Here's one possible reason they might care - they may be entering the market, and this would 'conveniently' harm existing currencies that would be in competition with theirs: https://cryptoinsider.21mil.co...
Indeed, this really drives home the "It's not a computer, it's just a toy / dumb appliance" mentality that the major smartphone and smartphone OS vendors have.
I have eight cores in my phone but I'm not allowed to use them for actually running stuff on? I've been purchasing computers since 1995 and every one I've purchased, I've been allowed to choose what to run on it, and had the choice to run software that max'd the CPU if I wanted to.
Sure, not every "Joe Public" type user is going to understand how to do this without overheating their device (I've seen people do bad things like block laptop vents), but mass-banning the entire range of applications? A computing device *should* be able to run at 100% CPU under ordinary circumstances without overheating - if it can't, it's faulty.
This is why smartphones have failed utterly at competing with the desktop, and why desktops are still years ahead for getting real work done... five or ten years ago I predicted that smartphones would usurp the desktop, and I was wrong, they remain basically toys / dumb appliances, with a few useful applications (e.g. navigation, flashlight, camera).
It also seems like an odd coincidence that they do this shortly after we hear that Google might be considering entering the cryptocurrency space: https://cryptoinsider.21mil.co....... so a move that just might happen to help hurt competing currencies?
So I must jump through extra hoops, for no reason, because the developer wants to spite the vendor, due to an issue over a feature I don't even use... no thank you, I don't jump through hoops for nobody. I'm a software developer and I don't make my users jump through unnecessary extra hoops on my own emotional wims. I'll just use alternatives.
As I said, I used to be a VLC fan, but this grates me.
Huawei devices are now forbidden to download VLC. We're fed up with their OS breaking VLC all the time.
Huawei basically kills VLC when the screen is shutting down. So that kills VLC when it plays audio in background.
This is childish behavior as a developer; there are many other (better-for-users) ways to deal with - including, if you detect those devices, show a message explaining that background audio won't work on this device for reason X. I am affected by this issue; I used to like VLC and actually would have wanted to use it to play videos (I don't care about background audio), but this petty behavior - randomly blocking long-time VLC fans like me from using it (for no reason as I don't even use the background audio feature) by banning entire ranges of devices. They're basically 'attacking' their own users just to spite a particular vendor.
They're actually good phones, really fast, perform well, there is no 'performance problem' - this is a very specific issue and behavior that isn't a performance issue. Other developers seem to manage to release Apps that work for these phones without mass-blocking them.
Developing for a broad variety of platforms means encountering issues with specific platforms, and dealing with it in a reasonable way; if you're a developer you have to expect that.
Smartphones "should have" started usurping the desktop by now, but for various reasons (no serious innovation in that direction from big players, and no focus on turning smartphones from 'non-dumb appliances' into real serious OS's / computing devices), so desktop computers remain the only way to do real "serious" work... this actually remains Microsoft's 'hidden strength' and they should be focusing on that, rather than trying to 'me too' what Google have done (Apps and their App Store, invasion of privacy etc... they're trying to copy Apple and Google, but they don't have the market position of either on phones to pull it off).
The mess that is the new Skype (that Microsoft are excitedly bragging about) is just one example... they want to drop Skype Classic already, yet the new Skype App can't do basic things (like have two open at once, message syncing doesn't even work properly, their 'Skype Web App' is even more of a mess).
People aren't mass-adopting smartphones and privacy-invading [cr]Apps because they're 'better than desktop/notebook computers'.. they're adopting smartphones because they need a phone anyway, and smartphones are occupying that niche, and have some benefits like built-in maps/GPS.
What MS should be trying to do, I think, is focus on trying to make desktops cheaper (e.g. ARM-based Windows? Cheaper OS?) - Intel have been helping dig Microsoft's grave by keeping PC's overpriced (new competition from AMD may help that slightly). None of this is easy; they have their work cut out for them.
To be fair, the Apple engineers may well be capable of doing the necessary design; it's possible the discussion went something like, "Well, we could do A, B and C but it's going to delay production by a year" but the business/marketing managers said, "But we want to be able to announce it offers performance level Y by next month" and went ahead. Either way, it isn't acceptable. Apple have the cash to absorb a launch delay like that, but they are probably afraid of longer-term erosion of public perception of their products.
No, it's why engineers focus on thermal design as an important issue when designing laptops. Or at least, they're supposed to. I have a high-end laptop and it rarely throttles, even under constant heavy load. Why? Because it wasn't designed by amateurs. Stop making excuses for crap. This isn't rocket science, this isn't something new that humans are only just starting to figure out; engineers have been successfully designing laptops for given thermal loads since probably before you were born. If you advertise that it supports a given CPU, it better support that configuration with relatively minimal throttling, or don't advertise it as such.
I have been following for a while as Google increasingly used all the exact same disgusting tactics to force their stuff on everyone that Microsoft used in the '90s (in some ways worse - e.g. even at the height of Microsoft's power they would have never dared to demand anyone who sells software that runs on Windows must give a 30% cut to them, yet somehow this absurd forced-middleman-cut has become the new normal... there's no valid reason an 'App store' should require more than 5% for the services they provide, and in any case there should be competing App stores on any platform). I followed the Microsoft case closely back then; there are so many parallels, even the excuses regurgitated by the apologists are the same. What's interesting though is the US media seem to be silent on the case (while the Microsoft case got heavy coverage) - I know it's an EU court case, but if you ask me, it's highly suspicious that US media have been so silent on all the tactics they've been using (e.g. strong-arming OEMs).
Your point is true, but the situation's actually even worse, as ultimately what does the Samsung do that a feature-comparable-but-much-cheaper Chinese phone won't do? Not much. Hence Samsung has "only" about 28% market share in India (while Apple don't even make the market share pie chart, getting bundled into "Others"), while Chinese brands dominate (https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/chinese-brands-dominate-indian-smartphone-market-51-share-q1-2017-report-62166)... Apple's a ripoff, Samsung less so, but I now only buy Chinese brands (my current Huawei is specification-wise almost as good as a Samsung S9 but literally half the price). Indians are less likely to buy into the 'pay 2 or 3 times as much because muh status' than Americans, but I'm surprised Apple are even doing as well as they are there, relatively.
"Mistake"? Or is this the journalist an Apple shill? In which case the idea is to deliberately strawman the competition. This reads like an Apple ad, pushing fallacy of false dilemma.
His other articles have headlines like this: "Here Are All The Cool New Things Coming To Your iPhone And iPad Soon", "Apple Will Reportedly Help India's Telecom Regulator Build An Anti-Spam App", "This Is The Brand-New Apple TV 4K", "These 12 Augmented Reality Experiences On iPhones Already Look Like The Future" etc.
There are, as you say, plenty of good-value alternatives to over-priced iPhones that are less than half the price of an iPhone and deliver comparable functionality in the middle of the market.
The mobile cartels lobbied for this to help protect their profits; from another source: "The Ugandan government has implemented a law forcing mobile users to pay taxes to use mobile money and social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Skype"... basically the mobile providers are unhappy that users are able to send messages to each other at very low cost using the data network over FB messenger, WhatsApp, Skype etc., where in the past they used to be able to charge exorbitant rates if those same messages were sent as SMS.
Thank you, you just helped prove my point by regurgitating a string of the same irrational anti-porn talking points they're teaching kids in school - silly arguments that are popular with millenials as what is effectively the new Puritanism takes hold in our culture... just a few decades ago it seemed we were entering an era of more enlightened, rational values. Now the curtains are closing and it's going dark again.
I was one of Microsoft's harshest critics back in the 90s, but the ugly reality is we were better under their monopoly than we are today. E.g. even at the height of their monopoly, MS would never have had the gall to demand a 30% cut of every single sale of any software ever made for the Windows platform (yet this absurd 'new normal' is the situation developers are in with the Apple and Google duopoly - and most developers today even think it's normal that the OS developer should take a massive cut just for some simple middleman services, as younger developers have never known different.) (And while 30% might sound relatively low, that used to basically be the typical developer's profit margin, so today most App developers lose money, while the 'App store cartels' profit richly - and companies like Google offer a share of those profits to OEMs like Samsung to hook them into further pushing their ecosystem - while App developers are expected, presumably, to be subsidized by their parents as they live at home, or something). (I am not an App developer; this is one of the reasons.)
$0 for the certificate, plus the hours you have to pay a technically skilled person to update your websites. But fortunately website admins all work for free, so it's still $0. Oh no wait, they don't, those skills are expensive. Or, it's free if system administrator time is valued at nothing.
Not all hosts support installing LetsEncrypt certificates for free, either.
Then of course when something goes wrong with that it isn't enough people will be like ah ha! You actually should have used multiple providers
Exactly; one of the core selling points of "cloud" services is that they're supposed to offer increased fault tolerance (e.g. a virtual server can be restored in a different data center if one data center explodes)... so now these knee-jerk Google defenders are telling us we need 'multiple cloud providers - let's call this new service a "cloudcloud" - so when your cloud service is shut down you can continue running your backup clouds from the cloudcloud... what next, we need a cloudcloudcloud for your cloudclouds?
The core issue here isn't that a server went down - of course everyone knows servers can go down - it's that they were deliberately shut down, with no warning, with unreasonable recourse, after the user paid for a service that Google failed to provide through incompetence. It should be a an SLA issue, you should be able to sue your service provider for something like this, but you can bet Google's lawyers have covered everything in the fine print.
This is like, you order a burger at a restaurant, and instead of a burger, you get a plate with shit on it. And then the people here would say, 'well you should have expected that you might get shit on the plate you dumb-ass, why didn't you order five burgers from five different places!?' Uh, because no reasonable person expects that.
I admit I initially made the mistake of naively believing the media bullcrap that Felix was some sort of racist anti-Semite Nazi. Eventually, I started watching his actual videos, and seeing the entire context, and much more of his body of work, and realized that the media was literally full of sh-t.
He made a minor slip of the sort that many people make now and again, and he sincerely apologized for it. He didn't go out and lynch someone. People are acting like he literally lynched someone. I'm not excusing saying the N word, but come on, the pitchfork mob has lost all perspective.
these companies have EVERY right to restrict how that content is used in this instance
You're slightly confused; they do have the right to specify contractual restrictions on how their game is used, however, it has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, it's in the End-User License Agreement that you implicitly agree to when you purchase their product, and the DMCA is not a tool for remedy of a EULA breach. Also, presumably they failed to include it in the EULA in the first place, and in fact explicitly encouraged and allowed the production of such independent content... because 20/20 hindsight. So now they must either retroactively add some fine print to a EULA that was never signed, or abuse the DMCA for censorship, both are wrong.
That is such a generic line it basically sounds like some corporate manager-bot spent a whole 5 minutes half-heartedly cutting and pasting it from some PR handbook just before going home for the day and proceeding to forget about it. It's so tone-deaf.
What's worse is they had early mover advantage in the market (as they pre-dated most other alternatives), AND when MS bought them they had the numerous advantages of the largest desktop OS vendor in the world backing them (e.g. financial, integration, network effects etc.)... to fail to make Skype a success under those conditions is a really big fail.
He's not, he's either confused or being disingenuous (I suspect the latter because he's not that stupid). Robots aren't "earning" income, they don't have bank accounts in which they deposit their salaries, they don't use their income to pay for robot kids or beer etc. Robots are presently property... because they're just machines... "taxing robots" is not taxing robots, it's taxing the human being that owns the robot (means of production). It's the human owners of the robot who then have less money to feed or educate or get healthcare for their kids.
We're a long way of robots that exhibit the sentience that warrants giving them rights.
They obviously didn't poll me. I would absolutely work less under a UBI, if decent enough. Damn, I am sick of the stress and pressure of working my fingers to the bone to pay for myself and my family's expenses, I would welcome sweet relief in a heartbeat. I long to live a life of moving from one meaningless hedonistic pleasure to the next. Mod me down for being an asshole, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
UBI under our current economic systems are a form of theft, but if technological progress allows us to create a post-scarcity society, there is no reason we should continue to toil if large-scale automation etc. can ease our burden.
Trump is showing himself to be the first actually pro-American leader in many years
This is why all the 'opinion pieces' urging impeachment say it must happen 'fast' - because they know if they wait longer, the anti-Trump hysteria whipped up by the media will die down as people realize Trump is basically OK after all, and everyone starts realizing that no, the Russians didn't 'hack the election' or any such nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one possible reason they might care - they may be entering the market, and this would 'conveniently' harm existing currencies that would be in competition with theirs: https://cryptoinsider.21mil.co...
Indeed, this really drives home the "It's not a computer, it's just a toy / dumb appliance" mentality that the major smartphone and smartphone OS vendors have.
I have eight cores in my phone but I'm not allowed to use them for actually running stuff on? I've been purchasing computers since 1995 and every one I've purchased, I've been allowed to choose what to run on it, and had the choice to run software that max'd the CPU if I wanted to.
Sure, not every "Joe Public" type user is going to understand how to do this without overheating their device (I've seen people do bad things like block laptop vents), but mass-banning the entire range of applications? A computing device *should* be able to run at 100% CPU under ordinary circumstances without overheating - if it can't, it's faulty.
This is why smartphones have failed utterly at competing with the desktop, and why desktops are still years ahead for getting real work done ... five or ten years ago I predicted that smartphones would usurp the desktop, and I was wrong, they remain basically toys / dumb appliances, with a few useful applications (e.g. navigation, flashlight, camera).
It also seems like an odd coincidence that they do this shortly after we hear that Google might be considering entering the cryptocurrency space: https://cryptoinsider.21mil.co... .... so a move that just might happen to help hurt competing currencies?
If you download the APK
So I must jump through extra hoops, for no reason, because the developer wants to spite the vendor, due to an issue over a feature I don't even use ... no thank you, I don't jump through hoops for nobody. I'm a software developer and I don't make my users jump through unnecessary extra hoops on my own emotional wims. I'll just use alternatives.
As I said, I used to be a VLC fan, but this grates me.
No, it has nothing to do with performance, here it is straight from the developer's mouth:
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=145236
Huawei devices are now forbidden to download VLC. We're fed up with their OS breaking VLC all the time.
Huawei basically kills VLC when the screen is shutting down. So that kills VLC when it plays audio in background.
This is childish behavior as a developer; there are many other (better-for-users) ways to deal with - including, if you detect those devices, show a message explaining that background audio won't work on this device for reason X. I am affected by this issue; I used to like VLC and actually would have wanted to use it to play videos (I don't care about background audio), but this petty behavior - randomly blocking long-time VLC fans like me from using it (for no reason as I don't even use the background audio feature) by banning entire ranges of devices. They're basically 'attacking' their own users just to spite a particular vendor.
They're actually good phones, really fast, perform well, there is no 'performance problem' - this is a very specific issue and behavior that isn't a performance issue. Other developers seem to manage to release Apps that work for these phones without mass-blocking them.
Developing for a broad variety of platforms means encountering issues with specific platforms, and dealing with it in a reasonable way; if you're a developer you have to expect that.
Smartphones "should have" started usurping the desktop by now, but for various reasons (no serious innovation in that direction from big players, and no focus on turning smartphones from 'non-dumb appliances' into real serious OS's / computing devices), so desktop computers remain the only way to do real "serious" work ... this actually remains Microsoft's 'hidden strength' and they should be focusing on that, rather than trying to 'me too' what Google have done (Apps and their App Store, invasion of privacy etc. .. they're trying to copy Apple and Google, but they don't have the market position of either on phones to pull it off).
The mess that is the new Skype (that Microsoft are excitedly bragging about) is just one example ... they want to drop Skype Classic already, yet the new Skype App can't do basic things (like have two open at once, message syncing doesn't even work properly, their 'Skype Web App' is even more of a mess).
People aren't mass-adopting smartphones and privacy-invading [cr]Apps because they're 'better than desktop/notebook computers' .. they're adopting smartphones because they need a phone anyway, and smartphones are occupying that niche, and have some benefits like built-in maps/GPS.
What MS should be trying to do, I think, is focus on trying to make desktops cheaper (e.g. ARM-based Windows? Cheaper OS?) - Intel have been helping dig Microsoft's grave by keeping PC's overpriced (new competition from AMD may help that slightly). None of this is easy; they have their work cut out for them.
To be fair, the Apple engineers may well be capable of doing the necessary design; it's possible the discussion went something like, "Well, we could do A, B and C but it's going to delay production by a year" but the business/marketing managers said, "But we want to be able to announce it offers performance level Y by next month" and went ahead. Either way, it isn't acceptable. Apple have the cash to absorb a launch delay like that, but they are probably afraid of longer-term erosion of public perception of their products.
No, it's why engineers focus on thermal design as an important issue when designing laptops. Or at least, they're supposed to. I have a high-end laptop and it rarely throttles, even under constant heavy load. Why? Because it wasn't designed by amateurs. Stop making excuses for crap. This isn't rocket science, this isn't something new that humans are only just starting to figure out; engineers have been successfully designing laptops for given thermal loads since probably before you were born. If you advertise that it supports a given CPU, it better support that configuration with relatively minimal throttling, or don't advertise it as such.
I have been following for a while as Google increasingly used all the exact same disgusting tactics to force their stuff on everyone that Microsoft used in the '90s (in some ways worse - e.g. even at the height of Microsoft's power they would have never dared to demand anyone who sells software that runs on Windows must give a 30% cut to them, yet somehow this absurd forced-middleman-cut has become the new normal ... there's no valid reason an 'App store' should require more than 5% for the services they provide, and in any case there should be competing App stores on any platform). I followed the Microsoft case closely back then; there are so many parallels, even the excuses regurgitated by the apologists are the same. What's interesting though is the US media seem to be silent on the case (while the Microsoft case got heavy coverage) - I know it's an EU court case, but if you ask me, it's highly suspicious that US media have been so silent on all the tactics they've been using (e.g. strong-arming OEMs).
That's a valid point, true.
Your point is true, but the situation's actually even worse, as ultimately what does the Samsung do that a feature-comparable-but-much-cheaper Chinese phone won't do? Not much. Hence Samsung has "only" about 28% market share in India (while Apple don't even make the market share pie chart, getting bundled into "Others"), while Chinese brands dominate (https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/chinese-brands-dominate-indian-smartphone-market-51-share-q1-2017-report-62166) ... Apple's a ripoff, Samsung less so, but I now only buy Chinese brands (my current Huawei is specification-wise almost as good as a Samsung S9 but literally half the price). Indians are less likely to buy into the 'pay 2 or 3 times as much because muh status' than Americans, but I'm surprised Apple are even doing as well as they are there, relatively.
"Mistake"? Or is this the journalist an Apple shill? In which case the idea is to deliberately strawman the competition. This reads like an Apple ad, pushing fallacy of false dilemma.
His other articles have headlines like this: "Here Are All The Cool New Things Coming To Your iPhone And iPad Soon", "Apple Will Reportedly Help India's Telecom Regulator Build An Anti-Spam App", "This Is The Brand-New Apple TV 4K", "These 12 Augmented Reality Experiences On iPhones Already Look Like The Future" etc.
There are, as you say, plenty of good-value alternatives to over-priced iPhones that are less than half the price of an iPhone and deliver comparable functionality in the middle of the market.
The mobile cartels lobbied for this to help protect their profits; from another source: "The Ugandan government has implemented a law forcing mobile users to pay taxes to use mobile money and social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Skype" ... basically the mobile providers are unhappy that users are able to send messages to each other at very low cost using the data network over FB messenger, WhatsApp, Skype etc., where in the past they used to be able to charge exorbitant rates if those same messages were sent as SMS.
Thank you, you just helped prove my point by regurgitating a string of the same irrational anti-porn talking points they're teaching kids in school - silly arguments that are popular with millenials as what is effectively the new Puritanism takes hold in our culture ... just a few decades ago it seemed we were entering an era of more enlightened, rational values. Now the curtains are closing and it's going dark again.
I was one of Microsoft's harshest critics back in the 90s, but the ugly reality is we were better under their monopoly than we are today. E.g. even at the height of their monopoly, MS would never have had the gall to demand a 30% cut of every single sale of any software ever made for the Windows platform (yet this absurd 'new normal' is the situation developers are in with the Apple and Google duopoly - and most developers today even think it's normal that the OS developer should take a massive cut just for some simple middleman services, as younger developers have never known different.) (And while 30% might sound relatively low, that used to basically be the typical developer's profit margin, so today most App developers lose money, while the 'App store cartels' profit richly - and companies like Google offer a share of those profits to OEMs like Samsung to hook them into further pushing their ecosystem - while App developers are expected, presumably, to be subsidized by their parents as they live at home, or something). (I am not an App developer; this is one of the reasons.)
Didn't you get the memo? Puritanism is in again, and the sexual revolution all but forgotten.
Even schools are now teaching that 'porn is bad', which makes one wonder who is behind this new trend back to Dark-Ages values.
$0 for the certificate, plus the hours you have to pay a technically skilled person to update your websites. But fortunately website admins all work for free, so it's still $0. Oh no wait, they don't, those skills are expensive. Or, it's free if system administrator time is valued at nothing.
Not all hosts support installing LetsEncrypt certificates for free, either.
Then of course when something goes wrong with that it isn't enough people will be like ah ha! You actually should have used multiple providers
Exactly; one of the core selling points of "cloud" services is that they're supposed to offer increased fault tolerance (e.g. a virtual server can be restored in a different data center if one data center explodes) ... so now these knee-jerk Google defenders are telling us we need 'multiple cloud providers - let's call this new service a "cloudcloud" - so when your cloud service is shut down you can continue running your backup clouds from the cloudcloud ... what next, we need a cloudcloudcloud for your cloudclouds?
The core issue here isn't that a server went down - of course everyone knows servers can go down - it's that they were deliberately shut down, with no warning, with unreasonable recourse, after the user paid for a service that Google failed to provide through incompetence. It should be a an SLA issue, you should be able to sue your service provider for something like this, but you can bet Google's lawyers have covered everything in the fine print.
This is like, you order a burger at a restaurant, and instead of a burger, you get a plate with shit on it. And then the people here would say, 'well you should have expected that you might get shit on the plate you dumb-ass, why didn't you order five burgers from five different places!?' Uh, because no reasonable person expects that.
I admit I initially made the mistake of naively believing the media bullcrap that Felix was some sort of racist anti-Semite Nazi. Eventually, I started watching his actual videos, and seeing the entire context, and much more of his body of work, and realized that the media was literally full of sh-t.
He made a minor slip of the sort that many people make now and again, and he sincerely apologized for it. He didn't go out and lynch someone. People are acting like he literally lynched someone. I'm not excusing saying the N word, but come on, the pitchfork mob has lost all perspective.
these companies have EVERY right to restrict how that content is used in this instance
You're slightly confused; they do have the right to specify contractual restrictions on how their game is used, however, it has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, it's in the End-User License Agreement that you implicitly agree to when you purchase their product, and the DMCA is not a tool for remedy of a EULA breach. Also, presumably they failed to include it in the EULA in the first place, and in fact explicitly encouraged and allowed the production of such independent content ... because 20/20 hindsight. So now they must either retroactively add some fine print to a EULA that was never signed, or abuse the DMCA for censorship, both are wrong.
That is such a generic line it basically sounds like some corporate manager-bot spent a whole 5 minutes half-heartedly cutting and pasting it from some PR handbook just before going home for the day and proceeding to forget about it. It's so tone-deaf.
What's worse is they had early mover advantage in the market (as they pre-dated most other alternatives), AND when MS bought them they had the numerous advantages of the largest desktop OS vendor in the world backing them (e.g. financial, integration, network effects etc.) ... to fail to make Skype a success under those conditions is a really big fail.
He's not, he's either confused or being disingenuous (I suspect the latter because he's not that stupid). Robots aren't "earning" income, they don't have bank accounts in which they deposit their salaries, they don't use their income to pay for robot kids or beer etc. Robots are presently property ... because they're just machines ... "taxing robots" is not taxing robots, it's taxing the human being that owns the robot (means of production). It's the human owners of the robot who then have less money to feed or educate or get healthcare for their kids.
We're a long way of robots that exhibit the sentience that warrants giving them rights.
They obviously didn't poll me. I would absolutely work less under a UBI, if decent enough. Damn, I am sick of the stress and pressure of working my fingers to the bone to pay for myself and my family's expenses, I would welcome sweet relief in a heartbeat. I long to live a life of moving from one meaningless hedonistic pleasure to the next. Mod me down for being an asshole, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
UBI under our current economic systems are a form of theft, but if technological progress allows us to create a post-scarcity society, there is no reason we should continue to toil if large-scale automation etc. can ease our burden.
Trump is showing himself to be the first actually pro-American leader in many years
This is why all the 'opinion pieces' urging impeachment say it must happen 'fast' - because they know if they wait longer, the anti-Trump hysteria whipped up by the media will die down as people realize Trump is basically OK after all, and everyone starts realizing that no, the Russians didn't 'hack the election' or any such nonsense.