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Obama Administration Releases Searchable Archive of Social Media Posts (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: President Obama's entire social media presence as POTUS is now available in a single online archive. The administration today launched The Obama White House Social Media Archive, a searchable collection of everything the president and his administration posted on Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest during his two terms in office. According to ArchiveSocial, the platform on which the archive is hosted, this includes more than 100 social media profiles associated with the White House and more than 250,000 total posts. As of right now, the archive's search function isn't the smoothest. A general search like "healthcare" will yield nearly 600 tangential results, including tweets from White House staffers. The Advanced Search will allow you to narrow things down a bit, with filters for date range and social media platform.
How about a searchable archive of lobbyists who show up at the WH. Heck, let's extend it to Congress, too.
I am sure this was done to intentionally create an expectation for Trump to do the same.
Smart move.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
>> searchable collection of everything the president and his administration posted on Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest
Yeah - just want we wanted: the headlines from a hundred thousand press releases. How about some of the staff's Tinder profiles and the like instead?
Not that all the science is wrong (though of course some of it is), but your leaves me a bit puzzled why you'd even ask.
> I mean... what is the profit motive here?
I mean, really? That's like asking "where's the profit motive in the military industry?" The politicians having handed out tens of billions of dollars to their friends based on plans to do something "green" (and some hefty donations). Do you have any idea how many billions of your money and mine Gore Inc gave to green companies who never released a product?
Heck even think of Gore himself. He rode AWG, mostly, into the White House. As he left the White House, he was worth $700K; over the next three years he and David Blood made $218 million profit from their carbon credit trading company. In three years, he personally made $172 from carbon trading. You don't see a profit motive there? Really?
"Green" is the liberal slush fund just as "defense" was the conservative slush fund.
Don't misunderstand me, national defense and environmental protection are both important. They also happen to be the multi-billion dollar industries that each of the parties chose to launder very large kickbacks in exchange for campaign contributions. If you haven't noticed that ... wow.
Still in denial. Work on it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I wrote:
> In three years, he personally made $172 from carbon trading.
Of course I meant:
In three years, he personally made $172 MILLION from carbon trading.
Does that mean the whole concept of global warming is all bullshit? No. Does it mean that Gore had a huge profit motive to hype it as much as possible (and got famous doing so)? Obviously.
Do you have any idea how many billions of your money and mine Gore Inc gave to green companies who never released a product?
How does any of that money benefit the climatologists that are "faking" AGW?
I mean, really? That's like asking "where's the profit motive in the military industry?"
Not that I can see. The military industrial complex is of course HIGHLY motivated to sell us more weapons to the point of paying whatever it costs to install congress critters friendly to that agenda; and there really is no highly organized 'counter' complex opposed to this situation.
The politicians having handed out tens of billions of dollars to their friends based on plans to do something "green" (and some hefty donations). Do you have any idea how many billions of your money and mine Gore Inc gave to green companies who never released a product?
Itty bitty teeny tiny potatoes compared to big oil/coal/fossil, automotive, and every other industry that produces anything substantially non-green -- and they are in direct opposition to anything 'green'; and would be (and are) happy to fight tooth and nail to dismantle the EPA and every enviro-regulation or treaty on the books.
Heck even think of Gore himself.
Right. But for every gore there's 7 Rex Tillersons, 6 Exxon Mobils, FII-IIVE fracking com-pan-ies, 4 hydro dams, 3 french fried hens, 2 turtle soup makers, and a partridge in a pear tree fighting to keep it business as usual.
"Green" is the liberal slush fund just as "defense" was the conservative slush fund.
Its simply NOT comparable to the military industrial complex; because the vested opposition to the 'green' is vast, organized, and extremely well monied. The opposition to the military-industrial-complex is a few hippies... its laughable to suggest that 'green' has the same un-contested level of clout.
They also happen to be the multi-billion dollar industries that each of the parties chose to launder very large kickbacks in exchange for campaign contributions. If you haven't noticed that ... wow.
If you think the multi-billion dollar green industry is a drop in the bucket compared to the multi-TRILLION dollar industry that is decidely "un-green" ... wow. I mean... so-called "liberals" can be bought just like anyone else, and there's plenty of anti-green money lying around.
It just doesn't make credible sense for the AGW crowd to be such a powerful deep rooted conspiracy with such a large and powerful opposition to what it stands for. It's ... delusional.
> There are a multitude of ways for politicians to shuffle money to their friends,
There are many ways. Especially for smaller amounts of money. When presidents, vice presidents, and senior senators want to shuffle billions of dollars to their friends, they of course use a federal program that awards billions of dollars to private companies. There are a few to choose from. If you rose to power based on green rhetoric, you tend to have friends involved in such things, and that fits the need just fine. Some more or less legitimate - he supports Greenpeace, they support him. Some not so legitimate, like solar panel companies who take huge amounts of government money, and never bother to produce even one solar panel. He could have switched to advocating for huge new programs that build affordable housing and his friends could run housing developments that never got built, but why change? He was already the green guy, that's how he got press.
> which three years
2008-2011, shortly afterv testifying before Congress that cap and trade would cause investors to make a ton of money. His investment firm was heavy into carbon credits as they rose to $70/ton. After he sold out to investors, they dropped to ten cents per ton.
> It would discredit government action on AGW much more than the science itself.
After Bush Jr. used trumped-up intelligence about WMDs as his causus belli to invade Iraq, I questioned both his actions and his excuse. The yellowcake uranium did exist, as did parts and pieces for biological weapons, but the threat was greatly exaggerated by the politicians.
When Gore used trumped-up studies about global warming as his causus belli for handing billions to his buddies (and indirectly, himself), I question both his actions and his excuse. Global warming bas a concept is a real thing, but the threat was greatly exaggerated by the politicians.
You demonstrate incredible ignorance.
1) Politicians are not as stupid as you think. They can find green products that actually make money. Yes some fail - so does some of any market segment. In general the green initiatives are just as profitable as any other business. If they were all scams, smart people would invade the market and out-compete the idiots,
2) While it is true that millions go to green companies, billions go to non-green companies. This is obvious to anyone that looks at the economy (Five of the ten largest companies in the world are oil companies, plus an electrical grid and 2 car companies). When you make that much money it is EASY to get government subsidies. But they call them tax breaks, rather than subsidies
3) In this case it is not a case of both sides being bad. Instead it is a clear case of an older established industry doing everything it can to stop a new technology that they are afraid is going to kill them. The new tech struggles to compete and has to beg the government that has been funneling billions to the old business to give them a few millions so they can survive.
Then the old money says "hey, no fair giving them millions", all without mentioning their own billions.
And you say, "duh, that's not right", in total ignorance of what is really going on.
As of today, 2017, solar is the single most profitable energy source in certain low cloud, high sunlight areas. Granted, most humans don't live in these super hot, dry, parts of the world. But that wasn't true 20 years ago. Come 2030, someone (China and Germany are leading the way), will almost certainly have Solar cheaper than fossil fuels in areas where you have to pipe or ship the natural gas.
But that requires an investment. China and Germany are making it, the question is:
1) Will the US do it also, or will we cede this market to foreigners?
2) If we do it, do we fund it with
A) direct grants (requiring government to make science decisions)
B) or instead via business rules that create a market based profit motive for private investors to do the funding.
I vote for (2B), because I am an American capitalist. if you are a communist, vote (2A). Or Chinese/Russian, vote (1).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Again, its about the balance.
For every time solar-Bob called greenboy-Al looking for some tit-for-tat for his solar slush fund there was old-coal-face-joe calling Senator open-for-business telling him there was 5 million dollars for his PAC if this 'green nonsense' would go away and he could get a fast track approval to grandfather running his smokestacks under 1950 standards because it would cost 20 million bucks to update them... or whatever.
The idea that the 'green lobby' could have such overwhelming influence over policy in the face of all all the opposed lobbies, to the point that they government would be running a decades long campaign to literally suppress and fake the science is simply absurd.
Especailly since old-coal-joe ALSO gets billions in taxpayer subsidies and support... so why aren't they whitewashing the science to show minimal impact? Al Gore isn't the only PAC open for business, and old-coal-joe has a LOT of money to spend...
A liberal-green-conspiracy just lacks credibility.
The opposite is the case. Large rant follows.
The whole pseudo-debate about the validity of climate science research is instigated, paid for, and kept alive by lobby groups of the petrochemical industry. A whole bunch of fake scientists and lobbyists have made a career in various conservative think-tanks and fake 'institutes' in the US whose sole purpose is to spread doubt about scientific results that have been established world-wide and by independent research organizations, institutions and countries. The only reason why this topic has been politicized so much in the US is that the petrochemical industry is traditionally linked and intertwined with the Republican party more than with the Democrats.
Nowhere else is the scientific consensus debated, the debate elsewhere is a fairly rational debate about the means to counter global warming and about how dangerous it may be for the respective country and its economy (how much to err on the side of caution, how much money to spend, etc.). This whole whole pseudo-debate is confined to the US only. No serious people outside the US have any reason to doubt the opinion of the vast majority of scientists world-wide, because elsewhere less lobbyist money has been spent and conservatives have no problems with accepting current scientific consensus. You have no idea how outright bizarre and batshit crazy this whole US pseudo-debate appears to the rest of the world, and if you're a conservative American, you should definitely start asking yourself whether mixing up values and facts in this anti-scientific way is really worth the damage in reputation. It is perfectly feasible to be conservative and accept the current state of the art of science (whether it later turns out to be wrong or right, that's a completely different question), in fact, I'm inclined to believe that many people with such views send mankind to the moon.
The saddest thing is that most of the people who continue to politicize this purely scientific topic and 'debate' it as if it where a matter of deciding which values to defend do not even realize that they are just tools for the US oil lobby and for some Republican politicians who ran out of topics to distinguish themselves from no less conservative Democrats. They think they are discussing in a world-wide debate, whereas in reality they are lost in a homegrown disinformation campaign.
Why don't you discuss quantum theory or relativity theory instead? Or how about particle physics? I'm sure you can cast doubt on particle physics, too, after all it's pretty clear that all of the areas of physics I've just mentioned are wrong somewhere and at some point. The standard model cannot be all there is, right. Maybe you can come up with some big conspiracy here as well, from the comfortable chair in your home and without doing some real work, and find some crackpot complaints that CERN doesn't release all their raw data on the Internet or has used some 'smoothing' to 'fake results'. I'll tell why you don't do that, though. Because there is no big industry with a huge lobby apparatus that would benefit from spreading doubts about current research in particle physics.