This idiot should be funding birth control in Kenya
I know it is in fashion to emulate Trump and try to sound 'tough' by offering simplistic comments in an insulting language, but hopefully things like insight, intelligence and thoughtfulness will come back in the not too far future.
Birth control is not really going to solve the problems in the developing nations - high birth rates are tied to the general expectation, that a majority of children are not going to survive. It used to be the same in Europe and America, before we learned how to avoid losing our children at a very early age, and we have seen consistently that the tendency to have many children drop off, once living standards get good enough. And the basis for a better living standard is education, because that gives people the means to improve their lives.
Things like universal, basic income is another simplistic idea - what you get is a population that feels entitled to live a parasitic life, ruled over by a kind of feudal elite. The Romans tried something like that; it didn't go well. People need to feel that it is worth striving - ie. they need to have a basic expectation that it is possible to improve your life, and that it is worth making the effort.
The articles do tend to have external references, so it is relatively easy to check the facts. That is, in my view, the only way to even attempt to be realiable. The sad fact is that even if you have a brilliant understanding of things and every intention of reporting truthfully, you may still get it wrong; that is why all scientific articles are crammed with citations and references - they want their readers to take part in the responsibility by checking everything.
As long as there are widespread, public misgivings about terms like GMO and genetically modified, there will be good, commercial reasons for pointing out that you haven't used it; it means that more people are willing to buy it. You and I may know that there is little to no scientific basis for the fears that people have, but it takes time for people to understand and accept it.
But also don't forget that up to means that 3000 laborers will work on construction, followed by a hundred or so people running the actual fab.
In fact, 'up to' means exactly the same as 'less than or equal to'. When somebody promises that you can get 'up to X', it means nothing - 0 is less than whatever X is, so I can promise to pay you 'up to $10 million' for a pack of chewing gum, even if I'm never going to pay more than $.1 for it.
How is that the case? Just because it isn't one of the common, algebraic operators that you learned in elementary school doesn't mean that it isn't maths. So:
Addition, '+' is a map from N x N -> N : +: N x N ->N, but we normally use the infix notation a+b for a, b in N instead of +(a,b) Concatenation is a map from Cfr x Cfr -> N; it takes a 2-tuple (a,b) and constructs a new number, ab. here Cfr is the set of digits in your chosen base.
Mathematics is much, much more than just arithmetics; more even, than numbers. You can, in principle, spend a whole lifetime in maths without ever having to deal with numbers. You wouldn't, of course; numbers is a very useful abstraction, that;s all, and a very basic one. You can derive all of fundamental arithmetic from naive set theory, without ever getting into sets with structure (topological spaces, groups, vector spaces...)
Yeah, but the fittest and most cunning survived. Bolstered our IQ. Now we're inviting the laziest to live off welfare and breed us out.
And you are the prime example of this higher IQ, are you? To me you just sound like a scared little individual, curled up in a corner, not daring to look out into real life for fear that you might not be able to cope. With real intelligence and courage, you'd go out in the world to listen and learn as much as you can. Calling immigrants into the US (a nation that is nothing but immigrants) the laziest is simply deluded; the lazy and scared will always opt to stay home, not daring to go out, whereas the ones that do get up and go on the long and often difficult journey into the unknown, are the ones that are brave and intelligent enough to see that there is a better life to be had elsewhere. They enrich the nation they settle in, but of course, they will tend to out-compete the locals, because they work harder.
It is a perennially good subject to fight overr - engineers always enjoy fighting over programming languages and -style, I know.
At the end of the day, only you can decide what is the right way for you. My advice is always to start from why you want to program - what do you need it for? That will help you choose the language, among other things. Don't worry too much about it from a (learning-) resource perspective - the most important thing is to be motivated enough to go and solve the problems you inevitably run into.
If you are strongly motivated and like solving problems, go for C. The syntax is very easy, but there are many pitfalls and no safety net; you will learn a lot about programming that way. C is also the inspiration for a large part of more modern languages - like Java - so you will feel somewhat familiar with the syntax in many languages.
If you want to write code that does a lot, and you are not too interested in GUI stuff, then perhaps python - it is a very well constructed language with loads of useful libraries, and it is easy to learn. You can achieve very satisfying results with simple code, and there are loads of advanced features, if you want to learn them along the way.
Swift I don't know at all - my understanding is that it only exists on Apple's systems, and specifically on iPhone, and to me that signifies the end of my interest. It may be a very good language - most modern languages are well thought through - but the world of iPhone is just too small for me.
So anyways, stop your fear mongering. Western cultures (where most of this is happening right now) arent going anywhere.
And no only that - Western Culture is, ironically, the result of wave after wave of immigration all the way back to the paleolithic: neanderthals, then modern humans, etc etc. At some point came the first farmers, then possibly the Indo-Europeans, the Germanic tribes went up to Scandinavia and then migrated south in the first half of the first millennium. Europe is in fact one of the messiest areas on the planet when it comes to ancestry. Very exciting to learn about, but we probably shouldn't talk too much about how 'pure' our ancestry is.
Well, you see, that is how fast things are moving - in the time it took you to get from the sentence with the 1% to the one with 11%, things have expanded a lot.
We don't want your "wisdom", old man. Your "wisdom" is why we have trump. Your time is over and you have become irrelevant. It's natural. Deal with it.
Hah, that's what you mere babes in arms always say, when you don't want to listen to sense. But you'll come running soon enough when you need our experience.
Funny how political extremists always seem to be the first to embrace new technologies to further their agendas. Hitler for example used the latest magnetic tape recording technology of his days to appear as if he was doing live broadcast in a city while he was in another.
Yes, and Trump uses Twitter to redefine reality in a way never seen before. There's definitely a pattern going on there. OMG!! That means Trump must be a Socialist!!
A word to the wise: always check the user ID and compare it to your own before you use that particular opening. In this case: 241428 1411889, meaning that he/she has been here a while longer than you.
There may be a deeper value to a company on top of these: Networking. It is important for managers and sales people to have a good network, and looking to the world of science, it is perhaps even more important there; but scientists are less under the yoke of business demands, so can go to some serious nerd fests. The problem, I find, is that because engineering, and especially SW engineering, lies somewhere between business and science, the conferences that you will be allowed to take part in, will too often be what managers and sales people feel comfortable with, which often means that it is too flashy and too light on actual interest to an engineer, and as a result, the people you get to meet are less likely to be the ones you would like to talk to. All in all, conferences are potentially very valuable, but in practice often disappoint. Perhaps we, as engineers, need to be much louder (and more persuasive) about what we would actually like to do at conferences.
PAIN is a motivating factor. these companies DESERVE to feel pain.
Well, perhaps that is so - although I think it isn't the companies that deserve the pain, but the millionaire and billionaire bosses and owners, who don't give a toss about the lives of the lower orders. To them we are no more than cattle, if that. People, incidentally, like the current president - isn't it incredibly naive to imagine that this spoiled billionaire, who inherited all his wealth, actually cares about the lives of ordinary workers?
Yes, it is no doubt important to have a healthy manufacturing sector, and in the age before globalisation it was possible to use protectionism, temporarily, to improve employment, but it comes with a price. If you put a tax on imports from China, they put one on imports from America, which will mean that American companies are less able to compete in China - the worlds biggest market. It also means that prices for goods in America will rise, or alternatively, the government will have to spend taxpayers' money on keeping prices artificially low. And, of course, protectionism is only affective against physical imports, unless you raise a massive firewall around the US. Otherwise, how can you stop companies using IT workers overseas? Globalisation is here already - it has happened already, and as we hear every time there are news about a new filtering on network traffic in China or elsewhere, there are loads of ways to get around all that.
How exactly does combating climate change "cripple Western civilization"?
Well, you know, in the same way that the Hippies destroyed civilisation and everything their parents had fought for in the 60es. IOW "just because".
It's funny - in a distinctly unfunny way - to look back at how the US was founded by these incredibly tough immigrants, who more or less walked across the plains, man, wife, children, grandparents and all, and built their lives out of basically nothing but their ingenuity. I wonder what they would have thought of this whining chorus, who are so afraid of change, that they refuse to even look at the many opportunities there are for making something better of tomorrow. How the hell did it come to be this way? It is no wonder that China and India are ambling past you guys without raising a sweat; how about showing a bit of backbone?
What is the point in using Oracle software in ANYTHING these days outside of the support contract*
Business reasons, in short. Oracle makes a lot more than just a very good RDBMS - just look at their website. My personal reason for liking Oracle RDBMS more than, say, MySQL, DB2, Informix or others that I have worked with professionally, both as a developer and a DBA, is the Error and Messages manual; nearly every fault has a well-documented description. The rest of the documentation is good too - if you work with it is professionally - because it is very comprehensive and delightfully free from click-and-point pictures. On top of that, if you pay for support, you have access to a team that are not only responsive, but also knowledgeable, unlike so many other support teams.
I work with MySQL too every day, and I like it, but when nearly every error message says "ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near... at line 1"; that's when I yearn for Oracle's database.
So not only the fact that she's a woman matters in this story, it's also important to throw some suspicion on her story of domestic violence.
I think so - domestic violence very often leaves the survivor with little self-confidence, and the fact that she has managed to not only pick herself up and leave a violent man, but had enough pluck to take on a demanding challenge like this, is remarkable - and perhaps inspiring to others in her situation too. Perhaps what she did was just the right thing; doing practical, hard work can be a real therapy, and the sense of achievement is pure gold. Any engineer knows this.
...not one goddamn person actually said Jack Shit about what Trump actually said during his speech.
I think we all know that he didn't actually say anything - he tends to waffle on about how great everything will be, but he doesn't really know how to achieve that, and he clearly has trouble accepting simple, plain reality. Your complaint sounds a lot like when the climate change denyers whine about not being taken seriously; well, you got to present something real, otherwise you're simply wasting other people's time. Nobody is against making America great or protecting American jobs - but it is plain to see that Trump hasn't got a clue, and why should he have a clue? He's the spoiled billionaire son of a billionaire - he's never in his life had to think about how to feed his children, pay his bills or find a job.
The FACT is that Trump has done an outstanding job of pushing his opponents into only paying attention to what HE wants them to, and only talking about what HE wants them to talk about. He played them like a fucking fiddle and they're still so wrapped up over the fucking crowd size comments that they don't even see it happening.
And that is good, you think? It doesn't matter that he is a shallow thinker, if 'thinker' is indeed the right word, who wants to bully through executive orders that are certain to harm the country and its citizens, because he struts around pretending to be the alpha male waving his dick around? Let's see how much you love him in a few months' time; I wouldn't be surprised if his presidency turns out to be the shortest in the history of the US.
Literally alternative fact just means facts that support a different narrative than the one a particular group wants.
No - what you re talking about, is called alternative interpretations. Facts are observations that can be reproduced independently; when the aerial photos of the crowds attending Obama's inauguration clearly show there were far more people there than at Trump's, then it is something that can be verified independently - and quite easily as well. There are loads of reports from many different sources that all confirm that Obama had more people in his crowd; if there was only 1 photo, you might brush it off, but not when there are so many independent sources that all agree.
...we can at least definitively say that Trump isn't a fascist...
The main difference between Trump and a fascist is that the fascist is usually guided by some sort of ideology. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky: Adolph Hitler was a sincere, hard working ideologist, whereas Trump isn't - he has changed between Democrats and Republicans in the past, and he happily contradicts himself if the moment seems to favour it. But he most definitely has the mindset of a fascist: the conviction that he is entitled to do whatever he wants, whether it tramples over the rights of others or inflicts real harm to real people; he simply doesn't care. IMO, that puts him on the worse side of fascism, because you can't even predict what he is going to do next. We only know that he is goine to act on the few, wild promises he made in his campaign, but after that? How will he tackle the problems when his stupidity encounters reality?
Perhaps he has a mental health issue - he certainly seems to have some sort of congnitive deficit. Just take this thing about the wall that he says Mexico is going to pay for - by rainsing an import tax on goods from Mexico. Now, who do you think is going to pay that import tax? Yep, good, red-blooded Americans. OK, so maybe Mexico won't be able to export as much to the US and they will suffer a loss, but that isn't going to pay for the wall either, is it? There is a much logic in his thinking as in saying "Obviously, the wind is caused by the trees waving about".
There's no scenario in which climate change is going to reduce the overall ability of the planet to support life, including human life.
Well, sure, but how much? We are in the beginnings of a major extinction event (this is something most, if not all scientists appear to agree on), and sure, on geological timescales, new species will evolve quickly - a few million years or so. People have always imagined that we could essentially let the whole ecosystem die around us without any major consequences for us - unfortunately it isn't true. Life depends strongly on other life, and if the ecosystem collapses, it will affect all parts, including humanity. Will we be able to support a human population of 5 - 10 billion in that situation? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it. The extinction of mankind is not unthinkable; maybe not likely, but how close to 0 do you want to go?
We know what a warm Earth looks like, and it's far more dense with life than the current Quaternary Ice Age.
We know what is looks like after it has had time to adjust. The problem with the current, anthropogenic climate change is that it happens very fast; in the past, nature had has time to move with the change in climate. A species of forest trees can move north, if it has time to spread by seeds, but we have every reason to think that this time it happens too fast; plus, of course, we contribute to the destruction of ecosystems in so many other ways. We have, since the start of the industrial revolution, seen quite a marked change, and that is no more than, say, 250 years ago, to be generous. There are well reasoned arguments for thinking that climate change will start off slowly, then accelerate near exponentially, before slowing down again, reaching a new level. I think we can survive it - well, some of us - but I don't think it will be a lot of fun.
Most of the people don't even know they own the land.
I would be surprised if they even have the same concept of ownership as us Europeans (and Americans are, when you get down to it, still Europeans, culturally speaking, however much you hate it). The idea that a person can own land and have the right to exclude others from it, is very often completely alien to traditional, native populations; land usually belongs to the whole of the community, and the idea that you can sell it to somebody else is absurd - you might as well sell your ancestors; even if you signed a contract saying "They are no longer my ancestors" and you received money for it, the reality is that your ancestors are still your ancestors.
Zuckkerberg could have avoided any trouble by being open to whatever concerns the natives have and willing to work towards a solution with them. But he feels entitled because he has accumulated money, as if that in itself made him better.
No, 20 days, so when you are arrested for still doing it, you can't claim ignorance. Also, it is not in society's interest to penalise a lot of young first-time offenders, many of whom will feel sufficiently worried about this to refrain in the future; the real criminals are the ones that look at the law - any law, really - with contempt and think they are too smart to ever get caught, and who immediately think of ways to try to dodge the law.
Slashdot Mirror
This idiot should be funding birth control in Kenya
I know it is in fashion to emulate Trump and try to sound 'tough' by offering simplistic comments in an insulting language, but hopefully things like insight, intelligence and thoughtfulness will come back in the not too far future.
Birth control is not really going to solve the problems in the developing nations - high birth rates are tied to the general expectation, that a majority of children are not going to survive. It used to be the same in Europe and America, before we learned how to avoid losing our children at a very early age, and we have seen consistently that the tendency to have many children drop off, once living standards get good enough. And the basis for a better living standard is education, because that gives people the means to improve their lives.
Things like universal, basic income is another simplistic idea - what you get is a population that feels entitled to live a parasitic life, ruled over by a kind of feudal elite. The Romans tried something like that; it didn't go well. People need to feel that it is worth striving - ie. they need to have a basic expectation that it is possible to improve your life, and that it is worth making the effort.
And Wikipedia is a reliable source?
The articles do tend to have external references, so it is relatively easy to check the facts. That is, in my view, the only way to even attempt to be realiable. The sad fact is that even if you have a brilliant understanding of things and every intention of reporting truthfully, you may still get it wrong; that is why all scientific articles are crammed with citations and references - they want their readers to take part in the responsibility by checking everything.
Please, stop apologizing for this shit
As long as there are widespread, public misgivings about terms like GMO and genetically modified, there will be good, commercial reasons for pointing out that you haven't used it; it means that more people are willing to buy it. You and I may know that there is little to no scientific basis for the fears that people have, but it takes time for people to understand and accept it.
But also don't forget that up to means that 3000 laborers will work on construction, followed by a hundred or so people running the actual fab.
In fact, 'up to' means exactly the same as 'less than or equal to'. When somebody promises that you can get 'up to X', it means nothing - 0 is less than whatever X is, so I can promise to pay you 'up to $10 million' for a pack of chewing gum, even if I'm never going to pay more than $.1 for it.
"and concatenation"
No, that's not really maths,
How is that the case? Just because it isn't one of the common, algebraic operators that you learned in elementary school doesn't mean that it isn't maths. So:
Addition, '+' is a map from N x N -> N : +: N x N ->N, but we normally use the infix notation a+b for a, b in N instead of +(a,b)
Concatenation is a map from Cfr x Cfr -> N; it takes a 2-tuple (a,b) and constructs a new number, ab. here Cfr is the set of digits in your chosen base.
Mathematics is much, much more than just arithmetics; more even, than numbers. You can, in principle, spend a whole lifetime in maths without ever having to deal with numbers. You wouldn't, of course; numbers is a very useful abstraction, that;s all, and a very basic one. You can derive all of fundamental arithmetic from naive set theory, without ever getting into sets with structure (topological spaces, groups, vector spaces ...)
Yeah, but the fittest and most cunning survived. Bolstered our IQ. Now we're inviting the laziest to live off welfare and breed us out.
And you are the prime example of this higher IQ, are you? To me you just sound like a scared little individual, curled up in a corner, not daring to look out into real life for fear that you might not be able to cope. With real intelligence and courage, you'd go out in the world to listen and learn as much as you can. Calling immigrants into the US (a nation that is nothing but immigrants) the laziest is simply deluded; the lazy and scared will always opt to stay home, not daring to go out, whereas the ones that do get up and go on the long and often difficult journey into the unknown, are the ones that are brave and intelligent enough to see that there is a better life to be had elsewhere. They enrich the nation they settle in, but of course, they will tend to out-compete the locals, because they work harder.
It is a perennially good subject to fight overr - engineers always enjoy fighting over programming languages and -style, I know.
At the end of the day, only you can decide what is the right way for you. My advice is always to start from why you want to program - what do you need it for? That will help you choose the language, among other things. Don't worry too much about it from a (learning-) resource perspective - the most important thing is to be motivated enough to go and solve the problems you inevitably run into.
If you are strongly motivated and like solving problems, go for C. The syntax is very easy, but there are many pitfalls and no safety net; you will learn a lot about programming that way. C is also the inspiration for a large part of more modern languages - like Java - so you will feel somewhat familiar with the syntax in many languages.
If you want to write code that does a lot, and you are not too interested in GUI stuff, then perhaps python - it is a very well constructed language with loads of useful libraries, and it is easy to learn. You can achieve very satisfying results with simple code, and there are loads of advanced features, if you want to learn them along the way.
Swift I don't know at all - my understanding is that it only exists on Apple's systems, and specifically on iPhone, and to me that signifies the end of my interest. It may be a very good language - most modern languages are well thought through - but the world of iPhone is just too small for me.
So anyways, stop your fear mongering. Western cultures (where most of this is happening right now) arent going anywhere.
And no only that - Western Culture is, ironically, the result of wave after wave of immigration all the way back to the paleolithic: neanderthals, then modern humans, etc etc. At some point came the first farmers, then possibly the Indo-Europeans, the Germanic tribes went up to Scandinavia and then migrated south in the first half of the first millennium. Europe is in fact one of the messiest areas on the planet when it comes to ancestry. Very exciting to learn about, but we probably shouldn't talk too much about how 'pure' our ancestry is.
Am I missing something here?
Well, you see, that is how fast things are moving - in the time it took you to get from the sentence with the 1% to the one with 11%, things have expanded a lot.
We don't want your "wisdom", old man. Your "wisdom" is why we have trump. Your time is over and you have become irrelevant. It's natural. Deal with it.
Hah, that's what you mere babes in arms always say, when you don't want to listen to sense. But you'll come running soon enough when you need our experience.
Funny how political extremists always seem to be the first to embrace new technologies to further their agendas. Hitler for example used the latest magnetic tape recording technology of his days to appear as if he was doing live broadcast in a city while he was in another.
Yes, and Trump uses Twitter to redefine reality in a way never seen before. There's definitely a pattern going on there. OMG!! That means Trump must be a Socialist!!
You must be new here.
A word to the wise: always check the user ID and compare it to your own before you use that particular opening. In this case: 241428 1411889, meaning that he/she has been here a while longer than you.
There may be a deeper value to a company on top of these: Networking. It is important for managers and sales people to have a good network, and looking to the world of science, it is perhaps even more important there; but scientists are less under the yoke of business demands, so can go to some serious nerd fests. The problem, I find, is that because engineering, and especially SW engineering, lies somewhere between business and science, the conferences that you will be allowed to take part in, will too often be what managers and sales people feel comfortable with, which often means that it is too flashy and too light on actual interest to an engineer, and as a result, the people you get to meet are less likely to be the ones you would like to talk to. All in all, conferences are potentially very valuable, but in practice often disappoint. Perhaps we, as engineers, need to be much louder (and more persuasive) about what we would actually like to do at conferences.
PAIN is a motivating factor. these companies DESERVE to feel pain.
Well, perhaps that is so - although I think it isn't the companies that deserve the pain, but the millionaire and billionaire bosses and owners, who don't give a toss about the lives of the lower orders. To them we are no more than cattle, if that. People, incidentally, like the current president - isn't it incredibly naive to imagine that this spoiled billionaire, who inherited all his wealth, actually cares about the lives of ordinary workers?
Yes, it is no doubt important to have a healthy manufacturing sector, and in the age before globalisation it was possible to use protectionism, temporarily, to improve employment, but it comes with a price. If you put a tax on imports from China, they put one on imports from America, which will mean that American companies are less able to compete in China - the worlds biggest market. It also means that prices for goods in America will rise, or alternatively, the government will have to spend taxpayers' money on keeping prices artificially low. And, of course, protectionism is only affective against physical imports, unless you raise a massive firewall around the US. Otherwise, how can you stop companies using IT workers overseas? Globalisation is here already - it has happened already, and as we hear every time there are news about a new filtering on network traffic in China or elsewhere, there are loads of ways to get around all that.
How exactly does combating climate change "cripple Western civilization"?
Well, you know, in the same way that the Hippies destroyed civilisation and everything their parents had fought for in the 60es. IOW "just because".
It's funny - in a distinctly unfunny way - to look back at how the US was founded by these incredibly tough immigrants, who more or less walked across the plains, man, wife, children, grandparents and all, and built their lives out of basically nothing but their ingenuity. I wonder what they would have thought of this whining chorus, who are so afraid of change, that they refuse to even look at the many opportunities there are for making something better of tomorrow. How the hell did it come to be this way? It is no wonder that China and India are ambling past you guys without raising a sweat; how about showing a bit of backbone?
Now I have to wonder when the Greatest Nation on Earth is going to do the same.
What? I don't think there are roaming charges inside China; or are you talking about another greatest nation? ;-)
2013... thx obama
Of course, Trump will immediately issue a presidential decree to fix that, right?*
(*don't tell anybody, but that was sarcasm)
What is the point in using Oracle software in ANYTHING these days outside of the support contract*
Business reasons, in short. Oracle makes a lot more than just a very good RDBMS - just look at their website. My personal reason for liking Oracle RDBMS more than, say, MySQL, DB2, Informix or others that I have worked with professionally, both as a developer and a DBA, is the Error and Messages manual; nearly every fault has a well-documented description. The rest of the documentation is good too - if you work with it is professionally - because it is very comprehensive and delightfully free from click-and-point pictures. On top of that, if you pay for support, you have access to a team that are not only responsive, but also knowledgeable, unlike so many other support teams.
I work with MySQL too every day, and I like it, but when nearly every error message says "ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ... at line 1"; that's when I yearn for Oracle's database.
So not only the fact that she's a woman matters in this story, it's also important to throw some suspicion on her story of domestic violence.
I think so - domestic violence very often leaves the survivor with little self-confidence, and the fact that she has managed to not only pick herself up and leave a violent man, but had enough pluck to take on a demanding challenge like this, is remarkable - and perhaps inspiring to others in her situation too. Perhaps what she did was just the right thing; doing practical, hard work can be a real therapy, and the sense of achievement is pure gold. Any engineer knows this.
...not one goddamn person actually said Jack Shit about what Trump actually said during his speech.
I think we all know that he didn't actually say anything - he tends to waffle on about how great everything will be, but he doesn't really know how to achieve that, and he clearly has trouble accepting simple, plain reality. Your complaint sounds a lot like when the climate change denyers whine about not being taken seriously; well, you got to present something real, otherwise you're simply wasting other people's time. Nobody is against making America great or protecting American jobs - but it is plain to see that Trump hasn't got a clue, and why should he have a clue? He's the spoiled billionaire son of a billionaire - he's never in his life had to think about how to feed his children, pay his bills or find a job.
The FACT is that Trump has done an outstanding job of pushing his opponents into only paying attention to what HE wants them to, and only talking about what HE wants them to talk about. He played them like a fucking fiddle and they're still so wrapped up over the fucking crowd size comments that they don't even see it happening.
And that is good, you think? It doesn't matter that he is a shallow thinker, if 'thinker' is indeed the right word, who wants to bully through executive orders that are certain to harm the country and its citizens, because he struts around pretending to be the alpha male waving his dick around? Let's see how much you love him in a few months' time; I wouldn't be surprised if his presidency turns out to be the shortest in the history of the US.
Literally alternative fact just means facts that support a different narrative than the one a particular group wants.
No - what you re talking about, is called alternative interpretations. Facts are observations that can be reproduced independently; when the aerial photos of the crowds attending Obama's inauguration clearly show there were far more people there than at Trump's, then it is something that can be verified independently - and quite easily as well. There are loads of reports from many different sources that all confirm that Obama had more people in his crowd; if there was only 1 photo, you might brush it off, but not when there are so many independent sources that all agree.
...we can at least definitively say that Trump isn't a fascist...
The main difference between Trump and a fascist is that the fascist is usually guided by some sort of ideology. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky: Adolph Hitler was a sincere, hard working ideologist, whereas Trump isn't - he has changed between Democrats and Republicans in the past, and he happily contradicts himself if the moment seems to favour it. But he most definitely has the mindset of a fascist: the conviction that he is entitled to do whatever he wants, whether it tramples over the rights of others or inflicts real harm to real people; he simply doesn't care. IMO, that puts him on the worse side of fascism, because you can't even predict what he is going to do next. We only know that he is goine to act on the few, wild promises he made in his campaign, but after that? How will he tackle the problems when his stupidity encounters reality?
Perhaps he has a mental health issue - he certainly seems to have some sort of congnitive deficit. Just take this thing about the wall that he says Mexico is going to pay for - by rainsing an import tax on goods from Mexico. Now, who do you think is going to pay that import tax? Yep, good, red-blooded Americans. OK, so maybe Mexico won't be able to export as much to the US and they will suffer a loss, but that isn't going to pay for the wall either, is it? There is a much logic in his thinking as in saying "Obviously, the wind is caused by the trees waving about".
There's no scenario in which climate change is going to reduce the overall ability of the planet to support life, including human life.
Well, sure, but how much? We are in the beginnings of a major extinction event (this is something most, if not all scientists appear to agree on), and sure, on geological timescales, new species will evolve quickly - a few million years or so. People have always imagined that we could essentially let the whole ecosystem die around us without any major consequences for us - unfortunately it isn't true. Life depends strongly on other life, and if the ecosystem collapses, it will affect all parts, including humanity. Will we be able to support a human population of 5 - 10 billion in that situation? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it. The extinction of mankind is not unthinkable; maybe not likely, but how close to 0 do you want to go?
We know what a warm Earth looks like, and it's far more dense with life than the current Quaternary Ice Age.
We know what is looks like after it has had time to adjust. The problem with the current, anthropogenic climate change is that it happens very fast; in the past, nature had has time to move with the change in climate. A species of forest trees can move north, if it has time to spread by seeds, but we have every reason to think that this time it happens too fast; plus, of course, we contribute to the destruction of ecosystems in so many other ways. We have, since the start of the industrial revolution, seen quite a marked change, and that is no more than, say, 250 years ago, to be generous. There are well reasoned arguments for thinking that climate change will start off slowly, then accelerate near exponentially, before slowing down again, reaching a new level. I think we can survive it - well, some of us - but I don't think it will be a lot of fun.
Most of the people don't even know they own the land.
I would be surprised if they even have the same concept of ownership as us Europeans (and Americans are, when you get down to it, still Europeans, culturally speaking, however much you hate it). The idea that a person can own land and have the right to exclude others from it, is very often completely alien to traditional, native populations; land usually belongs to the whole of the community, and the idea that you can sell it to somebody else is absurd - you might as well sell your ancestors; even if you signed a contract saying "They are no longer my ancestors" and you received money for it, the reality is that your ancestors are still your ancestors.
Zuckkerberg could have avoided any trouble by being open to whatever concerns the natives have and willing to work towards a solution with them. But he feels entitled because he has accumulated money, as if that in itself made him better.
20 days to set up a proxy? That's about right.
No, 20 days, so when you are arrested for still doing it, you can't claim ignorance. Also, it is not in society's interest to penalise a lot of young first-time offenders, many of whom will feel sufficiently worried about this to refrain in the future; the real criminals are the ones that look at the law - any law, really - with contempt and think they are too smart to ever get caught, and who immediately think of ways to try to dodge the law.