Anyone who believe he actually can or will do anything about this is naive to the point of being retarded. Trump will game this to his own best advantage and seek to help his own enterprises and cronies profit. To believe otherwise is idiotic.
That's the scary thing. He doesn't owe much so we don't know his motivations. It also means he doesn't have much incentive to actually listen to anyone. For a guy that was openly endorsed by the KKK that's more than a little frightening.
If we don't know his motivations, how do you "know" that he will use the Presidency to game his own business interests?
I guess I'm more on the side where he doesn't seem to have motivation to get rich (he's already rich) nor does he have the motivation to need to impress anyone or curry favor -- he amply demonstrated that in this election, even when it appeared suicidal to do so, such as insulting the Republican party when he (supposedly) needed its ground operation to have *any* chance at defeating Hillary.
Further, at least Trump acknowledges openly the money factor in politics. Hillary collection millions from big business and said nothing.
And really, what does the unsolicited endorsement of KKK loonies have to do with it?
Trump truly is a wildcard and nobody really knows what he will actually do in power, but he openly acknowledged the pay-to-play nature of politics and taking advantage of it as a businessman.
But he also said that that was broken and shouldn't be happening, and that one of his strengths was that he was best positioned to fix it because he knew exactly how it was broken as an insider participant.
I think it's certainly possible that he could block anti-competitive mergers based on his campaign rhetoric, and more importantly, the open contempt for him that establishment insiders had for him and his campaign, Republicans included. He doesn't owe those people *anything*, if anything they owe him -- he delivered the White House *and* the downticket vote.
Personally I think it's a mistake to see him as just another big business Republican -- if that was the case, he wouldn't have faced such withering criticism from the Republican establishment and probably wouldn't have run at all. He probably would have just kept writing checks to stooges in DC.
What exactly have the globalist, immigrant-friendly Democrats been doing to help people whose jobs have been offshored? Why don't I remember actual action by Obama to reduce or eliminate H1-B visas or crack down on sham job replacement "outsourcing"?
Other than digital restrictions management, what's the FSF-approved way for the publisher of an artistic work to offer a service consisting of a time-limited license for a subscriber to experience that work? Is the alternative really to drop rental altogether in favor of selling a durable copy of something that most people are likely to watch only once?
If they are only going to consume the content once, why not distribute a durable copy? Does rental exist because people only want to consume once, or do people only consume once because they have to pay per consumption?
I'll bet video rental wouldn't have existed at all if videotaped movies didn't cost $75 back in the VHS heyday, a price certainly inflated by the movie studios who believed it would undermine cinema viewership.
Fighting racism is a kind of magical machine that produces political power and moral righteousness as outputs. The people that benefit from it I think actually fear the end of racism because it will reduce their political power.
I think what's left at this stage isn't racial animosity but cultural animosity. It's not about skin color, it's about an amalgamation of cultural values that people object to. This would seem to explain things like anti-Islamic attitudes, where race is often quite ambiguous, or the near total evaporation of anti-Chinese racism as Chinese and other Asians have nearly completely integrated into mainstream culture.
What blacks seem to complain about anymore isn't skin discrimination, but cultural discrimination, and while there seems to be an inherent moral turpitude to discrimination on race, I don't know that cultural discrimination has that. I don't know that you can make people accept a culture in conflict with their own values.
I don't know about you, but if I was going to be running this kind of a scam I would do everything possible to make sure each of my counterfeit shopping apps had a unique identifier as far as Apple was concerned.
That way you couldn't easily get all your apps blacklisted.
What puzzles me is how easily so many got through. I wonder if part of the problem is that a fair number of luxury goods aren't sold direct to consumer, but through authorized resellers and I wonder if what the apps really look like is "price comparison" apps -- ie, some way of aggregating prices for luxury products and allowing people to purchase a specific good as if it was going through the actual merchant selling the products.
IE, to users or Apple the apps look like "Priceline" for some luxury good.
But how do we have the average productivity increase at a lower level of total hours worked? Doesn't that just reduce the amount of work product produced?
Lower work hours would seem to require an excess production capacity capable of producing the same amount of output with less labor input. While this may come about due to automation, it doesn't seem like productivity gains thusfar have resulted in uniform reduction in labor required for the same amount of output.
It does make sense that the value of increased output could be distributed more evenly, but even then I can see arguments where economic expansion and increased productivity were in some ways dependent on large scale capital investments only possible if the gains were concentrated in some kind of investor class who put their gains into capital markets instead of consumption.
The fractional gains in consumer income provided by more even distribution would mostly seem to get spent on consumption. I know if my income was increased by 20% or something, a large portion would just end up in consumption. But at some income level beyond a $1 million a year (and maybe even less), after a few years you would just run out of consumption desire and end up just investing it.
It would be interesting to see statistics on consumption vs. investment for the top 20% of income earners to see how consumption vs. investment changes as income increases.
I've all of the Expanse series so far released and the impression you get from the book is that while life in the belt is hard, most people in the belt work. I'm assuming this is because sustaining life in the belt is very labor intensive and sustaining non-working people in the resource-thin belt is too costly.
Earth still has a massive population and most of the people who subsist on Basic seem to be on Earth, probably due to the productivity advantage a "natural" planet like Earth can provide.
Mars seems to be portrayed as something like a contemporary suburb -- a low enough population with a substantial enough economy based on trade and terraforming that the general living standards are higher.
As for Rome, the Marian reforms of the military seem to have improved the lot of the free Roman, as it allowed free Romans an opportunity in the military and expansion of the Empire brought them lands and an opportunity to become more economically established outside Rome. Not soon enough to save the Republic, but a workable enough tactic that the Western empire managed to thrive for at least another couple of centuries until expansion halted.
If that's true, it's because some Indians are getting into the field for the money, even when they have little actual aptitude for it. That can probably happen in the US too, but it seems like it would be a less prevalent.
This may have a lot to do with it. If being in the outsource-to-US IT industry in India is considered a good job in India, might it not only attract people who are in it for the money but might not those people obtain that opportunity due to social factors and corruption, further reducing the quality of the people that end up in these jobs?
Maybe I'm painting with too broad a brush, but India ranks pretty far down on the transparency list for corruption and perhaps these kinds of jobs wind up with people who were able to get education slots and jobs through influence peddling, bribery and so forth.
The culture itself then provides some rationale why the quality is poor, because the culture is not merit oriented, but spoils oriented.
People suddenly voting their self-interest instead of their tribe would change everything.
The conundrum as I see is that African American self-interest is mostly aligned with their "tribal" (not intended ironically) self interest. Black America will never effectively creep out of poverty so long as vast swaths of it are effectively unemployed and wallowing in a culture of perpetual unemployment.
For better or for worse, the way out is through a culture of gainful employment, even if the employment is not instant upper middle class prosperity. No subgroup of Americans *ever* waltzed into that, even white ethnic groups. Most faced daunting discrimination and toiled for a couple of generations in low-wage and low-skilled jobs before educational attainment and cultural amalgamation allowed better employment and enabled large chunks of these groups to obtain a better life.
I would think that Blacks would be *outraged* at Democratic pandering to Hispanic groups over immigration issues. The Democrats are literally giving away the ability of Blacks to bootstrap their way out of poverty to non-citizens, and *nobody* is complaining about it.
I can only speculate on the reasons, and most are too conspiratorial to believe.
The one that sinks in the best is that Democrats have already given up on Blacks, and are turning to Hispanics as an all-purpose replacement for both Blacks and white blue-collar workers. White blue collar workers abandoned the Democrats at least as far back as 1980, and sheer intractability of Black poverty and criminality has made them more of a liability than an ally, especially with Hispanic populations surging.
Hispanics have less invested in white collar America, allowing Democrats to pander to Wall Street's willingness to gut middle class jobs for profit and re-tool their traditional labor message to an increasingly Hispanic blue collar labor force. To the extent that white blue collar workers already abandoned the Democrats and many managerial class whites are essentially for sale, such a change in orientation costs the Democrats nothing and gains them everything.
There is also an educational and cultural gap between middle class whites in rural and less urban America and urban whites. The Democrats can appeal to the urban whites while conspiring with Wall Street against the last bastion of traditional American middle classes.
It has been an epic failure of Republicans to tack into this headwind. Republicans years ago should have pursued their own demographic strategy, such as steering the many Black military vets into law enforcement -- putting a Black face on urban law enforcement may have actually made a difference in so many ways. They also should have vigorously pitted Black voters against Hispanics, asking them why the party they have so long supported is giving away their opportunity to foreigners. At worst, this could have disrupted Democratic political discipline, at best it could have split the Democratic party and exposed its divide and conquer agenda.
Why is there a Republican conspiracy to prevent minorities from voting, but no Republican conspiracy to keep minorities off airplanes or any other location that requires positive ID?
Frankly I'm more worried about the every day constraints on free movement than the periodic and de minimis reduction in voting.
The problem with bulk immigration, whether legal or illegal, has always been that both parties have a paradoxical alignment.
Traditionally the Republicans have been OK with it because it served the interests of corporations and big agriculture by pushing down labor costs and helping profitability. The existing system is OK because as long as the immigrants are non-citizens, they can't be a voting threat and their semi-legal to illegal status makes them disposable or willing to submit to hostile working conditions. This is why the Republicans have never done anything about illegal immigration or H1B abuse.
The Democrats have been in favor of it because it mollifies their progressive constituency's desire for social justice and multiculturalism and they believe it will give them a long term demographic base that will vote Democratic. Democrats also want to cozy up to Silicon Valley, which at least on the corporate side, is in favor of H1Bs, too.
But this has started to unravel for Republicans -- a non-trivial bloc of voters has seen through their strategy as a jobs replacement program and demanded better border enforcement. This was manageable for Republicans when they had a bottled up Tea Party segment who could scream about illegals but not do anything, but that genie has escaped the bottle and now they have Trump.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Republican establishment would back a Hillary move to expand H1Bs as a way to regain political power and try to evict the Trumpistas.
What I'm curious about is when immigration policy begins to unravel for Democrats. I'm amazed to this day that Black politicos haven't called the Democrats on immigration. It's worst effect is on African Americans who have seen Mexicans completely take over low-skilled, entry level jobs. And by rotting out the base of technical jobs that don't require professional degrees, Democrats have basically been gutting the kind of employment that allows people to pull themselves into middle class jobs and lifestyles, especially African Americans, who lack the connections and family history to gain entry to these jobs any other way.
I think the support Bernie Sanders had shows that Clinton globalization economics isn't universally popular, as does her inability to outpoll even Trump by 40 points.
I'll grant you population, but the Roman Empire at its peak was 5 million square miles. In terms of area managed per dollar invested with the technology they had, I think the Romans have nothing to be ashamed of.
It was a cold war Faustian bargain for several strategic advantages.
It provided control of the Bosphorous Straight, which would have bottled up the Soviet Navy in the Black Sea, depriving them of a southern and warm water port and easy access to the Mediterranean.
It gave the US access to an airbase at Incirlik, which allowed for electronic eavesdropping on the Soviet southern border as well as a bomber route into the southern Soviet Union.
It put a buffer between Russia and the oil fields of the middle east.
Turkey also has weird, historical cultural ties to Russia. The Vikings who moved into Russia heavily influenced Russian development and moved down the Russian river system to Constantinople for trade, ultimately forming a kind of palace guard for the Eastern Empire, and they still share some of these ties in the form of the Orthodox church. It's maybe a stretch, but its not hard to see these kinds of ties turning into a Russian/Turkish alliance.
Aligning Turkey with NATO disrupts this to some degree, and allows the Turks to instead focus on their more recent historical hegemony as a middle eastern power, valuable in an era when the Arab League was aligning itself as Soviet client states.
At this moment in history, maybe Turkish membership in NATO feels like a mistake, but it's origin seemed fairly sound as a strategy. And who knows what would have happened if the Turks could have been convinced to find some accommodation with the Kurds, do a mea culpa on the Armenian genocide, and dial back a little on the authoritarianism. They may have gained EU membership and turned the corner towards their Roman roots instead of their Islamic roots.
What does the middle east look like now if the past 25 years of Turkish culture was European facing rather than Islamic facing? Maybe a squeeze play on Syria when Hafez al-Assad dies in 2000, preventing Bashar al-Assad from consolidating power, which in turn undermines the Iran/Syria/Lebanon-Hezbollah axis? A lot of what-ifs, but had Turkey been flipped in the late 1980s/early 1990s to be a Euro-centric country, there would have been a model of Islamic moderation and modernity potentially disrupting so much of what has gone wrong and perpetuated the Middle Eastern mess.
I think the Model S is really cramped in the interior. I'm 6'1 and have to scrunch down to sit in the back seat and even the front seat feels cramped, although my head doesn't touch the ceiling in the passenger seat.
The seats are also some of the worst car seats I've sat in -- way too hard.
Fine, then we'll limit Congress and the Office of the Reviser of Statutes to the same information technology available to the Romans. I'll even spring for vellum over papyrus.
When I setup my sister in law's access point in a small apartment building and I was explaining why she should use a password, we ended up naming her SSID "Fuck off, freeloaders".
I named mine "Shocking Porn", which was all well and good until I ended up with my wife and six other women seated around the dining room table planning an event for the elementary school and one of them wanted wifi....
NAS: File-based protocol access (SMB/NFS) with perhaps iSCSI block access. Largely locked to the LAN based on the nature of access protocols.
Private Cloud: Usually NAS plus some kind of HTTP/S access. May or may not include a Dropbox-type client for local synchronization. Largely limited to LAN by LAN/FW configuration itself, not the software, although I have seen some brain damaged web access components that would make use over the internet dumb or frustrating.
Private Cloud web accessible: The above, but with a hardware vendor service in the middle providing a broker service to access the device from non-LAN location.
Private Public Cloud: Yes, a contradiction in terms but a step above. Usually privately controlled hardware or VM accessible from the internet without reliance on third party broker services. Could be hosted at home, run on AWS, etc, but all software and OS is under user control.
Public Cloud: Third-party provided service, often only web accessible and with OS client for local file sync. Infrastucture is shared. Dropbox, Google Docs, etc.
I was averaging up the "lung impact" of pot smoking with the idea that a joint would be smoked with deeper inhalation and longer hold times than a typical cigarette smoker.
That being said, I've known at least one heavy pot smoker who was a former cigarette smoker who smoked his joints more like a cigarette smoker smokes cigarettes, but even he didn't manage 5 a day.
It's not the cost I would find the obstacle, it's the strength.
If there's 16 waking hours in a day, that's an entire joint of premium marijuana about every 3 hours. I just don't think that's sustainable, unless being really stoned is all you need to do for your entire life.
Maybe if you really worked at it, you could build up enough tolerance to make it work, but not in my experience.
I wonder how cannabis compares. There is no way smoking small particulate matter of any kind is healthy, and while it isn't as carcinogenic as tobacco, I would be extremely surprised to see if it didn't have long term health effects on the lungs. Only time will tell.
You're right, but with any kind of decent pot, how much do you have to smoke? With any of the high test shit from California or Colorado, one hit and you're seriously high.
Even as a carefree college student, I maybe peaked out at 8-10 one hits per day on a really carefree day, like some weird Saturday when there was no homework and a serious party atmosphere. Your typical responsible person with a job or even me in college most days? 1 to 3 one hits in the evening after work? That should have most people plenty stoned.
Now compare that to a serious smoker pulling down an entire pack (or more) of cigarettes per day. By about the third or forth cigarette, you're way past whatever pot could do.
Now of course, there are compulsive pot smokers who smoke much more, but I figure a compulsive pot smoker would have to be smoking 5 or more joints a day to compare to a pack a day smoker. I just don't see how you could do that with most of the pot in circulation these days, especially in places where its legal or nearly so and is really strong.
It kind of makes me wonder, why did the ExpressCard standard mostly die off? It was a purpose-designed for exactly for adding small devices on a semi-permanent basis to laptops.
I guess I don't see why laptops couldn't have a couple of USB-C ports recessed by 10-20 mm with about the same lateral spacing as adjacent USB-A ports have now. That would allow for a fair amount of semi-permanent device connectivity for dongles and whatnot, and the lateral spacing and recessing would accommodate devices that can't physically be as narrow as a USB-C connector. SANDisk make a 128 GB USB3 flash drive that's 19.1 x 16.1 x 8.6 mm, and it's about as low profile as a USB dongle.
My sense is, though, that all laptop makers are infected with the thinness insanity and look at "extra space" as getting in the way and they also want to make their devices as locked-in as possible, charging you extra for features you might just unplug and replug into a new device.
My Dell laptop accepts an SD card and it fits almost completely flush, maybe 1-2mm at most sticking out. I even keep a 256GB SD card for temporary storage in it without worrying it will catch on my case.
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Anyone who believe he actually can or will do anything about this is naive to the point of being retarded. Trump will game this to his own best advantage and seek to help his own enterprises and cronies profit. To believe otherwise is idiotic.
That's the scary thing. He doesn't owe much so we don't know his motivations. It also means he doesn't have much incentive to actually listen to anyone. For a guy that was openly endorsed by the KKK that's more than a little frightening.
If we don't know his motivations, how do you "know" that he will use the Presidency to game his own business interests?
I guess I'm more on the side where he doesn't seem to have motivation to get rich (he's already rich) nor does he have the motivation to need to impress anyone or curry favor -- he amply demonstrated that in this election, even when it appeared suicidal to do so, such as insulting the Republican party when he (supposedly) needed its ground operation to have *any* chance at defeating Hillary.
Further, at least Trump acknowledges openly the money factor in politics. Hillary collection millions from big business and said nothing.
And really, what does the unsolicited endorsement of KKK loonies have to do with it?
Trump truly is a wildcard and nobody really knows what he will actually do in power, but he openly acknowledged the pay-to-play nature of politics and taking advantage of it as a businessman.
But he also said that that was broken and shouldn't be happening, and that one of his strengths was that he was best positioned to fix it because he knew exactly how it was broken as an insider participant.
I think it's certainly possible that he could block anti-competitive mergers based on his campaign rhetoric, and more importantly, the open contempt for him that establishment insiders had for him and his campaign, Republicans included. He doesn't owe those people *anything*, if anything they owe him -- he delivered the White House *and* the downticket vote.
Personally I think it's a mistake to see him as just another big business Republican -- if that was the case, he wouldn't have faced such withering criticism from the Republican establishment and probably wouldn't have run at all. He probably would have just kept writing checks to stooges in DC.
What exactly have the globalist, immigrant-friendly Democrats been doing to help people whose jobs have been offshored? Why don't I remember actual action by Obama to reduce or eliminate H1-B visas or crack down on sham job replacement "outsourcing"?
Other than digital restrictions management, what's the FSF-approved way for the publisher of an artistic work to offer a service consisting of a time-limited license for a subscriber to experience that work? Is the alternative really to drop rental altogether in favor of selling a durable copy of something that most people are likely to watch only once?
If they are only going to consume the content once, why not distribute a durable copy? Does rental exist because people only want to consume once, or do people only consume once because they have to pay per consumption?
I'll bet video rental wouldn't have existed at all if videotaped movies didn't cost $75 back in the VHS heyday, a price certainly inflated by the movie studios who believed it would undermine cinema viewership.
Fighting racism is a kind of magical machine that produces political power and moral righteousness as outputs. The people that benefit from it I think actually fear the end of racism because it will reduce their political power.
I think what's left at this stage isn't racial animosity but cultural animosity. It's not about skin color, it's about an amalgamation of cultural values that people object to. This would seem to explain things like anti-Islamic attitudes, where race is often quite ambiguous, or the near total evaporation of anti-Chinese racism as Chinese and other Asians have nearly completely integrated into mainstream culture.
What blacks seem to complain about anymore isn't skin discrimination, but cultural discrimination, and while there seems to be an inherent moral turpitude to discrimination on race, I don't know that cultural discrimination has that. I don't know that you can make people accept a culture in conflict with their own values.
I doubt London has seen dead bodies and dead cows floating down the Thames in those numbers in over a century, maybe longer.
I can barely justify Netflix as a package, but a bundle of cable channels? That's the last thing I want.
I don't know about you, but if I was going to be running this kind of a scam I would do everything possible to make sure each of my counterfeit shopping apps had a unique identifier as far as Apple was concerned.
That way you couldn't easily get all your apps blacklisted.
What puzzles me is how easily so many got through. I wonder if part of the problem is that a fair number of luxury goods aren't sold direct to consumer, but through authorized resellers and I wonder if what the apps really look like is "price comparison" apps -- ie, some way of aggregating prices for luxury products and allowing people to purchase a specific good as if it was going through the actual merchant selling the products.
IE, to users or Apple the apps look like "Priceline" for some luxury good.
But how do we have the average productivity increase at a lower level of total hours worked? Doesn't that just reduce the amount of work product produced?
Lower work hours would seem to require an excess production capacity capable of producing the same amount of output with less labor input. While this may come about due to automation, it doesn't seem like productivity gains thusfar have resulted in uniform reduction in labor required for the same amount of output.
It does make sense that the value of increased output could be distributed more evenly, but even then I can see arguments where economic expansion and increased productivity were in some ways dependent on large scale capital investments only possible if the gains were concentrated in some kind of investor class who put their gains into capital markets instead of consumption.
The fractional gains in consumer income provided by more even distribution would mostly seem to get spent on consumption. I know if my income was increased by 20% or something, a large portion would just end up in consumption. But at some income level beyond a $1 million a year (and maybe even less), after a few years you would just run out of consumption desire and end up just investing it.
It would be interesting to see statistics on consumption vs. investment for the top 20% of income earners to see how consumption vs. investment changes as income increases.
I've all of the Expanse series so far released and the impression you get from the book is that while life in the belt is hard, most people in the belt work. I'm assuming this is because sustaining life in the belt is very labor intensive and sustaining non-working people in the resource-thin belt is too costly.
Earth still has a massive population and most of the people who subsist on Basic seem to be on Earth, probably due to the productivity advantage a "natural" planet like Earth can provide.
Mars seems to be portrayed as something like a contemporary suburb -- a low enough population with a substantial enough economy based on trade and terraforming that the general living standards are higher.
As for Rome, the Marian reforms of the military seem to have improved the lot of the free Roman, as it allowed free Romans an opportunity in the military and expansion of the Empire brought them lands and an opportunity to become more economically established outside Rome. Not soon enough to save the Republic, but a workable enough tactic that the Western empire managed to thrive for at least another couple of centuries until expansion halted.
If that's true, it's because some Indians are getting into the field for the money, even when they have little actual aptitude for it. That can probably happen in the US too, but it seems like it would be a less prevalent.
This may have a lot to do with it. If being in the outsource-to-US IT industry in India is considered a good job in India, might it not only attract people who are in it for the money but might not those people obtain that opportunity due to social factors and corruption, further reducing the quality of the people that end up in these jobs?
Maybe I'm painting with too broad a brush, but India ranks pretty far down on the transparency list for corruption and perhaps these kinds of jobs wind up with people who were able to get education slots and jobs through influence peddling, bribery and so forth.
The culture itself then provides some rationale why the quality is poor, because the culture is not merit oriented, but spoils oriented.
People suddenly voting their self-interest instead of their tribe would change everything.
The conundrum as I see is that African American self-interest is mostly aligned with their "tribal" (not intended ironically) self interest. Black America will never effectively creep out of poverty so long as vast swaths of it are effectively unemployed and wallowing in a culture of perpetual unemployment.
For better or for worse, the way out is through a culture of gainful employment, even if the employment is not instant upper middle class prosperity. No subgroup of Americans *ever* waltzed into that, even white ethnic groups. Most faced daunting discrimination and toiled for a couple of generations in low-wage and low-skilled jobs before educational attainment and cultural amalgamation allowed better employment and enabled large chunks of these groups to obtain a better life.
I would think that Blacks would be *outraged* at Democratic pandering to Hispanic groups over immigration issues. The Democrats are literally giving away the ability of Blacks to bootstrap their way out of poverty to non-citizens, and *nobody* is complaining about it.
I can only speculate on the reasons, and most are too conspiratorial to believe.
The one that sinks in the best is that Democrats have already given up on Blacks, and are turning to Hispanics as an all-purpose replacement for both Blacks and white blue-collar workers. White blue collar workers abandoned the Democrats at least as far back as 1980, and sheer intractability of Black poverty and criminality has made them more of a liability than an ally, especially with Hispanic populations surging.
Hispanics have less invested in white collar America, allowing Democrats to pander to Wall Street's willingness to gut middle class jobs for profit and re-tool their traditional labor message to an increasingly Hispanic blue collar labor force. To the extent that white blue collar workers already abandoned the Democrats and many managerial class whites are essentially for sale, such a change in orientation costs the Democrats nothing and gains them everything.
There is also an educational and cultural gap between middle class whites in rural and less urban America and urban whites. The Democrats can appeal to the urban whites while conspiring with Wall Street against the last bastion of traditional American middle classes.
It has been an epic failure of Republicans to tack into this headwind. Republicans years ago should have pursued their own demographic strategy, such as steering the many Black military vets into law enforcement -- putting a Black face on urban law enforcement may have actually made a difference in so many ways. They also should have vigorously pitted Black voters against Hispanics, asking them why the party they have so long supported is giving away their opportunity to foreigners. At worst, this could have disrupted Democratic political discipline, at best it could have split the Democratic party and exposed its divide and conquer agenda.
Why is there a Republican conspiracy to prevent minorities from voting, but no Republican conspiracy to keep minorities off airplanes or any other location that requires positive ID?
Frankly I'm more worried about the every day constraints on free movement than the periodic and de minimis reduction in voting.
The problem with bulk immigration, whether legal or illegal, has always been that both parties have a paradoxical alignment.
Traditionally the Republicans have been OK with it because it served the interests of corporations and big agriculture by pushing down labor costs and helping profitability. The existing system is OK because as long as the immigrants are non-citizens, they can't be a voting threat and their semi-legal to illegal status makes them disposable or willing to submit to hostile working conditions. This is why the Republicans have never done anything about illegal immigration or H1B abuse.
The Democrats have been in favor of it because it mollifies their progressive constituency's desire for social justice and multiculturalism and they believe it will give them a long term demographic base that will vote Democratic. Democrats also want to cozy up to Silicon Valley, which at least on the corporate side, is in favor of H1Bs, too.
But this has started to unravel for Republicans -- a non-trivial bloc of voters has seen through their strategy as a jobs replacement program and demanded better border enforcement. This was manageable for Republicans when they had a bottled up Tea Party segment who could scream about illegals but not do anything, but that genie has escaped the bottle and now they have Trump.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Republican establishment would back a Hillary move to expand H1Bs as a way to regain political power and try to evict the Trumpistas.
What I'm curious about is when immigration policy begins to unravel for Democrats. I'm amazed to this day that Black politicos haven't called the Democrats on immigration. It's worst effect is on African Americans who have seen Mexicans completely take over low-skilled, entry level jobs. And by rotting out the base of technical jobs that don't require professional degrees, Democrats have basically been gutting the kind of employment that allows people to pull themselves into middle class jobs and lifestyles, especially African Americans, who lack the connections and family history to gain entry to these jobs any other way.
I think the support Bernie Sanders had shows that Clinton globalization economics isn't universally popular, as does her inability to outpoll even Trump by 40 points.
I'll grant you population, but the Roman Empire at its peak was 5 million square miles. In terms of area managed per dollar invested with the technology they had, I think the Romans have nothing to be ashamed of.
It was a cold war Faustian bargain for several strategic advantages.
It provided control of the Bosphorous Straight, which would have bottled up the Soviet Navy in the Black Sea, depriving them of a southern and warm water port and easy access to the Mediterranean.
It gave the US access to an airbase at Incirlik, which allowed for electronic eavesdropping on the Soviet southern border as well as a bomber route into the southern Soviet Union.
It put a buffer between Russia and the oil fields of the middle east.
Turkey also has weird, historical cultural ties to Russia. The Vikings who moved into Russia heavily influenced Russian development and moved down the Russian river system to Constantinople for trade, ultimately forming a kind of palace guard for the Eastern Empire, and they still share some of these ties in the form of the Orthodox church. It's maybe a stretch, but its not hard to see these kinds of ties turning into a Russian/Turkish alliance.
Aligning Turkey with NATO disrupts this to some degree, and allows the Turks to instead focus on their more recent historical hegemony as a middle eastern power, valuable in an era when the Arab League was aligning itself as Soviet client states.
At this moment in history, maybe Turkish membership in NATO feels like a mistake, but it's origin seemed fairly sound as a strategy. And who knows what would have happened if the Turks could have been convinced to find some accommodation with the Kurds, do a mea culpa on the Armenian genocide, and dial back a little on the authoritarianism. They may have gained EU membership and turned the corner towards their Roman roots instead of their Islamic roots.
What does the middle east look like now if the past 25 years of Turkish culture was European facing rather than Islamic facing? Maybe a squeeze play on Syria when Hafez al-Assad dies in 2000, preventing Bashar al-Assad from consolidating power, which in turn undermines the Iran/Syria/Lebanon-Hezbollah axis? A lot of what-ifs, but had Turkey been flipped in the late 1980s/early 1990s to be a Euro-centric country, there would have been a model of Islamic moderation and modernity potentially disrupting so much of what has gone wrong and perpetuated the Middle Eastern mess.
I think the Model S is really cramped in the interior. I'm 6'1 and have to scrunch down to sit in the back seat and even the front seat feels cramped, although my head doesn't touch the ceiling in the passenger seat.
The seats are also some of the worst car seats I've sat in -- way too hard.
Fine, then we'll limit Congress and the Office of the Reviser of Statutes to the same information technology available to the Romans. I'll even spring for vellum over papyrus.
When I setup my sister in law's access point in a small apartment building and I was explaining why she should use a password, we ended up naming her SSID "Fuck off, freeloaders".
I named mine "Shocking Porn", which was all well and good until I ended up with my wife and six other women seated around the dining room table planning an event for the elementary school and one of them wanted wifi....
Here's my taxonomy of storage:
NAS: File-based protocol access (SMB/NFS) with perhaps iSCSI block access. Largely locked to the LAN based on the nature of access protocols.
Private Cloud: Usually NAS plus some kind of HTTP/S access. May or may not include a Dropbox-type client for local synchronization. Largely limited to LAN by LAN/FW configuration itself, not the software, although I have seen some brain damaged web access components that would make use over the internet dumb or frustrating.
Private Cloud web accessible: The above, but with a hardware vendor service in the middle providing a broker service to access the device from non-LAN location.
Private Public Cloud: Yes, a contradiction in terms but a step above. Usually privately controlled hardware or VM accessible from the internet without reliance on third party broker services. Could be hosted at home, run on AWS, etc, but all software and OS is under user control.
Public Cloud: Third-party provided service, often only web accessible and with OS client for local file sync. Infrastucture is shared. Dropbox, Google Docs, etc.
I was averaging up the "lung impact" of pot smoking with the idea that a joint would be smoked with deeper inhalation and longer hold times than a typical cigarette smoker.
That being said, I've known at least one heavy pot smoker who was a former cigarette smoker who smoked his joints more like a cigarette smoker smokes cigarettes, but even he didn't manage 5 a day.
It's not the cost I would find the obstacle, it's the strength.
If there's 16 waking hours in a day, that's an entire joint of premium marijuana about every 3 hours. I just don't think that's sustainable, unless being really stoned is all you need to do for your entire life.
Maybe if you really worked at it, you could build up enough tolerance to make it work, but not in my experience.
I wonder how cannabis compares. There is no way smoking small particulate matter of any kind is healthy, and while it isn't as carcinogenic as tobacco, I would be extremely surprised to see if it didn't have long term health effects on the lungs. Only time will tell.
You're right, but with any kind of decent pot, how much do you have to smoke? With any of the high test shit from California or Colorado, one hit and you're seriously high.
Even as a carefree college student, I maybe peaked out at 8-10 one hits per day on a really carefree day, like some weird Saturday when there was no homework and a serious party atmosphere. Your typical responsible person with a job or even me in college most days? 1 to 3 one hits in the evening after work? That should have most people plenty stoned.
Now compare that to a serious smoker pulling down an entire pack (or more) of cigarettes per day. By about the third or forth cigarette, you're way past whatever pot could do.
Now of course, there are compulsive pot smokers who smoke much more, but I figure a compulsive pot smoker would have to be smoking 5 or more joints a day to compare to a pack a day smoker. I just don't see how you could do that with most of the pot in circulation these days, especially in places where its legal or nearly so and is really strong.
It kind of makes me wonder, why did the ExpressCard standard mostly die off? It was a purpose-designed for exactly for adding small devices on a semi-permanent basis to laptops.
I guess I don't see why laptops couldn't have a couple of USB-C ports recessed by 10-20 mm with about the same lateral spacing as adjacent USB-A ports have now. That would allow for a fair amount of semi-permanent device connectivity for dongles and whatnot, and the lateral spacing and recessing would accommodate devices that can't physically be as narrow as a USB-C connector. SANDisk make a 128 GB USB3 flash drive that's 19.1 x 16.1 x 8.6 mm, and it's about as low profile as a USB dongle.
My sense is, though, that all laptop makers are infected with the thinness insanity and look at "extra space" as getting in the way and they also want to make their devices as locked-in as possible, charging you extra for features you might just unplug and replug into a new device.
My Dell laptop accepts an SD card and it fits almost completely flush, maybe 1-2mm at most sticking out. I even keep a 256GB SD card for temporary storage in it without worrying it will catch on my case.