According to Wikipedia he's got a BA in philosophy and a M.Sc in politics. Between getting out of school and setting himself as a climate expert he worked as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry.
He has never done anything STEM related or worked in any other field but politics.
This is in a context of an Obama administration policy to undermine the Russian gas monopoly in Europe, which is potentially destabilizing. Just this year we started exporting LNG to Europe, and within a few years will have the capacity to replace most of Europe's imports from Russia should Russia cut them off.
Also oil production has increased dramatically under Obama as well. This year the US became a net exporter of energy for the first time since 1957.
It's not that the Obama administration wants the world to burn more fossil fuels, but it doesn't want Europe dancing on a Russian string either. A president has to balance different policy objectives against each other. US CO2 emissions have actually gone down slightly since the recovery started in 2010,
I agree that neither was a great candidate. But here's my theory: Trump is the first candidate ever to win by running a negative campaign -- against himself.
They were both candidates with enormous negative public perceptions. But Clinton had a lot of money. In a normal year she could have bought attention to start to shift perception, except that Trump's antics sucked all the oxygen out of the media space. And at a certain point the marginal cost of another revelation about Trump was nil.
"authoritarian leaders"... Leaders are by definition authoritarian, else they'd just be committee members
No, leaders by definition wield authority. That does not make them authoritarians "authoritarians":
Authoritarianism, principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual freedom of thought and action. In government, authoritarianism denotes any political system that concentrates power in the hands of a leader or a small elite that is not constitutionally responsible to the body of the people. Authoritarian leaders often exercise power arbitrarily and without regard to existing bodies of law, and they usually cannot be replaced by citizens choosing freely among various competitors in elections.
The key Trumpian personality traits that have people concerned are prejudice toward racial or ethnic minorities, fear of the outside world, aggressiveness, defensiveness, narcissism, and and an overly expansive view of what his powers as president would be.
I have to say that I get a lot of liberal noise, but I haven't seen anyone claim that Trump is literally Hitler or is going to murder people. The closest is the story that Trump kept a book of Hitler speeches by his bed. I initially discounted that since the source was his ex-wife, but there turns out to be corroborating evidence. Still, I consider that meaningless in itself because I have all kinds of "bad books".
I judge Trump on what he actually says and does, and that's enough. Yes he is not "literally" Hitler, but if you study the careers of authoritarian leaders he fits right in. People should be concerned.
Saying "Trump lost because of misinformed voters" "Trump won because EVERYONE who voted for him was misinformed".
Trump actually lost the popular vote; his electoral victory came down to any two of three states where his margin of victory was 1% or less. This means it takes only a small number of people switching their vote because of misinformation to throw an election one way or the other.
As few as 131607 vote switches could have swung the result. -- that was out of 14159807 votes cast in those two states, or about 0.9% of votes cast in those states.
I agree that most people who voted for Trump voted because they liked him, not because of misinformation. But we're talking about a marginal effect with big consequences. Misinformation in close elections can be decisive, which is why people do it.
Russia said that it talked with the teams of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the U.S. presidential election as part of routine outreach during a campaign. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the Russian embassy in the U.S. held talks with the Trump camp that “were on a sufficient, responsible level.” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Trump, said in an e-mail that she was “not aware” of any meetings by campaign representatives with Russian diplomats. Ryabkov said the talks were “part of routine everyday work.” There was also “sporadic” contact with the Clinton team, though it was “not always productive,” he said. Calls to members of Clinton’s former campaign team for comment weren’t immediately returned.
In other words while Trump's campaign worked with Russia "routinely", they contacted the Clinton campaign but they weren't friendly or cooperative.
Just imagine what reaction would have been like if the shoe had been on the other foot, if Clinton's campaign worked extensively with Russia during the election but had been rebuffed by Trump.
No, I think the banker that owns the farmer's loan is more powerful than the farmer, just like the slumlord that owns the building that an urban worker's one bedroom studio is in is more powerful than the worker.
Rather than NY being dominated by a coalition of smaller states with less total population? That protects individual and minority rights?
By all means look at a map of red vs. blue. But don't look at a regular map; look at a cartogram where the size of a state is scaled by population rather than physical area. Then let's talk about small dominating big; it's not the square footage you live in that matters, it's the say you have in your own government.
And getting rid of the electoral college doesn't mean we're not a Republic any more. Even if your defintion of "Republic" is "small states have disproportionate power". Small states have that in the Senate.
Anyhow, I've read Federalist no 10, and it sound convincing but it's basically hooey. The idea is that the complicated way the Constitution set things up would prevent the emergence of political parties. That didn't work as planned. Although really the plan was to preserve slavery by giving slaveholding interests more political power. Remember there used to be property requirements for voting. So this really wasn't about protecting minorities at all; Federalist no 10 was just a smokescreen for a compromise that divided power between wealthy people in the North and wealthy people in the South. To sweeten the deal further for Southerners slaves counted as 3/5 of a person.
So it's not really about protecting the little guy; it's about letting the powerful prey upon the less powerful.
I'm not saying there are no tool-and-die makers. But employment numbers of crashed since the early 90s (if you doubt me just ask donald trump's website), and their number is expected to drop by a further 13% over the next ten years according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What this means is that it will take years to reestablish manufacturing on the scale we had in the 90s. And when it comes back it's going to look a lot different.
Let me suggest that perhaps a course of action that actually could make the world a better place might be an option to consider, rather than one which is focused solely on satisfying your need to feel like you've expressed yourself. Voting is an act of power, not posturing.
I was a Sanders supporter in the primaries pretty much for this reason. My political positions were a little closer to Hillary's.
I don't think NAFTA has been good for the country in the long term, but I don't think simply withdrawing will roll back the clock to 1994. We've lost the capacity to operate the way we used to. Invisible stuff to most people, like the tool and die makers who've retired and not been replaced by new journeymen. It's not possible to ramp up manufacturing employment instantaneously. So I actually think Hillary's trade policies were better for the country than Bernie's.
But this was an anti-establishment year. So Bernie was a better candidate. But Hillary would have been a highly competent president. In Trump we have the worst of both worlds. The idea that the's anti-establishment is ridiculous. He's for whatever benefits people like him, he's just too incompetent to work for the establishment.
Because you get one-time pass on that kind of question. Barriers need to be broken down. Generally to do so you need someone who would otherwise be quite capable of winning. Obama is a gifted communicator who would be a formidable politician if he were white. But he needs some people to vote for him because he's black, because others won't vote for him because he's black.
On the other hand many people who would vote for Obama "because he's black" wouldn't vote for Jesse Jackson, because no matter his personal qualities he doesn't really have the political talent and ability to do the job. So it's not a case of vote for anyone who is black or female just because they're black or female; you give a little preference for someone who should be able to win but can't because of prejudice.
It's a kind of like acid-base titration. You want to add enough to make the system balanced.
I don't know where the extra Republican votes came from.
Well given that opinion polls are built around the methodology of sampling likely voters, I'm guessing its from the 40% of registered voters who never vote in a presidential election.
I agree on the spoofing issue; the main problem with autodialing (as opposed to manual) isn't autodialing per se, but predictive dialing where the computer speculatively dials based on the likelihood of an operator becoming free in the next few seconds.
But in a way it's almost a boon. If I pick up the phone and count three-Mississippi with nobody on the other end I just hang up.
There are many kinds of lying. There is lying by commission and lying by omission. If you purport to tell the truth but only tell carefully selected truths, you are lying, even if what you say is completely factually accurate.
Now social media companies don't actually lie; what they do doesn't even rise to the standard of a lie. A liar tries to get you to believe a proposition he believes to be false. What social media companies want to do is provoke a reaction.
In other words the nearly half of adults who get their news from social media are getting their news from trolls and bullshitters.
It probably does save money. The key is that you have to ask in comparison to what.
In comparison to not making a naval super-gun, of course it's a money loser. But the problem is that there are people in Congress who really, really like big guns. At the time this particular gun was proposed there were still people advocating for re-activating the New Jersey, with it's titanic (although primitive) 16 inch guns. And that would be very expensive indeed.
The New Jersey fired 2700 pound Mark 8 shells which cost about $100,000 apiece, and the last time we used them (in Beirut) we fired 300 of the suckers. Given that these shells were so powerful, why so many? Because given how far the New Jersey had to stand off to be safe, they ended up falling in a circle some 18km across. We had to spend thirty million bucks saturating an enormous area to hit anything, all pretty much to prove that reactivating the New Jersey was a good idea -- it wasn't. In fact the collateral damage from that single day of political theater was so horrific that it has created headwinds for US interests in that region for the past three decades. In comparison to that, a shell that cost $800,000 but falls within 50m of its target half the time is not only a bargain, it's likely more effective. It's just less impressive.
Of course it would make more sense just to give up on big gun shore bombardment altogether, but given that Congress says you do it, somethingn like this is the best a reasonable person would end up with an an era of high sensitivity to collateral damage and widespread adoption of anti-ship missiles. If you want to save money, elect congressmen who aren't so enamored of things that go "boom".
Slashdot Mirror
Which is not a license to act like a fool.
Here's the thing about democracy: it doesn't guarantee you good government. It only gives you the ability to kick a bad one out.
According to Wikipedia he's got a BA in philosophy and a M.Sc in politics. Between getting out of school and setting himself as a climate expert he worked as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry.
He has never done anything STEM related or worked in any other field but politics.
This is in a context of an Obama administration policy to undermine the Russian gas monopoly in Europe, which is potentially destabilizing. Just this year we started exporting LNG to Europe, and within a few years will have the capacity to replace most of Europe's imports from Russia should Russia cut them off.
Also oil production has increased dramatically under Obama as well. This year the US became a net exporter of energy for the first time since 1957.
It's not that the Obama administration wants the world to burn more fossil fuels, but it doesn't want Europe dancing on a Russian string either. A president has to balance different policy objectives against each other. US CO2 emissions have actually gone down slightly since the recovery started in 2010,
It's awfully Hitler like.
Well, these days you can't take it for granted when someone say something like that they consider it a bad thing.
I agree that neither was a great candidate. But here's my theory: Trump is the first candidate ever to win by running a negative campaign -- against himself.
They were both candidates with enormous negative public perceptions. But Clinton had a lot of money. In a normal year she could have bought attention to start to shift perception, except that Trump's antics sucked all the oxygen out of the media space. And at a certain point the marginal cost of another revelation about Trump was nil.
Not bad enough for you?
"authoritarian leaders"... Leaders are by definition authoritarian, else they'd just be committee members
No, leaders by definition wield authority. That does not make them authoritarians "authoritarians":
The key Trumpian personality traits that have people concerned are prejudice toward racial or ethnic minorities, fear of the outside world, aggressiveness, defensiveness, narcissism, and and an overly expansive view of what his powers as president would be.
I have to say that I get a lot of liberal noise, but I haven't seen anyone claim that Trump is literally Hitler or is going to murder people. The closest is the story that Trump kept a book of Hitler speeches by his bed. I initially discounted that since the source was his ex-wife, but there turns out to be corroborating evidence. Still, I consider that meaningless in itself because I have all kinds of "bad books".
I judge Trump on what he actually says and does, and that's enough. Yes he is not "literally" Hitler, but if you study the careers of authoritarian leaders he fits right in. People should be concerned.
Saying "Trump lost because of misinformed voters" "Trump won because EVERYONE who voted for him was misinformed".
Trump actually lost the popular vote; his electoral victory came down to any two of three states where his margin of victory was 1% or less. This means it takes only a small number of people switching their vote because of misinformation to throw an election one way or the other.
As few as 131607 vote switches could have swung the result. -- that was out of 14159807 votes cast in those two states, or about 0.9% of votes cast in those states.
I agree that most people who voted for Trump voted because they liked him, not because of misinformation. But we're talking about a marginal effect with big consequences. Misinformation in close elections can be decisive, which is why people do it.
In other words while Trump's campaign worked with Russia "routinely", they contacted the Clinton campaign but they weren't friendly or cooperative.
Just imagine what reaction would have been like if the shoe had been on the other foot, if Clinton's campaign worked extensively with Russia during the election but had been rebuffed by Trump.
Actually, he provided a citation -- the linked article, which does NOT in fact say Russia was communicating with the Clinton campaign.
So yes, he is a liar.
Texas has never wanted to secede. Just some kooks who live there.
Easier, then.
No, I think the banker that owns the farmer's loan is more powerful than the farmer, just like the slumlord that owns the building that an urban worker's one bedroom studio is in is more powerful than the worker.
The worker vs. the farmer is a tossup.
Rather than NY being dominated by a coalition of smaller states with less total population? That protects individual and minority rights?
By all means look at a map of red vs. blue. But don't look at a regular map; look at a cartogram where the size of a state is scaled by population rather than physical area. Then let's talk about small dominating big; it's not the square footage you live in that matters, it's the say you have in your own government.
And getting rid of the electoral college doesn't mean we're not a Republic any more. Even if your defintion of "Republic" is "small states have disproportionate power". Small states have that in the Senate.
Anyhow, I've read Federalist no 10, and it sound convincing but it's basically hooey. The idea is that the complicated way the Constitution set things up would prevent the emergence of political parties. That didn't work as planned. Although really the plan was to preserve slavery by giving slaveholding interests more political power. Remember there used to be property requirements for voting. So this really wasn't about protecting minorities at all; Federalist no 10 was just a smokescreen for a compromise that divided power between wealthy people in the North and wealthy people in the South. To sweeten the deal further for Southerners slaves counted as 3/5 of a person.
So it's not really about protecting the little guy; it's about letting the powerful prey upon the less powerful.
Oh, I don't disagree with you there. What we'll see is a drop in standards of living, not an increase in semi-skilled manufacturing employment.
I'm not saying there are no tool-and-die makers. But employment numbers of crashed since the early 90s (if you doubt me just ask donald trump's website), and their number is expected to drop by a further 13% over the next ten years according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What this means is that it will take years to reestablish manufacturing on the scale we had in the 90s. And when it comes back it's going to look a lot different.
Let me suggest that perhaps a course of action that actually could make the world a better place might be an option to consider, rather than one which is focused solely on satisfying your need to feel like you've expressed yourself. Voting is an act of power, not posturing.
I was a Sanders supporter in the primaries pretty much for this reason. My political positions were a little closer to Hillary's.
I don't think NAFTA has been good for the country in the long term, but I don't think simply withdrawing will roll back the clock to 1994. We've lost the capacity to operate the way we used to. Invisible stuff to most people, like the tool and die makers who've retired and not been replaced by new journeymen. It's not possible to ramp up manufacturing employment instantaneously. So I actually think Hillary's trade policies were better for the country than Bernie's.
But this was an anti-establishment year. So Bernie was a better candidate. But Hillary would have been a highly competent president. In Trump we have the worst of both worlds. The idea that the's anti-establishment is ridiculous. He's for whatever benefits people like him, he's just too incompetent to work for the establishment.
Because you get one-time pass on that kind of question. Barriers need to be broken down. Generally to do so you need someone who would otherwise be quite capable of winning. Obama is a gifted communicator who would be a formidable politician if he were white. But he needs some people to vote for him because he's black, because others won't vote for him because he's black.
On the other hand many people who would vote for Obama "because he's black" wouldn't vote for Jesse Jackson, because no matter his personal qualities he doesn't really have the political talent and ability to do the job. So it's not a case of vote for anyone who is black or female just because they're black or female; you give a little preference for someone who should be able to win but can't because of prejudice.
It's a kind of like acid-base titration. You want to add enough to make the system balanced.
I don't know where the extra Republican votes came from.
Well given that opinion polls are built around the methodology of sampling likely voters, I'm guessing its from the 40% of registered voters who never vote in a presidential election.
It's questionable whether an RSS feed is copyrightable, IMO. Is it more like a book, or a phone directory do you think?
I agree on the spoofing issue; the main problem with autodialing (as opposed to manual) isn't autodialing per se, but predictive dialing where the computer speculatively dials based on the likelihood of an operator becoming free in the next few seconds.
But in a way it's almost a boon. If I pick up the phone and count three-Mississippi with nobody on the other end I just hang up.
There are many kinds of lying. There is lying by commission and lying by omission. If you purport to tell the truth but only tell carefully selected truths, you are lying, even if what you say is completely factually accurate.
Now social media companies don't actually lie; what they do doesn't even rise to the standard of a lie. A liar tries to get you to believe a proposition he believes to be false. What social media companies want to do is provoke a reaction.
In other words the nearly half of adults who get their news from social media are getting their news from trolls and bullshitters.
It probably does save money. The key is that you have to ask in comparison to what.
In comparison to not making a naval super-gun, of course it's a money loser. But the problem is that there are people in Congress who really, really like big guns. At the time this particular gun was proposed there were still people advocating for re-activating the New Jersey, with it's titanic (although primitive) 16 inch guns. And that would be very expensive indeed.
The New Jersey fired 2700 pound Mark 8 shells which cost about $100,000 apiece, and the last time we used them (in Beirut) we fired 300 of the suckers. Given that these shells were so powerful, why so many? Because given how far the New Jersey had to stand off to be safe, they ended up falling in a circle some 18km across. We had to spend thirty million bucks saturating an enormous area to hit anything, all pretty much to prove that reactivating the New Jersey was a good idea -- it wasn't. In fact the collateral damage from that single day of political theater was so horrific that it has created headwinds for US interests in that region for the past three decades. In comparison to that, a shell that cost $800,000 but falls within 50m of its target half the time is not only a bargain, it's likely more effective. It's just less impressive.
Of course it would make more sense just to give up on big gun shore bombardment altogether, but given that Congress says you do it, somethingn like this is the best a reasonable person would end up with an an era of high sensitivity to collateral damage and widespread adoption of anti-ship missiles. If you want to save money, elect congressmen who aren't so enamored of things that go "boom".