The Vault 7 releases make it clear that US intelligence uses tools to plant signatures of other parties, including Russian intelligence. You don't need those releases though, because misdirection is so basic that it's the bulk of a magician's act.
Russia does a lot of hacking, both state sponsored and otherwise. China does a lot of hacking, too. If you are going to try and hide your identity, hiding it as Russian or Chinese makes it more likely to blend in with the countless attempts anything facing the internet is seeing from there.
Nobody is claiming that the Russian state doesn't do hacking, but the evidence presented in high profile cases tends to be weak, while McCain, Clinton, and the other war hawks are salivating at escalation with Russia. Hours of activity, Cyrillic characters, IP addresses (half of which are tor nodes). Those are all trivial to spoof, and may come from things as simple as using tor and some Russian hacking tools.
I seriously doubt Bernie or anyone else that the Democrats could have chosen would have fared much better against Trump.
Oh please, Bernie is the most popular politician in the country by a wide margin, while Trump is the least popular, with basically the only politician close to him in unfavorability being Clinton. Trump didn't beat anyone. Trump let his opponents beat themselves. And because everyone else was a clearly bought off whore, he could just call them out for being bought off whores.
My point is that I seriously doubt replacing Hillary Clinton with a different candidate wouldn't have been the sure thing that you seem to think it would have been.
Take a look outside. Voters are going populist all around the globe, and left or right is secondary to populism. Clinton was the establishment queen, so she is the worst candidate that could have possibly been picked. She also picked a useless VP that lost debates to Mike Pence, didn't even visit the Rust Belt, and ran the least issue based campaign this century.
Anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills knows that the justification for firing Comey is a lie.
True, but that metric eliminates a LOT of the voting public and virtually ALL of our politicians.
You conveniently forget that she actually won the popular vote, so considerably more people wanted her than wanted Trump.
Yeah, but Trump would have lost the popular vote to a wider margin to lice, had lice secured the Dem nomination.
There are a lot of different reasons why the election turned out the way it did, focusing on one reason to the exclusion of all others is myopic no matter who does it.
I'm focusing on the one that made the others matter. It takes EPIC failure to not beat Trump by 10 points.
Maybe the lesson is, when picking candidates, pick one of the hundreds of millions of possibilities that DON'T have ongoing FBI investigations? We knew far sooner than 11 days before the election that she was one of the most hated politicians in the country.
Exposing the truth isn't part of a fair fight? Look, the way to take down Trump is to throw Clinton under the bus. The Dems picked the only person in the country that could have lost a general election to Trump. The man is less popular than lice, and if he wasn't running against the Republican party's Emmanuel Goldstein, he would have had a historic loss.
Excommunicate everyone within a certain proximity to Clinton, go back to being Democrats instead of GOP-lite, and you'll kick Trump's ass. Sanders, Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, and Marcon all point to a very clear populist, anti-establishment trend. If you aren't playing a populist angle, you're going to lose to someone who will.
There is somewhat of a conflict here. Not necessarily a logical one, but it muddies the waters. Because so many put the blame on Comey, it's harder to say that Comey's actions are not worth firing him over. Trump is able to exploit the mixed messaging because the Dems can't admit that Clinton lost because she ran a horrible campaign and nobody wants establishment GOP-lite.
the amount you get paid for your work also has nothing to do with how smart/hard/better you are. you get paid purely based on how many other people can do the same thing. plain and simple. if anyone can be taught to do what you do, then you get paid less. Not because it's worth less, but simply because I can replace you with someone who'll take less. There's always someone with a lesser lifestyle than yours, and hence there's always someone to whom I can pay less.
Okay, let's cut the crap. We could more effectively import managers form India than software developers. So why should we pay them so much money, and why should we pay them so much more NOW in the US? The rate of executive pay has skyrocketed, even though they haven't made any real breakthroughs. Management and owners are wildly overpaid. That shouldn't be a surprise, given that direct labor has been outsources, while management is much less susceptible. Plus, the management and owner class tends to buy off more politicians.
No one cares about "increasing productivity" and "effective use of the American labor force".
I do, and most people probably do, although they probably don't see in those exact terms. Cheap labor is becoming obsolete, and poverty is a drag on basically everything. People whose work is more fulfilling and whose thoughts are listened to get a lot more done.
The reason coaches choose to punt on fourth down isn't because it's the right decision.
Yeha, it's because they are overly risk-averse cowards. But risk-averse cowards would get pulverized by teams driven by statistics, provided that the coach can stay around long enough for committing what is treated as a cardinal sin in football. It's the same idea as moneyball.
After you take all of those risks, and all of those failures, and all of those successful pitches, the rule as a business owner is don't screw it up, don't rock the boat, stop taking risks. Once you win at the roulette wheel, you don't keep playing until you lose. You walk away with your winnings.
Why not just admit that at a certain point, entrepreneurs become a liability, and the company should gut them for boring, practical people who can be easily replaced. Apple was largely right to kick out Steve Jobs, for example, despite him helping them revive their image later. Let the entrepeneurs get back to doing their thing, probably with enough money left that they can find another success without having to endure nearly as much suffering.
Unless, of course, it's just a racket where occasionally some people get lucky and move up the ladder, and thus merit has nothing to do with it (which you largely said already). Unless you use "business sense", which is full of bullshit treated as gospel by the in-group in the exact same way that spies believe in polygraphs.
If you want to make more money, your idea of "better" means nothing. You need to be your employer's idea of better. These days, and for most industries it's always been true, that means you need to make decisions out of experience, not work harder.
Who said anything about "working harder"? The value is in being smart, and MBAs aren't the smart ones.
When it comes to just "doing the work", almost every business would rather it take six times as long, and cost half as much, than cost more and be done faster & better. Teenagers are cheap -- they don't have families and mortgages and cars and problems.
And almost every coach will punt on a fourth down. That doesn't mean it's not the wrong decision. The values you are talking about, cheap labor and low quality, are hallmarks of the industrial revolution mindset, and they are not an effective use of the American labor force. But we've got enough education that the average worker can contribute, and higher quality workers are more useful. However, there's a lot of race-to-the-bottom, garbage, so workers have to compete in a global market while managers largely don't.
But this garbage that you spew where you assume that models 100 years old are somehow less relevant because they are old, is just ignorant. You ignore the test-of-time in favour of informed-observation, but you don't consider past results as valued information in-and-of-themselves, and you think that your information isn't somehow flawed to begin with.
Except the data makes it pretty clear that valuing employees and their contributions increases productivity, while CEO pay has nothing to do with results, except for somewhat of an inverse correlation.
If you don't like the way the business is run, run your own.
Oh, that's really fucking clever of you. Except it ignores that people can be highly skilled, and not have the particular skills to run a business. Someone can be smarter than anyone else they've ever met, but not be good at elevator pitches, or schmoozing with investors. The dumbest fucking manager I've ever met said basically that exact same bullshit to an employee that was smarter, worked harder, an was better at making decisions than him, despite the fact that this manager's previous business had failed.
Oh, because nobody accused of that for passing Richard Nixon's healthcare plan. He's going to get called a lefty, even if he spent eight years fellating Milton Friedman's corpse, so he might as well do something useful.
It's not that they aren't willing to learn a new skillset. It's that there is ONE skillset that is involved with advancement, and no matter the breadth or depth of other skillsets, you hit a bit of a career plateau if you don't have that one skillset.
Why should skilled people waste their efforts on management? Because of business structures dating back to the industrial revolution?
If people 'moved up' by being good at their job, instead of having to fit into a management role, then the calculus on making such a decision becomes much simpler. Entrepreneurs are useful. But we've OVERWHELMINGLY overvalued them, and give them far more money than they deserve, even though it's tough to accurately evaluate their contributions, and the data we do have suggests that paying them more actually lowers performance.
Okay, let's say that's true. I'm okay with NOT subsidizing the rest of the world's research, so let's just move to a single payer system like a civilized nation. There are plenty of issues. We could certainly improve the FDA approval process, and work on global testing standards so we can distribute that cost as well, at least to economically similar countries. We can pour money into more advanced modeling to reduce the labor costs involved. There are a hundred things we could do to improve medicine globally and domestically.
However, none of those factors are in any way a halfway decent argument for not having Medicare-for-All. Furthermore, private R&D expenditures are only half what is spend on consumer pharmaceutical advertising, which other countries generally don't allow. Big Pharma in the US are crooks, and that's the main reason why it's hard for us to get decent healthcare.
I actually WANT a progressive agenda to get passed. That's why I DON'T want horrible candidates like Clinton to run, because they put us at risk of electing people like Trump, even though ~60% of the country hates him too. Had the Democratic nominee literally been a ham sandwich, it probably could have beaten Trump by TEN MILLION votes.
There are tons of problems with our elections, and I'm not opposed to considering concrete solutions to them. Ideally, we should have something like 2FA IRV blockchain voting. That's far more concrete than anything being proposed by the fearmongerers. However, this is mostly just a smokescreen so the whores in the Dem party don't have to stop taking corporate money. That, and scary clickbait so an "expert" can rake in a lot of money to not do anything but maybe make our elections even more susceptible to hacking or interference.
Ingrates built society. The words "fuck this shit" are responsible for everything we have today. Or, as George Bernard Shaw puts it "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
To be fair, healthcare isn't that hard. What's difficult is making the structure of our healthcare work, but basically every other country has the same care for around half the price.
I didn't say it was perfect or foolproof. But our economic system is a form of capitalism, and owning capital is the easiest way to make money in such a system (hence the name). This is especially true when so many people with power straddle the line of not having enough compassion to pay their workers a decent wage, but aren't dispassionate enough to see that well-paid workers are more productive.
Lower pay makes money management much easier. Plus, better food, better beds, better stress relief increases productivity, while a lack of those things can result in a downward spiral that's difficult to escape. I've lived on both sides of the poverty line, and just being above it makes a world of difference.
True, but before we start blaming big data boogeymen, which isn't easy to confirm the efficacy of (perfect for scapegoats), why not focus on the more objective issues that clearly would have been able to swing the election. She was the most unpopular candidate ever, save Trump, and ran the least-issue driven campaign in the millennium. She ignored all of the people telling her the things she needed to do to win, and screwed over the most popular politician in the country to make sure she would lose to the least popular.
How do we know that she lost the big data arms race? What we know is that she lost the electoral college, and she ignored plenty of low hanging fruit that the data clearly supported, like the Sanders platform parts her and her cronies fought against, which enjoy around 70% support. How much the big data for Trump vs. the big data for Clinton affected the results is very difficult to tell, especially without access to all that data ourselves. The Berniecrats in the Rust Belt were screaming that she needed to get there because there was serious trouble, but she ignored that data.
Trump did have one major data advantage, but it had nothing to do with this company. It had to do with him not spending decades in the DC bubble, meaning that he wasn't COMPLETELY tone-deaf to how the rest of the country thinks. Not that he was great at it, but the bar was set so low by his GOP opponents, as well as his GOP-lite opponent, that in that respect, he seemed like Stephen Hawking.
Slashdot Mirror
The Vault 7 releases make it clear that US intelligence uses tools to plant signatures of other parties, including Russian intelligence. You don't need those releases though, because misdirection is so basic that it's the bulk of a magician's act.
Russia does a lot of hacking, both state sponsored and otherwise. China does a lot of hacking, too. If you are going to try and hide your identity, hiding it as Russian or Chinese makes it more likely to blend in with the countless attempts anything facing the internet is seeing from there.
Nobody is claiming that the Russian state doesn't do hacking, but the evidence presented in high profile cases tends to be weak, while McCain, Clinton, and the other war hawks are salivating at escalation with Russia. Hours of activity, Cyrillic characters, IP addresses (half of which are tor nodes). Those are all trivial to spoof, and may come from things as simple as using tor and some Russian hacking tools.
Oh please, Bernie is the most popular politician in the country by a wide margin, while Trump is the least popular, with basically the only politician close to him in unfavorability being Clinton. Trump didn't beat anyone. Trump let his opponents beat themselves. And because everyone else was a clearly bought off whore, he could just call them out for being bought off whores.
Take a look outside. Voters are going populist all around the globe, and left or right is secondary to populism. Clinton was the establishment queen, so she is the worst candidate that could have possibly been picked. She also picked a useless VP that lost debates to Mike Pence, didn't even visit the Rust Belt, and ran the least issue based campaign this century.
True, but that metric eliminates a LOT of the voting public and virtually ALL of our politicians.
Yeah, but Trump would have lost the popular vote to a wider margin to lice, had lice secured the Dem nomination.
I'm focusing on the one that made the others matter. It takes EPIC failure to not beat Trump by 10 points.
Maybe the lesson is, when picking candidates, pick one of the hundreds of millions of possibilities that DON'T have ongoing FBI investigations? We knew far sooner than 11 days before the election that she was one of the most hated politicians in the country.
Exposing the truth isn't part of a fair fight? Look, the way to take down Trump is to throw Clinton under the bus. The Dems picked the only person in the country that could have lost a general election to Trump. The man is less popular than lice, and if he wasn't running against the Republican party's Emmanuel Goldstein, he would have had a historic loss.
Excommunicate everyone within a certain proximity to Clinton, go back to being Democrats instead of GOP-lite, and you'll kick Trump's ass. Sanders, Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, and Marcon all point to a very clear populist, anti-establishment trend. If you aren't playing a populist angle, you're going to lose to someone who will.
There is somewhat of a conflict here. Not necessarily a logical one, but it muddies the waters. Because so many put the blame on Comey, it's harder to say that Comey's actions are not worth firing him over. Trump is able to exploit the mixed messaging because the Dems can't admit that Clinton lost because she ran a horrible campaign and nobody wants establishment GOP-lite.
Okay, let's cut the crap. We could more effectively import managers form India than software developers. So why should we pay them so much money, and why should we pay them so much more NOW in the US? The rate of executive pay has skyrocketed, even though they haven't made any real breakthroughs. Management and owners are wildly overpaid. That shouldn't be a surprise, given that direct labor has been outsources, while management is much less susceptible. Plus, the management and owner class tends to buy off more politicians.
I do, and most people probably do, although they probably don't see in those exact terms. Cheap labor is becoming obsolete, and poverty is a drag on basically everything. People whose work is more fulfilling and whose thoughts are listened to get a lot more done.
Yeha, it's because they are overly risk-averse cowards. But risk-averse cowards would get pulverized by teams driven by statistics, provided that the coach can stay around long enough for committing what is treated as a cardinal sin in football. It's the same idea as moneyball.
Why not just admit that at a certain point, entrepreneurs become a liability, and the company should gut them for boring, practical people who can be easily replaced. Apple was largely right to kick out Steve Jobs, for example, despite him helping them revive their image later. Let the entrepeneurs get back to doing their thing, probably with enough money left that they can find another success without having to endure nearly as much suffering.
Unless, of course, it's just a racket where occasionally some people get lucky and move up the ladder, and thus merit has nothing to do with it (which you largely said already). Unless you use "business sense", which is full of bullshit treated as gospel by the in-group in the exact same way that spies believe in polygraphs.
Feels Bad Man.
Who said anything about "working harder"? The value is in being smart, and MBAs aren't the smart ones.
And almost every coach will punt on a fourth down. That doesn't mean it's not the wrong decision. The values you are talking about, cheap labor and low quality, are hallmarks of the industrial revolution mindset, and they are not an effective use of the American labor force. But we've got enough education that the average worker can contribute, and higher quality workers are more useful. However, there's a lot of race-to-the-bottom, garbage, so workers have to compete in a global market while managers largely don't.
Except the data makes it pretty clear that valuing employees and their contributions increases productivity, while CEO pay has nothing to do with results, except for somewhat of an inverse correlation.
Oh, that's really fucking clever of you. Except it ignores that people can be highly skilled, and not have the particular skills to run a business. Someone can be smarter than anyone else they've ever met, but not be good at elevator pitches, or schmoozing with investors. The dumbest fucking manager I've ever met said basically that exact same bullshit to an employee that was smarter, worked harder, an was better at making decisions than him, despite the fact that this manager's previous business had failed.
Oh, because nobody accused of that for passing Richard Nixon's healthcare plan. He's going to get called a lefty, even if he spent eight years fellating Milton Friedman's corpse, so he might as well do something useful.
Being a workaholic doesn't mean they are useful or productive.
It's not that they aren't willing to learn a new skillset. It's that there is ONE skillset that is involved with advancement, and no matter the breadth or depth of other skillsets, you hit a bit of a career plateau if you don't have that one skillset.
Why should skilled people waste their efforts on management? Because of business structures dating back to the industrial revolution?
If people 'moved up' by being good at their job, instead of having to fit into a management role, then the calculus on making such a decision becomes much simpler. Entrepreneurs are useful. But we've OVERWHELMINGLY overvalued them, and give them far more money than they deserve, even though it's tough to accurately evaluate their contributions, and the data we do have suggests that paying them more actually lowers performance.
Okay, let's say that's true. I'm okay with NOT subsidizing the rest of the world's research, so let's just move to a single payer system like a civilized nation. There are plenty of issues. We could certainly improve the FDA approval process, and work on global testing standards so we can distribute that cost as well, at least to economically similar countries. We can pour money into more advanced modeling to reduce the labor costs involved. There are a hundred things we could do to improve medicine globally and domestically.
However, none of those factors are in any way a halfway decent argument for not having Medicare-for-All. Furthermore, private R&D expenditures are only half what is spend on consumer pharmaceutical advertising, which other countries generally don't allow. Big Pharma in the US are crooks, and that's the main reason why it's hard for us to get decent healthcare.
I actually WANT a progressive agenda to get passed. That's why I DON'T want horrible candidates like Clinton to run, because they put us at risk of electing people like Trump, even though ~60% of the country hates him too. Had the Democratic nominee literally been a ham sandwich, it probably could have beaten Trump by TEN MILLION votes.
There are tons of problems with our elections, and I'm not opposed to considering concrete solutions to them. Ideally, we should have something like 2FA IRV blockchain voting. That's far more concrete than anything being proposed by the fearmongerers. However, this is mostly just a smokescreen so the whores in the Dem party don't have to stop taking corporate money. That, and scary clickbait so an "expert" can rake in a lot of money to not do anything but maybe make our elections even more susceptible to hacking or interference.
Probably more the Dilbert principle.
Ingrates built society. The words "fuck this shit" are responsible for everything we have today. Or, as George Bernard Shaw puts it "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
To be fair, healthcare isn't that hard. What's difficult is making the structure of our healthcare work, but basically every other country has the same care for around half the price.
Anger doesn't relieve stress. Releasing anger does, however, and lashing out relieves anger.
More importantly, the people a few /.ers personally know do not constitute adequate data to make broad generalizations.
I didn't say it was perfect or foolproof. But our economic system is a form of capitalism, and owning capital is the easiest way to make money in such a system (hence the name). This is especially true when so many people with power straddle the line of not having enough compassion to pay their workers a decent wage, but aren't dispassionate enough to see that well-paid workers are more productive.
Data doesn't seem to support that. Perhaps that is mostly true for small businesses, but not in businesses large enough to have visits from corporate.
Lower pay makes money management much easier. Plus, better food, better beds, better stress relief increases productivity, while a lack of those things can result in a downward spiral that's difficult to escape. I've lived on both sides of the poverty line, and just being above it makes a world of difference.
True, but before we start blaming big data boogeymen, which isn't easy to confirm the efficacy of (perfect for scapegoats), why not focus on the more objective issues that clearly would have been able to swing the election. She was the most unpopular candidate ever, save Trump, and ran the least-issue driven campaign in the millennium. She ignored all of the people telling her the things she needed to do to win, and screwed over the most popular politician in the country to make sure she would lose to the least popular.
How do we know that she lost the big data arms race? What we know is that she lost the electoral college, and she ignored plenty of low hanging fruit that the data clearly supported, like the Sanders platform parts her and her cronies fought against, which enjoy around 70% support. How much the big data for Trump vs. the big data for Clinton affected the results is very difficult to tell, especially without access to all that data ourselves. The Berniecrats in the Rust Belt were screaming that she needed to get there because there was serious trouble, but she ignored that data.
Trump did have one major data advantage, but it had nothing to do with this company. It had to do with him not spending decades in the DC bubble, meaning that he wasn't COMPLETELY tone-deaf to how the rest of the country thinks. Not that he was great at it, but the bar was set so low by his GOP opponents, as well as his GOP-lite opponent, that in that respect, he seemed like Stephen Hawking.