Obviously the parts specific to the Y2K problem are pointless, but they're only a small part of what those documents mandate. Most of what's in them is, by modern standards, best practices or common sense:
* Keep an inventory of the systems you manage.
* Document the links of each system to core business processes and other systems, and understand the potential impact of the system becoming unavailable.
* Develop contingency plans for each system becoming unavailable.
* Determine whether you can access the underlying data held by each system and if necessary convert it to different formats. Be prepared to move away from it.
* Document potential maintainability problems with each system, such as access to source code and the ability to run on new hardware and operating systems.
* Develop formal test plans and policies for new software, including unit, integration, and system tests.
* Adopt formal configuration and change management systems.
You could edit out the references to Y2K, and about 95% of what the documents mandate still makes sense. This is probably why nobody ever bothered to formally retract these guidelines.
The question is, are there other guidelines that still mandate these commonsense best practices? Quite likely. But the point is it isn't as simple as looking at the title of the document and say, "we don't need that any more." You need to think about what's actually *in* the document.
People who are extremely intelligent are accustomed to being right when everyone around them are wrong and in fact aren't bright enough to realize they're wrong. This is not a good thing.
The smartest person I know (and I know a *lot* of smart people) had an affair with a married man that any idiot would have known was going to end badly. But there was no point in debating that with her because it would be like climbing into the ring and sparring with Ali in his prime. She never, ever loses an argument. I suspect part of the attraction of this guy was that he was kind of a fixer-upper. He in fact did leave his wife, moved in with my friend, and then promptly fell in love with her male apartment-mate. The problems he was having were him coming to terms with being gay, so in an ironic way she did end up fixing him up.
Being able to argue circles around other people invites a kind of stupidity that is the exclusive property of the very smart or very rich. When it's a harmless odd opinion like walking around naked taking "air baths", we call it "quirky". Sometimes it's even right, like Tesla's toe-scrunching; neuroscientists now know that helps the brain with "executive functions" like planning and attention control. But that same mule-headedness can have a darker side, like Nobel laureate Shockley's racial "theories".
This is why I think gifted education is so important, not because the educators themselves can do much for the truly gifted, but having intellectual peers who challenge the gifted student on an equal basis teaches that student a lesson smart people often miss out on.
Actually, battery storage technology is on a rapid downward trend. I was reading about India, which has severe coal-related pollution problems, and just recently the price of solar has dropped there has dropped to be less than coal. Within five years the cost of solar plus battery will be less on a per kwh basis than coal. It doesn't mean they'll be able to conjure the change overnight, but it'll start things going that way.
You didn't think Elon Musk just wanted to be this century's Henry Ford did you? He wants to be this century's John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) too. That's why pulling out of Paris pissed him off.
Anyhow, until battery backup of renewables is economically feasible, which will happen soon, there's plenty of fossil fuel generated kwhs that can be replaced with renewables. This is not only good for the enviroment, it'll mean lower local energy prices. That in turn will mean jobs and industry returning to some of those pockets of America that never saw any recovery from the Great Recession.
Well, with respect to dumb, two years ago people were criticizing solar subsidies because solar produced less than 0.5% of electricity in this country.
If by "dumb" you mean "something I don't like", I literally can't argue with you. But if by "dumb" you mean "obviously has no chance of meeting its objectives", the graph of percent of power generated speaks for itself.
Well, do you eliminate all the various ways the governments of the world subsidize fossil fuels? I'm not just talking about allowing oil companies to externalize their environmental costs, I'm talking cash, like the 21 billion dollars in tax breaks the US gives oil companies to encourage domestic exploration and production.
Do you really, seriously think that Katy Giffords was responsible for making this guy what he was? Or are you just pissed off by the offensiveness of it?
We don't have manned spaceflight capabilities??? I think NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin would disagree with you.
At present the last manned flight launched by the US was six years ago. Quite clearly we actually don't currently possess manned spaceflight capability. That's slated to change in a big way next year, but those chickens are most definitely not hatched yet.
You might argue that a seven year hiatus was a smart strategic decision that made the best use of limited budget as lower cost alternatives literally got off the ground, and I'd agree with you. But depending on the Russians for seven years was the kind of gamble a well-funded program wouldn't take. As things turned out oil prices have kept the Russian economy in bad shape, so that they couldn't afford to mess with us even after we slapped sanctions on them for Crimea. Things might have been uglier for us had oil prices gone up rather than down.
Ever hear off the Kolmogorov 0-1 law? Given a sufficiently large number of trials the probability of any particular outcome converges to either 0 or 1; it's either impossible or inevitable.
Bernie Sanders won 13.2 million votes in the Democratic primary. If one in a million were homicidal crackpots, that's 13 homicidal crackpots, and all you need is one. It doesn't make them representative of Sanders supporters. This guy was one of a small fringe of "Bernie or Busters" who urged people to vote for Jill Stein. That doesn't make him representative of Stein voters either.
Likewise while Trump may have had a lock on the neonazi vote in the election, I make it a habit of doing Trump voters the courtesy of not automatically assuming they're fascists, sexists, or Russia apologists.
Now I was a Sanders supporter in the primaries, and voted for Clinton in the generals. I detest the politics of Steve Scalise, but I don't wish him any harm. I wish him a speedy and full recovery, after which I will likely continue to detest his politics.
Converting your shit into a car analogy: "Bicycles work in a completely different way to tractor trailers"
Exactly. I don't see why you think that's ridiculous. Bikes and tractor trailers have some broad similarities, but they're built to accomplish different things so analogies between them aren't particularly useful.
But how's about we stop with bigotry, on all ends?
Sounds great, but I think I see a problem: bigotry is a cognitive bias. You might as well say, "How about we get rid of confirmation bias?"
You don't eradicate cognitive biases; they're baked in by millions of years of evolution. You mitigate them through education. You mitigate the Gambler's Fallacy by teaching people probability.
The problem with bigotry is it really hits us where we live: in issues of social status and survival; in belonging and exclusion. Bigotry is unique among the cognitive biases in its power to elicit shame.
Shame may be the single most painful negative emotion there is. People will die rather than experience it. So there's a simple-minded assumption that shame being so powerful, it ought to be a handy tool for behavior control. Actually it sucks for that purpose, precisely because it is so powerful. If you could tone it down to, say, mild chagrin, people would be eager to examine their bigoted attitudes critically. But faced with full-blown shame people will counterfeit the appearance of respectability while secretly harboring their beliefs, rationalizing them and quietly seeking out like-minded people.
Arguably selective forgetting is much more productive than being forced to continually defend the past. Where I live in Boston people are very proud of our Pilgrim and colonial heritage; we don't think much about hanging Quakers on the Common or the exchanges of genocidal terror attacks in King William's War. We treat the Salem Witch trials as a joke, but twenty-five people were killed, a phenomenal number considering the entire population of the colony was less than 40,000.
And yet, because we're not ashamed of our sordid past, there aren't people trying to keep the anti-Quaker sentiment alive. It's not because we're better than places that have active KKK chapters; it's that we feel free to pick and choose which part of our heritage to celebrate.
I assume your tech-idiot mother is functionally literate. Now take that away from her and see if she can manage on her own.
The usual standard for "functional literacy" -- being sufficiently capable at reading and writing to be a competent adult -- is eighth grade level proficiency. 21% of Americans read at a fourth grade level or lower. And when you look at prisoners, the number of read at below the fifth grade level is a staggering 70%.
Add to that that illiteracy tends to run in families, and yes, I'd say that going on the web and following the directions for setting up a google voice number is a challenge for many of these people -- much less reading the terms of service.
Well, they're not exactly overwhelmed by the volume of work. Congress is already stalled by the fact that the party in power is not quite so ideologically unified as it thought it was.
You are just spouting factoids and missing their significance. I never said water vapor is visible. I said it doesn't stay water vapor long.
The molecular weight of CO2 is neither here nor there. The atmosphere does not stratify by molecular weight the way you seem to believe it does. It is well-mixed within the troposphere, which is the relevant layer. In fact that's pretty much the scientific definition of the troposphere: it's the layer which is governed by turbulent mixing.
Expert systems work in a completely different way than machine learning approaches. Expert systems do indeed require the analysis of human knowledge as a starting point. Machine learning approaches do not; they just need data.
You also cannot duplicate my human method without aid (and pretty sure not even WITH aid)
My point is that duplicating the way you think isn't really necessary. You can in many cases be replaced by something that works in a completely different way.
This story is about machine learning. Whether you consider machine learning to be "artificial intelligence" probably says more about your definition of "artificial intelligence" than it does about machine learning.
Machine learning definitely replaces human judgment at certain tasks -- in this case classifying a thing by its attributes -- however it does it in ways that an unaided human brain cannot duplicate. For example it might examine the goodness of fit of a large number of alternative (although structurally similar) algorithms against a vast body of training data.
Many years ago, when I was a college student, AI enthusiasts used to say things like, "The best way to understand the human mind is to duplicate its functions." I believe that after three decades that has proven to be true, but not in the way people thought it would be true. It turns out the human way of doing things is just one possible way.
I think that's a pretty significant discovery. But is it "AI"? It's certainly not what people are expecting. On the plus side, methods like classification and regression trees produce algorithms that can be examined and critiqued analytically.
Most legitimate peer-reviewed journals have a conflict of interest disclosure requirement, so you just have to look at the paper to see.
The paper isn't available to no-subcribers, but here's the guideline listed by the journal in question:
A statement describing any financial conflicts of interest or lack thereof is published with each manuscript. During the submission process, the corresponding author must provide this statement on behalf of all authors of the manuscript. The statement should describe all potential sources of bias, including affiliations, funding sources, and financial or management relationships, that may constitute conflicts of interest (please see the ACS Ethical Guidelines). The statement will be published in the final article. If no conflict of interest is declared, the following statement will be published in the article: “The authors declare no competing financial interest.”
The bigger question is, what is the nature of the paper, and the journal it appears in?
The gold standard for evidence is a literature review paper published in a relevant journal that has a high impact factor for its field. Even high quality research reported in a relevant legitimate journal isn't something anyone should make any judgments based on. Science deals with evidence, and evidence in any non-trivial question tends to pile up on both sides at the outset.
ACS Sensors is a relatively new journal published by the American Chemical Society for research in chemical sensor technology. It's not even a health-related journal. This doesn't mean the research is bad, or the conclusions are bad. It just means that they're mainly relevant as to whether this technology could be used to research the health impact of e-cigarettes.
Another way to deal with people using national committees in ways you don't like is to not vote for or support those parties.
Sure, but that also means you're voting for third parties that can't win. And if they do by some miracle win it just means a whole new group of insiders. Because that's how it works. People who work hard and win feel entitled. That's how every new generation of insiders arises. Every old guard gets replaced by Young Turks who in time, become a new old guard. If you follow politics you'll see this happen over and over again.
Voting isn't about your feelings, and it isn't an exercise in self-expression. Voting is an exercise of political power. If you don't use your vote that way, you're responsible for the outcome.
So you STILL believe he was under investigation, even after Comey's hearing, where he testified he wasn't?
I have no opinion, because the question is in part dependent upon a dubious distinction. Is there a difference between investigating the President and investigating a large number of people who are around him?
Not really. There's no special juju that happens when you name a president as a target of an investigation other than this: a massive shitstorm of a Constitutional crisis automatically ensues. That's why it's the very last thing you do -- if you're going to do it. You're probably not old enough to remember Watergate, but Nixon wasn't named personally as a target of any investigations until the Watergate Seven were indicted, but it was apparent long before that he was in the crosshairs.
So I stand by what I said. You don't pull the trigger on naming the president until you've got your ducks lined up. We have no idea whether the investigators are heading in that direction, but if they were they wouldn't say.
They already do and don't you think that a few of the almost 1.4 billion people in China are able to come up with ideas on how to do new things?
This is an extremely important point to remember: population may not always be equivalent to total brainpower, but it certainly helps when it comes finding genius. Consider: the current US population of 341 million represents only 4.5 % of the world's 7.5 billion people. Even if we have more than our share of genius, most of the genius in the world comes from somewhere else.
Sometimes I think the Moon landing wasn't such a good thing for the US. While the rest of the world looked back at that blue marble in the black expanse and was humbled, the US was swallowing a dose of ego validation that would choke a politician. But Apollo really ought to tell us a different story, not of American winning solely because of native genius, but because its native genius working with immigrants like Werner von Braun on the largest public works program ever.
And it's not just space; from the 30s to the 70s many of the best minds in the world poured into the US. John von Neumann, who conceived of the basic design which underlies nearly all modern computers, was born in Hungary. He came to the US because of a job offer and because America was safe for Jews and intellectuals. Same for Einstein. When I was a student at MIT back in the early 80s many of our most important professors were WW2 refugees.
That infusion of European intellect helped fuel America's rise to global scientific dominance after the 1930s. Of the two dozen Physics Nobel laureates in the 40s-60s, nearly half were immigrants or children of immigrants; of the remaining dozen, half won for work performed with immigrant scientists.
US science and tech dominance is highly artificial; the product of jobs for intellectuals, tolerance for unpopular groups, openness to immigrants and refugees, and massive investments in research and education. And on that rests our economic and military dominance. Take that away, and we're just 5% of the world's population.
I was a Sanders supporter, and I didn't think the leaked information made the DNC looked bad. That's because I understand how the system works. I've read the party by-laws (you've read *your* party by-laws, haven't you?). Would the rules be better if, for example, the staging of debates was decided by some impartial process? Sure. But scheduling the debates to favor one candidate is not against the rules as they stand.
The national committees of each party are not non-partisan, impartial bodies. They are power centers that do the bidding of the party establishment, hopefully in an enlightened-self-interest way. That's by design. It's not spelled out explicitly, but it's quite obvious in the DNC bylaws: all kinds of rules require representation of women and minorities, but not wings of the party.
Russian trolls did their best to upset Sanders supporters over this, and they were pretty successful because most Sanders supporters are young and haven't figured out how things work yet. The world would be a better place if everyone were fair and impartial. But it will never happen, and you can't get there by trying to write the rules so insider power goes away. It won't go away it just goes somewhere else.
The way you deal with insider power is you take it away from them. Or at least threaten to. You either wangle and invitation or you kick the doors down. You don't expect them to play nice. Sanders understood this, which is why his slogan was "It's not about me, it's about us."
Slashdot Mirror
That's easy to deal with. You must rope off a separate "liquor store" inside the larger store. People who are buying liquor have to check out there.
Obviously the parts specific to the Y2K problem are pointless, but they're only a small part of what those documents mandate. Most of what's in them is, by modern standards, best practices or common sense:
* Keep an inventory of the systems you manage.
* Document the links of each system to core business processes and other systems, and understand the potential impact of the system becoming unavailable.
* Develop contingency plans for each system becoming unavailable.
* Determine whether you can access the underlying data held by each system and if necessary convert it to different formats. Be prepared to move away from it.
* Document potential maintainability problems with each system, such as access to source code and the ability to run on new hardware and operating systems.
* Develop formal test plans and policies for new software, including unit, integration, and system tests.
* Adopt formal configuration and change management systems.
You could edit out the references to Y2K, and about 95% of what the documents mandate still makes sense. This is probably why nobody ever bothered to formally retract these guidelines.
The question is, are there other guidelines that still mandate these commonsense best practices? Quite likely. But the point is it isn't as simple as looking at the title of the document and say, "we don't need that any more." You need to think about what's actually *in* the document.
People who are extremely intelligent are accustomed to being right when everyone around them are wrong and in fact aren't bright enough to realize they're wrong. This is not a good thing.
The smartest person I know (and I know a *lot* of smart people) had an affair with a married man that any idiot would have known was going to end badly. But there was no point in debating that with her because it would be like climbing into the ring and sparring with Ali in his prime. She never, ever loses an argument. I suspect part of the attraction of this guy was that he was kind of a fixer-upper. He in fact did leave his wife, moved in with my friend, and then promptly fell in love with her male apartment-mate. The problems he was having were him coming to terms with being gay, so in an ironic way she did end up fixing him up.
Being able to argue circles around other people invites a kind of stupidity that is the exclusive property of the very smart or very rich. When it's a harmless odd opinion like walking around naked taking "air baths", we call it "quirky". Sometimes it's even right, like Tesla's toe-scrunching; neuroscientists now know that helps the brain with "executive functions" like planning and attention control. But that same mule-headedness can have a darker side, like Nobel laureate Shockley's racial "theories".
This is why I think gifted education is so important, not because the educators themselves can do much for the truly gifted, but having intellectual peers who challenge the gifted student on an equal basis teaches that student a lesson smart people often miss out on.
Just wait until Net Neutrality bites the dust. It'll be the same business model for Internet service as we've enjoyed with cable all these years.
Actually, battery storage technology is on a rapid downward trend. I was reading about India, which has severe coal-related pollution problems, and just recently the price of solar has dropped there has dropped to be less than coal. Within five years the cost of solar plus battery will be less on a per kwh basis than coal. It doesn't mean they'll be able to conjure the change overnight, but it'll start things going that way.
You didn't think Elon Musk just wanted to be this century's Henry Ford did you? He wants to be this century's John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) too. That's why pulling out of Paris pissed him off.
Anyhow, until battery backup of renewables is economically feasible, which will happen soon, there's plenty of fossil fuel generated kwhs that can be replaced with renewables. This is not only good for the enviroment, it'll mean lower local energy prices. That in turn will mean jobs and industry returning to some of those pockets of America that never saw any recovery from the Great Recession.
Well, with respect to dumb, two years ago people were criticizing solar subsidies because solar produced less than 0.5% of electricity in this country.
If by "dumb" you mean "something I don't like", I literally can't argue with you. But if by "dumb" you mean "obviously has no chance of meeting its objectives", the graph of percent of power generated speaks for itself.
Well, do you eliminate all the various ways the governments of the world subsidize fossil fuels? I'm not just talking about allowing oil companies to externalize their environmental costs, I'm talking cash, like the 21 billion dollars in tax breaks the US gives oil companies to encourage domestic exploration and production.
Do you really, seriously think that Katy Giffords was responsible for making this guy what he was? Or are you just pissed off by the offensiveness of it?
We don't have manned spaceflight capabilities??? I think NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin would disagree with you.
At present the last manned flight launched by the US was six years ago. Quite clearly we actually don't currently possess manned spaceflight capability. That's slated to change in a big way next year, but those chickens are most definitely not hatched yet.
You might argue that a seven year hiatus was a smart strategic decision that made the best use of limited budget as lower cost alternatives literally got off the ground, and I'd agree with you. But depending on the Russians for seven years was the kind of gamble a well-funded program wouldn't take. As things turned out oil prices have kept the Russian economy in bad shape, so that they couldn't afford to mess with us even after we slapped sanctions on them for Crimea. Things might have been uglier for us had oil prices gone up rather than down.
Ever hear off the Kolmogorov 0-1 law? Given a sufficiently large number of trials the probability of any particular outcome converges to either 0 or 1; it's either impossible or inevitable.
Bernie Sanders won 13.2 million votes in the Democratic primary. If one in a million were homicidal crackpots, that's 13 homicidal crackpots, and all you need is one. It doesn't make them representative of Sanders supporters. This guy was one of a small fringe of "Bernie or Busters" who urged people to vote for Jill Stein. That doesn't make him representative of Stein voters either.
Likewise while Trump may have had a lock on the neonazi vote in the election, I make it a habit of doing Trump voters the courtesy of not automatically assuming they're fascists, sexists, or Russia apologists.
Now I was a Sanders supporter in the primaries, and voted for Clinton in the generals. I detest the politics of Steve Scalise, but I don't wish him any harm. I wish him a speedy and full recovery, after which I will likely continue to detest his politics.
Converting your shit into a car analogy: "Bicycles work in a completely different way to tractor trailers"
Exactly. I don't see why you think that's ridiculous. Bikes and tractor trailers have some broad similarities, but they're built to accomplish different things so analogies between them aren't particularly useful.
But how's about we stop with bigotry, on all ends?
Sounds great, but I think I see a problem: bigotry is a cognitive bias. You might as well say, "How about we get rid of confirmation bias?"
You don't eradicate cognitive biases; they're baked in by millions of years of evolution. You mitigate them through education. You mitigate the Gambler's Fallacy by teaching people probability.
The problem with bigotry is it really hits us where we live: in issues of social status and survival; in belonging and exclusion. Bigotry is unique among the cognitive biases in its power to elicit shame.
Shame may be the single most painful negative emotion there is. People will die rather than experience it. So there's a simple-minded assumption that shame being so powerful, it ought to be a handy tool for behavior control. Actually it sucks for that purpose, precisely because it is so powerful. If you could tone it down to, say, mild chagrin, people would be eager to examine their bigoted attitudes critically. But faced with full-blown shame people will counterfeit the appearance of respectability while secretly harboring their beliefs, rationalizing them and quietly seeking out like-minded people.
Arguably selective forgetting is much more productive than being forced to continually defend the past. Where I live in Boston people are very proud of our Pilgrim and colonial heritage; we don't think much about hanging Quakers on the Common or the exchanges of genocidal terror attacks in King William's War. We treat the Salem Witch trials as a joke, but twenty-five people were killed, a phenomenal number considering the entire population of the colony was less than 40,000.
And yet, because we're not ashamed of our sordid past, there aren't people trying to keep the anti-Quaker sentiment alive. It's not because we're better than places that have active KKK chapters; it's that we feel free to pick and choose which part of our heritage to celebrate.
I assume your tech-idiot mother is functionally literate. Now take that away from her and see if she can manage on her own.
The usual standard for "functional literacy" -- being sufficiently capable at reading and writing to be a competent adult -- is eighth grade level proficiency. 21% of Americans read at a fourth grade level or lower. And when you look at prisoners, the number of read at below the fifth grade level is a staggering 70%.
Add to that that illiteracy tends to run in families, and yes, I'd say that going on the web and following the directions for setting up a google voice number is a challenge for many of these people -- much less reading the terms of service.
Well, they're not exactly overwhelmed by the volume of work. Congress is already stalled by the fact that the party in power is not quite so ideologically unified as it thought it was.
Thanks.
You are just spouting factoids and missing their significance. I never said water vapor is visible. I said it doesn't stay water vapor long.
The molecular weight of CO2 is neither here nor there. The atmosphere does not stratify by molecular weight the way you seem to believe it does. It is well-mixed within the troposphere, which is the relevant layer. In fact that's pretty much the scientific definition of the troposphere: it's the layer which is governed by turbulent mixing.
Expert systems work in a completely different way than machine learning approaches. Expert systems do indeed require the analysis of human knowledge as a starting point. Machine learning approaches do not; they just need data.
You also cannot duplicate my human method without aid (and pretty sure not even WITH aid)
My point is that duplicating the way you think isn't really necessary. You can in many cases be replaced by something that works in a completely different way.
This story is about machine learning. Whether you consider machine learning to be "artificial intelligence" probably says more about your definition of "artificial intelligence" than it does about machine learning.
Machine learning definitely replaces human judgment at certain tasks -- in this case classifying a thing by its attributes -- however it does it in ways that an unaided human brain cannot duplicate. For example it might examine the goodness of fit of a large number of alternative (although structurally similar) algorithms against a vast body of training data.
Many years ago, when I was a college student, AI enthusiasts used to say things like, "The best way to understand the human mind is to duplicate its functions." I believe that after three decades that has proven to be true, but not in the way people thought it would be true. It turns out the human way of doing things is just one possible way.
I think that's a pretty significant discovery. But is it "AI"? It's certainly not what people are expecting. On the plus side, methods like classification and regression trees produce algorithms that can be examined and critiqued analytically.
Most legitimate peer-reviewed journals have a conflict of interest disclosure requirement, so you just have to look at the paper to see.
The paper isn't available to no-subcribers, but here's the guideline listed by the journal in question:
A statement describing any financial conflicts of interest or lack thereof is published with each manuscript. During the submission process, the corresponding author must provide this statement on behalf of all authors of the manuscript. The statement should describe all potential sources of bias, including affiliations, funding sources, and financial or management relationships, that may constitute conflicts of interest (please see the ACS Ethical Guidelines). The statement will be published in the final article. If no conflict of interest is declared, the following statement will be published in the article: “The authors declare no competing financial interest.”
The bigger question is, what is the nature of the paper, and the journal it appears in?
The gold standard for evidence is a literature review paper published in a relevant journal that has a high impact factor for its field. Even high quality research reported in a relevant legitimate journal isn't something anyone should make any judgments based on. Science deals with evidence, and evidence in any non-trivial question tends to pile up on both sides at the outset.
ACS Sensors is a relatively new journal published by the American Chemical Society for research in chemical sensor technology. It's not even a health-related journal. This doesn't mean the research is bad, or the conclusions are bad. It just means that they're mainly relevant as to whether this technology could be used to research the health impact of e-cigarettes.
Another way to deal with people using national committees in ways you don't like is to not vote for or support those parties.
Sure, but that also means you're voting for third parties that can't win. And if they do by some miracle win it just means a whole new group of insiders. Because that's how it works. People who work hard and win feel entitled. That's how every new generation of insiders arises. Every old guard gets replaced by Young Turks who in time, become a new old guard. If you follow politics you'll see this happen over and over again.
Voting isn't about your feelings, and it isn't an exercise in self-expression. Voting is an exercise of political power. If you don't use your vote that way, you're responsible for the outcome.
So you STILL believe he was under investigation, even after Comey's hearing, where he testified he wasn't?
I have no opinion, because the question is in part dependent upon a dubious distinction. Is there a difference between investigating the President and investigating a large number of people who are around him?
Not really. There's no special juju that happens when you name a president as a target of an investigation other than this: a massive shitstorm of a Constitutional crisis automatically ensues. That's why it's the very last thing you do -- if you're going to do it. You're probably not old enough to remember Watergate, but Nixon wasn't named personally as a target of any investigations until the Watergate Seven were indicted, but it was apparent long before that he was in the crosshairs.
So I stand by what I said. You don't pull the trigger on naming the president until you've got your ducks lined up. We have no idea whether the investigators are heading in that direction, but if they were they wouldn't say.
They already do and don't you think that a few of the almost 1.4 billion people in China are able to come up with ideas on how to do new things?
This is an extremely important point to remember: population may not always be equivalent to total brainpower, but it certainly helps when it comes finding genius. Consider: the current US population of 341 million represents only 4.5 % of the world's 7.5 billion people. Even if we have more than our share of genius, most of the genius in the world comes from somewhere else.
Sometimes I think the Moon landing wasn't such a good thing for the US. While the rest of the world looked back at that blue marble in the black expanse and was humbled, the US was swallowing a dose of ego validation that would choke a politician. But Apollo really ought to tell us a different story, not of American winning solely because of native genius, but because its native genius working with immigrants like Werner von Braun on the largest public works program ever.
And it's not just space; from the 30s to the 70s many of the best minds in the world poured into the US. John von Neumann, who conceived of the basic design which underlies nearly all modern computers, was born in Hungary. He came to the US because of a job offer and because America was safe for Jews and intellectuals. Same for Einstein. When I was a student at MIT back in the early 80s many of our most important professors were WW2 refugees.
That infusion of European intellect helped fuel America's rise to global scientific dominance after the 1930s. Of the two dozen Physics Nobel laureates in the 40s-60s, nearly half were immigrants or children of immigrants; of the remaining dozen, half won for work performed with immigrant scientists.
US science and tech dominance is highly artificial; the product of jobs for intellectuals, tolerance for unpopular groups, openness to immigrants and refugees, and massive investments in research and education. And on that rests our economic and military dominance. Take that away, and we're just 5% of the world's population.
I was a Sanders supporter, and I didn't think the leaked information made the DNC looked bad. That's because I understand how the system works. I've read the party by-laws (you've read *your* party by-laws, haven't you?). Would the rules be better if, for example, the staging of debates was decided by some impartial process? Sure. But scheduling the debates to favor one candidate is not against the rules as they stand.
The national committees of each party are not non-partisan, impartial bodies. They are power centers that do the bidding of the party establishment, hopefully in an enlightened-self-interest way. That's by design. It's not spelled out explicitly, but it's quite obvious in the DNC bylaws: all kinds of rules require representation of women and minorities, but not wings of the party.
Russian trolls did their best to upset Sanders supporters over this, and they were pretty successful because most Sanders supporters are young and haven't figured out how things work yet. The world would be a better place if everyone were fair and impartial. But it will never happen, and you can't get there by trying to write the rules so insider power goes away. It won't go away it just goes somewhere else.
The way you deal with insider power is you take it away from them. Or at least threaten to. You either wangle and invitation or you kick the doors down. You don't expect them to play nice. Sanders understood this, which is why his slogan was "It's not about me, it's about us."
Like the fact that Donald Trump was never under investigation for Russian collusion, but that didn't leak for some reason....
We don't know that for a fact, but the assertion was, in fact, leaked.
It makes no difference in international law.