1. The Clinton campaign desperately trying to distract attention away from Hillary's fundamental dishonesty. 2. Maybe the story is true, and the Clinton campaign hires people with the security acumen of a burned-out toaster. 3. Buzzfeed? Really? 4. Maybe they figure if they keep yelling "Trump is a Putin pawn!" enough we'll ignore the fact that Podesta is a registered lobbyist for Putin's bank.
There's one candidate in this race who has a proven record of taking money for favors from Russian sources, and it isn't Trump.
It seems that Twitter's stock price has nosedived precipitously since appointing radical Social Justice Warrior Anita Sarkeesian to their newly formed “Trust and Safety Council.” Since then, Twitter has:
And after having damaged their brand and destroyed billions worth of shareholder value, lo and behold, no one wants to buy them! Gee, turns out that alienating half your user base at the behest of a tiny cadre of radical feminists is a lousy business strategy...
It used to be people would pay a price for ignoring the press. However, as Hillary Clinton's campaign has proven, since no one trusts the press anymore, you pay no penalty for ignoring them at will.
Due to the Social Justice Warrior influx, the genre's awards are no longer given on merit, but rather on meeting the proper criteria of political, ethnic and gender correctness.
If you question this turn of events, expect to find yourself expelled from Worldcon for voicing anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.
Before the SJW invasion, the Hugo Award used to mean something, and the best of science fiction was gaining increased literary respect. Neither of those are true anymore.
And if SF awards have become meaningless, this designation applies doubly to literary awards. Quick, name the last ten winners of the National Book Award for Fiction. Outside a small circle of literary devotees, no one knows or cares.
...just to republish the talking points directly from the Clinton campaign, without all that wasteful middleman editing and rewriting. Saves everyone time and money...
Other book scammers offering books tht look like low-cost omnibus editions, but which are actually compilations of Wikipedia articles and other content-scraped public-domain material, are:
The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth.
Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO is Tony Podesta, one of the best-connected Democratic machers in the country. He founded the firm in 1998 with his brother John, formerly chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, then counselor to President Barack Obama, Mr. Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider. Outsiders engage the Podestas and their well-connected lobbying firm to improve their image and get access to Democratic bigwigs.
Which is exactly what Sberbank, Russia’s biggest financial institution, did this spring. As reported at the end of March, the Podesta Group registered with the U.S. Government as a lobbyist for Sberbank, as required by law, naming three Podesta Group staffers: Tony Podesta plus Stephen Rademaker and David Adams, the last two former assistant secretaries of state. It should be noted that Tony Podesta is a big-money bundler for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign while his brother John is the chairman of that campaign, the chief architect of her plans to take the White House this November.
Sberbank (Savings Bank in Russian) engaged the Podesta Group to help its public image—leading Moscow financial institutions not exactly being known for their propriety and wholesomeness—and specifically to help lift some of the pain of sanctions placed on Russia in the aftermath of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine, which has caused real pain to the country’s hard-hit financial sector.
It’s hardly surprising that Sberbank sought the help of Democratic insiders like the Podesta Group to aid them in this difficult hour, since they clearly understand how American politics work. The question is why the Podesta Group took Sberbank’s money. That financial institution isn’t exactly hiding in the shadows—it’s the biggest bank in Russia, and its reputation leaves a lot to be desired. Nobody acquainted with Russian finance was surprised that Sberbank wound up in the Panama Papers.
though Sberbank has its origins in the nineteenth century, it was functionally reborn after the Soviet collapse, and it the 1990s it grew to be the dominant bank in the country, today controlling nearly 30 percent of Russia’s aggregate banking assets and employing a quarter-million people. The majority stockholder in Sberbank is Russia’s Central Bank. In other words, Sberbank is functionally an arm of the Kremlin, although it’s ostensibly a private institution.
Snip.
John and Tony Podesta aren’t fooling anyone with this ruse. They are lobbyists for Vladimir Putin’s personal bank of choice, an arm of his Kremlin and its intelligence services. Since the brothers Podesta are presumably destined for very high-level White House jobs next January if the Democrats triumph in November at the polls, their relationship with Sberbank is something they—and Hillary Clinton—need to explain to the public.
And this is just one of many Clinton ties to Putin...
Hey look, it's Slashdot concern trolling their readers again!
I reject the premise.
"Why are software developers working on this trivial Internet thing rather than solving world hunger?"
It's the Von Mises knowledge problem, aka the economic calculation problem. You don't know what the most important problems to solve are because you (and by "you" I especially mean "any government body") can't see the future. One person can only be an expert on their own life, not everyone else's lives. You don't necessarily known what the real biggest problems today are, because when you read or watch the news you're watching edited abstracts of selections of other people's limited knowledge, with biases conscious and unconscious at every step of the process.
You have no way of known that specific technology you're working on won't have far greater benefit to society than whatever our cultural elites have decided to focuses on for clickbait concern trolling this week, especially ones with easy emotional appeals ("Show me rain forests! Show me police killing black people!") rather than more difficult or abstract ones ("Show me how deficit financing eventually destroys economies!").
It turns out that creating the Internet probably did more to help solve world hunger than, say, studying how to make krill into food patties.
Work on the problems that interest you and that you have the capacity to solve, not what other people think are "more important," because there's a good chance they're wrong.
Read the section in Charles Murray's Losing Ground about the SIME/DIME experiments in guaranteed minimum income. They were colossal failures.
They might be less of a failure in Finland, due to greater cultural and ethnic uniformity. But that doesn't mean it won't fail, it just means it will take longer to fail.
Middlemen used to drive up the cost, but they would also provide a quality control filter that's now missing as you can buy things directly from China and India through Amazon and eBay.
A lesson of the past few days is the danger of groupthink. Along with the major international institutions, the assembled might of establishment opinion – in the CBI and TUC, massed legions of economists and a partisan Bank of England – was confident that the existing order here and in Europe would be preserved by promises of unspecified reforms. Until around 2am on the morning of Friday 24 May, the bookies and currency traders followed the playbook that had been given them by the authorities and the pollsters. Then, in a succession of events of a kind that is becoming increasingly common, the script was abruptly torn up. A clear majority of voters had reached to the heart of the situation. Realising that the promises of European reform that had been made were empty, they opted for a sharp shift in direction. The consequences can already be observed: rapid political change in Britain and an accelerating process of unravelling in the European Union. The worldwide impact on markets and geopolitics will be long-lasting and profound.
There are sure to be concerted efforts to resist the referendum’s message. The rise of the hydra-headed monster of populism; the diabolical machinations of tabloid newspapers; conflicts of interest between baby boomers and millennials; divisions between the English provinces and Wales on the one hand and Scotland, London and Northern Ireland on the other; Jeremy Corbyn’s lukewarm support for the Remain cause; the buyer’s remorse that has supposedly set in after Remain’s defeat – these already commonplace tales will be recycled incessantly during the coming weeks and months. None of them captures the magnitude of the upheaval that has occurred. When voters inflicted the biggest shock on the establishment since Churchill was ousted in 1945 they signalled the end of an era.
Predictably, there is speculation that Brexit will not happen. If Britain can vote for Brexit, it is being argued, surely anything is possible. But those who think the vote can be overturned or ignored are telling us more about their own state of mind than developments in the real world. Like bedraggled courtiers fleeing Versailles after the French Revolution, they are unable to process the reversal that has occurred. Locked in a psychology of despair, anger and denial, they cannot help believing there will be a restoration of an order they believed was unshakeable.
Many liberal journalists, representing elites throughout the advanced world, have reacted with indignation to the fact that 52 percent of U.K. voters (many without degrees) have rejected the EU system of supranational government of which the elites approve. Naturally, these journalistic spokesmen argue, the common people could not possibly have good reasons for such an act of multinational vandalism. So they must be inspired by, er, racism, xenophobia, fear of globalization, and related other thought-crimes.
That account doubtless condenses and oversimplifies the elites’ response to the Brexit shock, which is just one small skirmish in a new class war in advanced societies between geographically mobile, liberal, skilled, high-earning professionals and more rooted, communitarian, particularist, and patriotic citizens (or what British journalist David Goodhart calls “nowhere” people and “somewhere” people). “Nowhere” people simply didn’t grasp the outlook of “somewhere people” in the referendum, not seeing that many decent people who voted for Brexit had such respectable anxieties as loss of c
The Congressional Black Caucus was a heavy supporter of the "war on drugs" in the 1980s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 passed a Democratic House with 205 Democratic co-sponsors to 96 Republicans.
Remember: All we see are the myriad propaganda films that paint the Federation in the best possible light. We never see the vast slave gulags back in the Federation hinterland. "Look, our society is perfect! No one is ever jelous, enraged, power-hungry, greedy, or ambitious! Starship Captains never abuse their positions to accumulate vast wealth!"
It's set in a magic fantasy world where communism works and people never have personal conflicts with each other. It's Potemkin Villages all the way down...
Star Wars, on the other hand, is set in an imaginary hereditary monarchy where out of untold trillions of living beings, only a handful of intermarried power families seem to control everything, and true virtue and magic ability only comes from those favored by God who have inherited high midichlorian counts...
Slashdot Mirror
A few points on this alleged story:
1. The Clinton campaign desperately trying to distract attention away from Hillary's fundamental dishonesty.
2. Maybe the story is true, and the Clinton campaign hires people with the security acumen of a burned-out toaster.
3. Buzzfeed? Really?
4. Maybe they figure if they keep yelling "Trump is a Putin pawn!" enough we'll ignore the fact that Podesta is a registered lobbyist for Putin's bank.
There's one candidate in this race who has a proven record of taking money for favors from Russian sources, and it isn't Trump.
It seems that Twitter's stock price has nosedived precipitously since appointing radical Social Justice Warrior Anita Sarkeesian to their newly formed “Trust and Safety Council.” Since then, Twitter has:
* Banned Robert Stacey McCain
* Banned Milo Yiannopoulos, AKA @Nero, permanently
* Suspended Instapundit
* Shadowbanned Anna Maria Perez
* Forced James O'Keefe to renove a Tweet and perform a spite reset
And after having damaged their brand and destroyed billions worth of shareholder value, lo and behold, no one wants to buy them! Gee, turns out that alienating half your user base at the behest of a tiny cadre of radical feminists is a lousy business strategy...
It used to be people would pay a price for ignoring the press. However, as Hillary Clinton's campaign has proven, since no one trusts the press anymore, you pay no penalty for ignoring them at will.
So why not ignore them?
That's something that came out in The Panama Papers.
Due to the Social Justice Warrior influx, the genre's awards are no longer given on merit, but rather on meeting the proper criteria of political, ethnic and gender correctness.
If you question this turn of events, expect to find yourself expelled from Worldcon for voicing anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.
Before the SJW invasion, the Hugo Award used to mean something, and the best of science fiction was gaining increased literary respect. Neither of those are true anymore.
And if SF awards have become meaningless, this designation applies doubly to literary awards. Quick, name the last ten winners of the National Book Award for Fiction. Outside a small circle of literary devotees, no one knows or cares.
...just to republish the talking points directly from the Clinton campaign, without all that wasteful middleman editing and rewriting. Saves everyone time and money...
Complete with pic.
Other book scammers offering books tht look like low-cost omnibus editions, but which are actually compilations of Wikipedia articles and other content-scraped public-domain material, are:
Let the buyer beware...
...right after Thiel was revealed to be a Trump supporter.
Almost as if the Obama Administration wanted to punish him for expressing non-liberal thoughts...
One of which is the fact that Tony Podesta, a big Hillary bundler and brother of John Podesta, her campaign manager, is registered lobbyist for Putin's bank:
Snip.
And this is just one of many Clinton ties to Putin...
Manning made his bed; let him sleep in it.
Hey look, it's Slashdot concern trolling their readers again!
I reject the premise.
"Why are software developers working on this trivial Internet thing rather than solving world hunger?"
It's the Von Mises knowledge problem, aka the economic calculation problem. You don't know what the most important problems to solve are because you (and by "you" I especially mean "any government body") can't see the future. One person can only be an expert on their own life, not everyone else's lives. You don't necessarily known what the real biggest problems today are, because when you read or watch the news you're watching edited abstracts of selections of other people's limited knowledge, with biases conscious and unconscious at every step of the process.
You have no way of known that specific technology you're working on won't have far greater benefit to society than whatever our cultural elites have decided to focuses on for clickbait concern trolling this week, especially ones with easy emotional appeals ("Show me rain forests! Show me police killing black people!") rather than more difficult or abstract ones ("Show me how deficit financing eventually destroys economies!").
It turns out that creating the Internet probably did more to help solve world hunger than, say, studying how to make krill into food patties.
Work on the problems that interest you and that you have the capacity to solve, not what other people think are "more important," because there's a good chance they're wrong.
Read the section in Charles Murray's Losing Ground about the SIME/DIME experiments in guaranteed minimum income. They were colossal failures.
They might be less of a failure in Finland, due to greater cultural and ethnic uniformity. But that doesn't mean it won't fail, it just means it will take longer to fail.
"We're required to shove one SJW feminist STEM propaganda piece down our readers throats every week"?
Like the media outlets responsible for #GamerGate, it seems that more and more Slashdot's moderators actively loath their own readers...
...with chocolate.
Neither are the people who worked for Gawker.
That Venn diagram doesn't intersect.
So, remind me again what political party controls San Francisco from top to bottom?
Oh, and here's a data point: Gurbaksh Chahal gave his political donations exclusively to Democrats.
...of being forced to take high-paying jobs with the Hillary campaign, the Clinton Foundation, or being hired as big-money lobbyists for the numerous Fortune 500 companies and foreign potentates who have donated to Clinton.
What a rough fate...
...bite me, China!
...10% Polyester.
Middlemen used to drive up the cost, but they would also provide a quality control filter that's now missing as you can buy things directly from China and India through Amazon and eBay.
Caveat Emptor
"...until they pick the alternative the ruling class prefers."
That worked before on EU votes. I don't think it will work this time.
Still, the Europhilic ruling class is exceptionally cross that mere citizens would dare to express opinions that differ from their elite betters:
The Congressional Black Caucus was a heavy supporter of the "war on drugs" in the 1980s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 passed a Democratic House with 205 Democratic co-sponsors to 96 Republicans.
Can you pay $3,000 every month to share a closet with three other people?
Remember: All we see are the myriad propaganda films that paint the Federation in the best possible light. We never see the vast slave gulags back in the Federation hinterland. "Look, our society is perfect! No one is ever jelous, enraged, power-hungry, greedy, or ambitious! Starship Captains never abuse their positions to accumulate vast wealth!"
It's set in a magic fantasy world where communism works and people never have personal conflicts with each other. It's Potemkin Villages all the way down...
Star Wars, on the other hand, is set in an imaginary hereditary monarchy where out of untold trillions of living beings, only a handful of intermarried power families seem to control everything, and true virtue and magic ability only comes from those favored by God who have inherited high midichlorian counts...
...to run over whoever keeps posting this dupe.
BOOM! Problem solved!