It's normal in China. When they buy an apartment, it is four bare walls with pipes sticking out. It takes two years to furnish before it's livable. You can move in early if you want, but all the other apartments near you are going to have construction noise, dusty workers hogging the elevator, etc. Chinese people consider they will live in the apartment their whole lives so it's not a big deal to them.
WP is Jeff Bezos' personal blog and should be trusted about as much as a blogger. Seriously, can anyone read that "democracy dies in darkness" headline without busting out in laughter? The Washington Post, mouthpiece of the DC Establishment? The unelected government that thinks it is not under the control of the people?
The man praised Venezuela as a model for the US to follow. He honeymooned in Communist Russia. He wrote misogynist articles about women. He was kicked out of a hippie commune for being too lazy. He never had a straight job in his life before going into politics at age 40. He backed Hillary Clinton after she rigged the primaries against him. Integrity is not his middle name.
Envy and resentment. They're all tied up in knots that the Americans are kicking their asses, and instead of replying with competition, they instead attempt to regulate. You have to realize how humiliating it is for them to be forced to follow the Americans when everyone knows Europe is clearly superior. A good way to restore their damaged psychological state is to lash out against those Americans who make them feel bad. They want so desperately to be seen as the best and to humiliate the Americans instead, and this is the only way they know. The idea that they need to change is a non starter. Humans hate changing themselves and only do it as an utter last resort when all else has failed.
The post office has nothing to do with banking. Why not make it so you can pick up your UPS packages at the local porno shop? Or put knitting supplies in fishing tackle stores?
Honestly as bad as banks are, having a US government bank sounds even worse.
The wealthy elites who live there will never put up with it. Owning a car in Manhattan is a status symbol, and elites love status symbols. Take away their cars and you attack the very center of their being. They will fight before they allow the proles to take away something that is rightfully theirs.
So, I notice you didn't address the far left's virulent hatred of the working class - the same working class they supposedly stood for since there was a far left in the first place. What happened? How'd you switch and end up on the side of the wealthy and powerful oppressors?
"As long as they believe Ivanka didn't intend any harm, she's let off the hook for any violations." was one of the items listed. It worked for Hillary; it will work here as well.
Americans love the smell because they associate it with getting a brand new car. This is a big deal in car culture.
Chinese hate the smell because it represents chemical contamination, something they know all too well. In China when they buy a new apartment and furnish it, there's a period of six months or so when they leave it vacant. They have to let all the materials outgas before they can live there.
So it's the different culture in China where every product is toxic and any off smell means you're being poisoned. Even if you buy from a reputable company there's always some middle manager somewhere who is going to substitute inferior materials for the quality materials her factory paid for and pocket the difference.
Sure, but it's going to be more expensive. You won't pay. They don't even put spare tires in cars any more because it increases the price and the weight decreases the gas mileage. You want cheap, cheap, cheap and don't care what materials are. You use phones made with slave labor because they're cheaper for fucks sake.
So why aren't you on the side of the working class against the powerful? Instead you're siding with the powerful and calling the little people deplorable. I'm not into hatred. I'm baffled as fuck by the far left who - a few years ago - were all about the working class, but who have since then morphed into fulltime anti-working class hatred and sympathy for privileged elites.
In 1960, an American family of four with one working class income could afford a home, a car, three square meals a day, and all the other requirements of a decent lifestyle. In 2010, fifty years later, an American family of four with one working class income was struggling to avoid living on the street if they weren't already there. This didn't happen by accident, nor was it the product of impersonal economic forces. It was the result of specific, easily identifiable policies carried out by a bipartisan consensus and backed to the hilt by the privileged classes across the political spectrum.
The good people, the morally virtuous people, thus enthusiastically supported policies that plunged tens of millions of Americans into destitution and misery. In the usual fashion of aristocracies, furthermore, they insisted that the policies that benefited them were the only moral options, and that anyone who objected to them could only be motivated by deliberate evil. For those inside the self-referential bubble of elite culture, it all seemed so straightforward: the sufferings of those people whose interests aligned with those of the privileged were all-important and had to be addressed, while the sufferings of those crushed by policies that benefited the privileged were their own fault and didn't matter anyway.
It's funny. Trump has delivered what the Dems have wanted for decades. That is, that trade deals require foreign workers to be paid closer to American wage scales. The Dems, by all right, should be applauding this deal. But they are so consumed by hate that they can't even be happy when they win. But then they long ago abandoned their working class base in favor of idiotic identity politics. So they probably don't even know they won.
As long as the FBI follows the same procedure as with Hillary:
An exoneration letter is drafted in advance.
Immunity is given to top Trump aides (and they're allowed to sit in on the interview).
The interview isn't recorded.
The lead official doesn't attend.
The #2 official's family has received large donations from Trump's political friends.
Prior to the interview, the lead official meets privately on plane tarmac with Trump's wife (to discuss grandchildren).
Main interviewer has expressed disdain for Trump's opponents, such as discussing an "insurance plan" with higher-ups to undermine them. If the same
terms aren't offered...Was Clinton's interview process unfair?
As long as they believe Ivanka didn't intend any harm, she's let off the hook for
any violations.
If Ivanka becomes a target, it should be referred to as a "matter" not an investigation.
Trump aides should be permitted to destroy subpoenaed or relevant public records and wipe relevant servers with a cloth or something.
Uh, did you respond to the wrong comment? China wallowed in poverty for decades before our elites admitted them to the WTO. This was what crushed our working class and enabled China to become wealthy beyond its wildest dreams. Their descent into poverty was not caused by the Japanese (WTF?) nor encouraged by the Americans (double WTF - America was China's staunch ally against the Japanese, something largely forgotten today). This tragedy was caused by Marxism.
Then why does the socialist Left spit on our working class and call them deplorable? Let's be honest: there is a huge problem with the socialist Left shitting all over them. And yet these same people pretend to represent the working class? Makes zero sense.
Elites basically came up with this: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor. In contrast, labor is far less mobile, and unable to shift as fluidly and frictionlessly as capital to exploit scarcities and opportunities.
Neoliberalism--the opening of markets and borders--enables capital to effortlessly crush labor. Our elites, in embracing globalism, have institutionalized a system that shreds the scarcity value of domestic labor in favor of lower cost foreign labor that serves capital's desire for lower costs.
For someone who is professional class, someone who has a nice income and who does NOT make their income from labor but from providing intellectual services (doctors, lawyers, teachers, white collar work in general) then moving production overseas is overall a plus. THEIR job is usually not threatened by factories closing and jobs being exported overseas and their costs go down as labor wages go down due to cheap crap from China. In other words, globalization leads to a net INCREASE in take home pay for the professional and upper classes. (Always has)
However, if you are an average working class American, then your incomes and your throats are being cut by the huge influx of new, cheap junk. Working class jobs are being destroyed by low income labor at one end and automation at the other, leaving working class voters angry and broke and with no place to go.
That's where the backlash is coming from, and that's why so many upper income people can't see any problem with it. It's the old old problem of the landed gentry and the nobility looking down their noses at all of those stinking deplorable peasants, all over again.
When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, members of today's elite betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. In the United States, "Middle America" - a term that has both geographical and social implications - has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: "family values," mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly dowdy, unfashionable, and provincial.
In the borderless global economy, money has lost its links to nationality. David Rieff, who spent several months in Los Angeles collecting material for his book Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, reports that "at least two or three times a weekâ¦I could depend on hearing someone say that the future 'belonged' to the Pacific Rim." The movement of money and population across national borders has transformed the "whole idea of place," according to Rieff. The privileged classes in Los Angeles feel more kinship with their counterparts in Japan, Singapore, and Korea than with most of their own countrymen.
In his latest book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, Fiorina argues that Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization. The polarization we hear about is mostly restricted to political activists and media elites who mistake their own extreme views for those of the common people.
"Everybody worries about the average American being ensconced in a filter bubble," says Fiorina. "Most of the research suggests it's the elites who are in these filter bubbles...and have this biased view of the world."
If this is the case then why did we build China into the behemoth it is today? China used to be a poor, backwards country until our elites decided to let it into the WTO. Afterwards our factories died and our working class fell into poverty as China became a force to be reckoned with.
For someone who's not a socialist, he sure has a lot of repugnant friends who are socialists and holds America in contempt just like a socialist.
"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, VENEZUELA and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"
The rest of the world has done fantastically well since then. You have to get your head around the ideas that are in play here. American elites decided to ruin our middle and working classes for the benefit of hostile people in distant lands. NAFTA, the Iraq war, TPP, they are not running things for the benefit of their own people. Heck, they don't even consider that they have anything in common with us. They are "citizens of the world" and anyone who says Americans are getting screwed is immediately labeled a Nazi and ignored. When you look at the actual goals of our elites, they are accomplishing them. It's just that they decided that they were going to ruin us to achieve them. It's working well so far.
But when Obama bribed voters with free phones it was OK. This is pure tribalism: when my side does it it is good, but when your side does it it is wrong.
You apparently think the job of NASA is space exploration. It is not. The job of NASA is enriching the bank accounts of NASA managers and government contractors. That blue-sky rocket research is very welcome among those who rely on it for continued lucrative employment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's normal in China. When they buy an apartment, it is four bare walls with pipes sticking out. It takes two years to furnish before it's livable. You can move in early if you want, but all the other apartments near you are going to have construction noise, dusty workers hogging the elevator, etc. Chinese people consider they will live in the apartment their whole lives so it's not a big deal to them.
WP is Jeff Bezos' personal blog and should be trusted about as much as a blogger. Seriously, can anyone read that "democracy dies in darkness" headline without busting out in laughter? The Washington Post, mouthpiece of the DC Establishment? The unelected government that thinks it is not under the control of the people?
The man praised Venezuela as a model for the US to follow. He honeymooned in Communist Russia. He wrote misogynist articles about women. He was kicked out of a hippie commune for being too lazy. He never had a straight job in his life before going into politics at age 40. He backed Hillary Clinton after she rigged the primaries against him. Integrity is not his middle name.
Envy and resentment. They're all tied up in knots that the Americans are kicking their asses, and instead of replying with competition, they instead attempt to regulate. You have to realize how humiliating it is for them to be forced to follow the Americans when everyone knows Europe is clearly superior. A good way to restore their damaged psychological state is to lash out against those Americans who make them feel bad. They want so desperately to be seen as the best and to humiliate the Americans instead, and this is the only way they know. The idea that they need to change is a non starter. Humans hate changing themselves and only do it as an utter last resort when all else has failed.
The post office has nothing to do with banking. Why not make it so you can pick up your UPS packages at the local porno shop? Or put knitting supplies in fishing tackle stores?
Honestly as bad as banks are, having a US government bank sounds even worse.
The wealthy elites who live there will never put up with it. Owning a car in Manhattan is a status symbol, and elites love status symbols. Take away their cars and you attack the very center of their being. They will fight before they allow the proles to take away something that is rightfully theirs.
So, I notice you didn't address the far left's virulent hatred of the working class - the same working class they supposedly stood for since there was a far left in the first place. What happened? How'd you switch and end up on the side of the wealthy and powerful oppressors?
"As long as they believe Ivanka didn't intend any harm, she's let off the hook for any violations." was one of the items listed. It worked for Hillary; it will work here as well.
Americans love the smell because they associate it with getting a brand new car. This is a big deal in car culture.
Chinese hate the smell because it represents chemical contamination, something they know all too well. In China when they buy a new apartment and furnish it, there's a period of six months or so when they leave it vacant. They have to let all the materials outgas before they can live there.
So it's the different culture in China where every product is toxic and any off smell means you're being poisoned. Even if you buy from a reputable company there's always some middle manager somewhere who is going to substitute inferior materials for the quality materials her factory paid for and pocket the difference.
Sure, but it's going to be more expensive. You won't pay. They don't even put spare tires in cars any more because it increases the price and the weight decreases the gas mileage. You want cheap, cheap, cheap and don't care what materials are. You use phones made with slave labor because they're cheaper for fucks sake.
So why aren't you on the side of the working class against the powerful? Instead you're siding with the powerful and calling the little people deplorable. I'm not into hatred. I'm baffled as fuck by the far left who - a few years ago - were all about the working class, but who have since then morphed into fulltime anti-working class hatred and sympathy for privileged elites.
In 1960, an American family of four with one working class income could afford a home, a car, three square meals a day, and all the other requirements of a decent lifestyle. In 2010, fifty years later, an American family of four with one working class income was struggling to avoid living on the street if they weren't already there. This didn't happen by accident, nor was it the product of impersonal economic forces. It was the result of specific, easily identifiable policies carried out by a bipartisan consensus and backed to the hilt by the privileged classes across the political spectrum.
The good people, the morally virtuous people, thus enthusiastically supported policies that plunged tens of millions of Americans into destitution and misery. In the usual fashion of aristocracies, furthermore, they insisted that the policies that benefited them were the only moral options, and that anyone who objected to them could only be motivated by deliberate evil. For those inside the self-referential bubble of elite culture, it all seemed so straightforward: the sufferings of those people whose interests aligned with those of the privileged were all-important and had to be addressed, while the sufferings of those crushed by policies that benefited the privileged were their own fault and didn't matter anyway.
It's funny. Trump has delivered what the Dems have wanted for decades. That is, that trade deals require foreign workers to be paid closer to American wage scales. The Dems, by all right, should be applauding this deal. But they are so consumed by hate that they can't even be happy when they win. But then they long ago abandoned their working class base in favor of idiotic identity politics. So they probably don't even know they won.
Why are you attempting to cover for the rich and powerful? Aren't you on the far left? These people are your enemies, no?
Eh, who am I kidding - your enemies are the working class. Same as the elites. No wonder take their side and defend them in public.
Uh, did you respond to the wrong comment? China wallowed in poverty for decades before our elites admitted them to the WTO. This was what crushed our working class and enabled China to become wealthy beyond its wildest dreams. Their descent into poverty was not caused by the Japanese (WTF?) nor encouraged by the Americans (double WTF - America was China's staunch ally against the Japanese, something largely forgotten today). This tragedy was caused by Marxism.
Then why does the socialist Left spit on our working class and call them deplorable? Let's be honest: there is a huge problem with the socialist Left shitting all over them. And yet these same people pretend to represent the working class? Makes zero sense.
Elites basically came up with this: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor. In contrast, labor is far less mobile, and unable to shift as fluidly and frictionlessly as capital to exploit scarcities and opportunities.
Neoliberalism--the opening of markets and borders--enables capital to effortlessly crush labor. Our elites, in embracing globalism, have institutionalized a system that shreds the scarcity value of domestic labor in favor of lower cost foreign labor that serves capital's desire for lower costs.
For someone who is professional class, someone who has a nice income and who does NOT make their income from labor but from providing intellectual services (doctors, lawyers, teachers, white collar work in general) then moving production overseas is overall a plus. THEIR job is usually not threatened by factories closing and jobs being exported overseas and their costs go down as labor wages go down due to cheap crap from China. In other words, globalization leads to a net INCREASE in take home pay for the professional and upper classes. (Always has)
However, if you are an average working class American, then your incomes and your throats are being cut by the huge influx of new, cheap junk. Working class jobs are being destroyed by low income labor at one end and automation at the other, leaving working class voters angry and broke and with no place to go.
That's where the backlash is coming from, and that's why so many upper income people can't see any problem with it. It's the old old problem of the landed gentry and the nobility looking down their noses at all of those stinking deplorable peasants, all over again.
People who make decisions about our lives. If you're not a decision maker, you're one of us. Read this essay and tell me if you sympathize more with them, or with the American people.
Voters Aren't More Polarized than Ever, Only Pols and Media Are - Stanford political scientist says it's media and political elites who live in ideological bubbles, not regular Americans.
If this is the case then why did we build China into the behemoth it is today? China used to be a poor, backwards country until our elites decided to let it into the WTO. Afterwards our factories died and our working class fell into poverty as China became a force to be reckoned with.
For someone who's not a socialist, he sure has a lot of repugnant friends who are socialists and holds America in contempt just like a socialist.
"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, VENEZUELA and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"
--Bernie Sanders
The rest of the world has done fantastically well since then. You have to get your head around the ideas that are in play here. American elites decided to ruin our middle and working classes for the benefit of hostile people in distant lands. NAFTA, the Iraq war, TPP, they are not running things for the benefit of their own people. Heck, they don't even consider that they have anything in common with us. They are "citizens of the world" and anyone who says Americans are getting screwed is immediately labeled a Nazi and ignored. When you look at the actual goals of our elites, they are accomplishing them. It's just that they decided that they were going to ruin us to achieve them. It's working well so far.
One word response and it's immediately whataboutism. That's pretty well played. ORANGE MAN BAD
But when Obama bribed voters with free phones it was OK. This is pure tribalism: when my side does it it is good, but when your side does it it is wrong.
You apparently think the job of NASA is space exploration. It is not. The job of NASA is enriching the bank accounts of NASA managers and government contractors. That blue-sky rocket research is very welcome among those who rely on it for continued lucrative employment.