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Funny how the EU always levies fines on American tech companies, and never dares touch Chinese companies.

Maybe the Chinese companies aren't dodging taxes? Or they haven't been around in the EU market long enough for their dodginess to be uncovered? Non-tech Chinese products have been on the EU market for a long time...and the EU raised quite a big fuss over some of them.

Also you will be glad to know that besides dishing out fines for American companies, the EU happily does that for it's own companies and those from other countries (like Japan) as well when they break the rules.

The NSA has a history of losing control of its tools and having them used by enemies of the US. It is not unreasonable that they may do so again.

Cyberattacks in 12 nations said to use leaked NSA hacking tool

They also have a history of trying to backdoor US technology.

Snowden: The NSA planted backdoors in Cisco products

Seriously. Start paying attention and thinking for yourself rather than whining "CITATION REQUIRED" whenever your worldview is challenged. You give AC's a bad name.

Google used AI to design cookies. It worked like this: your AI can generate recipes, you take 20 of them and put them in front of your employees, asking them to submit a rating every time they eat a cookie. These ratings are considered a 'reward signal' and used to train a reinforcement learning agent (like the ones that play games). The agent acts by inventing new recipes and learns by reinforcing the reward. So you could say that the AI needs a large committee of people to work as it's taste buds.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/0...

One possibility is that the price of Bitcoin is being manipulated. Ordinarily, I don'r find conspiracy theories very credible. But because of the poor visibility into who "owns" (i.e. controls) which units of Bitcoin it appears at least theoretically possible for malevolent individuals/organizations to manipulate Bitcoin markets. e,g https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/1...

Would "they" do that? If "they" can, "they" probably would.. The world of cryptocurrency is for sure a digital bad neighborhood.

... because, you know everybody can. (There are so many of these videos on YouTube, I suspect people are intentionally teaching their birds to do this. Or faking the videos: can't lip-read a beak.)

While I generally agree with what you are saying I think it is even more complicated. When situations become complex (war, economics, life) you will find experts disagreeing on fundamental courses of action.

Sure, but if qualified people can end up choosing A, B, or C that doesn't mean you should start choosing at random.

Not only are you less likely to choose the right among A, B, and C. But once people learn you're evaluating on the wrong criteria they're going to give you variants of A, B, and C that are much crappier that they should be.

So my point is that it is hard to find the right expert for a given situation.

But Trump isn't even getting the situations themselves right. Look at NK, there are two big directions pushed by the experts. 1) Be harsh and threatening enough that they have too cooperate, and 2) engage diplomatically and try to reduce the threat and liberalize the regime that way.

Trump started with #1 and almost started a Nuclear war by inflaming tensions with personal insults. Then he switched to #2, but he's doing it on the theory that NK is giving up its Nuclear weapons, which absolutely no expert thinks that's going to happen.

So what will happen? Either Trump will keep ignoring the situation, and give NK a deal where they're obviously cheating. Or the deal will fall apart and we'll be back to #1.

Despite what you and a large part of the media say, many people that have worked with Trump say he is a good listener and asks good questions and he expects you to be prepared and know your stuff.

Where is the evidence of this? Maybe it was true decades ago, and I'm sure there's a few current quotes since it's very obvious that he likes to be praised. But I haven't seen a single clip or even quotation that shows sharp attentive questioning.

So I am not convinced that Trump is clueless, but I think that is largely what the left media and Hollywood have conditioned us to believe.

So how do you explain my two original examples? Syria and the shutdown. Any informed person knew how they were going to end.

How do you explain him being off by orders of magnitude on the cost of health care insurance.

Or constantly confusing tariffs and interest rates.

How many times has he completely misunderstood some piece of legislation being debated?

He's really not in the loop.

With ISIS, Trump asked his chosen expert General Mathis to come up with a plan within 30 days to defeat ISIS. While the strategy did not change drastically, things did change.

ISIS was already collapsing when Trump took office.

The military was given the freedom to take action without having to go through layers of decision makers.

Perhaps he did, now here's a question. If he did remove those layers, why were they there in the first place?

If you don't have a deep understanding of what they were actually doing you can't actually be certain removing them was a good thing.

There's a lot of things that sound like really good ideas but never actually get done. And one of the main reasons that happens is that doing them actually turns out to be a really bad idea.

This is one area where Trump's instinct to judge a situation based on a superficial understanding tends to have very bad consequences.

They surrounded the enemy strongholds and destroyed them rather

I have not tried to investigate this issue very much, but I am not convinced. There are many experienced experts (border patrol) who say the wall helps (though it

Well, here. There are plenty more from plenty of various sources. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/2...
https://www.recode.net/2019/1/...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/busine...
https://www.newsweek.com/amazo...
https://www.kare11.com/article...
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/16/...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.businessinsider.co...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a...

Is Apple their largest customer? Foxconn manufactures for practically every major player in the industry. Apple is their most visible customer.

Well, I don't know for sure (I didn't look at financials) but Android Authority claims so.

And Foxconn might be Apple's largest manufacturer.

Same disclaimer as above, but CNBC says so.

Inaccurate. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/2...

Also, the capital is not the entire state. It isn't even likely to be science degrees, aka real degrees.

How much is FoxConn paying you, Shaitan? Your factory in Wisconsin is not going to happen. And seriously bad tactic anyhow, that a company that needs suicide nets around it's factories is going to be the saviour of Wisconsin at a pittance of $230,000 per saved person.

Whataboutism. It neither addresses nor refutes the premise established by the other poster.

The premise doesn't require refutation because it's false on its face.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/2...

CNBC estimates the total size of the bank bailout at $29 trillion..

That absurd number says way more about CNBC's credibility than it does about the actual cost of the bailout.

When IGW makes shit up and presents no numbers to back it up

CNBC estimates the total size of the bank bailout at $29 trillion. That may be a bit high, but it's the right order of magnitude once you include all the money the Fed used to buy mad mortgage-backed securities. By comparison, total federal spending is just over $4 trillion, up 145% from 2000.

That's a damn good return on investment for the campaign contributions from the bankers.

you can safely disregard the apologist faggot for the hoarding of the 0.001%

On of us here is saying "no, the government isn't shoveling money to the 1%", and I'm pretty sure I'm not the one saying that.

When your enemy tells you you're stupid and you should be doing something else, never do that. She'll always say things like "you're wasting your time on useless efforts" - if your enemy really thought that, she'd rejoice that you were wasting your time. Your enemy is not worried that you will fail. She is worried that you will succeed.

OR... your enemy is trying to goad you into doing exactly what they want.

Or perhaps your enemy sees the bigger picture that your selfish plan hurts everyone.

Or maybe your enemy is just a jerk.

Point is, there's more than one reason people say things. You shouldn't automatically do what others tell you to. But neither should you automatically reject it. Evaluate the reasons for their advice, then decide what makes sense.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/2...
Both should just manufacture in China. It's where the talent is.

Please name these senior citizens. Oh wait, nothing has happened to them. But THINK of the children, right???

Here's a pretty good CNBC article about Silicon Valley execs secretly agreeing with Trump's hardline stance on China. Keep in mind, SV tech execs tend to be pretty liberal and CNBC is a part of NBC News so they're well left of center as well.

"If we're ever going to do anything about China, this is the perfect time. If we're ever going to stop them from forcing our companies into dubious joint ventures that represent ridiculous technology transfers and often outright theft, this is the moment."

Oh interesting, there is something to this but it is not exactly insider trading.
https://www.cnbc.com/id/434715...

And Insider trading is not illegal to Law makers;
http://cnbc.com/id/43471561

Short the stock on a company, then reveal you--I mean, someone--hacked them. Rinse repeat. You can even do it legally. Well, maybe wait until the lawsuit plays out first before trying that maneuver.

Ask the French

You mean the country that's abandoned plants under construction? That says new nuclear plants aren't economically viable? Do you really want us to ask them?

Also, your education seems to have left out what to do with the waste. And no, you can't reprocess it all. First, it's not all spent fuel. Second, a reprocessing plant is also a nuclear weapons plant, which means it's not a practical global solution.

I think only 40% in the US do but if you can't handle a disruption or an unexpected payment then you're doing personal finance wrong.

When a little under half of the country is doing something, it's not exactly their fault now is it? Or are you really going to sweep that under the rug as "stupid democrats"? BTW: The actual percentage is around 78%. Over 3/4 of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, and it sure as hell isn't the result of them wasting their money.

"A number of financial institutions, including JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and international banks, were all judged guilty and paid enormous fines for violating sanctions in the last several years," Roach told CNBC's Eunice Yoon on Friday. "None of their executives, of course, went to jail — why is Huawei being singled out for the sanctions violations?"

Because it's only bad when other countries do it...

The poster fails to mention the $180B debt that at & t currently has and that as interest rates rise there's a substantial risk that the company could go bankrupt and need a bail out. They've already publicly committed to reducing their debt load by $20B in 2019. They'll probably need to do a lot more to survive the next big credit crunch.

Nope, guess again redneck

I was born well north of the Mason–Dixon line, but thanks for playing the "irrelevant personal attack" card.

the average new car price in the US last was $36,978

The average is skewed by wealth inequality in the US. The average middle class American can't afford a new car priced at the median average.

Far cheaper as well, at $0.11 it costs about as much as 2-3 gallons of gas to charge a Tesla from completely flat.

According to the EPA sticker on the Model 3, the estimated savings is $4,500 over 5 years. If the objective is purely to save money, a cheaper car still wins hands down.

The Prius was used as an example because the battery packs are showing that they are outlasting the idiot naysayers like yourself by leaps and bounds.

Being utilized in a hybrid, the Prius batteries aren't subject to the same usage patterns as an EV. We already do know what happens to EV batteries when they're run hard with improper cooling - older Nissan Leafs have extremely poor resale value due to suffering extreme battery degradation. It is also reasonable to assume that since the lithium battery technology used in current generation EVs is similar to battery technology used in portable electronics, that expecting them to last well over a decade (again, the average vehicle age in the USA) might be a bit too optimistic.

Redneck doesn't mean southern dipshit.

Wealth inequality is the weakest argument possible you could make for the average price of a car, since the poor buy used cars.

A cheaper car is still going to be the EV as per the link to Auto Trader dumbass, You can drop $5000 on an used all electric today that still has a few years left on it's warranty and charge it at home saving far more in transportation costs.

Except that they are using vented NiMH or LiFePO4 cells and not sealed Li-Ion pouch cells, which are the ones that are known for bulging and exploding, hence why you don't see hybrid and electric cars going up like Ford Pintos in crashes.

You still haven't made a single valid or evidence based claim you stupid mother fucker. And no, I don't have to be nice to a willful idiot.

Nope, guess again redneck

I was born well north of the Mason–Dixon line, but thanks for playing the "irrelevant personal attack" card.

the average new car price in the US last was $36,978

The average is skewed by wealth inequality in the US. The average middle class American can't afford a new car priced at the median average.

Far cheaper as well, at $0.11 it costs about as much as 2-3 gallons of gas to charge a Tesla from completely flat.

According to the EPA sticker on the Model 3, the estimated savings is $4,500 over 5 years. If the objective is purely to save money, a cheaper car still wins hands down.

The Prius was used as an example because the battery packs are showing that they are outlasting the idiot naysayers like yourself by leaps and bounds.

Being utilized in a hybrid, the Prius batteries aren't subject to the same usage patterns as an EV. We already do know what happens to EV batteries when they're run hard with improper cooling - older Nissan Leafs have extremely poor resale value due to suffering extreme battery degradation. It is also reasonable to assume that since the lithium battery technology used in current generation EVs is similar to battery technology used in portable electronics, that expecting them to last well over a decade (again, the average vehicle age in the USA) might be a bit too optimistic.

Few people move from CA to TX literally "due to high taxes and regulations"

Based on Census data, people moving out of CA are families with kids with only a high school education and lower-income are going to TX. High costs of living including housing are the chief reason people are leaving.

Those costs are, in part, because of government regulation and taxes that limit supply and increase building costs for new housing.

No one votes for "high taxes and regulations", that's just inflammatory rhetoric.

The entire government apparatus that makes people leave CA wasn't put forward by a single vote. People do vote for high taxes and regulations. Some are proud of being "civilized" to have such government services. It's a choice and they are free to make it just as other people are free to leave that state because of those costs.

It is accurate to say that people, particularly poor families, are leaving CA to places like TX because of taxes and regulation that make it too expensive for them to live there. There is evidence and data to support that statement.

What bothers me the most about CA migration is that the people leaving CA bring CA with them. They are increasing housing costs and in many instances (that I have seen personally) bring the politics and culture that created CA that they left.

Does the photo look to you like they are selling mass produced rovers now?

Is it just me, or is that just somehow ironic?

the ruling class not wanting to pay for it is holding it back.

I mean, we have massive amounts of data that single payer healthcare would be infinitely superior. The latest studies (real ones done by Universities) show $5 trillion savings every 10 years. We could pay off the national debt in my kid's lifetime with that and all our foreign held debt in _my_ lifetime. 70% of Americans support it.. Still no go.

Meanwhile several Democratic congressmen just exited Congress while imploring their party to abandon Medicare for All (funny that they all took big money from insurance & Phrama, I'm sure that was just them buying into their agenda).

America has a ruling class, but we like to pretend we don't. Like most things in life pretending the real world doesn't exist is bad juju.

This isn't due to bricks and mortar being obsolete (though the net has played a role), but rather due to the loss of purchasing power among the American middle class.

What in the absolute fuck are you babbling about? This past holiday retail US shopping season was the best in the last six years. American consumers (you know, that middle class you claim that has no purchasing power) spent $850 *BILLION* dollars between November 1 and December 24, up 5.1 percent from last year. By all definitions, (online) retail totally crushed it.

Please feel free to refute with links to real reports or numbers backing your claims of a broke-ass US middle class with no purchasing power. Seriously, if you're gonna post total unsupportable bullshit, at least try to disguise it a little better.

1) Straw-man argument

Hauwei was caught spying last year, and their products have been doing it ever since. Hauwei, ZTE, and One Plus were all caught doing it. They track everything from selfies to phone calls, and report back to China with the data. That is the reason they are all banned now for government use. It's not speculation, there is proof beyond reasonable doubt.

2) ITAR is irrelevant. That's just another straw-man.

ITAR regulates exports from U.S. businesses. None of those companies are U.S. businesses.

This is nonsense.

Hauwei, One Plus, and ZTE phones were all caught spying on their owners and sending the data back home to China. And no, it's not the same as Facebook or Google. This is at the firmware level.

You may know that those companies have been banned for government use for a while now.

There is nothing "racist" or political about it. Companies that spy on people â" no matter who they are or where they're from â" are not welcome. Hauwei's CFO is apparently guilty of arranging trade with Iran in violation of U.S. trade sanctions, and lying about it. That's yet another concern.

Stop with the U.S-bashing already. There was perfectly good reason to do this.

THIS was from last February, in case you don't keep up with the news.

Schumer NEVER offered $25 billion for the wall. NOT EVER. The closest he ever came was when Chuck (in his own words) ""In exchange for strong DACA protections, I reluctantly put the border wall on the table for discussion," - NOTE: he did NOT offer anything other than DISCUSSION. this was the typical Democrat faux-border-secutiry deal just like the one they made with Reagan in 1986. No actual substance and no actual border security were proposed by Schumer.

Schumer has repeatedly said NO MONEY for the wall - EVER.

TRUMP OFFERED TO LEGALIZE MORE DACA KIDS THAN THE DEMOCRATS REQUESTED IN EXCHANGE FOR WALL FUNDING, and Pelosi and Schumer walked away. This offer risked angering Trump's own supporters as even the liberals at NBC admitted.

"A number of financial institutions, including JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and international banks, were all judged guilty and paid enormous fines for violating sanctions in the last several years," Roach told CNBC's Eunice Yoon on Friday. "None of their executives, of course, went to jail — why is Huawei being singled out for the sanctions violations?"

Because it's only bad when other countries do it...

I refuse to believe that you're stupid enough to believe what you just wrote so I'll just assume that you are obfuscating.
You are surely aware that elements are not distributed evenly in the earth's crust but exist in high concentration "deposits". For millennia, man has been "mining" these deposits. I'm sure you are aware of copper, iron, aluminum, and gold "mines" where it is, indeed possible to economically mine all kinds of elements.

Here's a new "deposit"
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...
Researchers have found hundreds of years' worth of rare-earth materials underneath Japanese waters — enough to supply to the world on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a study published in Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports.

a serious Federal crime when they put that classified information onto computers that were accessible from the outside world.

But, but they had no criminal intent!! So no reasonable prosecutor should ever go after them!

Probably didn't consider this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...

Researchers have found hundreds of years' worth of rare-earth materials underneath Japanese waters — enough to supply to the world on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a study published in Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports.

Indeed:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...

bite the bullet and advocate that tax increase.

Let them eat cake

America has been drooling over Iran's oil since before the Iran/Iraq war that America started.

U.S. oil exports reached a record 3 million barrels a day last week -- a greater amount than is pumped each day by all but three OPEC countries.

Iran hostages come very quickly to mind.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/...
https://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/11/foreign-executives-arrested-in-china-please-do-not-look-away.html
https://www-m.cnn.com/2013/07/04/world/detained-americans-fast-facts/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
https://wset.com/news/nation-w...


Sadly, it goes on ALL the time. Normally, the west does NOT do this. We are normally above it. Sadly, W, and now trump, are showing that America's morals are plummeting. It needs to stop.

You're saying that you invested in Valeant in 2016? Or are you engaging in the fallacy of "because I disagree with Wall Street's consensus, Wall Street must be wrong"? If so... I strongly, strongly encourage you to short Tesla!

FYI, the guy who launched the short campaign against Valeant back in 2016? Andrew Left, of Citron Research? He switched teams. He's now long TSLA. ;)

That is, unless you're in the top 10%.

So how many jobs were lost due to the tariffs? GM claims they will say $6 billion per year with the cuts of 14,000 people - that's about $480,000 per employee. Clearly there is some funny accounting going on there... If it was the tariffs, why isn't Ford, or Chrysler laying people off as well? So just how many jobs were lost from the tariffs?

GM says the cuts will save $6 billion a year. That's $480,000 per job. Yeah - GM has other issues if each job costs them $40,000 per month...

Virtually all cars have a defect at some time in their lives - google Ford+defective+transmissions and you get https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/0...

It's just bizarre how these tariffs work spectacularly well for Japan, Germany, China, Canada, etc.
[snip]
Our minimum wage and other worker protections make us fundamentally noncompetitive with countries that can exploit slave labor (or something close).

I really doubt Japan, Germany & Canada have slave labor (or something close).

Further, the cost of labor as a percentage of total car cost isn't that big. Even if you reduce your labor costs by 70% the total cost doesn't drop that much.

Import tariffs (and the related topic of export subsidies) generally protect our comparatively strong social policy.

I doubt people from Japan, Germany & Canada would say the USA has a strong social policy.

Further, import tariffs protect some industries at the expense of others. Take steel as an example. If you have big tariffs on steel, you raise steel prices which does help US steel producers. However, increased steel prices are bad for US steel consumers (which includes the auto industry).

And US steel consumers employ far, far more people than US steel producers (approximately 70 to 1).

So, if you are going to favor one industry over the other, which one should you choose? (clearly, the industry that pays the biggest bribes. Or makes bigger campaign contributions.)

Further, Trump has classified Canadian steel as a national security threat, in the same category as Iran:

https://www.wgrz.com/article/n...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/0...

1. That's pathetic. Canada is like Iran? Seriously?
2. That's insulting. How many Canadians have fought & died side-by-side with Americans in WWI, WWII, Afghanistan and many others?
3. Canada is a large country with a small population and a small military. A US invasion would be over in about a week.

When did being a millennial get equated to materialism per se?

If I recall, it began with car manufacturers complaining that millennials don't buy cars. Then realtors complained about the same thing. Millennials don't buy homes.

Turns out they were just poor. Now that the economy has picked up, the trends have returned to normal.

Politics is dominated by money.

Trump spent about half of what Clinton did on his way to the presidency.

The internet enabled fake news in a way people were unprepared for.

Which had no discernible effect.

The Democrats were too concerned with doing the right thing instead of winning.

Yeah, right.

In a trade war both sides raise taxes/tariffs. These, at least in the US are collected by the Treasury and go into the general fund.

So:
* Citizens purchasing foreign goods pay more (tariff is a tax)
* Companies importing raw materials (for example, steel and aluminum) pay more (tariff is a tax), and will have to charge more for products (indirect tax)

The goal of course is to move manufacturing into the US.

But wage disparities cripple this in many cases. We could probably handle things like chip manufacturing competitively, but putting things together via humans is far more expensive in the US. Maybe robots are the answer (they are).

The problem to me is timing. It takes a long time to move the product and processes the tariffs are targeting. And raw materials? Wage disparity again.

Anyway, the tariffs are just a way to increase Federal income, from March through July it was about $1.4 billion from steel and aluminum:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/1...

And per the Congressional Budget Office's Monthly Budget Review, "Other Income" was up by $1 billion (includes tariffs), about 1%. Corporate taxes dropped by $92 billion, about 31%.

https://www.cbo.gov/system/fil...

Anyway, corporate tax rate drop was a gift to the already wealthy ($92 billion!) and the tariffs are a tax on the citizens and revenue for the Federal government.

That's almost cute considering Alibaba's Singles Day sales of $30.8 Billion for 2018. Or thousand million or whatever you prefer to call it.