter started.  What changed since Trayvon Martin, since Ferguson?  NOTHING, or so it looks.

But...

IMO, don't discount one salient, HUGE, factor here.

The videos.  

A picture is worth a thousand words.  But a thousand words is still a fragment of a story.  A video makes things REAL.  Or even surreal.  Think Ray Rice for the power of a video.

Add in the video of the old man *smacked* to the ground for no reason.
Add in the outright LIES told by the cops, in several of these incidents, that are getting blasted apart by the videos.  
Once you know the cops are lying about a few incidents...it's a lot easier to believe they've been lying about a LOT more, and thus those who've challenged them become far more believable.

Around here I'd say it's the decided exception when someone does NOT wear a mask.  That said, it still is extremely disheartening to see people refusing to take a *basic* step.  Even if it's no more than 1 in 50, at a guess.

 

The Floyd incident has done something amazing to me...
 
I've done a ton of shopping online for a long time now, and in many places.  So I get LOTS of promotional/announcement emails from those merchants.  In the last...7 to 10 days or so...I've seen more "we stand against racism/violence" messages *from companies* than I can ever recall.  High end coffee.  Outdoor gear.  Silk-screen apparel, mugs, etc.  2 from watch and strap blogs/vendors...one of which is in Australia!  A crafters' storefront.  I don't remember them all, but it's been a BUNCH.  MANY of these, AFAIR, have not made such statements in the past;  they just don't get political.  But here they are.
 
As for the Buffalo cops that resigned...
 
There was an article in, I'm pretty sure the NYT this morning about police departments that'd done a much better job in changing the statistics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/briefing/george-floyd-buffalo-coronavirus-your-friday-briefing.html
 
It's paywalled, so the high points...some of the things that've worked
--de-escalation training
--tougher measures to pull violent cops off the streets 
--sometimes, increasing the numbers...tired and stressed people make bad decisions
 
So m cynical side says, how many  of the cops that resigned are disgusted by the lack of support to their fellow officers...misplaced as that might be...and how many are doing it before they get nailed for doing the same thing?
 
If the cops in that video were following procedure, then senior members of the department responsible for the training curriculum NEED to be fired.  That CANNOT have been correct implementation, IMO.

The Floyd incident has done something amazing to me...
 
I've done a ton of shopping online for a long time now, and in many places.  So I get LOTS of promotional/announcement emails from those merchants.  In the last...7 to 10 days or so...I've seen more "we stand against racism/violence" messages *from companies* than I can ever recall.  High end coffee.  Outdoor gear.  Silk-screen apparel, mugs, etc.  2 from watch and strap blogs/vendors...one of which is in Australia!  A crafters' storefront.  I don't remember them all, but it's been a BUNCH.  MANY of these, AFAIR, have not made such statements in the past;  they just don't get political.  But here they are.
 
As for the Buffalo cops that resigned...
 
There was an article in, I'm pretty sure the NYT this morning about police departments that'd done a much better job in changing the statistics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/briefing/george-floyd-buffalo-coronavirus-your-friday-briefing.html
 
It's paywalled, so the high points...some of the things that've worked
--de-escalation training
--tougher measures to pull violent cops off the streets 
--sometimes, increasing the numbers...tired and stressed people make bad decisions
 
So m cynical side says, how many  of the cops that resigned are disgusted by the lack of support to their fellow officers...misplaced as that might be...and how many are doing it before they get nailed for doing the same thing?
 
If the cops in that video were following procedure, then senior members of the department responsible for the training curriculum NEED to be fired.  That CANNOT have been correct implementation, IMO.

The Floyd incident has done something amazing to me...
 
I've done a ton of shopping online for a long time now, and in many places.  So I get LOTS of promotional/announcement emails from those merchants.  In the last...7 to 10 days or so...I've seen more "we stand against racism/violence" messages *from companies* than I can ever recall.  High end coffee.  Outdoor gear.  Silk-screen apparel, mugs, etc.  2 from watch and strap blogs/vendors...one of which is in Australia!  A crafters' storefront.  I don't remember them all, but it's been a BUNCH.  MANY of these, AFAIR, have not made such statements in the past;  they just don't get political.  But here they are.
 
As for the Buffalo cops that resigned...
 
There was an article in, I'm pretty sure the NYT this morning about police departments that'd done a much better job in changing the statistics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/briefing/george-floyd-buffalo-coronavirus-your-friday-briefing.html
 
It's paywalled, so the high points...some of the things that've worked
--de-escalation training
--tougher measures to pull violent cops off the streets 
--sometimes, increasing the numbers...tired and stressed people make bad decisions
 
So m cynical side says, how many  of the cops that resigned are disgusted by the lack of support to their fellow officers...misplaced as that might be...and how many are doing it before they get nailed for doing the same thing?
 
If the cops in that video were following procedure, then senior members of the department responsible for the training curriculum NEED to be fired.  That CANNOT have been correct implementation, IMO.