Bay 12 Games Forum

Fuck it, The Guardian just joined the 'you must sign in/register to read' bandwagon. (yes, I know I posted the exact same thing to three 'emotion threads', I can be disappointed, WTF'd and frustrated at the same time to the same thing can't I?) Edit: of course though, I can just click 'not now', but still.........

Re: Dental work.

Dunno if anyone has heard of Mewing but it's basically a technique where you keep your tongue pressed against the roof of your mouth. It's basically a facial muscle strengthening exercise that may help reshape your face.

It's called that because it was proposed by Dr. John Mew. He basically said that instead of feeding the insanely expensive (and profitable) orthodontics industry that there were things people might be able to do to affect crooked teeth, messed up jaw lines and all this other stuff.

It basically made him a pariah in the orthodontics industry. His son, Dr. Mike Mew, is trying to carry on this father's work and at the start of next year he's essentially going on trial in his field where they are threatening to strip him of his practice for even suggesting such a thing could be beneficial. I just happened to catch a talk by him on Youtube out of the blue.

Sorry, all this talk of dentistry made me think of it. The field of orthodontics isn't even that old, merely 40 or so years. Yet it's already become an insanely profitable one. It's not proven that mewing actually helps but considering they've only been doing studies on for the last few years, it's hard to say what it's long term efficacy is. On the other hand, we are starting to see what the impact of braces and retainers and such on people's faces is.

Doesn't fix actual tooth issues like missing teeth or crowns or any of that, and it may just be quackery. But at least it's quackery that doesn't cost you five goddamn figures and a shit load of pain.

Sounds like total BS, I just tried it and the tongue is the only muscle that actually moves and given how long it takes for braces/retainers to do their thing, you'd probably need to do it 24/7 in order to see whether it actually does anything, which unfortunately, leaves out talking, eating, and drinking.

Anyhow, back to politics? Though I guess it's tangentially related because healthcare.

Sounds like one of those commentator things that they attach to articles from time to time.

Is that a baby bottle? lol, and dunno what's with the character looking down his pants, obviously looking at a particular male member, but I don't know the context of the cartoon character.

The idea is there wouldn’t be a time constraint,people would listen to the answers even if they took longer, since the longer scans were would hopefully provide more informstion

Yeah, but if you have 10 candidates and they take as much time as they need (think the typical town hall), I'm sure you realize how much time it's going to take to get through a single question. This is the main problem with the size of the debate field since it clashes right up against how long people are willing to pay attention to the debate vs selectively choose which candidate they want to hear as in a town hall and with how long networks are willing to set off a time slot. Though eliminating or minimizing ad breaks would definetly help.

The RNC attempted a three hour debate in 2016 which ended up being closer to 4 hours and appeared quite gruelling. The reality is that neither party has yet figured out how to deal with such massive fields in a way that is fair while making the debates effective.

Donald Trump has no money to go the self-funding route.

Once we go through a few primaries the field will narrow.

I believe he did self fund a little, but that was stuff like his jet and wasn't a full self-funding as Bloomberg seems to be going for.

Anyways, yeah, that was my point about freezing the requirements as they are. If artificially narrowing the field doesn't actually narrow the field all that much (those that have dropped out could arguably have done so due to factors unrelated to the debates, and there are many who haven't made recent debates who are still in), then narrowing the requirements further isn't likely to force any more to drop out between now and Iowa. Plus the mere fact that it's such a large field without an obvious frontrunner makes it worse because it slices up the numbers so thinly that it's hard (or impossible) to make a fair determination of who is viable and who isn't.

Oh, sorry, I will find something more related to the nation as a whole
apparently Trump is ordering park rangers to patrol the US-Mexico border

Why? What's the point of doing that? He's also sending park rangers from places nowhere near the border and from places that already have staff shortages.

From reading it, it seems like they're being used like scouts. Wouldn't it be better to use those native to the border areas? /s And no, I don't mean only Native Americans.

Love... D? I don't follow.

You're combining 'Love' and 'D.' when it's not meant to be.

The main problem is that Republicans haven't exactly been doing the voting ID stuff in good faith and there's the issue of states and lower manipulating it in a way that would further disadvantage minorities and the poor. Doing a national voter ID sounds good on paper, but there's the same issues unless you automatically give one at birth and retroactively give one to people still alive.

There's certainly other issues involved, I know it has come up from time to time on the thread, but a lot of it does come down to people not trusting the Republicans to not screw minorities, the poor, Democrats, or all three.