No, because that's not what's being asked. I did a double take when I read it too.
Generally speaking, immigration in the US has three stages: some form of temporary residency (examples would be a sponsored work visa, or a student visa), followed by permanent residency (a green card, given to people who want to live here for the rest of their lives), followed by citizenship.
The last is often thought of as the "easiest" to get because it just requires a test and a swearing in, but in reality it's the hardest because it needs the applicant to pass the other two hurdles first. The first is relatively easy, the second requires either a lot of money (hard for most of us), an employer who can demonstrate you're significantly more talented in a specific field than normal (harder than it sounds, this isn't the H1-B "Can't find anyone who isn't asking for a six figure salary we can't afford" test, though Melania Trump got in this way, so there's that), or marriage/family.
Before anyone points out otherwise, it's occasionally the case, though rare, that someone will immediately apply for a green card without spending any time in the US with which to get a credit record. My mother would be an example, I sponsored her green card shortly after I got my citizenship. But that's relatively rare, and means the information will be absent when the immigration authorities make a determination (so they'll have to ignore it), not that they'll divide by zero and dump a corefile.
Back to the proposal: What they're proposing to do is modify the test between first and second.
Now, the summary claims they're introducing a new "moral" test, but that's actually bullshit. Part of the green card requirements is that you're going to be able to support yourself, there's no risk you'll end up on government anti-poverty programs, and typically they send a stern letter to your sponsor making it clear they will be on the hook if you turn out to be a deadbeat. How enforceable that is is another question, but the principle - you should be able to support yourself if you want permanent residency - isn't new. And, to be honest, it's not even a bad one.
So... is using your American credit score, calculated on the basis of several years of living in the US, going to answer that question - notably whether you're capable of supporting yourself? By itself, no, but it certainly is reasonable for a government determining whether someone should be allowed to live here permanently should use information from your credit score as a part of that determination. If you're not paying your debts, then there's a high risk you'll not support yourself.
There are many concerns - punishing asylum seekers for seeking asylum by permanently stealing their children and placing them in torture camps being the most obvious (and to you shitty apologists itching to claim that because ICE separated a handful of families, suspected of child trafficking, during the Obama regime, this means it's normal or Obama's fault that the Republican regime has used it instead to deter asylum seekers by doing it to literally thousands of refugees, I sincerely hope you all die in the most painful way possible, you are utterly shitty people and the world would be better without you) - I have about the US immigration system right now. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with this proposal. It makes sense. Immigrants should be self sufficient. Using a credit score as a part of a determination for that is a perfectly reasonable way to help ensure that.
Pet peeve: Can we stop using Sid Meier's Civilization as a bible on types opf government?
Examples of Democracies: Britain, USA
Examples of countries that are not Democracies: China, Saudi Arabia
Examples of Republics: China, USA
Examples of Monarchies: Britain, Saudi Arabia
A Republic is merely a country with a non-hereditary head of state. Democracy, using the most widely accepted definition (yes, I know some dickhead is going to respond here with an "AcKsHuReLy DeMoCrAcY iS wHuR eVaRyWoN vOtEs oN eVaRyFiNg" comment) is a measure of how answerable a government is to the governed, usually implemented using an elected legislature and a - written or otherwise - constitutional requirement the government obey the same laws everyone else does (though the dickhead is kinda right that cities have in the past (when cities had a significant amount of autonomy) gone for the everyone-votes-on-everything thing, which is impractical the more people are involved so we don't do it.)
How would you know? We have two parties, the shitty party that says it's shitty, and the other shitty party that claims not to be shitty. The first is arguably the super shitty party right now, but it'll go back to a normal level of shittiness soon enough.
It's fake news. And to all those saying the CDC is the source, not CNN/MSNBC, can you say "Deep state"? When Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Nancy Pelosi are all saying you shouldn't eat lettuce, then you know there has to be a reason. What's more likely? That lettuce has some kind of deadly bacteria on it that ONLY LIEBRALS care about, or that a Soros funded conspiracy is trying to prevent decent hardworking Real Americans from having lettuce because of some benefit ONLY THEY KNOW ABOUT? Is it a coincidence that HOLLYWOOD LIBERAL ELITE ACTRESSES are often PHOTOGRAPHED eating lettuce?
All decent God-fearing conservatives should be eating lettuce, and should be getting them from their supermarkets before the supermarkets can remove this secret source of liberal power from their shelves. If the LIEberalsm BLM, and Antifar are going to say we shouldn't do it, then we should own them by eating as much lettuce as possible.
No, he just doesn't want to regulate them, so he's suggesting that the carriers "regulate" them instead, and by "regulate" I mean "charge", "favor", etc. So you'll continue to get spam, because that's paid for, but you won't get TFA tokens or fraud alerts, because nobody's willing to pay for that.
It has some very nifty features like "Throw all sent mail in the inbox" and "Put replies in the mailbox you sent them from" that you don't find in other email clients.
Got to admit, I don't understand why this isn't standard among threaded email clients. I can understand putting replies in a "Sent items" folder behind the scenes, but the UI shouldn't really show that if you're displaying everything as a "conversation".
While it hasn't always been so, right now the "extreme left", as defined by both the mainstream and right wing media, consists of people who advocate free healthcare, free tuition, helping refugees, and who think corporations aren't a force for good in the US. They are condemned as "violent" when some argue that it is 100% legitimate to confront high up political appointees who are complicit in human rights violations.
The far right, as defined by both the above groups, consists of people who advocate racial supremacy, masculine supremacy, who promote state sanctioned violence against blacks, human rights abuses against refugees, and who murder counter protesters.
So suggesting that this is about the "left" suppressing the "right" in some sort of hypocritical way is misleading and ignoring context. If the extreme left were committing murder and openly advocating actual violence, and the extreme right were doing nothing more extreme than arguing against universal healthcare (which is still a pretty shitty position, but whatever) then you'd expect silence from all sides about "censoring" the "extreme right" and calls from all sides of the political spectrum to deal with the "extreme left".
The reason you're hearing almost all sides call for Facebook to deal with the extreme right is because the extreme right is the problem right now, not the impotent non-murderous "extreme left."
Well, the immediate reason is that advertisers don't like it much when their ad is shown next to a post advocating white supremacy.
The longer term reason is that people who use a site are less inclined to use it if it appears to be a hotbed of truly horrible people. If you walked into a pub, and there was a KKK group in the corner quite openly talking about how much they miss lynchings, and, after a few visits, you noticed they seemed to be there on a regular basis, you'd probably not make it your regular.
Facebook needs users. It desperately needs users. It cannot afford the reputation of being a hangout for neo-nazis or other similar groups.
Toys R Us was making huge operating profits when it went bankrupt. Unfortunately they were saddled with debt, and the debt wasn't debt they generated, but debt the buyers generated when they decided to finance purchasing Toys R Us with a loan.
Sears is being run into the ground by an incompetent who's running a social experiment. It is hard to see if it could be profitable or not otherwise, but there's no good reason to presume that, with companies like Target and Walmart doing fine, it'd fail under a more sane leader.
Can't speak for Yellow Front because I've never heard of them. They may be the unicorn with the outdated business model of which you speak, but the other two were run into the ground for other reasons.
It's true that Lampert is a hedge fund manager but he isn't doing the "Suck the money out until it's dead" thing that Bain capital did with Toys R Us - he's legitimately investing in the company, and trying to make it profitable.
The problem is he sees it as a social experiment rather than a business venture. Or to put it less kindly, he's a complete and utter moron as far as running businesses goes.
Yeah, been playing with Thunderbird for the last week or two, and I wouldn't say it "sucked big time" but it's clearly an unfinished labor of love project. The UI is... a weird mix of mobile and 1990s desktop application with hamburger menus and ugly fonts, the calendar support is missing integrations due to an API change a year ago, the application keeps warning me that mailing list digests are actually scams (WTF? And no, I can't whitelist the sender...), and..
...and there's features in there that are... why are they in there? And if you're going to put them in there, why not finish them first?
Like there's a "Search the web" thing, and you wonder why, and go "Well, OK, guess it might be useful, I might highlight a word and think "What does this mean", and want to Google it", but then you find out the Windows version, and only the Windows version, doesn't support Google, but that's OK, because what you can do is (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) craft a special XML file, and then open the Thunderbird console (yes, there's a console, it's like the one in Firefox), and enter a long convoluted command that includes the path to the XML file, and then, voila! You have Google as a search engine.
Also you can enable and disable cookies. In your mail client. And you need to enable them when you're logging into Google to authenticate, and then disable them afterwards because, seriously, why would you ever want to store cookies sent by web servers displaying your email content? Rather than make an executive decision as to how this should work, the Thunderbird team made this an option. There's a UI for this option, which you're forced to use on a regular basis because on/off isn't appropriate, it needs to be "On for this, off for that", but there's no UI for adding a search engine.
It'll be great when it's finished though. They just have to have a clear idea of what it should be, and then finish that. At this point, despite being an older product, it's not as good as Windows 10 Mail, and that's really unfortunate.
Sears wasn't Bained, it was run by an idiot who put a flawed ideology, based upon a reading of Ayn Rand, as the centerpiece to Sears' strategy. Divisions were purposefully put at war with one another for no good reason, destroying the entire point of having them be part of the same company in the first place. There have been numerous fiascos causing so much in losses that stores closed even before the bankruptcy, the most infamous being one where Sears didn't extend opening hours in the run-up to Christmas one year because none of the divisions wanted to be the one proposing it, and thus forced to pay for it.
Eddie Lampert had enough evidence to realize he and the ideology he was using was running the company into the ground but continued to do so anyway, apparently oblivious to the damage he was doing.
No I am one of those people that doesn't give him a pass for helping the NAZIs rob people who were being sent to death camps.
I give him a pass for not doing that. He didn't rob people going to death camps. He didn't rob Jews in general. He didn't rob anyone.
He saw the possessions of one Jewish family confiscated, he was brought along, on precisely one occasion, with people who were doing that. The Jewish family hadn't been sent to a concentration camp, they'd fled Germany.
Soros was 9 years old.
Soros didn't have the ability to stop what was going on, and as a matter of fact had to play the role of "Godson" to a German bureaucrat or else face death. But the interview you've read is usually quoted out of context and with the key points ignored. Here's the key quote, from the interview that's always being quoted out of context:
whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
Witnesses are not culpable just because they're witnesses.
Now, I don't necessarily blame people for misreading that interview, he prattles on about his role in the markets, and how if he didn't do something, someone else would, but he's trying to draw a distinction between that and what happened when he was young, when he was trying to survive a regime that wanted to murder him and his family. He's always clearly blindsided by the questioning, which is probably why it's so garbled. There are known facts about what happened, such as this happening one time, and one time only, that are far from clear in what Soros says.
Soros is, for whatever reason, the right's bogeyman and virtually everything written about him needs to be taken with several truckloads of salt as a result. There's more misinformation about him than there is left wing misinformation about the Koch brothers, probably because Soros has made more enemies and is worse at the politics than the Kochs are. Soros was unfortunate enough to be brought up in a country whose leaders, and to a certain extent population, wanted to murder him. It's easy to manipulate any story of survival into a story of immorality. Be careful what you believe.
1. Eliminate oversight and quality control.
2. Eliminate oversight and quality control
3. Remove the ability of people to pay for healthcare with the exception of the very lowest, cheapest, part of the system. Eliminate access to hospitals and emergency care for everyone except the super rich.
4. Remove all privacy controls and ensure your private healthcare information is available to anyone who wants it, from employers to banks to marketing firms.
5. Only require that people be told the costs of their procedures immediately before the procedure is due to happen. Make no attempt to ensure costs are managable, affordable, or clear.
6. Reduce the costs of procedures by 1-2% by ensuring that anyone injured as a result of a doctor making a mistake has no recourse.
I'm not sure that "Removing access to" is the same thing as "Fix", but if that's your definition, then sure, yeah, your six points will do that.
Alternative idea: we copy the British NHS. Costs 1/3 per person of the American system, much more effective. The NHS has its faults, but note that the British system doesn't ban private healthcare, it just makes it mostly unnecessary.
I would say that if the DoJ is considering starting the process of putting together charges, then he wasn't correct, no. If the DoJ is considering charges now, then, at the time Assange said "Ooo I'm going to hide in an embassy and it's not because I've done anything that violates Swedish law it's because of the Americans honest" then we can be sure of two things:
1. There were no US charges against Assange at the time.
2. Because of (1) there was no chance of Assange being extradited to the US at the time.
Everyone here posting "This means Assange was right!" has got this completely backwards. The announcement today means that Assange was completely 100% wrong. (And, to be honest, I suspect he know the excuses were false at the time anyway.)
No, going to Sweden wouldn't have improved his chances of being extradited to the US over staying in Britain. They would have increased the chance of him being investigated for various sexual assault/rape charges, and he might have seen himself ultimately jailed for that, in a Swedish prison, but the idea that Sweden was going to extradite Assange to the US when the UK wouldn't is ridiculous - UK-US relations are far, far, closer and more interdependent.
But that was never a health issue, the other aspects of smoking cigarettes are what lead to lung cancer, not the nicotine itself.
While it's technically correct to point out Nicotine doesn't by itself cause cancer, it does reduce the body's defenses against cancer, so it does ultimately increase the chances of getting it regardless.
I agree adults interested in nicotine should be "encouraged" to vape instead of smoke, I'm just pointing out that it's not exactly healthy either, just not in the same ballpark as smoking.
Or to put my criticism of what you've written a different way, there's a difference between a programming language including a few features that could, if deliberately misused, cause a problem, and a language that cannot be used by a competent programmer without various types of unintentional problem. And no, handwaving and saying "Ah, but then they're not competent" is not an answer: Dennis Richie could be that programmer.
You are not that smart. I'm not insulting you, I'm just telling you the truth, and the truth to every C and C++ programmer sitting here smirking about how they can write solid C code. No, you can't. You may be better at it than the VB programmers in the other office, but you're not smart enough to never miscalculate a pointer, never accidentally dereference, or use pointer arithmetic on a pointer that starts at, null. You'll live long enough to put a buffer overflow in a production environment. You'll "learn" from each event, sure, but the worst part is, you will do it again. If you're very lucky, your code will be peer reviewed, and the bugs will get spotted before they go live.
The difference between a bad C programmer and a good C programmer is not that the latter avoids buffer overflows. It's that the latter is smart enough to know she won't. That she'll eventually fuck it up.
For what it's worth C is especially awful because, in addition to the basic bounds checks every normal language has, so much of its behavior is "undefined", yet developers are actively encouraged to take advantage of its undefined behavior to achieve useful work.
C is an artifact of its time, it's a language designed to program a multitasking operating system into a 16 bit minicomputer that had as little as of 8K of RAM. At that time, not only were the overheads of bounds checking a problem, but writing a programming language that supported such features was hard due to the need to ensure the compiler would fit into memory. Somehow, instead of saying "Wow, Unix has some great ideas, let's incorporate the better ones into the next generation of operating systems", we're stuck with Unix and its clones as the major computing standard at the moment (well, together with Windows which, because of the popularity of C in the 1980s at Microsoft, ended up with the same faults and then some.)
Unix has its flaws even if you dump the code and rewrite it to work in exactly the same way but using (gag!) Modula 2 or some other "safe" language. But it's worse because you can't trust it. You have thousands of C programs installed. And some of them were written by people like you, people who think that they can program in C without making a mistake.
And then you use the same program to shoot your second foot. And then a hacker uses the same program to shoot your "third" foot which happens to be the user's left foot...
Or maybe, hear me out here, maybe, when someone loses $250,000 worth of data trying to do the right thing then we as an industry have completely failed.
Every time someone posts to Slashdot "Ho ho! How funny it is such a man was an idiot and misfortune befell him!", they're implying we don't produce stuff where safe usage is intuitive and obvious.
You mean the ones that are controlled by Republicans that allow mail in voting? Like Florida?
The ones that are still receiving votes by mail postmarked before the election, because, I don't know, the person who mailed it was in Iraq or something? Now why would an American citizen be in Iraq? Oh wait, I know!
Exactly. And here's the thing: while we can blame "clueless managers" or whatever for much of the damage (x86 "won" because of IBM's decision to make it part of the PC, which then legitimized personal computers to businesses that were now coming under the control of tech-illiterate boomers, but only because IBM, and then that meant that only IBM's PCs were considered business worthy, for example), the reality is that tech people ran with it, and often made some of the dumb decisions that lead to disasters like the x86 architecture in the first place.
We're like any group of people. As individuals we can be very smart. As a group, we're dumb. And part of us being dumb is that as a group we rarely work together towards great outcomes, merely the ones that have the least resistance. And ironically the reason many ideas have the least resistance is because they're easier to understand.
People say "Windoze is proof we're idiots", but, you know, Unix isn't that hot either. It's a product of its time, trying to squeeze performance out of a slow CPU with very little RAM. The result was C, and an operating system written in C, and the result of that has been nearly fifty years of programming headaches including security holes. We've known how to do it right since before C, with higher level data structures and managed pointers, and capability architectures in hardware, but bad, but at the time necessary, decisions made at the beginning of the 1970s are still how we do things today.
I'm babbling, sorry about that. I just wish our industry was the "meritocracy" so many insist it is. It isn't. A massive amount of the stuff we do is really, really, bad. People stay on as programmers because they can "stand the heat" of our poorly ventilated cockroach infested kitchen, not because they're good cooks.
I have zero interest in having a constructive discussion with you as you clearly are just interested in "shitting all over" those investigating Facebook's behavior in Britain while grandstanding on Slashdot about it.
You are obviously just as contemptuous of democracy and the rule of law as Zuck is.
This isn't a debate and it doesn't matter whether British politicians are angry at Facebook or not. The fact is Facebook was the key to a major disinformation campaign that has caused severe damage to Britain and its constitution. Zuck MUST cooperate with the relevant authorities investigating it. If he doesn't, then Britain should, and must, take strong action against Facebook, including seizing their British assets and preventing them from operating in the UK.
By "US business owners" you mean "American owners of businesses that operate in the UK', and by "haters" you mean "Parliament, the British legislature which is investigating how the aforementioned business was part of a campaign to undermine British democracy by ensuring the most important British constitutional decision in four decades would be undermined by misinformation."
Zuck chooses to have Facebook operate in the UK. As long as he does, he's responsible for what it Facebook does there. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with his actions being questioned by Parliament. How DARE YOU suggest that his behavior in avoiding parliamentary scrutiny is anything other than cowardly, irresponsible, and contemptuous of democracy and the rule of law.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because that's not what's being asked. I did a double take when I read it too.
Generally speaking, immigration in the US has three stages: some form of temporary residency (examples would be a sponsored work visa, or a student visa), followed by permanent residency (a green card, given to people who want to live here for the rest of their lives), followed by citizenship.
The last is often thought of as the "easiest" to get because it just requires a test and a swearing in, but in reality it's the hardest because it needs the applicant to pass the other two hurdles first. The first is relatively easy, the second requires either a lot of money (hard for most of us), an employer who can demonstrate you're significantly more talented in a specific field than normal (harder than it sounds, this isn't the H1-B "Can't find anyone who isn't asking for a six figure salary we can't afford" test, though Melania Trump got in this way, so there's that), or marriage/family.
Before anyone points out otherwise, it's occasionally the case, though rare, that someone will immediately apply for a green card without spending any time in the US with which to get a credit record. My mother would be an example, I sponsored her green card shortly after I got my citizenship. But that's relatively rare, and means the information will be absent when the immigration authorities make a determination (so they'll have to ignore it), not that they'll divide by zero and dump a corefile.
Back to the proposal: What they're proposing to do is modify the test between first and second.
Now, the summary claims they're introducing a new "moral" test, but that's actually bullshit. Part of the green card requirements is that you're going to be able to support yourself, there's no risk you'll end up on government anti-poverty programs, and typically they send a stern letter to your sponsor making it clear they will be on the hook if you turn out to be a deadbeat. How enforceable that is is another question, but the principle - you should be able to support yourself if you want permanent residency - isn't new. And, to be honest, it's not even a bad one.
So... is using your American credit score, calculated on the basis of several years of living in the US, going to answer that question - notably whether you're capable of supporting yourself? By itself, no, but it certainly is reasonable for a government determining whether someone should be allowed to live here permanently should use information from your credit score as a part of that determination. If you're not paying your debts, then there's a high risk you'll not support yourself.
There are many concerns - punishing asylum seekers for seeking asylum by permanently stealing their children and placing them in torture camps being the most obvious (and to you shitty apologists itching to claim that because ICE separated a handful of families, suspected of child trafficking, during the Obama regime, this means it's normal or Obama's fault that the Republican regime has used it instead to deter asylum seekers by doing it to literally thousands of refugees, I sincerely hope you all die in the most painful way possible, you are utterly shitty people and the world would be better without you) - I have about the US immigration system right now. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with this proposal. It makes sense. Immigrants should be self sufficient. Using a credit score as a part of a determination for that is a perfectly reasonable way to help ensure that.
Pet peeve: Can we stop using Sid Meier's Civilization as a bible on types opf government?
Examples of Democracies: Britain, USA
Examples of countries that are not Democracies: China, Saudi Arabia
Examples of Republics: China, USA
Examples of Monarchies: Britain, Saudi Arabia
A Republic is merely a country with a non-hereditary head of state. Democracy, using the most widely accepted definition (yes, I know some dickhead is going to respond here with an "AcKsHuReLy DeMoCrAcY iS wHuR eVaRyWoN vOtEs oN eVaRyFiNg" comment) is a measure of how answerable a government is to the governed, usually implemented using an elected legislature and a - written or otherwise - constitutional requirement the government obey the same laws everyone else does (though the dickhead is kinda right that cities have in the past (when cities had a significant amount of autonomy) gone for the everyone-votes-on-everything thing, which is impractical the more people are involved so we don't do it.)
How would you know? We have two parties, the shitty party that says it's shitty, and the other shitty party that claims not to be shitty. The first is arguably the super shitty party right now, but it'll go back to a normal level of shittiness soon enough.
Or, you know, I might be a liberal trying to get right wing extremists to eat tainted lettuce.
It's fake news. And to all those saying the CDC is the source, not CNN/MSNBC, can you say "Deep state"? When Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Nancy Pelosi are all saying you shouldn't eat lettuce, then you know there has to be a reason. What's more likely? That lettuce has some kind of deadly bacteria on it that ONLY LIEBRALS care about, or that a Soros funded conspiracy is trying to prevent decent hardworking Real Americans from having lettuce because of some benefit ONLY THEY KNOW ABOUT? Is it a coincidence that HOLLYWOOD LIBERAL ELITE ACTRESSES are often PHOTOGRAPHED eating lettuce?
All decent God-fearing conservatives should be eating lettuce, and should be getting them from their supermarkets before the supermarkets can remove this secret source of liberal power from their shelves. If the LIEberalsm BLM, and Antifar are going to say we shouldn't do it, then we should own them by eating as much lettuce as possible.
It's the only way.
No, he just doesn't want to regulate them, so he's suggesting that the carriers "regulate" them instead, and by "regulate" I mean "charge", "favor", etc. So you'll continue to get spam, because that's paid for, but you won't get TFA tokens or fraud alerts, because nobody's willing to pay for that.
Got to admit, I don't understand why this isn't standard among threaded email clients. I can understand putting replies in a "Sent items" folder behind the scenes, but the UI shouldn't really show that if you're displaying everything as a "conversation".
While it hasn't always been so, right now the "extreme left", as defined by both the mainstream and right wing media, consists of people who advocate free healthcare, free tuition, helping refugees, and who think corporations aren't a force for good in the US. They are condemned as "violent" when some argue that it is 100% legitimate to confront high up political appointees who are complicit in human rights violations.
The far right, as defined by both the above groups, consists of people who advocate racial supremacy, masculine supremacy, who promote state sanctioned violence against blacks, human rights abuses against refugees, and who murder counter protesters.
So suggesting that this is about the "left" suppressing the "right" in some sort of hypocritical way is misleading and ignoring context. If the extreme left were committing murder and openly advocating actual violence, and the extreme right were doing nothing more extreme than arguing against universal healthcare (which is still a pretty shitty position, but whatever) then you'd expect silence from all sides about "censoring" the "extreme right" and calls from all sides of the political spectrum to deal with the "extreme left".
The reason you're hearing almost all sides call for Facebook to deal with the extreme right is because the extreme right is the problem right now, not the impotent non-murderous "extreme left."
That isn't the case right now.
Well, the immediate reason is that advertisers don't like it much when their ad is shown next to a post advocating white supremacy.
The longer term reason is that people who use a site are less inclined to use it if it appears to be a hotbed of truly horrible people. If you walked into a pub, and there was a KKK group in the corner quite openly talking about how much they miss lynchings, and, after a few visits, you noticed they seemed to be there on a regular basis, you'd probably not make it your regular.
Facebook needs users. It desperately needs users. It cannot afford the reputation of being a hangout for neo-nazis or other similar groups.
Toys R Us was making huge operating profits when it went bankrupt. Unfortunately they were saddled with debt, and the debt wasn't debt they generated, but debt the buyers generated when they decided to finance purchasing Toys R Us with a loan.
Sears is being run into the ground by an incompetent who's running a social experiment. It is hard to see if it could be profitable or not otherwise, but there's no good reason to presume that, with companies like Target and Walmart doing fine, it'd fail under a more sane leader.
Can't speak for Yellow Front because I've never heard of them. They may be the unicorn with the outdated business model of which you speak, but the other two were run into the ground for other reasons.
It's true that Lampert is a hedge fund manager but he isn't doing the "Suck the money out until it's dead" thing that Bain capital did with Toys R Us - he's legitimately investing in the company, and trying to make it profitable.
The problem is he sees it as a social experiment rather than a business venture. Or to put it less kindly, he's a complete and utter moron as far as running businesses goes.
Yeah, been playing with Thunderbird for the last week or two, and I wouldn't say it "sucked big time" but it's clearly an unfinished labor of love project. The UI is... a weird mix of mobile and 1990s desktop application with hamburger menus and ugly fonts, the calendar support is missing integrations due to an API change a year ago, the application keeps warning me that mailing list digests are actually scams (WTF? And no, I can't whitelist the sender...), and..
Like there's a "Search the web" thing, and you wonder why, and go "Well, OK, guess it might be useful, I might highlight a word and think "What does this mean", and want to Google it", but then you find out the Windows version, and only the Windows version, doesn't support Google, but that's OK, because what you can do is (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) craft a special XML file, and then open the Thunderbird console (yes, there's a console, it's like the one in Firefox), and enter a long convoluted command that includes the path to the XML file, and then, voila! You have Google as a search engine.
Also you can enable and disable cookies. In your mail client. And you need to enable them when you're logging into Google to authenticate, and then disable them afterwards because, seriously, why would you ever want to store cookies sent by web servers displaying your email content? Rather than make an executive decision as to how this should work, the Thunderbird team made this an option. There's a UI for this option, which you're forced to use on a regular basis because on/off isn't appropriate, it needs to be "On for this, off for that", but there's no UI for adding a search engine.
It'll be great when it's finished though. They just have to have a clear idea of what it should be, and then finish that. At this point, despite being an older product, it's not as good as Windows 10 Mail, and that's really unfortunate.
Sears wasn't Bained, it was run by an idiot who put a flawed ideology, based upon a reading of Ayn Rand, as the centerpiece to Sears' strategy. Divisions were purposefully put at war with one another for no good reason, destroying the entire point of having them be part of the same company in the first place. There have been numerous fiascos causing so much in losses that stores closed even before the bankruptcy, the most infamous being one where Sears didn't extend opening hours in the run-up to Christmas one year because none of the divisions wanted to be the one proposing it, and thus forced to pay for it.
Eddie Lampert had enough evidence to realize he and the ideology he was using was running the company into the ground but continued to do so anyway, apparently oblivious to the damage he was doing.
I give him a pass for not doing that. He didn't rob people going to death camps. He didn't rob Jews in general. He didn't rob anyone.
He saw the possessions of one Jewish family confiscated, he was brought along, on precisely one occasion, with people who were doing that. The Jewish family hadn't been sent to a concentration camp, they'd fled Germany.
Soros was 9 years old.
Soros didn't have the ability to stop what was going on, and as a matter of fact had to play the role of "Godson" to a German bureaucrat or else face death. But the interview you've read is usually quoted out of context and with the key points ignored. Here's the key quote, from the interview that's always being quoted out of context:
Witnesses are not culpable just because they're witnesses.
Now, I don't necessarily blame people for misreading that interview, he prattles on about his role in the markets, and how if he didn't do something, someone else would, but he's trying to draw a distinction between that and what happened when he was young, when he was trying to survive a regime that wanted to murder him and his family. He's always clearly blindsided by the questioning, which is probably why it's so garbled. There are known facts about what happened, such as this happening one time, and one time only, that are far from clear in what Soros says.
Soros is, for whatever reason, the right's bogeyman and virtually everything written about him needs to be taken with several truckloads of salt as a result. There's more misinformation about him than there is left wing misinformation about the Koch brothers, probably because Soros has made more enemies and is worse at the politics than the Kochs are. Soros was unfortunate enough to be brought up in a country whose leaders, and to a certain extent population, wanted to murder him. It's easy to manipulate any story of survival into a story of immorality. Be careful what you believe.
Reworded:
1. Eliminate oversight and quality control.
2. Eliminate oversight and quality control
3. Remove the ability of people to pay for healthcare with the exception of the very lowest, cheapest, part of the system. Eliminate access to hospitals and emergency care for everyone except the super rich.
4. Remove all privacy controls and ensure your private healthcare information is available to anyone who wants it, from employers to banks to marketing firms.
5. Only require that people be told the costs of their procedures immediately before the procedure is due to happen. Make no attempt to ensure costs are managable, affordable, or clear.
6. Reduce the costs of procedures by 1-2% by ensuring that anyone injured as a result of a doctor making a mistake has no recourse.
I'm not sure that "Removing access to" is the same thing as "Fix", but if that's your definition, then sure, yeah, your six points will do that.
Alternative idea: we copy the British NHS. Costs 1/3 per person of the American system, much more effective. The NHS has its faults, but note that the British system doesn't ban private healthcare, it just makes it mostly unnecessary.
I would say that if the DoJ is considering starting the process of putting together charges, then he wasn't correct, no. If the DoJ is considering charges now, then, at the time Assange said "Ooo I'm going to hide in an embassy and it's not because I've done anything that violates Swedish law it's because of the Americans honest" then we can be sure of two things:
1. There were no US charges against Assange at the time.
2. Because of (1) there was no chance of Assange being extradited to the US at the time.
Everyone here posting "This means Assange was right!" has got this completely backwards. The announcement today means that Assange was completely 100% wrong. (And, to be honest, I suspect he know the excuses were false at the time anyway.)
No, going to Sweden wouldn't have improved his chances of being extradited to the US over staying in Britain. They would have increased the chance of him being investigated for various sexual assault/rape charges, and he might have seen himself ultimately jailed for that, in a Swedish prison, but the idea that Sweden was going to extradite Assange to the US when the UK wouldn't is ridiculous - UK-US relations are far, far, closer and more interdependent.
While it's technically correct to point out Nicotine doesn't by itself cause cancer, it does reduce the body's defenses against cancer, so it does ultimately increase the chances of getting it regardless.
I agree adults interested in nicotine should be "encouraged" to vape instead of smoke, I'm just pointing out that it's not exactly healthy either, just not in the same ballpark as smoking.
In other words I am very smart.
Or to put my criticism of what you've written a different way, there's a difference between a programming language including a few features that could, if deliberately misused, cause a problem, and a language that cannot be used by a competent programmer without various types of unintentional problem. And no, handwaving and saying "Ah, but then they're not competent" is not an answer: Dennis Richie could be that programmer.
You are not that smart. I'm not insulting you, I'm just telling you the truth, and the truth to every C and C++ programmer sitting here smirking about how they can write solid C code. No, you can't. You may be better at it than the VB programmers in the other office, but you're not smart enough to never miscalculate a pointer, never accidentally dereference, or use pointer arithmetic on a pointer that starts at, null. You'll live long enough to put a buffer overflow in a production environment. You'll "learn" from each event, sure, but the worst part is, you will do it again. If you're very lucky, your code will be peer reviewed, and the bugs will get spotted before they go live.
The difference between a bad C programmer and a good C programmer is not that the latter avoids buffer overflows. It's that the latter is smart enough to know she won't. That she'll eventually fuck it up.
For what it's worth C is especially awful because, in addition to the basic bounds checks every normal language has, so much of its behavior is "undefined", yet developers are actively encouraged to take advantage of its undefined behavior to achieve useful work.
C is an artifact of its time, it's a language designed to program a multitasking operating system into a 16 bit minicomputer that had as little as of 8K of RAM. At that time, not only were the overheads of bounds checking a problem, but writing a programming language that supported such features was hard due to the need to ensure the compiler would fit into memory. Somehow, instead of saying "Wow, Unix has some great ideas, let's incorporate the better ones into the next generation of operating systems", we're stuck with Unix and its clones as the major computing standard at the moment (well, together with Windows which, because of the popularity of C in the 1980s at Microsoft, ended up with the same faults and then some.)
Unix has its flaws even if you dump the code and rewrite it to work in exactly the same way but using (gag!) Modula 2 or some other "safe" language. But it's worse because you can't trust it. You have thousands of C programs installed. And some of them were written by people like you, people who think that they can program in C without making a mistake.
And then you use the same program to shoot your second foot. And then a hacker uses the same program to shoot your "third" foot which happens to be the user's left foot...
Or maybe, hear me out here, maybe, when someone loses $250,000 worth of data trying to do the right thing then we as an industry have completely failed.
Every time someone posts to Slashdot "Ho ho! How funny it is such a man was an idiot and misfortune befell him!", they're implying we don't produce stuff where safe usage is intuitive and obvious.
We need to do better.
You mean the ones that are controlled by Republicans that allow mail in voting? Like Florida?
The ones that are still receiving votes by mail postmarked before the election, because, I don't know, the person who mailed it was in Iraq or something? Now why would an American citizen be in Iraq? Oh wait, I know!
Exactly. And here's the thing: while we can blame "clueless managers" or whatever for much of the damage (x86 "won" because of IBM's decision to make it part of the PC, which then legitimized personal computers to businesses that were now coming under the control of tech-illiterate boomers, but only because IBM, and then that meant that only IBM's PCs were considered business worthy, for example), the reality is that tech people ran with it, and often made some of the dumb decisions that lead to disasters like the x86 architecture in the first place.
We're like any group of people. As individuals we can be very smart. As a group, we're dumb. And part of us being dumb is that as a group we rarely work together towards great outcomes, merely the ones that have the least resistance. And ironically the reason many ideas have the least resistance is because they're easier to understand.
People say "Windoze is proof we're idiots", but, you know, Unix isn't that hot either. It's a product of its time, trying to squeeze performance out of a slow CPU with very little RAM. The result was C, and an operating system written in C, and the result of that has been nearly fifty years of programming headaches including security holes. We've known how to do it right since before C, with higher level data structures and managed pointers, and capability architectures in hardware, but bad, but at the time necessary, decisions made at the beginning of the 1970s are still how we do things today.
I'm babbling, sorry about that. I just wish our industry was the "meritocracy" so many insist it is. It isn't. A massive amount of the stuff we do is really, really, bad. People stay on as programmers because they can "stand the heat" of our poorly ventilated cockroach infested kitchen, not because they're good cooks.
I have zero interest in having a constructive discussion with you as you clearly are just interested in "shitting all over" those investigating Facebook's behavior in Britain while grandstanding on Slashdot about it.
You are obviously just as contemptuous of democracy and the rule of law as Zuck is.
This isn't a debate and it doesn't matter whether British politicians are angry at Facebook or not. The fact is Facebook was the key to a major disinformation campaign that has caused severe damage to Britain and its constitution. Zuck MUST cooperate with the relevant authorities investigating it. If he doesn't, then Britain should, and must, take strong action against Facebook, including seizing their British assets and preventing them from operating in the UK.
By "US business owners" you mean "American owners of businesses that operate in the UK', and by "haters" you mean "Parliament, the British legislature which is investigating how the aforementioned business was part of a campaign to undermine British democracy by ensuring the most important British constitutional decision in four decades would be undermined by misinformation."
Zuck chooses to have Facebook operate in the UK. As long as he does, he's responsible for what it Facebook does there. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with his actions being questioned by Parliament. How DARE YOU suggest that his behavior in avoiding parliamentary scrutiny is anything other than cowardly, irresponsible, and contemptuous of democracy and the rule of law.