Replying to myself because I accidentally copied the wrong link which is to a clip of the said talk and not the whole of it. Here's the original TED talk. The part about the lady & ducks is slightly after 11:10.
And what happens when a deer decides to bolt out from the woods in front of your vehicle? Are you going to trust that the car can detect a deer?
Am I going to trust that a computerized system is capable of detecting an object in front of the car an apply brakes faster than a human being?
Hell yes I am. The human reaction time is around a second (often considerably more if the driver's distracted or tired). By the time your brain has gone 'oh shit a deer", and decided to slam the breaks, the computer is already in the process of breaking or adjusting course to evade.
This TED talk from 2 years ago shows that the Google car is capable of detecting and reacting to numerous different obstacles it has not seen before in an urban environment such as ducks and a elderly woman in a wheelchair chasing them on the road. The car halts, waits for them to pass and continues. And keep in mind this footage is old, the capabilities at this point have probably improved.
Humans are on average really bad drivers because we cannot focus on very many things at once and our reaction time is relatively slow. Self-driving cars have both better awareness (ie. more sensory data) and the ability to continuously asses its surroundings in a way no human can, as well as having the ability to do math before making decisions. The car can calculate whether or not an emergency breaking maneuver will be enough to stop the car before it hits an obstacle, or if it's likely that the distance to said obstacle is too short and evasion is a better option, and it can calculate all of this in the second or so that it takes for your brain to even react to what's happening.
I've driven in heavy-snow conditions here in Finland with very poor visibility and had some close calls. Would I trust a car such as Google's that has LIDAR capabilities and is thus able to sense objects in the distance before humans can even see them in such conditions moreso than myself? Yes. Why the fuck wouldn't I? There is absolutely nothing miraculous about humans which would make computers surpassing us in driving abilities impossible. In fact in a sense they've already done so as the accident rate for Google's car for example is far below human drivers, although obviously it will take time before the cars learn to handle different weather/road conditions, but there's no computational/technological reason why they won't be able to do so.
Yes. It is totally and completely insane to spend any money trying to do anything with Florida except buy people out of their homes, which is cheaper than any other option
Are you sure about that being the cheapest option? The Dutch have been living on land that's below the sea-level rather successfully for centuries.
Now granted, there are coastal areas that cannot be defended with dams, because water can seep in through limestone etc. But the reason I'm asking is that relocating an entire state is bound to be insanely expensive, so it's not impossible that there are 'in-between'. options such as evacuating only parts of the state/coastal regions most in danger and starting to secure the rest to withstand ocean level rise.
Not to even mention that I find it somewhat unlikely that the current, or even future, US governments would be willing to create a buyout program of the scale that relocating an entire state would require, but that's another point.
Not so much the database table.. more problematic is the variety of different rules (different rates / thresholds in different countries, different requirements (some countries require line by line details of every invoice), the registration itself is problematic (All Finland registration paperwork is in Finnish - up to you to decipher / translate)
While you're right about the point of different countries having somewhat different rules, as a Finn and an entrepreneur I do have to wonder where you got the last point. There may be countries in which paperwork is hard to get in English, but I assure you the Finnish tax-officials provide a comprehensive instruction set in several languages, including English instructions on income taxation of foreign corporate entities, VAT registration of foreigners in Finland, tax obligations of a foreign employer in Finland as well as starting a business and a host of other topics. The Q&A/knowledge bank are both in Finnish and English, and to my knowledge the documentation that has to be filled (and can be filled electronically) is also available in English and they have English customer service to assist people with possible questions if the online resources are not enough.
We're not dumb here, we're quite well aware that we're part of a global economy and that for that to work translations are required for things to go smoothly. Quite a large chunk of small-businesses such as restaurants and bars are ran by immigrants with sub-par Finnish skills and sometimes even poor English, which is why the instructions on site are also available in Swedish (mandated by law as it's an official language here together with Finnish), Sami, Russian, Estonian, Polish, German and Chinese.
I think this is why they can't do things like the article talks about.
They realise that the second they do, not only do TV sales drop, but the amount of content purchased will drop dramatically. What's the point in paying for a movie from Netflix or wherever if the smart TV is going to put ads into it for you?
Currently there's no point. But if they start giving discounts for the devices that play ads you might well see consumers being okay with this. Hell, one day in the future I can even see tvs going out for nearly free if you agree to being shown say 10-15 minutes of ads per each hour of content. The ability to get accurate data on what people are watching and target ads based on that is something the advertisers would pay good money for. For the same reason I don't see it as an impossibility that Netflix & al will sooner or later create a 'freemium' model that could for example give you access to their own original content for free if you'll take some ads while watching them.
Because the newspapers actually have reporters and editors, while the stuff that shows up on the internet is neither researched nor edited; it combines garbage and half-garbage and random factoids in a mish-mash of opinion.
And herein lies the current problem with the internet as a news platform. research takes time and money, whereas page views and the ad money that comes with them follow whoever's the fastest. Newspapers come out once a day so they're bound by the format to have more time to do research on whatever goes out. Online if you wait 15-20 hours after an major event has occurred before posting about it, you're going to see a fraction of the traffic that those who pushed stuff out immediately did.
And also importantly newspapers cost money that gives them a revenue stream independent of advertisements. Now that consumers want news at a faster pace online while also being on average less willing to pay for the news themselves, it's really no wonder that the overall quality is as shitty as it is.
The problem here is that most of the international agreements being done in regards to the environment gives exemptions to China and India, because they have to "Catch up". China gets a free ride to build some of the most polluting industry in all of our history because of political interests and business interes
First of all, the problem with the treaties is that because the large polluters (US included) have such a varying level of enerfy infrastructure the treaties signed are not binding. The Paris agreement is about common emission goals that countries ought to strive to reach, there are no mechanisms in it to impose sanctions on nations that fail to meet theirs. So to speak of 'exemptions' in such a treaty is nonsense to begin with, you can't be 'exempt' from sanctions that do not exist in the treaty. Would it be good to have some kind of sanction system in place? Yes, yes it would, but if you think the US government would ever agree to internationally binding treaties that would impose sanctions on US trade should its goals not be reached, you're occupying an entirely different political reality than I am.
Second of all: why do you think it'd be realistic not to account for the fact that massive infrastructure overhaul will not happen immediately and give these countries realistic timeframes in the treaties? China at the moment gets roughly 2/3rds of all its energy from coal and has 4 times the population of the US with increasing private car ownership and you think giving them 13 years time to turn their greenhouse emisions downward (the paris agreement limit for when China's promised it will reach peak CO2 emissions is 2030 and they've also agreed to reduce their carbon intensity by 60 % by the same date, which means they have 13 years time to essentially redo the majority of their energy production) is somehow excessive? Wtf?
Thirdly, do you realize that China has very much woken up to the fact that it is within their own national interests to cut down on emissions? The level of pollution in many Chinese megacities is so bad (quivalent to smoking 1.2 packs of cigarettes just for breathing the air) its having significant adverse health effects leading to increased health care costs and declined productivity if they are not addressed. It's a major issue in domestic Chinese politics because the people don't like the status quo at all, which means if they keep making things worse they'd push the country towards increasing political instability which is certainly not something they want. The idea that China will just keep building polluting tech even though they're already struggling with massive pollution issues is not based in reality. They're building massive amounts of nuclear power plants and heavily focusing on renewables, but as is obvious to anyone with half a brain, this level of change will take a few years to accomplish. They're currently on the track to meeting their 2030 goals.
China’s carbon dioxide pollution output has already slowed more than the government promised in the Paris agreement, and that trend seems likely to continue, many experts say. China’s emissions are likely to peak years before the 2030 date that the government pledged as part of the Paris agreement.
“China is very close to making the turn in its carbon dioxide emissions. It will very likely be before 2030 and — in the very best case — may already have happened,” said Niklas Höhne, a founding partner at the NewClimate Institute.
International pressure may have played a part in curbing China’s emissions, but the main reasons have been domestic: an economy less dependent on heavy industry and coal, and public discontent over air pollution. That widespread anger has reinforced Chinese leaders’ efforts to cut smokestack industries, and those cuts are
BTW. Christians need not be smug since you can easily find plenty of genocide there although not as much as Islam.
Well now, that all conveniently hinges on what you count as 'christian'.
"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
"The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
The oath taken to join the SS also directly mentioned God, and the Catholic church was in official alliance with the third reich, Hitler's birthday being an occasion of celebration in all churches within Germany. 'Gott mitt uns' was inscribed in each and every belt buckle of German soldiers.
But I presume in your books this does not count as 'real christianity', am I right?
It's likely very true that Hitler himself was not truly religious (in fact current historical consensus seems to be that he was fairly irreligious and just saw the importance of religion as a tool), but he consistently and repeatedly made references to the faith and is was a central theme in Nazi propaganda to emphasize that unity of the church (and god) with their cause. And the church agreed with this, wholeheartedly, the Pope said not one thing against Adolf.
And if you think that was the end of the church's genocidal tendencies you'd be wrong again. The catholic church openly took one side over the other in the Rwandan genocide, with catholic priests openly preaching murder and committing it themselves even, all in the name of god. Less than 30 years ago.
If however it is your opinion that as the views of the nazis (or of the Rwandan catholics) do not align with the modern interpretation of Christianity it's therefore alright to not count the holocaust or Rwanda as a 'christian genocide' even though Christianity was deeply involved in both, then you ought to give other religions the same courtesy and understand that the way states, especially theocratic states, implement and enforce their religious views does not define the entire religion or its believers. Right now there's a budhist-lead genocide going on in Myanmar.
The point that this should drive home to you is that as satisfying as it'd be to think religions cause totalitarianism, most often it is the case that totalitarian states co-opt religion and religious tendencies for their own purposes. In North Korea this has gone so far that the ruling elite has made themselves to be worshiped as gods, and created a religion where Kim is seen as an all-powerful miraculous figure.
I've met and talked with batshit insane theocratic muslims and christians alike. I've also shared bread with deeply religious people from both faiths who abhor totalitarianism because they've experienced its iron grip first-hand. I've also met many more followers of both faiths who are de facto atheist but choose to not use that term because it'd cause familial issues so they call themselves christians or muslims although you'll sooner find them in a bar than in churches or mosques.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Nobody changed their mind on who to vote for based on a facebook ad. If you think someone did, prove it.
Wtf?
First of all, who said the point of the ads is to get people to change their mind? This is what the Trump team itself was doing with ads/targeting before the elections:
Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
All you need to dö is get enough people in the key demographic of your opponent to stay home in key areas.
Second of all: many people don't recognize sponsored content/ads in social media, or elsewhere. You'll see a news article or a blog post that has above it something like '[Your friend name here] also liked [our site]' and that's in fact a paid ad targeted to you because someone you know has liked the page and they've targeted their promotion that way, but really people generally don't think of these as ads but just another part of their newsfeed which actually makes them more effective.
Third of all: ads (both direct and sponsored content) do affect people's decisions. That's why they exist and why companies are pouring money into them but you obviously will have a hard time finding anyone who says they bought any opinion/product/service because it was advertised to them, partly because people don't often recognize the impact ads have on them. Chances are high advertising has affected your behavior during your lifetime without you being directly aware of it. You see ads and at some later point when you're making the decision of what to buy, the ads play into your preconceptions and decision making process at a subconscious level. Hardly no-one is at the store like 'I'm going to buy this product because I saw that ad last week" but there is still is an increase in sales following a successful marketing campaign.
So no, if you poll people and ask them 'did you see any paid for articles in your news feed about either candidate and if so did they effect your decision on whether to vote or not and for which candidate?' you're likely going to get a 'no' on all 3 of those from most people but that doesn't mean there was no effect, it just means most people can't recognize well placed ads as ads anymore and that like always, people think they're immune to the psychological effects of ads/sponsored content when they provably are not.
Human beings on average are much more easy to influence than we tend to admit, and the marketing industry has been honing their skills for way over half a century at this point becoming more and more successful at it.
We are a tribal species, and our psychology practically requires an "other".
This is true, but here's a hypothetical: 'the other' doesn't necessarily have to be other humans. I mean, the age-old sci-fi theme is humans uniting as a species against an external threat once we realize we're not that different compared to aliens, but the external uniting force does not have to be aliens either.
In this century we'll be facing multiple, complex issues and catastrophes caused by the environment rapidly changing. Armies across the world are masters at large-scale logistics and movements. My hope is we'll put these forces to good use by leveraging these abilities and having them for example rapidly deploy flood-barriers, maintain and deploy sources of power and deliver essential supplies to people in danger and so on. The best way to stave off global massive conflict is to try and enable people to stay and live where they are. If this is not done and tens or hundreds of millions of people turn into wandering hordes of refugees, we'll be in much deeper shit than we'd be if we decide to do the rational thing and allow the armies to put their logistical expertise to good use combating the actual root cause: the environment and its management.
Somebody has to work to produce all those things people on UBI are going to consume. Why should I have to work and pay for other people's good time?
You shouldn't, and you won't. Pretty much no-one will. Most production will be entirely automated (in the west) within the next half a century or so. That's precisely the point: we will have immense production capabilities that require next to no workforce, but without UBI or an equivalent system, there will be no-one to buy any of those things which will lead to major issues.
Does it matter if some people get to mooch off of the system if society, overall, is advanced? I suspect that a universal basic income and ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met would actually lead to a more productive society than we have now.
Entirely agreed. One of the reasons we're trialing basic income here in Finland (not for everyone at the moment, it's an experiment where a group of people on unemployment benefits have been transitioned to basic income) is that the current models of social security are outdated and no longer in tune with the way the job market functions. Back in the 60s-80s when the Finnish welfare system was created (much of it being copied from our neighbors to the west in Sweden who, having been spared the 2nd world war had had a head start in building theirs) there was still an idea going on that full-time employment is the end goal of all healthy people. This meant that the unemployment benefit was to be used as a mechanism in between full-time contracts or for people who've just graduated.
However, as we know throughout the west outsourcing and especially automation have already changed the landscape drastically. Companies hire less and less people on permanent contracts and instead favor a gig-based economy. This creates a lot of issues with the current old fashioned social security system because if someone's unemployed and they take up say a 2 week contract or a part time job, this immediately either entirely cancels or massively shrinks their unemployment benefit. This leads to a situation where people who're unemployed do not want to pick up such job-offerings because it affects the stability of their income. If your benefit is cancelled because you got work for a few weeks, you have to re-apply for it after that which takes time and may make a significant dent in your income. The same goes for micro-businesses and self-employment. Even if someone has a skillset that they could use to make some money on the side while looking for a job, many people choose not to do so because there's a real risk of the officials saying: 'aha, I see you've been tutoring students and being paid for it, that makes you an entrepreneur and we're now going to slash or revoke your benefit'. So it's pretty much an 'all or nothing' scenario right now where the system either expects you to be unemployed or working, there's no 'in between' mode and that's becoming more and more of an issue.
Unfortunately our current government is center-right and blind to the current realities so they're working their assess off to make the situation worse, not better (the basic income trial mentioned earlier was created prior to the current government). We have a couple hundred thousand more unemployed people than open job offerings at this point (the '08 crisis combined with the implosion of Nokia created a huge crater on the job market form which we've not fully recovered, people don't realize this but Nokia was responsible for almost a third of all of our exports), but the government, despite being aware of this, brazenly and openly lies and claims that the problem is that unemployed people arr all 'lazy' and just wanna mooch off the system. So using the 'lazy moochers' as a lame excuse they're creating all kinds of bureaucratic contraptions creating more and more pitfalls for the unemployed people to go through for them to maintain their benefit, such as increasing the amount of paperwork and documentation that has to be provided lest the benefit be cut, and even in some cases forcing people to take what amount to unpaid internships or face a slash in their income (this is actually an illegal thing to do, but they do not seem to care anymore, it also skews the job market even further by injecting free labor into the system which reduces the number of paid positions). This is especially idiotic because the right to social security is in the constitution here, so even if a person falls out of the unemployment benefit, the state is still obligated by law to make s
Cross-network play in shooters has never seemed like a good idea to begin with IMO. The difference in precision and speed afforded by a mouse+keyboard setup as compared to a controller is such that I think console players are at an inherent disadvantage.
Money does not make a good person gooder or a bad dude badder
Money is the ultimate tool because it can be converted into nearly anything. You're right that a bad person doesn't necessarily become more heinous when he/she is given a lot of money, but the point is that with great wealth they now have much higher chances of pursuing their goals and if those goals are bad (from the point of view of the rest of humanity) then they will be able to cause a lot more damage than if they had remained poor. Vice versa for good people.
Those of us who have had decades of experience in High Tech knows that Tech is not only Technology, it is actually AN ART FORM
Truly Great Technology - be it as simple as an UI, or as big as a spacecraft, or as complicated as genetic breakthrough, are TRUE ART and those excel in it are TRUE ARTISTS
We also know that Techies who have achieved the Artist status are enlightened, and it takes ZEN to attain True Enlightenment
The key figures (Mark Z and Bill G) along with the key corps (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM) I mentioned above, unfortunately, have decided to cramp their little brains with "Social Justice" mantra that takes them further and further away from true enlightenment, and thus, have lost their 'purpose of being'
That Nobel Prize winner was correct to lament that 'Tech companies are competing to serve the wealthy' because most Technology companies are behaving like zombies
Those tech companies have become soulless, aimless, blinded, and purposeless, and only MONEY can fill that 'void', that 'emptiness' that the tech companies are 'feeling'
Any craft, whether it's tech or making pottery, can be seen as an art. However the key problem with what you said is that when we're speaking of corporations, their goal is not and has never been the furthering of 'art', but rather the making of (more) money. Companies are by their nature neither moral or immoral, they're amoral, guided by profit and profit alone. They're meant to me 'zombies' that care only about the bottom line of their investors. Now this doesn't mean there aren't companies out there with good/ethical goals and concerns, but even those are in it for the primary goal of making money.
Therefore we ought not to look for companies to be the saviors of mankind, because companies are only interested in profit, the making of which only occasionally aligns with the common good of all of mankind.
Trouble is vast amounts of wealth and resources have been concentrated to the hands of a few tiny megacorporations and their wealthiest individual owners and this concentration shows no signs of slowing down. The oil companies for example have a collective fortune that surpasses most advanced states even and they're in a key position when it comes to reforming the way we produce energy and safeguard the ecosystem. However are they using their massive fortune to innovate for greener solutions? No, not really, because they don't have to. They can keep making money by doing what they're doing in the current regulatory environment where the downsides of using vast amounts of fossil fuels are almost entirely externalized and left for the tax-payers to sort out later when the damage hits.
So instead of waiting around for some miracle in which the oil CEOs all somehow become suddenly enlightened and decide to change their business logic around towards a path of sustainable solutions, we could force them to go into that direction by for example regulating the amount of their income that they have to use for greener R & D and/or setting them binding goals with regards to how much of their end product must come from renewable/sustainable sources by a given year. This obviously sounds horrendous to many because it limits the 'freedom' of these corporations, but ask yourself: if individuals are not free to wreck havoc to each other and the environment at their will, why
You remember incorrectly. I followed this story very closely at that time. Nokia was not only - by far - the largest smartphone vendor, it also was the fastest growing smartphone vendor in absolute number (different analysts published numbers). The smartphone unit was also extremely profitable (the numbers are also public). Nokia also had an new mobile platform in the pipeline (Meego) as a replacement for their older Symbian smartphone OS with several phones nearly finished (only the N9 was then sold which got stellar reviews and some prestigious awards.) They had a convincing plan to transition developers from Symbian to Meego via Qt. They had some initial set of working apps for Meego including third party apps. And all this at a time where Android was still small. .
It is also true that they had no significant presence in the US. They also lost market share in smartphones. (Despite growing fastest in absolute numbers. This may happen if the overall market grows rapidly and new players enter the market.) For some reasons (some say large investors from the US pressured them), they hired Stephen Elop. Stephen Elop cancelled Meego, declared Symbian obsolete already before a replacement was ready, and switched to Windows Phone which alienated their workforce and customers. Sales immediately collapsed. (Who would by a phone with a OS the vendor himself has declared obsolete?) Only the N9 was brought to market and it sold well in the few markets it was released in (no major market). Windows Phone never cathched on and smartphone unit never recovered. Samsung came and filled the void. Later the smartphone unit was sold to Microsoft.
You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10. The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.
The company panicked, and the investors panicked and saw the management as incapable of recovering from this tailspin. Elop was hired to turn the course, but instead of pushing Meego out asap they went with windows phones which sealed the fate of the company.
But the general point is this: Nokia had dug their own grave way before Elop. They didn't see the paradigm shift to smartphones early enough. I know that Nokia had its first prototypes of a touch screen operated smartphones in the works slightly after the turn of the century but the project was canned as too clunky/expensive. They weren't ready to compere with the iPhone, and they falsely assumed that they could maintain their market foothold with regular 'dumb' phones until they could switch from Symbian to Meego/something else but they did not expect the rapid pace of expansion of Apple into the market, or the rate at which dumb phones would lose relevance in the advanced economies especially.
Source: I know people that used to work for Nokia way back in its prime, as well as having studied the downfall of the company as part of my business administration studies here in Finland,
Making it a free speech issue is taking it too far, it's always really just been about whether it's false advertising / fair trade / fraud / etc. We already have a lot of laws that govern what businesses can and cannot say to customers in their efforts to sell them things
You're right of course. The problem we're facing now is that one of those 'things' corporations are selling to targeted audiences via social media is news and 'news' (ie. propaganda). Anyone can pay facebook & al to promote their views to an audience of their choosing. So even if I'm not a business, but a private individual running a blog with a lot of money, I can write up any number of conspiracy theories about anything, dress it up to look like a reputable news site and the advertise it on social media to influence people's behaviour, both as consumers and as voters.
So you really hit the nail on the head when you say:
Enforcement is the real problem.
Because the enforcement of the laws has not yet caught up with the way advertising/promoted content is treated. If I pay facebook to advertise a homeopathic medicine claiming that it cures cancer or some such, that's clearly false advertising. However, if instead of paying FB for a direct ad for the pills, I pay to some random blogger who then writes a blog about how he/she personally thinks homeopathic medicines can be used to treat cancer, and they then spend some of that money to promote their blog post on FB, that's not as easily treated as a false advertising, because the actual 'product' being directly advertised is the blog post itself, which is an opinion piece and not a statement of fact.
The situation is made even more complicated if no money exchanged hands between the blogger and the source selling the medicine. That is, if it is a genuine opinion held by some individual, but it's clearly not supported by facts, should they still be allowed to promote this content even if the blog post itself is not sponsored content by the manufacturer? Does it matter if the blogger runs ads on his site leading to him/her gaining money for views even if there's no connection to the maker(s) of the product(s) themselves? And so on.
It's very different... The captain from the first two episodes was a model Starfleet officer, trying to avoid conflict and do the right thing. Now we are getting echos of Section 31 and doing what it takes to win the war.
You're right that it's different, but there's also an issue with the main character that bugs me which is that she's got a way too broad range of skills based on the first episodes. Like just as an example in the 2 first episodes she twice beat a Klingon warrior in single combat while having no previous experience of fighting them, and being smaller. I get that the show wants to emphasize that she's a supergenius and raised by the Vulcans in science and martial arts, but still, I was expecting her character to be a modern take on Spock, not a deadly warrior-princess archetype that goes around instantly kicking everyone's ass. Really the ending of the 2nd episode was a really big blunder in my view from the point of view of writing. I mean, she first tells the captain that they should seek to capture the Klingon leader not kill him so as to not make him a martyr. Okay, makes sense. How do the plan to do it? By beaming to the klingon ship with no backup, just the 2 of them with phasers, 2 women against a shipload of gigantic space Mongol-superwarriors, and then when the captain is killed, instead of doing the logical thing which is retreating hell out of there, she violates her own advice and shoots the Klingon captain dead, essentially causing their mission to be a total failure while also making the death of her captain counter-productive. From a story point of view how're we supposed to feel that she's ever in any danger when she's already demonstrated in the first few episodes that no matter what she's up against and with how little previous experience, she'll get through just fine.
I mean, I get that they're playing round with the notion that she's not a Vulcan so her emotions do take over from time to time, that's ool, and that can function as a neat narrative device, however it's really rather annoying to watch a character that's supposed to be like the smartest person in the whole of Starfeet give out advice on what to do, and then violate her own advice 5 minutes later. Likewise in the beginning she goes to have a look at an unknown artifact that they have no scans on and no idea how hostile it is and instead of doing a flyby like she was instructed, she instantly goes 'wow, this is pretty, I'm going to land on it', runs into a Klingon and kills him in 5 seconds. Is this the Vulcan approach? Is this what Spock would have done? Is this the kind of discipline the Vulcan academy teaches to their students?
That being said, I think the show can still go into a good direction, we'll need to wait and see. So far it's a tad too much like the Abrams films, which is to say that it looks neat and has a lot of action that probably appeals to a larger audience, but it doesn't feel very Trekky to me yet.
I knew Hillary was the very definition of corruption, entitled, a pathological liar, and the worst kind of sickening elitist LONG before Facebook even existed. I didn't need to see any ads on the topic, her own statements, and admitted public actions were plenty enough to make me despise her and vote for *anyone*, even Trump, to prevent her from becoming president.
Which is why you saw no ads or stories about this, they're called targeted for a reason. Besides, unless you live in the key swing states there's no reason to target anything to you in the first place. Look at what the Trump campaign itself said it's doing with targeted voter identification and advertising:
When Bannon joined the campaign in August, Project Alamo’s data began shaping even more of Trump’s political and travel strategy—and especially his fundraising. Trump himself was an avid pupil. Parscale would sit with him on the plane to share the latest data on his mushrooming audience and the $230 million they’ve funneled into his campaign coffers. Today, housed across from a La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery along Interstate 410 in San Antonio, the digital nerve center of Trump’s operation encompasses more than 100 people, from European data scientists to gun-toting elderly call-center volunteers. They labor in offices lined with Trump iconography and Trump-focused inspirational quotes from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. Until now, Trump has kept this operation hidden from public view. But he granted Bloomberg Businessweek exclusive access to the people, the strategy, the ads, and a large part of the data that brought him to this point and will determine how the final two weeks of the campaign unfold. - -
Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.- -
Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”
For all of the commentators saying this is what America gets for guns being legalized, I would like to point out that in Europe there have been far more attacks using fully automatic, illegal weapons like what just happened in Las Vegas, than in the USA. In fact, Europe still holds the record for the most people killed in mass incidents of this kind. This was a premeditated attack using specialized weapons by someone so incredibly deranged and unhinged that they would obtain several thousands of dollars of gear ahead of time, then open fire on a crowd of innocent people over and over with a fully automatic weapon.
As a European I fully agree with your core point, which is that people who're motivated to do harm will go to great lengths to achieve their goals. However, one slight thing to point out: in Europe getting any kind of gun is a lot more difficult than in the US, which means if someone planning an attack, they pretty much have to get their weapons illegally, and if one's already about to go to the black market to get a gun illegally, might as well make it an automatic.
That being said, the US still has numerically a lot more (mass) shootings than Europe because the abundance of (legal) guns means that acquiring a gun of some description even illegally is far easier than in Europe. Thus you have a higher rate of gun crime and homicide than countries within the EU. That is, someone just wanting to get their hands on any kind of gun to go shoot up their school/workplace/etc. will have a much hgiher chance of success in the US than in here. Most mass shooters are mentally unstable, often depressed, so the difficulty of getting a gun illegally in here means the rates of mass shootings are much lower.
However, it should be noted that it's not about the plain amount of guns. There are plenty of countries in Europe that have high amounts of firearms, we (Finland) among them, Switzerland is another famous example where everyone that goes through the army keeps the rifle in their home, yet we both have several times smaller homicide rates as well as rates of mass shootings. Why then is this? Well it's because we do have regulations about how the guns must be kept and transported. And in Switzerland the ammo for the rifles provided by the army is strictly controlled. In here to get a hunting rifle you actually need to be part of a hunting club for a while and pass a psych exam, and it's illegal to transport the weapon in public without it being disassembled.
My point here is this: gun regulations do affect the amount of deaths by guns, but these regulations are too often thought of in the black and white mindset of 'less vs. more guns'. However, as I said we're both in agreement that even the most sensible regulation cannot stop all mass shootings or acts of terror. We've had a handful of mass shootings in the 2000s, all of them with the exception of a single case committed using stolen/illegal weaponry (and that case itself went to court that determined the police were guylty of dereliction of duty when they did not confiscate the weapon/license even though the perpetrator had been investigated based on his online writings idolizing violence). However, the only terror attack we've had which happened earlier this summer was done with a knife and the death toll was only 2 because of that.
So while you're right that this incident especially could not probably have been affected by more regulations, it's still good to keep in mind that the kind of regulations in place do affect the overall number of gun crimes and homicides significantly. One thing that is also a factor and I feel is too often sidelined in the american gun discussion is the availability of mental health services. Obviously it's too early to say what role if any that played here before knowing if he even tried to seek help, though it's rather that the guy was a nut of some description.
My heart goes out to anyone here with friends or family in Vegas, stay strong people!
4) Enact some kind of incentives to move to electric motors for lawn equipment.
This is a good point, but why stop there? Norway has the highest amount of electric vehicles on the planet per capita even though they're a major oil producer because they pay no taxes on EVs, meaning no VAT and no additional vehicle taxes that normal cars are subject to. Additionally, electric vehicles are not subject to road tolls. AT the same time, gas costs 2 dollars a litre, meaning 7,5 dollars a gallon, and that's cheap for Norway, the last time I was there it was higher.
This isn't rocket science, the 2 primary factors affecting the adoption rate of electric vehicles are: the prices of the vehicles themselves, and the price of gas. Both can be heavily affected by taxes (and tax-breaks) I understand that in the current American context where you're used to having gas that's dirt cheap (don't get me wrong, the Norwegian prices are high as hell even for a European standard, but even here in Finland we pay around 6,10 $ a gallon, (E9510 which is 10 % ethanol) raising the tax on gas is probably a political no-go for several reasons, but even just giving significant tax-breaks on the electric vehicles will increase adoption rates significantly.
Secondly: start putting pressure on the oil companies themselves to create less polluting fuels that can be used to power conventional ICEs. You could set a goal of: by the year NNNN X % of all fuel produced most come from non-fossil sources. You currently produce around 140 million gallons of biodiesel a month (figures from june), with the yearly total capacity being around 2,3 billion gallons, which is less than 1 % of all the oil you currently consume. You can do a lot better, as can the rest of us..
The thing is, we (as in, the globe) don't have a lot of time to react if we wish to keep the warming below 2 degrees celsius, after which point it starts getting beyond our control due to feedback-effects from the glaciers melting as well as methane starting to be released from the permafrost, after which we're royally screwed. This means drastic actions are needed from everyone, so focusing on lawn mover engines is putting a bandaid a paper cut while the body is suffering from cancer that needs immediate treatment.
The good things is we can do this, we (the advanced economies) have both the money and the technological knowhow to ditch fossil fuels at a rapid pace, and we should, but for that to happen we need large players like the US, together with EU and China to start actually doing large scale systemic changes in the ways energy is both produced, used and taxed. Emission costs are currently heavily externalized, in that fossil fuels are waaaaaay cheaper than the should be considering the damage being done to everyone by their continued use, but as the effects only appear years after the stuff has been burned, they've managed to remain as cheap as they have. This needs to change in the relatively near-future, because the economy will naturally reroute to low-emission alternatives once fossils become economically inefficient. However we cannot wait for that to happen naturally (ie. waiting for the oil to start running out) because at that point it's likely going to be too late, so really, a carbon tax of some description, together with other sensible policies like those mentioned above by you, me and others, is the way to go.
You can't raise the price of gas (yet) with so many people dependent on it, but if you aggressively push for adoption of EVs not with bans, but with sensible market policies, once the price of an EV is below the price of an equivalent ICE vehicle you can start to increase gas price at which point it will only further increase
Or worst case scenario in his POV, he realized might had nuclear-Armagaddoned the whole private / consumer Credit industry.
On a semi-related note as a non-American, I've always found the setup of the american credit rating system to be weird in the context of american individualism/consumer-culture. Like, I understand why these companies exist and why lenders want access to such data, but it's interesting to me that they're allowed to collect and maintain these databases and hand out information without any consent from the individuals. This to me goes very much against the principles of the free market, where the consumer himself should have control over which services he's using to handle his credit.
Here in Finland we have a credit rating system that works so that credit rating companies only collect information on failed payments. That's, there's no 'positive' credit rating score for anyone, only negative marks on those who've failed to pay and have had a court order for the debt to be collected, or who're over 60 days late on payment. Once the debts have been successfully collected the entry is deleted in 2-5 years and the person again has a 'clean' credit rating. Banks and financial institutions can and do always check these records when they're processing a loan/credit application, but any further info like monthly income etc. has to be provided for them by the customer via their bank/employer.
Of course this is slightly more tedious than the american system as in it takes more effort from the individual than the american model, but in so far as i can see this has 2 major benefits: 1) It avoids weak points like this Equifax thing when sensitive information is not stored en mass by private companies but rather remains in the control of the consumer 2) It doesn't encourage people to use credit as much. Granted, my understanding of the American model is limited, so I may be mistaken, but it's my understanding that in order to improve one's credit score in the US, many people buy stuff more on credit to get their score up even if they have money to pay out of pocket and could use a debit card.
A sensible credit raring system in my opinion should not be encouraging people to take debt so that they can take more debt in the future, nor should it place such sensitive and valuable information to the hands of 3rd parties without consent.
Yeah, that and Facebook didn't cause Hillary to lose Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. You know what did? Ignoring the plight of real Americans who are really hurting. Telling them off and letting them know you absolutely refuse to represent their interests in the government.
The most successful trick Trump pulled during his campaign was convincing these people that he, a millionaire cosmopolitan and a 'globalist' in every sense of the word, would represent their interests, or that he cares about them in any sense. He doesn't. He's now been in office for 8 months and done very little, and his attempts are focused on giving out tax-breaks to the wealthiest segment of the US - his co-millionaires - at the cost of the very poorest.
This is the main problem currently faced by all western democracies: there's a segment of poorly educated poorly employed people who do not understand why their jobs are gone and won't be coming back except as automated factories, and these people will vote for anyone who tells them that he'll get their jobs back and make everything better. Put another way: the people most negatively affected by the current economic development are also the ones with the least understanding of it, making them easy targets to manipulate into voting against their own interests.
Hillary's main problem has always been that she's not really a charismatic figure in any way, nor is she a great speaker, put simply: she's way too boring and unenthusiastic. Trump isn't an orator either and seems to be running on a vocabulary of a 9 year-old, but what he has over Hillary is emotion: like any good salesman, he's able to deliver an enthusiastic pitch that gets people interested, it gets them listening. He's a superior showman and knows his crowd, but it doesn't make him a competent politician, that he's clearly not.
Generally in a software project "under-resourced" means the milestones aren't being reached, which either means you have bad milestones, bad requirements, or bad coders.
These are all possible. It's also possible that requirements have been changed (because it has come to light that the original ones are bad). In fact the larger the scope of the project is, the more likely it is that the original plan is not comprehensive and things will come up during development that require the tweaking of the requirements/milestones.
Adding another 5 coders to part of the project doesn't make it go faster if the first one has written a pile of garbage and it needs to be unpicked or more likely the new coders are rubbish and no one wanted them on their project, so they're available to "help".
100 % agreed but again, it may be the case that the requirements/milestones have been changed and in that case adding more competent coders may be helpful depending on the circumstances and the nature of the changes..
Most PMs I've met have been great people with great PM skills, and no clue if what a coder is telling them is accurate. I'm sure there's some counter-example with great code assessment skills, but that doesn't make them representative of the class.
As a PM myself I can say I'm not an exception. While I'm no stranger to reading code, assessing it accurately is beyond my current skillset. But the thing is that I do recognise this, which is why I do not even attempt to do it myself, but rather if need be I show the code to a senior dev that I know knows his shit and and ask for his opinion, which is how it should be done unless the person leading the project has personal experience with said language(s).
I am an expert, I'm not, nor will I ever be the expert who can verify everything by himself. I've met a few older PMs who seem to think they're the latter but in reality no-one knows everything and the people who think they do usually make the worst managers, as they're overconfident in their abilities and end up making bad calls especially under stress when pressed for answers and results.
Rather than making educated guesses, it's really better to say 'I don't know, but I will find out'.
Keep it up! These are the sorts of tactics that are going to keep the Right in power for the next 50 years. Gratuitous insults and dehumanizing other people because they disagree with your far-left political opinions.
You do realize both sides are currently guilty as charged on this matter? I mean, have you looked at the rhetoric of the far-right? Yeah, it's not exactly free of dehumanization, insults or gross stereotyping of the people who don't agree with them either.
The cycle of polarization feeds itself: the far right insults the far left, who returns back in kind or the other way around. Both sides think the other side is either too dumb or too 'evil' to be reasoned with so both sides are content at mainly just flinging verbal shit at each other. To the far-left, anyone slightly on the right is a fascist or a nazi, and to the far-right, everyone to the left is an SJW, crybaby islam apologist or whatever.
The thing to realize is: both extremes of this discussion are in the wrong, and so long as people keep picking 1 or 2 of these sides going by 'the lesser of 2 evils' approach, this cycle will only continue and get worse and it will not necessarily mean 'the right' will come off as a winner on this one.
in reality, this russia probe is just the visible death pangs and hysteria of a mono cultural elite(am elite more exclusive than white males they rage against ) that has been in control of the levers of power for about 50 years, and are now starting to lose them, starting with narrative control.
Death pangs of an elite? Are you seriously saying that Trump is not himself part of that very elite himself?
This idea that a millionaire who appointed numerous wall street people to his cabinet, and is doing his best to help the rich get tax cuts and further the benefit of large corporations is baffling to me. And before you start bashing me as a Hillary supporter, I'm not even American, and I think Hillary was an awful candidates that the democrats should have never ran. But honestly, the fact that this idea that Trump is somehow separate from, or against 'the elites' is without any basis in reality. He's a different breed of elite than Washington has typically seen in power, but he is still most certainly a member of the elite himself.
Look at how oligarchies are born. It doesn't matter if they're right-wing oligarchies like in Russia, or left-wing oligarchies like in Venezuela, the basic formula is always pretty much the same: a political movement is born, lead by a strongman who most often is a part of the wealthy elite himself. This man then declares to everyone that corruption and greed have ruined everything and that he and only he can save the people from these corrupt elites. This is then used as a reason to purge the major institutions of ideological opponents who're then replaced with a more loyal group of people, often from the close circle of the man himself. This is usually followed by the stripping of the parliament of any de-facto power, and the manning of all relevant courts with judges loyal to the party.
The end result of such movements is pretty much always worse off for the people because of course they never wanted to get rid of the elites, or the corruption, they just wanted to overthrow the elites and take their place. Venezuela has more oil than saudi-arabia but its economy is now below Zimbabwe because what Chavez created and what Maduro has continued is a system so thoroughly corrupt that billions and billions have been shoveled into the back pockets of the elites while the people are now starving. Yet they still claim that they're 'continuing the revolution for the Venezuelan people', and who do they blame on this issue that's entirely of their own creation? 'The elites' of the US and EU, without whom, according to Maduro Venezuela would be prosperous.
As I said this is not a left-right -thing. This is a liberal vs. authoritarian thing. Russia has exactly the same deal going on, where Putin has consolidated all the power to himself and his close group of allies and divided the massive fortunes of his country's raw materials to the select few and shut down any and all opposition by painting it as just malicious 'western propaganda' that seeks to destroy Russia.
What's scary to me is that traditionally Americans have been good at spotting this development when it happens in other countries, even at times supporting it covertly or openly when the new oligarchy is more pro-US than the old. But now that it looks like the exact same deal is staring in your own country, out in broad daylight, somehow myopia sets in and people fall right for it just because they dislike the status quo so much. Traditionally the thing that has kept the US resilient against such movements is the strength of American institutions and the separation of powers that has been able to keep the president in check but Trump is already hard at work at discrediting and attacking all of those institutions: the courts, the media, the FBI and so on. I still personally want to believe that the institutions will withstand these blows and america will not turn the way of Russia or Turkey because I believe there's a large enough segment of intelligent Americans who will
Slashdot Mirror
Replying to myself because I accidentally copied the wrong link which is to a clip of the said talk and not the whole of it. Here's the original TED talk. The part about the lady & ducks is slightly after 11:10.
Am I going to trust that a computerized system is capable of detecting an object in front of the car an apply brakes faster than a human being?
Hell yes I am. The human reaction time is around a second (often considerably more if the driver's distracted or tired). By the time your brain has gone 'oh shit a deer", and decided to slam the breaks, the computer is already in the process of breaking or adjusting course to evade.
This TED talk from 2 years ago shows that the Google car is capable of detecting and reacting to numerous different obstacles it has not seen before in an urban environment such as ducks and a elderly woman in a wheelchair chasing them on the road. The car halts, waits for them to pass and continues. And keep in mind this footage is old, the capabilities at this point have probably improved.
Humans are on average really bad drivers because we cannot focus on very many things at once and our reaction time is relatively slow. Self-driving cars have both better awareness (ie. more sensory data) and the ability to continuously asses its surroundings in a way no human can, as well as having the ability to do math before making decisions. The car can calculate whether or not an emergency breaking maneuver will be enough to stop the car before it hits an obstacle, or if it's likely that the distance to said obstacle is too short and evasion is a better option, and it can calculate all of this in the second or so that it takes for your brain to even react to what's happening.
I've driven in heavy-snow conditions here in Finland with very poor visibility and had some close calls. Would I trust a car such as Google's that has LIDAR capabilities and is thus able to sense objects in the distance before humans can even see them in such conditions moreso than myself? Yes. Why the fuck wouldn't I? There is absolutely nothing miraculous about humans which would make computers surpassing us in driving abilities impossible. In fact in a sense they've already done so as the accident rate for Google's car for example is far below human drivers, although obviously it will take time before the cars learn to handle different weather/road conditions, but there's no computational/technological reason why they won't be able to do so.
Are you sure about that being the cheapest option? The Dutch have been living on land that's below the sea-level rather successfully for centuries.
Now granted, there are coastal areas that cannot be defended with dams, because water can seep in through limestone etc. But the reason I'm asking is that relocating an entire state is bound to be insanely expensive, so it's not impossible that there are 'in-between'. options such as evacuating only parts of the state/coastal regions most in danger and starting to secure the rest to withstand ocean level rise.
Not to even mention that I find it somewhat unlikely that the current, or even future, US governments would be willing to create a buyout program of the scale that relocating an entire state would require, but that's another point.
While you're right about the point of different countries having somewhat different rules, as a Finn and an entrepreneur I do have to wonder where you got the last point. There may be countries in which paperwork is hard to get in English, but I assure you the Finnish tax-officials provide a comprehensive instruction set in several languages, including English instructions on income taxation of foreign corporate entities, VAT registration of foreigners in Finland, tax obligations of a foreign employer in Finland as well as starting a business and a host of other topics. The Q&A/knowledge bank are both in Finnish and English, and to my knowledge the documentation that has to be filled (and can be filled electronically) is also available in English and they have English customer service to assist people with possible questions if the online resources are not enough.
We're not dumb here, we're quite well aware that we're part of a global economy and that for that to work translations are required for things to go smoothly. Quite a large chunk of small-businesses such as restaurants and bars are ran by immigrants with sub-par Finnish skills and sometimes even poor English, which is why the instructions on site are also available in Swedish (mandated by law as it's an official language here together with Finnish), Sami, Russian, Estonian, Polish, German and Chinese.
Currently there's no point. But if they start giving discounts for the devices that play ads you might well see consumers being okay with this. Hell, one day in the future I can even see tvs going out for nearly free if you agree to being shown say 10-15 minutes of ads per each hour of content. The ability to get accurate data on what people are watching and target ads based on that is something the advertisers would pay good money for. For the same reason I don't see it as an impossibility that Netflix & al will sooner or later create a 'freemium' model that could for example give you access to their own original content for free if you'll take some ads while watching them.
And herein lies the current problem with the internet as a news platform. research takes time and money, whereas page views and the ad money that comes with them follow whoever's the fastest. Newspapers come out once a day so they're bound by the format to have more time to do research on whatever goes out. Online if you wait 15-20 hours after an major event has occurred before posting about it, you're going to see a fraction of the traffic that those who pushed stuff out immediately did.
And also importantly newspapers cost money that gives them a revenue stream independent of advertisements. Now that consumers want news at a faster pace online while also being on average less willing to pay for the news themselves, it's really no wonder that the overall quality is as shitty as it is.
First of all, the problem with the treaties is that because the large polluters (US included) have such a varying level of enerfy infrastructure the treaties signed are not binding. The Paris agreement is about common emission goals that countries ought to strive to reach, there are no mechanisms in it to impose sanctions on nations that fail to meet theirs. So to speak of 'exemptions' in such a treaty is nonsense to begin with, you can't be 'exempt' from sanctions that do not exist in the treaty. Would it be good to have some kind of sanction system in place? Yes, yes it would, but if you think the US government would ever agree to internationally binding treaties that would impose sanctions on US trade should its goals not be reached, you're occupying an entirely different political reality than I am.
Second of all: why do you think it'd be realistic not to account for the fact that massive infrastructure overhaul will not happen immediately and give these countries realistic timeframes in the treaties? China at the moment gets roughly 2/3rds of all its energy from coal and has 4 times the population of the US with increasing private car ownership and you think giving them 13 years time to turn their greenhouse emisions downward (the paris agreement limit for when China's promised it will reach peak CO2 emissions is 2030 and they've also agreed to reduce their carbon intensity by 60 % by the same date, which means they have 13 years time to essentially redo the majority of their energy production) is somehow excessive? Wtf?
Thirdly, do you realize that China has very much woken up to the fact that it is within their own national interests to cut down on emissions? The level of pollution in many Chinese megacities is so bad (quivalent to smoking 1.2 packs of cigarettes just for breathing the air) its having significant adverse health effects leading to increased health care costs and declined productivity if they are not addressed. It's a major issue in domestic Chinese politics because the people don't like the status quo at all, which means if they keep making things worse they'd push the country towards increasing political instability which is certainly not something they want. The idea that China will just keep building polluting tech even though they're already struggling with massive pollution issues is not based in reality. They're building massive amounts of nuclear power plants and heavily focusing on renewables, but as is obvious to anyone with half a brain, this level of change will take a few years to accomplish. They're currently on the track to meeting their 2030 goals.
Well now, that all conveniently hinges on what you count as 'christian'.
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
The oath taken to join the SS also directly mentioned God, and the Catholic church was in official alliance with the third reich, Hitler's birthday being an occasion of celebration in all churches within Germany. 'Gott mitt uns' was inscribed in each and every belt buckle of German soldiers.
But I presume in your books this does not count as 'real christianity', am I right?
It's likely very true that Hitler himself was not truly religious (in fact current historical consensus seems to be that he was fairly irreligious and just saw the importance of religion as a tool), but he consistently and repeatedly made references to the faith and is was a central theme in Nazi propaganda to emphasize that unity of the church (and god) with their cause. And the church agreed with this, wholeheartedly, the Pope said not one thing against Adolf.
And if you think that was the end of the church's genocidal tendencies you'd be wrong again. The catholic church openly took one side over the other in the Rwandan genocide, with catholic priests openly preaching murder and committing it themselves even, all in the name of god. Less than 30 years ago.
If however it is your opinion that as the views of the nazis (or of the Rwandan catholics) do not align with the modern interpretation of Christianity it's therefore alright to not count the holocaust or Rwanda as a 'christian genocide' even though Christianity was deeply involved in both, then you ought to give other religions the same courtesy and understand that the way states, especially theocratic states, implement and enforce their religious views does not define the entire religion or its believers. Right now there's a budhist-lead genocide going on in Myanmar.
The point that this should drive home to you is that as satisfying as it'd be to think religions cause totalitarianism, most often it is the case that totalitarian states co-opt religion and religious tendencies for their own purposes. In North Korea this has gone so far that the ruling elite has made themselves to be worshiped as gods, and created a religion where Kim is seen as an all-powerful miraculous figure.
I've met and talked with batshit insane theocratic muslims and christians alike. I've also shared bread with deeply religious people from both faiths who abhor totalitarianism because they've experienced its iron grip first-hand. I've also met many more followers of both faiths who are de facto atheist but choose to not use that term because it'd cause familial issues so they call themselves christians or muslims although you'll sooner find them in a bar than in churches or mosques.
-Alan Watts
Wtf?
First of all, who said the point of the ads is to get people to change their mind? This is what the Trump team itself was doing with ads/targeting before the elections:
All you need to dö is get enough people in the key demographic of your opponent to stay home in key areas.
Second of all: many people don't recognize sponsored content/ads in social media, or elsewhere. You'll see a news article or a blog post that has above it something like '[Your friend name here] also liked [our site]' and that's in fact a paid ad targeted to you because someone you know has liked the page and they've targeted their promotion that way, but really people generally don't think of these as ads but just another part of their newsfeed which actually makes them more effective.
Third of all: ads (both direct and sponsored content) do affect people's decisions. That's why they exist and why companies are pouring money into them but you obviously will have a hard time finding anyone who says they bought any opinion/product/service because it was advertised to them, partly because people don't often recognize the impact ads have on them. Chances are high advertising has affected your behavior during your lifetime without you being directly aware of it. You see ads and at some later point when you're making the decision of what to buy, the ads play into your preconceptions and decision making process at a subconscious level. Hardly no-one is at the store like 'I'm going to buy this product because I saw that ad last week" but there is still is an increase in sales following a successful marketing campaign.
So no, if you poll people and ask them 'did you see any paid for articles in your news feed about either candidate and if so did they effect your decision on whether to vote or not and for which candidate?' you're likely going to get a 'no' on all 3 of those from most people but that doesn't mean there was no effect, it just means most people can't recognize well placed ads as ads anymore and that like always, people think they're immune to the psychological effects of ads/sponsored content when they provably are not.
Human beings on average are much more easy to influence than we tend to admit, and the marketing industry has been honing their skills for way over half a century at this point becoming more and more successful at it.
This is true, but here's a hypothetical: 'the other' doesn't necessarily have to be other humans. I mean, the age-old sci-fi theme is humans uniting as a species against an external threat once we realize we're not that different compared to aliens, but the external uniting force does not have to be aliens either.
In this century we'll be facing multiple, complex issues and catastrophes caused by the environment rapidly changing. Armies across the world are masters at large-scale logistics and movements. My hope is we'll put these forces to good use by leveraging these abilities and having them for example rapidly deploy flood-barriers, maintain and deploy sources of power and deliver essential supplies to people in danger and so on. The best way to stave off global massive conflict is to try and enable people to stay and live where they are. If this is not done and tens or hundreds of millions of people turn into wandering hordes of refugees, we'll be in much deeper shit than we'd be if we decide to do the rational thing and allow the armies to put their logistical expertise to good use combating the actual root cause: the environment and its management.
You shouldn't, and you won't. Pretty much no-one will. Most production will be entirely automated (in the west) within the next half a century or so. That's precisely the point: we will have immense production capabilities that require next to no workforce, but without UBI or an equivalent system, there will be no-one to buy any of those things which will lead to major issues.
Entirely agreed. One of the reasons we're trialing basic income here in Finland (not for everyone at the moment, it's an experiment where a group of people on unemployment benefits have been transitioned to basic income) is that the current models of social security are outdated and no longer in tune with the way the job market functions. Back in the 60s-80s when the Finnish welfare system was created (much of it being copied from our neighbors to the west in Sweden who, having been spared the 2nd world war had had a head start in building theirs) there was still an idea going on that full-time employment is the end goal of all healthy people. This meant that the unemployment benefit was to be used as a mechanism in between full-time contracts or for people who've just graduated.
However, as we know throughout the west outsourcing and especially automation have already changed the landscape drastically. Companies hire less and less people on permanent contracts and instead favor a gig-based economy. This creates a lot of issues with the current old fashioned social security system because if someone's unemployed and they take up say a 2 week contract or a part time job, this immediately either entirely cancels or massively shrinks their unemployment benefit. This leads to a situation where people who're unemployed do not want to pick up such job-offerings because it affects the stability of their income. If your benefit is cancelled because you got work for a few weeks, you have to re-apply for it after that which takes time and may make a significant dent in your income. The same goes for micro-businesses and self-employment. Even if someone has a skillset that they could use to make some money on the side while looking for a job, many people choose not to do so because there's a real risk of the officials saying: 'aha, I see you've been tutoring students and being paid for it, that makes you an entrepreneur and we're now going to slash or revoke your benefit'. So it's pretty much an 'all or nothing' scenario right now where the system either expects you to be unemployed or working, there's no 'in between' mode and that's becoming more and more of an issue.
Unfortunately our current government is center-right and blind to the current realities so they're working their assess off to make the situation worse, not better (the basic income trial mentioned earlier was created prior to the current government). We have a couple hundred thousand more unemployed people than open job offerings at this point (the '08 crisis combined with the implosion of Nokia created a huge crater on the job market form which we've not fully recovered, people don't realize this but Nokia was responsible for almost a third of all of our exports), but the government, despite being aware of this, brazenly and openly lies and claims that the problem is that unemployed people arr all 'lazy' and just wanna mooch off the system. So using the 'lazy moochers' as a lame excuse they're creating all kinds of bureaucratic contraptions creating more and more pitfalls for the unemployed people to go through for them to maintain their benefit, such as increasing the amount of paperwork and documentation that has to be provided lest the benefit be cut, and even in some cases forcing people to take what amount to unpaid internships or face a slash in their income (this is actually an illegal thing to do, but they do not seem to care anymore, it also skews the job market even further by injecting free labor into the system which reduces the number of paid positions). This is especially idiotic because the right to social security is in the constitution here, so even if a person falls out of the unemployment benefit, the state is still obligated by law to make s
Cross-network play in shooters has never seemed like a good idea to begin with IMO. The difference in precision and speed afforded by a mouse+keyboard setup as compared to a controller is such that I think console players are at an inherent disadvantage.
Money is the ultimate tool because it can be converted into nearly anything. You're right that a bad person doesn't necessarily become more heinous when he/she is given a lot of money, but the point is that with great wealth they now have much higher chances of pursuing their goals and if those goals are bad (from the point of view of the rest of humanity) then they will be able to cause a lot more damage than if they had remained poor. Vice versa for good people.
Any craft, whether it's tech or making pottery, can be seen as an art. However the key problem with what you said is that when we're speaking of corporations, their goal is not and has never been the furthering of 'art', but rather the making of (more) money. Companies are by their nature neither moral or immoral, they're amoral, guided by profit and profit alone. They're meant to me 'zombies' that care only about the bottom line of their investors. Now this doesn't mean there aren't companies out there with good/ethical goals and concerns, but even those are in it for the primary goal of making money.
Therefore we ought not to look for companies to be the saviors of mankind, because companies are only interested in profit, the making of which only occasionally aligns with the common good of all of mankind.
Trouble is vast amounts of wealth and resources have been concentrated to the hands of a few tiny megacorporations and their wealthiest individual owners and this concentration shows no signs of slowing down. The oil companies for example have a collective fortune that surpasses most advanced states even and they're in a key position when it comes to reforming the way we produce energy and safeguard the ecosystem. However are they using their massive fortune to innovate for greener solutions? No, not really, because they don't have to. They can keep making money by doing what they're doing in the current regulatory environment where the downsides of using vast amounts of fossil fuels are almost entirely externalized and left for the tax-payers to sort out later when the damage hits.
So instead of waiting around for some miracle in which the oil CEOs all somehow become suddenly enlightened and decide to change their business logic around towards a path of sustainable solutions, we could force them to go into that direction by for example regulating the amount of their income that they have to use for greener R & D and/or setting them binding goals with regards to how much of their end product must come from renewable/sustainable sources by a given year. This obviously sounds horrendous to many because it limits the 'freedom' of these corporations, but ask yourself: if individuals are not free to wreck havoc to each other and the environment at their will, why
You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10. The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.
The company panicked, and the investors panicked and saw the management as incapable of recovering from this tailspin. Elop was hired to turn the course, but instead of pushing Meego out asap they went with windows phones which sealed the fate of the company.
But the general point is this: Nokia had dug their own grave way before Elop. They didn't see the paradigm shift to smartphones early enough. I know that Nokia had its first prototypes of a touch screen operated smartphones in the works slightly after the turn of the century but the project was canned as too clunky/expensive. They weren't ready to compere with the iPhone, and they falsely assumed that they could maintain their market foothold with regular 'dumb' phones until they could switch from Symbian to Meego/something else but they did not expect the rapid pace of expansion of Apple into the market, or the rate at which dumb phones would lose relevance in the advanced economies especially.
Source: I know people that used to work for Nokia way back in its prime, as well as having studied the downfall of the company as part of my business administration studies here in Finland,
You're right of course. The problem we're facing now is that one of those 'things' corporations are selling to targeted audiences via social media is news and 'news' (ie. propaganda). Anyone can pay facebook & al to promote their views to an audience of their choosing. So even if I'm not a business, but a private individual running a blog with a lot of money, I can write up any number of conspiracy theories about anything, dress it up to look like a reputable news site and the advertise it on social media to influence people's behaviour, both as consumers and as voters.
So you really hit the nail on the head when you say:
Because the enforcement of the laws has not yet caught up with the way advertising/promoted content is treated. If I pay facebook to advertise a homeopathic medicine claiming that it cures cancer or some such, that's clearly false advertising. However, if instead of paying FB for a direct ad for the pills, I pay to some random blogger who then writes a blog about how he/she personally thinks homeopathic medicines can be used to treat cancer, and they then spend some of that money to promote their blog post on FB, that's not as easily treated as a false advertising, because the actual 'product' being directly advertised is the blog post itself, which is an opinion piece and not a statement of fact.
The situation is made even more complicated if no money exchanged hands between the blogger and the source selling the medicine. That is, if it is a genuine opinion held by some individual, but it's clearly not supported by facts, should they still be allowed to promote this content even if the blog post itself is not sponsored content by the manufacturer? Does it matter if the blogger runs ads on his site leading to him/her gaining money for views even if there's no connection to the maker(s) of the product(s) themselves? And so on.
You're right that it's different, but there's also an issue with the main character that bugs me which is that she's got a way too broad range of skills based on the first episodes. Like just as an example in the 2 first episodes she twice beat a Klingon warrior in single combat while having no previous experience of fighting them, and being smaller. I get that the show wants to emphasize that she's a supergenius and raised by the Vulcans in science and martial arts, but still, I was expecting her character to be a modern take on Spock, not a deadly warrior-princess archetype that goes around instantly kicking everyone's ass. Really the ending of the 2nd episode was a really big blunder in my view from the point of view of writing. I mean, she first tells the captain that they should seek to capture the Klingon leader not kill him so as to not make him a martyr. Okay, makes sense. How do the plan to do it? By beaming to the klingon ship with no backup, just the 2 of them with phasers, 2 women against a shipload of gigantic space Mongol-superwarriors, and then when the captain is killed, instead of doing the logical thing which is retreating hell out of there, she violates her own advice and shoots the Klingon captain dead, essentially causing their mission to be a total failure while also making the death of her captain counter-productive. From a story point of view how're we supposed to feel that she's ever in any danger when she's already demonstrated in the first few episodes that no matter what she's up against and with how little previous experience, she'll get through just fine.
I mean, I get that they're playing round with the notion that she's not a Vulcan so her emotions do take over from time to time, that's ool, and that can function as a neat narrative device, however it's really rather annoying to watch a character that's supposed to be like the smartest person in the whole of Starfeet give out advice on what to do, and then violate her own advice 5 minutes later. Likewise in the beginning she goes to have a look at an unknown artifact that they have no scans on and no idea how hostile it is and instead of doing a flyby like she was instructed, she instantly goes 'wow, this is pretty, I'm going to land on it', runs into a Klingon and kills him in 5 seconds. Is this the Vulcan approach? Is this what Spock would have done? Is this the kind of discipline the Vulcan academy teaches to their students?
That being said, I think the show can still go into a good direction, we'll need to wait and see. So far it's a tad too much like the Abrams films, which is to say that it looks neat and has a lot of action that probably appeals to a larger audience, but it doesn't feel very Trekky to me yet.
Which is why you saw no ads or stories about this, they're called targeted for a reason. Besides, unless you live in the key swing states there's no reason to target anything to you in the first place. Look at what the Trump campaign itself said it's doing with targeted voter identification and advertising:
Emphasis mine. And this is the Trump
As a European I fully agree with your core point, which is that people who're motivated to do harm will go to great lengths to achieve their goals. However, one slight thing to point out: in Europe getting any kind of gun is a lot more difficult than in the US, which means if someone planning an attack, they pretty much have to get their weapons illegally, and if one's already about to go to the black market to get a gun illegally, might as well make it an automatic.
That being said, the US still has numerically a lot more (mass) shootings than Europe because the abundance of (legal) guns means that acquiring a gun of some description even illegally is far easier than in Europe. Thus you have a higher rate of gun crime and homicide than countries within the EU. That is, someone just wanting to get their hands on any kind of gun to go shoot up their school/workplace/etc. will have a much hgiher chance of success in the US than in here. Most mass shooters are mentally unstable, often depressed, so the difficulty of getting a gun illegally in here means the rates of mass shootings are much lower.
However, it should be noted that it's not about the plain amount of guns. There are plenty of countries in Europe that have high amounts of firearms, we (Finland) among them, Switzerland is another famous example where everyone that goes through the army keeps the rifle in their home, yet we both have several times smaller homicide rates as well as rates of mass shootings. Why then is this? Well it's because we do have regulations about how the guns must be kept and transported. And in Switzerland the ammo for the rifles provided by the army is strictly controlled. In here to get a hunting rifle you actually need to be part of a hunting club for a while and pass a psych exam, and it's illegal to transport the weapon in public without it being disassembled.
My point here is this: gun regulations do affect the amount of deaths by guns, but these regulations are too often thought of in the black and white mindset of 'less vs. more guns'. However, as I said we're both in agreement that even the most sensible regulation cannot stop all mass shootings or acts of terror. We've had a handful of mass shootings in the 2000s, all of them with the exception of a single case committed using stolen/illegal weaponry (and that case itself went to court that determined the police were guylty of dereliction of duty when they did not confiscate the weapon/license even though the perpetrator had been investigated based on his online writings idolizing violence). However, the only terror attack we've had which happened earlier this summer was done with a knife and the death toll was only 2 because of that.
So while you're right that this incident especially could not probably have been affected by more regulations, it's still good to keep in mind that the kind of regulations in place do affect the overall number of gun crimes and homicides significantly. One thing that is also a factor and I feel is too often sidelined in the american gun discussion is the availability of mental health services. Obviously it's too early to say what role if any that played here before knowing if he even tried to seek help, though it's rather that the guy was a nut of some description.
My heart goes out to anyone here with friends or family in Vegas, stay strong people!
This is a good point, but why stop there? Norway has the highest amount of electric vehicles on the planet per capita even though they're a major oil producer because they pay no taxes on EVs, meaning no VAT and no additional vehicle taxes that normal cars are subject to. Additionally, electric vehicles are not subject to road tolls. AT the same time, gas costs 2 dollars a litre, meaning 7,5 dollars a gallon, and that's cheap for Norway, the last time I was there it was higher.
This isn't rocket science, the 2 primary factors affecting the adoption rate of electric vehicles are: the prices of the vehicles themselves, and the price of gas. Both can be heavily affected by taxes (and tax-breaks) I understand that in the current American context where you're used to having gas that's dirt cheap (don't get me wrong, the Norwegian prices are high as hell even for a European standard, but even here in Finland we pay around 6,10 $ a gallon, (E9510 which is 10 % ethanol) raising the tax on gas is probably a political no-go for several reasons, but even just giving significant tax-breaks on the electric vehicles will increase adoption rates significantly.
Secondly: start putting pressure on the oil companies themselves to create less polluting fuels that can be used to power conventional ICEs. You could set a goal of: by the year NNNN X % of all fuel produced most come from non-fossil sources. You currently produce around 140 million gallons of biodiesel a month (figures from june), with the yearly total capacity being around 2,3 billion gallons, which is less than 1 % of all the oil you currently consume. You can do a lot better, as can the rest of us..
The thing is, we (as in, the globe) don't have a lot of time to react if we wish to keep the warming below 2 degrees celsius, after which point it starts getting beyond our control due to feedback-effects from the glaciers melting as well as methane starting to be released from the permafrost, after which we're royally screwed. This means drastic actions are needed from everyone, so focusing on lawn mover engines is putting a bandaid a paper cut while the body is suffering from cancer that needs immediate treatment.
The good things is we can do this, we (the advanced economies) have both the money and the technological knowhow to ditch fossil fuels at a rapid pace, and we should, but for that to happen we need large players like the US, together with EU and China to start actually doing large scale systemic changes in the ways energy is both produced, used and taxed. Emission costs are currently heavily externalized, in that fossil fuels are waaaaaay cheaper than the should be considering the damage being done to everyone by their continued use, but as the effects only appear years after the stuff has been burned, they've managed to remain as cheap as they have. This needs to change in the relatively near-future, because the economy will naturally reroute to low-emission alternatives once fossils become economically inefficient. However we cannot wait for that to happen naturally (ie. waiting for the oil to start running out) because at that point it's likely going to be too late, so really, a carbon tax of some description, together with other sensible policies like those mentioned above by you, me and others, is the way to go.
You can't raise the price of gas (yet) with so many people dependent on it, but if you aggressively push for adoption of EVs not with bans, but with sensible market policies, once the price of an EV is below the price of an equivalent ICE vehicle you can start to increase gas price at which point it will only further increase
On a semi-related note as a non-American, I've always found the setup of the american credit rating system to be weird in the context of american individualism/consumer-culture. Like, I understand why these companies exist and why lenders want access to such data, but it's interesting to me that they're allowed to collect and maintain these databases and hand out information without any consent from the individuals. This to me goes very much against the principles of the free market, where the consumer himself should have control over which services he's using to handle his credit.
Here in Finland we have a credit rating system that works so that credit rating companies only collect information on failed payments. That's, there's no 'positive' credit rating score for anyone, only negative marks on those who've failed to pay and have had a court order for the debt to be collected, or who're over 60 days late on payment. Once the debts have been successfully collected the entry is deleted in 2-5 years and the person again has a 'clean' credit rating. Banks and financial institutions can and do always check these records when they're processing a loan/credit application, but any further info like monthly income etc. has to be provided for them by the customer via their bank/employer.
Of course this is slightly more tedious than the american system as in it takes more effort from the individual than the american model, but in so far as i can see this has 2 major benefits:
1) It avoids weak points like this Equifax thing when sensitive information is not stored en mass by private companies but rather remains in the control of the consumer
2) It doesn't encourage people to use credit as much. Granted, my understanding of the American model is limited, so I may be mistaken, but it's my understanding that in order to improve one's credit score in the US, many people buy stuff more on credit to get their score up even if they have money to pay out of pocket and could use a debit card.
A sensible credit raring system in my opinion should not be encouraging people to take debt so that they can take more debt in the future, nor should it place such sensitive and valuable information to the hands of 3rd parties without consent.
The most successful trick Trump pulled during his campaign was convincing these people that he, a millionaire cosmopolitan and a 'globalist' in every sense of the word, would represent their interests, or that he cares about them in any sense. He doesn't. He's now been in office for 8 months and done very little, and his attempts are focused on giving out tax-breaks to the wealthiest segment of the US - his co-millionaires - at the cost of the very poorest.
This is the main problem currently faced by all western democracies: there's a segment of poorly educated poorly employed people who do not understand why their jobs are gone and won't be coming back except as automated factories, and these people will vote for anyone who tells them that he'll get their jobs back and make everything better. Put another way: the people most negatively affected by the current economic development are also the ones with the least understanding of it, making them easy targets to manipulate into voting against their own interests.
Hillary's main problem has always been that she's not really a charismatic figure in any way, nor is she a great speaker, put simply: she's way too boring and unenthusiastic. Trump isn't an orator either and seems to be running on a vocabulary of a 9 year-old, but what he has over Hillary is emotion: like any good salesman, he's able to deliver an enthusiastic pitch that gets people interested, it gets them listening. He's a superior showman and knows his crowd, but it doesn't make him a competent politician, that he's clearly not.
These are all possible. It's also possible that requirements have been changed (because it has come to light that the original ones are bad). In fact the larger the scope of the project is, the more likely it is that the original plan is not comprehensive and things will come up during development that require the tweaking of the requirements/milestones.
100 % agreed but again, it may be the case that the requirements/milestones have been changed and in that case adding more competent coders may be helpful depending on the circumstances and the nature of the changes. .
As a PM myself I can say I'm not an exception. While I'm no stranger to reading code, assessing it accurately is beyond my current skillset. But the thing is that I do recognise this, which is why I do not even attempt to do it myself, but rather if need be I show the code to a senior dev that I know knows his shit and and ask for his opinion, which is how it should be done unless the person leading the project has personal experience with said language(s).
I am an expert, I'm not, nor will I ever be the expert who can verify everything by himself. I've met a few older PMs who seem to think they're the latter but in reality no-one knows everything and the people who think they do usually make the worst managers, as they're overconfident in their abilities and end up making bad calls especially under stress when pressed for answers and results.
Rather than making educated guesses, it's really better to say 'I don't know, but I will find out'.
You do realize both sides are currently guilty as charged on this matter? I mean, have you looked at the rhetoric of the far-right? Yeah, it's not exactly free of dehumanization, insults or gross stereotyping of the people who don't agree with them either.
The cycle of polarization feeds itself: the far right insults the far left, who returns back in kind or the other way around. Both sides think the other side is either too dumb or too 'evil' to be reasoned with so both sides are content at mainly just flinging verbal shit at each other. To the far-left, anyone slightly on the right is a fascist or a nazi, and to the far-right, everyone to the left is an SJW, crybaby islam apologist or whatever.
The thing to realize is: both extremes of this discussion are in the wrong, and so long as people keep picking 1 or 2 of these sides going by 'the lesser of 2 evils' approach, this cycle will only continue and get worse and it will not necessarily mean 'the right' will come off as a winner on this one.
Death pangs of an elite? Are you seriously saying that Trump is not himself part of that very elite himself?
This idea that a millionaire who appointed numerous wall street people to his cabinet, and is doing his best to help the rich get tax cuts and further the benefit of large corporations is baffling to me. And before you start bashing me as a Hillary supporter, I'm not even American, and I think Hillary was an awful candidates that the democrats should have never ran. But honestly, the fact that this idea that Trump is somehow separate from, or against 'the elites' is without any basis in reality. He's a different breed of elite than Washington has typically seen in power, but he is still most certainly a member of the elite himself.
Look at how oligarchies are born. It doesn't matter if they're right-wing oligarchies like in Russia, or left-wing oligarchies like in Venezuela, the basic formula is always pretty much the same: a political movement is born, lead by a strongman who most often is a part of the wealthy elite himself. This man then declares to everyone that corruption and greed have ruined everything and that he and only he can save the people from these corrupt elites. This is then used as a reason to purge the major institutions of ideological opponents who're then replaced with a more loyal group of people, often from the close circle of the man himself. This is usually followed by the stripping of the parliament of any de-facto power, and the manning of all relevant courts with judges loyal to the party.
The end result of such movements is pretty much always worse off for the people because of course they never wanted to get rid of the elites, or the corruption, they just wanted to overthrow the elites and take their place. Venezuela has more oil than saudi-arabia but its economy is now below Zimbabwe because what Chavez created and what Maduro has continued is a system so thoroughly corrupt that billions and billions have been shoveled into the back pockets of the elites while the people are now starving. Yet they still claim that they're 'continuing the revolution for the Venezuelan people', and who do they blame on this issue that's entirely of their own creation? 'The elites' of the US and EU, without whom, according to Maduro Venezuela would be prosperous.
As I said this is not a left-right -thing. This is a liberal vs. authoritarian thing. Russia has exactly the same deal going on, where Putin has consolidated all the power to himself and his close group of allies and divided the massive fortunes of his country's raw materials to the select few and shut down any and all opposition by painting it as just malicious 'western propaganda' that seeks to destroy Russia.
What's scary to me is that traditionally Americans have been good at spotting this development when it happens in other countries, even at times supporting it covertly or openly when the new oligarchy is more pro-US than the old. But now that it looks like the exact same deal is staring in your own country, out in broad daylight, somehow myopia sets in and people fall right for it just because they dislike the status quo so much. Traditionally the thing that has kept the US resilient against such movements is the strength of American institutions and the separation of powers that has been able to keep the president in check but Trump is already hard at work at discrediting and attacking all of those institutions: the courts, the media, the FBI and so on. I still personally want to believe that the institutions will withstand these blows and america will not turn the way of Russia or Turkey because I believe there's a large enough segment of intelligent Americans who will