Also don't forget that those jobs he promises to bring back won't be coming back. The jobs people want to come back are long gone, automated out of existence. The jobs that are available are fewer and require more skills and training.
It makes every sense to tax corporations since they rely and use government services at least as much if not more so than individuals do. They rely on government to enforce contracts, patents, copyright. They use government built roads. And government has to clean up after them when they make a mess and declare bankruptcy. They also rely on government funded education for their workers.
It's the difference between Hillary and Trump. Hillary talked about job training for future jobs where Trump talks about going back to the past. We're manufacturing more than ever before in this country but most of the manufacturing jobs have been automated. It takes a fraction of the number of people today to build a car than it did decades ago despite being an order of magnitude or more more complex. There are manufacturing jobs, but they're not the sort of jobs one can just jump into with only a high school education. Like you said, a lot more jobs will be disappearing and people need to prepare for this. If Trump tries to force the jobs to come back he'll be in for a shock when people riot with sky-high prices at Walmart and find that they're not qualified for the jobs (which is the case today). Manufacturing is hiring but can't find enough people with the skills needed.
On another note, it's the wrong time to suddenly spend a bunch of money on infrastructure since the country is already near full-employment. This is especially true of the infrastructure Stephen Bannon is talking about, like throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. He mentioned, for example, building shipyards, but there's a glut of ships and they're cutting them up due to lack of demand. Spending a bunch of money on infrastructure right now will lead to a lot of inflation. If you're going to build infrastructure you need to be smart about it and look at what will provide a good long-term ROI. Then there's the problem of when you stop building all the infrastructure due to the huge deficits; now suddenly a lot of people will be out of work. Some infrastructure makes sense, but not on the scale Trump is talking about. For example, we really need to invest a lot more in rail and fixing our transportation infrastructure as well as encouraging more broadband and clean energy and improving the grid and water infrastructure.
Nobody in their right mind is going to invest in coal today, especially clean-coal, not when natural gas is a lot cheaper. It's the same with nuclear. The expense is just too high. Hell, wind power is now cheaper than coal, even without the subsidies. Nobody mentions the fact that "clean coal" is a lot more expensive than regular coal either. It's just a marketing gimmick to try and make people think that coal isn't as dirty as it really is or that it's going to change, which it won't. If Trump really wanted to help the people in coal country he should encourage other businesses to move into the area to diversify, that way people are not dependent on any one industry since industries come and go.
I too find his remarks highly racist. I've been working in Silicon Valley for 20 years and at all of the companies I have worked at there has always been a large percentage of immigrant engineers of all races. Most of the start-ups in the valley were started by immigrants and 51% of the billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. While some companies seem to abuse H1bs I can honestly say that in my experience there is a shortage of good engineers, at least for the areas I work with (high-speed networking code, embedded processors, bootloader code, Linux kernel code, etc.). There are not enough Americans graduating from college with the degrees and skills needed to fill the gap, especially as the older engineers start to retire.
Like the above poster, we see far more foreign born applicants than native born. Unlike some companies which hire a huge number of H1b's who aren't all that skilled, my employer tries to be picky and hire good engineers and we jump at the chance to hire truly great engineers, regardless of race, sex, etc.
We are a country of immigrants. Immigrants help make this country great, bringing new ideas. Silicon Valley has always been a land of immigrants even as far back as the gold rush, where Chinese were brought in through San Francisco. My current employer, as were about half of my previous employers were founded by immigrants.
I say this as a native-born white guy who was born and raised in Silicon Valley. I work with a lot of very talented engineers from all over the world, including many from south-east Asia. In every engineering position I've held, I've been surrounded by "minorities" and am often the minority. Steve Bannon is a disgrace.
Its purpose has long since passed. Originally there was not direct voting for President.
The whole electoral college system and winner-take-all state behavior severely distorts the election. Because of this setup, the candidates typically only focus on the swing states and completely ignore the needs and wants of other states which might have significant votes that just won't reach a majority in that state. For example, because of this Republicans will ignore the wants and needs of states like California and New York and Democrats will often ignore states like Texas. By eliminating the electoral college and making it a direct vote the President needs to consider the concerns of ALL of the states. While, say, a democrat won't get a majority in Texas, they still need to focus on the needs of the state because the votes still count from democrats in the state.
It also hurts solidly red or blue states when their own party candidate wins because they know they're going to get the majority votes anyway.
My sister similarly has major health issues and relies on a number of provisions of Obamacare in order to stay alive. Losing insurance for her would be a death sentence. Several provisions of Obamacare are helping to keep her alive and a productive member of society: - Nobody can be turned away due to pre-existing conditions. - All medications must be covered (minus deductible) though some may require petitioning. - No lifetime limits on care
As it is, my family has to help subsidize her care since the monthly deductible on one of her medications is $500/month and she's on a teacher's salary that doesn't pay a lot. Without insurance her medication jumps to $5000/month.
My mother also at one time had to have a procedure similar to an abortion when the fetus died and had to be extracted. If they're so anti-abortion, why not work on ways to make it much less needed by offering more birth control and pre-natal healthcare to women? To me it just seems that they want to make women second-class citizens by legislating their bodies rather than help make it so the procedure is needed far less. People like Pence also seem to go out of their way to make it harder for wanted children by fighting against programs like CHIP.
Requiring everyone to work full-time for basic survival is just not sustainable in the long term. The capitalists montra of constant growth also is not sustainable since at some point it will have to reach a steady-state. While there are those of us who are highly technical, there are many things non-technical people can do with their creativity if they had a minimal living wage. People could take more risks in harnessing their creativity if they knew that if they fail they still have a base to fall back on. I think you could see a lot more artists and artwork. You almost need something like the WPA of the 1930s to employ artists and other people who otherwise wouldn't have jobs. The other thing that has to happen is the cost to get a college degree needs to fall, either through subsidies or other means in order to get more people with the needed skills.
There are a lot of openings for people with the skills for advanced manufacturing but not enough people to fill them. Bringing back the shop classes and properly funding them in high school as well as more trade schools would help a lot. There are plenty of things that can't be automated that don't require college degrees either but do require skills that often are no longer taught in school.
A basic income could lead to even more innovation and entrepreneurship since there would always be a fallback.
This would require a much better social safety net and a more socialist type society where basic needs are always met.
I think they'll be in for a shock when the jobs that went the way of the dodo with automation don't come back. Coal? Nobody in their right mind will invest in coal, especially clean coal when natural gas is cheaper and easier to deal with. Tariffs against China? Like trade wars have worked well in the past, they're often disastrous. Low-skilled jobs will continue to disappear as automation continues. In 10 years most truck driving jobs will probably be gone, for example. The same with things like taxi drivers, etc. If you're unskilled, the number of jobs is going to continue to decrease and there's nothing the President or anyone else can do about it other than ban innovation.
With progress, fewer and fewer people are needed to perform jobs. People need to either move on to something new or they'll be left behind. No business in their right mind would say, "Oh, I think we'll get rid of all this automation to hire more people."
At least Hillary understood this since she was pushing for job training.
I expect a lot of service jobs will also disappear as well as AI improves.
The jobs will become more and more technical. Those not able to hack it will continue to be further left behind.
Gamma globulin is so expensive because it is derived from human blood. It is basically the extraction of the antibodies out of the blood. She also requires Epipens because of that, which is price gouged.
Before you forget, it was George W. Bush and the republicans who pushed through the whole Medicare Part D which prohibits the federal government from negotiating drug prices and forcing it to pay whatever the manufacturers want.
And who prevented any change to help the middle class, by repealing all the Bush tax breaks or spending on needed infrastructure? Congress. The House controls the purse strings and the R's did everything in their power to block anything the democrats wanted to do (it was only a few months when democrats could overcome a republican filibuster). When the R's came to power they blocked just about every democratic proposal and refused to compromise. They did everything in their power to make Obama a one-term President.
Did you forget about his big golf course in Scotland? He has many foreign properties and HUUUGE conflicts of interests he cannot disassociate himself from.
Trump International is a global company with properties all over the world. Also, most of the money for his campaign did not come from him and he often used his campaign to pay himself to use his properties for campaign events.
My sister also will probably not make it without the ACA. Her work insurance doesn't cover the gamma globulin she needs to stay alive and on a teacher's salary she can't afford $5000/month for the medication. With our parents retired it will be very tough. Due to her work insurance (private school teacher) not covering it, she uses the exchange to pay for her own insurance that does where she only pays $500/month for her medicine with my parents helping to pay for it. It will be very difficult for me and my parents to come up with $60K every year to pay for her medicine. Tax deductions don't help her when she pays almost no taxes due to the amount of money she makes and my parents and I can't deduct it either since she's not a dependent. She has also run up enough hospital bills in the past where without the ACA she would have gone over the lifetime limits.
My sister has a major pre-existing condition and requires gamma globulin that costs $5000/month in order to stay alive. She works as a teacher and the insurance where she works (at a private school) does not cover it so she has to go to the exchange for another plan that does cover it. Without the ACA, no outside insurance company would touch her due to her pre-existing conditions. With the insurance she only pays $500/month for her medicine (not counting the other medications and doctor co-pays, etc.) If the ACA is repealed with Trump's plan she'd be out of pocket $5000/month to stay alive, which is far more than she makes. Tax deductions under Trump's plan won't help when she pays little to no federal income tax anyway at her salary.
If the ACA is repealed my family will have to figure out how to come up with at least $60K/year to keep her alive. My parents are retired and it's far more than I can afford. While healthcare in this country is fucked up and way overpriced, the alternative for many people of repealing the ACA is far far worse.
I know people who are alive because it prevented insurance companies from imposing lifetime caps on care, my sister being one of them. I also know people who lost everything before the ACA due to something like cancer or a stroke when insurance companies refused to pay due to caps or other reasons.
Obamacare is literally keeping my sister alive. The medication she needs to survive costs $5000/month and is not covered by her employer's insurance (she's a teacher at a private school). Thanks to Obamacare she was able to get into an exchange and buy insurance that does cover her medication for only $500/month. Being on a teacher's salary, my parents who are retired help her out. With her pre-existing conditions, there's no way any insurance company would take her and she'd quickly hit the limits with the medical issues she's had since every couple of years something major comes up. Her medication is so expensive because it is derived from human blood because her immune system has shut down and isn't making antibodies. And Trump's plan with tax deductions won't come close to paying for the medication, especially on a teachers salary where she doesn't pay much if any federal taxes.
Don't forget Trump University, his whole birther movement, the Trump foundation self-dealing and his multiple failed businesses where he deducted the loss of other people's money. Then there's all the wild conspiracy theories he kept putting out, like about Ted Cruz's father.
Also, a wired connection is generally not only faster but more reliable. It's not subject to crowded spectrum or interference from other devices. As for the SD slot, I have a relatively thin low-medium range HP laptop I bought a couple years ago. I easily upgraded it to 16GB and put in a 1TB SSD. It has a SD slot which I find useful for a number of things. While my camera takes both SD and compact flash, it's nice to have the SD so I can quickly take a jpeg picture from the camera and give it to someone. I set up my camera so JPEGs go to SD and RAW goes to compact flash.
The laptop also has an Ethernet port which I frequently use, 3 USB ports (sometimes I wish it had more) and HDMI. I would expect a premium professional laptop to offer more than my cheap HP laptop. About the only thing my laptop is missing is it's not high on the CPU horsepower, being an I3 based laptop, but it gets the job done for me.
If I were using it for work it would have to have more USB ports and support a minimum of 32GB of RAM and have a lot of USB ports and wired Ethernet. An escape key would also be important for those times I run VI.
I too am an original customer from @Home. When AT&T bought it out and turned it into ATTBI the service went to absolute crap. With @Home I originally had 10Mbps down and 10Mbps up, which was the limit of the modems at the time. Later it was reduced to 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up, which at the time was still extremely good.
Then AT&T bought it out. AT&T decided to change it to 10Mbps down, 128Kbps up but they screwed up badly. Rather than limit each customer to 128Kbps, which was pretty bad, they throttled ALL of the customers on a node through the same 128kbps. At the best of times, like 3am, I saw 40% packet loss with my only traffic being ping. My old 28.8kbps dialup modem was faster than my 10Mbps down cable modem because all of the TCP ack packets were getting dropped. Basic services like email were unusable. It was like this for 9 months! AT&T support were completely useless, their best answer was asking if I rebooted my computer. It wasn't just me but everyone I know in my area who was on that service.
When Comcast bought out AT&T it was like a breath of fresh air. Comcast immediately upgraded the performance and as bad as it is, their support is orders of magnitude better than anything I got out of AT&T. When people complain about Comcast, they don't realize just how much better they are than AT&T.
We had those when I was in college. They were popular for certain games because the escape sequences for things like cursor positioning were shorter than VT100s, though they tended to have certain keys being broken like (T)orpedo. They were a bitch to type on with extremely stiff keys and they looked terrible with a 5x7 character matrix.
Believe it or not, Comcast was a MAJOR upgrade from AT&T for me.
I used to have the @Home cable modem service and was quite pleased with it. This is before the days of Doxis and there was no throttling. My cable modem was capable of 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down. Later, @Home reduced it to 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. Times were still good since that was an insane amount of bandwidth.
Then AT&T bought out @Home and switched it to AT&T Broadband Internet (ATTBI). They decided to reduce the upstream bandwidth to 128Kbps, but they aggregated all of the users through the SAME 128Kbps pipe. As a result, on the best of days I saw 40% packet loss with ping. My old 28.8Kbps modem was faster than my cable modem. It was like this for 9 months. Technical support was absolutely useless. There were newspaper articles about it but still the incompetence continued.
When Comcast took over things improved drastically. I will go out of my way to avoid anything to do with AT&T. While Comcast has a lot of problems, it is nothing like what I experienced with AT&T. AT&T was absolute shit.
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Also don't forget that those jobs he promises to bring back won't be coming back. The jobs people want to come back are long gone, automated out of existence. The jobs that are available are fewer and require more skills and training.
It makes every sense to tax corporations since they rely and use government services at least as much if not more so than individuals do. They rely on government to enforce contracts, patents, copyright. They use government built roads. And government has to clean up after them when they make a mess and declare bankruptcy. They also rely on government funded education for their workers.
It's the difference between Hillary and Trump. Hillary talked about job training for future jobs where Trump talks about going back to the past. We're manufacturing more than ever before in this country but most of the manufacturing jobs have been automated. It takes a fraction of the number of people today to build a car than it did decades ago despite being an order of magnitude or more more complex. There are manufacturing jobs, but they're not the sort of jobs one can just jump into with only a high school education. Like you said, a lot more jobs will be disappearing and people need to prepare for this. If Trump tries to force the jobs to come back he'll be in for a shock when people riot with sky-high prices at Walmart and find that they're not qualified for the jobs (which is the case today). Manufacturing is hiring but can't find enough people with the skills needed.
On another note, it's the wrong time to suddenly spend a bunch of money on infrastructure since the country is already near full-employment. This is especially true of the infrastructure Stephen Bannon is talking about, like throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. He mentioned, for example, building shipyards, but there's a glut of ships and they're cutting them up due to lack of demand. Spending a bunch of money on infrastructure right now will lead to a lot of inflation. If you're going to build infrastructure you need to be smart about it and look at what will provide a good long-term ROI. Then there's the problem of when you stop building all the infrastructure due to the huge deficits; now suddenly a lot of people will be out of work. Some infrastructure makes sense, but not on the scale Trump is talking about. For example, we really need to invest a lot more in rail and fixing our transportation infrastructure as well as encouraging more broadband and clean energy and improving the grid and water infrastructure.
Nobody in their right mind is going to invest in coal today, especially clean-coal, not when natural gas is a lot cheaper. It's the same with nuclear. The expense is just too high. Hell, wind power is now cheaper than coal, even without the subsidies. Nobody mentions the fact that "clean coal" is a lot more expensive than regular coal either. It's just a marketing gimmick to try and make people think that coal isn't as dirty as it really is or that it's going to change, which it won't. If Trump really wanted to help the people in coal country he should encourage other businesses to move into the area to diversify, that way people are not dependent on any one industry since industries come and go.
Warming water also raises sea levels. Water is most dense at 4C. Raising the temperature causes it to expand and hence sea level rise. Much of the deep ocean is at 4C due to the higher density and this cold water is formed at the poles. According to the IPCC, thermal expansion accounts for about a quarter of observed sea level rise between 1961 and 2003. Between 1993-2003 thermal expansion accounted for around half of the sea level rise.
I too find his remarks highly racist. I've been working in Silicon Valley for 20 years and at all of the companies I have worked at there has always been a large percentage of immigrant engineers of all races. Most of the start-ups in the valley were started by immigrants and 51% of the billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. While some companies seem to abuse H1bs I can honestly say that in my experience there is a shortage of good engineers, at least for the areas I work with (high-speed networking code, embedded processors, bootloader code, Linux kernel code, etc.). There are not enough Americans graduating from college with the degrees and skills needed to fill the gap, especially as the older engineers start to retire.
Like the above poster, we see far more foreign born applicants than native born. Unlike some companies which hire a huge number of H1b's who aren't all that skilled, my employer tries to be picky and hire good engineers and we jump at the chance to hire truly great engineers, regardless of race, sex, etc.
We are a country of immigrants. Immigrants help make this country great, bringing new ideas. Silicon Valley has always been a land of immigrants even as far back as the gold rush, where Chinese were brought in through San Francisco. My current employer, as were about half of my previous employers were founded by immigrants.
I say this as a native-born white guy who was born and raised in Silicon Valley. I work with a lot of very talented engineers from all over the world, including many from south-east Asia. In every engineering position I've held, I've been surrounded by "minorities" and am often the minority. Steve Bannon is a disgrace.
Its purpose has long since passed. Originally there was not direct voting for President.
The whole electoral college system and winner-take-all state behavior severely distorts the election. Because of this setup, the candidates typically only focus on the swing states and completely ignore the needs and wants of other states which might have significant votes that just won't reach a majority in that state. For example, because of this Republicans will ignore the wants and needs of states like California and New York and Democrats will often ignore states like Texas. By eliminating the electoral college and making it a direct vote the President needs to consider the concerns of ALL of the states. While, say, a democrat won't get a majority in Texas, they still need to focus on the needs of the state because the votes still count from democrats in the state.
It also hurts solidly red or blue states when their own party candidate wins because they know they're going to get the majority votes anyway.
My sister similarly has major health issues and relies on a number of provisions of Obamacare in order to stay alive. Losing insurance for her would be a death sentence. Several provisions of Obamacare are helping to keep her alive and a productive member of society:
- Nobody can be turned away due to pre-existing conditions.
- All medications must be covered (minus deductible) though some may require petitioning.
- No lifetime limits on care
As it is, my family has to help subsidize her care since the monthly deductible on one of her medications is $500/month and she's on a teacher's salary that doesn't pay a lot. Without insurance her medication jumps to $5000/month.
My mother also at one time had to have a procedure similar to an abortion when the fetus died and had to be extracted. If they're so anti-abortion, why not work on ways to make it much less needed by offering more birth control and pre-natal healthcare to women? To me it just seems that they want to make women second-class citizens by legislating their bodies rather than help make it so the procedure is needed far less. People like Pence also seem to go out of their way to make it harder for wanted children by fighting against programs like CHIP.
I agree with you on the basic income movement.
Requiring everyone to work full-time for basic survival is just not sustainable in the long term. The capitalists montra of constant growth also is not sustainable since at some point it will have to reach a steady-state. While there are those of us who are highly technical, there are many things non-technical people can do with their creativity if they had a minimal living wage. People could take more risks in harnessing their creativity if they knew that if they fail they still have a base to fall back on. I think you could see a lot more artists and artwork. You almost need something like the WPA of the 1930s to employ artists and other people who otherwise wouldn't have jobs. The other thing that has to happen is the cost to get a college degree needs to fall, either through subsidies or other means in order to get more people with the needed skills.
There are a lot of openings for people with the skills for advanced manufacturing but not enough people to fill them. Bringing back the shop classes and properly funding them in high school as well as more trade schools would help a lot. There are plenty of things that can't be automated that don't require college degrees either but do require skills that often are no longer taught in school.
A basic income could lead to even more innovation and entrepreneurship since there would always be a fallback.
This would require a much better social safety net and a more socialist type society where basic needs are always met.
I think they'll be in for a shock when the jobs that went the way of the dodo with automation don't come back. Coal? Nobody in their right mind will invest in coal, especially clean coal when natural gas is cheaper and easier to deal with. Tariffs against China? Like trade wars have worked well in the past, they're often disastrous. Low-skilled jobs will continue to disappear as automation continues. In 10 years most truck driving jobs will probably be gone, for example. The same with things like taxi drivers, etc. If you're unskilled, the number of jobs is going to continue to decrease and there's nothing the President or anyone else can do about it other than ban innovation.
With progress, fewer and fewer people are needed to perform jobs. People need to either move on to something new or they'll be left behind. No business in their right mind would say, "Oh, I think we'll get rid of all this automation to hire more people."
At least Hillary understood this since she was pushing for job training.
I expect a lot of service jobs will also disappear as well as AI improves.
The jobs will become more and more technical. Those not able to hack it will continue to be further left behind.
Gamma globulin is so expensive because it is derived from human blood. It is basically the extraction of the antibodies out of the blood. She also requires Epipens because of that, which is price gouged.
Before you forget, it was George W. Bush and the republicans who pushed through the whole Medicare Part D which prohibits the federal government from negotiating drug prices and forcing it to pay whatever the manufacturers want.
He's moving from the ultra-conservative right to the conspiracy laced alt-right (i.e. birthism).
And who prevented any change to help the middle class, by repealing all the Bush tax breaks or spending on needed infrastructure? Congress. The House controls the purse strings and the R's did everything in their power to block anything the democrats wanted to do (it was only a few months when democrats could overcome a republican filibuster). When the R's came to power they blocked just about every democratic proposal and refused to compromise. They did everything in their power to make Obama a one-term President.
Actually, he has so many international business deals all over the world that the world owns him.
Did you forget about his big golf course in Scotland? He has many foreign properties and HUUUGE conflicts of interests he cannot disassociate himself from.
Trump International is a global company with properties all over the world. Also, most of the money for his campaign did not come from him and he often used his campaign to pay himself to use his properties for campaign events.
My sister also will probably not make it without the ACA. Her work insurance doesn't cover the gamma globulin she needs to stay alive and on a teacher's salary she can't afford $5000/month for the medication. With our parents retired it will be very tough. Due to her work insurance (private school teacher) not covering it, she uses the exchange to pay for her own insurance that does where she only pays $500/month for her medicine with my parents helping to pay for it. It will be very difficult for me and my parents to come up with $60K every year to pay for her medicine. Tax deductions don't help her when she pays almost no taxes due to the amount of money she makes and my parents and I can't deduct it either since she's not a dependent. She has also run up enough hospital bills in the past where without the ACA she would have gone over the lifetime limits.
At least you can get insurance.
My sister has a major pre-existing condition and requires gamma globulin that costs $5000/month in order to stay alive. She works as a teacher and the insurance where she works (at a private school) does not cover it so she has to go to the exchange for another plan that does cover it. Without the ACA, no outside insurance company would touch her due to her pre-existing conditions. With the insurance she only pays $500/month for her medicine (not counting the other medications and doctor co-pays, etc.) If the ACA is repealed with Trump's plan she'd be out of pocket $5000/month to stay alive, which is far more than she makes. Tax deductions under Trump's plan won't help when she pays little to no federal income tax anyway at her salary.
If the ACA is repealed my family will have to figure out how to come up with at least $60K/year to keep her alive. My parents are retired and it's far more than I can afford. While healthcare in this country is fucked up and way overpriced, the alternative for many people of repealing the ACA is far far worse.
I know people who are alive because it prevented insurance companies from imposing lifetime caps on care, my sister being one of them. I also know people who lost everything before the ACA due to something like cancer or a stroke when insurance companies refused to pay due to caps or other reasons.
Obamacare is literally keeping my sister alive. The medication she needs to survive costs $5000/month and is not covered by her employer's insurance (she's a teacher at a private school). Thanks to Obamacare she was able to get into an exchange and buy insurance that does cover her medication for only $500/month. Being on a teacher's salary, my parents who are retired help her out. With her pre-existing conditions, there's no way any insurance company would take her and she'd quickly hit the limits with the medical issues she's had since every couple of years something major comes up. Her medication is so expensive because it is derived from human blood because her immune system has shut down and isn't making antibodies. And Trump's plan with tax deductions won't come close to paying for the medication, especially on a teachers salary where she doesn't pay much if any federal taxes.
God no, then we'd be stuck with Pence.
Don't forget Trump University, his whole birther movement, the Trump foundation self-dealing and his multiple failed businesses where he deducted the loss of other people's money. Then there's all the wild conspiracy theories he kept putting out, like about Ted Cruz's father.
Also, a wired connection is generally not only faster but more reliable. It's not subject to crowded spectrum or interference from other devices. As for the SD slot, I have a relatively thin low-medium range HP laptop I bought a couple years ago. I easily upgraded it to 16GB and put in a 1TB SSD. It has a SD slot which I find useful for a number of things. While my camera takes both SD and compact flash, it's nice to have the SD so I can quickly take a jpeg picture from the camera and give it to someone. I set up my camera so JPEGs go to SD and RAW goes to compact flash.
The laptop also has an Ethernet port which I frequently use, 3 USB ports (sometimes I wish it had more) and HDMI. I would expect a premium professional laptop to offer more than my cheap HP laptop. About the only thing my laptop is missing is it's not high on the CPU horsepower, being an I3 based laptop, but it gets the job done for me.
If I were using it for work it would have to have more USB ports and support a minimum of 32GB of RAM and have a lot of USB ports and wired Ethernet. An escape key would also be important for those times I run VI.
I too am an original customer from @Home. When AT&T bought it out and turned it into ATTBI the service went to absolute crap. With @Home I originally had 10Mbps down and 10Mbps up, which was the limit of the modems at the time. Later it was reduced to 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up, which at the time was still extremely good.
Then AT&T bought it out. AT&T decided to change it to 10Mbps down, 128Kbps up but they screwed up badly. Rather than limit each customer to 128Kbps, which was pretty bad, they throttled ALL of the customers on a node through the same 128kbps. At the best of times, like 3am, I saw 40% packet loss with my only traffic being ping. My old 28.8kbps dialup modem was faster than my 10Mbps down cable modem because all of the TCP ack packets were getting dropped. Basic services like email were unusable. It was like this for 9 months! AT&T support were completely useless, their best answer was asking if I rebooted my computer. It wasn't just me but everyone I know in my area who was on that service.
When Comcast bought out AT&T it was like a breath of fresh air. Comcast immediately upgraded the performance and as bad as it is, their support is orders of magnitude better than anything I got out of AT&T. When people complain about Comcast, they don't realize just how much better they are than AT&T.
We had those when I was in college. They were popular for certain games because the escape sequences for things like cursor positioning were shorter than VT100s, though they tended to have certain keys being broken like (T)orpedo. They were a bitch to type on with extremely stiff keys and they looked terrible with a 5x7 character matrix.
Apple is just preparing people for their next generation Macbook Wheel.
Believe it or not, Comcast was a MAJOR upgrade from AT&T for me.
I used to have the @Home cable modem service and was quite pleased with it. This is before the days of Doxis and there was no throttling. My cable modem was capable of 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down. Later, @Home reduced it to 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. Times were still good since that was an insane amount of bandwidth.
Then AT&T bought out @Home and switched it to AT&T Broadband Internet (ATTBI). They decided to reduce the upstream bandwidth to 128Kbps, but they aggregated all of the users through the SAME 128Kbps pipe. As a result, on the best of days I saw 40% packet loss with ping. My old 28.8Kbps modem was faster than my cable modem. It was like this for 9 months. Technical support was absolutely useless. There were newspaper articles about it but still the incompetence continued.
When Comcast took over things improved drastically. I will go out of my way to avoid anything to do with AT&T. While Comcast has a lot of problems, it is nothing like what I experienced with AT&T. AT&T was absolute shit.
Radar should easily be able to tell the difference between the two.