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No single big bank has a monopoly

Except they were deemed "too big to fail" so they could get away with any behavior including illegal forclosures And laundering billions in drug money. Absolutely no punishment or even fines were leveled against the big banks. Breaking them up allows for thier complete collapse under thier own mismanagement without crashing the whole economy.

I'm curious, how exactly did you get this stupid?

Right-wing disinformation campaigns like these:

The Guardian: Exclusive: how rightwing groups wield secret 'toolkit' to plot against US unions

Rightwing activists are launching a nationwide drive to persuade public-sector trade union members to tear up their membership cards and stop paying dues, posing a direct threat to the progressive movement in America.

Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that a network of radical conservative thinktanks spanning all 50 states is planning direct marketing campaigns targeted personally at union members to encourage them to quit. The secret push, the group hopes, could cost unions up to a fifth of their 7 million members, lead to the loss of millions of dollars in income and undermine a cornerstone of US progressive politics.

“Well run opt-out campaigns can cause public-sector unions to experience 5 to 20% declines in membership, costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in dues money. This can affect the resources and attention available for union leaders to devote to political action campaigns,” the internal documents say.

The anti-union marketing drive is the brainchild of the State Policy Network (SPN), a coast-to-coast alliance of 66 rightwing thinktanks that has an $80m war chest to promote Donald Trump-friendly regressive policies such as low taxes and small government. The group is funded by such billionaire conservative donors as the Koch brothers and the Walton Family Foundation that stems from the Walmart fortune.

The fact that rich fatcats are spending millions to trick people into quitting their own unions is all you need to know about whose side unions are really on.

Indeed, the BBC has admitted [jalopnik.com] that the

Why is BBC admitting things on jalopnik.com ? Appears fishy. Do you have a BBC or topgear page about it ? Especially since the widely quoted statement from Andy Wilman is completely different : https://www.theguardian.com/en... .

Though it is also fishy that the blog is not accessible anymore - but I don't see people worrying too much about keeping blogs for 7 years. Topgear seems to have moved to blogging in different ways - unlikely they would move their whole blog platform for a Tesla controversy.

Quite right. Tesla is living off the gigantic traction it gets from a very aggressive marketing and generous government subsidies. It's kind of immoral to take advantage of this and refuse to have the failures talked about.

Another point that's pretty confusing with Elon Musk's approach is the fact that he's constantly talking about the risks of AI (eg: https://www.theguardian.com/te... ) and still, he's advocating this autonomous driving thing as the future of personal transportation. Sounds like kind of a paradox on some level. Or just opportunism.

Climate contrarians accidentally confirm the 97% global warming consensus A new paper by GWPF's Richard Tol accidentally confirms the results of last year's 97% global warming consensus study"

The second is paywalled

The third link ...

Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

etc etc

Yes, it does. And here's another one. But go ahead, believe what you want to believe, you are entitled to your own facts!

Nope, Germany uses QWERTZ.

And you've got it backwards on French letters... Half of young people do not use condoms for sex with new partner High rate of condom use in France

That's a good question. The best I see so far from a quick search is satisfaction survey results posted on the website with a lot of "very helpful" results ( https://bullies2buddies.com/do... ) and a decade-old pilot study that shows negligible results from a brief training ( https://www.psychologytoday.co... ). One confounding factor obvious from the pilot study is that kids undergoing the Bullies to Buddies training are less likely to report incidents -- meaning ideally the evaluation should be done other than by self-reports. I agree it would be good to have more recent and more extensive studies of the Bullies to Buddies program. You are right to point to AA as an example of a social movement not being backed by evidence and perhaps pushing out other better options for many people.

Ultimately, there are quite a few "knobs" one could theoretically tweak to reduce bullying in schools, including:
* educate the Victim (Bullies to Buddies or a different approach)
* educate the Bully (most bully training materials)
* educate the Bystander (also, most bully training materials)
* educate the Adults -- Teachers/Administrators/Parents
* general custom emotion coaching for every kid (like say done at the Albany Free School http://www.albanyfreeschool.or... ),
* make it possible for the victim to walk away (e.g. more alternative education options including freeschooling and homeschooling)
* make the environment more interesting and less stressful so kids have many other things to do than taunt each other
* change the nature of the schooling system and teaching so it does not itself model authotarianism/bullying e.g. John Taylor Gatto's writings like (http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=11375)
* de-emphasize competition and promote cooperation (like Alfie Kohn suggests https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont... ) or pursue other ways of reducing needless stress in school like eliminating homework ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/dwh/ ) and grades ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... )
* improve nutrition for everyone ("Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat (Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behavior" https://www.theguardian.com/po... )
* reduce the stress on families by progressive economics (better-paying jobs, basic income, universal health insurance, bugger tax credits to families with children, and so on)
* other?

Real GDP is the net of domestic output minus price changes, ie inflation. Look into how our inflation measurements have been contorted over the years and you'll see how it's "grossly" under-reported, thus GDP is overstated.

In addition, the usefulness of GDP is oversold. GDP is used as a "magic number" (bigger must be better, right?), but in reality it's not the best measure of how well an economy is performing.

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

Quick notes - the town decided to screw GE. They had big buildings and such and the council thought - hey, they can't move out of here... we got them by the short hairs. The night they voted to tax the crap out of GE, that's the night they raised buildings all over town, to the ground. The tax was on buildings. Gone. So did the jobs. So fuck you Schenectady. Yet I know people that stil live in the town and they still vote for Democrats - that brought this all on them! Can't fix stupid.

How about you stop being pedantic on what the background information means, and either helpfully answer the (fairly easy to understand) question or decide you have nothing useful to add to the conversation and not try to.

Actually he may be the only person so far who has something meaningful to add. *OMG I WAS HACKED HOW DO I STOP* is not an question that anyone can answer without further details. For all anyone knows every solution in this thread right now may have the same holes and present the same risk.

Asking someone to clarify a question is not about being pedantic. Its the common sense lacking in so many technical people who love jumping to solutions or conclusions without ever considering if the problem actually exists.

roll in with your clever meta-answers

Where you saw a clever meta-answer, many people saw a very important question in order to suggest a good solution. But you sound like you're more interested in "state of the art" regardless of what "art" is actually being produced or asked for. Here, have some art: https://www.theguardian.com/ar...

My point was P(pickup), not P(found). But you knew that.

If you really want to challenge my argument, instead of a strawman you should challenge me to provide citations of this (and similar) douchey behavior happening prior to the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order. If you did that, I would list:

* Major ISPs throttling Netflix, et al.
* Verizon stating on-record that they would like to charge services for better access to their subscribers
* Madison River (ISP) blocking vonage
* Comcast (ISP) blocking P2P applications
* Telus (ISP) blocking access to a website critical of them
* Shaw (ISP) charging a 'QoS fee' to subscribers using competing VoIP solutions
* AT&T blocking VoIP apps on the iPhone
* AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon blocking Google Wallet
* Verizon blocking tethering apps
* AT&T charging extra if iPhone users want to use facetime, instead of AT&T's competing product

No one would put up with a power company that charged more for electricity to power appliances that weren't also bought from them. And yet, when a company that is a combination of ISP and content provider decides to trollishly increase the cost of competitive content streaming, somehow that's OK? SMH.

You ended with a point about opening up more spectrum & increasing service (which I take to mean that the former would cause the latter.) I can't personally speak to the matter of opening up more spectrum, because I don't know how much spectrum sits fallow. I would be surprised if much did.

New reality from Google don't trust it. Forever in Beta, they will scrap it after selling, break it to suit them with total disregard to the people who already bought it, delete features and just invade your privacy like there is no tommorow and just for total dick baggedness, corrupt democracy and censor news, 'lets be evil' has to be their new motto.

PS google want to hunt and kill people with drones, here's a hint, do not hunt them passively but use active visual pattern recognition by projecting a digital visual pattern using specific frequencies of light and monitor and decipher the change of that pattern as it reflects of the environment and the AI analyse for targeting. See Google, no problem to be able to hunt down and execute all the women and children you want, perhaps you can charge a patent fee for each one you kill, better long term returns (have the AI automatically return 'SEARCH' and kill result higher points for children they are smaller targets), Google 'Evil is as Evil does'.

I suspect this in the future of the "scooter start-up".

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/25/chinas-bike-share-graveyard-a-monument-to-industrys-arrogance

Right! Right? Who the hell do NASA think they are? Rocket scientists!?!?

Good thing president pussygrabber has cut off climate research funding for these liberal scumbags.

So much ignorance in this response I don't know where to start....

1.) Any child labor is forced child labor. If they don't have the mental capacity to handle alcohol, consent to sex, own firearms, vote, join the military, then they don't have the mental capacity to agree to a 12x6 workday either. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/i...
2.) Read up just a little bit on Foxconn, if you don't think that's force labor you're just sticking your head in the sand. Walled compounds, workers unable to come and go. High rates of suicide. The list goes on... https://www.theguardian.com/te...
3.) Taiwan is as much a part of China as Puerto Rico is a part of the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Just stop trying to justify your continued purchase of Apple products to assuage your own guilty conscience. Or provide proof for any of your claims you've made so far. The one quote you provided has no reference, so I'll assume not just the emphasis is yours, but the words as well.

You despise him because you're an induhvidual eh. Apparently the idea is that if Assange is anything less than perfect we can easily betray him and your standards are so very high that everything Assange has contributed melts away when you consider the charges. Here's an article about the UK pressing Sweden to keep up chasing Assange.
https://www.theguardian.com/me...
I've started following Craig Murray's blog on this. Some kind or rapist that Assange, a real Weinstein! There are degrees of indecency, and if even Sweden had to be pressed to go after Assange I doubt any other country would have.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk...

Yeah, that’s how you run a secretive conspiracy: on Twitter.

Stop pretending the prezidunce is a genius. Trump can't keep his mouth shut when he's excited about something - he says exactly what's on his mind. This is the guy who admitted on camera that he fired Comey because of "the russian thing."

The guy has zero impulse control which is why his people have prevented him from doing press interviews with anyone other than the knob-gobblers at fox. Even then, Fox & Friends had to rush him off the air because he was revealing too much:

Finally, Kilmeade stepped in to politely cut Trump off and to offer him a graceful closing. “We could talk all day but looks like you have a million things to do,” Kilmeade said, and brought the interview to an end. Trump has only one event listed on his public schedule for the day.
— Donald From D.C. Calls in to Fox and Friends

If the white helmets are so great, why does no one in the liberated cities ever have anything good to say?
Why is there headquarters in the same building as ISIS?

Keep up the lies. The people the white helmets rescue are very grateful because they know if it were Assad's army the people would be killed on the spot. Oh look, your lie about the white helmetsA being associate with terrorists is false. How odd.

Oh look, an article describing how Russia deliberately bombs these rescuers so they can't help the people being killed.

Tell us again who the terrorists are? The ones who are trying to help people lead a better life or those who deliberately target civilians and rescuers? Go home comrade, you're too drunk, and stupid, to come up with anything original.

While in general i want to agree with you, yet we still end up with shit like Homan Square.

The Telegraph
The Guardian

It is undeniable that the White Helmets and the Syrian American Medical Society are western funded yet operate only in jihadi held territory. Their videos are staged. Their claims are questionable. The fog of war is thick in the mainstream media.

One of the biggest issues going on with CO2 is that a number of nations are cheating at this. For most of the western nations, we have loads of ground, sky, and space monitoring. However, nations like CHina, block all ground monitoring except for their own. As such, when groups like IEA report on energy usage, or CO2 emissions, they are simply taking numbers from those govs. Yet, when OCO2 went up, it forced China to admit that they were burning 17% more coal, which interestingly, none of the current figures have been updated with. Right now, OCO2, along with Japanese GOSAT, can do is show relative numbers and not absolute. What is needed now, is absolute measurements, which OCO3, combined with the other 3 sats can provide.

Keep in mind that China is NOT the only nation cheating. Plenty of others are cheating as well.

The other real possibility, perhaps one that is better, would be to have private funding of multiple sats. If we can get a pass over areas every hour or two, it will show what is really going on.

iPhone Manufacturers’ Slowing Sales Are a Bad Omen for Apple. Don't like the Slashdot headline? Then how about that bastion of conservative capitalism, Bloomberg. For your edification, "slowing sales" is commonly understood as synonymous with "slowing growth". Because everybody knows what comes next: "flat sales". Then "declining sales". Sorry I needed to spell it out for you.

You can say that Bloomberg article came out a week before the quarterlies. But they nailed the production numbers and here is the Guardian also talking about slowing sales with the quarterlies in hand. See, worry is a thing. Investors don't give a hoot how well a company just did, what they care about is where the company is going in the future. Apple's flagship product is slowing down. The quarterlies did nothing to dispel that widely held sentiment.

And then they move on to seizing unused bank accounts.

California already seizes bank accounts that are idle for more than three years. This messed up the tradition of parents/grandparents opening a large savings account for their grandchildren and letting the account mature for 16 years.

The UK has followed this lead and is now seizing bank accounts that are idle for more than 15 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/mo...

...but the signs probably WILL be required on every solar panel. Solar panels use a variety of toxic materials in the manufacturing process and in their actual makeup.

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

The end-of-life cleanup impact of this decision will be staggering.

We know that President Obama started a few, screwed others up...

Which ones were those then? Obama inherited a couple of clusterfucks from the previous administration, that is a fact.

But President Trump? Seems to have de-escalated the Korean peninsula,

What was his exact contribution to that? Because it looked that already started before he took office, and his single contribution was to yell like a spoiled child, then claim it was all him. Quite peculiar.

finished off ISIS in Iraq,

Finished or finishing? Because I'm not sure that one is finished yet. And all the progress made before he took office looks to be undone now that Iran and Israel are firing missiles at each other directly due to his actions

and actually acted appropriately with regards to Syria.

That's objective.

We're only a year and a bit in, how about we come back at the end of term and see how things are going?

China is NOT at 60%. China, like you, got caught lying about their coal and they still did not bring it up enough to match the CO2 that they emit.

Can espionage speed up progress that a competing nation makes? Sure, but it's not a requirement.

It is a requirement. If the adversary is evolving faster than you, then your only hope to avoid falling further and further behind is to steal his results every once in a while.

And we are evolving faster than China. To even match our speed they need to become a free-market Capitalist country — and they are moving in the opposite direction at present.

Also, you need to know, what the adversary is developing. It takes years to design a new anti-aircraft missile, for example. If your current designs have the top speed of X km/h and the ceiling of N thousand meters, you will be unprotected against the enemy's aircraft flying faster than X or higher than N for years until you can field a modernized weapon. Knowing the X and the N of the enemy's current designs is crucially important — and only spying can get you these numbers. For example, the US does not make much of a secret of the F-35 — and sells them to many allies — but many details of the F-22 are classified.

Intelligence, science, technology, and math aren't some hoardable commodities

They are hoardable. Though the theory was already well understood, try as they might have, for example, USSR could not create atomic bombs of their own in practice — until a family of Communist scumbags handed them the blueprints. The resulting nuclear parity emboldened USSR and condemned millions of people in Eastern Europe to decades of suffering under Soviet occupation. North Koreans and Vietnamese suffer even worse to this day for the same reasons. That is, how important anti-spying is...

There are plenty of other things (including Pepsi-Cola!) USSR just could not replicate — some of these they also ended up stealing, others (like automobile factories) they bought openly, or confiscated as spoils of war. Had the knowledge really been "not hoardable", as you naively assert, they would not have needed to pay Ford and Fiat for it.

Since the US is really an Oligarchy, and that Oligarchy has grabbed over 50 of all wealth, they're looking for the next financial conquest - and why not spend other peoples money to find it!!
https://www.theguardian.com/in...

Several. Yeah. You know very few, and very little.

I was raised by them - so I know a lot more than you know about them, my friend.

But I certainly will provide some evidence not of my upbringing. Let us start with the little list of the apocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Howard Camping, who's Family Radio group publicized his prediction that the World would end on May 21, 2011 was enraptured with the Rapture. They even made happy songs about it. They are mentioned in this article about the hopeful. https://www.theguardian.com/wo....

Michelle Bachmann, one of the Republican Presidential candidates called specifically by gawd to run - had this to say:

[the U.S.'s funding of al Qaeda in Syria] happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists, now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s end times history. Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand. (emphasis mine) When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”

Praying for the Rapture: https://gracethrufaith.com/ask...

Not just pray for it - desire it! http://christinprophecy.org/ar...

Any questions? Like I said, I was raised by these folks, and I can find plenty more of them if need be.

The Information Dominance Center can't be complete without some kind of interactive AI system.

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

The UK police have been using a system of racial profiling that says "if you are black, you are probably in a gang" - however, investigation reveals that the system is mostly wrong.

It is wrong, and 'stop and search' does seem to be disproportionately applied to certain skin colours (although I've been stopped and searched - twice in five minutes). Similarly the knife crime in London is heavily skewed to certain demographics - but as https://www.theguardian.com/co... suggests, the primary driver is not race.

Me, I'm distressed that these kids don't feel they have better options. That's a gender issue, not a race one.

We have to decarbonise our energy production as quickly as is humanly possible. That countries such as Australia are still granting fossil fuel exploration permits is, frankly, insane.

You have seen our current political leaders haven't you?

Australia had a carbon tax. It was working. The Liberal Party removed it, now our emissions are increasing.

John Kerry violated the Logan Act and committed treason,

If that's treason, then what would you call this?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

Of course it's not directly $1 equals x increase in CO2. There will be some variation based on what the people are willing to sacrifice. Don't get worked up between the difference between 60k 70k and 80k for already developed countries. Check the countries like China at 10k India at 2k, any other developing countries you want to choose.

Or are you really claiming Norway and Australia are developing countries?

It's not a secret every one already knows this.
It's the whole reason people are worried about poor countries developing and polluting like rich countries. If they didn't develop, there wouldn't be a problem. For rich countries anyway. But how to explain to the poor countries that they can't do exactly what you do? That is the problem.

That does nothing of the sort Windy. You aren't even remotely credible. Care to site a single source that says poor people produce more CO2 than Rich. Or even the same amount?

Because there are plenty that show I'm right. It's just common sense really.
More money more consumption.

Then you end up with a kind of captive population that has to work meaningless jobs with no time to look for work or train/educate themselves to find employment in a new field once their old field disappeared either from automation or outsourcing. They compete with the bottom end of the working pool, people for whom a relatively low-skilled job is all they are capable of. If the government is the employer, the govt. compete with private industry that previously provided the services that the government is now providing with their discounted labour.

Additionally, workers in these programs are at risk of losing their access to welfare (which is supposed to be a kind of social safety net) and so dare not report workplace violations of safety, for example.

If the program is voluntary, but has perks like welfare + amount; if there is a real prospect of either improving one's chance of future employment (education, experience and/training training) and if the structure of the program doesn't negatively impact either businesses or workers at the low end of the skill/pay scale, then maybe. Getting all that to line up is non-trivial. Australia has something like this, in intent, but it has problems in practice. Ref Work for the Dole and then reports like this which cite things like the safety issue and fear by people in the program of making complaints or reports.

You must work for Standard & Poor's. Yeah, they have a great track record when it comes to assessing the quality of investments. Mortgage Backed Securities, anyone?

https://www.theguardian.com/bu...

no, it is NOT being consumed by ppl. ppl do not eat coal asshole.
coal is burned for electricity, which provides for your buildings, your companies, your cars, your everything. WHy? Because you refuse to put in clean AE, and instead invest more into coal.
If your nation would just stop building out coal, and would instead focus solely on AE, nukes, etc. then you would clean up.
But, no, even knowing that your emissions are the WORST (14+% just for the #1 company; holy SHIT),
you continue to build out coal in CHina and around the world.
Even now, you will continue to lie about everything and ignore facts. But, I guess that is what you are paid to do.

one of the highest homeless population in the country,

Well, stop sending them here.

An a complete and total dependency of surrounding states for water.

Around half the food people eat in the USA is produced in California. Besides not sending us your homeless, you can also stop eating our food.

He fell to pieces... in an auto scrapyard.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Nice work, libtards. More laws, more rules, more interferince in the free market.

The libtards in California have now made it the #5 economy in the world passing the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

In summary, California now has a larger GDP than the UK (which includes England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales). California has 12% of the US population, but has contributed 16% of US job growth over the past 7 years.

If you don't live in California, you wish you lived in California.

The idea of the neighborhood reactors. They were to be powered by uranium hydride and be the size of a garden shed. Did these ever come to fruition? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

I'm pretty sure it's an oblique reference to Dr. Matt Taylor that also gets the details somewhat wrong...

Here's some data: by an informal count of gender-recognizable top 1000 kernel contributors to Linux kernel I did several years ago, there were 8 women (I recognize western and slavic names, first names I didn't recognize were skipped). A more thorough count of all "key" packages (as defined by testing migration criteria) in Debian Stretch, where I tried to guess gender based on first name, ldap, ~60 seconds of web search for that person -- shown 0.9% of last uploaders being female, with each female having only 60% packages on the average (although, with low population of data, this last figure might be not significant enough).

your data is interesting. You go on to make a conclusion, however, that is not based in any way on that data. You conclude "Thus, I believe this is approximately the natural gender ratio of skilled software engineers." However, your data would just as reasonably fit a conclusion "Thus, I believe that there are things in the software community that discriminate against women and drive women away from the community."

Like, perhaps, constant and unrelenting harassment:
http://fortune.com/2018/02/06/brotopia-emily-chang-tech-sexual-harassment/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/28/google-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-bro-culture
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/23/google-bro-culture-led-to-violence-sexual-harassment-against-female-engineer-lawsuit-alleges/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entrepreneurs-speak-out-sexual-harassment.html

Since one of the things he was objecting to was a code of conduct saying
Harassment and other exclusionary behavior aren't acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to: Violent threats or language directed against another person. Discriminatory jokes and language. Posting sexually explicit or violent material. Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”). Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms. Unwelcome sexual attention. Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.

I think he doesn't have any interest in solving this problem.

Sorry dude, its not about economic anxiety. That's just one of those fairytales we tell ourselves to avoid confronting ugly truths about our fellow citizens. The majority of people earning under $50K/yr voted for Clinton.

The anxiety of the stereotypical "Trump voter" is not coming from those in poverty / near-poverty for the most part. Those people get by and re-enter the workforce in large part because of safety nets championed by Democrats. Trump voters on the other hand are more likely to to have decent working class and middle class jobs they are afraid of losing. And these jobs tend to provide household incomes above $50k/yr. When you combine Trump voters with the rest of Republican voters you find that less than a third of those who voted for Trump were in the working class or lower.

Only a small fraction of people who voted for Trump are included in the what politicians consider "Trump voters". The rest were simply traditional Republicans. But these additional Trump voters are the ones that got him elected since they included so many independent voters. When people discuss the trends which helped Trump win they aren't talking about everyone who voted for Trump, just the ones who swung the election. So your statistics about the demographics of all voters who voted for Trump and Clinton show us nothing about the factors which led to his victory.

Then when the recession hit everyone is fighting for work, so having additional competition isn't welcomed.

Sorry dude, its not about economic anxiety. That's just one of those fairytales we tell ourselves to avoid confronting ugly truths about our fellow citizens. The majority of people earning under $50K/yr voted for Clinton.

Some facts: the US has forced, and further wants to force companies to provide backdoors to their hardware and software; the US has barred the sale of, or outright banned Chinese, Russian, etc. companies, both at the state and consumer-level, such as ZTE, Huawei or Kaspersky, for allegedly (and in the case of ZTE, admitedly) using backdoors in their hardware/software to spy on the US; China and Russia have obviously done the same, or heavily scrutinized US companies and/or forced them to have local servers and fully transparent operations to the state and even banned like the US (see China and Cisco/Apple/Microsoft); other countries have done similar things to data companies such as Facebook, Reddit, Google, either because they don't hand the keys to the kingdom to their own state authorities like they do the US, or because they can't control data flow like they can on state-based data; and last but not least, due to the Patriot Act, we know of 3 US companies that for sure have had spying on their own citizens, due to warrant canary expiration - we don't know of any other country that has done things similar, but we can assume from their own actions, that China (...), Russia (see the Telegram, VK and other shenanigans), and Iran (...) have as well.

Now, we see this report that companies are fighting back. I am no US citizen or even live there, but I have to admit, this fight is a losers' fight and nothing more than PR stunt for privacy-centric, non-tech savvy consumers. All these companies are US-based and/or have main operations in the US, and whatever they do, they have to abide to US law. And most of all, in a game where every state is playing dirty, there is no room to play fair, especially when you are (still) the player with the better hand. IRIS and secret court orders and gag orders and whatnot were scandalous when they got out, but really, one should really see them for what they are - not killing people in all-out-war, yet killing privacy indiscriminately. Violation of privacy is, in a way, like nukes and any WMD but instead of affecting life, it affects a core freedom. So unless everybody starts signing some very closed, transparent non-proliferation agreements, things aren't really gonna improve for us, the small folk, forever exploited, previously by compulsory military service, and now by compulsory data-gathering exploitation. If there's one thing certain, it is that countries like China, Russia, Iran, or even the US, as they are today, democratically, will never sign such accords because they allow spying on their own citizens, let alone sign it to foreign citizens. None of these countries are even enforcing this on people protected with diplomatic passports, who supposedly should have immunity at all levels to perform their tasks, even on data-snooping.

So whatever you want to make of it, things are dead simple - companies themselves have to take the initiative of NOT using data as they do today for their business models, and in the same way, states cannot indiscriminately enforce their own citizens to surrender non-essential data with a bureaucratic excuse. It's never been about encrypting data or using data anonymously - it's like R. Stallman put it in his recent opinion piece. Companies can stop pretending to care, and should start caring for real.

They've already asked him politely and he declined. This is the parliamentary equivalent of "We've tried being polite and you refused, so we're not asking anymore". Failure to attend seems to give parliament some vaguely defined power to punish the refusal.