The Gaming Den

Straight razors shave closer because there isn't a guard in the middle. Of course, Straight razors are also keen to cut deep rather than nick like Safety razors.

safety razors are much, much easier to use. That is the reason for popularity.

Multiple blades do give a cleaner probably due to the angle.

The newspaper link that says shaving without the battery running on the fusion is dangerous is, in my experience with it, bunk.

I personally use an electric rotator razor these days. It's efficient and safer for me. Also, all i do is moisturize my face a few minutes before the shave and pat it dry with my hands and then go to it. Electric razors suck though if you have particularly long hair that you have to shave. You have to first trim it and then shave it or the razor will yank it out of your skin forcibly. Which hurts a lot when you go over a three inch diameter of your face. Also leads to hella lot of bumps for me.

I love barber shaves though, too bad, most barbers these days don't shave. It's hard to find an old-fashioned barber shop that still owns a straight-blade license.

Also, on a similar note, if you get a shave in a barbershop in India, they massage your face and head afterwards with oil, crack/pop your neck, shoulders, and surprisingly your ears. A friend broke his nose once, and instead of going to the hospital, he just stepped to the barbershop couple of buildings from where he was and for 1/10 the price, he got it fixed. It's like the good old fashion "barbershops" that appear in the new Godfather video games.

I've found that electric razors are much better if you shave with them every day. If I go three days without shaving, it's much harder to get a good shave out of one.

As for safety razors, it seems like the mulitple-blade models shave a little closer than single-blades, but not by a huge amount. One thing I've noticed is that I seem to nick myself a lot less with the triple-blades. But then again, I've always used the generic store-brand version of both.

My beard grows too fast to reasonably shave.

I have shaved in the morning, late, got in my car, started driving, arrived at a job interview, around late lunch, with noticeable stubble.

They asked me if I was a bikie. (What some of you would call a "biker" whatever that means...)

These days I just keep the beard and employ myself.

I'm basically an Ewok really. (Covered in hair, lives in wilderness, self employed)

I've been using disposable straight razors for the last year or so, when I need to actually be clean shaven. When I used to use Mach 3s and such, I'd always got horrible infected hairs and irritated skin on my neck. With the straight razors I find I get a better shave and don't have any of the nasty side-effects.

That said, I've bought some real straight razors, but they need to be sharpened before I can use them.

Well, while we're talking about annoying questions that I want answered, let's talk about blackmail for a bit.

If you threaten to expose damaging information about someone in exchange for a good for service, that's blackmail and you're going to get prosecuted.

However, if you threaten to expose damaging information about someone just because you want to watch them squirm and destroy their personal life--and refuse payment or whatnot--that's not blackmail.

Why not?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Well, while we're talking about annoying questions that I want answered, let's talk about blackmail for a bit.

If you threaten to expose damaging information about someone in exchange for a good for service, that's blackmail and you're going to get prosecuted.

However, if you threaten to expose damaging information about someone just because you want to watch them squirm and destroy their personal life--and refuse payment or whatnot--that's not blackmail.

Why not?

It is probably because of the lack of an actual good aside from sadistic pleasure being obtained. This could be prosecuted as something else though.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Well, while we're talking about annoying questions that I want answered, let's talk about blackmail for a bit.

If you threaten to expose damaging information about someone in exchange for a good for service, that's blackmail and you're going to get prosecuted.

However, if you threaten to expose damaging information about someone just because you want to watch them squirm and destroy their personal life--and refuse payment or whatnot--that's not blackmail.

Why not?

I'm reasonably certain your second example gets prosecuted as something else. Harassment, or some junk like that. If you want a real talking point, here's one: blackmail should be legal. It should be 100% legal to write contracts saying "I agree not to divulge such-and-such information for a period of x years in return for a semiannual payment of $1000," and such contracts should be enforceable in court, with penalties imposed on those who break said contracts. This way, instead of not knowing how often the blackmailer will come to extort you (and therefore not being able to effectively judge the relative costs of paying off the blackmailer or telling him to shove it up his ass), everything's spelled out and enforceable. Discuss.

I don't see how it can be applied. Perhaps it can work in some edge cases.
Embarrassing blackmail material is something people don't want to put on paper, even in a roundabout way: "I agree not to tell anyone about my neighbor's weird sexual fetish". Info on crimes is something you don't want to be hidden at all. Stuff that's not important is not worth the lawyer fees.

Maj wrote:So I had a medical practitioner tell me this week that I shouldn't give my baby a bottle anymore because drinking from a nipple spreads whatever liquid is being drunk around a baby's mouth more than drinking out of a glass.

How does that even work?

He's an idiot. Not all medical professionals are qualified

Actually, such contracts are legal.

They're called Non-Disclosure Agreements and are often tacked onto legal settlements or corporate contracts.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:They're called Non-Disclosure Agreements and are often tacked onto legal settlements or corporate contracts.

Non-disclosure agreements are perfectly legal, but threatening to reveal the info they protect is not usually termed "blackmailing". Also, these agreements do not usually provide any optional money per se - they are required to get a job and any money at all. Even if there's a State Worker Rank II salary (schoolteacher, 100 gp) and State Worker Rank II salary (security officer, Secrecy 3, 100+20 gp), there's no way for a security officer to opt out of Secrecy and not receive the Secrecy bonus.

I signed my first NDA when I was studying at the university: as the university is funded by and all lab equipment belongs to the state, whatever I could have discovered whie working or studying had to belong to the state too. If I discovered cold fusion and wrote to the government, "Give me 10M or I'll give the technology to bin Laden", that would qualify as extortion, but not specifically blackmail:

Google first hit wrote:blackmail: extortion of money or something else of value from a person by the threat of exposing a criminal act or discreditable information.

Gelare wrote: If you want a real talking point, here's one: blackmail should be legal.

Generally speaking, society doesn't want people to keep information they could use to blackmail someone to themselves, which is why you can't contract to keep from reporting a criminal act. Merely financially crippling (though this would often have criminal ramifications as well due to disclosure regulations) or personally embarrassing are easier to defend as something you should be able to contract into, but it's a slippery slope and it's just easier to make one law to cover every blackmail subset.

Crissa wrote:Actually, such contracts are legal.

They're called Non-Disclosure Agreements and are often tacked onto legal settlements or corporate contracts.

-Crissa

Just FYI, those are legal, but often non-enforceable. They seriously get ignored or thrown out of court all the time.

In Beyonce's video, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," she keeps saying that if [he] liked it, he should have put a ring on it. The implication, of course, is that her guy should have asked her to marry him.

But she's wearing armor [only] on the hand that you put the engagement ring on (in the US). Doesn't that also imply that she would have turned him down?

Maj wrote:In Beyonce's video, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," she keeps saying that if [he] liked it, he should have put a ring on it. The implication, of course, is that her guy should have asked her to marry him.

But she's wearing armor [only] on the hand that you put the engagement ring on (in the US). Doesn't that also imply that she would have turned him down?

I think it means that she'd turn him down if he asked now.

It's because women are spoiled [EDITED] that want to put a man in chains before they give him anything positive, then use denial of that to continue to control him. Women aren't hard to understand, they're essentially malevolent.

Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:It's because women are spoiled [EDITED] that want to put a man in chains before they give him anything positive, then use denial of that to continue to control him. Women aren't hard to understand, they're essentially malevolent.

Haven't we done this dance before, Count? Women aren't evil just because your wife was the butch in your relationship.

I really hate those lyrics. Its like you can only have a long term monogamous relationship if you get engaged or married.

I mean, personally I think that long term relationships should have public acceptance of that fact, even if it is just letting everyone know via facebook that the two people are in a monogamous relationship for the foreseeable future. But this is saying that it is okay to break up just because they aren't married, or that marriage is the only indicator of relationships.

But the armoured hand? I can see two possibilities:
[*]That as you say, she wouldn't have accepted the proposal, in which case shes just making up excuses for breaking up.
[*]The engagement ring would have been "armour" to stop unwanted attention and keep her within the relationship. Which sort of suggests that she would have cheated anyway.

So no, I can't really see any innocent explanation. Although I suddenly got the image of her dancing with a chastity belt on, with a stereotypical engagement or wedding ring instead of a padlock, possibly with intercut images of the guy proposing with that ring to make it stupidly obvious.

Parthenon wrote:I really hate those lyrics.

There is nothing about that video that I like, including the singer - which may, in fact, be why I'm tending toward's Count Arioch's view in this particular instance.

Parthenon wrote:I can't really see any innocent explanation.

I tried looking at it from Angel's perspective - that if he asked her now, she'd say no - but failed. The idea that if you don't do what the chick wants, when she wants, you don't get what you want seems ridiculous to me.

I like both of your ideas. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that it may just be a potential stupidity on the part of the video makers: how do we differentiate between Beyonce's costume and the others? Metal glove!

Yeah, that's a pretty common theme in songs.

The sad thing is that Kanye was right. As terrible as Beyonce and that video are, they're still better than Taylor's Swift's.

Sexist, cynical, and lazy beats epically and hypocritically delusional any day of the week.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

Maj wrote:In Beyonce's video, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," she keeps saying that if [he] liked it, he should have put a ring on it. The implication, of course, is that her guy should have asked her to marry him.

But she's wearing armor [only] on the hand that you put the engagement ring on (in the US). Doesn't that also imply that she would have turned him down?

I think it means that she'd turn him down if he asked now.

I think it implies there aren't two brain cells to rub together amongst any of the people involved with that video.

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:I've found that electric razors are much better if you shave with them every day. If I go three days without shaving, it's much harder to get a good shave out of one.

I generally use an electric razor most of the time and a multi blade disposable one or twice a week. The reason for this is that I have a variety of hairs on my beard and the slowest, thinnest growing ones don’t get cut by my current electric. Plus I still have my bar of shaving soap made from goat milk.

angelfromanotherpin wrote: Hurf durf, Count Arioch is basing his opinions on one women durf. Even though he's clear that he isn't hurf derpyderpy doo. Now I'm going to eat some feces.

Thank you, you will be on ignore from now on. If you can't bother to read my posts and make judgements on your preconceived notions, I literally have no use for you as a human.

Alright, a question from me: How come every time I've been to the hospital in the last couple years, they give me a saline IV regardless of what I'm in there for? I asked them the last time and the nurse said "We just do this to everybody".

Second part: Is it harmful if I just tell them to bugger off if they don't have a better reason than that? Because an IV and a saline bag costs almost a grand. Per bag.