What kindergarden did this journalist fail out of. There is so much factually wrong in TFA that it's hard to know where to start. Just off the top of my head:
- Massive spending binge = inflation = a decrease in the value of the dollar, not a "surge"
- "triple the current budget deficit from approximately $600 billion"...um, the current deficit is $1.4 trillion. The other figure comes from accounting tricks that would be illegal for anyone other than the government
- If the federal reserve dramatically raises interest rates, the interest on the massive national debt will skyrocket. The government will meet payments by issuing more debt (how else?). This will lead to more inflation, not to the dollar "hitting the moon"
- Anyway, if the dollar were to hit the moon, then BitCoin would be worth less in terms of dollars, not more. So the whole premise of the article is nonsense
How does an utterly ignorant article like this get published anywhere other than The Onion?????
"The team reverse-engineered the proprietary wireless signalling systems used by the implants which revealed flaws in the way data was broadcast."
From this sentence alone, it is entirely obvious: The signals are not encrypted; there is no security to hack. These aren't flaws at all - they are design decisions. The manufacturers have some command protocol that they developed and use; while this may not be publicly documented, it is hardly secret: monitor the signals used, and you can figure it out. This doesn't take a "security researcher", all it takes is a kid with the right radio kit.
People then rush to ask: Why do these devices not secure their signals? It may be that they never thought about it. However, the answer may also be that they want an open interface. Consider: you have a pacemaker and suddenly have a heart problem, and you are taken to the nearest hospital. With a secure interface, how does that hospital get the private key required to talk to your pacemaker? Which is the lesser risk to the patient's health: leaving the interface open, or securing it?
Requiring ISPs to maintain the records for a year: That allows "retroactive" warrants, plus it imposes substantial costs on ISPs with zero recompense. That's a nasty law.
Allowing access without any sort of judicial oversight? That's full-on, true evil.
You know what's stranger? We just hosted a visitor from the UK. I asked him what he thought of the Snooper's Charter. He had never heard of it. Apparently, there has been relatively little discussion of this outside of the technical press.
There are two issues here, that need to be separated: Hype about development methodologies and hype about technologies.
If you have a good team, it doesn't matter what development methodology you use. It doesn't matter whether you have a scrum meeting every morning, or if you coordinate on a napkin over lunch - it's the team quality that matters. The rest is just formality, and provides a useful framework.
Technologies are more critical. Taking No SQL as an example: there are some very limited use cases where NoSQL makes sense, but there is a reason why 99% of the databases are still relational. Technical folks enjoy learning new technologies, but it doesn't take long to realize that there is no magic cure-all. It's the non-technical managers who get snowed by the marketing crap, and then try to dictate technology to their developers.
I worked at one mid-sized company that had put invested around 10 person-years in a new SOA application. Everything was looking good, and pretty much on schedule, but we had spent most of those first two years building foundation services that weren't terribly visible; the first GUI components were just emerging. Then the big boss got a visit from some Microsoft marketing weenie: "Wow, look at our new SharePoint - you can do anything with SharePoint". Next day comes a directive from the boss: Throw it all out, we're going with Microsoft. I dunno what planet he was living on, or what the marketing weenie offered him, but it took resignation letters on his desk to make him see sense.
Now that "fake news" has become a well-known term, it is already being used by people in an attempt to discredit opinions they disagree with.
Here's one of the articles criticizing Musk, Tesla and Solar City. Where it quotes facts, the facts are true. However, it also includes a great deal of opinion, mainly that the government subsidies Musk's companies receive are excessive, and a prime example of cronyism.
The facts are quite clear: Tesla and Solar City only exist because of the massive subsidies they have received. Are those subsidies justified? Should they continue? Some people apparently do not want to have this discussion.
Color me unimpressed. It tells me I moved my mouse on its page. It tells me when I click on its page. I would surely hope a web page gets those events. It does not seem to tell the user about all the fingerprinting information it can get, or much about cookies, beyond the fact that it sets one.
Embarrassing: it actually gets some things wrong, like the saying that I moved the mouse to the upper left (when I did not).
The idea is good, but the implementation seems to be pretty limited...
I wish there were some solution to stop acquisitions like this: a small company with a decent product is consumed by some multinational giant. The product may live on for a few years, but ultimately it gets transmogrified into something unrecognizable and - as often as not - useless. But the multinational now has the patents needed to prevent competition.
Look at what Oracle is trying to do with Java: suing Google for using the fricking APIs. Microsoft is renowned for this as well: "extend, embrace, extinguish".
While I'm no fan of government regulation, I have the feeling that this is part-and-parcel of "too big to fail", and requires government intervention. Companies should not be allowed to grow beyond a certain size. If a company reaches that size, it must divest or split itself into smaller, independent entities.
The explanations are plausible (exploitation of more of those weird quantum mechanical effects). If it works out, we get to cheat Newton, basically stealing momentum from the universe's underlying framework. Or the simulation engine, if that's what it is.
After that, it's an engineering problem to make it efficient. You'll still have to get out of the gravity well some other way, but after than, you can flit about anywhere nearly for free.
I'm trying to remain skeptical, but this really is what every sci-fi nerd has been waiting for.
Damn, memory's going: wasn't there a site that tried to do this? Give it your location and the kind of task you had (plumbing, electrical, whatever), and it would match you to one of the people who had registered with the site to offer their services.
It's not a bad idea, but you need a lot of professionals to reach critical mass. You also need a good ratings system, because anyone can claim to be a professional, but quality varies...um...widely. Ideally, you'd like to keep the incompetents out in the first place, just like a store should avoid carrying counterfeit products.
This will also open the door to the same kinds of issues that Uber and Lyft have: Are these professionals (if they are individuals) really independent contractors, or are they employees? Who is liable, when the amateur plumber floods your house? Really, it's not an area I would expect Amazon to dabble in - it seems to me that they are just inviting all sorts of unpleasant legal problems.
I would have thought that Facebook would avoid censoring viewpoints, however crazy. Once they start editing or restricting content, AFAIK they lose their legal immunity as a neutral platform. Once they take control of content, they become liable for that content. Some people get their news from tabloids. Some Facebook sites are the equivalent. So what?
On top of that: one person's "crazy" is another person's "entertainment" is another person's "truth". Remember the tinfoil conspiracy theories about the government spying on you? After Snowdon, they weren't so crazy anymore.
Finally, why are right-leaning sites disproportionately affected? Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the political leanings of Facebook employees...
38 percent of posts shared from three large right-wing politics pages on Facebook included "false or misleading information."
Of course, the posts shared from left-wing pages were completely accurate./sarc TFA is crap. It implies that the right-wing sites are unreliable, but ignores the negative information about the left-wing sites.
The BuzzFeed article is long, and gives lots of interesting detail. It even appears to be pretty balanced, not pushing any particular political agenda. No surprise, extremist sites on both sides make shit up to support their views. The site with the highest proportion of false content was right-wing, but it was also the site with the least content. The site with the most false content (in absolute numbers, more than all other sites combined) was a leftist site.
If Russia is behind this, shame on them. However, there is no proof that this is the case. The Hillary campaign declares this, to distract from...
...the actual, important issue: the corruption and criminality exposed by those emails. Interestingly, no one is saying that the information is actually incorrect.
Um, no? AFAIK, nothing I mentioned would be illegal.
Within the parts of Europe I am familiar with, the UK has the worst protection for workers, because of "temps". I know of companies where - aside from the top managers - everyone is a "temp", i.e., an employee with no benefits whatsoever. It's frankly a stupid way to run a business, since it means that employee turnover is high, and employee loyalty essentially zero.
Subjectively, this seems to tie into the UK class consciousness: the managers don't want employees to be loyal to the business, or to take on much responsibility, because they might turn out to be more competent that the managers find comfortable. You have to keep the lower classes in their place.
There's the old saying: "Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it". The Uber drivers who want to be classified as employees may think that they are suddenly going to have all the benefits of employees with none of the disadvantages. They may be rather unhappy, when they suddenly discover that they:
- must meet productivity targets
- cannot work for the competition
- must work particular hours
- must service particular areas
- generally are told exactly what/when/how they must do their work
Drivers will be ranked by productivity, with the least productive being fired. In other words, they will be treated like employees - just like they wanted. I rather doubt that this will please most of the people who drive for Uber...
We want to panic. The data isn't bad enough, it must be worse! So they hypothesize - with no proof whatsoever - that sea level is rising faster wherever there are no tide gauges.
There is plenty of evidence that this is nonsense. For example, looking at current sea level trends, we do not see a faster rise in the southern hemisphere, even though this is what they say should be happening.
Attackers get the service people on the phone, and spin a believable story about just why they don't know the answer to the security question, or have lost their PIN, but it's really important that they get this changed. They pull the support worker onto their side, partners against the evil bureaucracy. The support worker feels good, for helping someone out of a tight spot.
This is made more believable by the ranks of the clueless, who really do get themselves into weird predicaments. Sometimes there really do need to be exceptions to the security rules. But when? How do you tell?
I have a cousin who could do this. Let him talk to you for five minutes, and he'll have you believing anything he wants. Venus is actually in a retrograde orbit? Obama is actually a white guy in black face? It almost doesn't matter how outrageous it is. Fortunately, he's not evil, so it's just a party trick: he convinces people of stupid stuff, then let's them stew in their juices until they figure out that they've been tricked. It's damned unsettling...
Surely it is the responsibility of a court would make sure that the parties involved in a lawsuit actually exist?
One court in TFA did so - apparently none of the others bothered. If one cannot hold the court responsible, then surely a criminal complaint against the person who filed the suit (against a non-existent defendant) is justified?
Nature doesn't want people (or any animal) to live past the point where it is producing offspring and launching them into the world. Most animals have been bred to die, because this is advantageous to the species as a whole.
However, the limitations are largely artificial - we can see that some few animals are essentially immortal. Selective breeding in insects achieves dramatic improvements in just a few generations. IIRC, they tried this with fruit flies - by the simple measure of only allowing older and older females to breed - and they tripled the lifespan in just a few generations. Higher mammals have the same cellular machinery.
Of course, as soon as anyone talks about selective breeding in humans, well... Even if we could experiment with selective breeding for longevity (perhaps something along the lines of Heinlein's book, it is a sure route to massive resentment and probably mass murder Apparently, if we cannot give a benefit to everyone, then we are not allowed to give it to anyone.
Of course it shields assets. Why do you think it exists? Hillary's speech fees are paid to the foundation - this is public knowedlge. The foundation is nonprofit, this is on record. The reason for doing this is obvious: non-profits have tax advantages: she gets to keep more of her money, it's just kept in the nonprofit.
I'm not saying this is illegal - unfortunately, it is legal. It is a common way for rich people to avoid taxes.
As for whether or not the Clinton Foundation is "really" nonprofit, consider: A really good nonprofit that is genuinely supporting a cause puts somewhere between 75% and 90% of its income into whatever cause it supports. The Clinton Foundation has a rather different record. For example, in 2015 the New York Post published numbers from 2013 showing that they foundation spend $9 million (out of a budget of $140 million) on charity, Many times that amount when to payroll, employee benefits, travel and other expenses. You can find similar information from other sources, covering other years.
The Clinton Foundation is a legal organization, doing legal things. It's primary purpose is to provide a way for the Clintons to shield their money from taxes, and to provide salaries to their cronies. This kind of loophole exists, because taxes are for the little people.
Typical hatchet job - the MSM is devoted to Hillary, so they do things like this, while doing their best to ignore her games with the Clinton Foundation. Notes on the items in TFS:
- Of course Trump planned his remarks. What, you think he made them up randomly? Read the columns that Scott Adams has been writing - at this level of the game, there are very few accidents. According to Adams, Trump is using a technique called "pacing", where you make an extreme statement and follow it up by a moderate position. As with anyone running for a higher political office: what he says during his campaign has essentially nothing to do with his personal beliefs. It's all tactics to get elected. This is, sadly, how politics works.
- Trump appeared in Playboy? He wanted his wife to pose, but she refused. Um...so what?
- Trump lost money on some of his ventures. This is not news. Look at the number of ventures he owns, then tell you really expect all of them to be successful? He wrote off his losses on one of his ventures, wow, what a surprise. Hillary takes a different approach, by shielding most of her assets inside the Clinton Foundation. Frankly, that's a lot worse, because the Clinton Foundation is pretending to be a non-profit organization.
tl;dr: The MSM is in the tank for Hillary. Hatchet jobs on Trump are no surprise.
Yahoo: It's not our fault that our security sucked, and that we didn't tell anyone about it for two years. The Ruskies did it!
DNC: It's not our fault that we got caught rigging primaries - the Ruskies did it! It's not our fault that Hillary's poll results suck - the Ruskies did it!
Everybody together now: "It's not our fault - the Ruskies did it!"
Can we put that to music? Seriously, this is ridiculous. Even if it were true (which I doubt), it's still ridiculous.
What the parent said. In my experience, there are two stereotypical problems with people from Asian cultures (as opposed to Americans or Europeans of Asian ethnicity - important distinction). Individuals vary, of course, but Asian workers tend to have two problems, from an American/European perspective:
- Too much respect for authority. They do exactly what they are told, nothing less but also nothing more. You must instruct them on every step of their task, or they stop and wait, providing no initiative or imagination of their own. I consulted briefly with an Asian programming shop, where the boss spent his entire day walking from desk to desk, issuing detailed instructions, all the way down to the level of "put that CD back in its case". Workers used to this are a lousy fit in an European or American work culture.
- Crappy education. While there are good institutions, there are a lot of bad ones. Example: I taught a beginning Java course last year to international students. One of these students has a bachelor's degree in computer science from an Asian university. Another has certificates of graduation from 9 months of Java programming courses. Both of these students failed my "intro to programming" course. TFA claims that the Asian applicants had the same qualifications - that's something you have to take with a *very* large grain of salt.
The US, of course, has never tried to interfere with, or influence, a foreign election.
Anyway, I actually doubt that Russia in interfering at all, in 2016. The political elite in the US have produced the current situation all by itself: people are fed up with being presented with a non-choice (it was supposed to be Jeb vs. Hillary), so they did their damnedest to make it Bernie vs. Trump. Half succeeded, too, and Trump's chances are looking pretty good.
Pisses of the political elite no end, and since nothing could possibly be their fault, it must be the Ruskies. Or maybe aliens.
Slashdot Mirror
What kindergarden did this journalist fail out of. There is so much factually wrong in TFA that it's hard to know where to start. Just off the top of my head:
- Massive spending binge = inflation = a decrease in the value of the dollar, not a "surge"
- "triple the current budget deficit from approximately $600 billion"...um, the current deficit is $1.4 trillion. The other figure comes from accounting tricks that would be illegal for anyone other than the government
- If the federal reserve dramatically raises interest rates, the interest on the massive national debt will skyrocket. The government will meet payments by issuing more debt (how else?). This will lead to more inflation, not to the dollar "hitting the moon"
- Anyway, if the dollar were to hit the moon, then BitCoin would be worth less in terms of dollars, not more. So the whole premise of the article is nonsense
How does an utterly ignorant article like this get published anywhere other than The Onion?????
"The team reverse-engineered the proprietary wireless signalling systems used by the implants which revealed flaws in the way data was broadcast."
From this sentence alone, it is entirely obvious: The signals are not encrypted; there is no security to hack. These aren't flaws at all - they are design decisions. The manufacturers have some command protocol that they developed and use; while this may not be publicly documented, it is hardly secret: monitor the signals used, and you can figure it out. This doesn't take a "security researcher", all it takes is a kid with the right radio kit.
People then rush to ask: Why do these devices not secure their signals? It may be that they never thought about it. However, the answer may also be that they want an open interface. Consider: you have a pacemaker and suddenly have a heart problem, and you are taken to the nearest hospital. With a secure interface, how does that hospital get the private key required to talk to your pacemaker? Which is the lesser risk to the patient's health: leaving the interface open, or securing it?
Why is this news? Obama has the power now. I trust Obama, as a professional Chicago-machine politician, even less than Trump.
Requiring ISPs to maintain the records for a year: That allows "retroactive" warrants, plus it imposes substantial costs on ISPs with zero recompense. That's a nasty law.
Allowing access without any sort of judicial oversight? That's full-on, true evil.
You know what's stranger? We just hosted a visitor from the UK. I asked him what he thought of the Snooper's Charter. He had never heard of it. Apparently, there has been relatively little discussion of this outside of the technical press.
There are two issues here, that need to be separated: Hype about development methodologies and hype about technologies.
If you have a good team, it doesn't matter what development methodology you use. It doesn't matter whether you have a scrum meeting every morning, or if you coordinate on a napkin over lunch - it's the team quality that matters. The rest is just formality, and provides a useful framework.
Technologies are more critical. Taking No SQL as an example: there are some very limited use cases where NoSQL makes sense, but there is a reason why 99% of the databases are still relational. Technical folks enjoy learning new technologies, but it doesn't take long to realize that there is no magic cure-all. It's the non-technical managers who get snowed by the marketing crap, and then try to dictate technology to their developers.
I worked at one mid-sized company that had put invested around 10 person-years in a new SOA application. Everything was looking good, and pretty much on schedule, but we had spent most of those first two years building foundation services that weren't terribly visible; the first GUI components were just emerging. Then the big boss got a visit from some Microsoft marketing weenie: "Wow, look at our new SharePoint - you can do anything with SharePoint". Next day comes a directive from the boss: Throw it all out, we're going with Microsoft. I dunno what planet he was living on, or what the marketing weenie offered him, but it took resignation letters on his desk to make him see sense.
Now that "fake news" has become a well-known term, it is already being used by people in an attempt to discredit opinions they disagree with.
Here's one of the articles criticizing Musk, Tesla and Solar City. Where it quotes facts, the facts are true. However, it also includes a great deal of opinion, mainly that the government subsidies Musk's companies receive are excessive, and a prime example of cronyism.
The facts are quite clear: Tesla and Solar City only exist because of the massive subsidies they have received. Are those subsidies justified? Should they continue? Some people apparently do not want to have this discussion.
Color me unimpressed. It tells me I moved my mouse on its page. It tells me when I click on its page. I would surely hope a web page gets those events. It does not seem to tell the user about all the fingerprinting information it can get, or much about cookies, beyond the fact that it sets one.
Embarrassing: it actually gets some things wrong, like the saying that I moved the mouse to the upper left (when I did not).
The idea is good, but the implementation seems to be pretty limited...
I wish there were some solution to stop acquisitions like this: a small company with a decent product is consumed by some multinational giant. The product may live on for a few years, but ultimately it gets transmogrified into something unrecognizable and - as often as not - useless. But the multinational now has the patents needed to prevent competition.
Look at what Oracle is trying to do with Java: suing Google for using the fricking APIs. Microsoft is renowned for this as well: "extend, embrace, extinguish".
While I'm no fan of government regulation, I have the feeling that this is part-and-parcel of "too big to fail", and requires government intervention. Companies should not be allowed to grow beyond a certain size. If a company reaches that size, it must divest or split itself into smaller, independent entities.
The explanations are plausible (exploitation of more of those weird quantum mechanical effects). If it works out, we get to cheat Newton, basically stealing momentum from the universe's underlying framework. Or the simulation engine, if that's what it is.
After that, it's an engineering problem to make it efficient. You'll still have to get out of the gravity well some other way, but after than, you can flit about anywhere nearly for free.
I'm trying to remain skeptical, but this really is what every sci-fi nerd has been waiting for.
Damn, memory's going: wasn't there a site that tried to do this? Give it your location and the kind of task you had (plumbing, electrical, whatever), and it would match you to one of the people who had registered with the site to offer their services.
Ah, here it is: Thumbtack. It doesn't have the best reviews, from professionals trying to use it to get contracts: some people think it's doing like dating sites, only with virtual customers instead of virtual women.
It's not a bad idea, but you need a lot of professionals to reach critical mass. You also need a good ratings system, because anyone can claim to be a professional, but quality varies...um...widely. Ideally, you'd like to keep the incompetents out in the first place, just like a store should avoid carrying counterfeit products.
This will also open the door to the same kinds of issues that Uber and Lyft have: Are these professionals (if they are individuals) really independent contractors, or are they employees? Who is liable, when the amateur plumber floods your house? Really, it's not an area I would expect Amazon to dabble in - it seems to me that they are just inviting all sorts of unpleasant legal problems.
I would have thought that Facebook would avoid censoring viewpoints, however crazy. Once they start editing or restricting content, AFAIK they lose their legal immunity as a neutral platform. Once they take control of content, they become liable for that content. Some people get their news from tabloids. Some Facebook sites are the equivalent. So what?
On top of that: one person's "crazy" is another person's "entertainment" is another person's "truth". Remember the tinfoil conspiracy theories about the government spying on you? After Snowdon, they weren't so crazy anymore.
Finally, why are right-leaning sites disproportionately affected? Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the political leanings of Facebook employees...
38 percent of posts shared from three large right-wing politics pages on Facebook included "false or misleading information."
Of course, the posts shared from left-wing pages were completely accurate. /sarc TFA is crap. It implies that the right-wing sites are unreliable, but ignores the negative information about the left-wing sites.
The BuzzFeed article is long, and gives lots of interesting detail. It even appears to be pretty balanced, not pushing any particular political agenda. No surprise, extremist sites on both sides make shit up to support their views. The site with the highest proportion of false content was right-wing, but it was also the site with the least content. The site with the most false content (in absolute numbers, more than all other sites combined) was a leftist site.
With that background,
If Russia is behind this, shame on them. However, there is no proof that this is the case. The Hillary campaign declares this, to distract from...
Um, no? AFAIK, nothing I mentioned would be illegal.
Within the parts of Europe I am familiar with, the UK has the worst protection for workers, because of "temps". I know of companies where - aside from the top managers - everyone is a "temp", i.e., an employee with no benefits whatsoever. It's frankly a stupid way to run a business, since it means that employee turnover is high, and employee loyalty essentially zero.
Subjectively, this seems to tie into the UK class consciousness: the managers don't want employees to be loyal to the business, or to take on much responsibility, because they might turn out to be more competent that the managers find comfortable. You have to keep the lower classes in their place.
There's the old saying: "Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it". The Uber drivers who want to be classified as employees may think that they are suddenly going to have all the benefits of employees with none of the disadvantages. They may be rather unhappy, when they suddenly discover that they:
- must meet productivity targets
- cannot work for the competition
- must work particular hours
- must service particular areas
- generally are told exactly what/when/how they must do their work
Drivers will be ranked by productivity, with the least productive being fired. In other words, they will be treated like employees - just like they wanted. I rather doubt that this will please most of the people who drive for Uber...
We want to panic. The data isn't bad enough, it must be worse! So they hypothesize - with no proof whatsoever - that sea level is rising faster wherever there are no tide gauges.
There is plenty of evidence that this is nonsense. For example, looking at current sea level trends, we do not see a faster rise in the southern hemisphere, even though this is what they say should be happening.
Attackers get the service people on the phone, and spin a believable story about just why they don't know the answer to the security question, or have lost their PIN, but it's really important that they get this changed. They pull the support worker onto their side, partners against the evil bureaucracy. The support worker feels good, for helping someone out of a tight spot.
This is made more believable by the ranks of the clueless, who really do get themselves into weird predicaments. Sometimes there really do need to be exceptions to the security rules. But when? How do you tell?
I have a cousin who could do this. Let him talk to you for five minutes, and he'll have you believing anything he wants. Venus is actually in a retrograde orbit? Obama is actually a white guy in black face? It almost doesn't matter how outrageous it is. Fortunately, he's not evil, so it's just a party trick: he convinces people of stupid stuff, then let's them stew in their juices until they figure out that they've been tricked. It's damned unsettling...
Surely it is the responsibility of a court would make sure that the parties involved in a lawsuit actually exist?
One court in TFA did so - apparently none of the others bothered. If one cannot hold the court responsible, then surely a criminal complaint against the person who filed the suit (against a non-existent defendant) is justified?
Nature doesn't want people (or any animal) to live past the point where it is producing offspring and launching them into the world. Most animals have been bred to die, because this is advantageous to the species as a whole.
However, the limitations are largely artificial - we can see that some few animals are essentially immortal. Selective breeding in insects achieves dramatic improvements in just a few generations. IIRC, they tried this with fruit flies - by the simple measure of only allowing older and older females to breed - and they tripled the lifespan in just a few generations. Higher mammals have the same cellular machinery.
Of course, as soon as anyone talks about selective breeding in humans, well... Even if we could experiment with selective breeding for longevity (perhaps something along the lines of Heinlein's book, it is a sure route to massive resentment and probably mass murder Apparently, if we cannot give a benefit to everyone, then we are not allowed to give it to anyone.
Of course it shields assets. Why do you think it exists? Hillary's speech fees are paid to the foundation - this is public knowedlge. The foundation is nonprofit, this is on record. The reason for doing this is obvious: non-profits have tax advantages: she gets to keep more of her money, it's just kept in the nonprofit.
I'm not saying this is illegal - unfortunately, it is legal. It is a common way for rich people to avoid taxes.
As for whether or not the Clinton Foundation is "really" nonprofit, consider: A really good nonprofit that is genuinely supporting a cause puts somewhere between 75% and 90% of its income into whatever cause it supports. The Clinton Foundation has a rather different record. For example, in 2015 the New York Post published numbers from 2013 showing that they foundation spend $9 million (out of a budget of $140 million) on charity, Many times that amount when to payroll, employee benefits, travel and other expenses. You can find similar information from other sources, covering other years.
The Clinton Foundation is a legal organization, doing legal things. It's primary purpose is to provide a way for the Clintons to shield their money from taxes, and to provide salaries to their cronies. This kind of loophole exists, because taxes are for the little people.
Typical hatchet job - the MSM is devoted to Hillary, so they do things like this, while doing their best to ignore her games with the Clinton Foundation. Notes on the items in TFS:
- Of course Trump planned his remarks. What, you think he made them up randomly? Read the columns that Scott Adams has been writing - at this level of the game, there are very few accidents. According to Adams, Trump is using a technique called "pacing", where you make an extreme statement and follow it up by a moderate position. As with anyone running for a higher political office: what he says during his campaign has essentially nothing to do with his personal beliefs. It's all tactics to get elected. This is, sadly, how politics works.
- Trump appeared in Playboy? He wanted his wife to pose, but she refused. Um...so what?
- Trump lost money on some of his ventures. This is not news. Look at the number of ventures he owns, then tell you really expect all of them to be successful? He wrote off his losses on one of his ventures, wow, what a surprise. Hillary takes a different approach, by shielding most of her assets inside the Clinton Foundation. Frankly, that's a lot worse, because the Clinton Foundation is pretending to be a non-profit organization.
tl;dr: The MSM is in the tank for Hillary. Hatchet jobs on Trump are no surprise.
We've seen the tests in the past few days. Anyone want to bet that Netflix has blackmail demand waiting for an answer?
This is a huge threat to the net,and hard to answer.
Yahoo: It's not our fault that our security sucked, and that we didn't tell anyone about it for two years. The Ruskies did it!
DNC: It's not our fault that we got caught rigging primaries - the Ruskies did it! It's not our fault that Hillary's poll results suck - the Ruskies did it!
Everybody together now: "It's not our fault - the Ruskies did it!"
Can we put that to music? Seriously, this is ridiculous. Even if it were true (which I doubt), it's still ridiculous.
What the parent said. In my experience, there are two stereotypical problems with people from Asian cultures (as opposed to Americans or Europeans of Asian ethnicity - important distinction). Individuals vary, of course, but Asian workers tend to have two problems, from an American/European perspective:
- Too much respect for authority. They do exactly what they are told, nothing less but also nothing more. You must instruct them on every step of their task, or they stop and wait, providing no initiative or imagination of their own. I consulted briefly with an Asian programming shop, where the boss spent his entire day walking from desk to desk, issuing detailed instructions, all the way down to the level of "put that CD back in its case". Workers used to this are a lousy fit in an European or American work culture.
- Crappy education. While there are good institutions, there are a lot of bad ones. Example: I taught a beginning Java course last year to international students. One of these students has a bachelor's degree in computer science from an Asian university. Another has certificates of graduation from 9 months of Java programming courses. Both of these students failed my "intro to programming" course. TFA claims that the Asian applicants had the same qualifications - that's something you have to take with a *very* large grain of salt.
The US, of course, has never tried to interfere with, or influence, a foreign election.
Anyway, I actually doubt that Russia in interfering at all, in 2016. The political elite in the US have produced the current situation all by itself: people are fed up with being presented with a non-choice (it was supposed to be Jeb vs. Hillary), so they did their damnedest to make it Bernie vs. Trump. Half succeeded, too, and Trump's chances are looking pretty good.
Pisses of the political elite no end, and since nothing could possibly be their fault, it must be the Ruskies. Or maybe aliens.