There's an enormous difference between console DRM and PC DRM -- the console DRM was built into the hardware. Unless this new standard somehow forces computers (including all pre-existing computers) to include/install a hardware chip of some sort, the cracking potential is significantly easier.
Heck even with some sort of hardware dongle, PC cracking is significantly easier as the post-DRM output still goes through unsecured parts of the machine. That was the problem the whole "disk-to-screen" DRM system the MPAA was pushing a decade or so ago had. We got secured HDMI connections which allowed purpose-built bluray players and the such to be reasonably secure, but as soon as the first software bluray decoder was released its game over (never mind the kind of hardware hacks that were still possible like capturing the pinouts on the way from your TV's processor to the actual LCD panel and whatever other goofy things the smart hackers came up with.)
honestly questioning ourselves as to whether we are letting our biases colour our understanding
That's exactly my point. You cannot do that. You may think you can, but all of the research and evidence available points very strongly towards that not being the case and if you believe you're special somehow, then you're probably in this group of people: "and worse, they don't recognize that they don't know how." That's why you really need multiple people on the job with different viewpoints -- attempt to cancel out those built-in biases by averaging across a population sample (even if its a small sample of 2-3 people that's better than one.)
dispassionate fact-checking is possible
Possible yes, practical not so much when there's hundreds of stories to check each week. FB's plan is to essentially match quantity to quantity. We'll see how they do with regards to quality.
I assumed the word "practical" what implied. My bad.
you test their validity in a court of law
When there's dozens if not hundreds of BS stories coming out every week, I doubt you're going to find any court of law willing to waste that much time on the issue -- by the time you'd prosecuted your first one, there would be 100,000 new ones waiting in line. And you're assuming the court is somehow less biased than FB's gang of reviewers. Maybe differently biased, but completely unbiased is a pretty wild claim especially in today's political environment.
Facebook think they entitled to call them selves, judge, jury and executioner of news, it is a pretty solid indication they are the last people to trust
They're not. They're claiming to be the judge, jury and execution of new posted on their website. If you don't like them doing that, you're free to pick up your fake news elsewhere.
else shut the fuck up with your deceitful, disingenuous censorship and propaganda
The whole point is to try and shut up the deceitful propaganda because they aren't shutting themselves up, and neither the government (who is producing most of the crap in the first place) nor the news organizations (who used to be the ones doing this sifting work) are willing or maybe even capable of stopping it.
I don't know specifics about what they do, and I'm guessing that would differ from one organization to the next anyway depending on their specific criteria and how clever their designers and programmers are.
But in terms of the COBOL language specifically, keep in mind that its still maintained. The last COBOL spec was released in 2014. That is, new features and paradigms can likely be built on top of existing software by just porting forward to a new compiler rather than switching languages all together. Still a somewhat risky proposition (always the chance of new conflicting keywords or deprecated library routines or whatever problem COBOL upgrades present) but not nearly as bad as rewriting from scratch.
The opposite is also true though. A game that would have traditionally been cancelled because its over budget/time/whatever may be able to hang on if there's enough players supporting it.
Weird how you think this is weird. You may dislike it, but there's nothing inherently strange about it and there can be some pretty big benefits. Netflix of course being the prime example -- there's no way I could possibly afford to purchase everything I've watched on Netflix for full price, but between volume purchasing and amortization across shows, Netflix is able to provide a product that I wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain, even if its not "permanent."
Whether or not this will work for video games is another question. The potential is there but I don't know if the economics are.
There's got to be more to it than that. Very few people play one (and only one) game for 6 months straight, so right off the top the math you're providing is a losing equation. If you assume say, 1 week per game playtime on average (across all users and across all games,) then that means you're charging the user $2.50 for a $60 game.
I somehow doubt that new releases would be on the service for a few weeks/months until the initial purchasing rush is over, and this is just a way to get you to pay $10/mo for old games that you may not have otherwise considered buying at any price because you'd forgotten about them or weren't interested enough to pay the full sticker price or whatever other reason.
Then again, this is just some guy spouting off, so its entirely possible that he just made a "wouldn't it be cool if" rant that happened to become news simply because of the position he holds, without any serious thought toward the economics of it.
one, singular, successful subscription MMO: World of Warcraft
Define "successful." If you mean "makes a profit," then you're flat out wrong. If you mean "as successful as WoW" then well yeah, I guess that's true.
You also need to define "failure." There's plenty of MMOs that closed or tried F2P (or some other model) because they were starting to lose money -- but that doesn't negate all of the money they made before they started going downhill. An MMO that made $100m over its life and shutdown after deciding a loss of $10m couldn't be turned around is still a $90m profit, which is a big win in most peoples' books, even if its not the biggest win they could have dreamed up. Even if you replace those m's with k's that's still a pretty nice chunk of money they walk away with.
I think too many MMOs tried to define success as "WoW-killer" and failure as "didn't kill WoW." Of course by that metric you're going to lose. Well unless you happen to be the one that succeeds but none ever managed that and now the MMO heyday is pretty much over, so the likelyhood of any new WoW-killer claims is pretty slim (even though "beating" WoW would technically be much easier now since they're also losing significant numbers of subscribers as the market for MMOs declines. That said, the last numbers they released a year or two ago were still above the next largest MMO in its prime.)
Good Old Games has Civ 1-4. Don't know if 5 or 6 have been (legitimately) released DRM-free anywhere yet. I suspect they'll hit GoG or some similar site eventually after the devs decide that the greater sales exposure is worth the increased piracy risk (given of course that they somehow still believe the piracy risk is 100% regardless of DRM. It only takes one successful crack to take piracy from 0% to maximum and there's always at least one.)
Trouble is, you're alone on that. Most people (possibly including yourself) not only don't want to sift through stuff, they don't know how and worse, they don't recognize that they don't know how. Its not even (entirely) a Dunning-Kruger effect either -- simple confirmation bias will ensure that you disproportionately trust things you already believe. And there's nothing you can do about it. Our brains are just wired to work that way.
So you need a way to sift through the crud that counteracts those effects and biases. Our AI technology can get us partway there these days, but its not sufficiently good to be relied on entirely. So you've got to have people in the mix. But those people will suffer the same effects you do and the only way to balance that is to throw enough (independent) people at the problem with differing viewpoints in order to average out the biases and hopefully come up with a reasonable consensus.
Now whether Facebook and Google are the best organizations to do that is up for grabs. But at this point, I'd say they're actually among our best bets. In particular, they're not beholden to anyone but themselves. News organizations used to be the people we trusted but they've kind of dropped the ball as news has transitioned from informing us toward trying to entertain us, with a good sprinkling of partisan politics and corporate sponsorship thrown in to spice things up.
So FB and Google. They've certainly got their fair share of issues. But what they don't really have (at least not yet) is a strong leaning toward any political spectrum, or any strong pressure from sponsors to avoid or promote specific stories. They're about as unbiased as you can find these days, outside of the few topics that directly affect their bottom line (I wouldn't necessarily trust Google to be fairly reporting on net neutrality rules for example, as they stand much to lose if net neutrality is weakened or goes away. In that particular case, Google's needs somewhat align with well.. basically anyone who isn't a major ISP.. so that works out for us but there will be other stories where Google is firmly on the opposing side.)
I agree the article's claim is dumb, but not for the reason you suggest. Finding programmers is easy (at least if you're willing to pay a reasonable wage,) and teaching them COBOL is easy as well (any decent programmer should be able to pick up a new language within a week or two.. especially if they're hitting the ground running and have no choice but to learn it.)
The problem is the business logic. Banking isn't particularly simple at the best of times, and all of those ancient systems will have decades worth of hacks built on top of the base logic for whatever corner cases, hardware workarounds and other tweaks that have been needed over the years. A new programmer learning COBOL will have to be wary of those kind of hacks until they understand them. A programmer trying to port the system to another language/system on the other hand will have to understand those hacks all (nearly) at once in order to make sure they properly get replicated.
I don't really see any reason beyond simply "new is better!" to do this. By the time they manage to fully port and test the new system, they'll be wanting to rewrite it again in the next fad-language-of-the-day. I mean name one "top" language today that's been around for more than about 5 years and doesn't already have people crowing about how its past its expiry date and everyone should be rewriting all their code in some other language. There's the occasional specific domain where that happens (C++ for performance-centric applications like games, Fortran for sciency things, Matlab for mathy things and the such) but anything even close to general purpose? Few if any.
I'm not sure that's much of a lesson since there are plenty of other "biggest economies" that do use social media.
More likely, as many others have stated already, that its more to do with privacy concerns and just generally having cultures where "ME!ME!ME!" ego-stroking isn't considered proper never mind encouraged as it is in the US.
I don't see why any of them should pay extra to support schools.
So none of those people had, have, or even will have kids? If you want a comparison of what your school "support" accomplishes, compare it against the cost of a private school -- it might not be a direct comparison since public schools are already forced to cut corners where they can, but it should give you at least a ball park of what you'd have to pay up front if you (and everyone else) weren't covering it with your taxes.
Basically, that whole "saving for university" thing people do now? Without subsidized education it would be "saving for K-12" instead.
Couple of things here: - If its just a field, that's (relatively) cheap. Bunch of bleachers, some flood lighting, some grass and other such odds and ends. As long as they've got the land, that's not too expensive -- even if its $100k, that's only 2-3 years worth of a single teacher's salary (no idea what Comcast charges a school for internet or whatever so can't make that comparison.) Now if we're talking full on stadiums, that's a whole other story. Those suckers get into the 10s or even 100s of millions of dollars.
- A lot of that money won't be the school's money. Much of it will be donations from fans, city subsidies, etc that are earmarked specifically for the field. There's a lot of people out there who care more about their kids' sports than their education.
So.. this "balanced" article is claiming that removing price caps won't result in price increases because.. competition? If that was really the case then why would they care about the price caps in the first place -- they should already be well under them if competition was the driving force.
Never mind the fact that we're talking about one of the least competitive markets in the country. Sure critics "subdivide" the market -- based on the service areas defined by where those companies serve. Its not competition if Comcast is your only option in Memphis and Verizon is your only option in Nashville (and no I have no idea who serves those two cities in reality, its just an example. Pick whatever two districts you like as long as they're far enough apart that the nearest "competitor" isn't actually plausible competition. Shouldn't be too hard, especially if you head into smaller towns or rural areas.)
See that's all fine and logical when you phrase it that way. But it completely forgets to ask the question: If these "high-poverty" districts didn't exist, where would the people who live in them be? These people don't just disappear because you don't happen to like thinking about them.
You're arguing that rent should be free to jump through the roof and then in the next paragraph state that employers should be free to pay whatever wages they want -- which is pretty much always going to be far below the poverty line (because if they were willing and able to pay a fair wage, the wage floor wouldn't be preventing them from starting up.)
So you want a world where all prices are high and all wages are low. And somehow expect that to be good because you glanced at your friends econ101 text book one time and decided that "AMG Free Market FOAMFOAM!" was the solution to everything?
I didn't say it wasn't bad. I said it wasn't irreversible.
That is, you can suffer for 4 years or you can suffer for 8 (if Trump gets re-elected,) but whether its in 2020 or 2024, the following president will at least have the power to change the screwups Trump has made up to this point.
Whether the next president will actually want to undo Trump's decisions, or whether Trump between now and then does something that's truly irreversible, are both open questions and there's no way to answer them except wait and see.
Pretty sure the DNC emails didn't release themselves. That there was hacking involved is basically beyond question (well unless you take an extremely strict definition of "hacking" that conveniently excludes whatever was done to obtain those emails.)
There was question in the beginning about the source with Russia just being a rumor, but the FBI has since fairly confidently determined that Russia was indeed the culprits. Unless of course you want to start a new conspiracy theory about the FBI working for Iran and implicating Russia just to throw us off the real trail or something goofy like that.
not fulfilling the promise his party-affiliation made to the electorate
Trouble with that line of reasoning is that when there's only two parties to choose from, its extremely common for any one person's interests to not coincide exactly with the party line.
Your representative is there to represent you (well OK, they're there to represent the companies who paid for the campaign that convinced you to vote for them..), not whatever arbitrary ideals their limited choice of party affiliation gives them.
Its not like all of the people who know what they're doing simply vanished, or that there aren't more people who are capable out there but just don't happen to bow to the Trump line and thus are ignored under the current administration.
Trump's been a bumbling idiot as expected, but he so far hasn't done anything irreversible.
Of course that could change at any time -- renegotiating NAFTA is likely to be one of those "who knew international treaties were so hard" moments.
All of the recent military activity may or may not also lead to something more serious. Russia may take exception if the US tries to get too involved in Syria at this point since they're sill (for some reason) backing Asaad.
The same situation applies to North Korea having China's backing, except somewhat scarier since Kim Jong-un is possibly crazy enough to start something they can't finish. It would almost certainly be the end of North Korea either way, but if it escalated into a conflict between China and the US things could get ugly fast and we may well see something akin to the start of WWI where some almost-forgotten-to-history event sparks disastrous consequences for not just the people or countries involved, but the entire world.
The trouble with your argument is Hanlon's razor.. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Trump's entire rise to power, from his nomination to the RNC all the way up to his election as president was basically one giant gong show of ignorance, racism and general dislike of the (prior) status quo.
The Russian hacking certainly didn't help Hillary's cause, but I have some doubts as to how much it actually influenced the election results -- Hillary was pretty disliked before the email scandal and other BS. Maybe it would have been enough to swing the EC.. we'll never know.. but I wouldn't say its exactly clear cause-and-effect trail given everything else that was going on during both the campaign and the primaries before it.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an enormous difference between console DRM and PC DRM -- the console DRM was built into the hardware. Unless this new standard somehow forces computers (including all pre-existing computers) to include/install a hardware chip of some sort, the cracking potential is significantly easier.
Heck even with some sort of hardware dongle, PC cracking is significantly easier as the post-DRM output still goes through unsecured parts of the machine. That was the problem the whole "disk-to-screen" DRM system the MPAA was pushing a decade or so ago had. We got secured HDMI connections which allowed purpose-built bluray players and the such to be reasonably secure, but as soon as the first software bluray decoder was released its game over (never mind the kind of hardware hacks that were still possible like capturing the pinouts on the way from your TV's processor to the actual LCD panel and whatever other goofy things the smart hackers came up with.)
honestly questioning ourselves as to whether we are letting our biases colour our understanding
That's exactly my point. You cannot do that. You may think you can, but all of the research and evidence available points very strongly towards that not being the case and if you believe you're special somehow, then you're probably in this group of people: "and worse, they don't recognize that they don't know how." That's why you really need multiple people on the job with different viewpoints -- attempt to cancel out those built-in biases by averaging across a population sample (even if its a small sample of 2-3 people that's better than one.)
dispassionate fact-checking is possible
Possible yes, practical not so much when there's hundreds of stories to check each week. FB's plan is to essentially match quantity to quantity. We'll see how they do with regards to quality.
I assumed the word "practical" what implied. My bad.
you test their validity in a court of law
When there's dozens if not hundreds of BS stories coming out every week, I doubt you're going to find any court of law willing to waste that much time on the issue -- by the time you'd prosecuted your first one, there would be 100,000 new ones waiting in line. And you're assuming the court is somehow less biased than FB's gang of reviewers. Maybe differently biased, but completely unbiased is a pretty wild claim especially in today's political environment.
Facebook think they entitled to call them selves, judge, jury and executioner of news, it is a pretty solid indication they are the last people to trust
They're not. They're claiming to be the judge, jury and execution of new posted on their website. If you don't like them doing that, you're free to pick up your fake news elsewhere.
else shut the fuck up with your deceitful, disingenuous censorship and propaganda
The whole point is to try and shut up the deceitful propaganda because they aren't shutting themselves up, and neither the government (who is producing most of the crap in the first place) nor the news organizations (who used to be the ones doing this sifting work) are willing or maybe even capable of stopping it.
I don't know specifics about what they do, and I'm guessing that would differ from one organization to the next anyway depending on their specific criteria and how clever their designers and programmers are.
But in terms of the COBOL language specifically, keep in mind that its still maintained. The last COBOL spec was released in 2014. That is, new features and paradigms can likely be built on top of existing software by just porting forward to a new compiler rather than switching languages all together. Still a somewhat risky proposition (always the chance of new conflicting keywords or deprecated library routines or whatever problem COBOL upgrades present) but not nearly as bad as rewriting from scratch.
The opposite is also true though. A game that would have traditionally been cancelled because its over budget/time/whatever may be able to hang on if there's enough players supporting it.
Random speculation is fun.
PS4 doesn't require a PS+ subscription for general console-like functionality (ie: you can play games, including online games, without it.)
PS+ primarily gives you cloud storage and periodic discounts/freebies in the PS store. Its not like XBox where you're practically forced into it.
That said, I'm pretty sure the PS4 does at least require you to create a PS account. Which is annoying but its free.
Weird how you think this is weird. You may dislike it, but there's nothing inherently strange about it and there can be some pretty big benefits. Netflix of course being the prime example -- there's no way I could possibly afford to purchase everything I've watched on Netflix for full price, but between volume purchasing and amortization across shows, Netflix is able to provide a product that I wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain, even if its not "permanent."
Whether or not this will work for video games is another question. The potential is there but I don't know if the economics are.
There's got to be more to it than that. Very few people play one (and only one) game for 6 months straight, so right off the top the math you're providing is a losing equation. If you assume say, 1 week per game playtime on average (across all users and across all games,) then that means you're charging the user $2.50 for a $60 game.
I somehow doubt that new releases would be on the service for a few weeks/months until the initial purchasing rush is over, and this is just a way to get you to pay $10/mo for old games that you may not have otherwise considered buying at any price because you'd forgotten about them or weren't interested enough to pay the full sticker price or whatever other reason.
Then again, this is just some guy spouting off, so its entirely possible that he just made a "wouldn't it be cool if" rant that happened to become news simply because of the position he holds, without any serious thought toward the economics of it.
one, singular, successful subscription MMO: World of Warcraft
Define "successful." If you mean "makes a profit," then you're flat out wrong. If you mean "as successful as WoW" then well yeah, I guess that's true.
You also need to define "failure." There's plenty of MMOs that closed or tried F2P (or some other model) because they were starting to lose money -- but that doesn't negate all of the money they made before they started going downhill. An MMO that made $100m over its life and shutdown after deciding a loss of $10m couldn't be turned around is still a $90m profit, which is a big win in most peoples' books, even if its not the biggest win they could have dreamed up. Even if you replace those m's with k's that's still a pretty nice chunk of money they walk away with.
I think too many MMOs tried to define success as "WoW-killer" and failure as "didn't kill WoW." Of course by that metric you're going to lose. Well unless you happen to be the one that succeeds but none ever managed that and now the MMO heyday is pretty much over, so the likelyhood of any new WoW-killer claims is pretty slim (even though "beating" WoW would technically be much easier now since they're also losing significant numbers of subscribers as the market for MMOs declines. That said, the last numbers they released a year or two ago were still above the next largest MMO in its prime.)
Good Old Games has Civ 1-4. Don't know if 5 or 6 have been (legitimately) released DRM-free anywhere yet. I suspect they'll hit GoG or some similar site eventually after the devs decide that the greater sales exposure is worth the increased piracy risk (given of course that they somehow still believe the piracy risk is 100% regardless of DRM. It only takes one successful crack to take piracy from 0% to maximum and there's always at least one.)
Trouble is, you're alone on that. Most people (possibly including yourself) not only don't want to sift through stuff, they don't know how and worse, they don't recognize that they don't know how. Its not even (entirely) a Dunning-Kruger effect either -- simple confirmation bias will ensure that you disproportionately trust things you already believe. And there's nothing you can do about it. Our brains are just wired to work that way.
So you need a way to sift through the crud that counteracts those effects and biases. Our AI technology can get us partway there these days, but its not sufficiently good to be relied on entirely. So you've got to have people in the mix. But those people will suffer the same effects you do and the only way to balance that is to throw enough (independent) people at the problem with differing viewpoints in order to average out the biases and hopefully come up with a reasonable consensus.
Now whether Facebook and Google are the best organizations to do that is up for grabs. But at this point, I'd say they're actually among our best bets. In particular, they're not beholden to anyone but themselves. News organizations used to be the people we trusted but they've kind of dropped the ball as news has transitioned from informing us toward trying to entertain us, with a good sprinkling of partisan politics and corporate sponsorship thrown in to spice things up.
So FB and Google. They've certainly got their fair share of issues. But what they don't really have (at least not yet) is a strong leaning toward any political spectrum, or any strong pressure from sponsors to avoid or promote specific stories. They're about as unbiased as you can find these days, outside of the few topics that directly affect their bottom line (I wouldn't necessarily trust Google to be fairly reporting on net neutrality rules for example, as they stand much to lose if net neutrality is weakened or goes away. In that particular case, Google's needs somewhat align with well.. basically anyone who isn't a major ISP.. so that works out for us but there will be other stories where Google is firmly on the opposing side.)
I agree the article's claim is dumb, but not for the reason you suggest. Finding programmers is easy (at least if you're willing to pay a reasonable wage,) and teaching them COBOL is easy as well (any decent programmer should be able to pick up a new language within a week or two.. especially if they're hitting the ground running and have no choice but to learn it.)
The problem is the business logic. Banking isn't particularly simple at the best of times, and all of those ancient systems will have decades worth of hacks built on top of the base logic for whatever corner cases, hardware workarounds and other tweaks that have been needed over the years. A new programmer learning COBOL will have to be wary of those kind of hacks until they understand them. A programmer trying to port the system to another language/system on the other hand will have to understand those hacks all (nearly) at once in order to make sure they properly get replicated.
I don't really see any reason beyond simply "new is better!" to do this. By the time they manage to fully port and test the new system, they'll be wanting to rewrite it again in the next fad-language-of-the-day. I mean name one "top" language today that's been around for more than about 5 years and doesn't already have people crowing about how its past its expiry date and everyone should be rewriting all their code in some other language. There's the occasional specific domain where that happens (C++ for performance-centric applications like games, Fortran for sciency things, Matlab for mathy things and the such) but anything even close to general purpose? Few if any.
A robot tanks the company and then still gets a 10 million dollar payout when they're ousted.
I'm not sure that's much of a lesson since there are plenty of other "biggest economies" that do use social media.
More likely, as many others have stated already, that its more to do with privacy concerns and just generally having cultures where "ME!ME!ME!" ego-stroking isn't considered proper never mind encouraged as it is in the US.
I don't see why any of them should pay extra to support schools.
So none of those people had, have, or even will have kids? If you want a comparison of what your school "support" accomplishes, compare it against the cost of a private school -- it might not be a direct comparison since public schools are already forced to cut corners where they can, but it should give you at least a ball park of what you'd have to pay up front if you (and everyone else) weren't covering it with your taxes.
Basically, that whole "saving for university" thing people do now? Without subsidized education it would be "saving for K-12" instead.
Problem 1: "If Comcast charges you $10,000 per month for internet access and the FCC votes to remove caps, how screwed are you next month?"
Couple of things here:
- If its just a field, that's (relatively) cheap. Bunch of bleachers, some flood lighting, some grass and other such odds and ends. As long as they've got the land, that's not too expensive -- even if its $100k, that's only 2-3 years worth of a single teacher's salary (no idea what Comcast charges a school for internet or whatever so can't make that comparison.)
Now if we're talking full on stadiums, that's a whole other story. Those suckers get into the 10s or even 100s of millions of dollars.
- A lot of that money won't be the school's money. Much of it will be donations from fans, city subsidies, etc that are earmarked specifically for the field. There's a lot of people out there who care more about their kids' sports than their education.
So.. this "balanced" article is claiming that removing price caps won't result in price increases because.. competition? If that was really the case then why would they care about the price caps in the first place -- they should already be well under them if competition was the driving force.
Never mind the fact that we're talking about one of the least competitive markets in the country. Sure critics "subdivide" the market -- based on the service areas defined by where those companies serve. Its not competition if Comcast is your only option in Memphis and Verizon is your only option in Nashville (and no I have no idea who serves those two cities in reality, its just an example. Pick whatever two districts you like as long as they're far enough apart that the nearest "competitor" isn't actually plausible competition. Shouldn't be too hard, especially if you head into smaller towns or rural areas.)
To be fair, he drained the swamp quite well.
He just filled it up again. With people who are just as corrupt but also incompetent! Progress!
See that's all fine and logical when you phrase it that way. But it completely forgets to ask the question: If these "high-poverty" districts didn't exist, where would the people who live in them be? These people don't just disappear because you don't happen to like thinking about them.
You're arguing that rent should be free to jump through the roof and then in the next paragraph state that employers should be free to pay whatever wages they want -- which is pretty much always going to be far below the poverty line (because if they were willing and able to pay a fair wage, the wage floor wouldn't be preventing them from starting up.)
So you want a world where all prices are high and all wages are low. And somehow expect that to be good because you glanced at your friends econ101 text book one time and decided that "AMG Free Market FOAMFOAM!" was the solution to everything?
I didn't say it wasn't bad. I said it wasn't irreversible.
That is, you can suffer for 4 years or you can suffer for 8 (if Trump gets re-elected,) but whether its in 2020 or 2024, the following president will at least have the power to change the screwups Trump has made up to this point.
Whether the next president will actually want to undo Trump's decisions, or whether Trump between now and then does something that's truly irreversible, are both open questions and there's no way to answer them except wait and see.
Pretty sure the DNC emails didn't release themselves. That there was hacking involved is basically beyond question (well unless you take an extremely strict definition of "hacking" that conveniently excludes whatever was done to obtain those emails.)
There was question in the beginning about the source with Russia just being a rumor, but the FBI has since fairly confidently determined that Russia was indeed the culprits. Unless of course you want to start a new conspiracy theory about the FBI working for Iran and implicating Russia just to throw us off the real trail or something goofy like that.
not fulfilling the promise his party-affiliation made to the electorate
Trouble with that line of reasoning is that when there's only two parties to choose from, its extremely common for any one person's interests to not coincide exactly with the party line.
Your representative is there to represent you (well OK, they're there to represent the companies who paid for the campaign that convinced you to vote for them..), not whatever arbitrary ideals their limited choice of party affiliation gives them.
Don't re-elect Trump.
Its not like all of the people who know what they're doing simply vanished, or that there aren't more people who are capable out there but just don't happen to bow to the Trump line and thus are ignored under the current administration.
Trump's been a bumbling idiot as expected, but he so far hasn't done anything irreversible.
Of course that could change at any time -- renegotiating NAFTA is likely to be one of those "who knew international treaties were so hard" moments.
All of the recent military activity may or may not also lead to something more serious. Russia may take exception if the US tries to get too involved in Syria at this point since they're sill (for some reason) backing Asaad.
The same situation applies to North Korea having China's backing, except somewhat scarier since Kim Jong-un is possibly crazy enough to start something they can't finish. It would almost certainly be the end of North Korea either way, but if it escalated into a conflict between China and the US things could get ugly fast and we may well see something akin to the start of WWI where some almost-forgotten-to-history event sparks disastrous consequences for not just the people or countries involved, but the entire world.
The trouble with your argument is Hanlon's razor.. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Trump's entire rise to power, from his nomination to the RNC all the way up to his election as president was basically one giant gong show of ignorance, racism and general dislike of the (prior) status quo.
The Russian hacking certainly didn't help Hillary's cause, but I have some doubts as to how much it actually influenced the election results -- Hillary was pretty disliked before the email scandal and other BS. Maybe it would have been enough to swing the EC.. we'll never know.. but I wouldn't say its exactly clear cause-and-effect trail given everything else that was going on during both the campaign and the primaries before it.