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It's a catch 22. The FDA usual process is slow and plodding but results in medications and medical procedures which are generally safe and effective by reducing as much risk as possible. However it takes a LONG time to perform all the necessary studies and clinical trials and critically ill patients die while they wait.

The catch is that if you are trying to get approval for a novel medication that saves lives of the critically ill, how do you justify the delay needed to do all the safety and effectiveness studies? People will die if you don't try, but you might also kill and/or cure. What to do?

What you should do is put all the responsibility for making a mistake on the bureaucrats responsible for safety protocols, and all the costs associated with those safety protocols should be borne by the drug manufacturers.

Then what bureaucrat is EVER going to approve a drug? Every last one will become, "Nope, too dangerous!"

And what company would ever try to create a cure for AIDS, or even a flu vaccine?

In a game-theory sense, that gives you the safest drugs possible within the system.

Only if you define the "safest drugs possible" as the null set.

Then you mandate that no one can go outside this system

Geez. I bet you think the "War on Drugs" is wonderfully effective, too...

- no one can decide for themselves whether to take a risk on a non-tested procedure or drug, even if their disease is known to be terminal or completely debilitating.

Nope, your condition can't be treated, because this group of government bureaucrats has decided it's better that you be left to die.

For REASONS.

Naah, no such thing as "death panels", though, right?

It's unfortunate that people feel the need to go outside this system. If you follow the hacker community, there are a bunch of projects that could very easily be described as medical devices and experimental procedures. Things like home-built hearing aids, self (by the patient) adjusting glasses, and so on.

Some of these are downright scary.

I suppose it's like any industry. Big, entrenched companies become paralyzed with bureaucracy, and are eventually replaced by small, nimble startups.

DAFUQ?!?!?!

You just spent an entire post advocating a literally stifling bureaucracy in charge of a huge portion of health care, and now you say that won't work?

It's a catch 22. The FDA usual process is slow and plodding but results in medications and medical procedures which are generally safe and effective by reducing as much risk as possible. However it takes a LONG time to perform all the necessary studies and clinical trials and critically ill patients die while they wait.

The catch is that if you are trying to get approval for a novel medication that saves lives of the critically ill, how do you justify the delay needed to do all the safety and effectiveness studies? People will die if you don't try, but you might also kill and/or cure. What to do?

What you should do is put all the responsibility for making a mistake on the bureaucrats responsible for safety protocols, and all the costs associated with those safety protocols should be borne by the drug manufacturers.

In a game-theory sense, that gives you the safest drugs possible within the system.

Then you mandate that no one can go outside this system - no one can decide for themselves whether to take a risk on a non-tested procedure or drug, even if their disease is known to be terminal or completely debilitating.

It's unfortunate that people feel the need to go outside this system. If you follow the hacker community, there are a bunch of projects that could very easily be described as medical devices and experimental procedures. Things like home-built hearing aids, self (by the patient) adjusting glasses, and so on.

Some of these are downright scary.

I suppose it's like any industry. Big, entrenched companies become paralyzed with bureaucracy, and are eventually replaced by small, nimble startups.

Does your brain produce new cells?

It's no worse than GPS which resulted in an entire family from the UK being killed when they made a U-turn in the middle of a highway "because the GPS told them to". https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

Yes, AI gets pretty dumb when it sees stuff that's even slightly different than what it's used to. It adds sheep to pictures if it sees a pasture: https://www.theguardian.com/te...

Or, any yellow and black image must be a school bus: https://www.wired.com/2015/01/...

Problem is, with the possible exception of Afghanistan

Not even Afghanistan. Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laddin if the USG presented some evidence that he was guilty of what they were accusing him of doing. But, like the successful weapons inspections going on in Iraq, this was ignored in favor an an illegal invasion.

The videos were demonetized for inciting violence.

WTF are you talking about? Videos have been demonetized since the WSJ and friends became threatened by the success of the platform.

> the number of people owning guns also doubled.

Uh, no. You have utterly failed to understand what "per capita" means. At this point you just need to sit down and shut up because you don't know WTF you are talking about.

In fact, as hunting has fallen out of favor, the number of people who own guns has fallen. Its down to around 22% of adults now, despite there now being more guns in america than there are adults. Its the "economically insecure" gun hoarders that have been stockpilling them. In fact, just 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns.

Time will tell. As to china wanting to negotiate, really? What were they willing to offer to redress the US's grievances? What materially were they offering? Because we have a list here of things the US has been complaining about for well over a decade.

https://www.theguardian.com/te...

This sort of shit is typical. Is china "actually" going to do anything about this sort of thing?

Or this:
https://variety.com/2017/film/...

or this:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/6...

These are not "EVIL TRUMP" sources here, chum. The guardian... Variety... CBS News...

I can do this all day. What did the happy harmless did nothing wrong chinese offering? I'm dying to know "actually" what you're referring to here.

*gets popcorn*

Yet the Aussies raided him within a few days on "unrelated matters". Sure they did.

Well let's review the facts regarding the raid: Wright told his landlord he was leaving for Australia by December for London but extended his lease to January. He had apparently already began the moving process. So Australia waiting to raid his home and offices any later would have been foolish if they wanted any evidence.

Also The ATO ruled in December 2014 (a year prior to the raid) that cryptocurrency would be treated as an asset for capital gains: "The treatment of bitcoin for tax purposes in Australia has been the subject of considerable debate. The ATO ruled in December 2014 that cryptocurrency should be considered an asset for capital gains tax purposes." So Australia had no reason to raid his home for Bitcoin purposes.

I haven't seen the LN talk but if it's complete nonsense (I would not believe its primary advocate's protests) then he could be completely misunderstanding LN and still not be wrong about Bitcoin economics.

Then you should read or research it more. The original author of Lightning Networks, Joseph Poon, did say that he did not understand Wright's talk in the presentation.

The search for trivially simple answers often leads to foolish conclusions.

And which trivial answers do you object to not understanding? At any time if Wright wishes to publicly show the world he is Satoshi Nakimoto, he can by signing any message. The fact of the matter is that Wright at first claimed he was Nakimoto and then provided underwhelming evidence. When asked to present irrefutable evidence, he then backed down and refused.

I suppose the US is also causing 30% of south african men in this survey to have participated in rape. https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Having populations sitting around and unable to integrate with the country they are in or find legal livelihoods is a problem in a lot of places, and lots of them handle it a whole lot worse than the US does. Unfortunately, the AC above seems to want to use that as an excuse, and makes it pretty obvious that he's bomb throwing by reaching for the phrase "major white countries," which is not the least bit subtle. Also unfortunately, it looks like the Breitbart crowd has taken over moderation duties, as they would be the folks sympethetic towards this sort of "insight".

One of the worst manifestations of this problem is stateless people, which still exist even in places like Europe, even if they shouldn't by their own laws. Obviously it is also huge problem in the Middle East, and has been a compounding problem for a long time in large part due to the various wars dating back at least to the mid 20th-century wars against the Israelis and continuing to today with the Libyan and Syrian wars displacing large numbers of people as refugees.

Again unfortunately, the answer for this sort of problem that the alt-right and Trump folks seem to provide is the essentially the answer for the homeless that is routinely and roundly mocked on South Park: just send them elsewhere!

Thanks a lot Rick Springfield, you screwed a word by making it opposite of itself. I'm happy you didn't get Jessie's girl.

According to this story in the Guardian:

It's a different story in the United States, where since the 19th century a moot point has been one that is at best academic and at worst irrelevant. The OED quotes the supreme court, no less, ruling that "a moot question" has "no bearing" on an issue.

In my opinion it's better used that way, moot in the first meaning sounds like it means exactly the same as debated, disputed etc. while a moot point is an efficient way of saying "that is no longer relevant/important/possible, let's move on and discuss the options left on the table". Which is not to say you can't take lessons from it, but it's an efficient way to shut down pointless bickering.

You're allowed to cream over that buffoon all you want, but please let's stop pretending that there are "facts" supporting your worshipping.

Says the guy tossing the CIA's salad:

1) The women went to authorities not with rape accusations but to ask for an STD test
2) The state investigated the situation and cleared Assange to leave the country
3) Another, politically connected prosecutor steps in and starts throwing around the "R" word
4) Assange agrees to return to Sweden but wants a promise he wont be handed over to the United States, as Sweden has kidnapped people to be tortured by the CIA. Sweden continues to refuse that request to this day.

#4 alone means you and every other Assange hater is engaging in willful dumbfuckery. If this is really about a rape allegation and not a pretext to get Assange in U.S. custody, then let it be about rape allegations, for which Sweden's statute of limitations doesn't run out until 2020. And this was all old news five years ago - but now we can also add:

5) The UK government pressured Sweden to keep up the investigation and continues to spend large amounts of money on a police presence for what is now a bail jumping case
6) The case of Gottfrid Svartholm is the nail in your gaslighting coffin. Sweden goes to great lengths to have a Pirate Bay founder arrested in a non-extradition country on copyright charges. But as soon as he arrives in Sweden he is interrogated for weeks, in solitary confinement, without a lawyer or outside contact for an alleged crime in another country. And later on he is deported to said country where he is imprisoned.

Back to #4. Even if you think Assange is full of shit on returning to Sweden voluntarily if they give him a no-extradition promise, the threat of that possibility is what got Assange asylum from Ecuador. You take that threat off the table, Ecuador no longer has a reason to continue that asylum. Sweden could have taken care of this with the stroke of a pen waaay back in 2011, saving UK police millions of pounds in the process - also old news for anyone who doesn't have a hole in their heads. So are you gonna pull yours out now, or go on buying ranch dressing by the barrel?

You're allowed to cream over that buffoon all you want, but please let's stop pretending that there are "facts" supporting your worshipping.

Says the guy tossing the CIA's salad:

1) The women went to authorities not with rape accusations but to ask for an STD test
2) The state investigated the situation and cleared Assange to leave the country
3) Another, politically connected prosecutor steps in and starts throwing around the "R" word
4) Assange agrees to return to Sweden but wants a promise he wont be handed over to the United States, as Sweden has kidnapped people to be tortured by the CIA. Sweden continues to refuse that request to this day.

#4 alone means you and every other Assange hater is engaging in willful dumbfuckery. If this is really about a rape allegation and not a pretext to get Assange in U.S. custody, then let it be about rape allegations, for which Sweden's statute of limitations doesn't run out until 2020. And this was all old news five years ago - but now we can also add:

5) The UK government pressured Sweden to keep up the investigation and continues to spend large amounts of money on a police presence for what is now a bail jumping case
6) The case of Gottfrid Svartholm is the nail in your gaslighting coffin. Sweden goes to great lengths to have a Pirate Bay founder arrested in a non-extradition country on copyright charges. But as soon as he arrives in Sweden he is interrogated for weeks, in solitary confinement, without a lawyer or outside contact for an alleged crime in another country. And later on he is deported to said country where he is imprisoned.

Back to #4. Even if you think Assange is full of shit on returning to Sweden voluntarily if they give him a no-extradition promise, the threat of that possibility is what got Assange asylum from Ecuador. You take that threat off the table, Ecuador no longer has a reason to continue that asylum. Sweden could have taken care of this with the stroke of a pen waaay back in 2011, saving UK police millions of pounds in the process - also old news for anyone who doesn't have a hole in their heads. So are you gonna pull yours out now, or go on buying ranch dressing by the barrel?

Have you seen the video? The street was brightly lit. She was crossing directly underneath two streetlights. Uber "driver" was watching porn on her lap. Cheap self-driving camera has poor dynamic range and obviously not suited for controlling a vehicle at night. Some blame can be assigned to the pedestrian, but if I drove over every jaywalker at night I would be a record-holding murderer by now.

Because the UK can be trusted to uphold human rights post Brexit?

But from the way you're talking/typing I'm actually really glad to see you go.

... along with the attempts to punish ATT for not agreeing to exercise editorial control over CNN

Lesseee.... got both the Senate and the House of Reps under my thumb, what can I do about the DOJ, and the Forth Estate

My plan to Make America a Banana Republic is coming along just fine.

You think the US is uniquely unable to attack foes in this manner?

Russian security services use typewriters.

Sweden agreed to hear him at the Ecuadorian embassy, dropped the charges and now he's only wanted by the brits for jumping bail

Statute of limitations doesn't run out in Sweden until 2020. Assange steps out of embassy, the UK police would be happy to hand him over to Sweden, where he can be interrogated for weeks without a lawyer for Wikileaks activity,

He's not wanted in Sweden for Wikileaks activity, or anything to do with Wikileaks. It's doubtful that Sweden cares about Wikileaks one way or the other.

He's wanted to answer questions about a rape investigation. That investigation has been dropped, though, so he's not actually wanted in Sweden at all. (Although they could resume the investigation later, if they chose to, on one of the two rape charges (the other one is past the statute of limitations).)

because he hasn't been officially charged in the US (as Assange haters keep reminding everyone). Then deported to said US.

He can't be deported to the US, since he's not from there in the first place. I think you mean "extradited." But even there, there hasn't (so far) been any charges, much less an extradition request.

They've done it before: https://www.theguardian.com/co...

that's the exact opposite-- a person extradited to Sweden.

Sweden agreed to hear him at the Ecuadorian embassy, dropped the charges and now he's only wanted by the brits for jumping bail

Statute of limitations doesn't run out in Sweden until 2020. Assange steps out of embassy, the UK police would be happy to hand him over to Sweden, where he can be interrogated for weeks without a lawyer for Wikileaks activity, because he hasn't been officially charged in the US (as Assange haters keep reminding everyone). Then deported to said US. They've done it before:

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

No they gave up. But Scotland Yard spent millions of pounds doing exactly that. Well they say that they gave up at least. Maybe that was a trick to get him to come out and they are still there. But yes, he should assume that they will arrest him the minute he walks out the door. https://www.theguardian.com/me...

making an entire population poor

Could you explain how a carbon tax, even one that isn't revenue-neutral, would make everyone poor? What do you expect the people YOU elected would do with the money, burn it? If so, you need to be a little more careful how you vote!

Or maybe you're saying that we would be be poor because we wouldn't be digging up as much oil out of the ground and enriching ourselves at the expense of our children and grandchildren. This reasoning I could agree with.

Nice astroturfing you CIA bootlicker scum.

For anyone following along, the obvious solution to your BS is actually really simple: only act on evidence. By doing this, you will always have the best chance of being correct. Sure, you may miss things due to insufficient evidence, but that's a better outcome than jumping to fantasy conclusions - like WMDs in Iraq.

If you think assassinations on UK soil can only be committed by the "bad guys" think again and do some research into Dr David Kelly:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/16/david-kelly-death-10-years-on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_%28weapons_expert%29

"Even Russia and Iran have better prisons"

Worse based on what? Links?
Here's one for you.
https://www.theguardian.com/so...

Sweden could easily take of this by promising not to extradite him to the US

But those charges were dropped...from what I can tell he's no longer under investigation by the Swedish.
https://www.theguardian.com/me...

Not exactly 'dropped charges'; the investigation is discontinued. The public prosecutor says “If he, at a later date, makes himself available, I will be able to decide to resume the investigation immediately.”

How many CIA and DEA agents did heinous deeds outside the US and were never prosecuted for it. I'm all for prosecuting foreign intelligence operatives, but it's difficult...

The DEA agents and Honduran police who attacked unarmed Honduran civilians should be rotting in prison, for starters...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/d...

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Sweden could easily take of this by promising not to extradite him to the US

But those charges were dropped...from what I can tell he's no longer under investigation by the Swedish.
https://www.theguardian.com/me...

This may prove that was never the case.

Not likely:

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

After arriving in Sweden, Assange could be interrogated for weeks in effective solitary confinement for an alleged crime in another country, without a lawyer if they don't charge him first. As Assange haters keep reminding everyone, he hasn't been openly indicted by the USG. People have confessed to murders they didn't commit in less time, just to get the interrogation to stop. Sweden could easily take of this by promising not to extradite him to the US - but they keep refusing to do so.

On one hand that's bullshit. A court if law should not function in such a way.

On the other hand, that sounds terribly reasonable until you actually look into things

From: https://www.theguardian.com/ne...

A) After an initial arrest the UK chose to not prosecute him at all for his crimes. Perhaps if the UK had sought to send him through their own legal system initally things would have been different.

B) He was facing a possible 99 year sentence in the US. If his crimes were as harmless as you state then it certainly would have been less. Take the case of Babar Ahmad ( https://www.theguardian.com/uk... ). He was extradited, sentenced to 12 years, and was released to the UK after only one year because of his cooperation with the authorities.

C) He's being accused of crimes far more serious than you make out. "...but the US government, which accused him of helping to orchestrate and wage cyber-attacks on official websites including those belonging to the Federal Reserve, Nasa and the US army between 2012 and 2013. Love, they claim, along with three other unnamed co-conspirators in Australia and Sweden, stole sensitive military data and personal information belonging to more than 100,000 government employees. He is wanted for crimes including conspiracy, fraud and identity theft in no fewer than three judicial US districts – the Southern District of New York, New Jersey, and the Eastern District of Virginia – a record unmatched by any foreign or domestic terrorist (but by at least one other hacker)."

On one hand that's bullshit. A court if law should not function in such a way.

On the other hand, that sounds terribly reasonable until you actually look into things

From: https://www.theguardian.com/ne...

A) After an initial arrest the UK chose to not prosecute him at all for his crimes. Perhaps if the UK had sought to send him through their own legal system initally things would have been different.

B) He was facing a possible 99 year sentence in the US. If his crimes were as harmless as you state then it certainly would have been less. Take the case of Babar Ahmad ( https://www.theguardian.com/uk... ). He was extradited, sentenced to 12 years, and was released to the UK after only one year because of his cooperation with the authorities.

C) He's being accused of crimes far more serious than you make out. "...but the US government, which accused him of helping to orchestrate and wage cyber-attacks on official websites including those belonging to the Federal Reserve, Nasa and the US army between 2012 and 2013. Love, they claim, along with three other unnamed co-conspirators in Australia and Sweden, stole sensitive military data and personal information belonging to more than 100,000 government employees. He is wanted for crimes including conspiracy, fraud and identity theft in no fewer than three judicial US districts – the Southern District of New York, New Jersey, and the Eastern District of Virginia – a record unmatched by any foreign or domestic terrorist (but by at least one other hacker)."

Keep in mind what this guy (guccifer 2.0) was doing, he was basically running a social media and communications operation to publicize the stolen emails. There's no guarantee that he was personally involved with the initial hack that got the intel in the first place, and could easily have been using different systems and gotten handed the stuff from another department with tighter security.

Just speculating here, but one way I could think of this going wrong for him would be he could have normally been connecting to his accounts from a secured system with more automated connections to the VPNs and whatnot, but a small number of times decides to log on to social media outside of his normal workspace, and slips up and forgets to turn on the VPN there. Heavily secured systems can be a pain in the ass from a usability standpoint, and maybe he wanted to shitpost on Reddit or something and used his laptop and missed the VPN that one time, and well, whoops.

The recent example of NSA should also show that even high end signals intelligence agencies aren't completely airtight. Remember that the US case against Kaspersky depended on an NSA contractor screwing up and taking the NSA malware home on a compromised laptop. That's a bigger screw up than forgetting to connect to the VPN when logging on to social media one time.

A 2012 report from

Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election".

Just imagine what will happen when they find out guns aren't necessary for self defence here in the UK because we haven't armed criminals to the teeth.

Sounds like you may want to re-think your plan of an unarmed and vulnerable populace.

Criminals are in fact armed in the UK. You've just chosen to make sure they have a wider victim pool to choose from to spread out your risk.

Think about this - London is now more dangerous than NYC.

That video is somewhat brighter than what a real driver would see.

But even so, look at your video at 33 seconds - that's the point where the much wider camera in the uber catches sight of her shoes in his lane (at about 7 seconds in this video). The pedestrian is in shadow and if she wasn't moving before it would be very easy not to see her until she started moving. If you go back a bit further in the video she would be standing right between some bright background lights, making it even more difficult to see her if not moving.

Now look at the video of the safety driver. It's not like she was never looking up, she was looking back up every few seconds or so. If the woman were really as visible as you are thinking, the safety driver would have seen her way ahead of time. The last time in the video of the driver she was looking ahead was about 17 seconds into the driver view video, which equates to about 30 seconds in your video (look at the poles passing by the window), if the whole scene were really so bright shouldn't the safety driver have seen the pedestrian at that point? Again, if not moving the pedestrian (in all dark clothing and no reflectors) would have been far harder to see. Pedestrians are killed in this kind of situation by drivers who are watching the road continuously... or as continuously as a human can.

What would be really informative to get, is the LIDAR data from this incident. That would really say a lot about what the car itself did or did not see, then we could go on to speculate how it processed what it "saw".

Merkel and Macron pointedly did not congratulate.

Don't be silly. "Having a meaningful conversation" here means he gets to set ("help shape") the rules.

Rules mean, to a large company, a couple extra warm bodies in the compliance department. Changing the rules means greasing the wheels, for which they have the means. For a small company those same rules might well mean that the whole thing becomes a non-starter. So rules keep the competition out. So of course he isn't opposed to rules. He's got the means to make them work for him.

Yes, there is very little barrier to entry for Facebook competitors. If anything the software and hardware are easier to set up today than they were 15 years ago. The only issue is getting your friends to try something new and younger people are doing that all the time so you could see attrition away from Facebook.

Having more regulations would raise the cost of compliance and give Facebook a way to stomp out competition either before it gets started or as it gets big enough to be slowed down by regulators and the cost of compliance.

How about Facebook stop performing psychological experiments on people for starters: https://www.theguardian.com/te...

Intentionally harming their users just to see if they can.

You have to enable every fucking thing under the sun to get this video to play. I am NOT enabling googletagmanager.com, amazon-adsystem.com, or googletagservices.com, because I do not want to be systematically advertised to, nor do I want google to tag me so that they can track me.

Posting a link to a site like that is doing the advertisers' work for them. Fuck you, Slashdot. Fuck you twice. Here is a link to the guardian, which doesn't make you bend over for google and amazon just to watch a video.

The Daily Mail is a perfectly reputable news source for racists, nationalists and Brexit voters Just ask the Daily Mail. It's as unbiased as Fox News, Breitbart and that weird pro-Trump (fake) patriotism TV channel.

There is no real "brine problem" with desalination. All of the salt in the brine was there originally. Desalination just temporarily separates the salt and the water, without changing the amount of either.

The "brine" problem is if you dump it back into the ocean, it takes more and more energy to desalinate. Eventually you can reach the point of "peak-salt". Usually it doesn't get to that, but it is a problem you often need to think about...

In the free West your app hands over the encryption when the software is ready for users.
"Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages" (12 Jul 2013)
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
In Russia they still have to wait and see what brands trend in the market and then ask for decryption.

The researcher didn't - turns out while Facebook for some reason has been saying researcher its actually a company called Global Science Research the Guardian has a story about it https://www.theguardian.com/ne...

The interesting side note is that Facebook actually hired one of the companies founders a couple years ago.

But in the ToS that no-one read it said it would grab your private data AND the private data of your friends.

That last bit is definitely illegal.

That's just part of FaceBook's API. Is FaceBook's API that allows a user to grant access to their friends list illegal?

You can't agree to give up personal data on behalf of your friends.

Here's what the Obama campaign did in 2012:

Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.

Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

"If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of Obama says.

The only thing I can see that CA did differently than the Obama campaign is that they (allegedly) told FB it was for "research" but in fact used it for commercial purposes. So if you're mad at CA for violating FB's TOS and want to make sure Zuck gets his cheddar, then okay, that's fair. But if it's all just "conservative politicians are using social media to target political advertisements is evil!" then it's just more partisan selective outrage.

The significance of the fusion of Facebook and voter file data is hard to overemphasise. "This is the Moneyball moment for politics," says Sam Graham-Felsen, Obama's chief blogger in 2008. "If you can figure out how to leverage the power of friendship, that opens up incredible possibilities."

Obama does it: "We're leveraging the power of friendship!"

Trump does it: "Insidious fascist psychological warfare!!"

El oh el.

The more that compete for the job, who can do the job, the less they are paid, full stop, end of story, do not pass go for a big fat pay check when your services are in oversupply, worth means nothing.

And this is why big tech companies are pushing the lie of a STEM shortage, even in the face of an oversupply of tech workers. Tech workers in tech hub cities make good pay, and this is a major expense limiting the size/flight capability of executive megayachts.

There is no law prohibiting hiring a foreign worker for a campaign.

I'm sorry old friend, but that's just not true. If you read through that link to the FEC, you'll see that there can't be any foreign workers in a "decision-making" capacity or "participating" in decision making.

Here's the language:

Participation by foreign nationals in decisions involving election-related activities

Commission regulations prohibit foreign nationals from directing, dictating, controlling, or directly or indirectly participating in the decision-making process of any person (such as a corporation, labor organization, political committee, or political organization) with regard to any election-related activities. Such activities include, the making of contributions, donations, expenditures, or disbursements in connection with any federal or nonfederal elections in the United States, or decisions concerning the administration of any political committee. Foreign nationals are also prohibited from involvement in the management of a political committee, including any separate segregated fund (SSF), nonconnected committee, or the nonfederal accounts of any of these committees. See Explanation and Justification for 11 CFR 110.20 at 67 FR 69946 (November 19, 2002)

And further, this also would apply to volunteers...

However, the Commission cautioned that the foreign national could not manage or participate in any of the campaign committee’s decision-making processes.

Now (and pay attention here, Rooster, because I see your eyes starting to glaze over), members of the Cambridge Analytica staff have already snitched that CA was give legal guidance by their own lawyers warning them not to have foreign nationals in key positions and that advice was ignored and laws have been broken. This isn't me saying this, it's Cambridge Analytica legal counsel. And beyond that, staff was instructed to lie about it to authorities.

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

It's hilarious that the left had to invent the term "whataboutism"

It's merely a new label for the fallacy, a subspecies of argumentum ad hominem, traditionally known as the tu quoque fallacy. It remains a fallacy no matter who calls it or by what name they call it. The putative wrongdoing of a speaker is no answer to that speaker's accusations of wrongdoing. This is not, or should not be, a left vs right issue.

If you are not capable of mounting an argument (or defence) any more substantial than "no you are!" perhaps arguing (or defending) isn't your forte?

... examples on their side that are 10x worse

Any particular wrong doing by other parties is a separate question. Whatever wrongs the Obama campaign may have committed, especially if they encompass criminality, should certainly be pursued in their own right. However, not only is a claim that Obama's campaign was just as bad, a fortiori that was "10x worse," hopelessly irrelevant as an answer to the accusations now being levelled against Cambridge Analytica --nothing in the articles presented above to bolster this fallacy even approaches the level of malfeasance suggested by the recent news that is coming out about CA's activities.

They BRAGGED about doing the same things (and worse) than what they're accusing Cambridge of doing.

There's at least one big difference (besides the biggest difference which is that what the Obama data team did was nothing like what Trump's Cambridge Analytica team did, but let's put that aside for now). The people who were on Obama's data team were American citizens or were authorized to work in the US. Cambridge Analytica had a team made up primarily of foreign nationals who did not have US visas, green cards or work permits.

And, there is a law against that. Foreign nationals without green cards cannot work on US election campaigns even if they are volunteers.

https://www.fec.gov/updates/fo...

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

I know the story of Wallace and Darwin and I'm no expert but I simply think it's wrong and I can at least point out an alternative version of history, see here https://www.theguardian.com/sc...

This maybe? I don't really see the difference between CA getting your data because you're friends with someone who took a survey and Obama getting your data because you're friends with someone who signed up for their campaign. At the end of the day, the political campaigns have your data because of stuff people you maybe know did, but you sure didn't give Obama or CA your info.

It could be his own street, in small quiet suburbia, once safe to let your kids run around on has now turned into a highway.

You can thank planners for that!

And while traffic may not be good for residential neighborhoods, it's great for commerce. So why not allow retail uses for the properties along the now-highway? Then the middle-class neighborhood may need less welfare from poor neighborhoods, and the neighborhood may even be able to pass the popsicle test.

There was a time when it was safe and practical to go to the store and buy a gallon of milk without carrying any form of government ID. These days, you pretty much have to drive everywhere, so kids don't get to learn independence, and that's a real shame.