No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
Employers aren't using this for anything other than trying to squeeze as much productivity out of people as possible by treating them like robots or animals. This isn't a new trend, as employers have been using monitoring software on computer workstations that determine when people aren't at their desk typing/etc, and keeps track of when they use the bathroom or take a coffee break. It's a terribly short-sighted thing, as people don't function like machines. I'm just glad I work at a job where my output is what's important - that I do the work I'm supposed to, whether I do it quickly or slowly, whether I take breaks or not, and whether I take 30 or 60 minutes for lunch, or whether I waste time posting to Slashdot or not.
I'm pretty sure we don't need to worry about the Baltic states invading anyone.
As to why we should worry about someone (Russia or otherwise) invading the Baltic states, do I really need to explain why we believe that countries shouldn't be allowed to just invade other countries? That's the core reason WW2 was fought, and why the UN was created - to basically outlaw aggressive war. Yes, I realize that hasn't eliminated war entirely, but every conflict fought since then has at least made some sort of excuse of operating within the UN framework. We do not want to go back to the pre-1914 world order where might makes right.
You're correct in terms of the letter of the law. That said, the Logan Act, which makes private diplomacy illegal, has pretty much never been enforced in practice.
Another suggestion would be to require additional licensing to operate one of these vehicles. We already have it for certain classes, including motorcycles and commercial vehicles. Why not high performance cars? An inexperienced driver that isn't capable of handling the car is a danger to both themselves and others, but someone who has that experience isn't nearly as dangerous. I presently drive a high horsepower car, and I certainly wouldn't want someone whose only experience was driving a base model econobox to get behind the wheel of it. It even took a little getting used to for me, and I was moving from a car only 100hp lower. The controls just don't respond the same way (you have to absolutely feather the accelerator rather than press down firmly, for instance).
If anything, the main reason this hasn't been as big of a problem before now is that you need ridiculous amounts of money to get a supercar. Something like a high horsepower Mustang/Challenger/Camaro though can be just as dangerous in inexperienced hands, but is far cheaper than even a Tesla, hence why you can see all kinds of videos about Mustang crashes from idiots peeling out of their local Cars and Coffee meet.
This isn't something specific to California. There's old infrastructure that's been poorly maintained all across the country, mostly because no one has been willing to put up the money to pay for it, here, there, or anywhere. Here's a report on that from last year, though it was sparked by failures of dams elsewhere: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/11/...
Second - yes, this is a 'natural disaster', because that's exactly the term we use when the natural phenomena dump ridiculous amounts of water in a particular location. In other places it produces devastating floods, like last year in South Carolina. Here California was somewhat lucky, because they had a dam like this in place with an empty resevoir that absorbed it - and that wall of water would otherwise be flooding the valley below, along with all the people who live there, and may yet still if the emergency spillway collapses.
It may be hard to comprehend, but California is a pretty big state. It also covers a large swath of territory from north to south, and the northern edge is almost nothing like the southern edge, in terms of terrain/climate. Northern California is no longer in drought, but Southern California is a different story. Geographically speaking, it would be like saying "Pennsylvania is no longer in drought, but Georgia and South Carolina still are", because that's about how far apart the ends of California are from each other.
People vastly overestimate the power of the DNC (and RNC) in choosing candidates. The DNC sets the rules and schedule, and arranges the debates, but the rules (who has a primary, who has a caucus, etc) were all determined long before either Clinton or Sanders jumped in. People complain that the DNC favored Clinton, but I've yet to see anything that influenced anything even remotely substantial. Again, though, that's missing the greater point.
What you're missing is this - Money. Money is what allows candidates to run in the primaries. When candidates drop out, it's not because they were doing poorly, so much as that their poor showing led to no more donations (big or small) coming in. You want to know who 'anointed' Clinton? It wasn't Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, it was the collective donors of the Democratic party who weren't looking to back anyone else. There was only one person who got around that, and that was Sanders, by mobilizing large numbers of grassroots donations. Nobody else had the cash to make anything more than a brief showing in the first few debates.
Oh, and by the way - she was selected by the majority of voters in the primaries. I voted for Sanders, but Hillary still beat him by every real measure, in both votes and delegates.
The concept of a Free Market is a great teaching tool, but much like its counterpart, the infinite frictionless plain, it doesn't actually exist in reality in its theoretical form. That's because there is no free market where everyone involved has 100% access to all relevant information, and 100% freedom of action to buy or not, nevermind a complete absence of any consequence for behavior.
What is true, though, is that competition is a powerful force, and as long as that is kept reasonable/fair and free of anti-competitive forces, it can be harnessed to produce very positive results. Competition provides impetus for improvement and efficiency, where a noncompetitive market does not (and tends to lead to stagnation, arbitrary price increases, poor quality, and such).
Why this is important is that you need laws and regulations to make sure that the market is free and fair. Regulations can do things like make sure that weights and measurements are right (so you're not being cheated) or that companies aren't doing underhanded things to try and force competitors out of business or otherwise conspiring to scam the consumer (price fixing, cartelization, etc). That doesn't mean that every regulation is good, especially if they're being written by the competitors (regulatory capture), but they're not inherently evil either.
Correct, you don't just burn an asset* for no reason. You do it because it gains you an advantage, such as to protect a much bigger asset - such as the suggestions that this is meant to distract from scandals about pro-Russian influence in Trump's advisors. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis of whether they think what they get out of it is worth the questions it raises in the minds of future defectors/spies/etc.
So on one hand, we have prominent computer security firms like Crowdstrike and FireEye presenting evidence that a Russia-based APT group, whose targeting pattern matches Russian government/military interests, hacked a number of US politicians and political organizations. Information from those hacks then gets released to the press via Wikileaks and others, and the US Intelligence community attests that they believe it was done to try and sway the election.
The Washington Post reports on this. But on the other hand, Trump waves his hand dismissively and says maybe it was a 400lb hacker, so it must be "fake news", because he says so.
IANAL, but in terms of the law as written, you're correct that intent doesn't matter. In terms of how the law has been applied, it does - and this matters to some degree, because the U.S. is part of the English legal tradition, rather than the French/Napoleonic (with the exception of Louisiana state law).
More specifically, if you look back over the case law for this, people generally get prosecuted if:
A) They get caught lying to the investigators
B) Had the intent to steal, whether for profit or ideology
To date, no one has been prosecuted without one of those two, or without prosecutors alleging one of those two. When I was in the military, I saw several cases where someone screwed up and put classified material on a system that wasn't rated for it, including email. Investigations were conducted, servers were purged, and those responsible got a slap on the wrist and a note in their file for committing a security violation (if you get enough of those, you lose your clearance). This is why Comey said what he did - cases like Clinton's result in administrative punishment at most, and the worst penalty was loss of clearance and thus job (which didn't apply anymore for her because she was no longer Secretary of State).
In the case of this guy, likely the Prosecutors feel they have enough evidence to allege that he was trying to sell the data, probably based on his pattern of conduct, and probably also because those selfsame tools showed up for sale on the internet.
Whatever else you may think of Richard Hatch, know that he was a sci-fi fan at heart and he loved being a part of worlds and stories that he as an actor and writer and you all as fans helped build together.
Everyone is always so down on Global Warming. Why doesn't anyone ever look on the bright side of things? After all, once the icecaps and glaciers all melt, think of how much better the world will be:
1) Florida will be completely underwater. Not just Miami, but the "Florida Man" parts too.
2) So will large chunks of the Middle East (though admittedly they'll probably be a bit more worried about the heat than that).
3) Lots of currently undervalued inland property will become valuable beachfront areas. And without having to fire nuclear missiles at the San Andreas a la Superman!
4) Huge swathes of inhospitably cold Canadian land will be sunny, warm, and liveable, which will be good news for those of us fleeing the future American hellscape.
5) Make the Great Lakes Great Again - there will be a new Great Lake, right about where Montreal currently is. (French Canadians underwater? Bonus!)
Sure, there will be some downsides. The Netherlands will wind up completely underwater, though I'm sure they can build a wall to keep the North Sea out, since they've been doing it for decades already. Install some tidal power generation, and they can even make the North Sea pay for it, too!
For the curious, the US Navy has already decided on the next ship to be named the U.S.S. Enterprise. It will be the third Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, scheduled to be laid down in 2018, launched in 2023, and commissioned in 2025. No word yet on whether it will be sent on a five-year mission afterwards.
Personally, I wish they'd named the first ship of that class Enterprise, and let Ford be one of the latter ones, so it could be the "Enterprise Class." Ah well.:)
You could certainly achieve net neutrality without regulating it. It's fairly simple, and many other countries have done it, by making sure that there is competition in the internet service provider space, and breaking up the monopoly/duopoly structure.
And yet, the self-proclaimed champions of the free market haven't done jack squat to try to put that into effect, and are instead happy to proclaim that the status quo of third-world internet service and bloated profits from rent-seeking monopolists is the "free market" at work, and needs to be defended against those evil leftists. In short, denying that there's any problem at all, instead of offering up alternate/better solutions.
The "Russia hacked the vote" accusations didn't come from U.S. Intelligence, but rather, from a deliberate bit of confusion designed to act as a strawman to take away from the actual story. Nobody ever accused Russia of hacking VOTING MACHINES, and everyone official agrees that this didn't take place at all.
What did occur were several instances of politically motivated hacking that took place as part of a Russian campaign to find anything that seemed like dirty laundry on one side, and then dump that into the media. It was a digital Watergate operation, meant to influence who voted and how they voted, not one meant to stuff the ballot box or change votes that had already been cast.
That said, if this makes people paranoid enough to wake up to the dangers of unauditable electronic voting machines that Slashdot and others have been warning about for years, I'll certainly count that as a silver lining to the mess.
Of course he is. That's why his businesses are busy seeking all the foreign worker visas they can get. And that's why the H-2A and H-2B visas his businesses use aren't on the list of visa types he wants to crack down on, either.
I'd say it's unfair to characterize it that way. No voter agrees 100% with a candidate on every single issue or position (except the candidate themselves). We're forced to make tradeoffs, and it's made worse by the use of the winner take all/first past the post system in the USA. Sure, I don't want a lizard in office, but by the time the general election comes around and it's down to a choice between two lizards or protesting and getting no choice in which lizard it is, it's not irrational to vote for the lizard you think is less likely to want to eat your children.
That said, we'd be less likely to see lizards on the final ballot if more people were vocal about agitating for these things, and got active in helping primary opponents who make an issue of this. Career politicians are not completely dumb, and they can be taught, especially if they're scared witless they're next. Take a few scalps and many others will fall in line to avoid losing to a primary opponent. It would be great if there were other routes too, but in the current setup it's just not realistic for a third party to emerge as a real force unless one of the two existing parties has already begun to completely implode. The parties have been significantly changed from within far more times in US history than they have been actively supplanted by a rising third party (once). This is why Sanders was smart to run as he did - even in losing, he pushed the Democratic party closer to the issues he cared about, and now others can continue that work.
And that's entirely the point, and why you should be against this kind of thing regardless if you're on the left or right. You can't guarantee who comes next isn't someone you won't want to trust with that kind of unchecked and intrusive ability to spy on us all.
1) The voters didn't care (enough) that this was his long-running modus operandi (using any position of influence or power for personal gain, even at the expense of everyone else around him, has been a consistent theme for him), or that he made a particular point of ignoring/flouting political norms and expected behavior (this was seen as a plus by many, in fact).
2) Congress has become so completely polarized that it is at best hindered in, and at worst incapable of, acting as a check on a president of the same party.
3) Independent ethics groups hold no sway over him because he has no apparent shame, although they have resorted to suing him over the matter (whether that amounts to anything at all is another matter entirely).
The problem is that a program with limited intended use, for specific high-skill high-demand positions that can't otherwise be filled, and restrictions in place to prevent it from being used to replace American jobs, is being abused by companies (particularly the ones listed as complaining) to do exactly that.
The way they get around this is that they are not the one "replacing" an American job. They hire people from India as employees, and then compete for and fill contract services with other corporations. It is those corporations who get rid of their American work force and replace them with the Infosys/Tata/Wipro contract workforce, that just 'happens' to be H-1B staff. See Disney, SoCal Edison, etc.
What politicians normally do is submit a plan to an ethics review whereby their savings and investments are in a "blind trust" or equivalent. What this means is that they have no insight into where their money is invested ("blind"), and no control over the decisions that their trusted agent/broker makes regarding those investments, nor any communications with them apart from perfunctory statements or the like ("You currently have X dollars in your accounts" etc). This often involved selling off their existing assets to place them in that trust.
The problem with Trump is that he hasn't done this, and has shown absolutely no intention of doing so. He still knows where his money is invested, and still has control/influence over those investments. He claims that he doesn't, but it's grossly clear since his name is plastered all over it. What's more, it's his children that are now running the business, and if you think he couldn't quietly make his wishes known to them, you're deluding yourself. He therefore can easily take that information into account when he's making decisions, and directly benefit his own financial interests thereby.
To give an example, his travel/immigration ban covers several Middle Eastern countries, and cited terrorist attacks including 9/11 as cause. And yet, none of the countries the 9/11 hijackers came from are included in the ban. Why? Possibly because those countries happen to be ones that the Trump Organization does business in, since there's zero overlap between the banned country list and the list of countries in the Middle East where Trump's business has ties? Now, it's impossible to prove that was the reason why, but wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if we didn't have to even worry about that in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
Employers aren't using this for anything other than trying to squeeze as much productivity out of people as possible by treating them like robots or animals. This isn't a new trend, as employers have been using monitoring software on computer workstations that determine when people aren't at their desk typing/etc, and keeps track of when they use the bathroom or take a coffee break. It's a terribly short-sighted thing, as people don't function like machines. I'm just glad I work at a job where my output is what's important - that I do the work I'm supposed to, whether I do it quickly or slowly, whether I take breaks or not, and whether I take 30 or 60 minutes for lunch, or whether I waste time posting to Slashdot or not.
I'm pretty sure we don't need to worry about the Baltic states invading anyone.
As to why we should worry about someone (Russia or otherwise) invading the Baltic states, do I really need to explain why we believe that countries shouldn't be allowed to just invade other countries? That's the core reason WW2 was fought, and why the UN was created - to basically outlaw aggressive war. Yes, I realize that hasn't eliminated war entirely, but every conflict fought since then has at least made some sort of excuse of operating within the UN framework. We do not want to go back to the pre-1914 world order where might makes right.
You're correct in terms of the letter of the law. That said, the Logan Act, which makes private diplomacy illegal, has pretty much never been enforced in practice.
Another suggestion would be to require additional licensing to operate one of these vehicles. We already have it for certain classes, including motorcycles and commercial vehicles. Why not high performance cars? An inexperienced driver that isn't capable of handling the car is a danger to both themselves and others, but someone who has that experience isn't nearly as dangerous. I presently drive a high horsepower car, and I certainly wouldn't want someone whose only experience was driving a base model econobox to get behind the wheel of it. It even took a little getting used to for me, and I was moving from a car only 100hp lower. The controls just don't respond the same way (you have to absolutely feather the accelerator rather than press down firmly, for instance).
If anything, the main reason this hasn't been as big of a problem before now is that you need ridiculous amounts of money to get a supercar. Something like a high horsepower Mustang/Challenger/Camaro though can be just as dangerous in inexperienced hands, but is far cheaper than even a Tesla, hence why you can see all kinds of videos about Mustang crashes from idiots peeling out of their local Cars and Coffee meet.
This isn't something specific to California. There's old infrastructure that's been poorly maintained all across the country, mostly because no one has been willing to put up the money to pay for it, here, there, or anywhere. Here's a report on that from last year, though it was sparked by failures of dams elsewhere: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/11/...
Second - yes, this is a 'natural disaster', because that's exactly the term we use when the natural phenomena dump ridiculous amounts of water in a particular location. In other places it produces devastating floods, like last year in South Carolina. Here California was somewhat lucky, because they had a dam like this in place with an empty resevoir that absorbed it - and that wall of water would otherwise be flooding the valley below, along with all the people who live there, and may yet still if the emergency spillway collapses.
It may be hard to comprehend, but California is a pretty big state. It also covers a large swath of territory from north to south, and the northern edge is almost nothing like the southern edge, in terms of terrain/climate. Northern California is no longer in drought, but Southern California is a different story. Geographically speaking, it would be like saying "Pennsylvania is no longer in drought, but Georgia and South Carolina still are", because that's about how far apart the ends of California are from each other.
People vastly overestimate the power of the DNC (and RNC) in choosing candidates. The DNC sets the rules and schedule, and arranges the debates, but the rules (who has a primary, who has a caucus, etc) were all determined long before either Clinton or Sanders jumped in. People complain that the DNC favored Clinton, but I've yet to see anything that influenced anything even remotely substantial. Again, though, that's missing the greater point.
What you're missing is this - Money. Money is what allows candidates to run in the primaries. When candidates drop out, it's not because they were doing poorly, so much as that their poor showing led to no more donations (big or small) coming in. You want to know who 'anointed' Clinton? It wasn't Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, it was the collective donors of the Democratic party who weren't looking to back anyone else. There was only one person who got around that, and that was Sanders, by mobilizing large numbers of grassroots donations. Nobody else had the cash to make anything more than a brief showing in the first few debates.
Oh, and by the way - she was selected by the majority of voters in the primaries. I voted for Sanders, but Hillary still beat him by every real measure, in both votes and delegates.
The concept of a Free Market is a great teaching tool, but much like its counterpart, the infinite frictionless plain, it doesn't actually exist in reality in its theoretical form. That's because there is no free market where everyone involved has 100% access to all relevant information, and 100% freedom of action to buy or not, nevermind a complete absence of any consequence for behavior.
What is true, though, is that competition is a powerful force, and as long as that is kept reasonable/fair and free of anti-competitive forces, it can be harnessed to produce very positive results. Competition provides impetus for improvement and efficiency, where a noncompetitive market does not (and tends to lead to stagnation, arbitrary price increases, poor quality, and such).
Why this is important is that you need laws and regulations to make sure that the market is free and fair. Regulations can do things like make sure that weights and measurements are right (so you're not being cheated) or that companies aren't doing underhanded things to try and force competitors out of business or otherwise conspiring to scam the consumer (price fixing, cartelization, etc). That doesn't mean that every regulation is good, especially if they're being written by the competitors (regulatory capture), but they're not inherently evil either.
Correct, you don't just burn an asset* for no reason. You do it because it gains you an advantage, such as to protect a much bigger asset - such as the suggestions that this is meant to distract from scandals about pro-Russian influence in Trump's advisors. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis of whether they think what they get out of it is worth the questions it raises in the minds of future defectors/spies/etc.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/10/...
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/...
*Regardless of what we think of Snowden or his motives or his actions, this is how Putin/Russian intelligence will look at him.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
-Cardinal Richelieu
So on one hand, we have prominent computer security firms like Crowdstrike and FireEye presenting evidence that a Russia-based APT group, whose targeting pattern matches Russian government/military interests, hacked a number of US politicians and political organizations. Information from those hacks then gets released to the press via Wikileaks and others, and the US Intelligence community attests that they believe it was done to try and sway the election.
The Washington Post reports on this. But on the other hand, Trump waves his hand dismissively and says maybe it was a 400lb hacker, so it must be "fake news", because he says so.
Right.
IANAL, but in terms of the law as written, you're correct that intent doesn't matter. In terms of how the law has been applied, it does - and this matters to some degree, because the U.S. is part of the English legal tradition, rather than the French/Napoleonic (with the exception of Louisiana state law).
More specifically, if you look back over the case law for this, people generally get prosecuted if:
A) They get caught lying to the investigators
B) Had the intent to steal, whether for profit or ideology
To date, no one has been prosecuted without one of those two, or without prosecutors alleging one of those two. When I was in the military, I saw several cases where someone screwed up and put classified material on a system that wasn't rated for it, including email. Investigations were conducted, servers were purged, and those responsible got a slap on the wrist and a note in their file for committing a security violation (if you get enough of those, you lose your clearance). This is why Comey said what he did - cases like Clinton's result in administrative punishment at most, and the worst penalty was loss of clearance and thus job (which didn't apply anymore for her because she was no longer Secretary of State).
In the case of this guy, likely the Prosecutors feel they have enough evidence to allege that he was trying to sell the data, probably based on his pattern of conduct, and probably also because those selfsame tools showed up for sale on the internet.
Whatever else you may think of Richard Hatch, know that he was a sci-fi fan at heart and he loved being a part of worlds and stories that he as an actor and writer and you all as fans helped build together.
So Say We All.
Everyone is always so down on Global Warming. Why doesn't anyone ever look on the bright side of things? After all, once the icecaps and glaciers all melt, think of how much better the world will be:
1) Florida will be completely underwater. Not just Miami, but the "Florida Man" parts too.
2) So will large chunks of the Middle East (though admittedly they'll probably be a bit more worried about the heat than that).
3) Lots of currently undervalued inland property will become valuable beachfront areas. And without having to fire nuclear missiles at the San Andreas a la Superman!
4) Huge swathes of inhospitably cold Canadian land will be sunny, warm, and liveable, which will be good news for those of us fleeing the future American hellscape.
5) Make the Great Lakes Great Again - there will be a new Great Lake, right about where Montreal currently is. (French Canadians underwater? Bonus!)
Sure, there will be some downsides. The Netherlands will wind up completely underwater, though I'm sure they can build a wall to keep the North Sea out, since they've been doing it for decades already. Install some tidal power generation, and they can even make the North Sea pay for it, too!
For the curious, the US Navy has already decided on the next ship to be named the U.S.S. Enterprise. It will be the third Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, scheduled to be laid down in 2018, launched in 2023, and commissioned in 2025. No word yet on whether it will be sent on a five-year mission afterwards.
:)
Personally, I wish they'd named the first ship of that class Enterprise, and let Ford be one of the latter ones, so it could be the "Enterprise Class." Ah well.
You could certainly achieve net neutrality without regulating it. It's fairly simple, and many other countries have done it, by making sure that there is competition in the internet service provider space, and breaking up the monopoly/duopoly structure.
And yet, the self-proclaimed champions of the free market haven't done jack squat to try to put that into effect, and are instead happy to proclaim that the status quo of third-world internet service and bloated profits from rent-seeking monopolists is the "free market" at work, and needs to be defended against those evil leftists. In short, denying that there's any problem at all, instead of offering up alternate/better solutions.
Waht's raelly inrteseting is taht if you keep the frist and lsat lteetrs most popele can siltl unedrsatnd waht you worte.
The "Russia hacked the vote" accusations didn't come from U.S. Intelligence, but rather, from a deliberate bit of confusion designed to act as a strawman to take away from the actual story. Nobody ever accused Russia of hacking VOTING MACHINES, and everyone official agrees that this didn't take place at all.
What did occur were several instances of politically motivated hacking that took place as part of a Russian campaign to find anything that seemed like dirty laundry on one side, and then dump that into the media. It was a digital Watergate operation, meant to influence who voted and how they voted, not one meant to stuff the ballot box or change votes that had already been cast.
That said, if this makes people paranoid enough to wake up to the dangers of unauditable electronic voting machines that Slashdot and others have been warning about for years, I'll certainly count that as a silver lining to the mess.
Actually, the Dutch have been building walls to keep the North Sea out for some time now. They just pay for it themselves, though. :)
Of course he is. That's why his businesses are busy seeking all the foreign worker visas they can get. And that's why the H-2A and H-2B visas his businesses use aren't on the list of visa types he wants to crack down on, either.
http://www.npr.org/2017/01/12/...
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-...
I'd say it's unfair to characterize it that way. No voter agrees 100% with a candidate on every single issue or position (except the candidate themselves). We're forced to make tradeoffs, and it's made worse by the use of the winner take all/first past the post system in the USA. Sure, I don't want a lizard in office, but by the time the general election comes around and it's down to a choice between two lizards or protesting and getting no choice in which lizard it is, it's not irrational to vote for the lizard you think is less likely to want to eat your children.
That said, we'd be less likely to see lizards on the final ballot if more people were vocal about agitating for these things, and got active in helping primary opponents who make an issue of this. Career politicians are not completely dumb, and they can be taught, especially if they're scared witless they're next. Take a few scalps and many others will fall in line to avoid losing to a primary opponent. It would be great if there were other routes too, but in the current setup it's just not realistic for a third party to emerge as a real force unless one of the two existing parties has already begun to completely implode. The parties have been significantly changed from within far more times in US history than they have been actively supplanted by a rising third party (once). This is why Sanders was smart to run as he did - even in losing, he pushed the Democratic party closer to the issues he cared about, and now others can continue that work.
They're wrong regardless of who's President.
And that's entirely the point, and why you should be against this kind of thing regardless if you're on the left or right. You can't guarantee who comes next isn't someone you won't want to trust with that kind of unchecked and intrusive ability to spy on us all.
Several reasons:
1) The voters didn't care (enough) that this was his long-running modus operandi (using any position of influence or power for personal gain, even at the expense of everyone else around him, has been a consistent theme for him), or that he made a particular point of ignoring/flouting political norms and expected behavior (this was seen as a plus by many, in fact).
2) Congress has become so completely polarized that it is at best hindered in, and at worst incapable of, acting as a check on a president of the same party.
3) Independent ethics groups hold no sway over him because he has no apparent shame, although they have resorted to suing him over the matter (whether that amounts to anything at all is another matter entirely).
The problem is that a program with limited intended use, for specific high-skill high-demand positions that can't otherwise be filled, and restrictions in place to prevent it from being used to replace American jobs, is being abused by companies (particularly the ones listed as complaining) to do exactly that.
The way they get around this is that they are not the one "replacing" an American job. They hire people from India as employees, and then compete for and fill contract services with other corporations. It is those corporations who get rid of their American work force and replace them with the Infosys/Tata/Wipro contract workforce, that just 'happens' to be H-1B staff. See Disney, SoCal Edison, etc.
What politicians normally do is submit a plan to an ethics review whereby their savings and investments are in a "blind trust" or equivalent. What this means is that they have no insight into where their money is invested ("blind"), and no control over the decisions that their trusted agent/broker makes regarding those investments, nor any communications with them apart from perfunctory statements or the like ("You currently have X dollars in your accounts" etc). This often involved selling off their existing assets to place them in that trust.
The problem with Trump is that he hasn't done this, and has shown absolutely no intention of doing so. He still knows where his money is invested, and still has control/influence over those investments. He claims that he doesn't, but it's grossly clear since his name is plastered all over it. What's more, it's his children that are now running the business, and if you think he couldn't quietly make his wishes known to them, you're deluding yourself. He therefore can easily take that information into account when he's making decisions, and directly benefit his own financial interests thereby.
To give an example, his travel/immigration ban covers several Middle Eastern countries, and cited terrorist attacks including 9/11 as cause. And yet, none of the countries the 9/11 hijackers came from are included in the ban. Why? Possibly because those countries happen to be ones that the Trump Organization does business in, since there's zero overlap between the banned country list and the list of countries in the Middle East where Trump's business has ties? Now, it's impossible to prove that was the reason why, but wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if we didn't have to even worry about that in the first place?